Happy New Year – How bhakti-yoga fulfills the import of this sincere wish

Lecture Podcast:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Happy New Year. This is a sincere good wish that we express among each other at the turn of every year.
And generally, the New Year celebration, which is accompanied by a desire for happiness, actually is also celebrated with a lot of fervency. So, generally, the Christmas celebration, which starts at the 25th, that goes on to the New Year. Now, different cultures and different traditions, different countries, have the celebration of the New Year from different occasion, from different dates.
So, depending on the particular culture, in India, some people celebrate the New Year at the time of Diwali. Some people celebrate the New Year at the time of Gudi Padwa. Some people celebrate the New Year at the time of Holi, or Gaur Purnima, more specifically.
That is where, in the Gaudiya tradition, it is celebrated. So, there can be different times when we celebrate the New Year. Now, to a large extent, the Western culture has spread all over the world, and and that is why many of the Western cultural practices have become standard.
So, for one of them itself is the example of language. So, we are speaking right now in English. You may say English is not a basic or a traditional language, at least not in the Indian tradition.
But the important point is that culture doesn’t necessarily always have to be static. So, it is always dynamic, and that element of dynamism is because we, culture is lived by human beings who respond to situations. So, that’s why it’s not necessarily anything wrong or undesirable for a culture to adapt itself according to time, place, circumstance.
So, the same spiritual message of Krishna can be spoken in the English language, as it was spoken, say, in the past in Sanskrit. And the spiritual message remains the same. The language may be different.
So, now, there are celebrations of various kinds. So, there are directly spiritual celebrations which center on the appearance of the Lord or the appearance of His great devotees or which commemorate certain heroic acts associated with the Lord’s pastimes. So, those are directly spiritual activities.
Those are spiritual days, and they are celebrated spiritually. Now, apart from that, there are certain cultural occasions which are celebrated based on time, place, circumstance. So, for example, some people may celebrate, different countries will celebrate their Independence Day on different occasions.
So, in India, different states also celebrate their days, particular days on particular occasions. So, these are, these have practically nothing to do with religion. They are a national occasion, national or state or otherwise cultural occasions, and they are celebrated accordingly.
Now, somewhere in between the two are festivals like, celebrations like the New Year, which can have a spiritual connotation if it is celebrated on some spiritually significant occasion, or it can have a completely non-spiritual, secular connotation if it is divorced from the spiritual side. So, we generally wish Happy New Year. So, first, let’s look at this festival, if it is celebrated, divorced from any spiritual side, and then we will look at how it will be celebrated on the spiritual side.
So, actually speaking, if we remove the spiritual dimension from the human life, then the happy and the new in the Happy New Year become meaningless. Materialism promises us material enjoyment, materialism is centered in material enjoyment, materialism aims for material enjoyment, but actually materialism makes material enjoyment meaningless. How? Because if materialism is true, nothing except matter exists, and if matter alone exists, matter is unconscious, then our self-existence, we are observers of matter.
We experience emotions. So, how can matter produce something that experiences matter is one of the biggest unanswered questions within mainstream science today, as long as that science weds itself to materialism. So, Arvind Schrodinger was a Nobel laureate scientist, and he said that science arranges our observations of the world in an amazingly consistent pattern and helps us understand things as far as the natural world is concerned.
But as far as things close to the heart are concerned, science is eerily silent, ghastly silent. He says, as far as happiness and distress, sweet and sour, a God in eternity, life and death, such questions science provides us no answers. Sometimes science tries to provide answers also, Schrodinger says, they are so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.
So, now, this is not a criticism of science, which is actually coming from a scientist, but he’s pointing out, at the material level, these things have no explanation. So, what exactly is happiness? If you just look at materialism, it’s just the secretion of certain chemicals in certain parts of the brain, which makes us feel happy. But there is no feeling in reality, and there’s no feeler in reality.
Because the concept of a feeler who feels emotions, that actually is an illusion. So, the happy part goes out, because the emotion of happiness is nothing but the firing of certain electrochemical cells in the brain, and the person who feels happy is also actually an illusion, because there’s no such person, there are just patterns of brain signals, that’s all. Now, new also becomes meaningless, if we have a rigidly materialistic worldview.
Why? Because essentially, what is happening when we say Happy New Year? The Earth is going in its orbit around the Sun, and if we consider a circle, now, all the points on the circle are basically similar. There is no point which has any special significance. The circle, once it has been set, once it is set, like the planets, once they are set in orbit, there is no beginning point, there is no ending point.
So, in the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, there is no specific point which is special. That’s why if we single out a particular point in the orbital motion of the Earth around the Sun, and call that special, that is arbitrary. So, there is nothing new about the New Year from the rigidly materialistic point of view in terms of the measurement of time that a year signifies.
