There is a Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto, who has been working with water. He is fascinated by water because, as he says, we are mostly water, some 85% of our body weight, I think, the same percentage of water on the surface of the earth.  But anyway, he has been freezing water, photographing it and studying the crystals formed by the water. He has also used distilled water which is almost biologically inert and therefore forms very simple crystals, or crystals that are so underdeveloped that they have almost no distinct structure.  Then he has examples of distilled water crystals after the water has been exposed to music – exquisite crystals as a result of the music, and all very different according to to the music that is played. The crystals reflect the essence of the music – Bach, Mozart, folk songs etc.  It’s as if the water were not only influenced by the music but absorbs and reflects its character.

This scientist has also taped words on the vials of distilled water. For instance the word “beautiful” produces exquisite lacy crystals; the word “dirty” produces undeveloped crystals that you could only call ugly.

Water is alive, he says, and the world is more interdependent than we realized.

Another experiment:  water taken from a highly polluted reservoir, frozen and examined – no crystal structure whatever. Then an elder Buddhist monk sat next to the reservoir and prayed for an hour for the well being of the water.  When they took new samples of the water and froze it, the crystals were stunning.  What’s more they found crystals unlike any that they had seen before: seven-sided crystals rather than the usual six-sided. When they asked the monk about his prayer, he told them he had prayed to the Seven Goddesses.

So, who are we, and what is our place in the universe? What did God have in mind to have the universe work for 14 billion years so that we, you and I, could be here in this place at this time?
A powerful question worth pondering.

Am I fully who I am meant to be? Or as Brian Swimme says: “… manifesting the interior reality of my being, creating my soul?”  It is one aspect of the ultimate aim of the universe, a universe created by God as an expression of God’s overwhelming love and deep desire to share this love.

Reading Teilhard is one way to help us to know these truths more deeply.
“Teilhard,” as Ursula King explains, “was looking for a God of evolution, a God whose image is truly commensurate with the complex dimensions of our universe; a  God who is not an outsider, a prime mover, but is deeply involved with the entire cosmic process of which we form an integral part; a truly living God, with us here and now, fully incarnate in matter and all-becoming.”