Peter Merry's Blog

A talk I gave at a Visions for the Future event on the Northwest European Indigenous Tradition of Wyrd, followed by a visit to Wyrd Experience to see the consciousness-interactive technology hosted there (from 27:30).

A small topic, this one… The funny thing is that at one level it does feel small – essential, pure and simple. 

It has been a blessing this year to be running two year-long programmes where a small group meets monthly to inquire deeply into some core principles and explore what it means to live them. In those conversations, as we look to name the essences, although the words sometimes differ, I feel we always end up in the same place. That suggests to me that we are touching something essential.

Essential. From the Latin, esse, “to be”. The Latin essentia was used philosophically to translate the Greek ousia (οὐσία), meaning something like “being”, “substance” or “that which something fundamentally is.”

The kind of essential insights we keep coming back to are things like “it’s just about simple being, in the moment, as that is all there is”, or “it feels like when I let go into the present, I am deeply connected to everything around me”, or “when I am fully present I feel so much love”. Presence, connection, love. And we nearly always conclude “it’s really all so simple”.

At the same time, we are not static. We are alive. Things continually flow through us and we seem to change, as does the world around us. This aliveness, vitality, connection to a life force seems to increase relative to the depth of our presence. So the more we just are in the moment, the more we become a vehicle for the creative natural intelligence that brings potential into form. It feels effortless. 

More than effortless! It is a joyful experience of magic, flow and synchronicity as our life purpose weaves into the higher purpose of Life itself. It is love in action. It feels immensely liberating. At one level there is a place of deep stillness, a constant source of loving kindness, and on the surface there is dance, flow and effortless manifestation. This is the co-existence of the Absolute one and the Relative many in a non-dual embrace.

It is a deep experience of inter-being, the co-arising of all of life in an ex-static dance of weaving connections and crystallising uniqueness. It is existence itself – from the Latin ex-sistere, “to stand forth, emerge”. The existence of life emerging out of the essence of being. 

It is the dance of presence, love and interconnectedness with the eros life force, a dynamic balance of, on the one hand, equanimity and relaxation with, on the other hand, compassion, passion, emotion and profound alertness.

Our intention participates in the co-creation of existence and our attention connects us to the moment. All we have to do is be present, pay attention to the moment, notice life’s impulse and choose to act or not.

Maybe simple, not always easy. There are many things in our inner and outer worlds ready to distract us. But that’s the practice. Noticing when we slip away, gently bringing ourselves back with a little smile and, when the time is right, reflecting on what it was that distracted us and why.

When we are present in thiis way, heart full of loving kindness and mind clear of distractions, we can access the insights we need. Just ask and pay attention. When we are connected to the natural intelligence of the life force, those insights can find their way into the world with grace, joy and amplification in ways we could never have thought up ourselves.

It feels to me that this is the essence of how we can best engage the inner and outer suffering of today’s world. Simple, not easy, but what better way could there be than love and life?

The Leading from the Field year-long programme will start again in January. There are 8 places available, to keep the intimacy and depth of exchange. Click here for more information.

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(Human Made · 100% written by Peter Merry · No generative AI used)

Imagine standing outside in the rain.

A scientist could, in principle, describe an extraordinary amount of what is happening. The temperature of the air. The speed and chemical composition of the raindrops. The wavelengths of light reaching your eyes. The activity in your brain as you recognise what you are seeing. The changes in your nervous system as cold water touches your skin.

Yet none of those measurements tells us what it is like for you to stand there. Perhaps the rain makes you feel alive. Or it reminds you of childhood. Maybe you are miserable because you have just missed the bus. Or for a few moments the boundary between you and the world dissolves and you simply experience the rain falling.

There is the event that can be observed from outside, and there is the experience of the event from inside. That simple distinction takes us into one of the great unresolved questions of our time: consciousness.

The puzzle of experience

The philosopher David Chalmers famously called this the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Science has become extremely good at investigating what brains do. We can observe which regions become active when someone sees a face, feels pain or enters a meditative state. We can increasingly map relationships between brain activity and behaviour.

Yet there remains a strange gap. Why should all that physical activity be accompanied by experience? Why doesn’t a brain simply process information? Why should the firing of neurons be accompanied by the colour red, the smell of coffee, the pain of grief or the exhilaration of falling in love? This is what philosophers call the “phenomenal” dimension of consciousness: what an experience feels like from the inside.

