There are two ways

I know to go about making rain. The first is the shamanic or spiritual way. It uses intention, prayers, medicine objects, ceremony to help an individual connect with an unseen force of nature that produces clouds, rain, thunder and lightning, winds and other weather phenomena. The shamanic approach is thousands of years old and was once practiced worldwide. Most Native American tribal groups had a rainmaker in days past. The art is still known in a few places in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and wherever some knowledge of the old way remains.

In the shamanic tradition a man or woman becomes a rainmaker after showing a predilection and doing a long apprenticeship. While the means and methods vary from culture to culture, the paramount ability is the relationship that is developed with the weather – and with the forces that can move and change it.

In most Native American tribes, at certain times all the people would participate in rainmaking ceremonies. Among the Hopi of the Southwest the entire tribe could be considered rainmakers given their widespread activity in ceremonies. (This understanding that everyone can influence the weather needs more support and encouragement.)

In all tribal and cultural lands where rainmakers were found previously, the people acknowledged the craft, the necessity, and the value of it in their lives. As would be expected, some rainmakers were better at their craft than others. None did the job “fulltime” but were otherwise skilled as healers, herbalists, hunters, farmers, weavers, etc.

The second way

of making rain also requires a love of nature, a solid grounding in natural sciences, and a deep understanding of nature’s primary energy and how to work with it. This primordial energy has been known for thousands of years and has many names: the ether, chi, prana, zero-point, are among some of them. I prefer the term Wilhelm Reich gave it, the orgone, and use it as well as Reich’s descriptions and understandings of it in my own rainmaking work. I also use a method and instrument discovered by Reich to influence the orgone and by that alter weather. Reich called his simple instrument, basically a hollow steel pipe grounded in water, a “cloudbuster.”

There are other so-called scientific or technological means of altering the weather, and some might work. Personally, I have no direct experience of any of them being successful. So I leave them in the “maybe” category and go about my life, figuring if something is out there that can help me make rain, it’ll come to my attention . . .

Because I pay a lot of attention to rain, to weather, to nature. It’s why I know two different ways to alter the weather . . . even though today I never separate the ways in practice, or in my heart or mind. It would be like trying to separate your “parents,” even while you clearly have a mother and a father and two different kinds of influences – because ultimately, they’re one.

The shamanic way
I learned from Sun Bear, who was a rainman of the first degree. The weather seemed to follow him where he went, and there were many, many instances as traveled the country for years. Not that it was grey and rainy where ever he was, but that if rain was needed, it would come. He broke many droughts just by arriving. Other aspects of the weather such as the wind, gentle breezes or strong blows, seemed to mirror his needs. And there were a few thunder and lightning shows I was very lucky to see.

Sun Bear said that he worked with “the Grandfathers” – an invisible, spiritual consciousness, a being of sorts, one that worked with humans and the weather. He said they’d been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. It was their job, sort of. But modern science dismissed them, people were talked out of them, and very few people now know they exist.

The main thing Sun Bear told me was that in order to meet and understand the Grandfathers, I had to learn to love them unconditionally. At the first hearing of this, I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. Especially having unconditional love for something I couldn’t even see.

It was nine years later when I first met them. In the black light of the sweatlodge. I understood in a millisecond why the unconditional part, because they were so Big as a feeling inside of me. I would have burst or gone crazy if I judged that moment. For their part, they didn’t show up till I could handle it.

Since that first meeting, we’re on terms of best friends. Sometimes weeks go by and I don’t think of them, then something happens with the weather and I’m talking to them out loud and thinking of them frequently. When I start making rain I’m talking with them constantly, watching the sky, and often feeling a warm sensation in my chest (just like love). When I get a job making rain, we’re driving in the same truck across the countryside, sitting on the front seat side by side or producing unusual clouds in the sky out the windshield view.

No. I never saw them. They are a feeling to me, an awareness that communicates non-verbally. They have real energy on this dimension, and will usually shape-shift clouds when they’re around. I’ll see bears, birds, fish and various faces in the cloud forms, very clear sometimes, certainly beyond a Rorschach test scenario when the feeling sensations are taken in account.

