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New Year is the most widely observed holiday in the world; it has been celebrated in some manner for more than 5,000 years. While traditions differ across cultures and many regional variations have evolved, most rituals that accompany the holiday are intended to symbolically purge the old year or to ensure good times in the new one.
-- The New York Times, January 1, 2009
The rituals and superstitions connected with banishing the old and bringing in the new for New Year are fascinating and varied. Author Valerie Peterson made the following list of some of them (reported in The NYT):
The Danes make a wish as they jump off chairs, literally leaping into the New Year.
Filipinos wear clothes with deep pockets that are filled with coins and bills that are shaken noisily at the stroke of midnight in attempt to attract abundance.
In Britain and Ireland, there is a tradition of having the first person who crosses the threshold of your home on New Year's Eve be a tall, good looking man bearing a piece of coal, a loaf of bread (comfort and abundance) plus a bottle of good whiskey for the host of the party (friendship).
In Columbia, those who wish to travel during the next 12 months walk around the house with a suitcase.
At the 1, 200 year old Saishoji Temple in Askikaga, Japan, they celebrate the Festival of Abusive Language, where townspeople walk up the hill toward the temple screaming curses at employers, teachers, and politicians in order to release all the negativity they have been carrying around so that by the time they reach the temple at the top of the hill they are empty and can allow happiness to flow.
In Venezuela, there is a tradition where people give each other yellow underwear for them to wear into the New Year for good luck.
All of these rituals are attempts to make the New Year different than the old. What these practices have in common, regardless of how charming they are, is that for the majority of practitioners they do not make any real lasting difference. For most people the New Year is like the old one with some things better, some worse, but with the same old issues creeping back under different guises and names.
In fact the concept of a "New Year" is a function of agreement alone. Depending on the culture, the beginning of a New Year, the date of the present year, and the number of months and their names in the year vary. All the while, the natural world seems to go through its cycles, unfolding life from the formless into form and refolding it back again as it has before humanity and its labels and ideas about time ever appeared.
To be awake is to know that the New Year is a story that people tell themselves as they make plans for a future that may or may not come, a way of ticking off the precious moments of NOW, sometimes celebrating what they have accomplished and sometimes cursing themselves at how they have failed or wasted the time before their imagined end.
To be awake is to realize that no one has ever experienced a New Year or the past or the future. These are all man-made concepts of a conceptual world. To be awake is to realize that the ONLY REALITY that we ever experience, the ONLY REALITY that exists, is NOW.
To really experience what is called a "New Year" begins with your commitment to drop your attachment to and identification with the past. This commitment allows you to transform your whole experience of living into a joyful unfolding of new life arising moment by precious moment. You can do it, because the capacity to manifest such a life of joy, love, creativity, and inner peace is already the truth about you. What is required is simple yet profound. It requires a radical shift, not in DOING, but in BEING.
It requires that you dis-identify with that which most people are deeply attached to no matter how much pain and suffering it has caused them --- the story of your life that you call "me". If you actually look at what is so NOW in this moment, rather than looking through tbe distorting lens of belief and memory, you will find that this "me" with all its story and drama that you have identified yourself to be does not exist, it is a conceptual construct only. What is present is Awareness. As you open yourself to directly experience and identify with your true nature, you become aware that all the content of life that arises within the Awareness you are ---- thoughts, feelings, images, sensations --- is in constant change, arising from and returning to the formless in each moment. Understanding this intellectually as information makes no difference, it is KNOWING this truth directly that transforms your experience of yourself. It occurs in the moment that you realize with awe, joy and gratitude that what you are is the capacity to create life newly moment by moment.
Identifying with a story requires you to keep bringing the limited beliefs of the past into the present / future again and again. If you you have participated in a Core Wisdom program, utilize any of the powerful and rapid methods that you learned to focus on and dissolve all remaining identifications and attachments to past conditioning and false ways of Being. You are already capable of dis-identifying from and dissolving any remaining old dramas, strivings, struggles, and sufferings of the past and creating each moment of NOW fresh and new.
Here is a metaphor for what I recommend you do to create life from the living NOW rather than from the dead past: Imagine that you want to create your life newly, and that a new house represents your inner House of Being. It is empty,clean, and pristine inside. In what state would you enter this House of Being to create anew, to be unencumbered by the past and your story?
You would enter naked; stripping yourself of all past attachments, aversions, and identifications from the past that you have wrapped yourself in. Before entering you would have washed away the dust of yesterday from your eyes. You would leave behind all that you have identified with to insure the survival, security, control, and approval of the false "me". All belongings and baggage from the past would be left outside when you step across the threshold, because knowing your true nature, you know that you can create newly, from nothing, with infinite abundance.
Read the spiritual books of different cultures and you will see that they all give the same guidance --- that it is necessary to disidentify from what is not you, and from the ideas and beliefs that keep you asleep. In the parables presented in many of these teachings, clothing is the symbol for ideas and beliefs, shoes or sandels represent understanding, and belongings and baggage do not represent things, but represent the emotions, points of view, and conclusions and decisions from the past that weight down our lives.
So when you enter this "New Year", will you do so with gratitude that it is the opportunity to let go of the past and create newly by leaving your story of who and what you are at the door? Will you arrive at this new address of 2009, and enter this House of Being naked, willing to leave the clothes you have been wearing (past ideas and beliefs) at the door and put on the new robes that will be waiting for you if you trust the Source of All?
Will you be willing to leave your 2008 shoes (old understandings of yourself and the world) at the threshold, and put on the new sandals for your feet that were made to fit who you really are?
Will you be willing to drop your bulging, heavy suitcases by the curb to be picked up for disposal rather than bringing them inside your House of Being to contaminate the environment with their contents of resentments, bitterness, anger, frustration, hatred, judgment, seeking revenge, fear, sadness, apathy, guilt, shame, inflated pride, limiting beliefs, and assorted, collected grievences?
What about your old furniture? Furniture is a metaphor for the past events that continue to shape our lives when we have identified who we are by these events (a victim, a survivor, a hero, an agressor, etc.). Would you be willing to not truck over the furniture from your old house to the new House of Being? Would you be willing to not contaminate the possibility of creating your life newly by sitting on, sleeping in, and surrounding yourself with the stories and reminders that constantly throw you back into resonating with the past?
Your House of Being is always new in every moment of NOW. What you do with it --- be it filling it with the dead artifacts of the story of "me" from the past, or allowing it to be a clear, open space in which your intention is created, illuminated and expressed in every new moment of NOW---is up to you.
Choose NOW as your home, and you are choosing to live from your core wisdom. You are choosing to live in harmony with the natural dynamics of life --- Being, Creating and Dissolving.
May you create and live each moment as a NEW!
In-Joy!
-- Hal Isen
From Core Wisdom On-Line Number 91 - January 5, 2009
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