“Machinery is really thought poured into mineral.”

Rudolf Steiner
[Notes on the Evolution of Human Freedom and Personal Consciousness]

I wish to say a few words for the radionics instrument, specific to its purpose in the practice of radionics. There are people, especially in more recent years, who tend to discredit the instrument, by saying that the mind or intention is all that is necessary for practising radionics. They may say that a real practitioner can, through determination, psychic training and willpower, transcend the need to use a physical radionics instrument. From this point of view, the instrument is, at best, simply a tool for mental focus, later to be dispensed with once the practitioner is sufficiently “advanced,” and at worst, a crutch.

There may be no doubt that a highly evolved human being is the superior instrument. However when the radionic instrument is discounted or even discarded in favour of intention or the power of the mind, the art may no longer be considered radionics (an instrument-aided practice). For those of us who are lesser mortals the instrument is vital. And for some of us, the radionic instrument is a source of pleasure and beauty – as a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Sunburst might be to a guitarist – and an inspiration to our practice.

An advantage of radionics, which I will define as the use of a tunable resonant instrument, is that the practitioner of radionics is removed from the psychic loop that is inherent in the practice of psychotronics and some forms of radiesthesia (both of which remain outside the scope of this article). The physical instrument itself, rather than the mind, holds the resonant information of the intended treatment or result and the link to the subject. The practitioner needs to expend no psychic effort, while at the same time being outside of any potential psychic feedback.

On this subject, I shall share here the insights of several pioneers and practitioners who have advanced the art of radionics.

Ruth Drown: We do not concentrate

At the dawn of radionics a century ago, through the research of Dr Albert Abrams, the physical radionic device was a necessity, in as much as he understood that he was measuring a physical reaction in the body, by electrical means, related to a physical disease.

While Dr Albert Abrams was a renowned medical specialist with a rigorous scientific approach, his student of radionics, Ruth Drown, a chiropractor, began to consciously integrate esoteric principles drawn from the Kabbalah. In essence she was able to view radionics through the eyes of both a scientist and a mystic. In Ruth Drown was the first hint of understanding that radionics is more than just a physical science. One of the advances to radionics was her discovery that radionics could diagnose and treat at a distance, and that photographs, similar to X-rays, could be taken without the subject being present.

Ruth Drown made it clear that there was a difference between the radionics of her day, which were inspired by Dr Abrams’ bio-electrical theories, and her own instruments. Unlike Dr Abrams’ treatment instruments, her instruments did not require electricity.

She was also insistent that mental concentration should not be part of the radionic process. “We do not concentrate our thought on the part of the body into which we tune, and I have been criticized for talking on another subject while doing the routine diagnosing of a patient. Often the patient did not think I was keeping my mind on the subject. My reason for this is twofold: First, to keep my mind away from the part tuned into, and second, to keep the patient’s mind off himself. Then the energy is less qualified by our thoughts and comes in as free as we can get it.” [Ruth Drown, Drown Radio Therapy]

Ruth Drown revealed that one’s intent actually interferes with the true radionic process. As I observed above, this is the essential difference between radionics and radiesthesia. They may both work, but are not the same process.

Radionics clearly doesn’t preclude intention. However there remains the danger of karmic feedback. For example, if you are relying on intention or mental focus for curing someone of a cold, you may catch a cold yourself. Any practice includes focused intent, but radionics places a device between the practitioner and the subject being treated or analysed. The instrument both does the work and is a buffer between the two entities.

With her insistence that electricity and mental focus were not necessary for radionics, I suggest that Ruth Drown understood that the tunable radionic instrument was resonating with – and thus powered by – the energy of life force itself which is the animating expression of encoded information, symbolised by the eternal fractal patterning revealed in the sacred numerology of the Tree of Life and the Kabbalah.

