VII: 8

Chapter 7, Verse 8

"I am the Essence of the waters,
The shining of the Sun and the Moon.
I am the Om of the Vedas,
The sound of silence,
And the heroism in humanity."

Father Bede Griffiths:

Water is H-two-O.  We understand that to be its chemical composition, and so we think we know what water is and that there is nothing more to know.  On a deeper level of understanding, water reveals the mystery of life.  It quenches the thirst.  It feeds the plants.  It makes everything grow.  It contains the whole power of life itself.

Then, beyond that is the Presence of God in the living waters, in the taste, in the movement and in the clarity.

St. Francis called water his sister.

Science denies this spirit of things.  It is concerned only with that which can be measured.  It is not wrong to separate the material aspects of reality, of water, earth, air and fire, and to examine them chemically.  We may examine them as much as we like.  Such investigation brings greater understanding, as long as we also remember that beyond the material is another subtle world, and beyond that is the living God.

Sri Krishna Prem:

Students must in all things...in earth and fire and water, in Sun and Moon and in all splendid things, in humans, strong and wise...seek for that Essence, for That which makes them what they are.  Undistracted by the passing phantom shapes of outer forms, they hold firm to that essential nature of which the forms are only the transient embodiments.

Sri Eknath Easwaran:

Krishna is not only infinitely vast.  He is the Essence in every created thing.  In India, where the Sun gets terribly hot and the monsoon rains make the difference between life and death for millions of living creatures, water is precious every day of the year.  In summer, one of the services of my ancestral family used to perform was to keep huge, earthen pots of water in the courtyard so that travelers in the hot sunshine could quench their thirst on their way by.

Not only was Krishna present in the water in those pots, he is also in the blazing radiance of the Sun.  If our vision were not so drastically limited, physicists tell us, we could look beneath the illusion of solid forms to see the whole of creation as a dance of light, from which elements and substances emerge and to which they return.  This pure energy is the light which is the source of all that we behold.

Just as the Lord is light in all its forms, he is the sound behind all sound.  This sound is said to be approximated by the sacred syllable Om.  In meditation, when your concentration is so deep that you are no longer aware of cars on the road or birds outside your window, this sound may be heard reverberating throughout consciousness.