Another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, approached the same mystery by asking what it is like to be a bat. We can learn enormous amounts about bats from the outside: their biology, their nervous systems, their use of echolocation. Yet however sophisticated our instruments become, we do not gain access to the bat’s experience of being a bat. There is always an inside.

I first came across this distinction years ago through Ken Wilber’s Integral four-quadrant model and wrote about it in Evolutionary Leadership (2003). We can look at a human being from the outside — brain, body and behaviour — or encounter the person’s interior world of feelings, thoughts, values and meaning. We can similarly look at a group from outside through its structures and systems, or from within through its culture and shared meanings.

All of these perspectives reflect something real. The difficulty begins when we assume that only one of them is ultimately real.

What if we started with the wrong assumption?

The dominant scientific worldview of the last few centuries has tended to start with matter. Matter exists. Matter organises itself into increasingly complex structures. Eventually brains appear. Somehow, when brains become sufficiently sophisticated, consciousness emerges.

At that point science raises a tricky question. How does something entirely objective suddenly produce something subjective? How does matter start to feel? There are many sophisticated attempts to answer that question. Yet I increasingly wonder whether part of the difficulty lies in the way we have framed the problem.

We begin by separating observer from observed, mind from matter, subject from object. Having pulled reality apart conceptually, we then spend enormous effort trying to work out how the pieces could possibly relate to one another again. What if the separation was never as fundamental as we assumed?

Two aspects of one process

Rather than saying that everything is matter, or turning the argument around and saying everything is mind, there is a third possibility. What we call mind and matter may be different aspects of a deeper reality. From outside, I encounter a brain. From inside, I experience a mind.

Perhaps these are not two separate things requiring an explanation for how they are connected. They may be two expressions of one event. This seems to be fundamental to many of the places people have got stuck when trying to work out the nature of consciousness over the last few decades. A mindset of linearity and causality is preventing them from seeing other alternatives – in fact a very simple alternative that would resolve many of their struggles.

Instead of asking: How does mind act on matter? we can ask: What deeper process gives rise to both interior experience and exterior form?

That removes one of the classic problems of dualism. If mind and matter are two separate realities, we have to explain how one can somehow impact the other. If they co-arise, there is no mysterious causal bridge to cross.

The correlation between mind and brain, for example, does not necessarily mean that one must be reduced to the other. Both may be expressions of the same underlying process. That is much closer to how I explain things in Volution.

Reality as becoming

In Volution, I describe reality as an ongoing process of becoming. Things are never simply fixed objects. A tree, a person, an organisation, a culture. Each is continuously maintaining, adapting and transforming itself.

This brings us to another important question. What holds a living system together through time? A tree is continually exchanging matter and energy with its surroundings. Cells die and are replaced. Water moves through it. Leaves fall. New branches appear. Yet somehow it retains a recognisable identity as this tree.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle used the term telos to describe the final form towards which a living process is directed. A related term, entelechy, carries the sense of a thing having its end or fulfilment active within its own becoming.

The potential oak is not simply waiting somewhere in the future for the acorn to reach it. The potential is already active in the present as part of the organising tension of the living system. The acorn expands and the oak manifests in the volutionary tension between present and potential.

The tree exists between what it currently is and what it is capable of becoming. That relationship is never static. The present conditions constrain what is possible. The potential influences what becomes probable.

That is close to a postulate that Ken Wilber uses in describing living holarchies: lower levels establish the possibilities available to higher ones, while higher-order organisation shapes the probabilities of what the lower parts actually do. This is the same concept but applied to time. Translated into volutionary language:

The actual constrains the possible.
The potential influences the probable.
Their relationship generates the trajectory of becoming.

The field between present and potential

This reflects a deeper meaning to what I have been calling the volutionary field. The tension between present and potential not only initiates a process, triggering the movement out of the unified field. That volutionary tension is also what sustains it during its life process.

As long as there is a difference between what a living system is and what it can become, there is an organising polarity. Present reality on one side, potential reality on the other. The living system exists in the dynamic relationship between them. This is the definition of literally what keeps something alive in the relative world – the creative tension between two relative poles of present and potential.

