split the atom of fear
Human weakness seduces us to fear. We cannot control fear, so instead we react – by avoiding it, indulging in it, being humbled by it, attempting to defy it. We clench, addict, claim victim, stop believing, abandon ourselves and God.
split
We each perceive fear according to our unique weaknesses. We face the cruel loss of a loved one, suffer to conquer an insidious addiction, are imprisoned by intolerable pain or debilitating disease.
split
Human frailty is predetermined and necessary. Accepting frailty is a requirement for transcending. Christ teaches us in the serene image of suffering He imbued upon the Shroud as His body accepted human death and was released into the new life of the resurrection.
split
The faint and frail image that rests on top of the fibrils mirrors our tenuous nature. The marks of suffering, our fear personified. His calm expression, our salvation assured.
split
And then the unsolvable mystery. No one comprehending the true origin of particles binding the image. We reach out to clench hope and possess resurrection. Answers vanish.
split
the atom of fear
disintegrates
the faint image
dusts
our surfaces of surrender
we collapse by design
into the Divine
where human mirrors God
and frailty trembles
Friday, December 24, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Chapter 36: Thriving in Arsenic
All life as we know it up to this point requires 6 elements to make DNA and RNA. They are: Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Sulfur, and Phosphorous.
A newly discovered bacteria in Mono Lake has arsenic in its biomolecules in lieu of phosphorous. In fact, experiments show that it grows and thrives in arsenic.
Phosphorous is a central component of the energy carrying molecule in all cells, known as Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). This energy carrying molecule is responsible for the metabolic process.
This newly discovered life form uses some phosphorous, but it has arsenic in its DNA structure, meaning arsenic functions as part of its building blocks for new cells.
Arsenic would kill us (and probably all other life on earth as we know it). Thus, if this discovery proves to have scientific merit, it will be a pivotal discovery in terms of us broadening our definition of what constitutes a life form – here on Earth or elsewhere.
Is this arsenic-consuming life form just one tiny part of the Shadow Biosphere” (a parallel existence of other life forms that are radically different from everything we know of life thus far)?
More to the point where the Shroud is concerned:
Would the discovery of other forms of life in turn mean there are other forms of death?
Death as we know it is defined as the extinguished life force (life force meaning composed of the above 6 elements).
If this bacterium can use arsenic as one of its life-producing elements, then what might be different about how it dies?
The Shroud makes us contemplate death and resurrection. But what if Christ's life form, even though He was human, was in some small way different to ours...would the way he would perish also be different?
What other element/s might have built Christ's DNA and RNA?
And would traces of this/these elements have been left behind on the image on the Shroud?
Could it/they have impacted the carbon dating results?
And what of the relationship between Christ's death and the light of the resurrection...did the Holy Spirit wind the clock of metabolism to add the energy Christ would require to covert to a system of light?
Light is produced at an atomic level when an electron in the atom goes from an excited state of energy (a higher energy orbital) to a state of lower energy.
If the frequency of light that is emitted is a function of the excited particle transitioning to a lower energy quantum mechanical state, is there any relationship between quantum states of energy and the metabolic process of a life form?
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed.”
Can any form of energy be transformed into another form of energy?
Did Christ have superhuman metabolism that enabled Him to intentionally emit thousands or maybe millions of watts for a short time (that lasted maybe only seconds) and for the purpose of completing a superhuman task like resurrection?
The energy stored during photosynthesis as light can be triggered suddenly by a spark in a forest fire or made available more slowly for human metabolism when the molecules are ingested and catabolism is triggered by enzyme action.
Catabolism is the set of pathways that breakdown molecules into smaller units and release energy. As cells break down they create waste and release energy. The creation of this waste is usually an oxidation process involving a release of chemical free energy, some of which is lost as heat, but the rest of which is used to drive the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate.
Could this oxidation process in some way be responsible for the image left on the Shroud?
Could Christ willingly and suddenly trigger a spark that enabled Him to store His energy as light?
life to
death
life to
light
death to
life
death to
light
light to
light
He is the light of the world
A newly discovered bacteria in Mono Lake has arsenic in its biomolecules in lieu of phosphorous. In fact, experiments show that it grows and thrives in arsenic.
Phosphorous is a central component of the energy carrying molecule in all cells, known as Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). This energy carrying molecule is responsible for the metabolic process.
This newly discovered life form uses some phosphorous, but it has arsenic in its DNA structure, meaning arsenic functions as part of its building blocks for new cells.
Arsenic would kill us (and probably all other life on earth as we know it). Thus, if this discovery proves to have scientific merit, it will be a pivotal discovery in terms of us broadening our definition of what constitutes a life form – here on Earth or elsewhere.
Is this arsenic-consuming life form just one tiny part of the Shadow Biosphere” (a parallel existence of other life forms that are radically different from everything we know of life thus far)?
More to the point where the Shroud is concerned:
Would the discovery of other forms of life in turn mean there are other forms of death?
Death as we know it is defined as the extinguished life force (life force meaning composed of the above 6 elements).
If this bacterium can use arsenic as one of its life-producing elements, then what might be different about how it dies?
The Shroud makes us contemplate death and resurrection. But what if Christ's life form, even though He was human, was in some small way different to ours...would the way he would perish also be different?
What other element/s might have built Christ's DNA and RNA?
And would traces of this/these elements have been left behind on the image on the Shroud?
Could it/they have impacted the carbon dating results?
And what of the relationship between Christ's death and the light of the resurrection...did the Holy Spirit wind the clock of metabolism to add the energy Christ would require to covert to a system of light?
Light is produced at an atomic level when an electron in the atom goes from an excited state of energy (a higher energy orbital) to a state of lower energy.
If the frequency of light that is emitted is a function of the excited particle transitioning to a lower energy quantum mechanical state, is there any relationship between quantum states of energy and the metabolic process of a life form?
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed.”
Can any form of energy be transformed into another form of energy?
Did Christ have superhuman metabolism that enabled Him to intentionally emit thousands or maybe millions of watts for a short time (that lasted maybe only seconds) and for the purpose of completing a superhuman task like resurrection?
The energy stored during photosynthesis as light can be triggered suddenly by a spark in a forest fire or made available more slowly for human metabolism when the molecules are ingested and catabolism is triggered by enzyme action.
Catabolism is the set of pathways that breakdown molecules into smaller units and release energy. As cells break down they create waste and release energy. The creation of this waste is usually an oxidation process involving a release of chemical free energy, some of which is lost as heat, but the rest of which is used to drive the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate.
Could this oxidation process in some way be responsible for the image left on the Shroud?
Could Christ willingly and suddenly trigger a spark that enabled Him to store His energy as light?
life to
death
life to
light
death to
life
death to
light
light to
light
He is the light of the world
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Chapter 35: Thanksgiving
We set aside one day a year to give thanks for all our blessings. We could make the choice to do the opposite and set aside only one day a year to be ungrateful, thereby living in a state of gratitude every other day.
Easier said than done. Our pain and suffering likes to steal the spotlight.
The Shroud teaches us to have the courage to exhibit composure inside suffering. It teaches us to be grateful for the pain Christ endured on our behalf.
Perhaps if we were to make the choice to gaze upon its image everyday, we too would be able to release our pain, reconcile our suffering, and live in a steady state of gratitude.
Easier said than done. Our pain and suffering likes to steal the spotlight.
The Shroud teaches us to have the courage to exhibit composure inside suffering. It teaches us to be grateful for the pain Christ endured on our behalf.
Perhaps if we were to make the choice to gaze upon its image everyday, we too would be able to release our pain, reconcile our suffering, and live in a steady state of gratitude.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Chapter 34: The Face of Forgiveness
The word “sin” has taken on a number of unpleasant connotations. In my mind sin does not equal evil. Sin just means that, as humans, we are fallible. I don't really see it as a negative judgment – God hardwired us with the capacity to exercise our free will to sin, so He probably planned on us doing so.
In this respect, all human wars are essentially an exchange of friendly fire because we are all fighting on the same battlefield where sin is concerned.
Christ knew this was the deal from the get go. His mission was clearly defined: to save us...from ourselves.
Christ bears the eternal burden of human sin so that we are free to redeem ourselves through the eternal love of forgiveness.
In this way, every misstep of ours is another opportunity to learn to forgive ourselves and accept the forgiveness of God, endowed to us by the suffering and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
We make it surprisingly hard on ourselves and become our own worst enemy by judging ourselves as wrong for backsliding. I don't believe God created us as “wrong” or lets us suffer for sport. But in giving us the capacity and choice to sin, He in turn gives us the capacity and choice to forge a deeper relationship with Him, one wherein we can choose to re-gift our free will...back to Him.
And when we do that, He moves into a very deep place inside us. There we are sheltered and freed from the bonds of living as our unhappy self, the one who is trapped by egocentric bad habits like cruelty, greed, stupidity, weakness, fear... the list goes on.
Our faith is never forced; we are not required to believe in any God or religion. Our guilt for being less than perfect is self-inflicted because forgiveness is already a done deal.
Once we invite Him in, we become the best possible rendering of ourselves. That doesn't mean we won't backslide every once in awhile, spiraling down the tunnel of our imperfection, but we will recognize and remedy it much more quickly by forgiving ourselves. We will place ourselves in His hands by folding ours together to pray for the strength to be better.
The image on the cloth of the Shroud is a road map of the capacity for human sin. The record of torture and suffering is encoded in a way that we can witness but cannot explain.
But the face...the face is the gift of the serenity of forgiveness. In gazing upon it, we fall into His protection, into our innate purity, into the divine remedy within...
In this respect, all human wars are essentially an exchange of friendly fire because we are all fighting on the same battlefield where sin is concerned.
Christ knew this was the deal from the get go. His mission was clearly defined: to save us...from ourselves.
Christ bears the eternal burden of human sin so that we are free to redeem ourselves through the eternal love of forgiveness.
In this way, every misstep of ours is another opportunity to learn to forgive ourselves and accept the forgiveness of God, endowed to us by the suffering and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
We make it surprisingly hard on ourselves and become our own worst enemy by judging ourselves as wrong for backsliding. I don't believe God created us as “wrong” or lets us suffer for sport. But in giving us the capacity and choice to sin, He in turn gives us the capacity and choice to forge a deeper relationship with Him, one wherein we can choose to re-gift our free will...back to Him.
And when we do that, He moves into a very deep place inside us. There we are sheltered and freed from the bonds of living as our unhappy self, the one who is trapped by egocentric bad habits like cruelty, greed, stupidity, weakness, fear... the list goes on.
Our faith is never forced; we are not required to believe in any God or religion. Our guilt for being less than perfect is self-inflicted because forgiveness is already a done deal.
Once we invite Him in, we become the best possible rendering of ourselves. That doesn't mean we won't backslide every once in awhile, spiraling down the tunnel of our imperfection, but we will recognize and remedy it much more quickly by forgiving ourselves. We will place ourselves in His hands by folding ours together to pray for the strength to be better.
The image on the cloth of the Shroud is a road map of the capacity for human sin. The record of torture and suffering is encoded in a way that we can witness but cannot explain.
But the face...the face is the gift of the serenity of forgiveness. In gazing upon it, we fall into His protection, into our innate purity, into the divine remedy within...
Friday, October 29, 2010
Chapter 33: Divine Bioluminescence
So...was Jesus Christ a giant firefly?
Kidding -- but I do have my usual list of questions about bioluminescence because I cannot imagine that the tomb and surrounding area could have survived a normal blast of radiation.
And the image on the Shroud evokes, and seems to have assimilated, certain unique properties of light.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jesus the living light...
Was Christ a symbiotic organism that generated light by way of being carried inside the larger organism of God?
Did His internal chemistry convert to light energy rather than heat energy?
Did His body undergo an enzyme-catalyzed chemiluminescence reaction?
Did a luciferase enzyme oxidize a luciferin, thus leaving behind a kind of light-emitting biological pigment capable of “staining” the image onto the cloth of the Shroud?
Did luciferins share the use of reactive oxygen species (ROS) generated by ionizing radiation, thus creating light-emitting pigments that played a role in His cell signaling and caused cold light emission?
Did the presence of unpaired valence shell electrons cause the ROS to be highly reactive?
If less than 20% of the light energy of Christ during the Resurrection generated thermal radiation, did He adapt His genes to be turned on for light production at a high cell density in some kind of quorum sensing process?
Is the reason no one witnessed the light during the moment of His resurrection because the total light emitted by bioluminescence is not detectable by the human eye?
If the apostles had in their possession a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) camera, would they have been able to record (from an external vantage point) a digital image of His divine bioluminescence during the Resurrection?
Is the image on the Shroud a residue of a biological pigment unlike any other because of its Divine origin?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Living organisms hold unique manifestations of biology and chemistry.
Certainly Jesus as the “Light of the World” could extend beyond all we profess to know about past, present, and future forms of life.
Perhaps He expresses unknown properties of a living organism beyond our ability to fathom...one who left behind trace evidence – of His living and suffering and dying and rising – in the imprint on the Shroud on Turin...
Kidding -- but I do have my usual list of questions about bioluminescence because I cannot imagine that the tomb and surrounding area could have survived a normal blast of radiation.
And the image on the Shroud evokes, and seems to have assimilated, certain unique properties of light.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jesus the living light...
Was Christ a symbiotic organism that generated light by way of being carried inside the larger organism of God?
Did His internal chemistry convert to light energy rather than heat energy?
Did His body undergo an enzyme-catalyzed chemiluminescence reaction?
Did a luciferase enzyme oxidize a luciferin, thus leaving behind a kind of light-emitting biological pigment capable of “staining” the image onto the cloth of the Shroud?
Did luciferins share the use of reactive oxygen species (ROS) generated by ionizing radiation, thus creating light-emitting pigments that played a role in His cell signaling and caused cold light emission?
Did the presence of unpaired valence shell electrons cause the ROS to be highly reactive?
If less than 20% of the light energy of Christ during the Resurrection generated thermal radiation, did He adapt His genes to be turned on for light production at a high cell density in some kind of quorum sensing process?
Is the reason no one witnessed the light during the moment of His resurrection because the total light emitted by bioluminescence is not detectable by the human eye?
If the apostles had in their possession a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) camera, would they have been able to record (from an external vantage point) a digital image of His divine bioluminescence during the Resurrection?
Is the image on the Shroud a residue of a biological pigment unlike any other because of its Divine origin?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Living organisms hold unique manifestations of biology and chemistry.
Certainly Jesus as the “Light of the World” could extend beyond all we profess to know about past, present, and future forms of life.
Perhaps He expresses unknown properties of a living organism beyond our ability to fathom...one who left behind trace evidence – of His living and suffering and dying and rising – in the imprint on the Shroud on Turin...
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Chapter 32: Spiritual No Man's Land
Evidence of wounds and blood on the Shroud reflect the historical Jesus. But the Shroud is much more than a record. Something else draws us to yearn. Something buried in the image challenges us to delve into a deeper exploration of human suffering.
If we break it down, human suffering usually comes in any or all of 3 forms: physical, psychological, and spiritual.
Physical encompasses things like pain, hunger, homelessness, illness, poverty, torture.
Psychological includes any emotionally based suffering, such as loss, loneliness, grief, depression, mental disorders, emotional abuse, victimization, or any moral dilemmas we grapple with, such as guilt, greed, and hunger for power and control.
Spiritual suffering can be somewhat amorphous in that, although it affects us physically and emotionally, it is rooted in the deeper crevices of our being. The 'tormented soul' terrain, as it were. The part of us that asks the bigger questions like:
“Why am I here?”
“What is my purpose?”
“What does it all mean or matter?”
And then there is spiritual no man's land...the place where absolute desperation predicates surrender.
At some juncture, life invariably traps us in unhappiness and holds us hostage. Here we appreciate our blessings, while simultaneously knowing the fear of certain suffering to come. Every moment feels laced with a kind of dread about human life on earth. We sense a life beyond and our spirits crave what is next, because what is here has become all too mundane and unbearable. Yet, we are stuck... in this no man's land, this limbo of the soul.
And then the joy begins to drain out of everything. Life begins to flatten, deflate. It's not that we don't feel moments of joy or recognize life's beauty...it's that it's not enough anymore. We long for more vibrant colors, sounds, and breezes that magically transport us to that higher place and grant us passage (instead of just getting glimpses of it in our dreams).
Our attachment to life has lost its grip and there is no turning back. And then the reality looms...that we are trapped here until we die (which might be decades). And we wonder why our minds would mess with us like this.
Our suffering has retracted to its most elemental source. Our desperation is now truly insurmountable. Dead Sea salt burns in our wounds. The narrative of pain ceases and is replaced by an eerie clenching of the soul.
Our experience of fear spirals down into the confines of self and life. There is no pretense – and nothing we have ever done prior will help us find our way out. We try to tell ourselves it is all illusion and just a trick of the mind. And maybe it is...but still we are living that illusion.
By ringing out every last teardrop of our fabric of suffering in hopes of controlling our experience of life, we nullify it as a last resort. We figure, “ If we stop feeling life it can't hurt us.” That is, of course, not true – but it feels safe to take power over suffering and simply refuse it and rather insist: “Unless life is happy and easy and pain free, we don't want to live it.”
As victims of our own human weakness, we do not wish to hurt ourselves or others, but we are not going to play this futile game either. We deem suffering as unacceptable. We refuse to accommodate it as a necessary part of spiritual growth or human life.
Lurking, as if to spite us, the realization of our predicament creeps in and we learn to dread succeeding in life because then we have too much to lose. We stagnate our lives to escape loss and pain, only to discover that frozen living is equally fraught with suffering.
and the trap snaps shut
When suffering gets the best of us it means that we give it the upper hand. We give it free reign over our life force. We give it omniscient power over our free will.
If the Shroud teaches us anything it is that human suffering does not have the upper hand. Thus, how we reconcile our suffering is what really matters. If we use our free will to go through the portal willingly, like Christ did, then we go through consciously.
