When this happens, you yourself will be a beautiful, shining crystal of light.' 'When you have become the embodiment of gratitude,' Emoto writes, 'think about how pure the water that fills your body will be. All of this has broad implications for personal happiness and world peace, Emoto suggests, when you consider that our bodies are 70 percent water.

Mozart and the Beatles' song 'Yesterday' made it perk up, while heavy metal music freaked it out, making its crystals look malignant. Emoto, who has studied alternative medicine in Japan, also notes that water is picky about the music it likes.

Emoto's book is filled with photographs of the shiny, happy crystals that form when water is shown phrases like 'You're cute' or 'Thank you,' and also of the deformed, sorry-looking crystals that result when you show it 'You fool!' or 'Satan.' Emoto's book has sold some 400,000 copies internationally, and it has lingered on the upper reaches of the Times extended paperback advice list for months, rising this week to No. This work certainly takes us into a new realm of river restoration and there is even an Emoto.CRYSTAL LITE: Every so often a best seller comes along that, as Michael Korda put it in his book 'Making the List,' makes us 'question our sanity, or at least that of the American reading public.' One of those head-scratchers has got to be Masaru Emoto's spectacularly eccentric book 'The Hidden Messages in Water,' which argues that water has feelings, too - and that the crystals that form in frozen water change shape when an onlooker shows the water words, or beams thoughts in its direction. So next time you are out in a river, lake or even the bathtub, think about how the water around you can hold the resonance of your thoughts and feelings. His photographs show that human vibrational energy, thoughts, ideas, music and pollution directly affects the molecular crystalline structure of water. What he found was that water subjected to negative emotions showed an incoherent structure, whereas water subjected to calm and loving influences revealed a coherent and integrated structure.

Emoto photographed ice crystals of water in bottles that had come from different locations, exposed the bottles to different sounds, and had words typed onto paper facing inwards to the bottle. If you are feeling a bit adventurous and want to think about water a little differently, try investigating the work of Masaru Emoto.

The hidden messages in water