The River Of Life - By J Krishnamurti

The River is flowing steadily full of life & energy, but the pool is stagnant & heavy with scum. Man generally digs a pool for himself, away from the swift current of life, and in that little pool they stagnate and ultimately die. This stagnation, this decay is what we call Existence.

That is we all want a state of Permanency, we want certain desires to last forever, we want pleasure to have no end. We dig a little hole called our society, in which we barricade ourselves in it with our families, with our cultures, ambitions, fears, gods. There we die, letting life go by, life which is so swift, has so much vitality & beauty.

But we say that our pool existence is right and we develop a philosophy to justify the same. We don’t want to be disturbed since we are after a sense of permanency. We want the name that we bear to be known & continued thru the family, thru property.

Life is like a river endlessly moving on, ever seeking, exploring, penetrating every crevice with its water. But the mind won’t allow that to happen and so builds a wall around itself to secure permanency. Religion is the feeling of goodness, that love which like the river is living, moving deeper, & engulfing others as it moves on. In this way there is no search for desire fulfilment, & this ending of search, is the beginning of something totally different, i.e, the search for God, for the Truth, the feeling of being completely good.

This seeking out of something beyond the inventions and the tricks of the mind, i.e. the search for Truth and living in it, becoming it, is the True Religion. But we can do this only when we give up the pool that we have dug for ourselves, and go out into the river of life.