A lifecycle in the relative material world ends when that tension disappears. That might be because the entity has fulfilled its role in the ecology and manifested its fullest potential – so the two poles of present and potential have grown into each other. Or one of the poles loses its power – the present state of its material manifestation might get irreparably damaged or the need for the entity (potential) might fade – either way, the creative force field between the poles weakens and the form dissipates.

It’s important to note that the potential itself is not absolutely fixed. It changes as the environment changes. A tree growing beside a river has different possibilities from the same species growing on a dry hillside. An individual develops in relationship with family, culture, history and opportunity. An organisation’s potential shifts with its people, its purpose and its wider context.

So telos is not a predetermined destination. It is better understood as an emergent attractor towards fulfilment within a changing ecology. The potential evolves as the system evolves.

Subject and object may arise together

This brings us back to consciousness. If reality is fundamentally process rather than substance, and if living systems continuously arise through relationships between present conditions and emerging potential, then subject and object may themselves be products of this same process.

The world is not necessarily composed of separate things first and relationships second. Relationship may co-arise equally. The Buddhist idea of interbeing points in this direction. Contemplate a sheet of paper and you find the tree, the rain that fed the tree, the soil, the sunlight, the logger, the transport system and the countless conditions that made the paper possible.

The paper does not exist independently. Neither do I. My body is Earth temporarily organised into human form. My language exists because of countless generations before me. My identity emerges through relationship. My thoughts are shaped by culture, memory and interaction. Even the boundary I experience between “me” and “world” is more permeable than it first appears.

The philosopher Merleau-Ponty explored this from the perspective of lived experience. William James argued that experience itself may come before the distinction between subject and object. Whitehead went further, describing reality as a process of events becoming through relationship with both inherited actuality and unrealised possibility.

Different traditions, different language, similar intuition: the separate thing may not be the most fundamental unit of reality. The relationship may be.

Can co-arising be measured?

This is where our work with Wyrd becomes interesting. Wyrd uses random event generators — devices designed to produce unpredictable streams of data. Over time, that data should behave in statistically expected ways.

Researchers have explored for decades whether changes in human attention, intention or collective experience sometimes correlate with unusual patterns in such random systems. The effects reported in this field are small and the interpretation is far from definitive, but the possibility is intriguing.

If interior experience and exterior form are aspects of one deeper process, could changes in the interior or relational dimension of an event sometimes have measurable exterior correlates?

The wording is important. We are not asking whether “mind causes matter to change.” That would put us straight back into the dualistic problem. The hypothesis is that perhaps an unusual collective experience and an unusual statistical pattern are co-arising expressions of the same deeper event.

One is encountered through the interior dimension. The other appears through exterior measurement. Neither impacts the other in a linear causal way. That, to me, is a much more interesting possibility.

From causation to correspondence

We already accept something like this within a human being. If I am frightened, many things happen at once. My subjective experience changes. My heart rate changes. My breathing changes. My brain activity changes. My behaviour changes. Which one is the event? All of them. They are different aspects of one whole-system response.

We would be making a mistake if we assumed that the feeling of fear had to be a separate substance somehow reaching into the body and causing all the physical changes. Or vice-versa. The whole organism is responding.

What if some events work like that at larger scales? What if a group, organisation or wider human field has interior and exterior expressions too? Wyrd does not prove that – yet. It is however a very intriguing research question.

What about quantum physics?

Quantum physics inevitably enters discussions like this because it has revealed a universe far stranger than the mechanical world imagined a few centuries ago. At very small scales, probability, entanglement and measurement become central to our descriptions of reality.

It is tempting to jump from there to the conclusion that quantum physics explains consciousness. I don’t think we can say that. We do not currently know for sure that consciousness collapses quantum waves, creates matter or operates through entanglement.

The deeper contribution of modern physics may simply be that it has undermined our confidence in the old picture of reality as a collection of separate, solid objects interacting mechanically in empty space. That opens the door to new explorations.

Perhaps the hard problem is telling us something

The hard problem of consciousness may therefore be hard for a reason. It may reveal the limits of the worldview from which we are trying to solve it. If we begin with a universe made exclusively of external objects and then try to add interior experience later, consciousness looks almost miraculous.

If we begin instead with a participatory universe in which interiority and exteriority co-arise, the problem changes. We no longer have to explain how dead matter suddenly produces experience. We have to understand how one underlying process expresses itself as both experience and form.

