New Year Message

A Worship of the Process of Time – New Year's Eve Message given in 1993
by Sri Swami Krishnananda

We are now on the eve of a New Year. Everyone throughout the world observes this event as the beginning of a fresh enterprise in life, indicating thereby that something totally new, different from the experiences we have passed through earlier, will commence.

We have to ponder over the implication of this concept of the beginning of a New Year so that we may benefit by celebrating it. What actually happens when the New Year commences? Very easily one cannot give an answer to this question. Unless we feel that something is happening which is totally different from our earlier life, we would not be overjoyed or celebrate it as if it is a holy event.

We may say the year commences with the 1st of January, and therefore we should consider this occurrence, the event of the 1st of January, as the beginning of the New Year. But what does ‘January' mean? It is a word into which we have thrust some significance by sheer habit of thinking. Any habit assumes a great meaning and becomes a solid affair of our life merely because the psychological operation called habit enters into our very bloodstream and the fibre of our thinking. Otherwise, if we are to divest this thought from its being merely a habit, what other significance has it?

If you deeply think over this matter, you will realise that this is actually a worship of the process of time, about which we know really next to nothing. We do not know what time is. If anyone is to think over the fact of there being such a thing called time, we will be flabbergasted that it is indescribable. We do not know where time is. We can see, for instance, a thing called space. We open our eyes and see some large expanse in front of us which is space, akasha, but we cannot see time in that way. That is why time binds us more forcefully than the way in which space limits us. Space and time both limit us, but time can bind us in such a way that our entire life is conditioned by its process. Our birth, our growth, and the processes of our life are all to be interpreted in the manner of the passage of time.

How does time move? We imagine that time, like an arrow, perhaps, moves forward endlessly towards infinity. That time is a linear, straight-line movement is only a habit of thinking, just as sometimes we feel that the Earth is flat. Studying geography has told us that the Earth is not flat, but when we actually look around, it looks as if it is flat. When we walk on the road or move in a vehicle, no one feels that the movement is on a ball. It is a flat Earth. This shows that our optical perception is not to be taken for granted as a genuine method of calculating the principals of life.

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