Another New Year – But Is It Really A Beginning?

By James Donahue

Some thoughts as we plunge into the first day of the New Year 2008.

By now the revelries of launching another New Year with fireworks, dropping brightly lighted balls and champagne toasts is over and billions of people all around the world are waking up . . . some with hangovers from too much partying . . .to a reality that the sand in the great hourglass of our existence is rapidly sifting away.

Or is it?

As our planet reels under the assaults of overpopulation, industrial and chemical pollution, overheating and just old age, there is a growing awareness by most of humanity that we are nearing the end. The question is . . . the end of what?

Some say it seems inevitable that we are rushing toward the end of our existence. The stories abound, and soothsayers are aplenty who claim they are having dreams of a global apocalypse in which we all go down in flames. Many speak of the Nostrodamus prophecies, and the Mayan Calendar, the latter suggesting an exact date . . . Dec. 30, 2012, when the world as we know it grinds to an end. That is just five years away.

So how is this to come to be? Perhaps a large meteorite will come from the sky, striking the planet with such an impact that we go out under a cloud of smoke, ash and dust so thick that the planet goes into a frost and no crops can be grown, or sunlight seen, for many years. Or there may be massive volcanism. Or perhaps it will be a nuclear winter, created by our own self-destructive foolishness.

In the world of the occult, it is said that we humans are all connected in mind and spirit and that we collectively create the universe as we perceive it. If this is so, then can we not also believe that we possess the power to will our own destruction? Are we not creating our own horror by believing the mythology passed down via ancient religious belief systems? Is an unspeakable apocalyptic disaster inevitable?

It is our belief that the god within each of us has the creative power to change anything, even a built-in, religiously-oriented mental program as devious as we now are facing. If we can believe enough in our own demise just because our ancestors perceived and wrote about it in their prophecies, must we accept this as an unavoidable truth? Do we not also have the collective power to create our own magnificent future?

Indeed, the choice is ours. And as we look around us we see a world of new thinkers who are taking different spiritual pathways, no longer accepting old religious dogma to feed the intense hunger in their soul. As the veil begins to lift, we find ourselves looking ahead into this new year with a sense of cautious joy, suspecting that now, at last, enough of us will be awake and capable of changing our situation while there is still time.