Maybe we can go one step further. If living systems are continuously held in the tension between present reality and emerging potential, then consciousness may itself be part of that movement. Experience may be one way in which a living system participates in its own becoming.

Meaning, feeling, attention and intention may belong to the interior side of the same process that appears externally as physiology, behaviour, organisation and form.

The actual constrains what is possible. The potential influences what becomes probable. And life unfolds in the relationship between them.

Perhaps consciousness is not an inexplicable late arrival in the story of the universe. Perhaps interiority and exteriority, actuality and potentiality, form and meaning have always belonged to the same moment. The challenge then is not to force one half of reality to explain the other. It is to understand the deeper process from which both arise.

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.

The World Cup, private investment and the stewardship of our shared inheritance

On 30 July 2026, UEFA and its 55 national associations issued a remarkably forceful response to FIFA’s proposal to transfer ownership interests in the World Cup and other competitions to private investors. They rejected the proposal unanimously and announced that their national teams would withdraw from FIFA competitions while it remained alive.

The strength of the response caught the headlines and the language behind it caught my attention.

“The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product.”

That sentence opens up a question that reaches far beyond football.

Financial markets have become highly effective at identifying economic value, mobilising capital and supporting enterprise. They enable people to invest in ideas, share risk and bring new possibilities into form. They play a valuable role in the life of society.

They also carry a specific purpose. An investment seeks a return. Once investors acquire an ownership interest, the generation of that return becomes part of the institution’s responsibility.

UEFA put this plainly:

“Commercial return becomes a permanent obligation.”

That obligation begins to shape the questions people ask, the information they pay attention to and the decisions they make. Priorities gradually gather around the need to maintain financial value. The language of governance changes. So does the experience of those involved.

This gives us a useful way of looking at the relationship between markets and the wider society they serve. Many forms of value translate well into financial terms. Others carry meaning that stretches across generations and lives in the relationships between people. The World Cup belongs in this second category.

A shared inheritance

The World Cup has been built over generations by players, coaches, supporters, clubs, communities and national teams. Children have grown up watching it with their parents and later shared it with children of their own. Countries have carried memories of triumph, heartbreak and collective celebration for decades.

The tournament generates large revenues. Its cultural value reaches far beyond those revenues. It lives in the sense of connection that arises when millions of people focus their attention on the same unfolding drama.

These qualities emerge through participation. They accumulate slowly as people bring their energy, care and commitment to something held in common. An organisation may administer the resulting institution. Legal structures may allocate rights and responsibilities. The meaning itself continues to live in the wider community.

This is where ownership becomes an inadequate description of the relationship. Stewardship is more apporpriate. A steward receives something that existed before them and will continue after them. Their authority comes with a responsibility to care for its integrity, vitality and future. They hold a place in a much longer story.

We encounter this form of stewardship throughout life—in the languages and cultures shaped across centuries, the knowledge accumulated through inquiry and teaching, and the institutions, landscapes and ecosystems that sustain us. Each generation receives this inheritance, contributes to it and determines the condition in which it will be passed on.

The purpose carried by a system

Every institution carries a purpose: universities nurture learning and inquiry, healthcare systems support health, forests sustain communities of life, democratic institutions enable people to shape their shared future, and sporting competitions create space for excellence, commitment, identity and celebration. 

Financial health can help each of them fulfil that purpose, while investment can bring resources, discipline and creative energy. The quality of the relationship depends on whether those contributions remain in service of the institution’s deeper purpose.

When investor return becomes an ownership obligation, it acquires a permanent place in governance. It gains a voice in decisions concerning timing, scale, format, access and development. Its influence continues even when the interests of the investor and the original purpose of the institution begin to diverge.

This shift often happens gradually, through a series of decisions that each appear sensible in isolation. Over time, universities begin to treat students as customers, hospitals favour treatments that generate stronger margins, social-media platforms design for attention capture, and football competitions shape their calendars and formats around the value of commercial rights. The outward forms remain familiar, while the organising purpose gets changed.

