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...

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...

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

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.

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

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

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