Conscious Choice: Water ~ Mind ~ Spirit

July 1995

Water ~ Mind ~ Spirit

by Patricia Katherine Novick

For the past year or so, I have been conducting workshops with faith groups, helping them to make connections between their spiritual beliefs and their health. My colleagues and I have worked with congregations in five Chicago-area religious institutions and have plans to work with several more.

We have found that water provides many profound and moving images and metaphors to connect spirituality and health. Since we humans are primarily made of water, and since water has such vast health-giving properties, the connection between water and spirituality is both practical and uplifting. In the seminars, we sometimes begin by asking the participants to consider what it might be that they are "thirsty for," and we perform a meditation while drinking water. Appropriate hymns, prayers, and rituals are added as they fit the beliefs of the congregation.

I will recount some metaphors and images related to water, with the thought that you may use them in your own spiritual practice.

The Buddhist poet Li Po, who is reputed to have drowned when he leaned out of a boat to embrace the moon’s reflection, wrote:

You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom.
The water flows.

The Sufi, Jelaluddin Rumi:
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground.

God speaking through Isaiah:
"For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and the stream on the dry ground; I will pour my spirit upon your descendants, and my blessings on your offspring."

The Upanishads:
As a fish swims forward to one riverbank then the other,
Self alternates between awakeness and dreaming.

The Eskimo shaman Uvavnuk:
The great sea has set me in motion,
set me adrift,
moving me like a weed in a river.

Water cleanses and it purifies. Cleansing changes the surface; purification revives the essence. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian funeral rites all involve washing the dead person, to prepare him or her to meet the divine being in the most sanctified state. Shamans in many cultures use immersion as a way to achieve spiritual renewal and to resist the pull of undesirable forces that have been unleashed by a malevolent spirit or by another sorcerer. A Chinese tradition holds that waters purify, and baptism is not only a Christian sacrament but was also practiced by Mayans who washed newborns while a midwife prayed that the water might remove any evil still clinging to the baby from the misdeeds of its parents. Ritual baths and washings are central ceremonies in Jewish, Hindu, and Islamic religions. The Buryat require a shaman to undertake a purification ceremony, begun with water drawn from three springs, at least two times each year. A Great Flood is recognized in most cultural traditions as a force which cleansed the earth and purified humankind.

Water is a metaphor for the indomitable strength of will. The Vedic poem asks of the time when "neither being nor nonbeing existed": "What was moving with such force? Where? Under whose care? Was it the deep and fathomless water?" In many cultures, the power of the trickling stream to erode the strongest mountain represents the capacity of the spirit to overcome the greatest obstacles. The Taoist sage Lao-tzu observed, "Water is outstanding in doing good... And yet it has no equal in destroying that which is strong and hard."

Water represents possibility. Many cultures sustain stories of fountains of youth, of magic springs whose waters cure disease, bring the dead to life, and grant immortality. Springs and wells, appearing as if by magic from barren ground, are particularly revered. Mayans worshipped and performed sacrifices at cenotes, deep wells at which they thanked the gods for the gift of life. When Pope Gregory’s missionaries found that they could not stamp out worship by the Celts at their holy wells, they instead blessed them and adapted those sites of veneration to Christian purposes. The Vedas associate water with the origin of medicine. Coins tossed into a fountain would seem to be a vestige of the belief in mystical possibilities of water.

Spiritual nourishment, surcease from the thirsting of the soul, is also represented by water. Psalm 1 says of the "man and woman...who keep their hearts open day and night" that they are "like trees planted near flowing rivers, which bear fruit when they are ready. Their leaves will not fall or wither. Everything they do will succeed." Jesus told the woman at the well in Samara, "Everyone who drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

Water provides an image of individuality merged into a larger being. Ghalib: "For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river — /Unbearable pain becomes its own cure./Travel far enough into sorrow, tears turn to sighing/In this way we learn how water can die into air." Upanishad: "As rivers lose name and form when the disappear/into the sea, the sage leaves behind all traces/when he disappears into the light. Perceiving the truth, /he becomes the truth." In this regard, the after-death world is also portrayed with images of water. For example, Zuni ancestors are believed to inhabit a village at the bottom of a lake, to which all the deceased return. Polynesian chiefs are said to be returned to life by the God Tane’s gift of water, while the unmourned dead pass to a sad region beyond the seas. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "And if the earthly no longer knows your name,/whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing./To the flashing water say: I am."

In many creation myths, original chaos takes the form of primal waters. There is an analogy here to the beginnings of human life in the maternal waters in which the fetus is formed and nourished. In earth-diver creation stories, an animal enters the waters to bring back the mud or clay of creation. Some Native American traditions view the First Woman as springing from dew on a plant warmed by the sun. This First Woman is described as being "glad" as long as her feet are in the water, a place where she is centered, powerful and happy. In a similar vein, a Hindu cosmology says, "In the beginning, he created only the waters, and then in the waters, he laid his seed. And this became the golden egg.... In this egg Brahman was born of himself, the ancestor of all living things."

Jung interpreted the sea or any large body of water appearing in a dream as symbolizing the unconscious. The depths of the self, he said, are chaotic, formless, pregnant with violence and destruction, and are also the wellsprings of the conscious mind. "If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents and those in turn will fructify the conscious principle of the personality: dynamic, non-formal fluid, and creative." In Hispanic lore, yellow flowers spring up in the footsteps of Water Maidens who are endowed with the power to invert the normal order of things and to bring up happiness to all who behold them.

Finally, water images correlate with myriad bodily sensations. Feelings "well up" in us. We "bubble over" with happiness. We "gush" with uncontainable sentiment. We "overflow" with gratitude or love. A Buddhist teaching says:

[A] practitioner who is aware of body as body feels the joy which arises during concentration saturate every part of his body.... Like a spring within a mountain whose clear water flows out and down all sides of that mountain and bubbles up in places where water has not previously entered, saturating the entire mountain. In the same way, joy, born during concentration, permeates the whole of the practitioner’s body; it is present everywhere.

Some of the images and metaphors presented here may touch you as they have touched me, and may therefore serve you for meditations, prayers, or other spiritual sustenance. How they might do this, or whether they might do it at all, will be a function of this brief contact, but beyond that, who can say?

Coming, going, the waterbirds
don’t leave a trace,
don’t follow a path.
— Zen Master Dogen, "On Non-Dependence of Mind"

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