Fully conscious suffering seems impossible, beyond our capacity. Usually people claim they are too weak and pick up the bottle or start taking drugs or doing something — anything to cope.
Or, when all our adult mechanisms have been zapped of their effectiveness, we revert to primal coping mechanisms to resolve our fears. In childhood and through our formative years we have imaginary experiences of fear and, often, an acute feeling of low self-esteem. We don't know if we are “OK” because we are just out the gate in this race called life and we have no direct awareness of our own speed or capabilities. We just start racing and discover ourselves as we go.
After years of self discovery, we realize there is no self. It is then we may feel the nudge to reside wherever we are best suited to loving God...and let the rest take care of itself.
No matter the causes (and there are many), the place of desperation can be our ironic entry to authentic freedom and surrender. When we trust and let God take over, we loosen our grip on our pain and suffering. We ask Him to be the one to move our lives forward, because we have finally admitted we are absolutely incapable of handling it alone.
“Into your hands, I commend my spirit”
The image on the Shroud is one of calm and peaceful release. It is the image of a man who navigated His way through the desert of spiritual no man's land...a man who transcended human suffering by surrendering to God.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
the cry low deep
an edge too steep
you dive into density
absorbing a black hole
compressing mass
swallowing darkness
there the awakening fright
you are your own prisoner
solo
at the bottom of self
in the place of never happy
true surrender animates freedom
once you admit that alone you cannot
giving up
giving in
you beckon
Lord
pull me
past panic
corner me
in desperation
ruin me
in fear
purify me
in your image
magnetize me
in your might
mold my clay of gravity
transfigure me into light
If we break it down, human suffering usually comes in any or all of 3 forms: physical, psychological, and spiritual.
Physical encompasses things like pain, hunger, homelessness, illness, poverty, torture.
Psychological includes any emotionally based suffering, such as loss, loneliness, grief, depression, mental disorders, emotional abuse, victimization, or any moral dilemmas we grapple with, such as guilt, greed, and hunger for power and control.
Spiritual suffering can be somewhat amorphous in that, although it affects us physically and emotionally, it is rooted in the deeper crevices of our being. The 'tormented soul' terrain, as it were. The part of us that asks the bigger questions like:
“Why am I here?”
“What is my purpose?”
“What does it all mean or matter?”
And then there is spiritual no man's land...the place where absolute desperation predicates surrender.
At some juncture, life invariably traps us in unhappiness and holds us hostage. Here we appreciate our blessings, while simultaneously knowing the fear of certain suffering to come. Every moment feels laced with a kind of dread about human life on earth. We sense a life beyond and our spirits crave what is next, because what is here has become all too mundane and unbearable. Yet, we are stuck... in this no man's land, this limbo of the soul.
And then the joy begins to drain out of everything. Life begins to flatten, deflate. It's not that we don't feel moments of joy or recognize life's beauty...it's that it's not enough anymore. We long for more vibrant colors, sounds, and breezes that magically transport us to that higher place and grant us passage (instead of just getting glimpses of it in our dreams).
Our attachment to life has lost its grip and there is no turning back. And then the reality looms...that we are trapped here until we die (which might be decades). And we wonder why our minds would mess with us like this.
Our suffering has retracted to its most elemental source. Our desperation is now truly insurmountable. Dead Sea salt burns in our wounds. The narrative of pain ceases and is replaced by an eerie clenching of the soul.
Our experience of fear spirals down into the confines of self and life. There is no pretense – and nothing we have ever done prior will help us find our way out. We try to tell ourselves it is all illusion and just a trick of the mind. And maybe it is...but still we are living that illusion.
By ringing out every last teardrop of our fabric of suffering in hopes of controlling our experience of life, we nullify it as a last resort. We figure, “ If we stop feeling life it can't hurt us.” That is, of course, not true – but it feels safe to take power over suffering and simply refuse it and rather insist: “Unless life is happy and easy and pain free, we don't want to live it.”
As victims of our own human weakness, we do not wish to hurt ourselves or others, but we are not going to play this futile game either. We deem suffering as unacceptable. We refuse to accommodate it as a necessary part of spiritual growth or human life.
Lurking, as if to spite us, the realization of our predicament creeps in and we learn to dread succeeding in life because then we have too much to lose. We stagnate our lives to escape loss and pain, only to discover that frozen living is equally fraught with suffering.
and the trap snaps shut
When suffering gets the best of us it means that we give it the upper hand. We give it free reign over our life force. We give it omniscient power over our free will.
If the Shroud teaches us anything it is that human suffering does not have the upper hand. Thus, how we reconcile our suffering is what really matters. If we use our free will to go through the portal willingly, like Christ did, then we go through consciously.
Fully conscious suffering seems impossible, beyond our capacity. Usually people claim they are too weak and pick up the bottle or start taking drugs or doing something — anything to cope.
Or, when all our adult mechanisms have been zapped of their effectiveness, we revert to primal coping mechanisms to resolve our fears. In childhood and through our formative years we have imaginary experiences of fear and, often, an acute feeling of low self-esteem. We don't know if we are “OK” because we are just out the gate in this race called life and we have no direct awareness of our own speed or capabilities. We just start racing and discover ourselves as we go.
After years of self discovery, we realize there is no self. It is then we may feel the nudge to reside wherever we are best suited to loving God...and let the rest take care of itself.
No matter the causes (and there are many), the place of desperation can be our ironic entry to authentic freedom and surrender. When we trust and let God take over, we loosen our grip on our pain and suffering. We ask Him to be the one to move our lives forward, because we have finally admitted we are absolutely incapable of handling it alone.
“Into your hands, I commend my spirit”
The image on the Shroud is one of calm and peaceful release. It is the image of a man who navigated His way through the desert of spiritual no man's land...a man who transcended human suffering by surrendering to God.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
the cry low deep
an edge too steep
you dive into density
absorbing a black hole
compressing mass
swallowing darkness
there the awakening fright
you are your own prisoner
solo
at the bottom of self
in the place of never happy
true surrender animates freedom
once you admit that alone you cannot
giving up
giving in
you beckon
Lord
pull me
past panic
corner me
in desperation
ruin me
in fear
purify me
in your image
magnetize me
in your might
mold my clay of gravity
transfigure me into light
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Chapter 31: Search Engines for God
In our current Age of Accessibility the evolution of mankind has made an exponential leap thanks to the computer and the Internet.
Children born into the world now will never really know what it is like not to have at their disposal access to information about everything. They will never know how almost impossible it used to be to travel to strange and foreign lands. They will not be denied access to global information, photographs, videos, and news. Children born into this world now are essentially drop-kicked into life's complexities and their medium for learning is the search engine.
Each human being is, in and of him/herself a kind of search engine and operates like a search engine in the quest to know (or deny) God.
Outreach and Inreach
The farther outward we are able to reach to access information to understand our existence, we will equally reach farther inward to access the same. Thus, one's external capabilities and obsession with an Internet search engine is the mirrored reflection of our internal evolution and our insistence in accessing God through the search engine of one's self.
The Shroud, unlike anything else, is the manifestation of the fusion of the external and internal search engines. It mysteriously lures us towards its vortex-like pathway to God. No human mind in our world has been able to crack the code and access all the necessary information about how the image was formed or how it could be reproduced. The Shroud helps us to appreciate the layers upon layers of complexity and simplicity of our cosmos and the omniscience of God.
When we take everything we know, of Christ's life, of the Gospels, of the Bible, of the sciences, of religion, of history, of physics we fall down the rabbit hole into the image on the Shroud, searching for God through the light of the Resurrection of Christ.
Children born into the world now will never really know what it is like not to have at their disposal access to information about everything. They will never know how almost impossible it used to be to travel to strange and foreign lands. They will not be denied access to global information, photographs, videos, and news. Children born into this world now are essentially drop-kicked into life's complexities and their medium for learning is the search engine.
Each human being is, in and of him/herself a kind of search engine and operates like a search engine in the quest to know (or deny) God.
Outreach and Inreach
The farther outward we are able to reach to access information to understand our existence, we will equally reach farther inward to access the same. Thus, one's external capabilities and obsession with an Internet search engine is the mirrored reflection of our internal evolution and our insistence in accessing God through the search engine of one's self.
The Shroud, unlike anything else, is the manifestation of the fusion of the external and internal search engines. It mysteriously lures us towards its vortex-like pathway to God. No human mind in our world has been able to crack the code and access all the necessary information about how the image was formed or how it could be reproduced. The Shroud helps us to appreciate the layers upon layers of complexity and simplicity of our cosmos and the omniscience of God.
When we take everything we know, of Christ's life, of the Gospels, of the Bible, of the sciences, of religion, of history, of physics we fall down the rabbit hole into the image on the Shroud, searching for God through the light of the Resurrection of Christ.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Chapter 30: Humility
By now it is well known that no one can figure out how the image got onto the cloth of the Shroud of Turin, or how to reproduce it. And, most likely, no one ever will. So where does that leave us? Even if the speculations of some are true (that the image was caused by a burst of radiation during resurrection), we can never know for sure. Some can build amazing machines, such as the LHC and the TEVETRON, to find the God particle. Others can attempt to use nuclear reactors to prove the image was caused by outside radiation. But more likely than not, all anyone can ever attain is a “it could have happened this way” answer. Not that people shouldn't try and keep trying, but maybe there is more to consider.
If we cannot, and possibly never will be able to prove or reproduce the image...what was the point? Why would Christ have left it behind for us?
– To rub it in how very inadequate we are?
– To offer us hope of eternal life?
– To give us solid evidence so we would find a scientific way to explain or recreate resurrection?
– To guide us to levels of mind power and free will power that we never realized were accessible to us – akin to Dorothy's ruby slippers?
– To leave behind proof that Christianity is the true religion?
No possible solid answers. Just theories and beliefs and hopes and skepticism and cynicism. Yet we are mystified and compelled to keep trying to solve the mystery. We want to swim in the not knowing. We want desperately to prove it is real or fake.
Faith is not about proving. Faith is about trusting.
We are an entertaining species, at once naïve and arrogant, always hustling and haggling with life, ever needing to exert our control.
The Christianity of the past, it seems to me, had a lot more to do with humility. If we have faith that the image of the Shroud is indeed the stamp of the Almighty...can we not find the humility to admit that the supreme creator of all just may have left us a sign of His power. Isn't rejoicing in that enough for the faithful? Or do we need to venture farther because we think there is a hidden message about our own capabilities. And even if we could prove how Christ left behind the image, do we really think our own consciousness is so all powerful that we can resurrect ourselves?
I like to imagine Christ, suspended between the top and bottom of the cloth, floating and then choosing to have His particles expand to such a degree that He, in essence, vaporizes and reassembles into the image in such a way that His particles fall onto the fibrils of the cloth and also extend into the cloth as holographic information, before He expands so far and beyond our cognitive capabilities that we are at a loss to pinpoint His domain. He becomes the everything and is stamped inside each one of us.
Do I think I would ever be able to reach such a level of consciousness that I would be capable of doing the same? No. And does that make me feel human and inadequate? Yes. And does it also make me feel humbled? Very much so.
I think it is important to balance our trying to prove with humility and acceptance that our science may simply be inadequate. This is difficult, for both believers and skeptics. Believers seek proof that their faith is valid. Skeptics seek proof that their science is valid. What if faith and science are both valid and invalid? What if human consciousness is simultaneously adequate and inadequate? What if we already know everything there is to know...but we are simply unaware that we already know it?
I think the Christianity of the past over-played the humility card to make it seem almost like punishment. It had degrading overtones – as though we were too stupid and incompetent to know God. Presently, the scales are tipped in the polar opposite direction and we have become so confident in all our technologies and theories that we over-play the arrogant card and are certain we are capable of explaining God. From that perspective, the Shroud is a fascinating test for both our science and our faith. And it allows us to tinker with the deeper meaning of our existence, which we love to do.
Part of the fun of being human is that, as we advance our knowledge and technologies, we seem to be getting closer and closer to fundamental truth (though I imagine many “explorers” from the past felt the same as they made their way through the journey of human living). We enjoy thinking, doing, philosophizing, explaining, creating, and expanding our consciousness. The irony might be that this expansion is already complete and we are simply unaware.
Perhaps questioning and explaining are simply two sides of the same coin. If you read this blog, you will see that I prefer to hang out in the realm of questioning, mostly because I am ill equipped to explain because I am not a physicist or scientist. I rely mostly on intuition. To me, truth seeking is sport and essence combined.
The truth may just be that we never really know if we are close to the answers or not. Or maybe we already have the answers and just don't know it. Perhaps our struggle to understand is unnecessary and is just another feeble attempt on our part to control human existence. Perhaps we long to control because we feel as though we are not enough as we are. Perhaps control is already completely at our disposal or is completely unnecessary. The image on the Shroud is of a man who has surrendered, to suffering, to death, to resurrection. But surrendering is difficult for us because it means giving up control.
Sometimes, in a quiet moment, I can feel a fraction of the absolute power and glory of God. It's in our DNA. It's in everything that surrounds us. And it is truly magnificent and worthy of our awe. In those fractions of awareness, I need no proof, no explanation, no theory.
humbled by
the spirit of God operating
being is enough
If we cannot, and possibly never will be able to prove or reproduce the image...what was the point? Why would Christ have left it behind for us?
– To rub it in how very inadequate we are?
– To offer us hope of eternal life?
– To give us solid evidence so we would find a scientific way to explain or recreate resurrection?
– To guide us to levels of mind power and free will power that we never realized were accessible to us – akin to Dorothy's ruby slippers?
– To leave behind proof that Christianity is the true religion?
No possible solid answers. Just theories and beliefs and hopes and skepticism and cynicism. Yet we are mystified and compelled to keep trying to solve the mystery. We want to swim in the not knowing. We want desperately to prove it is real or fake.
Faith is not about proving. Faith is about trusting.
We are an entertaining species, at once naïve and arrogant, always hustling and haggling with life, ever needing to exert our control.
The Christianity of the past, it seems to me, had a lot more to do with humility. If we have faith that the image of the Shroud is indeed the stamp of the Almighty...can we not find the humility to admit that the supreme creator of all just may have left us a sign of His power. Isn't rejoicing in that enough for the faithful? Or do we need to venture farther because we think there is a hidden message about our own capabilities. And even if we could prove how Christ left behind the image, do we really think our own consciousness is so all powerful that we can resurrect ourselves?
I like to imagine Christ, suspended between the top and bottom of the cloth, floating and then choosing to have His particles expand to such a degree that He, in essence, vaporizes and reassembles into the image in such a way that His particles fall onto the fibrils of the cloth and also extend into the cloth as holographic information, before He expands so far and beyond our cognitive capabilities that we are at a loss to pinpoint His domain. He becomes the everything and is stamped inside each one of us.
Do I think I would ever be able to reach such a level of consciousness that I would be capable of doing the same? No. And does that make me feel human and inadequate? Yes. And does it also make me feel humbled? Very much so.
I think it is important to balance our trying to prove with humility and acceptance that our science may simply be inadequate. This is difficult, for both believers and skeptics. Believers seek proof that their faith is valid. Skeptics seek proof that their science is valid. What if faith and science are both valid and invalid? What if human consciousness is simultaneously adequate and inadequate? What if we already know everything there is to know...but we are simply unaware that we already know it?
I think the Christianity of the past over-played the humility card to make it seem almost like punishment. It had degrading overtones – as though we were too stupid and incompetent to know God. Presently, the scales are tipped in the polar opposite direction and we have become so confident in all our technologies and theories that we over-play the arrogant card and are certain we are capable of explaining God. From that perspective, the Shroud is a fascinating test for both our science and our faith. And it allows us to tinker with the deeper meaning of our existence, which we love to do.
Part of the fun of being human is that, as we advance our knowledge and technologies, we seem to be getting closer and closer to fundamental truth (though I imagine many “explorers” from the past felt the same as they made their way through the journey of human living). We enjoy thinking, doing, philosophizing, explaining, creating, and expanding our consciousness. The irony might be that this expansion is already complete and we are simply unaware.
Perhaps questioning and explaining are simply two sides of the same coin. If you read this blog, you will see that I prefer to hang out in the realm of questioning, mostly because I am ill equipped to explain because I am not a physicist or scientist. I rely mostly on intuition. To me, truth seeking is sport and essence combined.
The truth may just be that we never really know if we are close to the answers or not. Or maybe we already have the answers and just don't know it. Perhaps our struggle to understand is unnecessary and is just another feeble attempt on our part to control human existence. Perhaps we long to control because we feel as though we are not enough as we are. Perhaps control is already completely at our disposal or is completely unnecessary. The image on the Shroud is of a man who has surrendered, to suffering, to death, to resurrection. But surrendering is difficult for us because it means giving up control.
Sometimes, in a quiet moment, I can feel a fraction of the absolute power and glory of God. It's in our DNA. It's in everything that surrounds us. And it is truly magnificent and worthy of our awe. In those fractions of awareness, I need no proof, no explanation, no theory.
humbled by
the spirit of God operating
being is enough
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Chapter 29: Hidden Symmetry
I consider myself to be a student of the Shroud of Turin. I study it and it teaches me, continuously. Locked inside its image are secrets so profound that I am compelled to persist with my exploration. I realize I will never be able to prove anything in terms of how the image got there or what it means...but the relevant journey extends far beyond any proving.
The more I contemplate the Shroud, the more I come to realize that no proof is proof. If we could recreate the image or prove how it got there, it would be of worldly things and no measure of God. The fact that we cannot reproduce it leans us towards it being something of God.
Sometimes radical thoughts about it cross my mind. The most recent of these is: The image on the Shroud is the living Christ.
If we consider Christ's death and the disappearance of His body, how can we even be sure that His death would measure equally to a normal human death? If He was a man with supernatural capabilities, then it is possible that His physical death was a mirage, or at least that something beyond the typical indicators of physical death might have been going on – especially in terms of His consciousness.
The physical disappearance of His body too indicates that some force either acted upon His body or He evoked some force, via which He was able to make His physical body disappear. Mass into energy seems simple enough, except that the tomb and likely several nearby countries would have been blasted into smithereens...
