THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF WATER
Its Power and PurposeBy Alick Bartholomew |
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This is a profound, magical and shocking book that reveals clearly the limitations and destructiveness of the post-Enlightenment scientific paradigms that govern most contemporary economic activity. As Bartholomew puts it:
“The enormous energy released in the past two centuries by the explosion of fossil fuels has accelerated the development of prodigious technological achievements. More crucially it has given pioneers of new technologies a sense of dominance over Nature, as well as money, power and global influence. Inevitably, this worldview has influenced the politically inclined and educated among us. It has led to growth in materialism and the commercialisation of values.”
On the other hand, discoveries in quantum physics, fractal geometry and the physics of the organism are leading to a new science that is at odds with the orthodox Newtonian theories now understood to have relevance primarily in the physical domain. This new holistic science can contain the old orthodoxy, but the Newtonian orthodoxy cannot easily cope with the quantum; hence their antagonism. It is as though we are now seeing two incompatible kinds of science.
He moves on quickly to broadly identify, “…the lesser-known energetic and quantum qualities of water that enable it to perform its incredible functions of initiating and sustaining life… In discussing holistic research on water’s extraordinary qualities, we will be talking about energy in rather different terms from mainstream understanding.”
Bartholomew uses headings like Energy is Immaterial, Yin/Yang Balance and Water Retains and Communicates Energy to take his reader into a new cerebral universe, which is immediately relevant both to daily life and to the loftiest of reflections about science and humanity.
In outlining his insights and discoveries, he frees himself from most of the orthodoxies that structure familiar thinking, and highlights the manner in which these facilitated scientific and industrial cultures that have been highly, if unwittingly, destructive. He also suggests many pathways to explore in seeking to comprehend and relate to realities that have long been neglected. These include the importance of shape, flow, chaos and communication in the role of water.
Above all, Bartholomew leaves little doubt that further scientific progress will need to be based on a much more complex and subtle understanding of water if it is not to do great harm to Earth’s environment, organic ecologies and human well-being.
Amongst the eye-catching headings that Bartholomew uses to offer new insights are the following: The Blood of the Earth, Water and the Human Body, Water Circulation in Plants, The Water Wizard, The Organism and Quantum Water, Spirals, the Vortex and the Etheric, Water’s Cosmic Role, Water as a Communication’s Channel, The Memory of Water, The Future of Food Production and The Big Picture.
Frequently, the reader is confronted with associations and logic that seems to transform any established view of the world. It is hard not to recall the Daodejing, the great Chinese wisdom classic where “water” is a central organising theme and where the first two lines read:
The Way that can be travelled is not the everlasting Way,
The Name that can be named is not the everlasting Name.
This, of course, reminds one of other traditions of ethnic wisdom that have been overwhelmed by the certainties and aggression of the West’s post-Enlightenment science and progress. The growing awareness of energy at the quantum level and in the structure of water will increasingly raise fundamental questions about modern science and its eager dismissal of much traditional wisdom.
Bartholomew captures this sense often with insights like: “…..the insistence of repeatability as the criterion for scientific proof is actually anti-life, as life itself is not predictable.”
He has many examples of the practical consequences of this in sentences like: “Our water supplies are in grave danger, because we don’t know how to manage or care for fresh water.”
“Denuded land sheds a downpour like water off a duck’s back, for water will soak into the ground only if the surface is cooler than the rain. It is tragic how little understanding there is of the importance of tree cover to prevent soil erosion by increasingly violent storms.”
“The chemical monocultures of the Green Revolution use ten times more water than biodiverse ecological farming systems.”
When Bartholomew addresses the future of food production many of his perceptions are just as disruptive of much present received wisdom. His exploration of biological agriculture, soil remineralisation, organic farming, permaculture and biodynamic cultivation challenges a wide range of widespread practices.
Important new insights and understandings of ourselves and our environment, like Bartholomew’s, confront a phalanx of defenders of past orthodoxy. Not only are there established truths and ways of thinking that have to be challenged and shown to be deficient, but all those who have careers founded on such now dated knowledge have to be mollified and the corporate interests with substantial investments based on the old science have to be reconciled with their new challenges.
The world today is more dependent than ever on the work of such pioneers as Alick Bartholomew.
– Reviewed by Reg Little in New Dawn 131
