🎄 The Christmas Good News: Embracing the Love of Being
Christmas is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, the reason being that he brought us the Good News. When I was a teenager, I was given a Bible. I remember that it was called the Good News Bible. The Good News, I was told, was that God loves us, and if we believe in Him, then we will be saved. This is an old and universal story, and a similar story is coming into view as we celebrate Christmas in 2024.
The "news" this year is that the consequences of allowing the elites to put more carbon into the air are going to lead to the deaths of billions of people, and that human extinction is now the main scenario.
There are three reasons for this situation. In 2024, we found out that global temperature increases have now jumped to 1.5°C, with 2°C now effectively locked in, which will lead to the destruction of our societies. We found out that the natural carbon sinks, such as the oceans and forests, are collapsing, meaning that the meagre effects of reducing human carbon emissions will soon be wiped out by the emissions from natural sources. And we found out that the AMOC current is likely to collapse in the next 25 years, which will drastically lower temperatures and halve food production in the UK and Northern Europe, while destroying weather systems across the world.
We can argue over the details of these new realities, but there comes a point when asking for the details becomes not a desire for truth, but a distraction from the truth.
We have reached that point.
The truth is that humanity is facing the absolute — a total crisis. And so this means two things, based on the Chinese definition of crisis: a total danger — the death of humanity, and a total opportunity — the complete transformation of our culture, the very way we see. This is the big picture, this old and universal story. We have done wrong, and God, or this confrontation with the Absolute, offers us the Good News to put things right.
I think the spark that will lead to the next step in this story originates in the experience of being in prison. The conventional meaning here is that you lose your liberties, you cannot move around, and you have fewer possessions. But it can also mean that, through this experience, another way of seeing comes into focus. Through losing what we have, we come to see what we are. What we are are beings with consciousness who exist in time. This is all we can ever be — nothing more, nothing less. You can have everything in the world, but you still can only be in one place at a time, doing one thing at a time. You cannot become "more" beings, and you cannot get "more" time.
And looking at it the other way, you can have everything taken from you, but you still have your consciousness. You still have time. These things cannot be taken from you while you are alive. Of course, this is obvious once you think about it. But we don’t viscerally realise what this means until we experience it. And the crisis of imprisonment provides the opportunity to experience this basic foundational reality.
This experience can lead to a deep sense of peace, an ecstasy of transcendence, a sense of profound empowerment. We have been, and continue to be, told that prison is "this" or "that", and so we cannot speak of such experiences. It's a bit like a "love that cannot speak its name." But we should be allowed a "dignity of interpretation". No one has the right to tell us what our experience is or is not.
This realisation then is the Good News, and it has transformational social and political implications, just as the Good News of Jesus did. Both turn the world upside down. We now know that we can go into the world, and, in a fundamental sense, there is nothing that can be "got", and there is nothing that can be "taken away". We are already complete. There is nothing to be afraid of. What our ego and our culture tells us we need are pretences, conceits, lies. The gift of "prison" is that we come to release this, not in the sense of being told it, or reading about it, but we come to feel it in our gut.
Resistance is then no longer a "political" thing — the old story of victimhood or heroism. These are two sides of a perspective rooted in our culture of "having" or "not having" — of our liberties being "taken away" and thus being victims, or having the courage to suffer our liberties being "taken away" and thus being heroes. All that.
What confronting the absolute does then is enable us to see beyond "the political" to a new culture that is rooted in our "love of being". The act of stopping the horrors we face, this "resistance", leads to us being put in prison, which leads us to the realisation that there is actually nothing to be lost through this "resistance".
We realise that prison is not a "cost" or a "loss", but a "gift", if we choose to accept it. The gift of coming to know what we truly are. Like death, but a death in life, rather than a death at the end of life. In death, we realise what is important and what is not. And so, prison allows us to realise what is important while we live.
This is the Good News. Acting to stop the horrors, this "resistance", does not need to be motivated by a need to "get somewhere", to "have" something. It is no longer outcome-oriented. There is nothing to have or get. And so we can relax. And in response to that resistance, there is nothing the authorities can "take" from us.
And so again, we can relax. Our main and primary concern becomes just one thing: to be what we already are and to act accordingly. When we truly see our own "being", then we also see that "being" is everywhere, and everyone. And so to truly "be" means to love "being"; we have to act for "being". All of it. And so, we have no choice, in the present situation, but to engage in resistance. To be what we are, to be genuinely living our lives.
The paradox here then is that in this opportunity to "let go" of what we have, to "come home" to who we are, we have the most effective "messaging" that will lead to not just hundreds, but thousands of people deciding to act in such a way that they get imprisoned. And only when this happens will we be in the ballpark of stopping the horrors that can still be stopped. The circle, therefore, is completed. The story is played out.
This is the Good News, the Love of Being. What some people call the Love of God.
To act in a way you truly are — in resistance. Sign up where you are.
