The River of Life
J KRISHNAMURTI
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There is a long, narrow pool close to a 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.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. This stagnation, this decay , we call existence. That is, we all want a state of permanency; 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 a 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 don't want to be disturbed because what we are after is a sense of permanency .
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 a 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 don't want to be disturbed because what we are after is a sense of permanency .
