Is This New Year Special?

by Alan Cohen 

This month, Millennium Fever is building to a frantic pitch. After all, how often do we see the beginning of a new year, decade, century, and millennium? And how often do we face massive predictions that the world, as we know it, is going to fall apart before our eyes because of two faulty digits on our world-controlling computers? Wow, do we have a lot on our plate!

I invite you now to step back, take a deep breath, and listen to some reason. As millions, perhaps billions of people are scurrying about trying to position themselves in the most auspicious site to ring in the new year, some armed with party hats and others with survival gear, I wish to offer you a gentle vision of the new year, one that is not frenzied and debilitating, but joyful, empowering, and even inviting. 

Let us begin with a truth that you may find disturbing, yet ultimately liberating: We made it all up.  From where God sits, there is nothing particularly special or unique about the clock striking midnight on December 31, 1999. This moment, in the Big Picture, has as much significance as your car odometer moving from 1999 to 2000. You may wish to toot your horn or say to your passenger, “Look, the odometer is turning to 2000.”Beyond that, whatever you make of it is up to you.

The idea of reaching 2000 is not cosmic or spiritual — it is cultural and religious. At midnight on December 31st, while we are whooping it up (or breaking out the dried beans), billions of people on the planet will belong to cultural and religious traditions that swear it is entirely another time. In the Jewish calendar, the year is 5760; the Buddhists are living in 2544; in Islam, it is 1420; the Mayan calendar calls it 5119; the Chinese designate this as the year of the Dragon; and if we go by the actual birth of Jesus, it is 2004 — so the millennium kickoff may have already come and gone, and we are four years behind schedule with our festivities!

So we return to the Course in Miracles teaching that “everything I see has only the meaning I have given it”. As we apply this truth to the turn of the millennium and Y2K, we can see why those who are captured in the jaws of fear see it as a coming disaster; those motivated by money discover an easy way to capitalize; those who thrive on drama face a major crisis; those who have been wishing and hoping for the downfall of evil society, hold proof that they were right along; while those who find beauty in change and faith in well-being, recognize an opportunity to celebrate in a big way. (A friend of mine gave up being an atheist because there weren’t enough holidays.)

I do not mean to throw a damper on the party. To the contrary, my intention is to defuse the hysteria, demystify the hype, and replace the source of our power where it belongs: not in a calendar or the skills of computer programmers, but in our own minds, hearts, and hands. 

 In 1987, at the time of the famed Harmonic Convergence, I was flying in an airplane over Paris, returning from the Soviet Union with a group of citizen diplomats. At that time, like now, there was a lot of hoo-ha about the cosmic meaning of the day. A lot of people believed this was the day of reckoning, when God would smite the world with all kinds of disasters, and only those who belonged to a particular religion, had pure hearts, or made it to various sacred mountaintops, would be saved.

In our group there was an eight-year-old girl named Annie who had become quite frightened by the many dire predications. Annie approached Linda, a minister traveling with us, and asked her, “Do you think this plane will crash today?”

“No, Annie this plane will not crash today,” Linda assured Annie in a motherly way.

“But what if we land at a place that it not a power place? Maybe there will be an earthquake!”

Linda invited the girl to sit on her lap, and looked her in the eye. “Annie,” the woman began, “let’s get straight on this business of power places. Since God is everywhere, there is no place that is more special or sacred. People make places sacred or profane by their thoughts. You are not safe or unsafe because of where you go; you are safe or unsafe because of the thoughts you bring to where you go. And do you know what?  You are the real power place. Wherever you go, you have the power within you to make the life you choose. And because you are beautiful and lovable, you are safe, right here, and wherever we land.”

The notion of power times is the same as power places. Since time is an invention of the human mind, it also is whatever we make it. There is no time that is any more holy, powerful, or portentous than another, except by the thoughts we bring to it. So it is for midnight on December 31st.

Now here’s the fun part: We can make the turn of the millennium work on our behalf, if we choose it. It can be a wonderful fulcrum for us to mark the turning point at which we leave the old and unwanted behind, and step forward into the new and more desirable. It can be a moment for us to decide what we want to leave back in the 20th century, and what we want to take into the 21st. It can be the beginning of a new life with new values and new results, should we make it so. But not because the calendar, stars, or computers commanded it — because we make it so with our holy minds.

A while back I was having lunch with a friend at a Chinese restaurant. When the waiter brought our fortune cookies for dessert, I opened mine and found it to be rather blasé. I asked my friend, “Do you like your fortune?”

“Not especially,” she answered.

“Waiter,” I called out; “We don’t particularly like our fortunes. Would you please bring us some different ones?”

To my surprise and delight, the waiter returned with a whole bowl of new fortunes. My friend and I eagerly picked through the new fortunes until we found ones we really wanted.

So it is with the new millennium, and every moment of life. As Peter Drucker declared, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Happy New Year, friends. The New Millennium is within you, and it awaits with open arms. 

Previous columns & articles by Alan Cohen.