Rather than water, how about energy?

Consider that as mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is the present going past to future, yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

Suggesting consciousness manifests as an energy. Science has a similar problem with energy, as with consciousness, in that it can only be defined by the forms being manifest.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise. So the intellectual tendency is to focus on the form.

Yet it is constantly being manipulated by the energy, building it up and breaking it down. Our love/hate relationship with order and structure.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.