Alick Bartholomew - The Spiritual Life of Water: Its Power and Purpose

For Mari et amicis

To Mae-Wan Ho for her inspiration and for generously allowing me to quote from her books and articles. To Martin Chaplin for permission to quote from his useful website, to Callum Coats for his diagrams, to Chris Weedon of the Water Association for his encouragement and helpful suggestions, and to Christopher Moore of Floris Books and Laura Schlivek of Inner Traditions for their helpful editing.

And special thanks to Caroline Way for allowing me to quote her poem Still Water Meditation, which aptly sets the theme for this book.

FOREWORD

I have a great fondness for water bears. Less than a millimeter long, water bearsor tardigradesclamber about on eight stubby legs, tipped with the tiniest of claws, like minute animated jelly-teddies in a watery micro-world. Endearing! But water bears are much more special than that. When dry conditions arrive, instead of succumbing to death, water bears survive by just drying up... completely! Well, almost. Drying to a body content of 1 percent water, from close to 100 percent, the creature transforms into a microscopic speck of organic dust, utterly resistant to drought, extreme cold, vacuum, and even radioactivity. In this dormant, desiccated state, a water bear can survive for thousands of years. Its a good trick if you can do it!

Yet, however remarkable the resilience born of desiccation seems, surely the greater miracle is the life that water brings! For, with even a single drop of water, the sleeping water bear bounces back into action, striding again through mossy jungles. How is it that one extra ingredient has the power to awaken a mote of dust? What has happened? What is water doing? What is water that its presence facilitates and empowers life?

The Spiritual Life of Water sets out in answer to these questions, probing much further than merely repeating that favored adage that Water is Life. Here is a tale of wholeness and connectivity told through water; of the interplay between material and nonmaterial, enacted on Earth, yet influenced from far beyond the bounds of our planet.

The extraordinary subtlety and complexity of waters roles are vividly illustrated. And having done so, the book then asks: What are the qualities of water that best support life? The quest for a comprehensive answer to this question has been the research focus of the heroes of Alick Bartholomews story. By drawing together the findings and insights of these researchers into so many aspects of waters reality, a picture emerges of a seemingly infinite array of interrelating properties and qualities, which we are only just starting to comprehend. And by analyzing and then synthesizing these insights within a single volume, Alick has taken us a step closer to answering that related and most fundamental of questions, What is Life?

CHRIS WEEDON,
COFOUNDER OF THE WATER ASSOCIATION,
SOMERSET, UK

Still Water Meditation

Place a drop of water in the palm of your hand.

The drop that you hold in your hand

Is part of the water which was the cradle of all life

On this planet Aeons ago

The first rain that splashed down on the hot earth

To form the first sea.

Each drop, in sunlight

Has risen from the sea in countless ages

And fallen to the earth again

As rain

The drop that you hold in your hand

Has been a prism forming myriad rainbows

Has travelled underground streams

Bubbling through dark caverns

The Architect of cathedral caves

Formed valleys

And split granite

The drop that you hold in your hand

Has flowed down broad rivers

Has risen in the sap of trees

Has been the sweat of slaves

And the tears of children

It has become the foam topped waves

And deep unfathomable depths

Of vast dark lakes

And seas

The drop that you hold in your hand

Has been part of the great flood

It has been a dewdrop on a blade of grass

A drop that has been pounded

Through the hearts of whales in blood

And lain in an eagles egg

It has travelled in the fluid of a poets brain

And dripped from the wounds of the dying

The drop that you hold in your hand

Has been trapped in the snows of the arctic

Reflected the sun in a desert oasis

And refreshed the weary

This drop

Unimaginably old

Yet fresh and new

Is evaporating slowly from your hand

To mingle with the air you breathe, perhaps

Or drift in a sun-topped cloud

A thousand feet above the earth

Imagine its journey from your hand

Where will it go?

You can direct its journey

As it evaporates

Send your consciousness with it

It is the water of Life

It is still water.

CAROLINE WAY

INTRODUCTION

Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them.
It dwells in lowly places that all disdain.
This is why it is so near to Tao.

LAO-TZU

Why is water such an evocative subject? It influences the emotions, the imagination, and creativityartists and poets find inspiration in it. So many words in our language are stimulated by water: outpouring, flowing, bubbling; well up, swell, drain. Yet we take it for granted, treating it as a conveniencesomething to quench our thirst, bathe in, and use for washing our homes and cars. Water is the most familiaryet, at the same time, least understoodof all substances on our planet.

Widely published reports that climate change will alter the reliability of freshwater supplies have caused people to begin to think more seriously about the problem. We are already fighting wars over access to oil, which we worship for its huge energy potential and ability to create enormous wealth. In conflicts over water, which have also begun in the American Southwest and elsewhere, there is even more at stakeour survival.

Water is essential to human survival, yet we waste it profligately, taking for granted that it will issue forth at the turn of a tap, and abuse it in ways that belie its noble character and function. In a real sense, water is life, yet we treat it with neglect and contempt.

This precious substance is an essential component of our physical and spiritual being. We are water, and it is in our genuine interest to understand the true nature of this substance that plays such extraordinary roles in the creation, maintenance, and evolution of life. Some see it as an organism with its own life cycle.

Water carries all life but is beyond time, for it bears in its flow the seeds of future life, as well as the memory of past life. We have lost touch with the magic of waterthe freshness of a natural spring, reflections in a mountain lake, the mystery of a sacred well. Water mediates between life and death, between being and not being, and between health and sickness, yet we have allowed water to spread illness and disease.

Much is spoken these days of the destructive nature of water. Such water is Nature on the rampage, perhaps flaunting her power in response to the reckless damage humanity has wrought on Earths ecosystems.