Living Water

Read John 4:1-15 The woman said to him, "Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?"

Jesus said to her, "Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw."John 4:11-15
The sixth aspect of Buddha’s path is Right Effort. Each step on the path must have at its basis Right Effort. Effort, rightly understood, is not about struggle. This passage from John’s Gospel paints a graphic picture. Drawing water from a well can represent our struggle in contrast to receiving the presence of Christ.
Think about how much effort goes into make our lives physically easier? Think of the effort and resources committed to producing modern conveniences to reduce the struggle to sustain our lives. Yet, no matter how many labour-saving devices are invented we still experience life as a struggle.
This struggle is intricately tied to willingness. Christ says that: whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
Are we willing to surrender our tendency to stand, for instance, on a high moral ground and point the finger at those who don’t measure up? - like judging the woman at the well for having so many men in her life. Or, can we resist the temptation to punish ourselves when we think we don’t measure up? We cannot be good all the time. Rudolf Steiner puts it perfectly when he says that good is too weak. What is good anyway? It is the harmonious existence of two opposites. If we say that the pendulum is swinging from good to bad the operative word is ‘swinging’. The pendulum does not stop on point ‘good’, it experiences the full spectrum.
At this present point in evolution good is seen to be a total reliance on the physical world – this is the water in the well. Acknowledgement of our soul and spirit is the opposite of good – Christ’s water. We can say that everything that makes our physical life easier, more comfortable, in other words, requiring less effort, is represented by the water from the well. If we try to get the water from the well as prescribed and think that it will sustain our life forever we will be disappointed. We need living water to sustain our life, the living water that comes from Christ. He can only pour this living water into us if we surrender our ideas, our limited formulas and trust that Christ will give us this water that will become in us a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
When we work on issues with Right Effort we co-operate with each other. Right Effort requires openness, a willingness to look at opposing views and finding ways of harmonising them. All too often Right Effort becomes a struggle because the basic soul mood of sympathy and antipathy, like and dislike which overpowers reason and awareness. Like and dislike arise from our subjective, usually limited, experiences. If we operate from our I AM, that great light house that can scan 360 degrees, objectivity comes naturally. In this objectivity we continually re-assess our assumptions and we welcome other points of view because they enrich us.
Underpinning Right Effort are the basic principles that come to us as esoteric teaching; ethical principles that we must put into practice in our life. The foremost principle is love, pure love; the new commandment that is Christ’s gift to us (Jn 13:34).
How hard is it to love? This woman at the well loves – she has had five husbands and one lover. We often do not love because we fear, fears like ‘the well running dry’ or ‘falling into the well’? Fear really is hate. The pendulum also swings between love and hate, it doesn’t stop on point ‘hate’. If we love one another as Christ loves us we will experience the full spectrum of emotions between love and hate. We will not deny them. We will recognise our fear and with Right Effort we will conquer it. We will recognise the superficiality of our love, especially in our favouritism and seek to love more purely.
In all our endeavours we will seek to experience the full spectrum of the pendulum with honesty and trust. This means that we can admit our mistakes. This is only possible in an atmosphere of pure love – for mistakes are neutralised by love, this is Right Effort. If we do nothing else we should put all our effort into loving more, trusting more, casting errors into the sea of forgetfulness and drinking the living water that flows the continually from the presence of Christ.