The Secret Life of Water

by Masaru Emoto

  But gradually it became clear what the river really had provided. After being dammed, the Nile was no longer capable of nourishing the once-fertile farmland at the delta. Irrigation systems were implemented, and for the first time chemical fertilizers were used. Irrigation raised the salt density and deteriorated the quality of the topsoil. Puddles and pools of water formed on the delta, becoming a breeding ground for harmful insects and causing great harm to nearby residents. The delta plain itself has even started to sink. Scientists soon noticed that the fish population in the dam was becoming infected with mercury as the water from the mountain valleys drained into the dam. Plant life buried by the dam became the perfect breeding ground for bacteria; as this bacteria absorbed the mercury in the ground, it became a highly toxic bacteria containing methylmercury. The density in the ecosystem steadily rose until it entered the bodies of fish in alarming amounts.

  The annual flooding of the Nile may have made life along its shores difficult for humans, but it was an integral part of the life cycle for many other creatures. The dam squelched the vast ecosystem that nature had taken hundreds of thousands of years to form.

  Similar effects are seen in other parts of the world when rivers are dammed. In Canada, high levels of mercury have been found in hair samples of the Cree Indians living around the James Bay and Peace River since the lake where they fished was dammed up to make a reservoir for generating electricity. This same phenomenon can be seen in other parts of Canada as well.

  These are examples of what can happen when we choose to block or change the flow of water.

  The time has come for us to put on the brakes and think. Always keep in mind water’s pure, natural journey, and you will see how we as humans fit into this delicate cycle of life. We are part of the flow, and we need to respect it. We have seen how water shows its love by showering its gifts onto flowers, trees, birds, insects, and all the small creatures of nature as it flows along its path. In return, water is loved by all of nature.

  It’s time that we return to the cycle. When you have learned to love nature from the bottom of your heart, then you too will be ready to be loved by nature.

  The earth knows how to answer our most earnest prayers. When you pray, the earth responds. Then love spreads to all life and to water.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Wonder of Hado: Explaining the Inexplicable

  “L ong ago at the top of a distant mountain lived an old shaman …” So began a tale told to me by an old aborigine with a white scraggly mustache and a face darkened by time. He’s in his late eighties, but no one, not even himself or his family, knows his exact age. Wisdom and knowledge accumulated over the decades is as deep as the wrinkles in his face.

  I was on my first lecture trip to Australia in August 2002 when I was introduced to Eric, the aborigine elder. We met at a restaurant, and I presented him with a collection of my photographs of water crystals. He looked at it slowly and intently, and then he began to tell me an ancient tale passed down for generations.

  This evil shaman lived at the top of Mount Ridge in the northern region now known as New South Wales. A river runs down the mountain, and the shaman lived near the upper reaches of the river.

  One day she looked down on the river valley and saw all the happy people who lived along the banks of the river. The sight of all this happiness filled her heart with resentment, and she copied her thoughts into the water. She filled the river with spite and the desire that only she would be happy.

  She also blocked up the river so only a trickle of water reached the people. The riverbed where pure water once freely ran became filled with filth. The people who lived along the banks of the river soon became sick, and thievery, bickering, and fighting became rampant because of the evil thoughts copied into the water by the shaman.

  Years of pain and sorrow passed. Then one day a young shaman in the valley went for a walk with his dog. The dog chased after a kangaroo it saw, and the shaman waited for a long time for his dog to return. When the dog finally returned, he was dripping wet with pure water, not the foul water from the river.

  Wanting to know where the pure water came from, the young shaman followed his dog up the mountain to the doorstep of the evil shaman’s house. Nearby, the young shaman saw where the pure water of the river had been blocked.

  The young shaman turned the evil shaman into water, and in a moment she was washed down by the river. They say that the rugged fissures at the far reaches of the river were caused by the evil shaman clawing at the edges, trying to save herself from being washed out to sea.

  Just in time, she grabbed hold of a big rock. The young shaman spoke to her and said, ‘I will save your life if you change your ways. Stay where you are now and promise to work for the good of people.’

  The evil shaman promised to do so, and she became a large tree growing on top of the rock. The people along the riverbank were finally able to go back to living happy and peaceful lives. The old shaman, in the form of a tree, stood along the river to warn the people to stay away from the dangerous ledges.

  Listening to Eric’s story, I was surprised to hear the phrase “copied into the water.” I then realized that this was in complete accordance with the principle of hado. I would never have imagined that this phrase would be found within a story handed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. But I should have realized that the more years one has lived, the more likely one is to know that such things are possible.

  It was quite unexpected that I would hear such a story about water in such a distant corner of the world. Like the myths and fables of other countries and cultures, those of the aborigines in Australia are rich in truths about the universe and the ways in which life should be lived.