Living systems and nested purpose

A volutionary perspective understands every living system as nested within larger living systems. Cells form organs, organs sustain bodies, and people live within families, communities, societies and ecosystems, each level carrying its own identity and purpose while depending on the health of the wider contexts around it. Life flourishes through the reciprocity between these levels, as the parts contribute to the whole and the whole creates the conditions in which the parts can thrive. Markets belong within this living architecture too: they operate within societies, which in turn exist within the wider ecology of life. Seen in this way, the economy serves society, and society serves life.

Problems emerge when one part begins to organise the larger system around its own needs, allowing financial value to define social value, efficiency to define education and economic productivity to define ecological health. Over time, the system loses touch with the very conditions that sustain it. 

Leadership serves to hold the relationships between these nested purposes, keeping the parts connected to the whole, attending to the vitality of the system across time and remaining accountable to those who contribute to it, depend upon it and will inherit it. Stewardship becomes a practical discipline grounded in clear boundaries of authority, a living relationship with the people and places affected by our decisions, attention to forms of value that never appear on a balance sheet, and the humility to recognise that much of what we lead was created long before we arrived.

The commons in our time

The dispute between UEFA and FIFA provides a visible example of a much wider tension. Similar questions surround freshwater supplies, healthcare, universities, public space, scientific knowledge, cultural heritage and the natural world. Artificial intelligence brings another dimension to the inquiry as privately owned systems become part of the cognitive infrastructure on which societies increasingly depend.

Each domain has its own needs and calls for its own forms of governance. They share a concern for common wealth: the forms of value created collectively, inherited across time and needed for the flourishing of the whole. The commons is sometimes imagined as a collection of resources available to everyone. It is also a field of relationship. Its health depends upon participation, responsibility, trust and care.

Trust grows through repeated experience. People sense whether an institution remains faithful to its purpose. They notice when leaders listen, when decisions are transparent and when benefits flow back into the wider community. They also notice when something they helped to create begins to be used for purposes over which they have little influence. This is why decisions about ownership carry such power. Ownership shapes accountability. It determines which voices have standing and which outcomes gain priority. It influences the time horizon within which choices are made.

A steward looks towards the next generation. An investor understandably looks towards the return. Both perspectives have their place. Wisdom lies in creating relationships that keep each one connected to the appropriate purpose and level of the whole.

The things that matter

UEFA ended its statement with a simple assertion:

“Some things are simply too important to sell.”

The sentence carries moral clarity. It also leaves us with work to do. Which things matter in this way? Who decides? What forms of governance can protect their integrity while allowing them to evolve? How do we bring investment into public life while preserving the purpose of the institutions receiving it?

These questions belong at the centre of leadership today. We have become skilled at asking how much something is worth. Stewardship invites us to ask what something is for, where it came from, who it serves and what future depends upon it.

The World Cup has brought that inquiry into public view. What we choose to hold in trust will shape the civilisation we pass on.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Peter Merry explores what it means to navigate our time of profound transition through an integral, evolutionary lens. Together we examine why chaos is not simply breakdown, but the fertile space where the future begins to emerge. Rather than trying to predict or control what comes next, Peter invites us into the practice of “not knowing”—a deeper form of presence that allows us to participate consciously in emergence.

We explore consciousness, time, leadership, Spiral Dynamics, AI, and the subtle fields of awareness that shape human evolution. Peter shares why future-ready leadership is less about having answers and more about sensing the whole, translating complexity for different perspectives, and creating the conditions for self-organization. We also discuss why AI, despite its extraordinary capabilities, cannot access the living field of consciousness in the way human beings can, and why reconnecting with our deepest human capacities may be the key to co-creating the Third Attractor.

Ultimately, this conversation is an invitation to let go of certainty, trust the creative process of evolution, and contribute with integrity to the future that is already trying to emerge through us.

Peter Merry is a social innovator, author, educator, and one of the leading voices in evolutionary leadership and systems transformation. As Chief Innovation Officer of Ubiquity University and founder of the Wyrd initiative, he explores the intersection of consciousness, leadership, subtle interconnectedness, and societal change. Drawing on Integral Theory, human ecology, and emerging understandings of energy and information fields, Peter’s work invites us to lead “from the field” and participate consciously in the evolution of humanity. He is the author of Evolutionary Leadership, Why Work?, and Leading from the Field. https://petermerry.org/ https://gowyrd.org