But what if He did not completely disappear and the image on the Shroud is a living residue of His physical body? Loosely defined, living would mean that it possesses an energetic quality that has a vibratory presence. A frequency, so to speak, of a living entity.
If you were not fortunate enough to see the Shroud at the 2010 exhibition, you can see it on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PakXpgcoijg
In the 20 hours I spent looking at the Shroud, I can say that the image itself has a pulse, a vibratory quality, as though it is simultaneously emitting and receiving light and energy from some unknown source. It has a grace and presence, calm and serenity. It feels energetically alive, not static or stagnant. It hums with the breath of the living Christ. (I wonder if anyone has ever tested it for the emission of any kind of frequency sounds).
Intuitively the image beckons us to keep searching for answers we very likely can never acquire while in our human body framework. Yet our quest to know is insatiable – even when we know we cannot know. The only reassurance we get is the intuitive impulse to keep exploring and explaining, wandering and wondering, questing and questioning...
This living energy quality of the image on the Shroud takes me back to questions of physics. Our definitions of human life and death tend to be limited to identifiable indicators of both. But if we consider questions of life and death within the larger framework of all existence, hidden energies and symmetries evoke deeper questions and meanings about life and death.
The God Particle. It's known as the Higgs Boson and physicists from around the world are on the chase for it. They know there is a range of values where the particle could be. They say it explains why everything around us has mass. They say that if it turns out it doesn't exist, then the Standard Model is incorrect. It's the only particle in the Standard Model that hasn't been observed. Some think it is the mediator of mass.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If before the Big Bang a symmetry existed, does that symmetry still exist and is the image on the Shroud is a reflection of it?
Is not the cloth under the image on the Shroud also exemplary of mediating mass? Is the Higgs Boson observable right in front of us — in the threads beneath the image on the Shroud?
If the mass of all particles, hence all matter, is derived from the Higgs field...and the Higgs Boson is the measurable particle of the Higgs field and is its own anti-particle and is CP even(charge conjugation symmetry + parity symmetry – meaning the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle), then did the Higgs Field emerge from an original state of symmetry?
Does the image on the Shroud express CP symmetry? Is it CP even?
We focus so much on the actual image on the surface fibrils, but what of that which lies in the threads beneath it? Is the anti-image the mirrored parity symmetry of the image?
Does the holographic nature of the image and the mirrored image from the threads beneath bely the hidden symmetry between the image, the cloth and the mediating energy/radiation?
Is the image on the Shroud an example of simultaneous preservation and violation of CP symmetry?
The weak interaction is the only force capable of violating CP symmetry. If pions and muons decay during the weak interaction — does this mean they do not have parity symmetry?
Is the Planck mass responsible for originating consciousness?
If the resurrection was an expression of the symmetry that existed before the Big Bang, were the photons from Christ's body at resurrection the massless force carrier for electromagnetism that broke the symmetry between the other force carriers and interacted with the weak force carriers on the cloth to give the image its mass?
Does SUSY (supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model) tell us how the image was created and what it means? Are there many Higgs bosons particles or is it just a single particle?
Does SUSY account for dark matter?
And what of the theory of “weak dematerialization”? Was there some thermal neutron flux or radio-carbon anomaly that was the result of weak dematerialization of the body during resurrection? Did the release of pions and muons allow them to decay and bombard the cloth to form the image?
Did Christ use His free will to release gravity?
If nuclear radiation occurred in Christ's tomb, was the Shroud cloth irradiated by particle radiation?
Would the blast of radiation have acted as a shape charge, as though the explosion during Resurrection would have directed the force of the blast through the “projectile” (Christ's body) and onto the cloth?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Out of asymmetry comes all universes, glued together by gravity, unglued by hidden symmetry. Just as massless photons and the heavy massed W and Z bosons allow each other to coexist, so too perhaps is symmetry allowed by forces that will forever remain (to us) an unobservable mystery.
The energies we would need to explain the gravity–related gaps are impossible to obtain. Even if physicists find the Higgs Boson, the hidden symmetry of God will always remain hidden because we cannot retain our mass and our human living inside a massless sea of radiation. If we are to live in the hidden symmetry of God, we live as light.
Perhaps the resurrection is the Anti-Big Bang...or the Little Bang, where Christ imploded and released into symmetry on such a minuscule, reverse subatomic scale that the process left Him living on tiny dots of particles, evenly sprayed across a linen cloth...as the mirrored inversion of the resurrection, the living radiation, the trail of mass leading us to faith.
silence holds all sound
light holds all darkness
space holds all form
mass is and is not
life is and is not
suffering is and is not
death is and is not
no proof is proof
The more I contemplate the Shroud, the more I come to realize that no proof is proof. If we could recreate the image or prove how it got there, it would be of worldly things and no measure of God. The fact that we cannot reproduce it leans us towards it being something of God.
Sometimes radical thoughts about it cross my mind. The most recent of these is: The image on the Shroud is the living Christ.
If we consider Christ's death and the disappearance of His body, how can we even be sure that His death would measure equally to a normal human death? If He was a man with supernatural capabilities, then it is possible that His physical death was a mirage, or at least that something beyond the typical indicators of physical death might have been going on – especially in terms of His consciousness.
The physical disappearance of His body too indicates that some force either acted upon His body or He evoked some force, via which He was able to make His physical body disappear. Mass into energy seems simple enough, except that the tomb and likely several nearby countries would have been blasted into smithereens...
But what if He did not completely disappear and the image on the Shroud is a living residue of His physical body? Loosely defined, living would mean that it possesses an energetic quality that has a vibratory presence. A frequency, so to speak, of a living entity.
If you were not fortunate enough to see the Shroud at the 2010 exhibition, you can see it on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PakXpgcoijg
In the 20 hours I spent looking at the Shroud, I can say that the image itself has a pulse, a vibratory quality, as though it is simultaneously emitting and receiving light and energy from some unknown source. It has a grace and presence, calm and serenity. It feels energetically alive, not static or stagnant. It hums with the breath of the living Christ. (I wonder if anyone has ever tested it for the emission of any kind of frequency sounds).
Intuitively the image beckons us to keep searching for answers we very likely can never acquire while in our human body framework. Yet our quest to know is insatiable – even when we know we cannot know. The only reassurance we get is the intuitive impulse to keep exploring and explaining, wandering and wondering, questing and questioning...
This living energy quality of the image on the Shroud takes me back to questions of physics. Our definitions of human life and death tend to be limited to identifiable indicators of both. But if we consider questions of life and death within the larger framework of all existence, hidden energies and symmetries evoke deeper questions and meanings about life and death.
The God Particle. It's known as the Higgs Boson and physicists from around the world are on the chase for it. They know there is a range of values where the particle could be. They say it explains why everything around us has mass. They say that if it turns out it doesn't exist, then the Standard Model is incorrect. It's the only particle in the Standard Model that hasn't been observed. Some think it is the mediator of mass.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If before the Big Bang a symmetry existed, does that symmetry still exist and is the image on the Shroud is a reflection of it?
Is not the cloth under the image on the Shroud also exemplary of mediating mass? Is the Higgs Boson observable right in front of us — in the threads beneath the image on the Shroud?
If the mass of all particles, hence all matter, is derived from the Higgs field...and the Higgs Boson is the measurable particle of the Higgs field and is its own anti-particle and is CP even(charge conjugation symmetry + parity symmetry – meaning the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle), then did the Higgs Field emerge from an original state of symmetry?
Does the image on the Shroud express CP symmetry? Is it CP even?
We focus so much on the actual image on the surface fibrils, but what of that which lies in the threads beneath it? Is the anti-image the mirrored parity symmetry of the image?
Does the holographic nature of the image and the mirrored image from the threads beneath bely the hidden symmetry between the image, the cloth and the mediating energy/radiation?
Is the image on the Shroud an example of simultaneous preservation and violation of CP symmetry?
The weak interaction is the only force capable of violating CP symmetry. If pions and muons decay during the weak interaction — does this mean they do not have parity symmetry?
Is the Planck mass responsible for originating consciousness?
If the resurrection was an expression of the symmetry that existed before the Big Bang, were the photons from Christ's body at resurrection the massless force carrier for electromagnetism that broke the symmetry between the other force carriers and interacted with the weak force carriers on the cloth to give the image its mass?
Does SUSY (supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model) tell us how the image was created and what it means? Are there many Higgs bosons particles or is it just a single particle?
Does SUSY account for dark matter?
And what of the theory of “weak dematerialization”? Was there some thermal neutron flux or radio-carbon anomaly that was the result of weak dematerialization of the body during resurrection? Did the release of pions and muons allow them to decay and bombard the cloth to form the image?
Did Christ use His free will to release gravity?
If nuclear radiation occurred in Christ's tomb, was the Shroud cloth irradiated by particle radiation?
Would the blast of radiation have acted as a shape charge, as though the explosion during Resurrection would have directed the force of the blast through the “projectile” (Christ's body) and onto the cloth?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Out of asymmetry comes all universes, glued together by gravity, unglued by hidden symmetry. Just as massless photons and the heavy massed W and Z bosons allow each other to coexist, so too perhaps is symmetry allowed by forces that will forever remain (to us) an unobservable mystery.
The energies we would need to explain the gravity–related gaps are impossible to obtain. Even if physicists find the Higgs Boson, the hidden symmetry of God will always remain hidden because we cannot retain our mass and our human living inside a massless sea of radiation. If we are to live in the hidden symmetry of God, we live as light.
Perhaps the resurrection is the Anti-Big Bang...or the Little Bang, where Christ imploded and released into symmetry on such a minuscule, reverse subatomic scale that the process left Him living on tiny dots of particles, evenly sprayed across a linen cloth...as the mirrored inversion of the resurrection, the living radiation, the trail of mass leading us to faith.
silence holds all sound
light holds all darkness
space holds all form
mass is and is not
life is and is not
suffering is and is not
death is and is not
no proof is proof
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Chapter 28: Constructs
questions asked
theories posed
an image on a cloth reposed
resurrection
salvation
serenity
suffering composed
near death
reliving the past
foretelling the future
reincarnation
out of body
aura emission
power of thought
mystery of dream
mind over matter
thought into matter
virtual visualization
energy elicitation
matter manipulation
density derivation
thought transformation
theory modulation
sleep simulation
human conglomeration
life liberation
death desecration
what we think we know
constructs shared
by cultures and generations
beliefs and religions
practices and faiths
miracles
no space
no time
no locality
not defined
holographic
holocentric
holoverse
holodiverse
layers
phases
transparencies
alternate dimensions
potential futures
parallel universes
particles
waves
vibrations
forming fate
determining destiny
creating consciousness
reality participation
questioning
why we bother
what it all means
who cares
why me
why us
anybody out there
please answer
answer seeking mongers
stuck in perceptions
defined by the physical body
mind is
consciousness is
awareness is
God is
free will is
individuality is
unity is
God
faith the gift paramount
theories posed
an image on a cloth reposed
resurrection
salvation
serenity
suffering composed
near death
reliving the past
foretelling the future
reincarnation
out of body
aura emission
power of thought
mystery of dream
mind over matter
thought into matter
virtual visualization
energy elicitation
matter manipulation
density derivation
thought transformation
theory modulation
sleep simulation
human conglomeration
life liberation
death desecration
what we think we know
constructs shared
by cultures and generations
beliefs and religions
practices and faiths
miracles
no space
no time
no locality
not defined
holographic
holocentric
holoverse
holodiverse
layers
phases
transparencies
alternate dimensions
potential futures
parallel universes
particles
waves
vibrations
forming fate
determining destiny
creating consciousness
reality participation
questioning
why we bother
what it all means
who cares
why me
why us
anybody out there
please answer
answer seeking mongers
stuck in perceptions
defined by the physical body
mind is
consciousness is
awareness is
God is
free will is
individuality is
unity is
God
faith the gift paramount
Friday, July 16, 2010
Chapter 27: Reality Fields Forever
Human reality is generally confined by our perceptions, which are generally confined by our senses. Some people are able to hang out in the fringe and do things like see auras or move objects with their minds or materialize matter out of thin air. Many have been documented. Their access to reality fields extends a bit further than ours.
Some of the saints and mystics delved into alternate reality fields, as do some of those who experience stigmata or other miraculous phenomena for which no plausible explanation exists inside conventional reality.
Most of us exist in a box where we experience our lives through our senses and then make sense of our world through the information we take in and mold into our perceptions. Human life, in this way, is so limiting.
If we imagine a human frequency, beyond our senses and perceptions, a higher frequency than that of normal matter/energy, a vibratory energy (according to the Hindus), we can start to understand how some have seemingly supernatural abilities. We can also begin to fathom different reality fields stretching out into forever.
Our human construct, the thing we think we know, is solidified by our thinking we know and understand human reality. We take comfort in our box and most of us would probably prefer not to see auras or be able to move objects with our minds because what would that mean about the true nature of our reality? Is our box a complete illusion, only a construct to which we adhere for comfort's sake?
At times we all intuitively yearn for life outside the box, for alternate modalities in order to expand our existence. We sometimes experience frustration, knowing in our minds and hearts that so much more is possible, yet we remain trapped by the limitations of our human perceptions.
Certainly experiences where the normal human reality field meets the human energy field are worthwhile in that they prove that the simultaneous coexistence of the two realms of being are possible. Throughout history some people have stepped outside the box and shimmered for awhile in an alternate reality.
But no one can really define what a human energy field is. Like an electron, it exists beyond the limitations of our human definitions. We can only define it loosely, based on our observations of how it behaves. We cannot solidify it as a construct and then explain what it is made of or name its essence.
One has to wonder what modalities Christ was able to access or if He used free will to transfer His image onto the cloth of the Shroud, or to “cause” His image to appear. When any of us uses our free will to cause something to happen, we take ownership of that cause, meaning nothing else is doing the causing. It is as though our free will is connected to, or is the manifestation of, our human energy field.
Some interface between thought and matter must have allowed Christ to cause His suffering to transform into light and leave behind His serene image. He somehow released the matter of his physical body into light. And that light somehow managed to leave behind residual matter (His image).
Matter -- into light -- back into matter
Because no one has ever been able to explain or duplicate His image on the Shroud...
Because the image challenges science and religion to merge their efforts and share their insights to solve the mystery...
Because my birth resulted from having been cloned from the blood on the Shroud...
All these reasons have lead me to use my free will to cause and continue to deeply question how Christ was able to leave behind His image and why He would have chosen to do so...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Is the image on the Shroud a picture of one possibility of how the human energy field behaves?
Does a human energy field exist everywhere at the same time...is it non-local?
Does human perception transform this frequency into solidity for the sake of controlling and comprehending our existence?
Was Christ's body at death a solid construct or a holographic image...or both?
By solidifying His image on the cloth, did Christ provide us with a glimpse into nonlocality, one that we can experience via our limited human perceptions for the sake of teaching us that we are both a solid body and a human energy frequency, capable of so much more that we realize?
If God is the consciousness that produces the appearance and awareness of the brain, matter, space, and time...then is the image on the Shroud the only human energy field perceivable to humans?
Does consciousness, via the human mind, create all realities or are all realities a manifestation of God, a consciousness that encompasses all and the human mind is just one of its realities?
If Christ's physical body was one reality field, that of solidity, then is the image on the Shroud evidence that matter (solidity) can co-exist simultaneously with the reality field of an energy frequency?
If we were to simply open ourselves and let God in on an energetic level, would we shift into deeper, more fascinating and reliable reality fields?
Is our free will to choose to live God's will for our lives equal to the choice to transform the matter of our bodies into light?
Is our free will our mechanism for the continuation of the life of our human souls?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It almost seems moot to look for answers/proof inside unexplainable phenomena...its existence already is an answer, already is the proof that we exist far beyond our perceived limitations, regardless if our senses are able to conjure perceptions that confirm this or not.
regarding matter
say it so
so be it
Some of the saints and mystics delved into alternate reality fields, as do some of those who experience stigmata or other miraculous phenomena for which no plausible explanation exists inside conventional reality.
Most of us exist in a box where we experience our lives through our senses and then make sense of our world through the information we take in and mold into our perceptions. Human life, in this way, is so limiting.
If we imagine a human frequency, beyond our senses and perceptions, a higher frequency than that of normal matter/energy, a vibratory energy (according to the Hindus), we can start to understand how some have seemingly supernatural abilities. We can also begin to fathom different reality fields stretching out into forever.
Our human construct, the thing we think we know, is solidified by our thinking we know and understand human reality. We take comfort in our box and most of us would probably prefer not to see auras or be able to move objects with our minds because what would that mean about the true nature of our reality? Is our box a complete illusion, only a construct to which we adhere for comfort's sake?
At times we all intuitively yearn for life outside the box, for alternate modalities in order to expand our existence. We sometimes experience frustration, knowing in our minds and hearts that so much more is possible, yet we remain trapped by the limitations of our human perceptions.
Certainly experiences where the normal human reality field meets the human energy field are worthwhile in that they prove that the simultaneous coexistence of the two realms of being are possible. Throughout history some people have stepped outside the box and shimmered for awhile in an alternate reality.
But no one can really define what a human energy field is. Like an electron, it exists beyond the limitations of our human definitions. We can only define it loosely, based on our observations of how it behaves. We cannot solidify it as a construct and then explain what it is made of or name its essence.
One has to wonder what modalities Christ was able to access or if He used free will to transfer His image onto the cloth of the Shroud, or to “cause” His image to appear. When any of us uses our free will to cause something to happen, we take ownership of that cause, meaning nothing else is doing the causing. It is as though our free will is connected to, or is the manifestation of, our human energy field.
Some interface between thought and matter must have allowed Christ to cause His suffering to transform into light and leave behind His serene image. He somehow released the matter of his physical body into light. And that light somehow managed to leave behind residual matter (His image).
Matter -- into light -- back into matter
Because no one has ever been able to explain or duplicate His image on the Shroud...
