The Hidden Messages in Water

Atria

Prologue

As you begin reading this book, I'd like to ask you to evaluate your life. More specifically, I'd like you to ask yourself if you are happy.

Of course, your definition of happiness will depend upon who you are -- but do you have a sense of peace in your heart, a feeling of security about your future, and a feeling of anticipation when you wake up in the morning? If we can call this happiness, then would you say that at this moment you are happy?

I think I can safely say that not many people will be able to reply with a resounding yes. Most people are unable to say that their life is everything they had hoped it would be. What is it that causes us so much pain? What is going on in the world that prevents so many people from simply being happy?

It seems to me that we are living in an age of chaos. Chaos describes a condition of confusion, indicative of the unorganized matter that existed before the creation of the cosmos.

Simply by going about our lives, we find ourselves worn out and fatigued. Newspapers and television bombard us with information, and at work we face problems and misunderstandings. The sources of our problems seem numerous and overwhelming.

This is likely to be a fact of life no matter where in the world we go. This tiny planet of ours is covered with economic conflict, domestic discord, ethnic prejudice, environmental distress, religious wars, and every other type of problem imaginable. And all the bad news about people suffering, people enjoying the suffering, people getting richer, people getting poorer, the oppressed and the oppressors, reaches us within a matter of seconds from the opposite side of the globe.

Who, might we ask, is responsible for all this suffering? The world is becoming an ever more divided, estranged, and complicated place to live. We are already up to our necks in chaos, but the world's troubles seem to be getting deeper and deeper.

One thing we all have in common is that we are looking for a way out. Everyone is looking for an answer -- and it is an answer so simple and effective that it has heretofore eluded us.

So what is the cause of all this chaos? What is at the center of it all? Whatever it is, it is pushing the world away from harmony and towards discord.

Perhaps this is an inevitable phenomenon. Though we all belong to the same species, if we live in different places and in different skin ways, the way we think is bound to be different.

And to make matters worse, most people have difficulty accepting things that are unlike the things around them. The result is a neverending process of troubles and suffering. It would seem that as long as people are people, any solution proposed is certain to come up short.

And so now we are back where we started. Can there ever be a single solution that can apply to all people on the globe, that everyone can be convinced of, and that is so simple that everyone can understand it?

In fact, I have found the answer, and it is just this: The average human body is 70 percent water.

We start out life being 99 percent water, as fetuses. When we are born, we are 90 percent water, and by the time we reach adulthood we are down to 70 percent. If we die of old age, we will probably be about 50 percent water. In other words, throughout our lives we exist mostly as water.

From a physical perspective, humans are water. When I realized this and started to look at the world from this perspective, I began to see things in a whole new way.

First, I realized that this connection to water applies to all peoples. Therefore, what I am about to say applies to everyone, all over the world.

I believe I am also starting to see the way that people should live their lives. So how can people live happy and healthy lives? The answer is to purify the water that makes up 70 percent of your body.

Water in a river remains pure because it is moving. When water becomes trapped, it dies. Therefore, water must constantly be circulated. The water -- or blood -- in the bodies of the sick is usually stagnant. When blood stops flowing, the body starts to decay, and if the blood in your brain stops, it can be life threatening.

But why does blood become stagnant? We can see this condition as the stagnation of the emotions. Modern researchers have shown that the condition of the mind has a direct impact on the condition of the body. When you are living a full and enjoyable life, you feel better physically, and when your life is filled with struggles and sorrow, your body knows it.

So when your emotions flow throughout your body, you feel a sense of joy and you move towards physical health.

Moving, changing, flowing -- this is what life is all about.

If we consider that before we became human beings, we existed as water, we get closer to finding the answer to the basic question of what a human being is. If we have a clear understanding of water, we will better understand the human body, and even unlock the mystery of why we were born and exist as we do.

So just what is water? Your first answer might be that it is a life force. If we lose 50 percent of the water in our bodies, we can no longer maintain life. Water, carried by blood and bodily fluids, is the means by which nourishment is circulated throughout our bodies. This flow of water enables us to live active lives. Water serves as the transporter of energy throughout our body.

This transport of energy is similar to a freight car that moves throughout the body. If the body is clogged and soiled, then the cargo in the freight car will also become filthy, and so it is essential that water always remain clean.

More now than in the past, the medical community has begun to see water as a transporter of energy, and it is even being used in the treatment of illness. Homeopathy is one such field where the value of water is recognized.

Homeopathy originated in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century with the work of Samuel Hahnemann (1791-1843), but its roots go back to the father of medicine, Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 370 B.C.), who wrote down many treatments similar to those promoted by homeopathy. In a word, these pioneers of medicine taught us to "treat like with like, fight poison with poison."

For example, if someone is suffering from lead poisoning, symptoms can be alleviated by drinking water with the minutest amount of lead in it -- an amount ranging 1 part in 1012 (one trillion) to 1 part in 10400!

