-- Osho
----------
“What if we said, “This is the way it is; this is what it means to be human," and decided to sit down and enjoy the ride?”
--Pema Chödrön
----------
In a few days it’ll be another new year.
Brand new, coming right up!
Well, ok the moment isn’t even at the same time in all parts of the world, and somehow it looks a whole lot like yesterday’s old year... but still.
Time to pretend that something old is ending ('Bye! Good riddance!) and that something new is beginning (Please please please).
Something better. Something Improved.
Something thinner, cleaner, nicer, and more enlightened.
Yep, it’s the annual Pretend-I-Want-To-Fix-Me time.
Oh yay. Ritualized comparing to an idealized version of how we're supposed to be, and finding ourselves lacking! Whoo hoo!
I mean let’s face it, we all know these self things are too fat or not peaceful enough or they drink too much or game too much or are too out of shape or are either too busy or too unproductive.
We all know what we need is more self-care and only-necessary pants organized by color tidily in the closet. That’ll do it.
So resolutions are made, with vows that this year, proper rules of proper personhood will be properly followed.
Never mind that when we make these resolutions, we completely know we’re not actually going to keep them.
Not for long anyway. Just long enough to keep up the sham.
Oh yes honey, of course we know this. Noticing how many times, how many years, the same resolutions have been made and then quickly broken, we’d have to be idiots otherwise.
Humans pretend to want improvement while actually having zero intention of fixing these messy selves.
Because there’s only one thing on this earth that is perfect and unflawed.
Plastic.
And we hate plastic.
We don’t even like the thing we’re supposedly trying to be.
So clearly, improving the self is not the actual intention of these yearly vows.
No, the actual intention is what actually happens.
Validation of the wrongness of self.
New Year's is a ritual that shows us, year after year, that we totally know we are not what we are pretending to be.
We know we are not this self story. We know we are not the ego, the personality, the overly-well-fed body staring at its phone, reading this Mind-Tickler and perhaps muttering, "What the hell is she talking about?"
We know.
Which is why New Year’s resolutions are so often privileged, and frivolous, and, year after year, change absolutely nothing.
Because obviously, nothing in this universe cares if any particular body on planet Earth drinks or smokes or dies at 20 instead of 80.
Nothing needs us fixed. Nothing needs us improved. Nothing finds us lacking as is.
Not even us.
Not actually.
If we did, we’d stick to those resolutions.
Not sure? Curious readers can always check for themselves.
Sense into whatever you really are- whatever that is, and however you do it, just being sure to leave it undefined or unnamed for a moment-
Feel in, and see if that essence of what you are is altered by alcohol or chips or closets or money. See if the real you -whatever that is- becomes better if the body eats broccoli. See if it needs anyone to be more peaceful, more enlightened, more anything.
See if it agrees that the brilliant person reading this brilliant Mind-Tickler needs improvement.
Now of course, if one’s idea of a good time is to promise to clean the bathroom, or to throw out all the cigarettes, or to sit in lotus position with closed eyes on January 1,
perhaps nothing minds if we do that either.
It's just that, rather than an annual Not Good Enough As Is day,
New Year’s Eve might be a good time for celebrating these messy, dirty, fat and ridiculously imaginary selves.
Being whatever they enjoy pretending to be.
Unimproved and happily being whatever existence may have gotten
exactly the way it likes
Already.
That might be fun to celebrate every year.
I mean, it would certainly be
new.
Click here to get your Mind-Tickled every week.
Click here to watch Judy on Buddha at the Gas Pump
Click to watch Judy and Walter have fun chatting about about
nonduality, the self, consciousness, awareness, free will
and other light and breezy stuff
Judy And Robert Saltzman talk nonduality
and again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fv_vsvaejs
and again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DAn8Rqg3I0
“It is only when
The very idea of changing is seen
As false that
One can perceive the changeless.”
--Wu Hsin
