The River Cannot Go Back

River doesn’t tremble with fear, it is ecstatic, it is excited. It’s goal about to be accomplished. It sees the ocean with wide spread arms, waiting, inviting, raging Whether she is a bride going to be one with the beloved Or a daughter returning to her parental home The question is immaterial It is about to surrender the identity bestowed upon it by the ocean and the sky, it is about to experience the eventual dissolution, It is aroused, it is awakened, it is rapturous, it is joyous, it is fervent but it is not afraid It is about to achieve what it had been seeking through the forests the gorges the plains and the mountains It doesn’t experience fear, it is just thrilled, just awakened slowly and slowly it discards its banks, sands become one with sand and water with water. There was no river, there is no river. Probably Gibran didn’t have an exposure to the concept of individual consciousness piercing the envelopment which seemingly separated it from the universal consciousness. Obviously he doesn’t subscribe to its rising through the various barriers, knots and the chakras. The moment of river’s tremulousness to which he ascribes fear as the cause is actually the status of ecstasy just before the merger with the lotus of thousand petals. River is the process of metamorphosis of life. From snowflakes to icicles to glaciers and through the streams, rivulets till the delta and beyond it is a continuous saga of transformation and evolution. Alll that it acquires it keeps on renouncing and eventually it moves ahead of the the last of its material belongings, the sands of its banks and the riverbed, renouncing them as well. It is the story of life, of creation and creativity. This is what happens to all forms of living beings. From chromosomes to embryo to full fledged individual body having amazingly complex, inexplicably organised organ systems. Some of the life forms evolve to attain the human status and still fewer of them are able to renounce and attain merger just like the river with the ocean.

It's not about the individual consciousness got excited about merging with universal, it's about death, for river it's about what it has been all the time, losing that is not easy, no one will get excited about it, the deeper meaning he quotes here i think is, to trust the process of surrender to life than the individual identity we carry, losing that is not easy, because you are now in a unknown territory now, from books we can read about what's what and add meaning to the ocean being invitive etc but how do we know that's the case , fear seems the natural response for everyone when they deal with unknown, but he goes further to surrender as there is no going back, i think he is insightful ! And the scenarios mentioned by you presupposes to only few will merge but what khalil mentioned fits everyone, the ocean is death, which everyone will meet someday, surrender to that will give peace !