The percentage of water within the human body must be carefully maintained. A loss of just 5 percent of the body's total water will cause the mouth to go dry, the surface of the skin to shrink, and may even cause hallucinations. A loss of more than 15 percent total body fluid would be fatal. And, death by dehydration is one of the most painful experiences imaginable.

About 15 percent of human water loss is through the act of respiration. Another 20 percent is lost through perspiration, and almost 65 percent is by excretion. Sweat has been found, through chemical analysis, to be loaded with waste products. Without a sufficient supply of liquid to carry it away, such filth would remain in the body and poison it. The retention of too much water, on the other hand, may cause nausea, tremors, convulsions, disorientation, and even unconsciousness or coma.

The average person has about 50 quarts, nearly 100 pounds or 65 percent of their total weight, of water in their body. A lean, muscular adult's body may be as much as 75 percent water, while an obese adult, with an abundance of water-poor fat tissue, may be only about 50 percent liquid. A young child may be as much as 90 percent water, however, but the total volume diminishes with age.

Mankind, and all other known forms of life, is helpless without water. A person may survive for several weeks without food, but would die a painful death in just a few days without water. In fact, one Indian Fakir lived for almost 81 days with no form of solid nourishment whatsoever. But, without water, however, the longest anyone has ever survived is 12 days.

Some strains of virus can exist indefinitely without oxygen, but no life at all can exist without water. The human body needs at least two (2) quarts of water each and every day. Much of that, nearly half, may be obtained by way of solid foods. But, our foods vary greatly in the amount of liquids they will give up to the digestive system. The driest food, for example, is the sunflower seed (only 5 percent water), while the wettest food is the watermelon (nearly 97 percent water). Thus, one must be sure to carefully balance their diet and obtain adequate amounts of water. Doctors, today, recommend at least eight full glasses, each and every day.

Deserts and droughts stir man's innate fear of being without water, since humans suffer more from thirst than from hunger. In many parts of the world, people spend nearly half of their lives hauling water for the barest necessities of survival. In point of fact, only one person out of every nine has water piped into their homes, a thought almost inconceivable to us in the industrialized west. Such diseases as dysentery, typhoid fever, cholera, and trachoma are often the consequences of contaminated water or poor sanitation in these under-developed nations. Some areas of our own country, such as certain regions of Appalachia or the Ozarks, suffer from these same problems as well.

Life on our planet is dependent upon an important aspect of liquid water -- it is virtually indestructible. The total supply of water on earth has neither grown nor diminished since its first appearance. There is almost exactly the same amount today as there was over a billion years ago. It has been used, disposed of, purified in the underworld, used again, and endlessly recycled. The water in your morning cup of coffee may have been, in ages long past, the urine of Julius Caesar or the Buddha. And, while such a thought may be a little disgusting, the knowledge that the world's supply of its most vital substance cannot be depleted or forever contaminated should be of some immediate comfort. For, if water could not shed many of its impurities through the evaporation and recycling process, if it were to be made permanently dirty, life would never have been possible on this planet.

When humans organized themselves into "civilized" communities, they began to interfere with the natural order of the water cycle. They siphoned it away to irrigate their fields. They built dams to protect their crops and settlements from floods. They dug canals to transport their heavy goods. They drew off large quantities for their own consumption, and to power their newly developed industries. They drained the swamps to make room for their own expansion into the wilderness. But, after all this, they could not deplete the world's water supply by even a single drop. Its availability in certain regions at certain times may have suffered, but its total amount could not be altered.

Blank spaces cover nearly half of any map of the planet. We know more about the farthest reaches of outer space than we do about the depths of our own oceans. The icy waters, into which the sun's rays never penetrate, lie right at our feet and yet continue to defy our greatest attempts to explore beyond only a few hundred feet.

Water is our life, and our greatest mystery. But, because water makes up so much of our physical structure, it is our link to the world around us... and to the universe itself.

Water is an oddity, an exception to almost all the rules of nature. As a substance, it is the softest and most malleable of all elements. At the same time, it is a chemical compound of the greatest stability. Its molecular structure clings together more tenaciously than most solid metals. It is a remarkable solvent and a powerful source of chemical, electrical, kinetic and magnetic energies. It can be used to extinguish fires, yet it is composed of two of the most highly explosive gasses in all of nature, hydrogen and oxygen. It expands when frozen, until it gains nearly nine (9) percent in volume as a solid, unlike all other substances that contract when frozen. As a solid, therefore, it is lighter than it is as a liquid and will actually float upon its warmer counterpart. It is also one of the strongest elements in nature and can even be used under high pressure, due to its incompressibility, to lift great weights or to cut through steel.

If ice did not expand and float, the world would have long ago become a gigantic frozen ball. Icebergs would have sunk, instead of floating where the sun could melt them, and each winter would have added a new layer of ice to the ocean floor. Sooner or later, every body of water would have frozen solid and the planet would have been layered in a massive sheet of ice.

Water also behaves curiously in relation to heat. An enormous amount of energy is required to raise the temperature of water. This fact is all too obvious to anyone who has ever burned their hand on the handle of a hot sauce pan, only to discover that the water inside was still cool. Raise the temperature of water to the boiling point, however, and there will be a pause where heat is still being absorbed without any further increase in the water's temperature, until the liquid is completely changed into a gaseous form -- steam. Similarly, ice cubes do not chill a glass of water because the ice is cold but because they absorb the heat from the surrounding substance in the process of melting. If enough ice is used to absorb the heat, the surrounding liquid will become cold itself.

Swiftly flowing and tumbling waters release huge amounts of oxygen and ionized particles into the atmosphere. Spiraling and cascading water can produce electrical potentials of up to 20,000 volts. Springs, babbling brooks and mountain streams are, therefore, more "alive" than the still waters of lakes and wells.

Yet, water is a poor conductor of electricity. Plug in an appliance while standing in a puddle of water and you will receive a walloping jolt. But, oddly enough, it is the impurities, which are always found dissolved in water, which allows it to carry an electrical current. Pure and distilled water, in fact, will not pass any charge at all.

Holy wells, although not as highly charged as rivers or waterfalls, are traditional places of interface with the Spirit of the Earth. Their calm surfaces reflect the world like a mirror, presenting an opportunity for prayer, meditation, self-contemplation, consciousness expansion and revelation. Visions of the Virgin Mary have occurred at such places -- La Salette in 1846 and Lourdes in 1858. She is, of course, a Christian symbol of the Earth Mother, known to the ancient Greeks as Gaia.

The act of drawing water from a well is (like fishing) symbolic of drawing the Spirit upward from the depths of the soul to quench the thirst of the mind. To gaze into the waters of a well is tantamount to the Mystic attitude of contemplation. It would be a gross violation to carry out noisy or physically energetic rituals and activities at such a sacred place. These sites radiate natural ionization, perhaps due to a powerful underground body of water. This tends to produce a sleepy calm and, thus, equivalent brain wave frequencies. Such electromagnetic radiation can influence the magnetically sensitive hippocampus, the brain center associated with dreaming. So, visions and dreams are the most natural way to tune into the earth field at such places.

Mesmer, Jung, and other early explorers of the human mind, have devoted much time to the study of water symbolism, especially as it concerns the alchemy of the soul. They seem to all conclude that water is the perfect symbol of the Spirit as the source of inner life and dynamic energy. So, for once, science and religion are in agreement.