New Year Message

The Passage of Time for the Experience of Eternity – New Year's Message given in 1993
by Sri Swami Krishnananda

The New Year is approaching. Time passes. The passage which is known as temporal is also the process of the evolution of the universe. There is a progressive march of the constituent elements of things in the passage of the time process. When a particular specialised occasion arises in this progression of the time process, we call that particular event or occasion by a designation as a ‘New Year’s Day’, a ‘birthday’, a ‘holy day’, an ‘occasion of celebration’ and some such nomenclature.

There are pressures exerted by the time process at different times of each march onwards, and one such pressure is what we call the commencement of a New Year. This novelty of the year that is to come is not connected merely with the numbers on the calendar that we have with us. It is something more than a mathematical event. It is not that we just count several days and when a certain number of days are over we say that the year is complete. Though that may be so, there is something more about it at the beginning of what we call a New Year. Otherwise, if it does not have some supernormal significance, why do we make so much fuss about it, feel happy about it, and are exuberant when it comes?

Anything that makes us feel happy, hopeful, and charges us with a noble expectation for the future is something more than the normal, something above the terrestrial—super-physical, not merely Earthly. Actually, nothing on the Earth can make us happy. If at some time, during some moments of our day, we seem to be happy occasionally, we should conclude that something not of the Earth is operating in us, because nothing merely Earth-earthly can satisfy us. This body, which is a part of this Earth, participates in the sorrows of the world and has all the characteristics of the Earth. The body, which is physical, cannot expect anything from this Earth more than what the Earth can give; and the Earth can give us only what this body has. If this body cannot make us happy, the Earth also cannot make us happy, because both these are made of the same substance—physical, material stuff. This body, this Earth which is matter, is not the reason behind our being sometimes happy in this world. There is a super-Earthly operation taking place in us, whether we know it or not. The transformations that are taking place within ourselves, within our own selves, are not always objects of our perception. We may know what is happening outside; we cannot know what is happening above us.

If for some reason or the other the world is celebrating the New Year, it is inspired by some feature operating in this world which is above the world. To say the least, we may say this has an astronomical significance. The revolution of the planets around the Sun is of course taking place perpetually, day in and day out, and these revolutions, rotations of the planets in respect of the Sun which is their centre, have their hallmarks, their specific indications. Some aspects of this process of the revolution of the planets and the movement of the planets on their orbits are known as the houses of the zodiac. There are no built-up houses in the sky. They are only names that we give to certain occasions, significations arising at certain moments of time during the movement of these planets on their orbits; and we people, humans living on the Earth, have the direct impact of whatever the Earth does when it moves along its orbit. Without going too far into the astronomical significances of the influence exerted by the cumulative effect of the planetary system upon us on account of the fact of Earth itself being one of the planets, we may safely say that the New Year is one specific signpost in the process of the march of time, with special reference to the revolution of the Earth around the Sun and its influence on all creatures on it.

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