During the recent New Year’s celebrations in the Netherlands, Gurudev shared the following:
See, with what enthusiasm and gaiety do we celebrate the new year? The new year is something new. Time is new. Every day is new. Every moment is new.
But when we are attending to it, with all our attention and enthusiasm, we make it a celebration, don’t we?
You can make a celebration of it every month and then every day. Every day is a little too much. But if you can imagine that you maintain so much enthusiasm, love, freshness, and newness, then the job is done. You become the lighthouse for the world.
Otherwise, invisible firecrackers keep happening in life. How you watch and witness the firecrackers in the same way you should see all the different emotional colors coming up in the world.
All the different tendencies rise up and fall. They look beautiful.
Embrace life totally
Embrace life in its totality, with all its colors and flaws. We attribute our own perceptions to things, making them seem like shortcomings or mistakes.
But when you embrace it totally, then life is a celebration. All is perfect the way it is every moment. This allows you to celebrate 100%.
If you say this is not okay or that is not perfect, then celebration can’t happen because that calls for you to take action. You get busy setting right whatever isn’t okay. But celebration is just chilling out and doing nothing.
There’s a stage where you see you can do both simultaneously. You can set right what needs to be set right and yet not lose the spirit of celebration. That’s enlightenment.
Continue to be in the spirit of celebration, yet attend to all the details and set them right wherever needed.
So the spirit is in celebration while the matter of the external world starts getting evolved. I mean, it will start getting corrected, and it will start to evolve.
That’s the message for the New Year.
The cobra and the antelope
Embrace the New Year like the cobra. It sheds its old skin and comes out fresh and new. So, shed the past like the skin of a cobra or like the old horns of the antelope.
Do you know what the antelope does? It’s too dangerous to see it with horns. Then, once a year, or sometime in this season, it sheds the horns, and then it looks cute and innocent again, with no defense.
Like that, we move around with defense all the time. But sometimes, we must shut down our defenses and repose in the core of our hearts, knowing divinity is right here and now and all is well. All is being taken care of, got it?
This aphorism, intention, or idea that all is well and is taken care of itself helps to bring the best out of you.
Manifest the joy
What’s the best in you? Not the talents. Talents are very different in different people. What is the best in you? Unconditional love and joy. Like that, it's an exuberant joy.
Say in 2024, “I’m going to be a source of joy, not a source of complaints.” It takes skill to be joyful and yet to complain. Until you get that skill to set things right and complain, first start to manifest the joy that is inside of you. That’s what you are.
Manifest the joy that you are. Everyone I see has so much potential to bring light, love, and happiness to the world. Everybody has the beauty in them and it’s being covered with ignorance, all sorts of stress, and hankerings and bickering.
So this New Year, 2024, decide you’re going to be a source of enthusiasm. Bring positivity in the world, which needs it more than ever.
Whatever we can do physically, we will do to help out. Where we can’t do anything, we can put the intention. Pray for peace. You might say, “Yes, Gurudev, I know. But what can we do in Gaza or Palestine, Ukraine or Russia?”
I say there’s no point in reeling in desperation. You have the power to pray. So pray and believe the higher power will take care of it. Your prayer will be heard. Unless we get the confidence that our prayers will be heard, we won’t be able to pray authentically. The authenticity of our praying isn’t through words.
Prayer is through silence and the subtle feeling, “Let there be peace and let everyone be happy.” What do you say? Good idea?
To do that every day, you have to meditate. So, resolve to meditate in 2024 every day. Resolve to do the same silence program at least twice or thrice a year. That would be good, at least thrice a year.
Say, “I will do it every four months. Let me go deep within and clean up all the cobwebs, all the dust that I collect and gather from activity and interaction in the world of illusion.
To experience Gurudev’s ancient secret to modern well-being, SKY Breath Meditation, register for the Art of Living Part 1 course. SKY has helped millions of people worldwide improve all aspects of their lives.
