December 5th 1966
Because it is the custom in your world to wish each other a happy and a peaceful New Year, we, too, wish you these things. But we would remind you that there is nothing new under the sun, and that one cannot escape from the old. And however new a thing, a creed, a sect, a teaching, appears to be, always you will find the rudiments of the old. Things that have been tried and tested and proved true, must indeed be old, and so we greet you with the knowledge that an old year has ended and a new year has begun. But, children of the light, we bring you nothing new. We only give you again and again, the old, the trusted, and the true.
There is no need to make New Year, so-called New Year resolutions. For at the beginning of your very first year, you brought with you the resolution to find the way to light through the darkness of the Earth experience. It is very difficult for those in the world of spirit, in the planes of light and love, to believe that they could possibly forget in any circumstances, environment, or conditions, the light and the love and the peace of the Spirit world, and of the Prince of light. But, you have found that searching for this light in the world is one of the most difficult, we would say the most difficult task a human soul can accomplish.
But now, this first and foremost resolution has been fulfilled. You know about the light, you do not just believe it. You seek further for knowledge, for greater truths, and for the explanation of the meaning of the purpose and the plan of the great Spirit of love.
And so, beloved, the years can come and go and there will be no difference between the new and the old. You have believed always in the great oneness, and can now see the oneness of time and space and eternity.
But, nevertheless, this time of year has, if you study nature, and we have always told you to do this, this time of year if you study nature can help you inasmuch as you will take notice, and abide by, the natural laws.
And although all around you there is noise, more and more noise, coming in at you from the outside world, and we sympathise greatly with you concerning this, for it is a menace. But it is only man, and the things that are man made, which make the most noise. For the very stillness and the peace, of which we are always telling you, abounds and abides at all times in nature. And it is in the quiet, in the dark, in the silence of one's spirit, that great things are learnt and great things accomplished. Even as at this moment of time, under the great dark Earth of your land, in your garden, in the fields, in the woodlands…
This transcript refuses the very premise of New Year's resolutions, on the grounds that nothing here is actually new — "there is nothing new under the sun," the same phrase this collection opened with two years earlier. What was resolved at the very beginning of incarnation — to find light through Earth's darkness — is here declared already fulfilled (by Mary): no longer believed, but known. Her task then became not searching for the light itself, but deepening into "greater truths" once it has already been found.
Against the mounting noise of the modern world — "more and more noise, coming in at you from the outside world" — the transcript points, as it does often in this collection, back to nature and to silence as where anything of real substance is actually learned. Even the turn of the calendar, so heavily marked by human custom, means nothing in nature itself: the transcript's closing image, of quiet work continuing unseen "under the great dark Earth," in garden and field and woodland through winter, suggests growth that asks for no fanfare and needs no new resolution to begin.