In the middle of the night, I found myself in that liminal threshold state between sleeping and waking, where the normal boundaries of the thinking and dreaming minds merge.
For some reason, I became aware of how dry it had been recently, particularly in our local neighbourhood, although the same was true for the whole of the Netherlands and much of Europe. We had not had rain for weeks, and the effects of the prolonged dryness were becoming increasingly visible.
Lying there, half awake, I felt the impulse to try a rain intention, in a very curious and playful way. I imagined it raining outside. I pictured the rain falling across our neighbourhood, soaking into the gardens and the trees, leaving puddles on the paths. I then drifted off again for a moment.
A few minutes later, it started to rain. It rained hard. I’m not sure for how long, as I fell asleep again, but in the morning the ground was still wet.
As I lay there listening to it, I found myself wondering what had happened. I was aware of recent sessions I had been teaching about the non-linearity and non-causality of consciousness. So i couldn’t accept the idea that I had somehow caused the rain – but I did know that I was involved in the experience in some way. So what had actually gone on?
I recalled the process. First, I had become conscious of the dryness particularly in the neighbourhood. Then I had vividly imagined the rain. Soon afterwards, the rain arrived. How might those events be connected without falling into either egoic linear causality or a refusal to consider that anything meaningful had occurred?
I was reminded of a word I have been using a lot recently: entanglement. Also of how I describe it as one co-arising process, moment to moment. Inter-being, to use a Buddhist term.
With entanglement, I mean the possibility that we are participants in systems from which we cannot ultimately separate ourselves. We are entangled with our families, our communities, the places where we live and the wider ecology that sustains us. Their conditions affect us, and our attention, intentions and actions become part of their ongoing life. We are embedded in a dynamic interconnectedness.
The thought occured to me that In that half-waking state, perhaps my awareness had simply opened more fully to the condition of the neighbourhood. I was not standing outside it, observing its dryness as an abstract problem. I was inside it, entangled with it. I was part of the same living field as the trees, plants, soil, animals and atmosphere.
This led to a different, startling, yet ultimately obvious possibility. Perhaps it wasn’t me who had the intention for rain. Perhaps the neighbourhood had the intention for rain, and I happened to become available to it.
We know that intention seeks the way of least resistance to manifest itself. So the neighbourhood needs rain, then this human shows up in the system who has the ability to connect to the field of potential, so the neighbourhood uses that human channel to increase its chances of receiving rain.
That reverses the usual way we think about intention. We generally imagine that an individual decides what should happen, forms an intention and then directs that intention towards the world. The self is the originator, and the world is the object upon which it acts.
But what if an intention can also belong to a system as a whole and can use an entangled human to help it achieve its needs?
A dry ecosystem “wants” rain, not in the sense that it possesses a human mind, but in the sense that its entire organisation is oriented towards the restoration of moisture and vitality. Plants are closing their pores, roots are searching farther into the soil, animals change their behaviour and atmospheric pressures shift. Every part of the system is responding to the absence of water.
In that context, intention could be seen as the felt direction of a whole system seeking its next need. Human beings have a particular capacity to form images, focus attention and consciously hold possibilities. That may make us useful points of connection within larger living systems. When we become sufficiently quiet, receptive and attuned, we may find ourselves carrying an intention that did not originate solely within our personal minds. In fact, nothing ever exists “solely within our personal minds” as we are always connected with other life around us.
From this perspective, I was not a heroic individual imposing my will upon the weather. I was, at most, a temporary participant in a much larger process. The field may have recruited me.
There is something greatly liberating in that thought. It challenges the ego’s tendency to interpret unusual experiences as evidence of personal power. We move from “Look what I can do.” to “What is life trying to do, and how am I being invited to participate?”
This brought to mind a conversation I once had with the geomancer Richard Leviton. Richard has spent many years exploring the relationship between physical places, subtle energies and different orders of intelligence. In his understanding, reality contains many levels of being and organisation, from the dense physical world to increasingly subtle forms of intelligence.
He describes these levels as connected through a kind of stepped transmission. An energy or intention arising at a very subtle level might be too intense, abstract or undifferentiated to connect directly with natural expressions of life on the physical place. It therefore has to be stepped down through other levels, becoming progressively translated until it reaches a form that can be received and enacted in the material world. In Richard’s language “the energy of an angel would fry the ass off a gnome”. He believes that the agreement between humans, the angelic realm and the eartlhy elemental realm is to “connect heaven and earth”, to be the transformer of higher “angelic” frequencies into frequencies that can be integrated by the natural world.
Humans, in this view, can serve as bridges. We have physical bodies rooted in the Earth, relational and emotional lives connecting us to other beings, and forms of consciousness capable of perceiving possibilities that have not yet taken shape. We stand at an intersection between different dimensions of experience.
Perhaps something similar was happening that night. One could imagine, using Richard’s language, a larger intelligence such as the “deva” of the neighbourhood holding the possibility of rain that the ecological field of the neighbourhood was reflecting, with the plants, soil and other living beings expressing that need; and a half-awake human mind momentarily becoming part of the chain through which the intention moved.
I cannot of course know whether that description is literally true. It is an image that helps me explore the experience. What matters is the shift it produces in my relationship to what happened.
My worldview and understanding of these processes mean that I cannot claim that I caused the rain. Nor do I need to dismiss the sequence as meaningless simply because I cannot demonstrate a mechanism. I can hold the experience with curiosity.
Perhaps our role is less often to originate change than we imagine. Perhaps intentions are already moving through the living systems to which we belong, looking for places where they can be heard, held and expressed.
Most of the time, our minds are too busy to notice. We are preoccupied with our personal plans, concerns and interpretations. Yet in moments of stillness—during meditation, in nature, in dreams or in the fluid space between sleeping and waking—the boundaries soften. We may become more sensitive to what is trying to happen around and through us.
This has implications beyond unusual experiences with the weather. A group may be ready for a difficult conversation before any one individual consciously proposes it. An organisation may be trying to move in a new direction before its leaders can articulate what that direction is. A place may be asking for care. A community may be carrying a grief that needs acknowledgement. An idea may appear simultaneously to several people because the conditions for it have ripened.
In each case, the person who first expresses the movement is not its sole creator. They are simply the one who heard it. This suggests a different approach to leadership and creativity. Rather than continually asking what we want to impose upon the world, we might ask what the systems we belong to are already trying to become. We might listen for the intentions held within places, communities and ecosystems, and make ourselves available to support their movement towards greater vitality and coherence.
It rained. The soil softened, the leaves glistened and the whole neighbourhood seemed to breathe. I do not know what part, if any, my midnight imagining played in its arrival. But the experience left me with a deep insight, which may have been the purpose of the whole experience – a little midnight teaching:
Whenever an intention arises, ask what the field is trying to bring into being, and how I might be recruited to help.
Note: I first shared this experience with the Leading from the Field class I am teaching. It was Mukara Meredith from the class who channelled the “recruited by the field” language.
