I offer you a metaphor of what it means to exist. Each of our lives is like this, maybe. But remember, a metaphor is a bridge to meaning. Not being the thing itself, a metaphor has limits. To use metaphor, keep what feels right and ignore the rest.
Your life is like a river. Not the entire river, with all the little streams from the uplands combining to a larger channel and flowing on down to the ocean. You are the river at a specific location. Imagine standing there on the bank. (You would have to be outside of yourself for a moment.) Your life is the river water flowing by. Your body is the riverbed and banks.
If you let me paint this picture for a while, I promise the imaginative stimulus will pan out and provide some value.
Continuing downstream is the flow we call a memory of the past. That is life that was already lived. Except that we are only here at this one riverbank location. We don’t go with the water. We can only imagine life happens elsewhere too.
From upstream comes our future. It imposes itself on us now and can’t be stopped! Where does this water come from? We don’t know. We only have it now, and we must live it.
Yet, things change. Our banks erode here and there. Sometimes a gravel bar deposits itself right at our location. Then a flood washes it away. Sometimes things are calm; sometimes hectic.
The flowing water is our life, and other people also have lives. They exist at different locations along the riverbanks. The flowing water is life for everyone, all the animals and plants. Life is a thing we all share, and nobody owns it. Sometimes, we can’t imagine what it must be like to be another person. Someone is over there on the opposite bank. Crazy!
You are a stream of consciousness. Some say our lives are merely processes that will come to an end. If life is this flowing river water, then death must be the river drying up. But something doesn’t fit about that. If death is the river drying up, then everyone along that river would die at the same time.
So, it is not that the river goes dry where you are; it is that your consciousness of it is taken away. Am I still alive, but I don’t know it? Am I being transported to a different riverbank location? A famous man once said that, for anyone who accepts the giver of life, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” In a sense, we invite the river to become part of our innermost being.
After all, life continues in a cycle. Imagine being able to put a little tracker device on a water molecule. Let it go from your place along the river. Downstream it flows. Will it get all the way to the ocean? Maybe not. A wave could splash it up onto a warm, sun-baked stone, where it would evaporate and float up into a cloud.
Or maybe it gets into a little eddy along a slow section of the river. Maybe from there it sinks into the riverbed. It percolates through rock crevices on down under ground to a water table. It hangs out there for a few months, moving with the underground reservoir slowly sloping toward another river bank, where it seeps back into the active flow.
If it eventually arrives at the ocean—what then? Maybe the little water molecule joins the Gulf Stream current and goes all the way across the ocean. Yet, on a certain sunny day, right off the ocean surface, the molecule can be pulled back up by evaporation and join the clouds.
These clouds grow weary of their moisture burden when they cross over mountains. The water molecule may then become part of a snowflake pulled down again by gravity and fall onto a glacier. It could get buried by layers of snow above. There, it may settle for many years. The glacier moves at a glacial pace. The buried molecule has never in its life moved so slowly.
Finally, one day, enough sunshine has sublimated the snow layer above. Or some of it has melted and flowed away. The molecule gets pulled up again into the air. Maybe for a while, it drifts with the humidity of a surface-level air mass. Eventually, it rises to join a cloud again, and this time, it floats in the atmosphere and returns to our same watershed. It rains, joins the rivelets upstream of us, gets gathered into creeks, then back to our channel. An amazing coincidence if that very same water molecule could come back years later to our specific spot.
A single water molecule seems insignificant. It is a particle of life, created by a power we don’t understand. The power allows us to feel life, to be conscious of it for a while, to be part of something beyond ourselves. We can only get glimpses, hints, and guesses.
There’s an idea called panpsychism that you might like to check out. The Wikipedia article is extensive and shows that the subject has a long history and yet a recent renewed interest among today’s thinkers. “Panpsychism holds that mind, or a mind-like aspect, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.” (Wikipedia)
Are rocks conscious? Leaves? Grains of sand on the beach? Is consciousness the dark energy that physicists theorize but have never actually detected? It gets to where panpsychism is just another metaphor. Take it or leave it.