Because the image challenges science and religion to merge their efforts and share their insights to solve the mystery...
Because my birth resulted from having been cloned from the blood on the Shroud...
All these reasons have lead me to use my free will to cause and continue to deeply question how Christ was able to leave behind His image and why He would have chosen to do so...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Is the image on the Shroud a picture of one possibility of how the human energy field behaves?
Does a human energy field exist everywhere at the same time...is it non-local?
Does human perception transform this frequency into solidity for the sake of controlling and comprehending our existence?
Was Christ's body at death a solid construct or a holographic image...or both?
By solidifying His image on the cloth, did Christ provide us with a glimpse into nonlocality, one that we can experience via our limited human perceptions for the sake of teaching us that we are both a solid body and a human energy frequency, capable of so much more that we realize?
If God is the consciousness that produces the appearance and awareness of the brain, matter, space, and time...then is the image on the Shroud the only human energy field perceivable to humans?
Does consciousness, via the human mind, create all realities or are all realities a manifestation of God, a consciousness that encompasses all and the human mind is just one of its realities?
If Christ's physical body was one reality field, that of solidity, then is the image on the Shroud evidence that matter (solidity) can co-exist simultaneously with the reality field of an energy frequency?
If we were to simply open ourselves and let God in on an energetic level, would we shift into deeper, more fascinating and reliable reality fields?
Is our free will to choose to live God's will for our lives equal to the choice to transform the matter of our bodies into light?
Is our free will our mechanism for the continuation of the life of our human souls?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It almost seems moot to look for answers/proof inside unexplainable phenomena...its existence already is an answer, already is the proof that we exist far beyond our perceived limitations, regardless if our senses are able to conjure perceptions that confirm this or not.
regarding matter
say it so
so be it
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Chapter 26: A Piece of Peace
“I leave you peace. My peace I give you.”
The most remarkable contrast evident upon the image on the Shroud of Turin is the overwhelming sense of peace amidst ample forensic proof of so many tortuous wounds and bloodstains. Clearly the man of the Shroud suffered immense physical pain, yet the residue of His image projects complete serenity.
Why would the image of serenity immersed in suffering have been the only artifact left behind? Was it Christ's intention to show us another possibility for our relationship to suffering?
Given the right set of circumstances, it would be safe to say that “the whole world is against us.” Among the billions of people on the planet, there are very few people, mostly our family and friends, who care deeply for us. Are we so naïve that we actually believe the world population really cares about our tiny individual lives before their own? If the whole world were to fall into a state of crisis, we would likely all be capable of turning on each other to fight for our own and our family's survival. Our lives hang in such a precarious balance and we are always on the edge of this primitive “survival of the fittest” mode, even though we perpetuate an illusion to the contrary.
The recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is only one tiny fragment of proof that having zero back up plan is the norm for many human endeavors. We coexist in the illusion that our governments, companies, and institutions have their acts together and can handle all manner of large scale crises. We fabricate this false comfort zone because the reality of the tenuous nature of human existence is too overwhelmingly scary to contemplate. Good thing we have a sense of humor...
As one crisis after another emerges in our world, we are starting to see that our relief efforts only go so far. Haiti is still a disaster and most who were there to help have moved on. It's understandable – people can only do so much to help others; our own lives inevitably beckon us back home to help ourselves and those we love.
The time between disasters and crises seems to be shortening. It begs the question:
Why hasn't the the whole world already fallen into crisis all at once?
And that question leads me to other questions...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What is this force that binds together all our fragile realities and doles out the suffering incrementally so that we can recover and sustain our existence as a species?
Is it the same force that binds the scars and stains of torture embedded into the image on the Shroud?
Is human suffering holographic in nature, existing on many planes, in various domains, all suspended in some illusion of reality?
Is our suffering like a holographic image in that it is nonlocal – it cannot remain in a fixed location in space and time?
Do the particles of our suffering convert to waves when we are not directly experiencing the pain?
Is suffering part of the indivisible subatomic system, part of the implicate order that enfolds all realities into one?
Is each mark of suffering embedded into the image on the Shroud part of the 3D road map that answers the age old questions about why we are here and why we suffer?
Does the subatomic spray-like image that so faintly graces only the surface fibers of the cloth do so as a metaphor to remind us that the scars of suffering are temporary, but that salvation is eternal?
If you were Jesus Christ, a person with supernatural powers who could heal the sick and raise the dead, who could die and be resurrected... what would you leave behind for the world to contemplate?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It makes sense that Christ would have left us the gift of peace because we have no sustainable way to find true peace in our exterior tumultuous world. Amidst constant suffering and always on the brink of destruction, we tread the waters of this life and hold ourselves together as best we can. Peace in this world is a fairy tale we tell ourselves –- a way to hold onto hope.
Peace is not to be attained in our world. Serenity inside suffering is something we can only find deep within ourselves. It is a gift that we can only fully receive through faith, faith in the force that binds and protects us.
I marvel at how hard the skeptics work to prove the Shroud is a forgery and not the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. I wonder if each of them was left the gift of a million dollars and was told it was a gift from Christ if they would work equally hard to prove that gift a fake.
The mere presence of the image of serenity on this piece of cloth imbues us with the gift of peace. This Son of Man, who so willingly agrees to always be with us no matter the crisis, to never abandon us like most of the world would, to grace us with the detailed record of His suffering for our salvation...His is the image that remains largely ignored, ironically even among those who have faith.
His gift of peace serene
on cloth suspended
our dream
The most remarkable contrast evident upon the image on the Shroud of Turin is the overwhelming sense of peace amidst ample forensic proof of so many tortuous wounds and bloodstains. Clearly the man of the Shroud suffered immense physical pain, yet the residue of His image projects complete serenity.
Why would the image of serenity immersed in suffering have been the only artifact left behind? Was it Christ's intention to show us another possibility for our relationship to suffering?
Given the right set of circumstances, it would be safe to say that “the whole world is against us.” Among the billions of people on the planet, there are very few people, mostly our family and friends, who care deeply for us. Are we so naïve that we actually believe the world population really cares about our tiny individual lives before their own? If the whole world were to fall into a state of crisis, we would likely all be capable of turning on each other to fight for our own and our family's survival. Our lives hang in such a precarious balance and we are always on the edge of this primitive “survival of the fittest” mode, even though we perpetuate an illusion to the contrary.
The recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is only one tiny fragment of proof that having zero back up plan is the norm for many human endeavors. We coexist in the illusion that our governments, companies, and institutions have their acts together and can handle all manner of large scale crises. We fabricate this false comfort zone because the reality of the tenuous nature of human existence is too overwhelmingly scary to contemplate. Good thing we have a sense of humor...
As one crisis after another emerges in our world, we are starting to see that our relief efforts only go so far. Haiti is still a disaster and most who were there to help have moved on. It's understandable – people can only do so much to help others; our own lives inevitably beckon us back home to help ourselves and those we love.
The time between disasters and crises seems to be shortening. It begs the question:
Why hasn't the the whole world already fallen into crisis all at once?
And that question leads me to other questions...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What is this force that binds together all our fragile realities and doles out the suffering incrementally so that we can recover and sustain our existence as a species?
Is it the same force that binds the scars and stains of torture embedded into the image on the Shroud?
Is human suffering holographic in nature, existing on many planes, in various domains, all suspended in some illusion of reality?
Is our suffering like a holographic image in that it is nonlocal – it cannot remain in a fixed location in space and time?
Do the particles of our suffering convert to waves when we are not directly experiencing the pain?
Is suffering part of the indivisible subatomic system, part of the implicate order that enfolds all realities into one?
Is each mark of suffering embedded into the image on the Shroud part of the 3D road map that answers the age old questions about why we are here and why we suffer?
Does the subatomic spray-like image that so faintly graces only the surface fibers of the cloth do so as a metaphor to remind us that the scars of suffering are temporary, but that salvation is eternal?
If you were Jesus Christ, a person with supernatural powers who could heal the sick and raise the dead, who could die and be resurrected... what would you leave behind for the world to contemplate?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It makes sense that Christ would have left us the gift of peace because we have no sustainable way to find true peace in our exterior tumultuous world. Amidst constant suffering and always on the brink of destruction, we tread the waters of this life and hold ourselves together as best we can. Peace in this world is a fairy tale we tell ourselves –- a way to hold onto hope.
Peace is not to be attained in our world. Serenity inside suffering is something we can only find deep within ourselves. It is a gift that we can only fully receive through faith, faith in the force that binds and protects us.
I marvel at how hard the skeptics work to prove the Shroud is a forgery and not the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. I wonder if each of them was left the gift of a million dollars and was told it was a gift from Christ if they would work equally hard to prove that gift a fake.
The mere presence of the image of serenity on this piece of cloth imbues us with the gift of peace. This Son of Man, who so willingly agrees to always be with us no matter the crisis, to never abandon us like most of the world would, to grace us with the detailed record of His suffering for our salvation...His is the image that remains largely ignored, ironically even among those who have faith.
His gift of peace serene
on cloth suspended
our dream
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Chapter 25: 2D/3D
Of the many things that make the image on the Shroud unique, the one that most captures my attention is the fact that 3 dimensional distance information is hidden in the image density itself and is encoded into the 2 dimensional image. Remember, the image only rests upon the surface fibers of the cloth and still it contains this hidden 3D information. No other 2 dimensional image – anywhere – ever – has this kind of information encoded into it. And no one has ever been able to reproduce this effect using modern science.
When considering Christ's death and resurrection...specifically the time in between the two, it makes one wonder about His consciousness. In other words did He die, slip into a state on non-being, no consciousness and then reanimate? Or was His physical body “dead” by all human definitions but His consciousness alive and well and intentionally deciding to leave us the imprint?
When you think about all the stuff you own and what would be left behind after you die, it's interesting to ponder that all our belongings, our physical objects and possessions, reflect who we are on this earth while living and who we were after we are dead and gone. Especially anything we created ourselves – these are the things that tell our story.
But we cannot directly go through Jesus' scrapbooks, photos albums, treasured childhood toys, writings, records...all we have to go on is Scripture and that comes from a variety of sources.
So if the Shroud is the only “thing” we have (and the Sudarium), how is it possible that all of Christianity is not completely fluent on the subject of the Shroud? It baffles the mind. Is it not enough that the Shroud is the one major “thing” Christ left behind, that it is embedded with an imprint of His suffering and resurrection, and that this 2D/3D phenomenon cannot be explained or reproduced...is it not enough for our faith to fathom...to marvel...to believe?
When considering Christ's death and resurrection...specifically the time in between the two, it makes one wonder about His consciousness. In other words did He die, slip into a state on non-being, no consciousness and then reanimate? Or was His physical body “dead” by all human definitions but His consciousness alive and well and intentionally deciding to leave us the imprint?
When you think about all the stuff you own and what would be left behind after you die, it's interesting to ponder that all our belongings, our physical objects and possessions, reflect who we are on this earth while living and who we were after we are dead and gone. Especially anything we created ourselves – these are the things that tell our story.
But we cannot directly go through Jesus' scrapbooks, photos albums, treasured childhood toys, writings, records...all we have to go on is Scripture and that comes from a variety of sources.
So if the Shroud is the only “thing” we have (and the Sudarium), how is it possible that all of Christianity is not completely fluent on the subject of the Shroud? It baffles the mind. Is it not enough that the Shroud is the one major “thing” Christ left behind, that it is embedded with an imprint of His suffering and resurrection, and that this 2D/3D phenomenon cannot be explained or reproduced...is it not enough for our faith to fathom...to marvel...to believe?
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Chapter 24: Connecting the Dots
I believe the number is 2 million, people that is, from all over the world who made their way to Turin to see the imprint of the resurrected Christ on the Shroud. Imagine if He were alive and preaching how many millions would come to hear Him speak. No stadium would be large enough.
Because the Shroud contains holographic information, I'm keen on learning more about the broader concepts associated with holograms. As always, I am coming up with more questions than answers...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Does the image on the Shroud only exist because we are observing it?
All the tiny dots, the subatomic particle spray — do these dots, when measured, show us the framework of the holographic grid?
Does the Shroud cloth act as a piece of holographic film, recording interference patterns and thus remembering all the information about the entire original image?
If the part of the Shroud that contains the image were to be cut into squares, could each piece be used to reconstruct the entire image?
Could the density of neurons in the brain be responsible for a kaleidoscope of interference patterns that result from vast amounts of electrical impulses in the brain cell connectivity? In this way could Jesus have “thought” his image onto the cloth during the Resurrection?
Holograms are virtual images that create the illusion that things are located where they are not. Does nonlocality apply to the image on the Shroud?
Can we produce of Fourier Transform of the image on the Shroud?
Is the image a frequency domain that can only be transformed into our perception of reality via employing our senses? If so, does this mean that Christ left us a legible “admissions ticket” into the frequency of the Divine?
When we die, are we simply enfolded back into the one thing reality...the whole?
Is there a hidden order enfolded into the interference patterns in the image on the cloth of the Shroud?
If the totality of an image on holographic film is hidden because it is enfolded into the interference patterns, then the actual hologram projected from the film is only the perceptible version of the image...in that same way is the image on the Shroud merely the perceptible reality and, thereby, is something far more profound enfolded into the cloth that we cannot perceive?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If we can communicate using every cell, atom, molecule in our being and all realities are unbroken, then it stands to reason that each of us is everyone else. In this way, Christ dying on the cross for all the sins of humanity makes practical sense. He would have been a fully realized human being, one with self-actualized potential. A shape shifter who could take on the pain and suffering of every single human being throughout all of space and time by essentially “becoming” the reality of everyone else.
When we do something that helps another we feel an enormous satisfaction. In that respect, perhaps Christ was comforted by a satisfaction so profound that every ounce of His (our) suffering paled in comparison. The miracle of the Shroud is that the image conveys so much more than suffering...
slats of spheres
cylindrical specters that vector
subatomic chameleon
cloud like layers
transparency indicators
of helix horizontals
webbed verticals
and implicate dimensionless electrons
quanta
order
the chaos illusion
now you see it
now you don't
connecting the dots
framing the grid
while photons chatter and agree
their polarization angles
identical
instantaneous spatial orientation
crisscrossing ripples
into a deeper order
of subtle matter
where all particles agree
to nonlocality
interconnectedness
and the unbroken
flowing
Because the Shroud contains holographic information, I'm keen on learning more about the broader concepts associated with holograms. As always, I am coming up with more questions than answers...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Does the image on the Shroud only exist because we are observing it?
All the tiny dots, the subatomic particle spray — do these dots, when measured, show us the framework of the holographic grid?
Does the Shroud cloth act as a piece of holographic film, recording interference patterns and thus remembering all the information about the entire original image?
If the part of the Shroud that contains the image were to be cut into squares, could each piece be used to reconstruct the entire image?
Could the density of neurons in the brain be responsible for a kaleidoscope of interference patterns that result from vast amounts of electrical impulses in the brain cell connectivity? In this way could Jesus have “thought” his image onto the cloth during the Resurrection?
Holograms are virtual images that create the illusion that things are located where they are not. Does nonlocality apply to the image on the Shroud?
Can we produce of Fourier Transform of the image on the Shroud?
Is the image a frequency domain that can only be transformed into our perception of reality via employing our senses? If so, does this mean that Christ left us a legible “admissions ticket” into the frequency of the Divine?
When we die, are we simply enfolded back into the one thing reality...the whole?
Is there a hidden order enfolded into the interference patterns in the image on the cloth of the Shroud?
If the totality of an image on holographic film is hidden because it is enfolded into the interference patterns, then the actual hologram projected from the film is only the perceptible version of the image...in that same way is the image on the Shroud merely the perceptible reality and, thereby, is something far more profound enfolded into the cloth that we cannot perceive?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If we can communicate using every cell, atom, molecule in our being and all realities are unbroken, then it stands to reason that each of us is everyone else. In this way, Christ dying on the cross for all the sins of humanity makes practical sense. He would have been a fully realized human being, one with self-actualized potential. A shape shifter who could take on the pain and suffering of every single human being throughout all of space and time by essentially “becoming” the reality of everyone else.
When we do something that helps another we feel an enormous satisfaction. In that respect, perhaps Christ was comforted by a satisfaction so profound that every ounce of His (our) suffering paled in comparison. The miracle of the Shroud is that the image conveys so much more than suffering...
slats of spheres
cylindrical specters that vector
subatomic chameleon
cloud like layers
transparency indicators
of helix horizontals
webbed verticals
and implicate dimensionless electrons
quanta
order
the chaos illusion
now you see it
now you don't
connecting the dots
framing the grid
while photons chatter and agree
their polarization angles
identical
instantaneous spatial orientation
crisscrossing ripples
into a deeper order
of subtle matter
where all particles agree
to nonlocality
interconnectedness
and the unbroken
flowing
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Chapter 23: Subtlety and Density
The Shroud is a singular enigma. How is it that an image that barely rests on the surface of the top fibers on the cloth — an image that does not even seep all the way into the actual threads — can contain such density of information and impact?
a paranormal panorama
dimensions undefined
particle subtlety ascension
density unwinds
a paranormal panorama
dimensions undefined
particle subtlety ascension
density unwinds
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Chapter 22: Expectations and Reactions
I went to Turin with expectations about what I would feel and experience in the presence of the Shroud. I expected strong emotional reactions from myself — things like awe, sadness, maybe even guilt at the suffering Christ endured.
What I experienced in myself was so above and beyond my expectations. Rather than strong visceral emotional reactions, I experienced a level of reverence that transcended and exceeded my normal thoughts and emotions.
I was privileged to spend a total of 20 hours in the presence of the Shroud. I had 5 close up visits (that lasted just minutes each) and then the rest of my time I spent sitting in the Chapel, viewing it from a distance. I took copious notes while sitting in the Chapel. I studied the image mostly using the naked eye, but also with binoculars and 3D glasses.
