Water Treatment

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First Man: see…and put it on containers of water; the words “love” and “gratitude”. And “gratitude” seemed to have more effect on the water than the word “love” but they both had a very strong effect on the water and they realised that the simpler the message, the better because when they tried to put more, you know, like longer messages or when they tried to speak in longer sentences to the water saying you know like “I really have a great deal of respect for you”; you know “without you we wouldn’t have”…that didn’t have as much effect as …
Second Man: One word.
First Man: …as just saying “love”, “respect”, “gratitude” and he said…
Second Man: BEAUTY!
First Man: …and he said something that …he said we were constantly struck by things that happened, when we did these experiments, for example and I think I am remembering this correctly when he said that saying the word “gratitude” twice as many times as the word “love” seemed to be the perfect combination almost like H2O.
Second Man: Right.
First Man: And this was a very interesting idea again as well.
Second Man: Love gratitude gratitude. Love gratitude gratitude.
First Man: Before we leave off on Emoto, there were two other things that really struck me in the text. One was in the introduction. It was where he was talking about his despair about society. And I suppose he was meaning mostly Japanese society but more generally modern society and he was saying that …

(the sound of coughing)

….that after he came to understand water better…

(the sound of a coin dropping)

… he became much positive about the future of the world because he realised that all of us everywhere in the world for all of our problems are, you know, for the most part, a bit more for kids and a bit less for old people, about seventy – seventy five per cent water…

(coughing again)

…and this filled him with hope.

Second Man: Yeah.
First Man: … and I thought this was an astonishingly beautiful simple …
Second Man: Mm.
First Man: …naive, if you like, but wonderfully hopeful idea, and a wonderfully expressed simplicity about life, and the other thing was when he was just beginning and he didn’t really know which way to go with this research…

(coughing)

… he was encouraged…he … I forget how he came to know this woman but there was a woman who has an Anglo name … I don’t know if she was American or English or whatever, that was living and working in Switzerland and had been for many many years and she was around retirement age or perhaps had already retired as a university professor; she devoted her life with her team to finding better ways to deliver larger amounts of water…

(coughing)

… to big populations of people in a healthy form and somehow somewhere along the line during his kind of initial attempts to study water, he had come across her… Maybe he had been to one of her conferences or something … but anyway he was in correspondence with her and and she was trying to encourage him in any way she could. When she retired from university she continued her work with a private foundation and again her main function was…focus was trying to deliver good quality water to very large numbers of people in various parts of the world. Right?
Second Man: Mm.
First Man: This was her dream. And a wonderful idea and it was good to hear that there was somebody in the world thinking about that …
Second Guy: Mm.
First Guy: … but again it is not what is normally the idea. You know? When people talk about irrigation schemes or you know providing water, they just think of water as a basic commodity. They don’t think about the quality of that water. Right?
Second Guy: Mm.
First Guy: But she said something to him that really struck me. She said, it will be a great journey and whatever you discover about water, it will be a great journey for you, and the one thing that I always try to keep in mind is that we don’t have to treat water. Everybody always talks about, you know, “water treatment” and “treatment plants” and , you know, what do we do to water… We don’t have to do anything to water. We just have to respect it. This really struck me. You know?
Second Guy: Mm.
First Guy: And even more so as he developed his research…was…you know… It would be very simple to take care of water in the world.
Second Man: Mm.
First Man: We could go out there and sit next to that pool and if there were enough of us and maybe even just two of us, we could improve the quality of that water just by thinking good thoughts for that water.
Second Man: Wow!
First Man: I am convinced of that.
Second Man: Wow!
First Man: On a scale like…you know….It was few years ago, I think when we were both still living in Kyoto, where a whole bunch of Japanese NGOs got together and they circled Biwako and they prayed for its health.
Second Man: Mm.
First Man: And I didn’t know anything about Emoto at the time but I am absolutely sure it was based on his research that those people came up with the idea for doing that.
Child: Where’s my book?
Second Man: Excuse me. Where’s your what?
Child: Where’s my book?
Second Man: Your book? Do you want to draw a picture?
Child: Yes.
Second Man: … Yeah. Go on.
First Man: So rather than putting chemicals in the water to clean it, all that is really required is…
Second Man: … to speak to it.
First Man: Good will.
Second Man: Yeah. Good will. Love it.
First Man: In the same way that the Ganges by all scientific standards is a dead river without oxygen and yet it has freshwater dolphins.
Second Man: Yep.
First Man: …living in it.

Link to Water and Feelings