Water For Thought ©
By Jaime Zaragoza
Are cells immortal?
According to Nobel Laureate Dr. Alexis Carrel, yes. In 1912 he took heart tissue from a chicken and kept it alive in vitro for 34 years simply by changing the fluid around it. Before he died in 1944 he theorized that:
"The cell is immortal. It is merely the fluid in which it floats which degenerates. Renew this fluid at intervals, give the cell something on which to feed and, so far as we know, the pulsation of life may go on forever..."
The chicken cells outlived Carrel himself until the fluid replacing experiment was terminated.
Thinking cellular
If you are thinking about living for a long time, better start thinking Cellular! All living matter is made up of cells. And your body is not an exception. Cells have been called ”the smallest unit of life,” and are basically small powerhouses that create energy. The human body has as many cells as a galaxy has stars (about one hundred thousand million). The lifespan of the human “normal” cells vary according to the type, but it is believed to be tightly regulated and finite, for example: Some cells, like red blood cells, divide rapidly. Others, such as nerve cells, lose their capability to divide once they reach maturity (if you loose them they are gone!). Some cells, such as liver cells, retain but do not normally utilize their capacity for division. Liver cells start to divide if part of the liver is removed and stop the division once the liver reaches its former size.
When cells’ health is compromised because the fluid surrounding them is not conducive for life because of various causes including high acidity etc., they either mutate or die. Once the cell death rate exceeds the birth rate, any individual’s body experiences accelerated aging. Among the many factors that affect aging, diet is the most important, and the foundation of a good diet is water.
Water: the matrix of life
Water is so common we fail to notice its role and effect on life. But it is the most vital substance on this planet. Simply put, our existence depends on it. We can survive for weeks without food, but on average only about 100 hours without water. Water is the largest single constituent of the human body and is essential for cellular homeostasis and life.
Some of the “basic” functions of water in the human body are: Delivering oxygen and nutrition to the cells; removal of carbon monoxide, toxins and waste material (detoxification) which helps dissolve minerals and other nutrients to make them accessible to the body; moistening of tissue (i.e. skin, mouth, eyes nose, lungs); protection of bodily organs and tissue; prevention of constipation; joint lubrication; and body temperature regulation.
Given its importance, you might be surprised how little is known about how water molecules interact with life processes, especially at the quantum and molecular levels. To give you an idea, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2003 was given to Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon for pioneering discoveries concerning water and ion channels of cells, the mechanism that explains how water flows from and into cells. These discoveries contributed to fundamental chemical knowledge of how cells function and opened peoples’ eyes to a fantastic family of molecular machines: channels, gates and valves, all of which are needed for the cell to function.
Water inside the body
The primary indicator of hydration status is plasma, or serum (blood). Total body water is distributed between: Intracellular Water 65% (fluids inside the cells) and extracellular water 35% (water around the cells). The free movement of water between both is called intracellular water exchange, and it is considered to be a key factor in health.
The total water content of our bodies varies between individuals, but it is generally observed that it drops as we age. For example, the human fetus is about 90% water. By infancy this figure has dropped to 74%; as a teenager (male) to 59%; as a teenage female to 65%. It declines further to 50-60% as we become adults of either sex, and to 54-47% for individuals over 50. That is one of the reasons why dehydration (especially at a cellular level) has been postulated as a contributing factor in the aging process.
Hydration
Hydration increases endurance and energy, regulates body temperature, aids in digestion, and facilities muscular and nervous activity. Water is responsible for literally every metabolic process in the body. The blood is important in carrying nutrition and oxygen to the cells and removing waste from cells. The cells of the body make up the tissues, which in turn extend their complex organization to the level of every organ. Dehydrated cells can often lead to cell hypoxia, which is oxygen starvation and has been linked with cancer risk of the colon, kidneys and bladder.
So how much water should I drink per day?
Total daily water intake includes drinking water, water in beverages, and water that is part of food. Here are some percentages of water content of selected foods: Tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, watermelons, water – 91%-100%; Peaches, grapes, apples, orange cantaloupe, non carbonated fruit drinks – 80%-90%; Eggs, some fish, peas – 70%-79%; Pasta, bread, rice, beef, poultry, baked goods - <69%; Grains - <10%.