At this level, the matter no longer for practical purposes remains in the water, but the characteristics of the matter do remain, and this forms the medicine for treating lead poisoning.

Homeopathy proposes that the greater the dilution, the greater the effectiveness. The logical conclusion is that the denser the poison in the body, the higher should be the dilution ratio.

Another way to express this idea is that, instead of the effect of the matter being used to get rid of the symptoms, the information copied to the water is being used to cancel out the information of the symptoms from the poison.

So water has the ability to copy and memorize information. We may also say that the water of the oceans has memories of the creatures that live in the ocean. The earth's glaciers may well contain millions of years of the planet's history.

Water circulates around the globe, flowing through our bodies and spreading to the rest of the world. If we were capable of reading this information contained in the memory of water, we would read a story of epic proportions.

To understand water is to understand the cosmos, the marvels of nature, and life itself.

I have studied water for many years. The realization that water has the ability to copy information has changed my life. After making this discovery in America, I brought it back with me to Japan, and have since used the information-copying function of water to help people recover their health.

At that time, however, doctors would not even consider the possibility that water by itself had healing capabilities. I was and am fully convinced that water is able to memorize and transport information, but this suggestion has been met with complete rejection by the medical community.

In 1988, the French scientist Jacques Benveniste undertook an experiment to test the basic principles of homeopathy. He diluted a medicine with water to the point where the medicine was no longer detectable by clinical means, and then he discovered that this dilution had the same effect on patients as the undiluted medicine.

A year after he submitted his results to the British scientific journal Nature, they were finally published, along with the comment that the results of the experiment were doubtful and without any physical proof. The hypothesis has remained buried and forgotten ever since.

Whenever someone comes along with research and experiments that turn the scientific community on its ear, the reaction, to one degree or another, is usually the same. I long wondered if it might be possible to find physical evidence of the ability of water to memorize information -- might there be some way of seeing it with the physical eye?

When your heart is open to possibilities, you start to notice small things that can lead to enormous discoveries. And one day I casually opened a book to words that jumped off the page: "No two snow crystals are exactly the same."

Of course, I had learned this same thing in elementary school. The faces of all the snowflakes that have fallen on the earth for millions of years have all been different. However, I read this sentence as if it had a completely different meaning because my heart was open and receptive to its message. The next moment I thought, If I freeze water and look at the crystals, each one will look totally unique. And that moment marked my first step on an adventure into a new and unexplored world. My plan was to freeze water and take pictures of the crystals.

It's my nature not to want to sit on a fresh idea. I immediately asked a young researcher in my company to start experimenting, but this was a field that no one knew anything about. There was nothing to assure us that our efforts would eventually pay off. Oddly enough, I never doubted that they would. I knew with certainty that my hypothesis was correct and that the experiments would go well -- I just knew it. I usually suffer from a critical shortage of perseverance, but this time I refused to give up.

My first step was to lease an extremely accurate microscope and look at water frozen in a kitchen refrigerator. However, since the photographs were taken at room temperature, the ice would soon melt. It took us quite some time before we were able to get any photographs of crystals.

Late each evening, I would take the young researcher to dinner and try to encourage him. I told him that I only expected him to do his best.

After two months of experiments, we finally succeeded in getting one photograph. The water gave us a photograph of a beautiful hexagonal crystal. I was filled with excitement when the researcher came to me with the news.

I now have a large walk-in refrigerator where the temperature is maintained at -5°C (23°F) for experimenting, but it all started with that first photograph. Considering the method we used and what I know now, it was quite miraculous that we were able to get that first photograph at all.

What you really know is possible in your heart is possible. We make it possible by our will. What we imagine in our minds becomes our world. That's just one of many things that I have learned from water.

The crystal photographs that I started taking proved to be extremely eloquent in expressing the world. I found within them a profound philosophy. Crystals emerge for only twenty or thirty seconds as the temperature rises and the ice starts to melt. The truths of the cosmos take shape and become visible, if only for a few moments. This short window of time gives us a glimpse into a world that is indeed magical.

Let me explain how I go about taking photographs of crystals.

I put fifty different types of water in fifty different Petri dishes. (I used one hundred during the first few years.) I then freeze the dishes at -20°C (-4°F) for three hours in a freezer. The result is that surface tension forms drops of ice in the Petri dishes about one millimeter across. The crystal appears when you shine a light on the crown of the drop of ice.

Of course, the result is never fifty similar crystals, and sometimes no crystals at all are formed. When we graphed the formation of the crystals, we realized that different water formed different crystals. Some of them were clearly similar, some were deformed, and in some types of water, no crystals at all formed.

First I looked at the crystals of tap water from different locations. The water of Tokyo was a disaster -- not a single complete crystal was formed. Tap water includes a dose of chlorine used to sanitize it, utterly destroying the structure found in natural water.

