People around the world are greeting each other Happy New Year and declaring their new year resolutions. I am also contemplating my resolution, though I am not sure if it will change anything in my life — but I do want certain change within me. The atmosphere outside has become very toxic. The people who matter in our society — the politicians — have created such a toxic atmosphere — by their hateful utterances against each other. And it seems that we are also following them to a large extent, enjoying spreading hate statements all over the media and the social media. This is our daily food.
Every new year as we age, we resolve to do something different and better, but it does not happen, because, on the level of our collective consciousness, we are creating a mountain of hate over the head. And all heads are busy fighting with the hypnotic idea of survival of the fittest — the idea that belongs to the animal world, not the human or the spiritual world. Jesus, Guru Nanak, and Tao did not teach us survival of the fittest. Jesus said: Blessed are the meek... Guru Nanak told us: Nanak Nanhe Ho Raho.... Lao Tsu of the Tao religion reminded us: The softest thing in the universe, overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
The world created by the politicians is totally opposite and makes us fight with each other all the time. We go on ageing thinking that we are maturing — but this maturity is very toxic. I suggest that we drop this idea of maturity and be children again. As Jesus says: Unless you are a child again, you cannot enter into my Kingdom of God.
Recently I was reading Childhood of the Magician by Hermann Hesse. He wrote: I was an active and happy boy, playing with the beautiful, many-coloured world, at home everywhere, not less with animals and plants than in the primeval forest of my own fantasies and dreams, happy in my powers and abilities, more delighted than consumed by my burning desires... It was beautiful and it pleased me, but more beautiful still was the world of my wishful thinking, richer still the play of my waking dreams. The reality was never enough, there was need of magic.
In my meditation in the new year, I wish to regain the magical childhood. And I know that meditation can do wonders — bring about a metamorphosis in the human psyche. An old man can become fully childlike, without losing the consciousness that happens in the age of maturity.
Osho says: Maturity is not concerned with age at all. Maturity is growth, and the growth must be through childhood, not against it, remember. Your maturity is false because it has been against the child. The child was born; maturity has been created. The child was natural; you are artificial, cultivated. You will have to go back to the child to regain the source from where growth is possible.