And further, if we see, if we, so materialism may remove the happiness and the newness from the Happy New Year. And Happy New Year becomes an empty, empty set of words, nothing more. Now, rather than accepting such a emotionally draining and intellectually bankrupt world view, we can move forward to look for a more meaningful and more fulfilling world view.
And that is what the spiritual traditions offer to us. So, the Bhagavad Gita and the tradition associated with Bhagavad Gita, the Gita wisdom tradition, that explains that there is a spiritual side to our life. That we are at our core souls, and we are meant to experience much more than just bodily sensations, which we interpret as pleasure.
We are meant to experience eternal spiritual fulfillment. And spiritual fulfillment is what will truly bring something new in life and make us truly happy. So, the Srimad Bhagavatam says that if we do not have a spiritual side to our life, we do not pursue the spiritual side, then we just keep doing the old things again and again and again.
Chewing the chewed again and again and again. So, what does chewing the chewed refer to? All living beings pursue four primary activities, eating, sleeping, mating, and defending. So, we human beings also pursue those activities, although we do them in much more fashionable ways.
We may go to McDonald’s, a five-star hotel street. We may create extravagant houses in which we mate. We may have buzzer alarms and high-tech security systems for defense.
And we may have comfortable beds for sleeping. Animals may do these things mostly on the streets. But essentially, although the form in the case of human beings of these activities may be more sophisticated, the purpose remains the same and the pleasure also remains similar.
There is nothing new, no new pleasure that we are going to get in the activities of eating, sleeping, mating, defending. And as long as the Happy New Year celebration centers on eating, sleeping, mating, defending, then there is nothing new that is going to come up in our life. So, although we may desire it, it is not going to be new because we are doing the same old activities again and again.
Now, it is said one sign of insanity is to keep doing the same activities again and again and expect a new result. So, we have been doing eating, sleeping, mating, defending throughout our life and it has not given us any special pleasure. And that’s why the reasonable inference from that is in the future, it’s not going to give us anything special.
So, if you want our life to become happy and to become new, then we have to redirect our energy in life from the material side to the spiritual level. And Gita Wisdom offers this process of Bhakti Yoga as a way to harmonize our material side with our spiritual quest. And thereby, we can experience higher spiritual happiness and the more we connect with the highest spiritual reality, that is Krishna, that is God, Krishna through Bhakti, the more we experience happiness.
So, So, there are great saints who when they describe the happiness of devotion, then they describe it as unlimitedly happy. An ocean of happiness which also keeps expanding. And At every step, one is relishing great happiness.
A complete nectar. That is Chaitanya Mahaprabhu speaking in Shiksha Ashtakam and Yamunacharya, a great saint, he also speaks in Sotratna that One experiences new, new, new rasa at each moment in devotion to God. So, the happiness and the newness in our life will come when we explore our spiritual dimension.
Because spiritual dimension makes our life intellectually meaningful and emotionally joyful. Intellectually meaningful because we understand what is new if the earth is just going round and round and our body is also pursuing eating, sleeping, mating, depending on what is new. The new thing will be that instead of loving the temporary, we will learn to love the eternal.
Instead of loving the things of this world, we will learn to love the source of all those things that is God. And in loving him, we will experience newness and happiness both. So, now significantly this redirection of our energy to this of our energy and our endeavor to the spiritual level can fulfill the spirit of Happy New Year in other way.
You know, when we wish Happy New Year to each other, we also know, at least in the back of our minds, that things are not going to automatically improve. So, quite often we make New Year resolutions. I do this, this, this, this, this.
And by those New Year resolutions, we hope that we will be able to do things better, become more responsible, become more self-mastered, and by better performance, we will get better results. Now, we do make New Year resolutions, but unfortunately, if we look at several years of our life, for most people, the New Year resolutions are not new in the sense that they made the same resolutions in the previous year, and those resolutions did not give them any happiness. They were not able to live up to those resolutions.
And this year again, they’re making the same resolutions. So, scientific surveys have shown very interestingly some insights which can help us to reinforce our New Year resolutions so that we can transform them into actions with determination. Since the 1920s, religious sociologists and social scientists have been observing the effect of religion on society and on people’s behavior.
And they have found consistently that people who have stronger religious faith, they have greater willpower. They succumb less to bad habits, and if they succumb to bad habits, they’re able to overcome those bad habits easier. That’s why many people who get into addictions of some kind, often they, when they want to come out of addictions, they often take shelter of God, and that helps them also to come out of that.