Once, while I was trying to decide if I could trust the simultaneous sensation of seeing a face in a cloud in the sky and then having a warm sensation in my chest as being connected, like having a look and a talk with your lover, close up, I was sitting in a hot tub on the side of a hill with a good friend looking at Mt Shasta, 14,000’ and snowcapped, cloud after cloud floating by. I was explaining my predicament and receiving understanding from him but not resolving anything for me, when all of a sudden this Rocking Chair Cloud appeared in the southwest. He was facing northeast and couldn’t see it. I stared at it for a full minute or more, watched it build, articulate into a classic rocking chair with broad wood arms and a high back.

Based on the size of Mt Shasta, that Rocking Chair started about 15,000 and went up to 20,000’.

I said to my friend, “Turn around and tell me what you see?”

“Jesus . . . it’s a Rocking Chair.”

I said, “Yeah.” And that was the end of it. No more questions on my part.

Because on my best day with my best insights I wouldn’t come up with a Rocking Chair Cloud as an answer. Not on my best day.

Nature is, as the Natives of this continent and aboriginal peoples around the world knew, alive and listening and acting and reacting with us, within us and around us. In all kinds of ways.

In the way of the weather

something is out there listening in, inside listening out, and together we can connect 40,000’ up in the sky. Astonishing. And that connection can change the weather overhead, and as far as you can see. Rain will fall where it hasn’t in a wide area of land, sometimes a whole region. Winds can change speed and direction.

The shamans weren’t crazy.

The second approach

I use was discovered by Dr. Wilhelm Reich in 1952. It was neither Reich’s only discovery nor his greatest, but one in a seamless career of discoveries and insights and understanding that saw him start as a young man trying to understand human behavior and psychology, move into physiology, then biology, and finally open a new physics on the fundamental life energy, the orgone. The orgone, or the chi-prana-zero point-ether energy is responsible for all life and activities of life on this earth.

The orgone is why all life forms move, spontaneously. The orgone is why the weather moves (changes) constantly. The orgone is why water is a light hue of blue, completely unique, and moves so easily. It’s why your heart beats and your cells divide in the same manner. The life energy fills all space, as far as we know – inside and outside of you. Fills the space of the Universe, as far as we know.

Unlike gravity or electricity, you can see the orgone energy: it’s the pulsing, flickering in the daytime sky, the soft flickering of the night sky. It is the bluish white aura you can see around living things like trees and people if you look close. It’s the blue, liquid “air” pooling in pockets made by your footsteps in freshly fallen snow. It’s involved in the visible shimmering of the “heat wave” you see on the highway, and the shimmering air off a galvanized roof in the midday sun. The orgone is why blood, water and the sky are all a shade of blue.

The life energy moves and pulses constantly, and so all life does the same. When the living being through trauma, sickness, age can no longer hold the life energy charge within its tissues, it stops moving. And we all know, immediately, when that being is dead -- because it no longer moves.

Why mainstream science continues to ignore the existence of a ubiquitous, life energy is beyond reason. Other than Reich, more than a dozen scientists in the 20th Century produced empirical, experimental evidence of its existence and workings. Einstein himself was convinced that some sort of energy united gravity and electromagnetism, and his “unified field theory” became his life’s work.

Yet mainstream science continues to dismiss the existence of a mass-free, ubiquitous life energy beyond reason, at this point. The ignorance must then be emotional in nature; they have a need to not know. Something is afraid of the knowledge.

Nevertheless, using mainstream science’s own tools and procedures, anyone can see, show, and prove the orgone is real and present. That’s how I first confirmed Reich’s discoveries and showed the orgone to myself.

Today, I do it with the rainmaking. A lot of what I do and why I’m successful when I take a rainmaking job I learned first from Reich.

Wilhelm Reich discovered the instrument to work with the orgone in the atmosphere by genius chance and observation. Some workers building a small deck on his pond had driven hollow steel pipes a few feet into the bottom of the pond, leaving 10 feet or so sticking out, pointing at the sky. Then they were called away to another job. The pipes remained some weeks that way and over the summer Reich noticed that when cumulus clouds would float by they would bust up as they went over the top of the pipes.

Hence “the cloudbuster.”