  From the fable told by the elder, we learn that water must always flow. When the flow is stopped, then the river will die. We also learn that jealousy and greed have the power to destroy that which is good—an appropriate message for the times we live in.

  Yet another lesson is that water has the ability to read emotions and to spread the hado of such emotions to the rest of the world. In other words, the messages that water carries throughout the world depends on each one of us, for better or worse.

  For our ancestors, fantasy, science, and theology were all one and the same. And the way to pass on the truths of the world to future generations was through stories. Such stories were based on an understanding of the invisible laws that govern the visible world.

  The advanced medical practitioners were the shamans who prayed for and healed the afflicted. Such is the role of water crystals. In fact, my journey toward water-crystal research was born out a desire to heal.

  I was first introduced to the strange and wonderful world of hado more than fifteen years ago. I had just set up my company, IHM (originally International Health Medical, now International Hado Membership), and was importing a low-frequency medical device used to alleviate pain from the United States. My contact in the States was a biochemist named Dr. Lee H. Lorenzen. I learned that Dr. Lorenzen’s wife had been quite ill. He had done all he could think of to restore her health, but nothing seemed to work. He finally decided to consider water.

  He formed a team of scientists specializing in electronics and physics with the goal of developing the best water possible. They started their research with the proposition that water had the ability to transfer information. I heard from Dr. Lorenzen that they had actually found this water. Then one day I had the opportunity to see for myself what the water could do.

  Under the bright blue skies of California, I was playing golf with Dr. Lorenzen and two of the researchers working with him when my left ankle started to ache from an old rugby injury. The other three noticed that I was limping and were concerned.

  When we finally got back to the clubhouse, one of the men handed me a small plastic container with water in it. They instructed me to apply the water to the area around my ankle. I knew on one level that water couldn’t remove pain, but I also
knew that it couldn’t hurt either, so I applied the water to my swollen ankle.

  To my amazement, my foot no longer hurt when I walked on it, nor even when I stretched it out. I couldn’t help but become interested in this strange water.

  In Japan at that time, there was widespread interest in various types of water that claimed to be good for the health, so I signed a contract to introduce this technology to Japan, and I invited Dr. Lorenzen and the two researchers to seminars in three of the largest cities in the country.

  At all three locations, perhaps because there was no charge to get in, the halls were overflowing with people. But I soon learned that the explanation of water’s healing abilities was far too difficult for most people to grasp. I myself could hardly understand what the scientists were describing. Some people got up and left partway through; many others nodded off in their chairs. It was pretty much a disaster.

  Afterward, I reflected on what went wrong. I realized that water is essential to human life in so many ways, and yet we really don’t understand much about it. Around that time when I was still thinking about what to do next, I heard something that made sense to me: “Science is based on first forming a hypothesis and then using instruments and technology to prove the hypothesis.”

  Then it hit me. All sorts of instruments and technology can be used to analyze chemicals and other materials, so why isn’t there anything that can be used to analyze water? I wasted no time in calling Dr. Lorenzen to ask him to look for a device of some type that we could use to analyze water. This led to my encounter with the MRA device that analyzes and transfers hado.

  Since bringing this device to Japan in 1987, I have had the pleasure of working with as many as 15,000 people who have come to me with concerns about their health. I have written more than ten books about hado and the many miraculous cases I witnessed.

  Over the years, scores of people have tried to imitate this hado machine and have made similar devices to analyze hado, creating a type of hado fad in Japan. Vast numbers of people have become interested in learning about the unseen world of hado. This movement has the energy to take us into a new age and open the door to a new stage of our evolution.

  Understanding hado gives us a better understanding of how our world works, and it also gives us hope for the future. I sometimes even think that knowing the possibilities of hado is like possessing a golden lamp that can make the impossible possible. Then at other times, I feel that the more I understand hado, the more there is to understand about what’s going on around us.

  Photographing Crystals Is a Subjective Science

  To gain the understanding and support of as many people as possible, I have approached my research as scientifically as possible. But we can’t forget that not everything can be understood by research or science. The photographs of water crystals present to us a majestic fantasy world, but this is a fantasy world that has much to teach us, for sometimes fantasy is the best way to get a clear picture of reality.

  When water is frozen, the same crystal will never appear twice, just as there are no two snowflakes that are exactly alike. When I show slides of crystals at lectures, I am often asked, “If no two crystals are alike, how do you choose one particular crystal photograph?”

  It’s a good question. Of course it would be impossible to show you all the hundreds of photographs we take of all the crystals, but then again, I don’t see why this should cause grave concern. It would be like looking at an encyclopedia of animals and questioning how the picture of one particular dog could possibly represent all the different dogs of that species. When I choose a photograph for a collection, I make a choice based on the photograph of the crystal that most accurately represents the crystals made under a certain set of circumstances.

