Have you ever been told not to drink such-and-such water because it is 'dead' or to drink such-and-such water because it is 'alive'? And when you have inquired into what makes a water 'dead' or 'alive' has your line of questioning been left hanging in the air? This essay attempts to provide a framework within which we can start formulating sensible answers to this question.
We have all heard stories about how people have benefitted from 'taking the waters' - the effects ranging from a miraculous healing to a general feeling of well-being. These 'life-giving waters' are supposedly obtained from particular geographic locations, e.g. Lourdes, the source of the Ganges, etc.
It has been assumed that the 'life-giving effects' originate from the chemical constituents of these 'waters'. So by bottling these 'waters' we believe that we can widely distribute these benefits to people who cannot make the journey to these particular geographic locations. Folklore has it that the effect of drinking this 'bottled water' is not quite the same as drinking the water at source. However this is normally put down to the extra psychosomatic effect of making the journey.
Extrapolating this fuzzy line of thinking we have come to a stage where we feel that almost all waters that originate from a spring have some 'life-giving effect'. No significant attention seems to have been paid to the question of which chemical constituents and in what quantity or combination provide these 'life-giving effects'. The fact that the chemical constituents of various spring waters vary widely does not really make us question the link between the chemical constitution of the water and the 'life-giving effects'.
Even though they cannot specify the origin of the 'life-giving effects' there are some people who feel that these 'life-giving' properties are destroyed when we put a water through a purification process - particularly a process that uses heat like distillation. Consequently they tell us that distilled water is 'dead' and that we should not drink it.
Earlier this century the Austrian naturalist Viktor Schauberger started moving away from the notion that the 'life-giving' properties of water stemmed from its chemical constituents. He observed that water existed naturally in two states - 'dead' or 'alive'. The physical environment of water was critical in determining which 'state' water existed. Schauberger paid particular attention to temperature and motion. He was able to practically demonstrate that 'living' water had more energy than dead water by transporting a greater quantity of logs more efficiently in 'living' water.
This idea of looking to the physical structure of water for its 'life-giving effects' has recently been given a further scientific basis by the work of Dr. Lee Lorensen. He has demonstrated that water can exist in two different physical structures whilst chemically remaining the same. One of these states is where the molecules are structured randomly or chaotically. This is the state in which almost all water that we encounter is. In the other state - known as clustered water - the molecules are organised in a hexagonal ring. In this state water is 'alive' - amongst other things it is able to support our metabolic activity much more efficiently.
Our cells water requirements are best provided by clustered water. It passes freely through cell walls delivering nutrients and removing toxins. It is also part of an intricate inter-cellular communication system. As we age the proportion of water that is 'clustered' in our body decreases. More of it gets bound to other cell materials. This impairs its ability to move nutrients and toxins and the cell metabolism becomes sluggish. In addition the inter-cellular communication system starts going haywire.
It may be easier to accept the idea of clustered water if we think of the somewhat analagous situation with 'chaotic' light waves and 'organised' laser beams. We all know that laser beams are much more powerful than light waves by virtue of their 'organised state'.
One of the properties of clustered water is that it is highly unstable. If we alter the physical environment that created the rings we lose this clustered structure. Although clustered water does occur in nature (it is not very common - most springs do not produce clustered water!) this structure is destroyed by the time we get it in a bottle at our local supermarket. So 'taking the waters' at source can really be more beneficial than drinking it from a bottle!
The application of heat to clustered water will destroy its structure. If we started with clustered water and distilled it we would have destroyed its structure. So here is a way of understanding what is meant by the claim that distilled water is 'dead'. However this is only part of the picture - the fact is that any other water that you get from a tap or a bottle is equally 'dead'.
Another property of clustered water is that at the right temperature it will 'communicate its structure' to a larger body of water - if you put a teaspoonful of clustered water into a litre of distilled water and put it into a fridge, after a few hours the whole litre of water is clustered (an analagous process that we are more familiar with is making yoghurt by placing a small quantity of culture in a larger volume of milk at an appropriate temperature). This 'communication of structure' is most efficient in distilled water as opposed to any other water. Since our body converts some of the water that we give it into 'clustered' water, clearly we make its job easier by giving it distilled water.
Using the above framework we can say that distilled water is 'dead' - but so is every other water that is available to the vast majority of us. However, of these 'dead' waters distilled water has the most potential for 'life'!
The author, Aman Kanwar, is a Director of The Freshwater Company
REFERENCES:
1. Dr.Lorensen - Phd. in Nutritional Biochemistry - 'ROD Water Information'. Up-to-Date Food Processing (Japan) July 1989
2. Viktor Schauberger - 'Living Water' by Olof AlexanderssonNOVEMBER 1995