How it works, basically, is that a connection exists between the orgone in the sky and the orgone in the water, and the connection is amplified by the steel conductor. What you do after the connection is made is the art and natural science of it. Reich’s instrument is simple, using it is not.

In my 23 years of experience with it, I know only a handful of people who ever learned to use it. Most others who tried usually gave up, or got sick (it can have that effect). Unfortunately, there are a few who insist that they have discovered new ways and methods and constructions of various type “cloudbusters”, new and improved, better than Reich’s, etc . . . In my experience of them, they don’t know how to make rain. Hopefully, they’re not causing problems.


Who can make rain?

Anybody. Thousands and thousands of people on this Earth today have altered the weather, one way or the other (even if they never told anyone, and hardly believe it themselves).

Everybody has had the experience of altering the weather for a day, for an event, for a specific thing you just had to do that needed sunny weather, a picnic day. All you need is the desire . . .

Consider the “June Bride.” More American women choose June to be married than any other single month. Fact. Across the USA the month of June is, on average, the rainiest month of the year. Fact. So, on any given Saturday in the contiguous USA it may well be raining.

So how are the June Brides doing? If you start asking around you will soon find that many American brides started altering the weather about the time they started doing final alterations on their wedding dress – not that they necessarily understood it that way, usually it was more like a hope and wish and a prayer for weather that would fit just right, something sunny and bright.

In the whole world

there might be several thousand rainmakers. These are men and women who have altered the weather more than once or twice, and feel like, in a jam, they could do it again.

This kind of weather influencing would include getting winds to change during fires; clouds to form to cool off an area; little sweet showers overhead in the evening; cooling breezes to soften the day; and more intense rainfalls when needed in an area.

Then there are the semi-pros. These are people who have altered the weather on numerous occasions, by themselves or in groups. They feel confident they can do it under certain circumstances. Members of the Bear Tribe Medicine Society would, after years around Sun Bear, travel to other states to do programs and upon arriving it would invariably rain. Gentle rains, fortunately, because many of these programs were held outside.

In Reich’s way, there have been some attempts by the Reichian college back in Princeton to teach some basics about the cloudbuster.  Hopefully, they managed to turn out some semi-pros. Then there are the neo-Reichians who will teach anyone anything, it seems; but whether it works or not I really can’t say.

From my point of view, there’s only one other person I would send you to to.

My own apprenticeship was with Jerome Eden, a genius with nature who had an intimate knowledge of Reich’s work. It was close and intense for four years till he passed over. And then five years on my own (although I had good connections at a distance with two other Reichian rainmakers) trying to figure out what he’d shown me before I went out in public and said, “I’m a rainmaker. Sure, I can break that drought.”

In my life, I’ve known five Reichian rainmakers who were pros, and know of another seven or so (though some are now dead and include Reich). There may be more legitimate people out there who actually know how to use Reich’s knowledge in this area, but given what I do, I should have heard of most of them.

With the Indian for 10 years, I met four shamanic rainmakers (had a wild, on the edge experience with one of them). From the Indian and other people I knew, I heard second hand of maybe 20 others who had some skill. Then there were books, now the internet, with stories of others far away, and between all that I think I’ve seen or heard of maybe 50 shamanic rainmakers.

That’s a lot fewer then there used to be.

Sun Bear’s medicine teachers went back to the time of Custard’s last stand. Sun Bear knew the old ways and had a natural talent for them. He dreamed of things that then happened, had visions while he was walking around, ran a 25 mile trapline when he was 8 years old in the Minnesota winter woods, loved nature and the weather and would sit on the ground and talk about it all for hours.

He told me maybe 3% of the Indians remembered the old ways. Since he traveled this country from 17 on, traveled the world, went to 5 of the 7 continents, and had the medicine himself, he knew what he was talking about. I took his word for it, and I’ve found in my experience there aren’t as many so called shamanic rainmakers around, compared with what there could be.

So I would hope there’s several hundred in this country who have done it at least once. I hope there’s several thousand around the world who have done it at least once. Because once qualifies. Once assures the man or woman doing it, that they could do it again. And they may need to. You may need them to, at some point. In any event, people who are aware they can influence the weather, even make rain, are good to have around (usually).

So are people who have heard the stories about rainmaking. . .

