The Secret Life of Water

by Masaru Emoto

  I first got the idea of exposing water to words and photographs before I even thought about taking photographs of water crystals. I was experimenting with the hado machine I mentioned previously. When people suffering from health problems came to my office for consultation, I would test and analyze their hado and recommend water as one treatment. The water would be infused with hado to counteract their illness. If they were too ill to leave their bed, I would print out the person’s name and then test the hado from the name. Or I would test the hado of their photograph. The scores of instances where the ill person healed convinced me that even photographs have their own hado. (To read more about these cases, please refer to The True Power of Water.)

  You might refer to this hado as something like a desire. There are people, but not many, who are able to detect the hado emitted by photographs and thus are able to sense if a missing person is dead or alive from a photograph in the newspaper. Even people who would never admit to believing in such special powers may experience having a premonition and then later learn that their premonition was valid. An acquaintance of mine said he remembered reading about a mountain climber who had reached the top of Mount Everest. When he looked at the picture of the climber, he sensed that the climber was no longer alive. Not long after, he heard on the news that that the climber was lost and presumed dead. It’s hard to deny that somewhere buried deeply within the human consciousness, there is a hidden power—perhaps intuition—to sense what has happened despite the barriers of time and distance.

  This same thing can also be said of words. There’s an ancient belief in Japan that each individual word has its own spirit, which makes it possible for messages to be transferred and information relayed.

  When water is exposed to words such as “Thank you” and “You idiot!” we can see that the water accurately captures the characteristics of these words. But when words are spoken to water, the meaning of the words changes significantly with the speaker’s intonation and inflection. The words “You idiot!” can have completely different meanings depending on whether they’re said with deep-felt hatred or in jest. But with words written on paper, the way the word is said is not a factor, and the pure energy of the word is able to reveal itself in the formation of the crystal.

  No matter how often or how deeply you consider it, it remains remarkable—almost unbelievable—that the messages of water are able to pass through the barriers of time and space.

  The fact that a photograph contains information indicates that consciousness is involved. When you see a photograph of a landscape and think it’s beautiful, or a picture of a friend that brings back old memories, the photograph is appealing to your consciousness. In the same way, an ID photo serves as ID because of the awareness that the picture represents the actual person.

  A psychology professor at Yale University conducted an experiment a while back. He chose several words from Hebrew, and then he simply made up an equal number of words. Next he mixed all the words together, showed them to subjects who didn’t know Hebrew, and had them guess the meanings of the words. The subjects, of course, did not know that half of the words were fake. The result was that there were significantly more right guesses for the Hebrew words than for the made-up words.

  This experiment serves as support for the theories of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a scientist who believes that the words which people have used for ages form “morphic fields” for perception of the meaning of such words. So someone who has never seen a word can guess its meaning with an unexpected degree of accuracy. The morphic field is not anything you can see with the eyes, and it’s not an energy that can be measured. It might best be described as another world invisible to the eye.

  With the formation of a morphic field, there’s an increased likelihood that something which happens twice will happen again. This same process can be seen in the unfolding of history. The words that have already been spoken somewhere in the world are somehow easier to learn.

  To illustrate this idea, let’s look at an example. On a visit to Germany a while back, I heard an amazing story. A doctor had collected blood samples from several patients and stored them. The doctor said he was able to identify what the patient was ailing from by just looking at his or her blood sample.

  The samples were sealed and stored to keep them from being contaminated or altered. But two years later, when the physician reexamined the patients and the previous samples, he noticed that the components of the blood had changed, and not just randomly. The two-year-old blood was now changed to the same components as the recently reexamined blood. In other words, if a patient was sick two years previously and then healthy after, the two-year-old blood changed to be that of a healthy person, and vice versa. The doctor then went on to conduct two thousand more experiments and to publish the results.

  I met another doctor, a man in his eighties, in Germany who had conducted a similar experiment. He had used a pendulum to conduct diagnoses by taking a drop of blood from the patient’s finger and soaking it into a piece of paper. He said that he could use the same bloodstain throughout the treatment of the patient, because it continued to change in appearance according to the patient’s condition. In other words, a bloodstain from two years ago could be used to diagnose the current condition of the patient.

  The scientific explanation for this? I do not know.

  How can we interpret the principles of hado? Think about the three terms we discussed in the first chapter of this book concerning hado.

  First, hado is vibration. All human beings are in a state of vibration, and the condition of an individual can be understood by examining the vibration of a blood sample from that person.

  Second, hado is resonance. Blood taken from a person two years ago remains in resonance with the person’s hado today, changing to match the current status of the blood flowing through the veins now.

