On August 18, 2018, I participated in Claudiu Murgan’s Facebook Launch of his recent book “Water Entanglement”—a near-future speculative novel that explores water’s mysterious properties and our odd relationship with it. I participated remotely from British Columbia and talked about water’s ‘magical’ properties, issues of water scarcity and the need for increased awareness. My colleague ch scientist Florin Munteanu also made an appearance from Bucharest in Romania. A copy of “Water Is…” was one of several book giveaways at the launch party.

The book jacket blurb of “Water Entanglement” provides an intriguing premise:

“…Since the creation of Earth, water and crystals have woven their paths into a billion-year-long tapestry that has captured the cycles of nature’s evolution. They have observed the appearance of humans and their troubled, but fascinating development, and the energies and vibrations of everything that is part of this amazing ecosystem … In 2055 water activists fight against irresponsible corporations that pillage the Earth. Hayyin, the hidden identiry of Cherry Mortinger, a limnologist, leads the movement. Will she be able to prove that water has memory and is alive and that we could awaken to the possibility of facing a fierce battle against the primordial element that gave us life: WATER?”

Tangled Universe

In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger invented the term “entanglement” to describe the behaviour of two previously bound-together individual particles, separated and later behaving as a single entity. His thought exercise was a chaotic dark thriller with a rather macabre baroque scenario involving a cat, a box and some poison. Thirty years later, John Bell proved what Schrödinger’s cat suggested: the existence of an instantaneous connectedness—what Einstein later called “spooky action at a distance.” Fifty years after, quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral argued how quantum mechanics no longer applies to small things—particles—as formerly thought. Vedral showed how biological processes from bird migration to photosynthesis use quantum processes.

Water displays a high degree of coherence as do most living systems; this has led researchers and thinkers to connect entanglement with numinous feelings of connectedness and conscious awareness; something akin to Carl Jung’s synchronicity and collective unconscious.

Physicists discovered that the universe is made of energy waves and every moment of our human reality is a wave function collapsed from probability by a conscious observer. This means that our world is a product of our consciousness. Realities aren’t fixed but ever-changing creations we bring forth, both individually and collectively through our beliefs and actions. It’s more like a storytelling universe that we iteratively express rather than a stable physical entity in which we grope our way through. “The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine,” says British physicist James Jeans.

“The new view, revealing a conscious Universe and a living Earth in which we are co-creators, takes us out of fatalistic victimhood to becoming consciously active agents of our destiny. It lifts the fog of our self-image as consumers of stuff, giving us awesome rights and responsibilities to live out our full co-creative humanity,” writes Elisabet Sahtouris.

Work by Del Guidice and others demonstrated that water molecules create coherent domains. Water tends to polarize around a charged molecule, storing and carrying its frequency so that it may be read at a distance. “This would mean that water is like a tape recorder,” writes science journalist Lynne McTaggart in her book “The Field”. Water “imprints and carries information whether the original molecule is still there or not.” McTaggart concludes that water is a natural medium of cells, acting as an essential conductor of a molecule’s signature frequency in all biological processes and that water molecules organize themselves to form a pattern on which wave information can be imprinted.

Human bodies contain over 70% water.

Entangled Minds

Let me tell you a story of entanglement. A few years ago, I helped Claudiu Murgan with his first book “The Decadence of our Souls”. I worked with him for several weeks, coaching and editing his book.

I then gave him my book “Water Is…” my non-fiction journey as mother, scientist and teacher with water. The book would later be chosen by Margaret Atwood as her first choice of books to read in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ for 2016.

After reading “Water Is…” and discussions with me, Claudiu felt compelled to write a novel on water. During an interview on That Channel, Claudiu shares the story of a previous interview on his first book “The Decadence of our Souls”, in which the interviewer asked him what his next project was, and he blurted out without any idea of a story, “I’m going to write about water.”   Inspired by “Water Is…” Claudiu wrote “Water Entanglement” in seven months.

In the meantime, I had embarked on a project I’d been thinking about for some time since writing short story “The Way of Water”—commissioned by Francesco Verso of Future Fiction for Mincione Ediziuni in Rome. I knew that “The Way of Water” was just a snap shot from a larger story that I had to write. From this emerged “A Diary in the Age of Water” (now due in 2020).

Without knowing what the other was doing, Claudiu and I were writing very similar stories and water was a principle character. Both stories were set in near-future Toronto—around the 2050s, during growing tensions and politics surrounding a crisis of water scarcity, with continued short-sightedness of climate-denying politicians and corporate Earth.  Both novels read like seamless slipstream between fiction and reality (mine is written partially as a memoir, which increases this experience); both explore humanity’s potential evolution linked to our relationship with an entity that remains as mysterious as it is common and life-giving. An entity that most indigenous peoples call alive.

When Claudiu and I met later, we shared our projects and both had to laugh at how similar they were. Water had entangled our minds. We had both tapped into the synchronicity of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, what quantum physicist David Bohm would call “Implicate Order”, what the Vedas would call “akasha”, Goethe would call “the ground of all being”, Rudolf Steiner would call “cosmic intelligence”, and biochemist Mae-Wan Ho would call “quantum entanglement.”

Water is the singularity.

I attended “Water Entanglement” launch at Indigo and then later interviewed Claudiu about it. Here is the interview on “Water Entanglement.”

Watch Hugh Reily and Hildegard Gmeiner interview Claudiu Murgan on That Channel. “There is an evolutionary gap between us and water; we have to feel that gap in order to understand how to behave with water and what exactly she wants to tell us,” says Claudiu in his interview. He also speaks more on “primary water”, a term that describes water created deep in the Earth from the synthesis of hydrogen and oxygen. In “Water Is…” I describe something similar:

Scientists recently discovered a vast ocean of water bound in the rock of the Earth’s mantle, hundreds of miles down. The water exists not as liquid, ice or vapour, but as a hydroxyl radical, bound up in the mantle rock containing the mineral called ringwoodite. “Ringwoodite is like a sponge,” said geophysicist Steve Jacobsen in a press release in June 2014. “There is something very special about the crystal structure of ringwoodite that allows it to attract hydrogen and trap water. This mineral can contain a lot of water under conditions of the deep mantle.” Scientists had speculated that water is trapped in a rocky layer of the Earth’s mantle between the lower mantle and upper mantel, some 250 miles to 410 miles deep. Jacobsen and his colleagues were the first to provide direct evidence that there may be water in this area of the mantle, known as the “transition zone”, on a vast scale. “The weight of 250 miles of solid rock creates such high pressure, along with temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, that a water molecule splits to form a hydroxyl radical (OH), which can be bound into a mineral’s crystal structure.” (from “Water Is…The Meaning of Water“)

 

Watch Hildegard Gmeiner and Hugh Reilly interview Nina Munteanu on writing and water on “Liquid Lunch”

 

Parts of this article are excerpts from “Water Is…The Meaning of Water” (Pixl Press) by Nina Munteanu

 

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist, limnologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books.