The River
AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND, MAY 1968
The river was especially wide here, deep and clean. Higher up was the very
ancient city, perhaps one of the oldest in the world. But it was a mile or so away,
and all the filth of the town seemed to have been cleansed by the river, and here
the waters were clean, especially in midstream. On this side of the bank there
were a lot of buildings, not particularly beautiful, but on the other side was
freshly sown winter wheat, for the river rises twenty or thirty feet during the
rainy season and so the soil on both banks is rich—and beyond the banks were
villages, trees and fields of wheat and a kind of nourishing grain.
It was beautiful country, open, flat and spreading to the horizon. The trees
especially were very old—the tamarind, the mango—and in the evening, just as
the sun was setting, there would come upon the land a sense of extraordinary
peace—a benediction which you never find in any church or temple.
On this side of the river bank there were four sannyasis, monks, each selling
his own wares—gods. They were shouting and a crowd gathered round each of
them. But the one who shouted most, repeated Sanskrit words and was covered
with beads and other insignia of his profession, attracted most people, and
presently you saw the other monks slip away, leaving only this one with his gods,
chants and rosaries.
Imagination and romanticism deny love, for love is its own eternity. Man has
sought through various gods, ideologies and hopes, something that is not bound
by time. The birth of a new baby is not the indication of something eternal. Life
comes and goes. There is death, there is suffering and all the mischief that man
can make, and this movement of change, decay and birth is still within the cycle
of time.
Time is thought; and thought is the outcome of the past. That which has
continuity—the cause which produces the effect and the effect which becomes
the cause in turn—is part of this movement of time. In this trap of time man has
been caught and he uses every device of romance and imagination to bring about
a counterfeit of what he calls eternity. And out of this comes the desire, with its
pleasure, for immortality, a deathless state which he hopes to experience through
the images of the mind.
Religions have offered a counterfeit of the real. The most earnest are aware of
all this and of the mischief that has come through the false. There is a state which
is not imagination or romantic fancy, which is not of time nor the product of
thought and experience. But to come upon it, all the counterfeit coins which we
have treasured must be thrown away—buried so deeply that another cannot find
them. For the other thinks that he must go through those things which you have
thrown away, and that is why what you throw away must never be discovered by
another. For out of this comes imitation, and false coins are minted. To deny
them needs no effort, no strong will nor the attraction of something greater; you
put them away very simply because you see their futility, their danger and their
inherent nuisance value and vulgarity.
The mind cannot manufacture the thing called eternity—as it cannot cultivate
love. Nor can eternity be discovered by a mind that is seeking it. And the mind
that is not seeking it is a wasted mind. The mind is a current, very deep at the
centre and very shallow at the periphery—like the river that has a strong current
in the middle and quiet waters at its banks.
But the deep current has the volume of memory behind it, and this memory is
the continuity that passes the town, that gets sullied, that becomes clear again.
The volume of memory gives the strength, the drive, the aggression and the
refinement. It is this deep memory that knows itself to be ashes of the past, and it
is this memory that has to come to an end.
There is no method to end it, no coin with which to buy a new state. The
seeing of all this is the ending of it. It is only when this vast volume ends that
there is a new beginning. The word is not the real; the measurement of the word
denies the actual.
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