Great Dreams Blog

Perspective 11 What Is Your New Years Purpose 2007?

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Strephon talks about choosing and having purpose in the New Year. We are nothing but a flash of existence, like a firework exploding unless we use a greater value to live by.

What indeed characterizes the new year? As is traditional I greeted fellow tennis players I knew when we met after January 1 with a traditional Happy New Year and a shake. But what more is there?

What then is New Years that we celebrate it unconsciously?

I awoke this morning from a dream in which I instructed a woman to release and let go to her death time. If she believed it was coming up soon, then believe in it, accept it, let go to it. Don’t resist and deny, and then it comes up on you unexpected and you don’t react well to it.

Also, I said in the dream, be sincere. If you have the feeling, don’t just talk about it. Act on it.

Then when the time comes and passes you by, you can rejoice in the fact you have further new life. You have not died yet. But what will you do with that further life? What purpose or value will you dedicate it to?

If you die on that day then you have already prepared for it in the best way by releasing yourself from life already.

I suspect that many people when they die don’t release themselves of life and go freely into dying and death. They hold on and try to stay alive, no matter what. This makes their purpose for living being life itself.

Is there not more to life than life?

This is always the question. The answer seems to be: there is more to life than life if we choose for it.

Dedicate your life to a greater purpose than surviving in life. Thus you give the fragment you call your existence to the existence of a greater value than yourself. This is the purposeful life.

What does this have to do with New Years?

At New Years everybody dies and is reborn. If you want to feel the significance of New Years then prepare and act as if the end of the world comes at December 31, and if you are not dead the gods have given you and all humans another year of life.

What I found in giving and getting New Years greetings is that people may have celebrated with a little party with their friends or next door neighbors, or even a big party somewhere if you are young. Some explode fireworks in the night, a rather boring and noisy sight after awhile.

Why? Fireworks represent death-rebirth. You die. You explode in a great mandala of color and are nothing. Just like existence. You are in existence but a moment, and hope to shine, to make an impression, to live richly. But do you? Does anyone notice your existence? How many come to your funeral?

Here’s the solution, whether you choose it or not. My New Years observation this year was that most people did nothing but acknowledge New Years symbolically. They had no personal relationship to it. They did nothing with it, made no great choice to affirm new life.

Here is how it works. New Years symbolizes new birth out of the old dead life. The past year is gone, is dead. It was all you were this past year. Did you review your old year before going into the new? What were your accomplishments, personal and in projects?

Now, going into the New Year, what do you plan to live for? What are your values to realize? What are your projects to achieve?

You can live at these levels:

◦ 1. You live at the survival level, even if comfortable materially. You live, love, work, socialize, accomplish little things. Life for you is just reacting to things as they happen. Someone comes for a visit, you visit. No great purpose in any of this, but at least you are alive and enjoying your existence mostly, except when the problems come.

◦ 2. You are handling your survival level. You are handling your work and relationships existence. You have enough money to live and work and have recreation. Well, it’s nice to have that in order. What more? The time you don’t need surviving you put into bettering your situation. You start a business. You get a better job with more chance for achievement. You get a better relationships partner with more challenge and possibility in it for you. So you can see and plan for yourself a life that is better and more fulfilling in the coming year if things work out. You have your new experiences you choose for. You have your projects. You have also let go of old projects and companions who do not offer you greater value. At least you see that the New Year is the birth out of the death of the old. You are using your life for something greater than you now have.

◦ 3. You use part of your existence to survive, to live more or less securely on the material level. But the rest of your time and energy is devoted to Greater Purpose, or the manifestation of God-Source on earth. You put a lot of energy into improving yourself, solving your neurosis, developing your personality and social skills, intellectual skills also. This may be just to better your life. This can be also bettering the life of the world.

◦ 4. You are surviving but you move into the New Year with a sense of Greater Purpose and you structure your projects and your life around this value. You don’t go in for material gains, like buying a house, because these are distractions that take you away from doing something original and of value to humanity. Here your projects are to benefit others as well as yourself. You create a new piece of software, a new group to teach, you take a new coursework to make you a better person, you write that book, you travel to contribute to people’s lives, you join a cause, an organization that has value to the world.

We note in conclusion then that as we go up the scale of conscious values, people are using the New Years transition as an impetus to live as a better person and in a better life in the coming year. They don’t just do symbolic celebrations.

They commit themselves to live differently, more focused on values, in the coming year. They acknowledge the old year and what they have accomplished. They build on the good things from there in the new year.

They go consciously through a death-rebirth cycle in the New Years transition. These are the conscious people living life.

This is Strephon Kaplan-Williams living life.