Daniela Bomatter is a Swiss-born former software engineer and business leader who rose through various leadership positions to become CEO of SwissEnergy at the Federal Office of Energy in Switzerland. After a successful career in technology and public service, her life took a transformative turn through the encounter with spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. As a co-founder of Manifest Nirvana, Daniela has been a senior practitioner of Evolutionary Enlightenment, living, studying, and working closely with Andrew Cohen from 2008 until his passing in March 2025. Her work continues to carry forward the essence of his vision—an awakening that is not separate from evolution itself. She now lives in Tiruvannamalai, India, where she founded and runs the Manifest Nirvana Ashram, a vibrant hub for spiritual practice, dialogue, and conscious community within a small sustainable village. From there, she also facilitates the activities of the online ashram (https://manifest-nirvana.com), offering courses, dialogues, and retreats dedicated to evolutionary spirituality, collective awakening and cultural change. In 2025, Daniela published her first book, The Viratya Myth Begins—a mythic-visionary narrative exploring the next step of human evolution through a fusion of story, philosophy, and consciousness inquiry.

A conversation with Lee Mason

These are extracts from an interview I gave to CNBC in Brazil about Whole Performers. (This is the full interview, with some rather strange dubbing….)

A message recently came to me through a church network (see below). It invited people around the world to pause for one minute each day in prayer, silence or intention for peace. The message was simple and beautiful: when many people turn their hearts toward peace at the same time, something larger than the individual is formed.

It is a great invitation and is also close to what we have been exploring in the Wyrd consciousness research: that consciousness does not appear to be sealed inside individual brains, but may participate in fields of relationship, meaning and coherence.

There is a long history to this kind of practice. During the Second World War, the “Silent Minute” invited people to pause at a fixed time each evening for prayer and intention. Many experienced it as a powerful act of collective spiritual alignment. The historical claims about its direct effects are hard to verify in ordinary causal terms, but the practice itself points to something important: when human beings pause together, with sincerity and shared purpose, a field of attention is formed.

And yet our research also suggests something crucial: the clearer the field, the stronger the intention effect.

A general prayer for “world peace” is noble, but it may be too diffuse to form a coherent intentional system. “World peace” includes every conflict, every country, every timescale, every actor, every pathway. It is so vast that the mind and heart struggle to hold it as a living reality.

From the perspective of the Model of Pragmatic Information, or MPI (a model for understanding how consciousness works), this matters. MPI suggests that meaningful correlations arise within systems that have enough coherence, boundary and relevance to become entangled in a practical way. In ordinary language: intention seems to work best when it has a clear context.

So instead of only praying for “peace on Earth,” we might choose a more specific field of intention. For example:

Peace, protection and wise resolution in Ukraine over the next three months.

That simple shift changes the quality of the act. It gives the intention a place, a timeframe and a living context. It allows the imagination, the heart and the field of attention to gather around something more concrete. It gives our compassion a vessel. A river needs banks in order to flow.

What might make collective prayer or intention more effective is not only the number of people involved, or even the sincerity of the feeling. It may also depend on the coherence of the field being created.

A coherent intention practice has three movements, relatd to the practice of prayer in many ways.

1. Name a clear goal bounded in time and space

The first step is to define the field.

For example:

For the next three months, we hold a field of protection, wisdom and de-escalation around Ukraine, so that a real pathway to peace becomes visible, trusted and chosen.

This gives the intention a boundary. It says: this is the living situation we are turning toward. This is the system we are holding in consciousness. This is the timeframe in which we are inviting change. That does not mean we care less about other conflicts or other suffering. It means we give compassion a container to work in.

A general wish says: may there be peace everywhere. A coherent intention says: let us hold this situation, in this period of time, with this living outcome in heart and mind.

2. Imagine the intention already fulfilled, and feel what that would be like

The second step is to enter the felt reality of the outcome.

This is more than visualisation in the ordinary sense. It is a shift from hoping for peace to inhabiting the feeling of peace already present.

What does it feel like when people in Ukraine wake without fear of missiles?

What does it feel like when soldiers are returning home?

What does it feel like when leaders, against expectation, find the wisdom to choose life over escalation?

What does it feel like when children sleep safely, families rebuild, and the land itself exhales?

The practice is to let the body feel the reality of the fulfilled intention. The nervous system becomes an instrument of the future it is helping to invite.