  And third, hado is similarity. For all hado, there is a miniature and a macro version, and these versions resonate with each other. In the experiments done in Germany, my interpretation is that the blood sample is a miniature version of the sample’s body, changing in unison with the body from whence it came.

  About seven decades ago, a scientist named Harold Saxton Burr laid much of the basic foundation for the science of hado. Burr was a renowned professor of anatomy at Yale University. In his attempt to understand the mysteries of life, he gave us the term L-field or life field. Since all the cells within our bodies are replaced over a period of six months, why do we keep being reborn as the same person over and over?

  Like a mold used to make Jell-O, an invisible force enables this to happen, he believed, and he called it the “life field.” He believed that since the life field is an electrical field in nature, it could be measured, and he even developed his own measuring device using a voltage indicator and an electrode. He discovered that the measurements he took varied with the way the subject was feeling. He got higher voltage readings from subjects who were feeling blissful, and lower voltage readings from those feeling depressed.

  It seems that his device was a forerunner for the MRA device that I use to analyze hado. By entering various code numbers into the device, it’s possible to identify the part of the body that matches the code. When a certain part of your body is suffering, emotional hado is inevitably involved. By using the codes, such emotional hado can also be measured and classified.

  In his book Blueprint for Immortality: The Electric Patterns of Life, Dr. Burr wrote that someday it will be possible to pinpoint even the emotions of people using millivolts.

  Anyone who has worked very much with vibration has noticed at least one thing: the soul is affected by anything, and it affects everything. Both your body and the things that go on around you—and even the world that you live in—is created by your soul. It’s something that I have observed over and over. There is so much power within you.

  Perhaps we do live in a world of uncontrollable and unpredictable chaos. We really don’t know what’s going to happen f
rom one moment to the next.

  But this chaos is also of your own creation. Chaos is brimming over with myriad amounts of energy. After all, before heaven and earth, before there was a universe moving in order, there was just one thing: chaos.

  So if you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now.

  And when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Our World and Our Water Are Changed by Prayer

  When I was a child, I had a recurring nightmare. The ground shook beneath my feet, and a volcano spewed out red-hot lava. The ocean turned into a huge wave that enveloped everything, knocking over houses and buildings like blocks, and all the people ran about screaming as the earth moaned.

  There was a time when it seemed like I had this dream every night. I’m no longer bothered by the dream. In fact, it stopped when I published my first book of water crystals. But I suspect I have seen the dream thousands of times over the years. Sometimes it scared me so much that I jumped out of bed wide awake and ready to run for my life. To this day, I still don’t know the meaning of the dream or why I saw it over and over. I know it was just a dream, but that scene of hell still lurks in my memory as if it were real.

  The turn of the century seemed to be a time of particular uncertainty and instability. One of the outcomes was a greater interest in spiritual matters. Yes, we survived July 1999, the month when Nostradamus said the world would be destroyed, and 2000 came and went without all our computers turning against us. While many people can recall a feeling that something dreadful was about to happen, many others believed that we stood at the brink of a period in human history when all the knowledge and wisdom of the ages just might culminate to create a golden age. And those who didn’t have such a feeling at least hoped for such a future. But the hopefulness wasn’t to last long.

  September 11, 2001, came and nothing was the same. The flames of war ignited in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel. The first page of our new hope-filled century was stained with blood. Then came the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And I recalled the nightmare of my childhood.

  There have always been people who believe the end of the human race, the destruction of the world, and global catastrophe are imminent. I don’t believe such a bleak future is waiting for us, and I’ve always tried to take a stand against such negative predictions. The reason for my optimism is that I feel that the words engraved in our hearts might just have an effect on the direction in which the world is moving.

  But I must admit that it sometimes does seem that the world is taking the steps which will lead straight to the destruction of the human race. No matter how positive you try to be, it’s hard to ignore the fact that we are faced by an avalanche of problems of our own creation.

  With the global population expected to explode by 1.5 times in the next fifty years and four times in the next one hundred years, with rapid industrialization, with the condition of the environment deteriorating at a rapid pace, our survival is uncertain. Some reports say that a temperature increase of between 4 and 6 degrees centigrade within one hundred years will increase the ocean level by 80 to 150 centimeters and flood much of the land we currently inhabit.

  And there’s no guarantee that the change will be gradual. Large islands in the South Seas are already now slipping into the ocean. The rising of the oceans combined with a tsunami similar to the one we just witnessed could wipe out many of the great cities and entire civilizations in some parts of the world. Instable weather patterns are another concern. Unusual downpours and droughts are wreaking havoc with the world’s food supply.

  I sometimes wonder if the recurring dream I saw a child wasn’t more than just a child’s dream. What could we possibly do to change this course even slightly? One solution is to change the way we live and the structures and systems that form society.

