Pause for a moment.
What comes to mind as you stare at graphics above?
Say it out loud.
"You are what you think" yields over fifteen million Google search results. That's a lot of agreement. If it's true, your thoughts matter. A lot!
The average adult generates fifty to seventy thousand thoughts every day. That's about one thought every second. At these speeds, much of our thought life happens "automatically," drawing from and sifting through a massive storehouse of information at a phenomenal rate. What, then, causes you to think one specific thought over another? When you saw the word at the top of this post, what thought was triggered?
It may seem a bit odd to think about thinking. It's such a "natural" process you may be wondering, "What's to think about? Doesn't it just take care of itself?" Exactly. That's the point. When you encounter something in your outer world, when something stimulates your senses, or information comes to you by any means, what influences your first flash thought in your inner world? Then, as you continue to generate the string of thoughts that inevitably follow, what drives that "train of thought?" Understand that, and you are poised to intentionally shape your thought life. And if "You are what you think," you are also poised to intentionally become whatever you choose to be.
Take 15 seconds and watch this video. Note what comes to mind. What are the words? Describe what you're watching to yourself or someone else before you read further.
When I captured this video, my family was the unsuspecting subject of an experiment. It was Thanksgiving week, 2015, and we had descended on Southern California to be together for the holiday. This evening, after our dinner in Long Beach, we came out of Lola's on 4th Street and hung a right. We didn't get far. This really cool device was doing its thing in a lit up window in front of the adjacent building.
Standing on the sidewalk, we stared at it, mesmerized, for a minute or so until I turned to everyone and said, "Wow! Structured water!" I got blank stares in return. What the rest of the family thought was a cool water dispenser, I recognized as a device that claims to produce structured water. We all saw the same thing, but the thoughts it generated were radically different.
Our history, experiences, culture and education, formal and otherwise, define how our inner world experiences our outer world. In the broadest sense, we are "domesticated" by this history over time, as Don Miguel Ruiz describes in "The Four Agreements." In this very specific incident that evening in Long Beach, I had previously come across the science related to this fourth state of water and I had delved into it deeply. I had seen this before. It was part of my experience, my inner world, but it wasn't part of my family's. So this outer world experience produced a completely different response from me. They saw a vortex in a water cooler. I saw the world differently. I saw structured water.
We have much more control over our life experience, how we experience our world, than we generally assume. And it goes back to our inner world. Want to change your experience? Then change your thinking by opening your mind and pouring in new perspectives. There is some very interesting cognitive science that speaks to this. It's called the "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon," or "frequency illusion." This phenomenon is our tendency, when we discover something new, or even just learn a new word, to encounter it everywhere. It was there before, but went unnoticed. If you want to shift your thinking in support of achieving your goals and living the life you were born to live, magnetize your mind with the material that supports you.
The Resources page is a good place to start. Feed yourself. Stay curious. Devour books. Go down the rich rabbit holes on TED and myriad YouTube channels and blog sites. Be a sponge. Yes, there is a wide range of quality and credibility, but even this yields useful perspective. Your outer world experience will be enriched beyond measure as you absorb these things into your inner world. Take it all in without judgment and then take it into your life experience to sort it out. You already know how to do this. You're built for it. In fact, you already have years of experience doing it. This is how you explored and learned about your world as a child before you locked your mind into a model you eventually adopted as "truth." If you want to change your experience and experience change, you must change your model by changing your thinking. "You are what you think." Simple. True.
Post-it Note
Structured Water and Hydration in General
A full treatment of structured water, and hydration in general, would be several posts. The health effects of hydration/dehydration, including your energy level, mental acuity and mood, is huge. It impacts every cellular function in your body. Absent a full post series, this Post-it Note briefly introduces the topic of structured water and provides links if you'd like to dig deeper now. I highly recommend you do. The commercial claims of those selling devices that are supposed to generate structured water are controversial, but the underlying science is well documented by credible researchers.
Dr. Gerald Pollack, a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, is a bioengineering professor and pioneer in this research. His current faculty website at the University of Washington is here and his CV is here. In simplest terms, he has discovered that water can and does enter a phase where it has very interesting properties, including the exclusion of many solutes and the generation of electrical potential. Check out his TEDx talk, The Fourth Phase of Water: Dr. Gerald Pollack at TEDxGuelphU to learn more.