Making Aim for the New Year

Most people make New Year resolutions.

 In the Work, however, making Aim is our particular task for this time of year. Although the New Year is basically a secular holiday centered on a change in the calendar, it's still a significant moment in which to pause to evaluate ourselves, to look at what we'd like to change and what we wish to encourage in our personal work.

The New Year celebration is actually a part of the Christmas season, which extends from the beginning of Advent until February 2nd (Candlemas). Only habit and commercial pressure, which hurries us on from one spending splurge to another, stop us from fully experiencing the richness of this season.

What has this to do with making Aim?

Everything!

For a start, looking at the season in a new way, and appreciating how it extends in time from Advent through to the beginning of February, is a form of metanoia. Dr. Nicoll was clear about the need for metanoia in every area of our life. Society has forgotten the real Christmas season, but in the Work we wish to understand and enhance its unique potential for our personal growth.

With this attitude we can begin to see the entire annual cosmic and spiritual calendar in a different way. We can look back and appreciate how, at the start of Advent, we began to prepare ourselves for the new birth in Essence which would take place on Christmas Night.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the following few days are an especially concentrated time for us in our personal work. There's much joy and celebration, but also the danger that the new energies coming to us at this time may prove too much for our limited understanding, and may turn to negativity.

So, to maintain the inflow and to make the greatest use of this potential, we make the effort to stay positive amidst all the various events around Christmas - the present-giving, the family reunions, the parties, the extra food and drink most of us will consume - and to resist the commercial interests that try to push us to burn up all this fine energy in an orgy of shopping.

The new birth must be watched over, safeguarded.

Immediately the Wise Men told King Herod that they had learned of the birth of a new king, Herod plotted to destroy him. To make sure that he would dispose of the tiny rival, he ordered all the young boys in Bethlehem to be slaughtered.

For us, Herod is a symbol of all the Hasnamuss forces, both within and without, that seek the destruction of Essence, of that sacred place within each of us where the new birth takes place.

Today, these forces include not only the commercialization I've already mentioned, but also the many threats to peace that invade our inner and outer worlds. Externally, we've seen so many atrocities this year - including right in the midst of Christmas celebrations - that we almost become resigned to them; we can become wearied of trying to fight what seems to be the inevitable destruction of so many Western values, of our whole way of life.

It is really a cosmic battle of good versus evil that is taking place.

 It is not simply a clash of cultures, of civilizations, or even of religions, as the media present it. It is a basic struggle between the forces of good, led by Conscious Humanity, and the forces of evil, of mechanicalness, of the destruction of all real values. The Will of the Absolute cannot reach so far down the Ray of Creation, and it is our urgent task to fight this battle on the side of Consciousness. If evil - mechanicalness - prevails, only darkness and chaos will result. And in this tremendous battle, God needs our help.

The opposing forces today are exactly the same as those during World War II. Only their names have changed. Their aim is the same; to eliminate everything good, everything holy, all that comes from God.

We know we cannot avoid this struggle, which will become ever more intense at crucial times of the year, when the cosmic energies are available to all, for good or ill. We must do everything we can to combat external evil, by speaking out against terror, by writing to power-possessing beings, by emphasizing peace and goodwill in our own personal circle.

Faced with the huge scale of evil that exists today, the most powerful weapon we have are our prayers, our own personal work on ourselves, and our refusal to imitate our enemies in hating others and wishing to destroy them.

If we all redouble our efforts now to become more conscious, we will increase our own supply of higher hydrogens, and we will produce a surplus to offer to Cosmic Humanity as they guide the future of our planet and of humankind. They need our efforts. The whole Catholic and Orthodox Christian faiths recognize this fact, and urge us to offer up our suffering, to make extra efforts, to increase our prayers and devotions at this time so that good may overcome evil.

The new birth within our Essence, so precious and sacred, must be kept safe from all the external forces that would injure and destroy it.

We must be clever as well as wholehearted in this struggle.

Saint Joseph, in the Gospels, plays the part of the Sly Man. When he learns of the evil intentions of Herod in a premonitory dream, he takes the Divine Child and His Mother, Mary, and escapes with them to Egypt. The location is significant, because many elements of the Christian faith were found in the Essenes and the Therapeuts in Egypt, and in the monotheistic religion of Akhnaten. There were many ready to help the Holy Family in Egypt, and the tiny child was blessed and protected.

As Saint Joseph protected Jesus, so must we protect our own understanding and insights in the Work.

But threats come not only from outside, but from within us, from our Chief Feature, which wishes to destroy all that's good and true in us, in order to reign supreme in its own hellish world.

So, all our negative thoughts, negative emotions, anxieties, worries, deceptions, vanity, and so on will be exacerbated now unless we stay attentive.

Watch and pray; that is what all the Gospels tell us, and it applies especially to critical nodes in the year, of which Christmas is among the most important.

Protect your new birth; carry it into the New Year; and formulate an Aim which will give your Essence the best chance of growth, and of your whole understanding to be increased during the year to come.