If time itself is an illusion, what is the numeration of years? Illusion or not, it was jet lag that kept me awake last night thinking about life, and not a concern for new year’s resolutions. Yet I decided three things:

1. There must be progress towards embracing the underlying unity.
2. How to correct the fallacy in perception that causes us to see a world of objects with ourselves as subject… the fallacy that has plagued our civilization from the beginning and has now grown to be of critical importance with our destruction of the biosphere? It’s hard to go from our normal insensitive and self-centered everyday behaviour towards this rational realization. Probably the way goes through the practical means of reducing our exploitation of people, animals or the earth itself for our selfish wants. It involves living with the bare necessary to sustain our existence, care in sourcing the products we use, love for those around us and sensitivity in our interaction with the earth and the creatures and humans with which we share it. The Biblical injunction ואהבת לרעך כמוך (love your companion as yourself) sounds preachy only as long as we insist on the unnatural separation of self from other, forgetting the underlying unity.
3. Work must be done henceforth in a spirit of non-doing, without pressure or effort.
   I don’t know what will come, but from now on, I will work in this way. The hours spent may be long, and I don’t live for enjoyment, but the work will be achieved without pressure or sense of effort. This is the way I work best; or rather this is the best way that work is achieved through me.
4. Entertainment is of no more use
   We become so addicted to activity that when there is nothing to do, we feel a need to fill all available time with something else. The silence between activities is there to be enjoyed. Rather than “killing time”, or filling time, why not just enjoy it by simply being?

The way of thinking of our current era has given emphasis to self-involvement, self importance. For this reason we have given obeisance to religious and political leaders and credence to their human-based ideologies and causes. My inclination is to chuckle instead. It is not that the individual lacks value, but that the value is transcendent. The individual’s greatness is the greatness of the undying universe. Each human expresses that greatness in the range of his uniqueness and the breadth of humanity’s diversity. The essential is not mortal. We owe no allegiance to ideas, leaders, nations, causes, priests, religions or their gods. Yet we cannot do other than remain loyal to our essence, the consciousness expressed through us, so uniquely and diversely. In living, as well as in dying we give testimony to the unceasing unfoldment of the divine, like the endless back and forward movement of waves on the shore. It is due to the conviction of our own self-importance that we so easily fall under the spell of leaders and are willing to lay down our lives to fulfill their dreams. Let the foolish give credence to the foolish. We have better things to do with our time; to lay in the warm sun listening to grass hoppers, or watching ants carry grains of corn to their nests are more worthy pursuits than participating in building empires or defending them. If we are unable to serve our essential nature, in a generosity of spirit, what is the purpose of accruing time, money or goods? The fulfillment of such service (of the essential) is the dissolution of all consideration of I and mine. We take part in the manifestation, the upheaval, the outpouring of all life. We own this process; this greatness is our greatness. And whether the name and form by which we are known dies today or lives another hundred years is rather trivial. Life itself is trivial if we think only of ourselves, or serve surrogates for the true essential greatness at the heart of our lives.