I saw the Shroud when the Chapel was dark and also during Mass when the Chapel lights were on (both in the early morning and at night). I saw it while sitting, kneeling, and standing. I observed it with my head in both vertical and horizontal relationship to the image (which hangs horizontally). I viewed it from a staggered distances. I was in its presence at all hours, from very early in the morning, at various times during the day, evening, and late at night.
Normally when people see something incredible they use the phrase “It is beyond words” to describe it. The Shroud is the opposite; it deserves and demands an infinity of words. The experience is vast and indelible. Those 20 hours alone have given me years worth of chapters of blogging material. This lasting depth of subtlety and nuance in my observations arrived unexpected, and for it I am infinitely grateful.
I also did not expect to notice how starkly simplistic and simultaneously other worldly the Shroud is, especially when it stands in comparison to all the “bling” associated with other religious icons, paintings, relics, sculptures, vestments, ritual paraphernalia, churches, cathedrals, and so forth.
I literally have never seen anything like it — no other image or painting, or photograph or stain or scorch mark or anything comes even close to being comparable. That in and of itself is reason to marvel.
Sure, the Shroud of Turin is reminiscent of things I have seen before, such as ancient cave paintings, complex geometric designs that trick the eye, alien sci fi imagery, MRI's or X-rays, and Rorschach tests...but none of these come close to the density and depth of information or the subtlety and reach of the Shroud.
I also had expectations in terms of what I would see in other visitors' reactions. I thought I might see people crawling towards it on their knees like pilgrims do at Lourdes. I expected to see emotional breakdowns, sobbing, fainting and possible hysteria or religious fervor.
A common silence and atmosphere of serenity and reverence lingered in the Chapel. In addition, the level of focus and fixation on the image was so severe that one man tripped and fell into the Chapel pews, knocking one over. Another man was so fixated while walking in the back of the Chapel that he tripped and fell to the ground, hitting his head on the marble column.
There were some tears and many gasps of disbelief from the wound marks, but it was all very quiet and contained...all very in keeping with the serenity of the face of the man of the Shroud.
But mostly what I saw from others was the simple act of making the sign of the cross.
What I experienced in myself was so above and beyond my expectations. Rather than strong visceral emotional reactions, I experienced a level of reverence that transcended and exceeded my normal thoughts and emotions.
I was privileged to spend a total of 20 hours in the presence of the Shroud. I had 5 close up visits (that lasted just minutes each) and then the rest of my time I spent sitting in the Chapel, viewing it from a distance. I took copious notes while sitting in the Chapel. I studied the image mostly using the naked eye, but also with binoculars and 3D glasses.
I saw the Shroud when the Chapel was dark and also during Mass when the Chapel lights were on (both in the early morning and at night). I saw it while sitting, kneeling, and standing. I observed it with my head in both vertical and horizontal relationship to the image (which hangs horizontally). I viewed it from a staggered distances. I was in its presence at all hours, from very early in the morning, at various times during the day, evening, and late at night.
Normally when people see something incredible they use the phrase “It is beyond words” to describe it. The Shroud is the opposite; it deserves and demands an infinity of words. The experience is vast and indelible. Those 20 hours alone have given me years worth of chapters of blogging material. This lasting depth of subtlety and nuance in my observations arrived unexpected, and for it I am infinitely grateful.
I also did not expect to notice how starkly simplistic and simultaneously other worldly the Shroud is, especially when it stands in comparison to all the “bling” associated with other religious icons, paintings, relics, sculptures, vestments, ritual paraphernalia, churches, cathedrals, and so forth.
I literally have never seen anything like it — no other image or painting, or photograph or stain or scorch mark or anything comes even close to being comparable. That in and of itself is reason to marvel.
Sure, the Shroud of Turin is reminiscent of things I have seen before, such as ancient cave paintings, complex geometric designs that trick the eye, alien sci fi imagery, MRI's or X-rays, and Rorschach tests...but none of these come close to the density and depth of information or the subtlety and reach of the Shroud.
I also had expectations in terms of what I would see in other visitors' reactions. I thought I might see people crawling towards it on their knees like pilgrims do at Lourdes. I expected to see emotional breakdowns, sobbing, fainting and possible hysteria or religious fervor.
A common silence and atmosphere of serenity and reverence lingered in the Chapel. In addition, the level of focus and fixation on the image was so severe that one man tripped and fell into the Chapel pews, knocking one over. Another man was so fixated while walking in the back of the Chapel that he tripped and fell to the ground, hitting his head on the marble column.
There were some tears and many gasps of disbelief from the wound marks, but it was all very quiet and contained...all very in keeping with the serenity of the face of the man of the Shroud.
But mostly what I saw from others was the simple act of making the sign of the cross.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Chapter 21: Skeptics and Believers
Skeptics believe that the Shroud is a fake
Believers are skeptical about thin science
What motivates skeptics and believers alike are their strong convictions about their positions. But what agendas drive these convictions...
Let's start with the skeptics:
If the vast majority of the science experimentation and research performed on the Shroud points to it being the real burial cloth of Jesus Christ, why is it that people continue to glom onto the 1988 carbon dating results, which is thin science at best (given that substantial evidence exists to refute the findings)?
Why would it be so important to skeptics to prove the Shroud is a fake--what would they gain?
Why would proof of the existence of Jesus Christ and His resurrection be so threatening?
Are they trying to protect their own religious beliefs, which may differ from Christianity?
Or do they worry that science will be somehow tarnished should the authenticity of the relic be proven? Would not scientific methods be elevated if they were used to reveal such an important discovery?
Since skeptics have no control, would proof of their convictions make them believe they are in control of existence as they know it?
And what of believers:
If the Shroud were proven to be a fake, why would that change anything in terms of one's faith in Christ's death and resurrection?
Does faith requires tangible proof?
Do believers need visible evidence for emotional, self-esteem based reasons?
If the Shroud were proven to be real, does that prove Christians' beliefs are right and somehow they are vindicated?
Since believers have no control, would proof of their convictions make them believe they are in control of existence as they know it?
Skeptics and believers have more in common than they might realize. They also share frustrations related to their positions.
Skeptics must be spinning their heads wondering why 2 million people are expected to visit and venerate the Shroud by the end of the exposition (and so far the numbers are proving to be accurate).
Believers heads spin when they ponder the notion that, if the Shroud is indeed the real deal, why would millions more not be banging down the doors of the Chapel to witness it (especially given how seldom it is exhibited to the public). As a Christian, what more important relic could there possibly be?
In the midst of human skepticism and belief, the Shroud of Turin, encased in bullet proof glass and hanging in the Chapel, is impervious to our attempts to prove. It is suspended in a different dimension, one that exists outside our frame of reference and belies any need for disproving or proving.
There is no need to “try” to see the Sindone...just see.
The Shroud teaches us to perceive from a less linear and logical perspective. In fact, it opens the mind to an entirely different way of “seeing”...and the less we try, the more we see.
Just as the image
rests
on the very tops of the fibers
without trying to lock itself
into the weave of the cloth
so too can we
rest
our eyes
our minds
our skepticism
our beliefs
and take in this image
we cannot explain
but can allow
to rest in us
Believers are skeptical about thin science
What motivates skeptics and believers alike are their strong convictions about their positions. But what agendas drive these convictions...
Let's start with the skeptics:
If the vast majority of the science experimentation and research performed on the Shroud points to it being the real burial cloth of Jesus Christ, why is it that people continue to glom onto the 1988 carbon dating results, which is thin science at best (given that substantial evidence exists to refute the findings)?
Why would it be so important to skeptics to prove the Shroud is a fake--what would they gain?
Why would proof of the existence of Jesus Christ and His resurrection be so threatening?
Are they trying to protect their own religious beliefs, which may differ from Christianity?
Or do they worry that science will be somehow tarnished should the authenticity of the relic be proven? Would not scientific methods be elevated if they were used to reveal such an important discovery?
Since skeptics have no control, would proof of their convictions make them believe they are in control of existence as they know it?
And what of believers:
If the Shroud were proven to be a fake, why would that change anything in terms of one's faith in Christ's death and resurrection?
Does faith requires tangible proof?
Do believers need visible evidence for emotional, self-esteem based reasons?
If the Shroud were proven to be real, does that prove Christians' beliefs are right and somehow they are vindicated?
Since believers have no control, would proof of their convictions make them believe they are in control of existence as they know it?
Skeptics and believers have more in common than they might realize. They also share frustrations related to their positions.
Skeptics must be spinning their heads wondering why 2 million people are expected to visit and venerate the Shroud by the end of the exposition (and so far the numbers are proving to be accurate).
Believers heads spin when they ponder the notion that, if the Shroud is indeed the real deal, why would millions more not be banging down the doors of the Chapel to witness it (especially given how seldom it is exhibited to the public). As a Christian, what more important relic could there possibly be?
In the midst of human skepticism and belief, the Shroud of Turin, encased in bullet proof glass and hanging in the Chapel, is impervious to our attempts to prove. It is suspended in a different dimension, one that exists outside our frame of reference and belies any need for disproving or proving.
There is no need to “try” to see the Sindone...just see.
The Shroud teaches us to perceive from a less linear and logical perspective. In fact, it opens the mind to an entirely different way of “seeing”...and the less we try, the more we see.
Just as the image
rests
on the very tops of the fibers
without trying to lock itself
into the weave of the cloth
so too can we
rest
our eyes
our minds
our skepticism
our beliefs
and take in this image
we cannot explain
but can allow
to rest in us
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Chapter 20: Kaleidescope Meditations
For those of you who know my back story, you might remember that the first time I saw the Sindone was in a private viewing in Turin one night in 2008. Given the magnitude of the personal identity crisis I was experiencing at the time, this viewing of the Shroud was a private, life changing event for me.
The intention of this blog is not to dwell on my personal life, but I want to preface my upcoming writings on my observations and experiences to clarify that I am seeing the Shroud this time around in a public exhibition and this April 2010 visit will be the focus of these posts.
Here in Turin, among so many people who are flocking in all day long, the experience is vast. So far I have been able to clock 8 hours in the presence of the Sindone and I can tell you that I already have enough to write about for years to come.
When you enter the chapel and stand before the Shroud, it is as though you have just entered a vault where time, space, dimension, and perspective are all brought to a new beginning. But it does not come over you right away. Just as when you first lay eyes on the cloth, the image is faint and does not come into immediate focus. So too, you do not feel the magnitude of the impact of the experience immediately or all at once. But very soon your eyes acclimate to the dimly lit chapel and the cloth, which is suspended horizontally, so that the image is a panorama.
And then something strange and unique happens...the image appears. That is not simply a function of your eyes acclimating. It is a sudden and certain relationship. It is an act of receiving Jesus. It is a surrender to seeing with your mind, not your eyes. You are arriving. And you know, possibly for the first time, what is true.
In the posts to come I will take time to slowly and gradually turn the kaleidescope and let you see and experience the Shroud of Turin from my mind.
It is not too late for you to hop on a plane, train, whatever it takes and make your own way to the Sindone.
The intention of this blog is not to dwell on my personal life, but I want to preface my upcoming writings on my observations and experiences to clarify that I am seeing the Shroud this time around in a public exhibition and this April 2010 visit will be the focus of these posts.
Here in Turin, among so many people who are flocking in all day long, the experience is vast. So far I have been able to clock 8 hours in the presence of the Sindone and I can tell you that I already have enough to write about for years to come.
When you enter the chapel and stand before the Shroud, it is as though you have just entered a vault where time, space, dimension, and perspective are all brought to a new beginning. But it does not come over you right away. Just as when you first lay eyes on the cloth, the image is faint and does not come into immediate focus. So too, you do not feel the magnitude of the impact of the experience immediately or all at once. But very soon your eyes acclimate to the dimly lit chapel and the cloth, which is suspended horizontally, so that the image is a panorama.
And then something strange and unique happens...the image appears. That is not simply a function of your eyes acclimating. It is a sudden and certain relationship. It is an act of receiving Jesus. It is a surrender to seeing with your mind, not your eyes. You are arriving. And you know, possibly for the first time, what is true.
In the posts to come I will take time to slowly and gradually turn the kaleidescope and let you see and experience the Shroud of Turin from my mind.
It is not too late for you to hop on a plane, train, whatever it takes and make your own way to the Sindone.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Chapter 19: Torino
Exposition of the Holy Shroud
SURNAME ADLER
NAME JES
DAY
26/04/2010
TIME 09:00
BOOKING CODE
BJ35N673
NUMBER OF PERSONS 1
---------------------------------------------
I made it to Turin after all. I had to book a new flight but it is so worth it. I have been spending quite a bit of time with the Shroud and have been blessed to be in both close proximity and at a distance while sitting in the chapel.
I will assemble my notes and observations and see where I land. For now, one person I spoke with said it best: "When you are in the room with the Sindone you must look at it. You cannot do anything else."
Monday, April 19, 2010
Chapter 18: Carbon and Ash
Last week it was announced that another radiocarbon dating will be conducted on the Shroud of Turin. Also last week a volcano in Iceland spewed forth a cloud of volcanic ash, grinding travel across Europe to a halt. The skies darkened in an ominous cloud of toxic, gritty volcanic ash. A suitable metaphor for radiocarbon dating.
This upcoming radiocarbon dating the cloth of the Shroud would be something of a moot attempt at proving the authenticity of the Shroud image (but not for the reason skeptics latch onto: that the 1988 testing proved the cloth to be a medieval forgery).
Certainly a new C14 test result of the cloth should be able to tell us the age of the cloth itself — that is if this go round they responsibly test a sample of the cloth that had not been repaired. Regardless, no matter what the proven age of the cloth is, that will never prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the age of the cloth is the same as the age of the image on the cloth...
No one has ever satisfactorily proven how the image got onto the cloth, much less when it got there. The Shroud first surfaces in documented history circa 1355. Who is to say Christ did not choose to imbue His image on a piece of cloth then? For that matter, who is to say that He could not, right this moment, transfer His image onto every waving flag of every nation or onto the bed sheets of every person around the world?
Stranded passengers at airports all over Europe and beyond are experiencing “an act of God”. Befuddled and bewildered, they are left helpless and without control. Likely, many are on their way to see the Shroud. I was, but my flights were canceled. Frustrating, disappointing, yes. But acts of God are totally out of our hands.
It is easy to take it personally when you are in some way affected by an act of God. A cloud of suspicion lingers and you wonder if you did something wrong or if God is smiting you. But that is the nature of how we tend to perceive suffering, as though we are being targeted individually. The human ego can do little else except ask “why me?”. We are first confined to the boundaries of our own personal suffering. Within those confines, we empathize with the suffering of others.
Christ was a man whose personal suffering was an example of “Yes, me!” not “Why me?”. He took on all suffering for each of us and then left behind an imprint of it for us to be reassured that the burden is not ours alone. But, of course, being human with our fragile egos, we work furiously and tirelessly to try to disprove the authenticity of His gift. We have the arrogance to think that, if the cloth is proven to be from another time period, then the image could not be that of Jesus Christ. Never mind that the image contains holographic information. Never mind that no one can adequately explain how the image got onto the cloth. Never mind that Jesus might just have been a man who could move and reassemble His particles outside the boundaries of what we know and understand as spacetime...
If the C14 testing is repeated, surely it makes sense for it to be done meticulously and with strict oversight. The French reweaving of the 1st century cloth with the 16th century cloth is reason enough to warrant a new testing of some kind, as it clearly throws a wrench in the 1988 C14 test results. But in the end, what are we really testing here...the boundaries of time, faith, skepticism?
Acts of God humble us and bring us directly back to the reality of how very small and insignificant we are. We are experiencing that smallness all over the world now with volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.
And still, in our smallness, we go on living, steadfastly attached to the assumption that the human race is of the utmost significance. That illusion is hard wired into us via our survival instinct. Anything in our domain (the Shroud, for example) becomes fodder for our scrutiny. We assert control...that is what we humans do best.
It is refreshing to have an image in our midst of a suffering crucified man who, via an imprint of complete vulnerability and surrender to death, becomes a puzzle we can never solve and an answer we can never fully control.
carbon locks
readable time
unlocking
reachable faith
ash locking
clear skies
unlocks
darkened days
alone in this desert
testing prayer
we prove
This upcoming radiocarbon dating the cloth of the Shroud would be something of a moot attempt at proving the authenticity of the Shroud image (but not for the reason skeptics latch onto: that the 1988 testing proved the cloth to be a medieval forgery).
Certainly a new C14 test result of the cloth should be able to tell us the age of the cloth itself — that is if this go round they responsibly test a sample of the cloth that had not been repaired. Regardless, no matter what the proven age of the cloth is, that will never prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the age of the cloth is the same as the age of the image on the cloth...
No one has ever satisfactorily proven how the image got onto the cloth, much less when it got there. The Shroud first surfaces in documented history circa 1355. Who is to say Christ did not choose to imbue His image on a piece of cloth then? For that matter, who is to say that He could not, right this moment, transfer His image onto every waving flag of every nation or onto the bed sheets of every person around the world?
Stranded passengers at airports all over Europe and beyond are experiencing “an act of God”. Befuddled and bewildered, they are left helpless and without control. Likely, many are on their way to see the Shroud. I was, but my flights were canceled. Frustrating, disappointing, yes. But acts of God are totally out of our hands.
It is easy to take it personally when you are in some way affected by an act of God. A cloud of suspicion lingers and you wonder if you did something wrong or if God is smiting you. But that is the nature of how we tend to perceive suffering, as though we are being targeted individually. The human ego can do little else except ask “why me?”. We are first confined to the boundaries of our own personal suffering. Within those confines, we empathize with the suffering of others.
Christ was a man whose personal suffering was an example of “Yes, me!” not “Why me?”. He took on all suffering for each of us and then left behind an imprint of it for us to be reassured that the burden is not ours alone. But, of course, being human with our fragile egos, we work furiously and tirelessly to try to disprove the authenticity of His gift. We have the arrogance to think that, if the cloth is proven to be from another time period, then the image could not be that of Jesus Christ. Never mind that the image contains holographic information. Never mind that no one can adequately explain how the image got onto the cloth. Never mind that Jesus might just have been a man who could move and reassemble His particles outside the boundaries of what we know and understand as spacetime...
