New year greetings are being exchanged since the last few days. This is what we do every year. Our greetings represent our hopes and our prayers. We have no idea what the new year has in store for us, but we all hope it is going to be better than the old one. The “old one”? 2021 was “new” only a year ago.
We begin every year with the hope that things will henceforth be somehow different. In some unseen and unexpected way the tired, weary, boring parts of our life, we hope, will retire into nothingness and will be replaced by a new energy that will make life interesting and fun again. There is something magical about the allure of the new. The thrill we experienced as children when we got a new present or a new toy somehow resurfaces in us as adults when nature gives us a new year to play with.
So how long will 2022 remain new? We don’t know. What we do know is that, like our toys, this new year too will lose its shine after a while. That is what happened last year as well. Year after year our hopes grow dimmer when the newness of the year wears out and we are back to square one. Those with poor memory are able to summon up enough energy to renew their hope when the next new year draws near, but cynicism sets in eventually and the magic of the new is irretrievably lost.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way to preserve hope. What would life be without hope? The problem is not in being hopeful. The problem is in placing hope in the wrong place. If we direct our energy in the right direction, our hopes can become a reality, our dreams can come true. A new year can perpetually remain new if we look in the right direction.
We have been looking outside all along and wondering why the year’s newness is so short-lived. It’s not just the year that gets old. Everything and everyone get old. Nothing remains new forever. With the passage of time, the shine wears out. Changes occur. Decline sets in. Destruction may not be far off. None of which is surprising, since everything material is subject to birth and death. When material particles are brought together and held together in some way, the process is called birth, or composition. When the particles disperse eventually, the process is called death, or decomposition. Time is the devourer of the world (kālo jagad-bhakṣakaḥ), as Śrī Śaṅkarācārya says in his hymn, “Śivāparādha-kṣamāpaṇa Stotra.”
The interplay between the old and the new is expressed in the Gītā (2.20) by two qualifiers applied to the Ātman—eternal (śāśvata) and ancient (purāṇa). As Śrī Śaṅkarācārya explains in his commentary, “eternal” denotes the absence of decline in the Ātman and “ancient” denotes the absence of growth. The Ātman is the “real me” who is indivisible and unchangeable. Thus nothing can be taken away from me and nothing can be added to me. Only with changes and additions does anything become “new.” Neither is possible or needed in the Ātman, which “though ancient,” is always “as if new” (purā api, nava iva). In time, everything ages. Being beyond the reach of time, the Ātman is ageless. It never gets old. The real me is always new.
Everything I see is ravaged by time, because the “me” who does the seeing is also being ravaged by time. Not surprising that a perishable me sees a perishable world. As long as my “me” is centered around a body and mind, it is the material me seeing a material world. The body/mind me is getting old by the day, so is the world that I see. What wonder, then, that the new year I welcome with great anticipation every twelve months also becomes old before long?
If I want a new year that is always new, I must find a way to keep my own self always new. That can happen only when I loosen the shackles of the body/mind over me. When I free myself from the snares of the material layers that cloud my understanding, the real me wakes up. I then begin to see everything clearly. The more I hold on to the real me, the easier it gets to see a world that is perennially fresh. Goodbye forever, then, to a dull moment and to a boring day. Never again will there be a new year that gets old.
So what does it mean to let go of the body/mind me and to awaken the real me? It means to remind myself of my true identity as often as I can—and this is something none of us can overdo. In daily life, our true identity lies hidden under several pseudo-identities that have become an integral part of who we are in the world. Among the superficial identities we carry everywhere are those associated with our age, gender, education, relationships, workplace, interests, and hobbies. That’s quite a burden the mind carries 24/7 throughout life. We realize this only when we become mindful of what’s going on within us. The only time we have any realistic chance to shed these identities, even if temporarily, and be truly ourselves is when we try to go “inside” and spend time in the presence of God through prayer, worship and meditation.
The quality of our practice is directly related to how often and how efficiently we can shed our layered identities and affirm our true self. In the language of devotion, our true identity may express itself in any number of ways such as being a child of God or a servant of God. In the language of philosophy, we may see ourselves as the Ātman. These represent the “ripe-I” which can take me to the edge of the boundary that separates the relative from the Absolute.
When even this “ripe-I” falls away eventually, I regain my true nature. I once again become both “ancient” and “eternal,” renewing myself every moment. The new me sees a new world. With my own self-renewal, everything that I see, everything that I touch, everything that I feel, is also refreshed and renewed. After all, what I see outside is only an expression of who I am inside.
This will happen in the lives of all of us if we continue resolutely on the spiritual path. The challenge has always been to recover our lost memory. Can we find innovative ways to remind ourselves of the ideal? We’ll try to take a look at some of the ways next time. But, right now, let’s go about trying to preserve the newness of 2022.