The River as Spiritual Teacher
By: Simon Heathcote
Tags: Fiction, Spirituality, Life Lessons, Buddhism, Books

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.” Norman Maclean

Once, when I was a boy in the backseat of a big car, we crossed a road where the river had burst its banks. We were the last car to get through that night.

My mother in the passenger seat and my brother beside me were in a panic as the rushing water rose up to the windows. I must have been 12 maybe, but instead of fear, trusted the river to let us pass when it could so easily have swept us away.

I have loved rivers ever since, although perhaps respect is a better word. Strange things happen by them and in them. Communities spring up, needing the river’s life-giving qualities and people suffer and sometimes drown.

I was 16 when my first love told me she had a secret. She looked nervous in the telling and I knew this was something important, something worthy of my full attention.

She had recently moved down south following a tragedy.

On the banks of the River Clyde, transport artery for Glasgow and its shipping yards, before the days of mobile phones, her mother had left the car to use a phone box.

The old girl was a talker and was on the phone for a long time, leaving her son in the backseat with the dog.

She had left the window open. Out climbed the dog followed by the boy, down to the river rushing by, not to be seen for a very long time.

The frogmen took four weeks to find a child’s body some way downstream; the river had claimed another victim, tore her family apart. So, they came south to leave the past, not forget it. They never would.

But what takes life can also give it. The mother birthed a second boy, now her only living son, years after most women have children.

It was heralded a miracle; I always thought the river had a hand in Alasdair’s arrival, its mysterious life-giving power carrying into life a newborn like Moses on the Nile.

In my own life, a therapy client who came to me saying he knew he was going to die, slipped in the shower and fulfilled the fate he was expecting just weeks after we started talking.

Two years later, I was walking the River Thames and heard a voice telling me to turn off my music and pay attention. I turned around and there was a bench with his name on. It felt like the river was speaking to me.

In Siddhartha, Herman Hesse’s wonderful novella, we see the river as protagonist, a funnel around which the plot weaves, returning to its imagery again and again.

It acts as marker for the different seasons of the eponymous hero’s life as he pursues his own truth, for many years becoming lost and unconscious, embroiled in the world, until the river rescues him once more.

The book begins ‘in the sunshine of the river bank’ as if the river is the sun itself shining its beacon on the young man, a wayshower for sure.

Most of us like our mentors to be more human, less enigmatic, but here the river is the perfect accompaniment to the hero as he peers into its unending depths on his quest for enlightenment.

There is always more to be learned from it and as he grows and matures he sees more and more, until finally he sees the whole of life itself reflected in its waters.

In mythology, the Self is often symbolized as a complementary pair of opposites, a king and queen for instance, reflecting the polarities of our own nature.

In Siddhartha, the river represents the unity of selves, the perfect synthesis of all our warring personalities and the wholeness that underlies all.

Toward the end of the book when he meets the ferryman Vasudeva, Siddhartha is told that by looking into the river he can learn everything worth knowing.

But at that point he remains too divided within himself to see this truth, yet gradually a change, guided by the ferryman, begins to take place.

Carl Jung, the great psychiatrist described the human task as to wake up to the primordial unity that joins the divided and conflicted parts of ourselves.

The river symbolizes that unity and the soul’s eternity.

When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river to the song of a thousand voices ; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter , when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om perfection.

At another time, under instruction from the old sage masquerading as a simple ferryman, he is shown how to listen to the river and learn from it.

They listened. Softly sounded the river, singing in many voices. Siddhartha looked into the water, and images appeared to him in the moving water: his father appeared, lonely, mourning for his son; he himself appeared, lonely, he also being tied with the bondage of yearning to his distant son; his son appeared, lonely as well, the boy, greedily rushing along the burning course of his young wishes, each one heading for his goal, each one obsessed by the goal, each one suffering. The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its voice sang.

He finally finds the correct understanding of life embracing both pain and pleasure, seeking nothing, as the oneness of life supersedes the notion of being a separate self.

In the end, the river is seen as the soul itself, both the individual soul and the world soul:

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”

As Norman Maclean, who spent a lifetime ripening before writing his classic A River Runs Through It says, all things merge into one and a river runs through it.

The river is seen as distinct from life as we know it, timeless and always present, but is ultimately life itself, creator and destroyer, like a mountain-top Shiva resting at the head of the Ganges.

In Sufism, the divine is often referred to as a river of loving; this is not the stop and start of love in the physical world, but a constant flow that ultimately heals us all.

The waters of life contain both our beginning and our end.

© simon heathcote

https://medium.com/soul-sea/this-is-the-holy-grail-you-seek-1281ced94c2b