Floods, hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, tornados, droughts, winter snow and ice, blight, disease, predatory animals, erosion all have suggested to humankind that there is disorder in the world just as there is disorder in human personality. The world is our friend, but it is also. Worse still, the world seems to imprison us. For a long time many humans felt that the body was a prison in which the human spirit was temporarily captured, and that the purpose of human life was to progressively break free of the chains and bars of such a prison. In the West such a theory has not been explicitly propounded in recent times except by the increasingly numerous advocates of Eastern religious beliefs and practices.
Water is the primal element.
It is the matrix in which all else exists. Yet it is terribly destructive, too, wiping out fields, flocks, towns, and people. Water is the source of both life and death. As the primal element of the world in which we live, water has all the ambiguities of the rest of the environment in a quintessential way. We know the fear of trying to drive a car at night in a blinding rainstorm or on a frozen and slippery road.