The Importance of Rivers

“In this culture, we did not see rivers as just water bodies. We see them as life-giving gods or goddesses.”

—Sadhguru

If you look at the people we worship in this culture, whether Shiva, Rama or Krishna, they were people who walked this geography at one time. They went through many more trials and tribulations than most human beings do, but the reason we worship them is because, no matter what situations happened around them, no matter what challenges life threw at them, they did not deviate from their inner nature. We worship them because they remained untouched. In many ways, a river represents that: it doesn’t matter what kind of people touch it, it remains pure because its nature is to flow.

Diseases, injuries and birth defects—all these are realities of life. It is true we would like to see that In this culture, we did not see rivers as just water bodies. We see them as life-giving gods or goddesses. To a thinking mind, which is confined to the limitations of its logic, this may sound foolish or very rudimentary. “A river is a river. How is it a goddess?” If you lock up such a person in a room without giving him water for three days, and then show him a glass of water, he will bow down to it–not to a river, just a glass of water! What we call water, air, food and the earth that we walk upon, are not commodities. We never saw rivers as just geographical happenings. We always saw them as life-making material because over 70% of our body itself is water. Whenever we look for life, we look for a drop of water first!

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