How much water an individual should drink is not an easy question to answer, because the data regarding optimal water intake is unclear. This is mainly because water balance in the body is a function of many factors like age, activity, temperature and bodily functions such as sweating (noticeable and unnoticeable), exhaling, urinating and bowel movements.
A good rule of thumb of water intake for an individual with normal activity is half your body weight in oz per day. For example, if your weight is 150 lb. divide that figure by 2 (150/2=75 oz); for a 200 lb individual the intake figure comes to 100 oz. per day.
For more information on how to calculate this, go to Cnn.com/HEALTH/
library/NU/00283
Ideas to Increase Water Consumption
Upon waking up drink at least one full glass of water. Substituting coffee for water first thing in the morning is best. Morning is when the blood can be the most sluggish, which is probably why the highest risk of heart attacks occurs at this time of day.
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Carry water in your car.
Keep a pitcher of herbal tea in the fridge.
Substitute soft drinks with water. Soft drinks are generally too acid and devoid of real nutritional value.
Add juice concentrates (i.e. cranberry) or fresh lemon or lime to juice to water.
Drink hot herbal teas, like green tea, which are rich in antioxidants.
Drink a glass of water one hour before, after, and between each meal.
Take water breaks instead of coffee breaks.
Substitute water for alcoholic drinks in the evening and at social gatherings.
What kind of water is best?
This is a topic that will be explored in future articles in more depth. But for the time being consider that i f we want to give our cells the best chance to thrive, tap water might not be the best source.
Commercial tap water is treated to meet “legal and quality standards,” and can contain many contaminants. Three of the most common are chlorine, fluoride and lead. The experimental use of chlorine, which is a strong oxidizing agent, began in the 1890's to combat water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. It quickly gained wide acceptance because of low cost and high efficiency in “killing just about everything” in public water systems. The problem with chlorine is that it is a “known poison” and the safety of ingesting this substance over the long term is highly debatable. Certain studies suggest it may increase the risk of heart disease and certain cancers. Lead, even in small amounts, may be toxic, especially in infants, children, and pregnant women. And then there is fluoride. If fluoride is so great, why have the following countries banned fluoridation?
- West Germany
- The Netherlands
- France
- Belgium
- Finland
- Sweden
- Norway
- Denmark
- Japan
- Italy
- Scotland
Alternatives
Use a quality bottled spring water. I f bottled water is too expensive for regular use, have tap water tested to see if impurities exist. State and local health departments often will test your water for bacterial contamination. To find out about toxic substances, such as lead, arsenic, and high levels of chlorine, use a private testing lab. Home purifying or filtration systems can be helpful. But distillation units may produce the purest available water, since it separates solids by evaporation.
Jaime Zaragoza is President of Zunami Corporation which produces Zunami™, a highly purified water effective for accelerated hydration.
Zunami is available from the Bleep Store
The Return of the Alchemists
Part Four: The Art of the Alchemist
by Raoul Tollmann
In part three of this series of articles, we’ve taken a closer look at a core concept of alchemy: That the archetypal energies of planets and stars are also manifest in you and work through you, the human. We’ve discussed some circumstantial modern evidence that this may well be so. We have examined the idea of metallic preparations and those of gems and minerals as being earthly representatives of these stellar energies or formative forces.
Today, we peek into the laboratory of the practical alchemist. What does he – well, mostly he. There have been very few female alchemists throughout the ages – attempt to create there?
We should emphasize again, for it is so far-out when looked at from a contemporary viewpoint, that he bases his entire practice on the system of correspondences between the stars and planets and the human, expressed in the concept of the human being as a microcosm or miniature representation of the formative forces of the greater universe or macrocosm. It is this key understanding that gives laboratory alchemy its raison d’être: producing pharmaceuticals on the basis of this concept, substances that address a specific zone or area of the human energy body and fortify the particular area, thus inducing a transformation of the human. Depending upon how skillful the preparations have been made, an immediate and strong effect, or a vague and miniscule effect, on the corresponding organ is noticeable.
Laboratory alchemy, as part of (at the peak of?) the natural healing arts, does not aim at killing microbes. This ‘shoot the invaders’ concept derived from the Parisian School of Biology, and was made famous by Louis Pasteur. But at the end of his life, Pasteur admitted that the microbe is nothing and the inner milieu is everything. At the same time, Antoine Bechamp, a biologist working at the University of Montpellier in Southern France (known as Cathar-Land to history buffs), presented a wildly differing concept to the astonished world. He utilized high-resolution optical microscopy and could demonstrate that human blood, which is usually considered sterile, carries besides red blood cells and white blood cells another, third element1.
In the microscope, this third element shows as tiny specks of light in comparison to the much larger blood cells. Upon closer examination, these dots of light called mycrozymas or ‘tiny ferments’ by Bechamp, are changeable. In a healthy human, they undergo three stages of transformation, all of them empowering the human. If the internal environment deteriorates, however, these specks of light turn into pathogens! Thus, the invader is already within you – a natural component of every living being, and not there to kill you but to support life. As soon as the body deteriorates, however, the microzymas’ task is to dissolve the deteriorating tissue – disease is characterized by this stage.
Today, modern medicine holds onto the world-view of Pasteur and continues to administer antibiotics to target specific but ever changeable ‘invaders,’ while a few renegade naturopaths have taken Bechamp’s original work to new heights and understanding. The late German Herr Professor Enderlein has done some spectacular work in this regard. An internet search for the terms ‘Enderlein’ and ‘pleomorphism’ will lead to several websites that show the micrographs of the said microzymas or protits, as Enderlein called them, at their various stages.
Today, this arcane information is there for everyone to see who cares to look.
Ancient alchemists may or may not have had any idea of these mycrozymas, but they sure knew that any deterioration of health could be understood as a process of ‘fermentation’ or, as they put it more drastically, as ‘rotting.’ They also knew that this process is often preceded by a disturbance of emotional and mental well-being. It was therefore their goal to re-energize the diseased area and thus enable nature to go about the necessary repair. Alchemy, coming from a spiritual angle, has never been interested in manipulating biological functions on a biological level, but rather intervening where mind intersects with body.
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References
1 Bechamp’s main work has been translated into English and is available as a reprint: Bechamp, Antoine: The Blood and Its Third Element, several reprints available 2 One medieval reference that includes a viable manufacturing process of this calx of gold, today called monoatomic gold, is: Jugel, Johann G.: Johann Gottfried Jugels freyentdeckte Experimentalchymie, Leipzig, Germany 1766, Publisher J.P. Krause, page 172ff
3 Possibly a good starting point to read more about this subject is the article: Microclusters by M. Duncan and D. Rouvray, Scientific American, Dec. 1989, p. 110ff
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It thus became necessary to extract the ‘formative forces’ of metals, rocks and gems and tie them to a carrier that allowed them to be introduced safely into the human system; to perform curative effects without doing harm. This seemingly impossible task has been, and is being, achieved by alchemists around the globe. Let us examine the various categories of preparations and the effects we can expect from them.
At the entry level of mineral and metal alchemy are the transformed metals, turned into edible substances with very little, if any, any metal toxicity. These preparations are called ‘ashes of metals’ in alchemy, and more specifically, in the West they are called ‘calxes of metals.’ In India, they are called ‘bhasmas of metals.’ Ayurvedic physicians are carrying the torch of this art today, and many companies in India prepare bhasmas of various qualities. These bhasmas range from complex, micro-clustered metal oxides to the totally non-metallic, non-toxic form of a bhasma that passes the test of apunarbhavatva or ‘test of non-revivability.’ This strange terminology signifies that such an ash of a metal cannot be returned to the metallic stage by any standard metallurgical process. In Western alchemy we find the same idea: the high-end calx of gold was known and used in the Pharmacopoeia of Western Medieval Alchemy as ‘the retrogradedcalx of Gold that cannot be revivified’ [meaning again it cannot be returned to the metallic state by conventional metallurgical processes]. 2
Contemporary science has long disputed the existence of such non-metallic and totally non-toxic forms of metals, but then, something important happened. Electron Microscopy and more specifically Scanning Tunneling Microscopy reached a state that actually allowed taking a peek at the molecular and atomic level; providing fascinating pictures of atoms in lattices that do not support the common accepted model of the atom in chemistry textbooks. The surprising discovery was that metals, such as those in gold chloride or comparable dissolved salts in water, tend to stay in clustered aggregates and are surrounded by a cloud of chlorine, in our example, mimicking a true solution. Thus, the relatively new branch of cluster chemistry was born.
