Happy New Year

It is strange why people would celebrate the advent of a new year. Surely a new year brings them closer to death? So is a new year celebration a celebration of death, a strange morbid festival of anticipated release? And if humanity and the universe have expiry dates, would not the turning of the wheel move all things one notch closer towards the end?

Yet a new year also brings new possibilities and new birth: both literal and metaphorical. Even death and destruction are typically the heralds of new dawn. A festival of death is no more or less than a festival of change, and therefore of life. And once intelligence has evolved, the ultimate fate of the universe is no longer fixed, even if physical laws decree universal darkness.

And underlining our celebrations is perhaps also a vague intuitive faith in the teleological movement of time, an amorphous sense that life and the universe are moving towards some goal and consummation. Certainly many religions express the vision of a New Creation, or a Satya Yuga, that will come about in the 'fullness of time', whether cyclical or linear. Perhaps our new year celebrations are secular expressions of this archetypal faith.

For myself, I do not concern myself too much with the distant future of the New Jerusalem. But I do gaze with both sadness and hope into the prospects of the next few centuries. I look forward to the birth of a new civilisation. I look forward to an age where humanity's inner and spiritual powers would acquire an ampler and more opulent sweep. On the ruins of the old, a culture will arise where humanity's inner wealth would richly complement the external knowledge that have accrued over the last few centuries.

It was in this spirit that I wrote my Atlantean stories. Whether one literally believes in Atlantis is not important, for it represents a dream, a vision of a civilisation where humans are more truly human. Imperfect the Atlanteans may be, but they do not live impoverished lives of seeming opulence. The highest of them live close to a sun of everlasting splendor; the middling folks are free citizens of inner realms whose doors are barred and shut to almost all today. Even the lowest and most materially engrossed enjoy capacities of intellect and perception and strength that would be well above average today. It is a civilisation where wisdom, whether intellectual, spiritual and 'occult', attain heights that are rarely surpassed in the last ten thousand years. It is a nation where art and beauty ascend fiery peaks, and yet a nation where art is humbly infused into every aspect of life. No civilisation could match the universal Atlantean achievement in almost every field of Mind.

I believe that such a civilisation would be born in the centuries ahead to break the fall of the old, and perhaps to war against the rising evil that would seek to enthrone man as God himself through pride and technology.

2010 comes, and with it, the approach of the Atlantean descent.