The Electrical Field of Reception

Prayer and healing are a matter of electricity. Here's what amplifies (and dampens) the current.

Every day, Brad and I read and listen to the news. Every night before sleep, we pray hard to pour that news back into the Big Room so it doesn’t wake us up in the middle of the night with panic or despair. I prefer addressing those feelings in the daytime when I’m well-rested, preferably between the hours of 3pm and 5pm when I can also take some sort of action like calling my representatives. (God help us, are we doing enough?)

Before I met Brad, I used to think that prayer required systematically going through a list of people or situations in need, which if I’m honest, felt tedious and a little boring. Since then, I’ve learned that prayer is more about tapping the fountain of sacred emotion and electricity, and then letting the current carry me to the Big Room. I do sometimes direct my electrical prayer-feelings to a specific target, but more often I concentrate on throwing myself and everything I’m carrying back into the cosmos, trusting that God already knows what’s weighing on my heart and there’s no need to spell it out. St. Augustine captures it in his prayer line:

Here is my heart, O God, here it is with all its secrets…

I confess to appreciating the efficiency and reduced mental taxation of this form of praying. It’s the ultimate “Do it, Lord” approach inspired by the late Reverend Malcolm Miner. He stopped saying elaborate prayers before laying his healing hands on people and instead handed the whole thing over with just three words.¹

Illustration by me, from The Pinnacle Prayer Book.

In the Big Room, the “I” dissolves, the life force circulates, and everything is sorted out by higher wisdom.

Now I can tell you that a couple of years ago, Brad dreamed of the Big Room. It appeared as a special kind of field. A guide brought Brad to a room and announced, “I will show you how the spiritual universe energetically operates.” Suddenly the walls and ceiling dissolved into a great darkness that revealed many lines of light crisscrossing vertically and horizontally. The guide pointed to the web of horizontal lines and said, “This is the electrical field of reception.”

At the point where each line connected there was a small, glowing node. “Each one is a human being receiver.”

We’re all in there somewhere…

The guide further explained that no one is an independent receiver of spiritual electricity. Rather, there is a network of receivers that constitutes the electrical field of reception. When one person receives a transmission, it is received by the whole field.

“At the same time,” the guide explained, “the capacity of each individual node to receive a transmission is dependent on the amount of interference.” What is the source of interference? Too much focus on the self at the expense of the field.

“When attention is given to the self, the electrical charge at that point is dampened. This diminishes the amount of electricity moving through the whole network.”

I admit that when I first heard this report my mind immediately thought of certain well-known, non-receptive nodes on the planet right now who are selfishly dampening the whole grid for the rest of us. I wondered, “Can we maybe partition them off into their own separate field? Imagine how much brighter our section of the world would be…”

But I know that’s not how interdependence works, and I soon lamented how quickly my “field mind” gives way to dampening dualisms. The guide must have anticipated this kind of reaction because he also assured Brad in the dream,

“When even just a few able receivers bring down a charge, it’s enough to light up the whole field. Don’t focus on the self, concentrate on the field. That’s what amplifies the current for everyone.”

Soon after Brad’s vision, I came across these resonant words from Zen teacher, Dainin Katagiri Roshi:

You are connected with the whole universe—you cannot escape. . . Whatever you do, you always do it with the whole world.²

Electrical field translation: Whatever spiritual electricity you receive, you receive for the whole world.

Beautiful, yes?

The inverse is also true. Whatever electricity your interfering self blocks, you block for the whole world.

I can feel that second part pulling me out of field mind again, but this time into earnest self-assessment. As a well-intended “receiver” I certainly don’t want to be out here diminishing the charge for everyone else.

Here we must do our best to read the dream’s teaching from inside the field and not as an individual ego-node. Ego-node is the opposite of field mind; it makes everything about itself. When ego-node tries to follow the guide’s instruction to “concentrate on the field,” it can only concentrate on itself in relationship to the field, which is not the same thing.

For example, ego-node may start fantasizing about becoming a “field influencer” who receives electricity on behalf of thousands of followers. It feels good imagining how people will notice and benefit from its special abilities, quickly forgetting that every fantasy about the self further blocks its capacity to even catch a spark.

On the other hand, ego-node might get sad or angry at the implication that it’s somehow dampening the current for the entire field of existence just because it’s not operating at “maximum reception capacity,” which sounds like yet another ridiculous performance benchmark someone invented. Ego-node would like the rest of the field to cut it some slack.

Don’t listen to ego-node. Listen to the guide instead: “Concentrate on the field. That’s what amplifies the current for everyone.”

Now we can go past self-centered reactivity and advance to the more interesting double-bind of the field mystic: some self-awareness and self-reckoning are required to honestly discern our degree of electrical interference, right? At the same time, self-observation is the very thing that blocks the current from coming through. It seems we’re dampened if we do and dampened if we don’t.

Before we rush in to resolve this tension, let’s ask: do we have to observe the self in order to change? Do we really need to know or understand anything about our current-quashing habits to clear away their interference and become more electrically conductive?

What if, instead, we boldly follow the dream’s instruction to not consider the self at all but only concentrate on the field? I mean just entirely drop the notion that there exists an individual receiver or transmitter of spiritual electricity, an individual prayer of prayers, sender of good vibrations, or catcher of dreams. What could be more liberating, dissolving, exhilarating, comforting, and simplifying than letting go of any sense of self and other by placing all our concentration on the intersecting lines of illumination in which we are eternally bound and electrically found?

Practically speaking, this means the next time you catch yourself observing or assessing the self, even in ways you’ve been taught are therapeutic, try interrupting that action with whole-field concentration.

Maybe you’ll envision the electrical field of reception as a beautiful, glowing web.

Maybe you’ll repeat these words like a prayer or Sufi dhikr, internally or aloud:

concentrate on the field,

concentrate on the field,

the field, the field,

return me to the field…

Try being like the Electrical Lineworkers of old and place your moving body in the field so it can be rocked, shaken, and danced by the current.

Sing, hum, drum, paint, or breathe yourself into the field.

Grab your partner’s hand and re-enter the field together.

If you’re a healer, go full “Do it, Lord” with Reverend Miner and only direct your electrical attention to the field, not to any individual recipient.

(Guild members: remember our community “field transmission” experiment last season? Let’s do that again this year!)

Whoosh…just drop into the feeling of the field, however you can.

Do it now.

God help us, I don’t know if we’re doing enough for this world. But I do remember the guide’s words: “When even just a few receivers bring down a charge, it’s enough to light up the whole field.”

Let’s get amongst it and enjoy experimenting with all the ways and means of self-dissolution and field concentration! I don’t think it matters how we do it or what senses we use, only that we keep returning to, caring for, and taking refuge in the field, our Big Room home.

One more thing: I never addressed the vertical lines Brad saw in his dream. Those lines are where the current comes from. But they’re not ours to handle. Our work is here on the horizontal plane, strengthening the electrical field of reception as best we can while we’re still plugged in.

Here’s to a full night’s sleep, God willing. Or even better, a Big Room electrical dream.

Hillary & Brad

Thanks for hitting the ❤️ button. It feeds the field.

More from Fire in the Bones:

A Story from the Big Room

You Are a Biopsychic Resonator

The Circle of Attunement

1. I wrote about Reverend Miner in The Pinnacle Prayer Book.

2. From his book, The Light of the Self