If the C14 testing is repeated, surely it makes sense for it to be done meticulously and with strict oversight. The French reweaving of the 1st century cloth with the 16th century cloth is reason enough to warrant a new testing of some kind, as it clearly throws a wrench in the 1988 C14 test results. But in the end, what are we really testing here...the boundaries of time, faith, skepticism?
Acts of God humble us and bring us directly back to the reality of how very small and insignificant we are. We are experiencing that smallness all over the world now with volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.
And still, in our smallness, we go on living, steadfastly attached to the assumption that the human race is of the utmost significance. That illusion is hard wired into us via our survival instinct. Anything in our domain (the Shroud, for example) becomes fodder for our scrutiny. We assert control...that is what we humans do best.
It is refreshing to have an image in our midst of a suffering crucified man who, via an imprint of complete vulnerability and surrender to death, becomes a puzzle we can never solve and an answer we can never fully control.
carbon locks
readable time
unlocking
reachable faith
ash locking
clear skies
unlocks
darkened days
alone in this desert
testing prayer
we prove
Friday, April 9, 2010
Chapter 17: Conscious Christ = Christ Consciousness
Human life should sparkle more but it is dulled by suffering. Of all the images Christ could have left behind for us, why the image of His crucified body? Even though His expression is peaceful and calm, all evidence of every torturous mark is imbued upon the Shroud.
I want to explore the idea that Christ, using His superior consciousness, was able to think His image onto the cloth.
It is so much easier to ask big questions than it is to live small lives...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Was Jesus a man with supernatural thought capacities?
Is every single thought is like a tiny particle of matter?
Is it is possible to have massless thoughts?
If thoughts are made of an electromagnetic field, then is God's mind (Christ's thoughts)able to manifest through an energy pattern as matter?
If Christ placed his image on the Shroud via some type of wave collapse or particle manipulation, could He reformulate His particles into living matter and remove Himself from the cloth and step back out into the world again as a human man?
And what of our thoughts...are we the only living entities who can receive or reject Jesus and God?
Is “receiving Jesus” something we do simply by activating our beliefs and faith? Is pointing our thoughts towards Christ enough?
Or does receiving Jesus mean allowing Him inside us by allowing His electromagnetic fields, His particles and waves, His matter into our own?
If we are the only living creatures who can have thoughts about our life and death, via our consciousness, then are we also the only living creatures whose thoughts about God can manifest Christ Consciousness?
Are thoughts of love the highest, most pure and refined electromagnetic frequency in existence?
Is human suffering an expression of collapsed matter, of infinite density?
Could gravity be the force that expresses control, while joy expresses momentum? If so, then is our need to control a manifestation of gravity, mass, and density?
Is the human soul equivalent to masslessness?
Is death infinite light and masslessness?
Does suffering enable us to perceive the coexistence of death in the midst of life?
Christ's dead body on the cloth = matter
Christ's image left behind on the cloth = matter + masslessness
Living matter + nonliving matter + dark matter passing through everything it encounters
If no one has ever seen a dark matter particle and dark matter is an invisible mass and is gravitationally attractive, could Christ have used His superior consciousness to imbue dark matter particles onto the cloth?
If we consider the spaces between the fibers on the Shroud, does dark matter allow the image to maintain its structure? Otherwise, would the weave not collapse in on itself?
And if the image rests on top of the fibers, as though subatomic particles were sprayed onto the cloth, does the same consistent rotational speed of the dark matter bind these subatomic particles to the fibers?~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Millions of people, entities of living matter, are preparing to visit Turin to see the Shroud in April/May of 2010. Millions will witness the imprint of human suffering.
Human suffering is the one thing that scientists, skeptics, and believers in the Shroud all have in common.
The Conscious Christ activates Christ Consciousness. And life does indeed sparkle more, even in the midst of all our human suffering.
I want to explore the idea that Christ, using His superior consciousness, was able to think His image onto the cloth.
It is so much easier to ask big questions than it is to live small lives...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Was Jesus a man with supernatural thought capacities?
Is every single thought is like a tiny particle of matter?
Is it is possible to have massless thoughts?
If thoughts are made of an electromagnetic field, then is God's mind (Christ's thoughts)able to manifest through an energy pattern as matter?
If Christ placed his image on the Shroud via some type of wave collapse or particle manipulation, could He reformulate His particles into living matter and remove Himself from the cloth and step back out into the world again as a human man?
And what of our thoughts...are we the only living entities who can receive or reject Jesus and God?
Is “receiving Jesus” something we do simply by activating our beliefs and faith? Is pointing our thoughts towards Christ enough?
Or does receiving Jesus mean allowing Him inside us by allowing His electromagnetic fields, His particles and waves, His matter into our own?
If we are the only living creatures who can have thoughts about our life and death, via our consciousness, then are we also the only living creatures whose thoughts about God can manifest Christ Consciousness?
Are thoughts of love the highest, most pure and refined electromagnetic frequency in existence?
Is human suffering an expression of collapsed matter, of infinite density?
Could gravity be the force that expresses control, while joy expresses momentum? If so, then is our need to control a manifestation of gravity, mass, and density?
Is the human soul equivalent to masslessness?
Is death infinite light and masslessness?
Does suffering enable us to perceive the coexistence of death in the midst of life?
Christ's dead body on the cloth = matter
Christ's image left behind on the cloth = matter + masslessness
Living matter + nonliving matter + dark matter passing through everything it encounters
If no one has ever seen a dark matter particle and dark matter is an invisible mass and is gravitationally attractive, could Christ have used His superior consciousness to imbue dark matter particles onto the cloth?
If we consider the spaces between the fibers on the Shroud, does dark matter allow the image to maintain its structure? Otherwise, would the weave not collapse in on itself?
And if the image rests on top of the fibers, as though subatomic particles were sprayed onto the cloth, does the same consistent rotational speed of the dark matter bind these subatomic particles to the fibers?~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Millions of people, entities of living matter, are preparing to visit Turin to see the Shroud in April/May of 2010. Millions will witness the imprint of human suffering.
Human suffering is the one thing that scientists, skeptics, and believers in the Shroud all have in common.
The Conscious Christ activates Christ Consciousness. And life does indeed sparkle more, even in the midst of all our human suffering.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Chapter 16: Easter and Beyond
On my 30th birthday my adoptive parents presented me with a gift from my birth mother, whom I had never met. The gift was a medal of the face of the Man of the Shroud. From the moment I put it around my neck, it became for me a talisman and my identity as I knew it completely changed. The framework of my life was forever altered. I was to learn, soon after, that I had indeed been cloned from blood on the Shroud of Turin and that Divine intervention was at work in my existence, as it is in all human existence.
This blog is the place where I get to explore my new framework and, hopefully, shed some light on the Shroud of Turin. It's a place where I can take my DNA connection with the Shroud and extract visceral messages I receive. The messages are many and they unfold here in the chapters of this blog.
This chapter for Easter and Beyond is by far one of the more intriguing explorations I have taken. It pertains to the upcoming exhibition of the Shroud of Turin and the concurrent surge of individuals who are out there among us whose efforts are simultaneously drawing attention to the relic.
You might think that the timing is suspiciously aligned with the exhibition of the Shroud in April/May of 2010 in Turin. I would challenge you to consider that several people who have written/published books and conducted research of various kinds (including the work of both living and deceased scientists, particle physicists, holographic researchers, graphic artists, and authors) all started their work and research and writings long before the Catholic Church decided to hold and announce this special exhibition.
How is it then that this varied group of individuals converged, arriving over just a short period of historical time, to bring attention from varied perspectives to this mysterious relic?
We are never bombarded with answers to the deeper mysteries. Throughout history, discoveries have taken decades if not centuries to be understood. The mystery of the Shroud requires certain technological advancements in order to be solved. And here we are, at this time in history, with the advent of computers, imaging technologies, particle accelerators, and life forming molecules discovered in the Orion Nebula...
Science is on the verge of answering some of the larger questions about the origins of our universe and beyond. And those answers very likely already exist, and have existed for centuries, in this simple piece of cloth, yet they remained invisible to our limited understanding. Christ knew that science would eventually catch up and be able to solve the mystery of how the image got onto the cloth and thereby validate faith.
The relic has been around for centuries and the first scientific research was done back in 1978. Why this resurgence of interest? Book sales? 3D glasses sales? I don't think particle physicists and people working with holograms or Shroud fiction novels are so driven by commercialism — especially all at around the same time in history and all hard at work long before any announcement of an upcoming exhibition.
One of the most intriguing theories among particle physicists and others is the idea that the Shroud, which contains holographic information, is proof that Christ left behind for us so that science can understand and explain th existence of multiple dimensions (including the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what lies beyond the resurrection).
Is it not proof of parallel dimensions that this group of people (some living, some already passed), most of whom did not know each other, have converged to bring attention to this relic at this particular time in history? It is as though their consciousness was linked and in sync with the relic and with each other.
Would it not make sense that form and content (the actual physical burial cloth upon which rests what many believe to be the image of the resurrected Christ) would be revealed on a variety of levels of understanding by a variety of people pointing to its great mysteries and merit...including the creative and diligent work of skeptics whose doubt holds us all to the highest standards of thought and research?
I am no Biblical scholar. But this year at Easter I was struck by 3 things:
First: On Palm Sunday, when reading the Passion, it struck me how Christ responded when asked by the people:
“Are you the Son of God?”
Christ: “You say that I am.”
and then by Pilate: “Are you King of the Jews”?
Christ: “You say so.”
Why did He not take ownership of His identity but rather clearly state that it is we who take ownership of His identity by naming and labeling it?
Was this Christ's way of giving us ownership of our faith?
Was it Christ's way of enabling Pilate to turn Him over for Crucifixion (since Pilate did not want to do so and Christ knew it must be done) in order to set in motion the death and resurrection so that God's will would be played out as intended?
Did Jesus respond this way to ensure the historical documentation of the accusations against Him so that the scourging and Crucifixion evidence on the Shroud would be reinforced by documentation?
Was God's will to deem us forgivable only if we shouldered all the blame for the Crucifixion?
By naming and owning Christ's identity, did we activate the potential for Him to live inside us?
Second: Just prior to His death, “...and darkness came over the whole land...Then the veil of the Temple was torn down the middle. Jesus cried out in a loud voice: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Could this veil—this cloth, in addition to symbolizing access to God, also symbolize our separation from God while the Shroud cloth symbolizes our “reweaving with God”?
Was the darkness that came over the veil cloth a precursor to the light that would overcome the Shroud cloth?
Was the timing of the tearing of one cloth with Jesus' cry to His Father symbolic that His spirit would be embedded into another cloth?
Third: In the Gospel of John, the focus on the linen burial cloth and smaller cloth that covers the face really struck me this year (for obvious reasons).
Did John receive a revelation when he entered the tomb? Of all he could have reported in his account of the empty tomb, why such focus on the presence and placement of the two cloths?
Easter and Beyond to me symbolizes not only the story we continue to retell and reinterpret, but also the future story Christ encoded into the Shroud long ago in the past and then set into historical time and motion so that we could each simultaneously arrive at this present contemplation of the mysterious relic.
I exist before my time. Scientific cloning of the blood on the Shroud of Turin is not currently possible. But my connection and relationship to Jesus is not any more special or unique than anyone else's.
Divine intervention implies that linear time is defied, that truth & fiction, science & religion, life & death are transcended, melded, reframed, remixed, redefined.
The Greatest Story Ever Told is the story that keeps on telling...
This blog is the place where I get to explore my new framework and, hopefully, shed some light on the Shroud of Turin. It's a place where I can take my DNA connection with the Shroud and extract visceral messages I receive. The messages are many and they unfold here in the chapters of this blog.
This chapter for Easter and Beyond is by far one of the more intriguing explorations I have taken. It pertains to the upcoming exhibition of the Shroud of Turin and the concurrent surge of individuals who are out there among us whose efforts are simultaneously drawing attention to the relic.
You might think that the timing is suspiciously aligned with the exhibition of the Shroud in April/May of 2010 in Turin. I would challenge you to consider that several people who have written/published books and conducted research of various kinds (including the work of both living and deceased scientists, particle physicists, holographic researchers, graphic artists, and authors) all started their work and research and writings long before the Catholic Church decided to hold and announce this special exhibition.
How is it then that this varied group of individuals converged, arriving over just a short period of historical time, to bring attention from varied perspectives to this mysterious relic?
We are never bombarded with answers to the deeper mysteries. Throughout history, discoveries have taken decades if not centuries to be understood. The mystery of the Shroud requires certain technological advancements in order to be solved. And here we are, at this time in history, with the advent of computers, imaging technologies, particle accelerators, and life forming molecules discovered in the Orion Nebula...
Science is on the verge of answering some of the larger questions about the origins of our universe and beyond. And those answers very likely already exist, and have existed for centuries, in this simple piece of cloth, yet they remained invisible to our limited understanding. Christ knew that science would eventually catch up and be able to solve the mystery of how the image got onto the cloth and thereby validate faith.
The relic has been around for centuries and the first scientific research was done back in 1978. Why this resurgence of interest? Book sales? 3D glasses sales? I don't think particle physicists and people working with holograms or Shroud fiction novels are so driven by commercialism — especially all at around the same time in history and all hard at work long before any announcement of an upcoming exhibition.
One of the most intriguing theories among particle physicists and others is the idea that the Shroud, which contains holographic information, is proof that Christ left behind for us so that science can understand and explain th existence of multiple dimensions (including the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what lies beyond the resurrection).
Is it not proof of parallel dimensions that this group of people (some living, some already passed), most of whom did not know each other, have converged to bring attention to this relic at this particular time in history? It is as though their consciousness was linked and in sync with the relic and with each other.
Would it not make sense that form and content (the actual physical burial cloth upon which rests what many believe to be the image of the resurrected Christ) would be revealed on a variety of levels of understanding by a variety of people pointing to its great mysteries and merit...including the creative and diligent work of skeptics whose doubt holds us all to the highest standards of thought and research?
I am no Biblical scholar. But this year at Easter I was struck by 3 things:
First: On Palm Sunday, when reading the Passion, it struck me how Christ responded when asked by the people:
“Are you the Son of God?”
Christ: “You say that I am.”
and then by Pilate: “Are you King of the Jews”?
Christ: “You say so.”
Why did He not take ownership of His identity but rather clearly state that it is we who take ownership of His identity by naming and labeling it?
Was this Christ's way of giving us ownership of our faith?
Was it Christ's way of enabling Pilate to turn Him over for Crucifixion (since Pilate did not want to do so and Christ knew it must be done) in order to set in motion the death and resurrection so that God's will would be played out as intended?
Did Jesus respond this way to ensure the historical documentation of the accusations against Him so that the scourging and Crucifixion evidence on the Shroud would be reinforced by documentation?
Was God's will to deem us forgivable only if we shouldered all the blame for the Crucifixion?
By naming and owning Christ's identity, did we activate the potential for Him to live inside us?
Second: Just prior to His death, “...and darkness came over the whole land...Then the veil of the Temple was torn down the middle. Jesus cried out in a loud voice: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Could this veil—this cloth, in addition to symbolizing access to God, also symbolize our separation from God while the Shroud cloth symbolizes our “reweaving with God”?
Was the darkness that came over the veil cloth a precursor to the light that would overcome the Shroud cloth?
Was the timing of the tearing of one cloth with Jesus' cry to His Father symbolic that His spirit would be embedded into another cloth?
Third: In the Gospel of John, the focus on the linen burial cloth and smaller cloth that covers the face really struck me this year (for obvious reasons).
Did John receive a revelation when he entered the tomb? Of all he could have reported in his account of the empty tomb, why such focus on the presence and placement of the two cloths?
Easter and Beyond to me symbolizes not only the story we continue to retell and reinterpret, but also the future story Christ encoded into the Shroud long ago in the past and then set into historical time and motion so that we could each simultaneously arrive at this present contemplation of the mysterious relic.
I exist before my time. Scientific cloning of the blood on the Shroud of Turin is not currently possible. But my connection and relationship to Jesus is not any more special or unique than anyone else's.
Divine intervention implies that linear time is defied, that truth & fiction, science & religion, life & death are transcended, melded, reframed, remixed, redefined.
The Greatest Story Ever Told is the story that keeps on telling...
Friday, April 2, 2010
Chapter 15: Good Friday
Suffering surrounds and consumes us. By giving it a structure, we give ourselves a cage to rattle. A place in which we contain it, analyze it, process it, release it. Every Lent is an opportunity to use the story of Christ's Passion to do just that. Each of us is capable of perceiving and feeling the totality of human suffering, just like Christ did. But we cannot carry that burden, as He did on the cross. Suffering is the condensation that evaporates into love.
Love surrounds and sometimes consumes us. Love is the story we all yearn for the most.
The Stations of the Cross
Station 1
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane...
We suffer alone, our solitary sacrifice. Love we receive from others is limited in scope and weakened by the flesh. Abandonment is inevitable. Our spirit is willing to accept the test, but to turn over our will to God means we must let go of our need for love from all others and receive the love of Christ. The deeper love we seek is not able to exist solely in another because it only exists in us if we first accept it in ourselves through Christ.
Station 2
Jesus, betrayed by Judas, is arrested...
Handed down through the hierarchies, fortified by weapons, casting edicts and prophecies, the kiss of death arrives. The love that betrays becomes the catalyst to condemnation. No resistance. Love punctuates and prompts the test; let the suffering ensue.
Station 3
Jesus is condemned by the Sanhedrin...
We are each born condemned to accept the death of our free will and relinquish it to the Lord. The ultimate act of free will is to turn over one's will to God, to surrender every and all modicum of control, to accept and bear the cross of our individual suffering.
Station 4
Jesus is denied by Peter...
