A New Year thought

I don't know if you have ever noticed on your walks along a rocky beach a small pool beside the ocean. It is isolated and not connected with the sea. Near it the ocean is vast and deep with waves and current, but this pool is heavy with scums and sticky bubbles on its surface being warmed with the sunshine. There are no fish in it. It is a stagnant pool, and the ocean, full of life and vitality, flows with tides coming and going.
Now, don't you think human beings are like that? They dig a little pool for themselves away from the fresh and current life. In that little pool they stagnate, die; and this stagnation, this decay we call existence, our life. That is, we all want a state of permanency; we want certain desires to last for ever, 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 let life go by and die, beside which the real life is flowing, always changing, with its enormous depths, with such extraordinary vitality and beauty.
If you sit quietly on the beach you hear its song - the lapping of the water , the roaring sound of the waves, the songs of sea gulls. There is always a sense of movement, an extraordinary movement towards the wider and the deeper....towards infinity. But in the little pool there is no movement at all. It may be warm and cozy but its water is stagnant, filled with the smell of decaying process and death. And if you observe you will see that this is what most of us want: little rotten pools of existence away from life. We say that our pool-existence is right place to live and we have invented a philosophy to justify it; we have developed social, political, economic and religious, a thousand and one theories in support of it, and we do not want to be disturbed because, you see, what we are after is a sense of permanency. But what OUR permanency means is the permanency of the pleasurable. We want what is not pleasurable to end as quickly as possible. We want the name that we bear to be known and to continue through family, bloodline, through property. We want a sense of permanency in our relationships, in our activities, which means that we are seeking a lasting, continuous life in the stagnant pool, where we do not have to change in a real sense. We are supposed to have built a society which guarantees us the permanency of property, of name, of fame.
But you see, life is not like that at all; life is not permanent. Like the leaves that fall from a tree, all things are mortal, nothing endures forever; there is always change and death. Death is everywhere just as life is every where. Exactly the same number of deaths there are as lives.
In a park I saw a tree standing naked against the sky. All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness there is a poem, there is a song. In the bleakness I thought I saw a warmth of life. Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring. When the spring comes it again fills the tree with the music of many leaves, which in due season fall and are blown away; and that is the way of life. In a fleeting moment and before we try to taste it it changes. To our inconvenience, that's only when beauty lives.
We do not want anything of that kind. We cling to our children, to our traditions, to our society, to our names and our little virtues, just because we want....permanency. That is why we are afraid to die. We are afraid to lose the things we know. But life is not what we would like it to be; life is just as is. Birds die, snow melts away, earthquake destroys whatever we have built. The fact is that life is like the ocean; endlessly moving on, ever seeking, exploring, pushing, washing, penetrating every crevice with its water. But our mind... it never want that happen to ourselves. We build walls to prevent the water from flowing in. But this is a hopeless fight. We lose and will be gulped someday.
Now a mind that has no walls, that is not burdened with its own acquisitions, accumulations, with its own knowledge, a mind that lives timelessly, insecurely--if there is such a mind, it is life itself because life has no resting place. If there is such a mind, it will never invent philosophy nor God because the mind itself is God. Our current god is just a projection of our own desires.
A mind which is seeking permanency soon stagnates. The mind which has no walls, no foothold, no barrier, no resting place, which is moving completely with life, dancing with it, timelessly pushing on, exploring, sometimes exploding --- only such a mind can be happy, eternally new, because it is creative in itself.