The following question thus became relevant: What happens if we attack the metal clusters and reduce their size? Remarkably, metal clusters will reform in their shape, depending on their size, and will eventually break up and rearrange themselves into single atoms or monoatoms.3 This transition from the state of metallic aggregation to single atoms is usually accompanied by a partial, or total, change of the physical and chemical properties of the metal at hand, which loses its metallic nature and becomes a monovalent or zerovalent atom. Once formed, these edible monoatoms are a distinct phase of matter and will re-aggregate, forming a material with a look comparable to ceramic crystals when examined under a microscope.
These monoatoms are less reactive than their metallic counterparts, and are found in nature. They cannot be returned to the metallic state by standard metallurgical means. It is this test that can show if we have indeed produced the edible, often highly psychoactive monoatomic form of the element, or if we have merely produced metallic oxides. Modern science has finally caught up with the most basic preparation of mineral alchemy, that of the calx of a metal that cannot be revivified.
The next level up the ladder of Western mineral alchemy are elixirs made from micro-clusters or monoatoms, by extracting them, bringing forth what are conceived to be their respective spirits or ‘formative forces,’ as Steiner puts it. The manufacturing process is initiated by what is called a ‘Lunar Extraction,’ because the masters of our art have developed a sleek process utilizing the polarized light of the moon to perform the feat of creating the secret solvent. Moon magic! Among the cognoscenti it is reported that this technique coagulates the ether of the ancients, making it an integral part of the resulting solvent, which is derived from organic sources and imbued with it. In traditional alchemical literature, this solvent is usually called spiritus mundi, or ‘the spirit of the world.’
It’s interesting to note in this context that Franz Bardon mentions in his work Initiation into Hermetics that human digestion of food is actually the extraction of the vital principles of food by use of the fifth element that we take in with the air we breathe, Bardon relates to it by the Hindu name, ‘akasha.’ If we follow this train of thought, then an alchemical preparation made with this ‘spirit of the world’ can be seen as an etherealized, pre-digested substance that does not need to go through any human digestion anymore. Alchemical literature has called the extraction of such calxes by the spiritus mundi a ‘digestion,’ a term that has migrated into modern chemistry where it has assumed quite a different meaning. An alchemical digestion lasts for forty days and is performed in a hermetically sealed vessel at a consistent, mild heat. Today, we use thermostat-controlled incubators. In the old days, alchemists plunged their flasks into horse dung, which provided consistent and even heat for the task of this digestion. Talk about biotechnology!
At the top level of mineral alchemy are the ‘oils of metals’ and ‘stones,’ miraculous substances that can perform such feats as instant rejuvenation and metallic transmutations. These substances are usually manufactured by adepts of the art, and since I am not one of them, I cannot report firsthand. But I have witnessed a large-scale metallic transmutation by a Washington State-based student of a Czech alchemist, and there are numerous reports of miraculous transformations witnessed by independent third parties that I have gathered from the literature of West and East. In the next article, we will review some of these and we will certainly discuss the underlying principles that guide them.
Raoul Tollmann grew up in Austria. The son of two university geologists, he was introduced at an early age to the mineral kingdom. A near death experience at age 14 put him on the spiritual path; his natural scientific bent eventually led him to apprenticeship under two contemporary alchemists. In 2001 he founded AlchemiaNova, a company that produces his alchemical gem elixirs and noble gas waters. For more information: alchemianova.com
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