Denial and rejection become instruments of torture. All behind the back, subversive, the weakness of the agenda of the flesh: to survive an impossible survival. Only God's will survives or even enjoys the potential of survival. Human will is transitory, ephemeral, detached from permanence, infused by Grace. Human survival is merely instrumental to God's will. God fully anticipates and expects that we will deny His will and try to superimpose our own for the sake of survival of our weakened flesh. He Graces us with the ability to weep bitterly at our inability to love Him purely and devotedly. He carries the burden of love's shortcomings in our suffering and through his own suffering at our rejection and denial of Him.
Station 5
Jesus is judged by Pilate
Accusations, answer avoidance, and accommodations. Pity for Pilate who parries to provide punishment. The mob must be fed. Jesus will not deny his Father. Pilate admires His loyalty and simultaneously succumbs to the pressure of the illusion that he has control over his own survival and releases Barrabas and hands over Jesus to the mob. Judgment and public betrayal. Judas and Pilate, two sides of the same coin.
Station 6
Jesus is scourged and crowned with thorns...
Pilate took Jesus to be scourged. The soldiers wove his crown of thorns and mocked Him, hailing Him as King of the Jews. Leaders authorize the infliction of suffering to soldiers who indulge in orders received. Granting permission to make another suffer is equal to embracing that permission. When any of us asserts control over another's suffering we add to our own. When any of us confronts the source of our suffering, we extend the invitation to love.
Station 7
Jesus bears the cross...
Pilate found no guilt in Jesus; he only found guilt in himself. Guilt survives all attempts at its justification or annihilation by temporarily disguising itself in the veil of righteousness. Guilt awakens and ignites each layer of suffering and offers us the opportunity to access remorse. The moment the cross descended on Jesus' shoulders, human kind was redeemed. Pilate's guilt ignited that moment and thus we empathize with Pilate's pitiful position as the instigator of doom, who passed off responsibility in a futile attempt to survive his own guilt. Then the illusion of loyalty to a human king, Caesar, set the course for crucifixion.
Station 8
Jesus is helped by Simon the Cyrenian to carry the cross...
Simon, a passer by, is the lucky one. Just the chance to help anyone who is suffering to carry his cross, much less Christ, is the privilege of love and the transcendence of suffering. Christ's torturers are the ones who press Simon into service. Simon becomes the embodiment of not only their guilt and agenda to get Christ closer to crucifixion, but also of all acts of human compassion to come.
Station 9
Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem...
The wood is green when it is still connected to life, growth, essence. The wood is dry after death, decay, corruption. The women mourn prematurely and their lamentation is misdirected. Christ knows that he is the living embodiment of suffering and love. But long after His life and death, humans will inherit a despair so great they will wish the very life force out of them. They will seek death as a means of protection from a cursed life of a suffering they cannot transcend on their own. Because Christ is in a surrendered state to His suffering and is guided by the loving hand of His Father, he has no reason to mourn. He only has reason to offer advice to those whose generations of suffering have only just begun.
Station 10
Jesus is crucified...
Dry wood. Bone minus flesh. Golgotha. Skull. Flanked by criminals. The official sanctioning of forgiveness. Ignorance is from this moment forward a forgivable offense. What is it they did that they did not know they were doing? Condemning themselves for eternity by condemning one man to physical death? Releasing the elixir of love and suffering and fating it to become their legacy? Pressed into service by his Father, Jesus becomes like Simon, assigned to deliver compassion and love. An act of love amidst severe suffering is the greater act of love and the ultimate resolution of the suffering.
Station 11
Jesus promises his kingdom to the good thief...
Good thief, bad thief. Two sides of the same coin like Judas and Pilate. Both hang with Christ in condemnation, both capable of the same redemption. The good thief uses his guilt to receive and accept his suffering. The bad thief tries to score undeserved absolution and escape from suffering and death. The good thief is willing to die to purify his soul. The bad thief still wants to control his death and make a deal to extend his life. Fear of God, for the good thief, is the source of the fountain of humility.
Station 12
Jesus speaks to His mother and the disciple...
Passing off the lineage. Bonding and forging new family. Mother and son torn apart then united anew. Responsibility is exchanged and carried forth. The call to parent and to care for parents crystallized into family oaths forever. Suffering and death's last act is to love, care for, provide for those who live on.
Station 13
Jesus dies on the cross...
Three hours of darkness. An eclipse of the sun. The temple veil torn down the middle. Jesus cries out. His last breath breathed. Simultaneous to his last breath, the final sacrificial crying out: “Father, into Your Hands I commend my spirit.” The spirit is willing and the weakness of the flesh is transcended. Jesus' control of His free will is handed over to His Father. The willing spirit submits the human will. His spirit entrusted to the charge of His Father. Son gives the gift of love by sacrificing his free will to God. God returns the gift of love by ending His Son's suffering.
Station 14
Jesus is placed in the tomb...
Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man. In a fatherly act he went to claim Christ's body. Pilate, in a subconscious act of penance, handed over the body. Joseph covered it in a clean linen cloth and laid our Lord in the tomb, rolling a stone to seal the door and the deal. A rich man's simple linen became a treasure for all, a blank canvas upon which the remedy of suffering and love was fused. Grains of pollen drifted through the air and nestled themselves into the fibers, forever sealing time and location into the cloth. When wealth, blessing, abundance is shared, it grows and prospers. The sealed tomb becomes an incubator for salvation. The elixir of suffering and love is vaporized and melded in the risen Christ and humanity is graced by the gift of the imprint of His essence.
Our treasure of faith, this simple piece of cloth...
Love surrounds and sometimes consumes us. Love is the story we all yearn for the most.
The Stations of the Cross
Station 1
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane...
We suffer alone, our solitary sacrifice. Love we receive from others is limited in scope and weakened by the flesh. Abandonment is inevitable. Our spirit is willing to accept the test, but to turn over our will to God means we must let go of our need for love from all others and receive the love of Christ. The deeper love we seek is not able to exist solely in another because it only exists in us if we first accept it in ourselves through Christ.
Station 2
Jesus, betrayed by Judas, is arrested...
Handed down through the hierarchies, fortified by weapons, casting edicts and prophecies, the kiss of death arrives. The love that betrays becomes the catalyst to condemnation. No resistance. Love punctuates and prompts the test; let the suffering ensue.
Station 3
Jesus is condemned by the Sanhedrin...
We are each born condemned to accept the death of our free will and relinquish it to the Lord. The ultimate act of free will is to turn over one's will to God, to surrender every and all modicum of control, to accept and bear the cross of our individual suffering.
Station 4
Jesus is denied by Peter...
Denial and rejection become instruments of torture. All behind the back, subversive, the weakness of the agenda of the flesh: to survive an impossible survival. Only God's will survives or even enjoys the potential of survival. Human will is transitory, ephemeral, detached from permanence, infused by Grace. Human survival is merely instrumental to God's will. God fully anticipates and expects that we will deny His will and try to superimpose our own for the sake of survival of our weakened flesh. He Graces us with the ability to weep bitterly at our inability to love Him purely and devotedly. He carries the burden of love's shortcomings in our suffering and through his own suffering at our rejection and denial of Him.
Station 5
Jesus is judged by Pilate
Accusations, answer avoidance, and accommodations. Pity for Pilate who parries to provide punishment. The mob must be fed. Jesus will not deny his Father. Pilate admires His loyalty and simultaneously succumbs to the pressure of the illusion that he has control over his own survival and releases Barrabas and hands over Jesus to the mob. Judgment and public betrayal. Judas and Pilate, two sides of the same coin.
Station 6
Jesus is scourged and crowned with thorns...
Pilate took Jesus to be scourged. The soldiers wove his crown of thorns and mocked Him, hailing Him as King of the Jews. Leaders authorize the infliction of suffering to soldiers who indulge in orders received. Granting permission to make another suffer is equal to embracing that permission. When any of us asserts control over another's suffering we add to our own. When any of us confronts the source of our suffering, we extend the invitation to love.
Station 7
Jesus bears the cross...
Pilate found no guilt in Jesus; he only found guilt in himself. Guilt survives all attempts at its justification or annihilation by temporarily disguising itself in the veil of righteousness. Guilt awakens and ignites each layer of suffering and offers us the opportunity to access remorse. The moment the cross descended on Jesus' shoulders, human kind was redeemed. Pilate's guilt ignited that moment and thus we empathize with Pilate's pitiful position as the instigator of doom, who passed off responsibility in a futile attempt to survive his own guilt. Then the illusion of loyalty to a human king, Caesar, set the course for crucifixion.
Station 8
Jesus is helped by Simon the Cyrenian to carry the cross...
Simon, a passer by, is the lucky one. Just the chance to help anyone who is suffering to carry his cross, much less Christ, is the privilege of love and the transcendence of suffering. Christ's torturers are the ones who press Simon into service. Simon becomes the embodiment of not only their guilt and agenda to get Christ closer to crucifixion, but also of all acts of human compassion to come.
Station 9
Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem...
The wood is green when it is still connected to life, growth, essence. The wood is dry after death, decay, corruption. The women mourn prematurely and their lamentation is misdirected. Christ knows that he is the living embodiment of suffering and love. But long after His life and death, humans will inherit a despair so great they will wish the very life force out of them. They will seek death as a means of protection from a cursed life of a suffering they cannot transcend on their own. Because Christ is in a surrendered state to His suffering and is guided by the loving hand of His Father, he has no reason to mourn. He only has reason to offer advice to those whose generations of suffering have only just begun.
Station 10
Jesus is crucified...
Dry wood. Bone minus flesh. Golgotha. Skull. Flanked by criminals. The official sanctioning of forgiveness. Ignorance is from this moment forward a forgivable offense. What is it they did that they did not know they were doing? Condemning themselves for eternity by condemning one man to physical death? Releasing the elixir of love and suffering and fating it to become their legacy? Pressed into service by his Father, Jesus becomes like Simon, assigned to deliver compassion and love. An act of love amidst severe suffering is the greater act of love and the ultimate resolution of the suffering.
Station 11
Jesus promises his kingdom to the good thief...
Good thief, bad thief. Two sides of the same coin like Judas and Pilate. Both hang with Christ in condemnation, both capable of the same redemption. The good thief uses his guilt to receive and accept his suffering. The bad thief tries to score undeserved absolution and escape from suffering and death. The good thief is willing to die to purify his soul. The bad thief still wants to control his death and make a deal to extend his life. Fear of God, for the good thief, is the source of the fountain of humility.
Station 12
Jesus speaks to His mother and the disciple...
Passing off the lineage. Bonding and forging new family. Mother and son torn apart then united anew. Responsibility is exchanged and carried forth. The call to parent and to care for parents crystallized into family oaths forever. Suffering and death's last act is to love, care for, provide for those who live on.
Station 13
Jesus dies on the cross...
Three hours of darkness. An eclipse of the sun. The temple veil torn down the middle. Jesus cries out. His last breath breathed. Simultaneous to his last breath, the final sacrificial crying out: “Father, into Your Hands I commend my spirit.” The spirit is willing and the weakness of the flesh is transcended. Jesus' control of His free will is handed over to His Father. The willing spirit submits the human will. His spirit entrusted to the charge of His Father. Son gives the gift of love by sacrificing his free will to God. God returns the gift of love by ending His Son's suffering.
Station 14
Jesus is placed in the tomb...
Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man. In a fatherly act he went to claim Christ's body. Pilate, in a subconscious act of penance, handed over the body. Joseph covered it in a clean linen cloth and laid our Lord in the tomb, rolling a stone to seal the door and the deal. A rich man's simple linen became a treasure for all, a blank canvas upon which the remedy of suffering and love was fused. Grains of pollen drifted through the air and nestled themselves into the fibers, forever sealing time and location into the cloth. When wealth, blessing, abundance is shared, it grows and prospers. The sealed tomb becomes an incubator for salvation. The elixir of suffering and love is vaporized and melded in the risen Christ and humanity is graced by the gift of the imprint of His essence.
Our treasure of faith, this simple piece of cloth...
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Chapter 14: Palm Sunday
Braided palms from the marketplace
Christ dying on the cross
Christ living in a halo
Holding the eclipse in his mouth
the ancient serpent priest
tests the rain the sun the moon
marks his days
Amen
folds his hours
Amen
measures his year
from inside a blackened cave
Amen
Skeletal palm shadow
waving into the future
a man
a marker of every solstice
a dweller in every cave
braided into the hands
of humankind
Christ dying on the cross
Christ living in a halo
Holding the eclipse in his mouth
the ancient serpent priest
tests the rain the sun the moon
marks his days
Amen
folds his hours
Amen
measures his year
from inside a blackened cave
Amen
Skeletal palm shadow
waving into the future
a man
a marker of every solstice
a dweller in every cave
braided into the hands
of humankind
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Chapter 13: What Matters
To be human is to suffer. During Lent we are reminded of Christ's passion and suffering for the sins of mankind. The road map of wounds He encoded on the Shroud preserve a depiction of a tortured, human man. Suffering becomes matter.
The Shroud is matter. Or is it? The cloth clearly is matter. But is the image on the cloth matter? Since it is an observable form, then would it not be deemed to be an expression of matter? But what kind of matter? This leads me to a whole new vein of questioning, this time from the world of quantum mechanics and mathematics...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Is the Shroud perhaps the first example of observable dark matter?
Is the image on the Shroud our first detection of gravitons?
Is the image created by gluons?
Is it possible Christ radiated His anti-particle pairs via creating virtual sequences, thereby encrypting into the Shroud a copy of His image?
Did a wave function collapse account for the contact force between Christ's physical body and the cloth to become temporarily massless?
Did decoherence account for the thermodynamically irreversible loss of information between Christ's dead and alive body into the “environment” of the cloth of the Shroud?
Was Christ's body temporarily yet simultaneously dead and living and did the Shroud capture that moment of perceivable wave-particle duality?
Is the force that created the image on the Shroud the same force (which has yet to be discovered) that unifies the four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, weak interaction, and strong interaction?
If particles and anti-particles annihilate each other, is it inside that annihilation that we find the mediation capabilities of virtual particles?
Is the Shroud a tangible expression of mediation between life and death?
Jesus said: “I am the truth, the way and the life”
Is all life one singular life?
Although we cannot perceive the origin of the image of the Shroud, we can perceive that the Shroud image is indeed present.
Is the image the first manifestation in the physical world of a particle and a wave existing simultaneously in a way that is perceivable to the observer? Are we seeing particle and wave at the same time when we gaze upon the image of the Shroud?
Life = inertia = particle
death = expansion = wave
Is Christ's resurrection the mediation between death and life, life and death?
particle = life
anti-particle = death
virtual/mediating particle = resurrection
Even though we cannot perceive life and death as existing simultaneously, they do. Is the Shroud proof of this?
Life + Death = Resurrection
Resurrection = Death + Life
cloth = inertia, mass, density
image = expansion, masslessness, gravitons
Is the Shroud an expression of a possible symmetry between baryons and anti-baryons?
If a theoretical virtual particle, the graviton, is the mediating element in gravity and is a massless boson (because it has integer spin), then would non-baryonic matter (dark matter) be the static constant in terms of measurability and knowability?
Is it possible for mass and masslessness to exist simultaneously even though we cannot perceive it as such and must separate the two and perceive each individually?
Is the image on the Shroud an expression of simultaneous mass and masslessness, matter and anti-matter, baryons and anti-baryons, particles and anti-particles, waves and anti-waves, physical body mass and the massless soul...?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So many questions arise from this single cloth
The mystery of this matter
Perhaps what truly matters
is what is hidden in the matter
Christ alive, Christ dead, Christ risen
and the one cloth that captured the moment
of life and death coexisting
so that we could perceive the possibility
The Shroud is matter. Or is it? The cloth clearly is matter. But is the image on the cloth matter? Since it is an observable form, then would it not be deemed to be an expression of matter? But what kind of matter? This leads me to a whole new vein of questioning, this time from the world of quantum mechanics and mathematics...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Is the Shroud perhaps the first example of observable dark matter?
Is the image on the Shroud our first detection of gravitons?
Is the image created by gluons?
Is it possible Christ radiated His anti-particle pairs via creating virtual sequences, thereby encrypting into the Shroud a copy of His image?
Did a wave function collapse account for the contact force between Christ's physical body and the cloth to become temporarily massless?
Did decoherence account for the thermodynamically irreversible loss of information between Christ's dead and alive body into the “environment” of the cloth of the Shroud?
Was Christ's body temporarily yet simultaneously dead and living and did the Shroud capture that moment of perceivable wave-particle duality?
Is the force that created the image on the Shroud the same force (which has yet to be discovered) that unifies the four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, weak interaction, and strong interaction?
If particles and anti-particles annihilate each other, is it inside that annihilation that we find the mediation capabilities of virtual particles?
Is the Shroud a tangible expression of mediation between life and death?
Jesus said: “I am the truth, the way and the life”
Is all life one singular life?
Although we cannot perceive the origin of the image of the Shroud, we can perceive that the Shroud image is indeed present.
Is the image the first manifestation in the physical world of a particle and a wave existing simultaneously in a way that is perceivable to the observer? Are we seeing particle and wave at the same time when we gaze upon the image of the Shroud?
Life = inertia = particle
death = expansion = wave
Is Christ's resurrection the mediation between death and life, life and death?
particle = life
anti-particle = death
virtual/mediating particle = resurrection
Even though we cannot perceive life and death as existing simultaneously, they do. Is the Shroud proof of this?
Life + Death = Resurrection
Resurrection = Death + Life
cloth = inertia, mass, density
image = expansion, masslessness, gravitons
Is the Shroud an expression of a possible symmetry between baryons and anti-baryons?
If a theoretical virtual particle, the graviton, is the mediating element in gravity and is a massless boson (because it has integer spin), then would non-baryonic matter (dark matter) be the static constant in terms of measurability and knowability?
Is it possible for mass and masslessness to exist simultaneously even though we cannot perceive it as such and must separate the two and perceive each individually?
