The river of life

Apr 22, 2010, 12.00am IST


I don’t know if on your walks you have noticed a long, narrow pool beside the river. Some fishermen must have dug it, and it is not connected with the river. The river is flowing steadily, deep and wide, but the pool is heavy with scum because it is not connected with the life of the river, and there are no fish in it. It is a stagnant pool, and the deep river, full of life and vitality, flows swiftly along.

Now, don’t you think human beings are like that? They dig a little pool for themselves away from the swift current of life, and in that little pool they stagnate, die; and this stagnation, this decay we call existence. That is, we all want a state of permanency; we want certain desires to last forever, we want pleasures to have no end. We dig a little hole and barricade ourselves in it with our families, with our ambitions, our cultures, our fears, our gods, our various forms of worship, and there we die, letting life go by – that life which is impermanent, constantly changing, which is so swift, which has such enormous depths, such extraordinary vitality and beauty.

Have you not noticed that if you sit quietly on the bank of the river you hear its song – the lapping of the water, the sound of the current going by? There is always a sense of movement, an extraordinary movement towards the wider and the deeper. In the little pool, there is no movement at all; its water is stagnant ... This is what most of us want: little stagnant pools of existence away from life. We say that our pool existence is right, and we have invented a philosophy to justify it; we have developed social, political, economic, and religious theories in support of it, and we don’t want to be disturbed because what we are after is a sense of permanency.

To seek permanency means wanting that which is pleasurable to continue indefinitely, and wanting that which is not pleasurable to end as quickly as possible. We want the name that we bear to be known and to continue through family, through property. We want a sense of permanency in our relationships, in our activities, which means that we are seeking a lasting, continuous life in the stagnant pool; we don’t want any real changes there, so we have built a society which guarantees us the permanency of property, of name, of fame...

Life is like the river: endlessly moving on, ever seeking, exploring, pushing, overflowing its banks, penetrating every crevice with its water. But the mind won’t allow that to happen to itself. The mind sees that it's dangerous, risky to live in a state of impermanency, insecurity, so it builds a wall around itself ...

Religion is the feeling of goodness, that love which is like the river, living, moving everlastingly. In that state ... there is no longer any search at all, and this ending of search is the beginning of something totally different. The search for God, for truth, the feeling of being completely good – not the cultivation of goodness, of humility, but the seeking out of something beyond the inventions and tricks of the mind, which means having a feeling for that something, living in it, being it – that is true religion. But you can do that only when you leave the pool you have dug for yourself and go out into the river of life.

Excerpt from JK’s Think on These Things.

(Talk: Jiddu Krishnamurti)