  Environmental Concerns

  In chapter 3, I discussed the destructive repercussions of blocking the flow of water. We see the same results when we interfere with the delicate circle of life that forms ecosystems.

  One of the first warning bells was the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, who revealed that pesticides such as DDT pollute the water and push entire species of birds and fish to the brink of extinction. Silent Spring told the story of how the insecticide dieldrin was sprayed in and around Sheldon, Illinois, in order to eradicate the Japanese beetle in that area and stop its northern progression. The chemicals seeped into the ground, killing or driving out all the beetles and other insects. After eating the insects or bathing in the polluted water, the death of robins, pheasants, and starlings came next, followed by the deaths of squirrels, rabbits, and then 90 percent of farm cats. Even sheep could not escape the fatal effects of the chemicals.

  Carson also revealed the impact of the chemicals on the salmon and trout in rivers, and the rising cancer rate in humans. But all this didn’t stop the state and federal governments from spraying stronger and stronger insecticides for years to come.

  As expected, her work earned protests from the agrichemical industry. They made fun of the book and labeled her a hysterical woman. But when Carson appeared in the press to defend herself, her logic and her dignity made and even deeper impression on the viewers. Eventually this led to the government being forced to admit that she was right. Carson’s good judgment and courage reaches beyond her time and has just as much to teach us today. Her book should be required reading for anyone living in these times.

  Carson sounded an early warning about the potential risks of pollution, but she also warned us about the chain effect that results when a link of the circle of life is broken. We have already seen where the removal of bugs or weeds by chemical means can lead to the extinction of a vast area of other forms of life, including the microorganisms that live in the soil. And when the soil has died, then the perpetual use of chemicals becomes necessary to continue farming.

  Once the natural circle of life is broken, putting it back together is next to impossible. Some forty years have passed since Rachel Carson first warned us about the effects of pesticides. Have we seen any improvement in the situation? In advanced countries, at least, the use of DDT, dieldrin, and other chemicals that Carson warned us about have been banned and for the most part discontinued. But deplorably, these chemicals are still sold to other countries that haven’t banned them yet.

  In our pursuit for profit and convenience, we have closed our eyes to the cycle of life that has formed over the aeons. So much of what we do threatens to end this cycle and create a new cycle of waste and destruction.

  Ever-Increasing Materialism

  Do you ever get the feeling that society in general and you in specific are moving at a faster pace than ten or twenty years ago? It’s not likely that the hands of our clocks have sped up, but our perception of time certainly has.

  Imagine that the world is an enormous spinning top. We’ll call it the “top of materialistic culture.” As culture develops and we acquire more and more, the top gets bigger and bigger. This is how life goes in our materialistic state. Each year, sales have to increase, incomes have to rise, and economies have to expand. We’re made to think that staying the same or slowing down will lead to recession, depression, and failure. Goals achieved lead to the setting of higher goals and requirements to work ever harder and faster. Ever loyal, we have labored diligently to expand the size of the spinning top.

  And we at the edge of this top must travel an increasingly wider distance to make one rotation. While a small top might complete a rotation in one second, a top twice as large—or a thousand times larger—would take much longer to go around once. While a small top may rotate a few centimeters per second, a larger top may travel a few meters.

  The speed of the hands on your clock are going at the same speed, but the rate at which change takes place is
speeding up, and perhaps someday this spinning top will go so fast that we’ll no longer be able to hang on. How can we slow down this spinning top?

  I know of only one way, and that is to cast aside our fast-paced, materialistic lifestyles. In other words, our continued sojourn on this planet will require that we pack lighter. It’s just that simple.

  You may believe that you can get more accomplished in less time if you live your life in over-drive, but for most people it ends up meaning working harder and harder in a job they like less and less.

  As society expands and infrastructures become more complicated, the role of the individual is increasingly delegated to a miniscule piece of a vast machine; feeling powerless to make a difference, people resign themselves to doing what they are told to do and nothing more. But the greatest steps forward can often be made by becoming smaller instead of bigger, by going slower instead of faster.

  Within an organization, workers are able to expand their abilities only to the limits of the box within which they function. In many large companies with compartmentalized divisions, the scope of most people is limited to the task at hand. With only a small role to perform within a large box, the importance and value of each role is minimal, as is the employee’s perspective and need to develop his or her abilities. But when the size of the box that people function within is reduced, the role of the people within the box becomes more important and valuable, and knowing this, most people will strive to expand their skills and abilities. They get to know their co-workers, communication improves, and motivation increases. Ideas that were formerly obscured by the complexities of the big organization would emerge and innovations would revolutionize the organization. Young employees in the company would see hope and be motivated by their unlimited potential to move up in the company. The concept that smaller is better applies not only to companies. These same results could be seen in governments and all other organizations in society.