Darrell Butcher: We do not interfere

A similar understanding is reflected in Darrell Butcher’s observations of his experiments with automatic radionics instruments of his own design, that the instrument itself is capable of the radionic process without interference from the operator: “It has been found that the operator is not required so much as had been necessary in the past, because the machine is capable of working by itself… It is a form of diagnosis over which we have no control, and with which we do not interfere.” [R. Murray Denning, My Search for Radionic Truths]

Clearly a properly designed radionic instrument is capable of working independently of mental effort. A study of sacred geometry reveals the ever-repeating fractal nature of the universe, and some theorists propose that the universe is intelligent and self-simulating. Nature, the world, the universe, reveals itself in conscious designs, endlessly cycling through repeating and harmonic patterns. In other articles I have proposed that the radionics instrument is a physical resonant pattern, with rates and geometric patterns used to tune it to, and hold, the desired result. It is the self-balancing nature of the universe that essentially powers the radionic instrument, as reality comes into resonance with the patterns incorporated into its tunable elements (e.g. dials or geometric cards).

With an appropriately designed instrument, as in metaphysical practice, once the work is done to set things in motion, the practitioner walks away and forgets about it. You don’t will a seed to sprout once the planting is done, even though you intend it to grow. The practitioner’s work is done essentially with the planting. I remember my grandfather telling me, when I was a boy: “I plant the seeds, but God makes them grow.”

Keith Mason writes: “Getting back to the physical structures in the radionic analysis we may fairly state that the whole point of using an instrument lies in the fact that by placing rates on a dial, or using a card with partial radii to represent the disease or parts of the body, you have a symbol or value for the disease or part of the body which you are investigating. This saves the practitioner from trying to keep his thoughts on the factor whilst at the same time seeking the information which travels on that thought wave which is giving him the causes or degrees of imbalance of that part of the body.” [Keith Mason, Radionics and Progressive Energies]

Malcolm Rae: Application of a non-living energy

The relationship between thoughtform, resonant patterns, and the radionic instrument was explored and expanded by Malcolm Rae, another highly regarded radionics innovator. His research resulted in Magneto-Geometric cards, which was a major evolution in radionics.

Rae used the analogy of music to describe the radionic process. A composer “thinks” a symphony; he writes his thoughts in the form of a score in which symbols represent the frequencies of notes to be played. An orchestra interprets the symbols to record the music, thus focusing the symbols into a single unit of time, spatially represented in the grooves of an L.P. record. Thus “to reproduce, as nearly as possible… the composer’s original thoughts, it is necessary only to apply to the record the requisite form of energy – that is rotation in contact with a stylus which will respond to the undulations in the groove.” [Malcolm Rae]

Following these examples as analogous of the radionic phenomenon, the original composition can be understood as the practitioner’s intention, the transcribed and recorded medium as the creation of numerical rate or geometric card, and the record-player as the radionic instrument. Each are a vital part of the whole radionic function, and one part does not take precedence over, or supplant the other. In fact the instrument itself is necessary to interpret and transform the pattern or “spatial proportions” (that we interpret as rates or cards) to be “broadcast” to the subject (or the listener, to complete Rae’s analogy).

Rae summarised it thus: “Numerical expression requires a living brain to decipher it, whereas geometrical expression can be deciphered by the application of a non-living energy…
Attention is drawn to the need for the living brain to decipher the numerical ratios of the [musical] score, whereas the mechanism of the record-player is all that is required to decipher the geometrical representation of the groove in the record.
Do radionic instruments, many of which have dials on which numbers are selected to tune the instrument to the requisite thought, use numerical representation? No… The purpose of the numbered scale [of the rates dials] is to enable a pattern of spacial proportions to be built up within the instrument…
Numerical proportions and geometrical patterns may both be regarded as symbols for thoughts.”
[Malcolm Rae, Radionic Quarterly, March 1977]

I suggest that the purpose of using a radionics instrument is to abandon your intention to the device. Your will or intention is encoded into physical symbols/patterns or tuned array, and the device will do the work for you. Once your thoughts are thus embodied by the instrument, your work is completed by also abandoning your desire for outcome, as Ruth Drown suggested in the quote above.

The instrument does not exist apart from, independent of, or external to, the mind. Peter Lindemann of Borderland Research stated that “The tuner [i.e. instrument] is only a SOLIDIFIED THOUGHT FORM and the rates represent AGREEMENTS.”