Is the image on the Shroud an expression of simultaneous mass and masslessness, matter and anti-matter, baryons and anti-baryons, particles and anti-particles, waves and anti-waves, physical body mass and the massless soul...?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So many questions arise from this single cloth
The mystery of this matter
Perhaps what truly matters
is what is hidden in the matter
Christ alive, Christ dead, Christ risen
and the one cloth that captured the moment
of life and death coexisting
so that we could perceive the possibility
Friday, February 26, 2010
Chapter 12: A Dark Energy Self-Portrait
Stillness is compelling me to think, to write, to question, to speculate, to dare, to dream, to wonder, to ask, to know.
From my own inertia, inertons, entropy comes a particular anxiety and quest for answers.
Questions emerge that I cannot reach...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Is the Shroud of Turin a dark energy self-portrait of Jesus Christ?
Is it our first visible image of dark energy, the cosmological constant?
Does the three dimensional holographic information found on the photographs of the figure on the Shroud make it a tangible example of isotropy and homogeneity (meaning it looks the same and has uniformity from all directions and in every location)?
Does the image of the Shroud beg us to find new ways to image the cosmos?
Could an image of Shroud face be hidden in a map of the stars, galaxies,constellations?
Just as dots appear to be subatomically sprayed onto surface of the Shroud cloth, are stars too sprayed into space to formulate an image with the same holographic info as the Shroud? If we take the grandest look at the stars can we see this subatomic particle spray that forms the image?
Is there some alignment inherent in astronomical information that is already mapped and could lead us to the image of the Shroud, possibly inside some cluster of stars?
Is the linen cloth of the Shroud akin to an existing veil of stars in our galaxy, billowing and in flux like the Northern Lights?
The space that holds and binds the stars, dark energy, the stillness that contains all, dark matter... does any of it form an image if we use positive space to read the negative space?
Are the stars and what is in between the stars really our “road map for the soul”?
Is the path of questioning an expression of dark matter?
Does the darkness form the image—in the same way that we get a positive image from the photographic negative of the Shroud?
Are all physical bodies vessels and inward expressions of stillness and dark matter?
Is a blast of insight an event horizon?
Is the secret me the secret you and the secret everyone? Are we all one subatomic particle?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The more still my body is
the more my mind awakens and expands
I am fluid and in flux
I keep trying to impose a static state of this or that
when it's all undulating beyond my control
The aliveness is in the flux and flow
The mind opens and expands in bursts
then quiets and rests
The survival instinct is there
so we can keep asking and exploring
Our desire and instinct to stay alive
is the fundamental question we yearn to answer
Alive = flow and flux
Dead = still
Alive = still
Dead = flow and flux
Being = dark energy
Thought = the Singularity
Being = the Singularity
Thought = dark energy
Answers pin us down
Questions keep us moving
From my own inertia, inertons, entropy comes a particular anxiety and quest for answers.
Questions emerge that I cannot reach...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Is the Shroud of Turin a dark energy self-portrait of Jesus Christ?
Is it our first visible image of dark energy, the cosmological constant?
Does the three dimensional holographic information found on the photographs of the figure on the Shroud make it a tangible example of isotropy and homogeneity (meaning it looks the same and has uniformity from all directions and in every location)?
Does the image of the Shroud beg us to find new ways to image the cosmos?
Could an image of Shroud face be hidden in a map of the stars, galaxies,constellations?
Just as dots appear to be subatomically sprayed onto surface of the Shroud cloth, are stars too sprayed into space to formulate an image with the same holographic info as the Shroud? If we take the grandest look at the stars can we see this subatomic particle spray that forms the image?
Is there some alignment inherent in astronomical information that is already mapped and could lead us to the image of the Shroud, possibly inside some cluster of stars?
Is the linen cloth of the Shroud akin to an existing veil of stars in our galaxy, billowing and in flux like the Northern Lights?
The space that holds and binds the stars, dark energy, the stillness that contains all, dark matter... does any of it form an image if we use positive space to read the negative space?
Are the stars and what is in between the stars really our “road map for the soul”?
Is the path of questioning an expression of dark matter?
Does the darkness form the image—in the same way that we get a positive image from the photographic negative of the Shroud?
Are all physical bodies vessels and inward expressions of stillness and dark matter?
Is a blast of insight an event horizon?
Is the secret me the secret you and the secret everyone? Are we all one subatomic particle?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The more still my body is
the more my mind awakens and expands
I am fluid and in flux
I keep trying to impose a static state of this or that
when it's all undulating beyond my control
The aliveness is in the flux and flow
The mind opens and expands in bursts
then quiets and rests
The survival instinct is there
so we can keep asking and exploring
Our desire and instinct to stay alive
is the fundamental question we yearn to answer
Alive = flow and flux
Dead = still
Alive = still
Dead = flow and flux
Being = dark energy
Thought = the Singularity
Being = the Singularity
Thought = dark energy
Answers pin us down
Questions keep us moving
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Chapter 11: One Theory
As we approach the exhibition of the Shroud in the spring of 2010, surely more scientific theories will be appearing in the news.
When I learned that the presence of God was animated in me when the DNA sample that was used to clone me was miraculously rendered viable, I was lifted elsewhere, into a place where my experience of God, the life force, and creation was altered.
I am not required to adhere my thoughts on the subject of the Shroud to peer review or empirical science. I have the luxury to meander when I contemplate how the image got onto the cloth, to really step beyond the boundaries and play – so here goes...
1. Perhaps “How did the image get onto the cloth?” is not the way to phrase the question. Maybe we should be asking “How did the cloth get onto the image?”
Rather than remaining fixated on how the image got onto the cloth, perhaps the focus should shift to the image itself, apart from the cloth. Why do we confine the image to the cloth? Perhaps it also exists elsewhere in our universe, perhaps right in our midst. What if Christ left it on a cloth just as a clue and what He really wants us to do is find it “hidden in all things.”
Everything is at once itself and everything else
Micro and macro are one in the same
One unifying principle of physics exists
which will inevitably explain
the relationship of singularity and unity
The human fingerprint and DNA are evidence
of both our singularity and unity
2. What if...the mystery of the Shroud has less to do with how the image got onto the cloth and more to do with the image being an imprint on cloth of an image that is repeated elsewhere...hidden, yet imprinted inside each of us?
The image on the Shroud has unique spatial encoding. Is that spatial encoding repeated inside each of us? Perhaps it is stamped on a particle level in our fingerprint or in our DNA or in every single cell as that unifying principal amidst our singularity.
The burn marks on Shroud are shaped very much like the bones in the proximal and middle phalanges of the human fingers—is this a clue?
If the Shroud is a quantum hologram, could the mystery be solved by using already existing imaging methods to search for the image of the Shroud inside the human body?
Perhaps, once science is able to record images of the more elusive and subtle energies, we will see God hidden inside each of us.
3. Is it that impossible to believe that the Creator of all things could not embed a hidden message inside each of us that would serve to unify us and bind us back to the Creator?
The Shroud has us all befuddled. The more intriguing readings I've come across put forth radical notions, such as: Was the image of the soul of Jesus Christ left behind as a residual byproduct of the Resurrection? Can science prove the existence of the human soul?
Why would it be far fetched to believe that Christ had a superior consciousness? After all, He performed miracles.
Using His superior consciousness, perhaps he directed his image, not only onto the cloth, but also into us via some uniform, subatomic particle spray that transcends the confines of any light source we understand. Like dark matter that holds together the galaxies, perhaps this transparency will eventually be rendered visible and reveal hidden images.
If Christ's superior consciousness left us an imprint of His soul on the Shroud, eventually science will be able to “read” that imprint accurately and understand its origins.
4. The absence of our understanding of the image on the Shroud is, in and of itself, proof that something exists to understand.
The Shroud is an enigma. If, by using His superior consciousness, Christ was able to materialize the image of His soul into observable matter, then would not the image of His soul be able to materialize inside everything else if He willed it so (perhaps, as suggested, as a repeated visual image inside each human fingerprint or DNA)?
And what meaning would it have for the world—to prove the existence of the soul? To prove that an image of Jesus Christ is not just imprinted on a cloth but also inside each of us?
Would it calm us down, fix our flaws, wipe clean the slate of the sins of humanity, assure us that we are forgiven?
5. Do we need scientific proof in order to animate the presence of God inside each of us?
Some people do. For others, faith is enough.
All stories are the same story
Mythology, religions, UFOs, ancient cultures,
pyramids, ruins, archetypes...
all stories are one
One Theory = An Inverse Question
Must we believe it to prove it?
Must we prove it to believe it?
Science proves things primarily through the physical evidence, through matter and energies and atoms and molecules and physical forces.
Religion/spirituality proves things through faith, beliefs, emotions, intuitive knowing.
We focus so much on the differences between science and religion we forget that, hidden in each of their singularities, is an expression of unity...of One.
6. We already know all answers to all questions; otherwise the questions could not exist.
I read or heard somewhere that “physics is intuitive.” My life has become inextricably bound to intuition because I cannot rely on the parameters of science or religion alone. My relationship between the two, like the Shroud, is an amalgam.
In my readings and meanderings, I have intuitively arrived at certain questions, which I respectfully direct to particle physicists who may be reading this blog (these may give you a good chuckle, since I am so obviously not a scientist/physicist).
Is the relationship between Love and Suffering the unifying principle...the interface that binds?
Is the Shroud proof of the Big Bang?
Is the Resurrection evidence of the Big Crunch, a collapsed event horizon?
Does the human soul exist in The Singularity (“at the center of a black hole, where matter is crushed to infinite density, the pull of gravity is infinitely strong, and spacetime has infinite curvature”).
Could LIGO (gravitational wave detector) measure the vibrations in spacetime generated by the Shroud?
Could it be that Sir Arthur Eddington was actually spot on when he commented: “Gravitational waves propagate at the speed of thought.”
Does the Shroud, like a black hole, have its own natural mode of vibration—its unique frequency ring?
If rotating black holes can create and emit particles and quantum perturbations of the event horizon can allow information to escape from the black hole, could the uniformity of the rotation of the black hole account for the unique spatial encoding of the particles in the image on the Shroud and the light emerging evenly from within the body on the image of the Shroud, everywhere at the same time?
Did Christ's body, as a rotating frame of reference, form a redshift of His image onto the cloth?
At The Singularity, is everything. Is everything one transparency experience, one perfect entropy that binds all randomness?
Is the Theory of Everything the one unifying principle physics is searching for and, if so, will we find the E8 pattern in the image of Shroud?
Did Christ uniformly spray subatomic particles onto the cloth or was the cloth temporarily swallowed (so to speak) by a collapse in the event horizon, wherein the information encoded onto the Shroud is the first visible image ever comprised by dark matter?
If space and time cease to exist and cause and effect cannot be unraveled at The Singularity...is it the gateway to Heaven?
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in a system, a process that occurs will tend to increase the total entropy of the universe. The exception to this is that a reversible/isentropic process, such as frictionless adiabatic compression. Could this exception explain how Christ was able to momentarily transfer his skeletal image onto the cloth by allowing His hot particles to steal the energy of the cold particles so that his image could heat up enough to to emit exact black body radiation?
In quantum physics:
Unitarity = the sum of probabilities of all possible outcomes of any event is always One.
Does the Inverse of Unitarity = The laws of physics all break down at The Singularity?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The meaning of the Shroud = the explanation of the image's origins
The explanation of the image's origins = the meaning of the Shroud
a formation
an information
source
life
death
the afterlife
all recorded on the same image
an image
equally and interchangeably
microscopic and grand
finite and infinitesimal
the tangible expression
of omniscience
this
one
singular
controversial cloth
When I learned that the presence of God was animated in me when the DNA sample that was used to clone me was miraculously rendered viable, I was lifted elsewhere, into a place where my experience of God, the life force, and creation was altered.
I am not required to adhere my thoughts on the subject of the Shroud to peer review or empirical science. I have the luxury to meander when I contemplate how the image got onto the cloth, to really step beyond the boundaries and play – so here goes...
1. Perhaps “How did the image get onto the cloth?” is not the way to phrase the question. Maybe we should be asking “How did the cloth get onto the image?”
Rather than remaining fixated on how the image got onto the cloth, perhaps the focus should shift to the image itself, apart from the cloth. Why do we confine the image to the cloth? Perhaps it also exists elsewhere in our universe, perhaps right in our midst. What if Christ left it on a cloth just as a clue and what He really wants us to do is find it “hidden in all things.”
Everything is at once itself and everything else
Micro and macro are one in the same
One unifying principle of physics exists
which will inevitably explain
the relationship of singularity and unity
The human fingerprint and DNA are evidence
of both our singularity and unity
2. What if...the mystery of the Shroud has less to do with how the image got onto the cloth and more to do with the image being an imprint on cloth of an image that is repeated elsewhere...hidden, yet imprinted inside each of us?
The image on the Shroud has unique spatial encoding. Is that spatial encoding repeated inside each of us? Perhaps it is stamped on a particle level in our fingerprint or in our DNA or in every single cell as that unifying principal amidst our singularity.
The burn marks on Shroud are shaped very much like the bones in the proximal and middle phalanges of the human fingers—is this a clue?
If the Shroud is a quantum hologram, could the mystery be solved by using already existing imaging methods to search for the image of the Shroud inside the human body?
Perhaps, once science is able to record images of the more elusive and subtle energies, we will see God hidden inside each of us.
3. Is it that impossible to believe that the Creator of all things could not embed a hidden message inside each of us that would serve to unify us and bind us back to the Creator?
The Shroud has us all befuddled. The more intriguing readings I've come across put forth radical notions, such as: Was the image of the soul of Jesus Christ left behind as a residual byproduct of the Resurrection? Can science prove the existence of the human soul?
Why would it be far fetched to believe that Christ had a superior consciousness? After all, He performed miracles.
Using His superior consciousness, perhaps he directed his image, not only onto the cloth, but also into us via some uniform, subatomic particle spray that transcends the confines of any light source we understand. Like dark matter that holds together the galaxies, perhaps this transparency will eventually be rendered visible and reveal hidden images.
If Christ's superior consciousness left us an imprint of His soul on the Shroud, eventually science will be able to “read” that imprint accurately and understand its origins.
4. The absence of our understanding of the image on the Shroud is, in and of itself, proof that something exists to understand.
The Shroud is an enigma. If, by using His superior consciousness, Christ was able to materialize the image of His soul into observable matter, then would not the image of His soul be able to materialize inside everything else if He willed it so (perhaps, as suggested, as a repeated visual image inside each human fingerprint or DNA)?
And what meaning would it have for the world—to prove the existence of the soul? To prove that an image of Jesus Christ is not just imprinted on a cloth but also inside each of us?
Would it calm us down, fix our flaws, wipe clean the slate of the sins of humanity, assure us that we are forgiven?
5. Do we need scientific proof in order to animate the presence of God inside each of us?
Some people do. For others, faith is enough.
All stories are the same story
Mythology, religions, UFOs, ancient cultures,
pyramids, ruins, archetypes...
all stories are one
One Theory = An Inverse Question
Must we believe it to prove it?
Must we prove it to believe it?
Science proves things primarily through the physical evidence, through matter and energies and atoms and molecules and physical forces.
Religion/spirituality proves things through faith, beliefs, emotions, intuitive knowing.
We focus so much on the differences between science and religion we forget that, hidden in each of their singularities, is an expression of unity...of One.
6. We already know all answers to all questions; otherwise the questions could not exist.
I read or heard somewhere that “physics is intuitive.” My life has become inextricably bound to intuition because I cannot rely on the parameters of science or religion alone. My relationship between the two, like the Shroud, is an amalgam.
In my readings and meanderings, I have intuitively arrived at certain questions, which I respectfully direct to particle physicists who may be reading this blog (these may give you a good chuckle, since I am so obviously not a scientist/physicist).
Is the relationship between Love and Suffering the unifying principle...the interface that binds?
Is the Shroud proof of the Big Bang?
Is the Resurrection evidence of the Big Crunch, a collapsed event horizon?
Does the human soul exist in The Singularity (“at the center of a black hole, where matter is crushed to infinite density, the pull of gravity is infinitely strong, and spacetime has infinite curvature”).
Could LIGO (gravitational wave detector) measure the vibrations in spacetime generated by the Shroud?
Could it be that Sir Arthur Eddington was actually spot on when he commented: “Gravitational waves propagate at the speed of thought.”
Does the Shroud, like a black hole, have its own natural mode of vibration—its unique frequency ring?
If rotating black holes can create and emit particles and quantum perturbations of the event horizon can allow information to escape from the black hole, could the uniformity of the rotation of the black hole account for the unique spatial encoding of the particles in the image on the Shroud and the light emerging evenly from within the body on the image of the Shroud, everywhere at the same time?
Did Christ's body, as a rotating frame of reference, form a redshift of His image onto the cloth?
At The Singularity, is everything. Is everything one transparency experience, one perfect entropy that binds all randomness?
Is the Theory of Everything the one unifying principle physics is searching for and, if so, will we find the E8 pattern in the image of Shroud?
Did Christ uniformly spray subatomic particles onto the cloth or was the cloth temporarily swallowed (so to speak) by a collapse in the event horizon, wherein the information encoded onto the Shroud is the first visible image ever comprised by dark matter?
If space and time cease to exist and cause and effect cannot be unraveled at The Singularity...is it the gateway to Heaven?
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in a system, a process that occurs will tend to increase the total entropy of the universe. The exception to this is that a reversible/isentropic process, such as frictionless adiabatic compression. Could this exception explain how Christ was able to momentarily transfer his skeletal image onto the cloth by allowing His hot particles to steal the energy of the cold particles so that his image could heat up enough to to emit exact black body radiation?
In quantum physics:
Unitarity = the sum of probabilities of all possible outcomes of any event is always One.
Does the Inverse of Unitarity = The laws of physics all break down at The Singularity?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The meaning of the Shroud = the explanation of the image's origins
The explanation of the image's origins = the meaning of the Shroud
a formation
an information
source
life
death
the afterlife
all recorded on the same image
an image
equally and interchangeably
microscopic and grand
finite and infinitesimal
the tangible expression
of omniscience
this
one
singular
controversial cloth
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