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Hatha Yoga: The Yogi Philosophy of Physical Well-Being1826
necessary to use plain words when calling your attention to these things.
And all this for the lack of a little water—just think of it. You who are so
particular to keep yourselves clean on the outside, allow yourselves to
remain filthy within.
Man’s body needs water all over its inner parts. It needs constant
irrigation, and if that irrigation is denied the bodies suffer just as does the
land, denied its natural supply of water. Every cell, tissue and organ needs
water in order to be healthy. Water is a universal solvent and enables the
system to assimilate and distribute the nourishment obtained from the food,
and to get rid of the waste products of the system. It is often said that the
“blood is the life,” and if this is so, what must the water be called—for without
water the blood would be but dust.
Water is needed also for the purpose of enabling the kidneys to perform
their functions of carrying off the urea, etc. It is needed in order to be
manufactured into saliva, bile, pancreatic juice, gastric juices, and all the
other valuable juices of the system, without which digestion would be
impossible. Shut off your supply of fluids, and you decrease your supply of
all of these necessary things. Do you realize that?
If you doubt these facts, thinking them to be but theories of the Yogis,
you have but to refer to any good scientific work upon physiology, written
by any of the Western authorities upon the subject. You will find all that we
have told you fully corroborated there. A well-known Western physiologist
has said that so much water exists in the tissues of a normal system, that it
may be asserted as an axiom that “all organisms live in water.” And if there is
no water, there can be no life, or health.
You have been shown that the kidneys secrete about three pints of
urine in twenty-four hours, which is passed off from the system, carrying
in solution waste products and poisonous chemical substances which have
been gathered up from the system by the kidneys. In addition to this, we
have shown you that the skin excretes from one and one-half pints to two
pints of water, in the shape of sweat and perspiration, in the same time. In