Finally

there is the rainmaker who has done it a lot. A hundred times or so (who keeps counting after or 30 or so?) Among the shamanic people, Rolling Thunder had a knack. He could rig a thunderstorm out of a desert canyon in Nevada on a searing dry summer afternoon, and you couldn’t see it and not feel blessed. Sun Bear once pulled off a gentle nighttime summer shower when the roof of the longhouse was off. He told me in the evening it was coming that night and I couldn’t believe it;  but I was highly-trained and so stood outside for hours as it built and then misted, just a mist, just enough to settle the dust that had been bothering the people all day, but not disturb a person or thing in the entire 2nd floor or the longhouse, which was completely open to the elements, its roof on the ground. I was impressed by that mist for weeks. How slick God could be . . .

Booming thunderstorms and bursts of rain on the desert land, a gentle mist in the stifling heat of a cloudless August night -- is the kind of thing the medicine-way rainmakers do, so you have to pay attention, over a period of time, before you can see that these weather events exceed “coincidence.”

Using Reich’s approach is different. I generally get wide-scale effects. The rain will fall on a region, like a good portion of the Northwest, on parts of several states, or on a multi-county area. The system that brings the rain will be well organized and carry on past my area. It will act just like “normal” rains and weather systems, jet stream and all. Because it is. It’s a rainmaker one though because it wouldn’t have come otherwise at that time.


You can’t learn any kind of rainmaking from a book. You can only approach it that way; and truly, the weather can be approached from a book, like an old friend can be called on the telephone. But for real intimacy you have to be close up, just you and It. You need to spend a lot of time outside till sooner or later you start to want the weather on your side.

What else?

As a rainmaker I go into areas where farmers and ranchers are dry and drying up. The media usually describes them as “desperate.” They have raised money to bring you in and there you are, hundreds of miles away from your home, facing these “desperate” people every day . . . not the time to have “theories and explanations.” They need moisture on the ground, and they need it soon.

A rainmaker delivers the water. There’s nothing like it. It’s extraordinary. The skies are now raining when some days ago they were supposed to be dry, like they’d been for a while . . .

I once had a job where a small group of farmers, mostly one related family, paid me to come in, while all their neighbors laughed at them. They were an old-time German family, settled an area on the Great Plains east of the Rockies’, probably 5 miles wide and 20 miles long. That’s where everyone who paid me lived.

I had some success early on in the whole region; it rained on half the state. But it didn’t want to pulse again for a while, and I had to leave. On the last day, heading out of town, I decided at the last minute to drive north 60 miles to the farmer’s lands. By the time I got there, a thunderstorm cloud was floating in the western sky that looked just like a huge bird, wings outstretched, the classic form that gave rise to the Plain’s Indians thunderbird. I barely got there, out of the truck, set up a connection into the water off a shaky, one-lane bridge on a dirt road that crossed a seasonal creek when this Grandfather came pouring in and drenched us, then continued on a path that swept over the lands of the family farms, delivered something over an 1” along that route.

Those farmers were ecstatic. That rain got their crop started and they were now certain more would come because a lot of them had seen me down at the bridge and figured I actually knew how to make a t-storm sweep their lands. For 11 years they’d seen drought and little rain when they needed it. So something got restored inside of them.

And me, on my best day, with my best techniques, honed over 23 years of experience, I still have no idea how to get a t-storm to be 5 miles wide and 20 long, and drop much needed moisture just on the people who are paying me.

The rest of that summer turned out one of the best on record for growing grain in the whole region. Something else I can’t really take specific credit for, except when I was there early on they were in a drought.

When the rainmaker leaves it should still keep raining for a while. Several weeks, a month, a season, should see good weather, a little wetter than normal.

If you visit a rainmaker the area where he or she lives should feel good, regardless of the climate and topo. If it’s high desert it will be primo high desert such as the Hopi have managed down in Arizona for more than 900 years, the oldest, continuous settlement in N. America.

I no longer know what the difference is between the medicine way of making rain, and Reich’s natural scientific methodology. Not on the dry, dusty ground when I’m waiting for rain.

With both ways, you have to make a connection to something that is at once outside of you while being inside of you. The sensation this produces inside of you is not distinguishable from the sensation produced by love: there’s a glowing (although there’s no “object” to pin it on).