The river metaphor is not concerned with whether everything has consciousness, but rather, the extent of our particular consciousness. I like to think that love is the dark energy flowing through the entire universe. This love is life-affirmation. The idea that consciousness is ubiquitous is getting at something I have put differently. The Creator has made everything out of himself, yet is not confined to the physical. The Creator is also supernatural. Every physical thing can be for us a meeting place to experience the Creator. You can call it a sense of the Holy Spirit.
We may lose consciousness when we die, but Love may give it back to us in another time and place. Maybe not. Death may end our existence. But I like the way our lives are surrounded by cycles. Some rain was in the ocean. Seasons come and go. What could it mean to be reincarnated?
We will find out. Or not.
The Neville Brothers have their take: River of Life
Listen to the Spirit that will guide your path…
Conscience has to make a choice, when the maker speaks, heed his voice
Tremble and shiver, flow with the river of life
I’d never heard that song before. It’s great! Peggy said she saw the Neville Brothers in Denver many years ago.
The “river of consciousness” idea has, not surprisingly, been expressed at other times and in other traditions. I like that at the heart of it is the idea of impermanence – it is, as you mention, every flowing and ever changing. What you experience now in this moment will never be experienced again. An individual molecule may indeed find itself following the same course again, but the entire make up of that moment will be fundamentally different. That is actually kind of exhilarating in a way – every moment is special and unique and worthy of our attention: it is ultimately our truest experience of this life, not anticipation and not memory.
That kind of brings up another idea that made an impression on me when I have heard other expressions of this metaphor and that I like your take on as well. I have read it said that the two banks of the river are mindfulness/awareness on the one side and service to others on the other. I have taken this to mean that without intentional focus the stream of consciousness just spreads out in dissipation. Focus that is inward awareness and outward awareness, self and other. For me when you mention the banks being our body, the vessel and senses in which we carry and experience consciousness, it is an expression of this same concept. There’s a lot there to think about, even down to how we care for our body and mind.
Another idea I have heard expressed in relation to this metaphor that I really like is the idea of observation of thoughts – watching this or that thought come and then go, this emotion or that come and go, floating along on the river, and not trying to catch or contain or hold onto it.
I wonder if and when you have read Siddartha by Hermann Hesse? It is a very interesting and thought provoking little book. I read it again here in the last couple of years and found the end quite compelling this time, I guess because of my own journey. If I remember right, at some point in his younger years Siddharta meets a ferry man who lives simply by the banks of a river. The ferryman makes quite an impression on Siddharta but it is only much later in life, after having explored every aspect of mysticism, asceticism, hedonism, etc, including getting advice from the Buddha himself, that Siddharta again encounters the ferry man and asks to be his assistant. Here’s an AI summary of that interaction: Vasudeva (the ferryman) does not teach through doctrines, but by example, encouraging Siddhartha to listen to the river. Through Vasudeva’s (the ferryman) quiet wisdom, Siddhartha learns that the river has many voices (joy, sorrow, good, evil) and that they all merge into one sound: “Om”.” It is only after understanding what it means to be attuned to the river that Siddharta attains what could be called enlightenment. It is a pretty powerful metaphor for living with awareness and contentment in the present, ever changing moment.
Steve: I like how metaphors stimulate the imagination and that other people can see things we don’t notice at first. Thanks for all your thoughts. I hope Mind in Heart provides seeds that get people thinking, especially imaginitively. Your comment also shows people that the site can accomodate long comments and replies. I assure you that I read every word of yours and appreciate the cross-pollination!
You cause me to remember T.S. Eliot in Dry Salvages, the third of his four quartets, starting out: “I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river is a strong brown god.” As a river engineer, I like how he continues: “Sullen, untamed, and intractable…” He was probably talking about the mighty Mississippi, wide and definitely brown. He goes on to meditate on the oceans. His transition phrase is: “The river is within us; the sea is all about us. The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses its hints of earlier and other creation.” Similarly to our thinking about rivers: the stream is its banks also.
I have had similar thoughts regarding the metaphor of river and life. I like the idea that as soon as you step into the water, you will never experience that same water again. We may be stationary, but the water, (life,) continues on unabated.
Ken: You show another aspect of good metaphors. They are rich enough to provide food for thought further than any one person can come up with. The refreshing water that keeps going by, as you say, can also supply us with fresh perspectives. Thanks for taking the time to comment!