An ancient book of wisdom, the Yoga Vasistha, states that the mind, arising in consciousness, is that which is ultimately responsible for the manifestation of the material universe. “The five elements are the seed of which the world is the tree; and the eternal consciousness is the seed for the elements… The vibration in the Infinite Consciousness is not different from that Consciousness itself. From that vibration, just as the living entity becomes manifest, even so from that being the mind becomes manifest, because the being thinks. The mind itself entertains the notions of the five elements and it transforms itself into those elements. What the mind thinks of, that alone it sees.” [Yoga Vasistha, translated by Swami Venkatesananda]

Yvon Combe: The instrument is indispensable

We must be careful that, in giving precedence to the mind, radionics can easily degrade into a lazy form of wish fulfilment, relegating the manifest as inferior to mental desire, and not giving the instrument its full due as an active partner in radionics. Why is the use of instruments indispensable in radionics? This question was posed by the well known French radionics innovator, Yvon Combe.

Responding to the claim that radionics is all to do with the mind of the practitioner, Yvon Combe, making the comparison between the physical body and the physical instrument, says that this “does not take into account that mind also penetrates and incorporates matter. The explanation is therefore unbalanced as it only represents part of the radionic phenomenon. It is not difficult to understand that in order to generate any activity on this earth, we need a material support, we need a body. This means that even the most subtle states, or the most abstract parts of our consciousness, can only be perceived because of the organisation of the living matter of our physical body.”

He goes on to describe how, in whatever activity we undertake – whether physically or radionically – we require an equilibrium of all planes of being. “Thus, for whatever one wants to achieve, this threefold unity, SPIRIT-SOUL-BODY, is indispensable. No isolated, single plane is sufficient… Thus in this perception of things, the instrument in radionics is as indispensable to the therapeutic radionic act, as our physical material body is indispensable to experiencing sentiments, or to perceiving the state of abstract thought, or the beatitudes of consciousness or Divine Grace.”

Combe then joins the dots between the totality of being, the resonant pattern created by the instrument, and the subject receiving the treatment. “The physical reason that makes the radionics instrument indispensable is that the patient, who will be interacting at a distance with the instrument, is made up of a totality of Spirit-Soul-Body within a physical body. Each partial ray on a magneto geometric coded card, radiates a wave form, which is a physical reality. Each potentiometric ohm value translates a resistance which specifies an energy for a given structure. In addition, one must not forget that a radionic treatment which has been made concrete by means of an instrument constructed for that purpose, protects the practitioner from strong mental fatigue…

“This material support, once it has been made concrete by a numeric code or by a geometric code indicating disease, biological structure or energy, serves as a guarantee that one will not get lost in abstract planes, and this is one of the major reasons for the necessity of an instrument. Otherwise it leaves an open door to all kinds of ‘enlightened’ people, who employ so-called spiritual powers, but who have nothing to do with instrumental radionics.”

Having established the necessity of the physical instrument to the radionic phenomenon, Combe continues to describe the principles in more detail. “We read in the classical radionic literature that the encoded cards or the rates are a representation of thought waves. RADIONIC INSTRUMENTS REFLECT THE LAWS AND PRINCIPLES OF SPACE-TIME which are themselves based on fundamental symbols of Life…

“The energy of transmission and cohesion is at the origin of the universe. It is an energetic substratum within which everything is immersed, and this substratum is differentiated as a function of the plane in which it is manifested… At each plane traversed it acquires the physical and psychical qualities of that plane. More accurately, it becomes totally integrated within the plane. This continues for all the planes, up to the densest plane, which is that of matter.”

He then describes the ideal radionic practitioner as being “in a state of consciousness which is the basis of the energetic field of the materialised universe. Therefore there are different action levels in radionics. At the most subtle level the radionician utilises the vibratory field of Thought which is manifested in matter. The instrument is there to enable the making of that contact, because there is no separation between the matter of his instrument and the immaterial field of his spirit.”

He concludes that “the instrument, be it radionic or not (and the same is true for his physical body), is always necessary as it is the indispensable material link which enables the radionician or the therapist to reach the patient who has come to seek help.” [Yvon Combe, At the Heart of Thought, Vol.1]

So we have heard the from experiences and insights of some respected names in the field of radionics on the necessity of an actual, physical device. Radionics isn’t only what has been received from the past – it is a living tradition. It incorporates the information and experiences that we create, now and into the future. The instruments are our creations, and we imbue them with “life” through the purpose with which we create. I invite you to participate in the ongoing conversation and share your thoughts below about the role of the radionic instrument.

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