After my Mom died, I decided one day to leave my own home in California and just journey “out.” I left Mt Shasta, drove to the Northwest, then Midwest, East Coast, Midwest again, Southwest, back to home in California. I was on the road for 20 months and every time I moved I ran into a drought; every time it ended the day I arrived, or within 48 hours after.

Driving back to Albany, NY, my family home, on Dec 20th, 1995, I drove into a very dry northern NY. Most of the state had been that way for a year and a-half. First city I hit crossing the border from the west was Buffalo, where it started to snow. Not unusal for Buffalo. Then it stayed with me for 6 hours till I got to Albany. Thirteen inches at the house. Not too unusual either. But over the next 11 days, December of ’95 broke the historical record for snowfall in that month, something that went back to 1883.

That was unusual. Especially since I grew up and lived there till I was 30. It was not something I could overlook.

That kind of thing had already happened to me in Spokane, Washington, and Plymouth, Michigan. It would continue over the next year in Bloomington, Indiana, back in Albany, several weeks outside of New York City, Cleveland, Bloomington again and then, finally, and confirmedly: Santa Fe, New Mexico. When the rains fall around you regularly in the desert Southwest, then you know you’re a pro . . .

And there’s only a few of us. Literally. I only know a few people I could call to end a drought. There may be others, but I don’t know of them, and as I said, given what I do, I should have heard of them.

In fact, if you had the money tomorrow to finance an operation, there’s only one other person I know who could show up and do it. Regardless of where you lived.

So how many actual rainmakers are out there. Someone you could call up and say,

“Hey, we got a bad drought here, it’s starting to kill us. Can you do something?”

I don’t know how many . . .

But I hope there’s a bunch. (Because anyone could do it)

The Judgments

For some of the things I’ve written here the “Reichians” will likely charge me with being a mystic, a big sin in their lights, and consider me unreliable.

I have no excuses. Life popped up several big things in front of me that I haven’t been able to squeeze into a Reich Box, and so I tend to get mystical about them.

The Shamanic practitioners might disfavor the science approach; call me a technologist, someone from the dry lot of empty sales, and not spiritual enough.

The conventional scientist and much of the rest of the planet who listen to them and “conventional wisdom” in general, will most likely consider much of what I’ve written here to be crazy.

I have no excuses.

I do, however, have a slew of newspaper articles that attest to the fact that I know how to make rain, and a few hundred people around the country who will tell you the same.

What do they have? Theories and judgments.

Moreover, I’m the only one I ever knew who got to work with two rainmakers when I started off: one from the spirit; one from the science (without believing either one of them at the start).

Today, I can’t tell them apart.

And I have an obligation to report that . . .

And One More Thing . . .

There are actually two people I would call today to deal with a drought if I couldn’t.

Only two.

But this is not their website.

Its for the rest of the rainmakers past and future.


Additional Notes and Observations There are a number of matter based approaches that claim to make rain. Some use chemicals, some electromagnetism, some use various forms and structures that purportedly encourage rainfall. I have no direct experience of them being successful; many seem fanciful at best. There are also continuing rumors and reports of the “Govt” doing something to alter weather, and that may well be true. However, altering the weather and making rain are two different things. A summertime underground nuclear bomb test at the Nevada site will cause a strong, dry, high-pressure cell to develop within 24 hours over the West Coast from S. Calif to Seattle, and inland as far as Utah and Idaho. For seven to ten days following, no rains fall out West. Now that’s the Govt altering the weather, but not making rain.

Then there is the commercial business of “cloud seeding,” also known as “weather modification.” This approach shoots chemicals into rain bearing clouds attempting to make more nuclei for water in the cloud to attach to, and then fall as additional raindrops. The method works in certain areas, sometimes, but it’s more accurately called rain enhancement since it requires the rainclouds to be imminent before the seeding can be done. It has no positive effect in dry or drought conditions. The downside to weather modification through cloud seeding is that the chemicals create havoc in the atmosphere, and generally lead to drier conditions in time over a large area. Nevertheless, this drugging of the sky is the only recognized method of “rainmaking” by the Govt, by mechanistic scientists, and is now a multi- billon dollar enterprise in this country.

End of Part 1