Another one of those elementary-school-check-box characteristics of life that I remember is that organisms respond to their environment. In the archetypal example, plants bend their branches towards the light, but rocks do not—(at least on the scales of time over which we’re capable of keeping an eye on them.)

What these characteristics don’t tell you is that life is a singular field of continuous transformation. There appear to be discrete organisms, but there are not. There are merely stable orchestrations within a sea of exchange—local boons of complexity which begin and end in light, and which are never truly discrete.

The mechanistic notion of life we’re taught describes the stacking and sequencing of stable commodities—the combination of immutable elements into molecular propensities, the typesetting of amino acids into instructions, and the weaving of molecules into the biological media of bone, muscle, brain and skin. But the underlying process of life is not combination; it is transformation.

Transformation simply looks like combination when it is not understood for what it is. When it is not afforded its natural state of wholeness.

All of life’s exchange involves the speeding up or slowing down of the universal substance of light. A rock absorbs and emits light with minimal transformation. At most there is a shift in spectrum. But a tree absorbs light and emits—days later—fragrance, wood, and cherries. The light has slowed down, densified into matter, and been transformed. This is the hallmark of life.

The misperception that forms when transformation is left out of life’s equation is beautifully apparent in our understanding of water. We call it H₂O when in fact it is nothing of the sort. Water is not a sack of atoms, but a marriage begetting a new form of life. Water is a transformer of cosmic information.

Both Viktor Schauberger and Johann Grander wrote of this, and their ideas would be easy to dismiss were it not for their efficacy. Grander described water as a “cosmic substance” and noted that water actively receives subtle forms of energy and information from the cosmos, stores them, and releases them to living organisms. We see in water a primordial version of the continuous process of transformation on which life is built.

In Grander’s technology water that has been prepared using his proprietary methods is sealed inside of stainless steel containers. These containers can then basically go anywhere, and, through resonance, the water inside of them can impart beneficial energetic characteristics to other water that passes nearby. The effects are most obvious when studying the bacteria that live in the water. What has been found in repeated trials is that the bacteria present in the water not only undergo a physiological transformation—a shift in the size and structure of the colonies that is noted when the bacteria are cultured, as well as an increased metabolic rate—but also a shift in the spectrum of species that dominate the population.

Grander described this as the reactivation of water’s natural immune system.

Leaving the details and secondary effects aside for the moment, what is astounding to me is water’s capability to receive information from the larger structure of nature, to not only sustain it’s “living state” but simultaneously to transform it into forms that organisms can sense and utilize. One of the more amazing examples of this that I heard once was when I had a brief correspondence with a research scientist at Purdue University who was studying the role that water dynamics play in the body clock. He’d noticed an interesting phenomenon: the inner dynamics of water he was studying sometimes “rebooted” during strong solar events.  I sent him a Grander device once to test—a small apparatus the size of a ball point pen with water sealed inside of it—and he noted the same process occurred instantly when the device was exposed to water in his laboratory.

An amazing thing about the Grander devices is they don’t wear out. So it’s not a case of the water within them being “charged up” at the factory and then “wearing down” over time. They don’t have any power source, and are just water in a box. It’s literally a case of water being a medium of continuous energetic exchange with the larger natural world, absorbing and transforming subtle forms of energy and information into new life. It’s a case of water being a bridge from the cosmos to the cell.

When I first began experimenting with Grander devices I was working in industrial cooling systems. Mostly at nearby hockey rinks. I would head over during lunch over several weeks to take samples of the cooling water to a laboratory, then install a Grander device, and do it again. It was fascinating to see the pictures of the bacteria colonies and witness how they changed in shape, size and quantity. Something was obviously happening.

On one occasion two different labs were given samples from the same system we were testing. One lab told me the cooling water had thousands and thousands of colony forming units, and the other lab told me there were none whatsoever. This was really strange, because it was the middle of summer and the water was under incredible stress biologically speaking. I asked the second lab to check for really small colonies, and they called me back later and said they had assumed there was some sort of very fine debris in the sample because they didn’t usually see colonies like that, but on re-examining the slides with this idea in mind they recounted, and agreed with the other labs quantification of the result.

Of course, most people I spoke with either kept their thoughts to themselves on this idea I was offering, or suggested I check myself into a rehab facility. But every time I think of the stars whispering into water’s ear, and water listening–transforming and passing those whispers on to living beings–I get goose bumps. Non-living matter simply doesn’t do this… Not, at least, at the level of scale that we see in living matter. At the deeper levels of nature I think we know each particle of matter is this very sort of resonating energetic twinkle.

Eventually you realize, life is all there is…