Many forms of prayer ask for something to happen and stop there. But in consciousness research, and in many contemplative traditions, there is another mode to add: entering the felt reality of the outcome as if it is already present.

So instead of only praying, “May there be peace,” we spend one minute feeling peace as real.

3. Release the intention to God, the Universe, or the larger field of intelligence

The third step is release.

Once the goal is named and felt, we do not need to control the how.

In prayer language, we entrust it to God.

In spiritual language, we release it to the Universe.

In consciousness language, we let the larger field find the most elegant path of manifestation.

This release is important because attachment to the how can make the field rigid. We may think peace has to come through one leader, one treaty, one negotiation, one political move, one dramatic breakthrough. But the deeper intelligence of life may have pathways we cannot see.

So we hold the end goal clearly in mind and heart, while releasing our attachment to the mechanism. Then we pay attention and stay curious. We notice synchronicities, openings, changes of tone, unexpected meetings, shifts in public mood, new possibilities. We do not force the outcome, but neither do we become passive. We become participants in a living field of possibility.

This is the difference between wanting peace from outside the system and helping to stabilise the pattern of peace within it.

A one-minute practice could therefore become more powerful if it had three elements:

First, a define space and time.

Second, a shared focus.

Third, a shared felt sense of the manifested outcome, followed by release.

For example, a group might agree to pause every evening and hold this intention:

For the next three months, we hold a field of protection, wisdom and de-escalation around Ukraine, so that a real pathway to peace becomes visible, trusted and chosen.

Then, for one minute, they would not merely think about peace. They would feel the peace as already real. They would sense the relief in bodies, homes, hospitals, fields, decision rooms and front lines.

Then they would release the intention to God, or to the larger intelligence of the Universe, trusting that it knows the best way to manifest. And finally, they would remain attentive and curious.

This kind of practice need not replace prayer. In a religious context, it may deepen prayer. For others, it may be held as meditation, intention or sacred attention. The language can differ, but the pattern is shared: coherent hearts, coherent minds, coherent focus.

The old Silent Minute showed the power of collective pause. Today, perhaps our task is to make that pause more conscious, more precise and more relational.

Not just “peace somewhere, someday.” Peace here. Peace now. Peace in this living field. Held together and felt as real. Then released into the mystery that knows how to weave.

The Original Message

(translated from Dutch)
Dear people,

At this moment, a silent invitation is going around the world. From different countries, people are sharing with one another a simple but powerful gesture: to consciously come together every day for one minute in prayer, silence or intention.

During the Second World War, a similar movement arose. At a fixed time each evening, a group of people would put down what they were doing in order to pray for peace and protection for everyone. Day after day, they came together in this single moment of attention and devotion.

It was later said that the power of this shared prayer was so great that it felt as if an entire city fell silent for a moment. Shortly afterwards, the bombings stopped.

Today, people are once again choosing to connect with one another in this way.

All over the world, people take one minute each day to open their hearts to peace. A minute in which we focus on safety, harmony and protection for all countries and all people on Earth.

In that one minute, we remember that consciousness has power. That thoughts, prayers and intentions form a field that reaches beyond borders, languages and cultures.

We invite the highest light to flow through our world.

We ask that wisdom and compassion may guide the decisions of leaders.

And we hold a field in which peace becomes possible.

When thousands or even millions of people connect at the same moment, a powerful collective field of consciousness arises.

One minute may seem small.

But one minute of shared intention can open a world.

We connect energetically at the same time around the world: Netherlands – 4:00 p.m.

Take one minute each day, at the time indicated, to turn your heart toward peace on Earth.

A minute in which we pray for world peace, for the ending of conflicts, and for the restoration of calm, safety and dignity for all people on this planet.

A minute in which we also ask that families may find their protection, guidance and inner strength in God – the Universal Source.

When people connect at the same moment in prayer or intention, a powerful field of consciousness arises. Throughout history, we have seen that shared intention can have an immense effect.

If we truly understood how powerful prayer and focused intention are, we would be amazed at what becomes possible when hearts unite.

Feel free to share this call with people around you, so that this field can expand further.

You can simply set an alarm on your phone each day for the time indicated for your country, and use that one minute to consciously connect with this worldwide field of peace.

When many people focus on peace at the same time, a force arises that reaches further than we can see with the eye.

Together, we remind the world of peace!