A Soul River

The river's voice was sorrowful. It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards its goal.
"Do you hear?" asked Vasudeva's mute glance. Siddhartha nodded.
"Listen better!" whispered Vasudeva.


Siddhartha tried to listen better. (All the pictures) became part of the river. It was the goal of all of them, yearning, desiring, suffering; and the river's voice was full of longing, full of woe, full of insatiable desire. The river flowed on towards its goal. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea to the current to the ocean and all goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water changed to vapor and rose, became rains and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew. But the yearning voice had altered... other voices accompanied it, voices of pleaure and sorrow, good and evil voices, hundreds of voices, thousands of voices.


...He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening... He could no longer distinguish the different voieces. They all belonged to each other... They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. All the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.


When Siddhartha listened attentively ot this river, to this song of a thousand voices: when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bing 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 ofa thousand voices consisted of one word: Om- perfection.


.... his Self had merged into unity.


From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things...




excerpt from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse