The indigenous people of our land know well their slogan, “Water is Life.” Of course, we all know that we are largely made up of water, as is our planet, so we cannot keep on polluting our precious source of life.

This month, I would like to talk about another level of meaning to water. I am confident we can find this in all sacred scripture, but I am most familiar with the Christian Gospels, so I shall draw on those. In the Gospel of John, Jesus meets a woman by a well, where she is drawing water. He asks her for a drink. She is surprised that Jesus is speaking to a woman in public. He sidesteps the issue and replies, “If you only knew who it is that is asking you for a drink of water, you would have asked him for a drink and he would have given you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Water welling up. Where does it well up from?

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who recorded thousands of his patients dreams comments that water in dreams is a symbol of the unconscious. So we consider that the water Jesus mentions wells up from our unconscious.

Another Gospel story in Matthew takes it further. The apostles are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. There is a storm. The apostles are frightened. Jesus appears, walking on the surface of the water. He bids Peter to come to him across the water. Peter here represents the human ego. When he steps out of the boat, it is his ego stepping out on to the Sea of the Unconscious, always an unknown quantity, and therefore intimidating. Peter becomes scared and begins to sink. Jesus grabs hold of him and immediately they are safe back in the boat. It sounds like a nightmare that we wake up from and realize we are safe. We’re back in bed; back in the boat. As Jung realized, the unconscious is not just a Freudian heap of suppressed negativity but contains positive, creative contents. In short, it is the realm of spirit.

Bishop Carlton Pearson, visionary, spoke Sunday in a Zoom call from the Center for Contemporary Mysticism in Chestnut Hill, Pa. He mentions Luke 22, where Jesus instructs Peter and John to go into the city to prepare a place for the disciples to have the Passover meal. He tells them that they will meet a man carrying a jug of water. A man carrying water is the zodiac symbol of Aquarius. With this instruction, Jesus is saying that those who follow him, those who seek higher consciousness, enter the Age of Aquarius, the Water Bearer, who will elevate our Consciousness by drawing the Unconscious up into our awareness, where we can see it in the earthen vessel of Aquarius, that is, in ourselves.

The implication of all this is that we are the carriers of this divine water. It is divinity itself within us. And if it is divinity within us, then we have infinite potential. If all this be true, and I firmly believe it is, then we are not sinners. No, we are vessels of the divine and our life journey is a matter of drawing up this divinity into our consciousness. This is the basis of the emerging theology of universal salvation which I prefer to call universal union because there is nothing that needs saving. How’s that for good news?!

Hafiz says, “It is all just a love contest and I never lose. Now you have another good reason to spend more time with Me.” (The Gift, Ladinsky translation, p.163)

Bill O’Brien is a consciousness coach and shamanic practitioner. He and his wife Linda lived in Shepherdstown from 2005-2021, before relocating near family in Blue Bell, Pa. He can be reached at billobrienconsciousnesscoach@gmail.com.