About Water

Water. That essential life giving element. It always seeks the line of least resistance. What if you could somehow harness its essence?

Water has some peculiar properties and aspects. One of it is that it always seeks the lowest point, which people generally abhoar. It is gentle, yet you can't cut it down with a knife. You can’t squeeze it, nor can you compress it. It can shape the contours of entire landscapes. It’s the most gentle, yet strongest substance in the world.

And this brings to my mind certain people, who have these same attributes. Of going with the flow of nature. But there are other people, who don't seem to see the flowing aspect of things. They talk about firm foundations, rock of ages, and mighty fortresses, as the basis for certain aspects of life, not realizing that we are living in a floating world.

Majority of Earth is water, and we are furthermore floating in interstellar space. And so an attitude to living which could be considered ideal, is not where one is cluching on to rocks, but learning how to swim. It doesn't do any good grabbing on to rocks that are falling with you.

This attitude of going with the flow, just because it is the flow of life, or a natural process, you cannot capture it. One can't shut off wind inside a box and expect it to behave like wind, or catch flowing water in a bucket, because then it is no longer flowing. Never swim against the stream but with it, wherever it takes you, and you'll have the entire force of the stream with you always.

Another way of saying the same thing is, always assess the field of forces in which you find yourself in. As an example take a slum. Now this slum, has a very delicate and sensitive ecology and hierarchy going. And going in there with a bulldozer will only rile up and disrupt that ecology.

You need to consider in what ways are the people there involved with each other and outside contacts. It is the same thing with anything in nature. All environments have this delicate ecosystem. And “being natural”, is a state in which you are aware how the ecosystem works and how its parts interact with each other.

So one then thinks: “How can I be naturally natural? How can I flow within the course of nature? How can I let my mind think whatever it wants to? Because the moment I start doing that, I realize I'm doing it for an ulterior motive; I'm trying to contemplate, I'm trying to achieve something spiritually. And that ruins the entire thing.”

Well, when one has strived and tried for a long time to get the right approach, and found out that all the approaches that one gets are false ones, then one comes to the realisation that there's nothing they can actually do about it, that it doesn't make any difference to anything. Then one simply “gives up”, and in doing so, gains the strength and energy one was searching for.

By giving up I don't mean that you become lifeless, inert and generally passive. Nor do I mean going with the flow of nature is like that. Because taking water again, it's never in a state of doing simply nothing. We can't really help ourselves moving to different directions in life. Life is motion. And to think we need to somehow settle for a rigid rock, instead of knowing how and where to move when the time is right, always going with it, instead of against it, is the kind of person that could be called a truly virtuous in its real sense.

So water, is life, it is living. We all need it, just as we need each other. We might occasionally go “against the grain” of things, and don't see the bigger picture, but even that is actually part of nature. After all, there is nothing that is happening apart from it. And to understand what the watercourse way of life entails, one has to stop on their tracks from time to time, and assess their relationship with the total environment.

T.F.