  In The True Power of Water, I briefly described how we photograph water crystals. I’d like to add more details to that explanation. If we are testing the effects on water of words, photographs, or music, we begin with distilled water and then expose the water to whatever influence we are testing for the appropriate amount of time. If we are testing water from a source such as a lake, we do not expose it to any outside influence, such as words or music. We simply use the water as is.

  To photograph water crystals, we put 0.5 cc of water into about fifty petri dishes using a syringe. Then we freeze the petri dishes to minus 25 degrees centigrade and take photographs through a microscope. Of course, the result is never fifty similar crystals in the fifty petri dishes.

  When we have the photographs, we divide them into eight categories: beautiful, rather beautiful, hexagonal pattern, radial pattern, lattice pattern, indefinite pattern, collapsed pattern, and no crystal formation.

  This classification helps to give us a general idea of the type of crystals formed. Let’s take, for example, the crystals made from water collected from the Honmyo River shown on pages 185–186. When we took water from the river before it runs into the Isahaya Bay in the Ariake Sea, we found that the crystals were broken and no complete hexagonal crystals formed. The results were as follows:

  Beautiful: 0

  Rather beautiful: 0

  Hexagonal pattern: 0

  Radial pattern: 2

  Lattice pattern: 6

  Indefinite pattern: 29

  Collapsed pattern: 2

  No crystal formation: 11

  This shows us that no crystal formations appeared in eleven of the petri dishes, and when crystals did form they were broken. There was a not a single crystal that could be considered beautiful. Based on this, we then chose a crystal that we felt best represents the array of samples—an indefinite pattern, in this case.

  Let’s next look at the example of crystals formed from water collected near the source of the Honmyo River. The results were as follows:

  Beautiful: 2

  Rather beautiful: 4

  Hexagonal pattern: 0

  Radial pattern: 4

  Lattice pattern: 8

  Indefinite pattern: 29

  Collapsed pattern: 3

  No crystal formation: 0

  In this case, we chose a beautiful crystal to represent the sample. Of course, there were only two beautiful crystals in the sample of fifty. But when such crystals appear from a sample, there are also usually many crystals that are classified as rather beautiful, hexagonal pattern, radial pattern, and lattice pattern. This indicates that there are many formations that are in the process or have the potential to make beautiful crystals.

  Considering that crystals easily form from this particular sample of water, we can justifiably choose a beautiful crystal to represent the sample. I admit that the selection process is not strictly in accordance with the scientific method, but simply put, we choose the crystal that best represents the entire sample instead of simply one from the most common category.

  And the whim of the person doing the selecting certainly comes into play. When making the selection for a collection of crystal photographs, it is best if one person chooses all the photographs for consistency, which is why all the photographs in this book were selected by me.

  In fact, the crystals in the photographs that we take are affected by such factors as the environment, the timing, and even the personality and thoughts of the photographer. This is not unlike the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle was first put forth by a Germany physicist named Werner Heisenberg, and it is said to have completed the science of quantum mechanics. The theory says that each time you look at electrons, they move in a different way. In other terms, the very act of observing results in a differing movement of the electrons, making observation impossible.

  The reason for this is that human observation requires light, and when electrons are exposed to light electrons, the electrons are disrupted, making their direction impossible to predict. This means that we know very little about what is going on in the world around us. When this theory was first presented to the scientific community, it apparently came as quite a shock.

  The s
ame principle applies to water. It changes its form completely depending on the person doing the observing. Water’s reaction will differ depending on whether the heart of the observer is filled with appreciation or with anger, and this difference is reflected in the formation of the crystals.

  Another factor that makes the observation of crystals even more difficult is that the form changes moment by moment for the two-minute life of the crystal. The crystal will look quite a bit different depending on when the shutter is pushed. Uncertainty truly is a factor in everything in our world.

  The sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. That is one thing we can count on. But if you consider the long history of the universe, this phenomenon is something that has continued for only a short time, and it’s something that won’t go on forever. After some five billion years, the sun will gradually expand and eventually consume the earth. And that too is just a part of the process that the sun which lights our world today is going through. What’s a mere five billion years of earth time when talking about the forever time of the universe?

  The methods employed to photograph water crystals might not pass everyone’s definition of being scientific, and there is a degree of uncertainty involved. In fact, there is much about the world of hado that is murky and that cannot be explained by the black-and-white standards of statistical analysis.

  But when you think about it, all any scientist can do anyway is lift up one small corner of the veil that covers the truth of this world and then try to express it with words that the general population can stretch their minds around.

  Everything Emits Hado

  Another question that I’m frequently asked is, “How could exposing water to a picture or words possibly result in crystals that are so different from each other?” Even I must admit that this is a difficult question to answer.