However, within natural water, no matter where it came from -- natural springs, underground rivers, glaciers, and the upper reaches of rivers -- complete crystals formed.

My efforts to photograph ice crystals and conduct research began to move ahead. Then one day the researcher -- who was as caught up in the project as I -- said something completely out of left field: "Let's see what happens when we expose the water to music."

I knew that it was possible for the vibrations of music to have an effect on the water. I myself enjoy music immensely, and had even had hopes of becoming a professional musician as a child, and so I was all in favor of this off-the-wall experiment.

At first we had no idea what music we would use and under what conditions we would conduct the experiment. But after considerable trial and error, we reached the conclusion that the best method was probably the simplest -- put a bottle of water on a table between two speakers and expose it to a volume at which a person might normally listen to music. We would also need to use the same water that we had used in previous experiments.

We first tried distilled water from a drugstore.

The results astounded us. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, with its bright and clear tones, resulted in beautiful and well-formed crystals. Mozart's 40th Symphony, a graceful prayer to beauty, created crystals that were delicate and elegant. And the crystals formed by exposure to Chopin's Etude in E, Op. 10, No. 3, surprised us with their lovely detail.

All the classical music that we exposed the water to resulted in well-formed crystals with distinct characteristics. In contrast, the water exposed to violent heavy-metal music resulted in fragmented and malformed crystals at best.

But our experimenting didn't stop there. We next thought about what would happen if we wrote words or phrases like "Thank you" and "Fool" on pieces of paper, and wrapped the paper around the bottles of water with the words facing in. It didn't seem logical for water to "read" the writing, understand the meaning, and change its form accordingly. But I knew from the experiment with music that strange things could happen. We felt as if we were explorers setting out on a journey through an unmapped jungle.

The results of the experiments didn't disappoint us. Water exposed to "Thank you" formed beautiful hexagonal crystals, but water exposed to the word "Fool" produced crystals similar to the water exposed to heavy-metal music, malformed and fragmented.

Further experimenting showed that water exposed to positive expressions like "Let's do it!" created attractive, well-formed crystals, but that water exposed to negative expressions like "Do it!" barely formed any crystals at all.

The lesson that we can learn from this experiment has to do with the power of words. The vibration of good words has a positive effect on our world, whereas the vibration from negative words has the power to destroy.

Learning about water is like an exploration to discover how the cosmos works, and the crystals revealed through water are like the portal into another dimension. As we continued with our experiments in taking photographs of crystals, we found that we were setting out to climb the stairs toward an understanding of the profound truths of the cosmos.

I particularly remember one photograph. It was the most beautiful and delicate crystal that I had so far seen -- formed by being exposed to the words "love and gratitude." It was as if the water had rejoiced and celebrated by creating a flower in bloom. It was so beautiful that I can say that it actually changed my life from that moment on.

Water had taught me the delicacy of the human soul, and the impact that "love and gratitude" can have on the world.

In Japan, it is said that words of the soul reside in a spirit called kotodama or the spirit of words, and the act of speaking words has the power to change the world. We all know that words have an enormous influence on the way we think and feel, and that things generally go more smoothly when positive words are used. However, up until now we have never been able to physically see the effect of positive words.

Words are an expression of the soul. And the condition of our soul is very likely to have an enormous impact on the water that composes as much as 70 percent of our body, and this impact will in no small way affect our bodies. People who are in good health are also generally in good spirits. Indeed, a healthy spirit most comfortably resides in a healthy body.

Out of desire to help as many people as possible remain or become healthy, I had worked for years taking care of the sick. And the more afflicted people that I see, the more I become convinced that illness is not just an individual problem, but a result of the deformation of society as a whole.

Unless something is done about the deformed world that we live in, and unless we can heal the wounded soul, the number of people suffering from physical illnesses will not decline.

So what are the deformities of the world? These are the deformities of the soul, and such deformities have an impact on the cosmos itself. Just as a drop in a pond creates a ripple that spreads out endlessly, the deformity of even one soul spreads throughout the world, resulting in global deformities.

But all is not lost -- there is hope. There is salvation, and it's called "love and gratitude."

The earth is searching. It wants to be beautiful. It wants to be the most beautiful that it can be. Earlier I said that we could define the human being as water. I am quite certain that the water in the people who look at the photographs of crystals undergoes some form of change.

And I have found the most beautiful crystal of all -- the one created by "love and gratitude." This is supposedly what all the world's religions are founded on, and if that were true, there would be no need for laws. You already know the answer. "Love and gratitude" are the words that must serve as the guide for the world.

Water teaches in a very clear way how we must live our lives. The story of water reaches from every individual cell to encompass the entire cosmos. I hope that you will feel the same anticipation and excitement that I felt as I discovered the unfolding of this drama.

Copyright © 2001 by Masaru Emoto

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Excerpted from The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto Copyright © 2005 by Masaru Emoto. Excerpted by permission.
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