So, in general, our willpower is often not enough to overcome our bad habits, because bad habits, when they go deep inside, they become deep patterns within us, then they are not so easy to overcome. So, our willpower, when it is supplemented, complemented with divine power, with God’s power, then it becomes truly powerful, and we can overpower our weaknesses. So, just as suppose somebody has got loose motions, and a person says, oh, by my willpower, I will, by my willpower, I will control myself.
I’ll not, I’ll not go to respond to nature. I’ll control it by my willpower. Now, willpower is powerless here.
When there is a bodily disease, one has to respond to nature, and one certainly, it’s not that one has to consider willpower pointless, but rather one has to use the willpower to follow a proper process for healing the stomach. So, that means we use our willpower to go to a doctor and take the prescription of the doctor and live, mold our life accordingly. That means, at least for the time of the treatment, we avoid certain foods the doctor tells us not to take, and we take the medicines the doctor tells us to take, even if those medicines are bitter.
And the use of the willpower, when it is coupled with the process, then that leads to satisfactory results. That leads to healing. So, Krishna also says in the Bhagavad Gita, when he talks about controlling the mind, he says that we have to follow the right process.
In 6.36, he says, that if a person does not have a controlled mind, Yoga, the success in Yoga, success on the spiritual path is not possible if one doesn’t control the mind. But by trying whatever control we have of our mind, we endeavor with the proper process. If we have a proper process, then we can control the mind.
So, actually, sticking to our new resolutions is essentially a matter of controlling the mind. So, Krishna says that if we follow a proper process, then we will be able to succeed. It is not just a matter of willpower, it is a matter of willpower coupled with a proper process.
And that process, again, is the process of Bhakti Yoga. So, Michael McCullough, in the Psychological Bulletin in 2009 Jan issue, published an article that overviewed the correlation between willpower and belief. Among people, studies have been done since 1920s about this.
And they were summarized into an article in Psychological Bulletin. And it was a striking finding that in general, consistently, religious people had more willpower. As I said, they were able to control their bad habits better, give up the bad habits, and stay protected from bad habits also.
So, John Turney reported this in New Year’s Eve in 2008, 31st December. And he said that if for better self-control, try getting religious about it. That was the theme.
So, the implication was striking. That means, if we want to actualize our New Year resolutions, we can add one more resolution to it. The resolution to increase our devotional commitment to God.
Because if we increase our devotional commitment to God, that will connect us with Him. That will help us to tap into His infinite power. And thus, when we become empowered, we will be able to stick to our other resolutions also.
So, God is a reservoir of energy. When we plug into Him, when we commit ourselves to a process for plugging into Him, then we are able to get a higher satisfaction. And that higher satisfaction enables us to counter the urges for lower gratification that sabotage our resolutions.
When we make resolutions, I’ll be more disciplined about my diet. I’ll be more disciplined about my exercise. I’ll be more responsible in my relationships.
Whatever we make in the resolutions, what sabotages them is our urges for quick pleasures. Oh, I just wanted to eat this. Oh, I just wanted to… I didn’t feel like working so hard or whatever.
So, those urges for quick pleasure sabotage our resolutions. But when we get a higher fulfillment through our spiritual practices, through our devotional activities, then that satisfies our need for happiness. And then we don’t succumb to those lower urges.
So, the chanting of the holy names, the studying of the sacred scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita, associating with spiritually minded people, associating with devotees, these are ways in which, tangible ways in which we can increase our spiritual commitment. So, by doing these things or by taking a resolution to do these things in a more regulated and committed way, we can connect with God, get His power, and by that, we’ll get the strength, get the inner empowerment to stick to our other new resolutions also. So, then the wish, Happy New Year, can be fulfilled in its import both spiritually and materially.
What do you mean spiritually and materially? Spiritually, actually, we will be experiencing something new which we haven’t experienced. We will be rising beyond the old activities of eating, sleeping, mating, defending. We’re rising higher to experience higher spiritual happiness.
So, that is new and that newness will also make us happy. And even at the material level, we are not meant to renounce the material level, but we are meant to harmonize it with our spiritual side. We want to function effectively, productively, successfully, even in our material life.
So, for that, if we have greater willpower, greater determination, that will help us to do, to succeed. And our commitment to devotion will, by giving us willpower, strengthening our willpower, by complementing our willpower with divine power, will enable us to function better even in these fields. So, by greater commitment in our worldly obligations also, there also, we will get greater satisfaction, that is happiness.
And we will be able to, by better performance, get better success. That will also be new. So, in this way, by our devotional commitment, by devotional practice, by bhakti yoga, we can fulfill the import of Happy New Year, both spiritually and materially, by bringing newness and happiness into our lives.