Looking for the Light: Consciousness, Near Death Experiences and the Mystical Shroud of Turin

In my research the past month, I have dealt three phenomena which I believe are related: consciousness, Near Death Experiences (NDE) and the Shroud of Turin. Among other things I discovered a Renaissance painting of astonishing relevance.

A. Consciousness

There is a heated scientific dispute as to the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the brain. The philosophical battlefield for this dispute is the application of materialistic reductionism. The reductionists hold that all worthwhile scientific inquiry must be aimed at reducing any phenomena to its physical components at the simplest level. Thus to the reductionist consciousness is merely the sum total of physical processes of the brain. On the other hand there is a large body of thought by some scientists that perceive consciousness not only existing apart from the processes of the brain but being the basic fabric of not just human existence but all existence.

Quantum Mechanics (QM) poses unique problems for the reductionists. QM deals with existence at its most elementary levels and grapples with the problems posed by the apparent role of conscious observation in determining our existence.

Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff have written:
“Consciousness implies awareness: subjective experience of internal and external phenomenal worlds. Consciousness is central also to understanding, meaning and volitional choice with the experience of free will. Our views of reality, of the universe, of ourselves depend on consciousness. Consciousness defines our existence.” (Emphasis added)

B. NEAR DEATH AND OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCES

There are two phenomena which have been studied that specifically relate to the issue of whether the consciousness is merely a process of the physical brain or can exist independent of the brain. One phenomenon is Out of Body Experiences (OBE). The other is Near Death Experiences (NDE). OBE have occurred during surgical procedures when the patient suffers a crisis and seems to have died by reason of a cardiac arrest and apparent cessation of brain function.

The classic example of an OBE is a sensation of the patient that she or he is observing the doctors from a position above the operating table. The patient sees and hears things that due to her unconscious state she could not hear or see.

The NDE goes several  steps further. The individual is projected into a different stage of existence and although the experiences may very depending upon cultural or religious backgrounds there are repetitive observations that occur across a broad cross-section of the NDE experiences.

For this brief outline of where I am heading I will concentrate on two of them which are widely reported among the hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals who have had NDE  experiences. The first is progressing through a tunnel and the second is the seeing of a bright light at the end of the tunnel. If you were to Google as I have the phrase "light at the end of the tunnel" on May 20, 2016 the program would report 77 million hits. If you were to modify the search request to "light at the end of the tunnel death" you would receive merely 24 million hits.

I believe that is one example of the pervasive nature of the tunnel – light observation of the NDE. I am not writing that there are 77 million tunnel and light experiences only that the 24 million hits indicate extraordinary interest in the phenomena.

There is in the matter I have reviewed one illustration of the light at the end of the tunnel in death:


It is from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: Ascent into the Empyrean, circa 1500. It has been identified by one recent NDEer has an accurate representation of what he saw in his NDE experience. 

It's difficult to draw a definitive conclusion about the inspiration for Bosch's painting. Did he have an NDE? Was he told about an NDE by a third party. How could hundreds if not thousands of individuals relate an NDE that contains the Bosch vision? I believe that most people today, if they are familiar with Bosch's work at all, are familiar with his visions of Hell rather than his vision of the light at the end of the tunnel. There can be no doubt if you are familiar with NDE studies that Bosch's vision was inspired by an NDE or NDEs.

Those who have related  the tunnel – light phenomena as a part of an NDE go on to recite that the light was a warm welcoming presence but before they become immersed in the light they are drawn back to reality. Christians have identified the light as God or Jesus. 

Throughout Scripture Jesus is identified with light. How apropos is that to the NDE experience and beyond that to the mysterious image of the crucified Christ on the Shroud of Turin. Is the Bosch vision part of Carl Jung's "collective unconscious" or Teilhard de Chardin's "Noosphere?

C. The Shroud of Turin

There have been significant hypotheses that the Shroud image may have been created by collimated light which resembles but obviously is not a laser beam. May we not say at least metaphorically that through the scientific study of the Shroud, He is coming again. That is my query from the Introduction of my book: The Coming of the Quantum Christ.

In this Apocalyptical time, when the extinction of humanity now appears to be a real possibility as soon as 2101, do we not need Him more than ever? 


SOME RESOURCES:

The authenticity of the Shroud
A grave Injustice: An investigation into "The First Selfie"
http://www.shroud-enigma.com/

Consciousness
Roger Penrose, PhD, OM, FRS1, and Stuart Hameroff, MD, “Consciousness in the Universe: Neuroscience, Quantum Space-Time Geometry and Orch OR Theory,” Cosmology of Consciousness: Quantum Physics & Neuroscience of Mind (Kindle Locations 681-683). Cosmology Science Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Global Consciousness project
http://www.noetic.org/research/projects/mindatlarge

The Tunnel Experience
"I also came across a very interesting work by Hieronymus Bosch, the famous 15th-century Dutch painter. In a painting entitled Ascent into the Empyrean, he had depicted what looked like a typical NDE: a passage down a tunnel toward a bright light, with people being taken there by angels ….I wondered whether Bosch had experienced an NDE himself or whether someone else had described one to him."
Parnia, Sam. What Happens When We Die?: A Groundbreaking Study into the Nature of Life and Death (p. 9). Hay House. Kindle Edition.

van Lommel, Pim. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (p. 27). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Dave Hines
Dave Hines who is producing a video of Shroud of Turin  as witness to the Resurrection has created an adaptation of the tunnel-light phenomenon as an introduction to the video. Interesting work in progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d2e62RCPFo
Can you identify the theme music? Think Peter O'Toole.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is not a promo for my book "The Coming of the Quantum Christ" but if you are interested:  but if anyone is interested: http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html

Is the Shroud Image created by a laser? Why not.

The following is a reply to an E-Mail by Dave Hines who has been very helpful to me and whose citation to photons and the Shroud caused me to investigate and begin to develop the working hypothesis cited in this response.

Dave Hines,

Do not fall into a trap of discussing laser beams. They didn't have lasers then in 33CE, obviously, and so the properties per se of a laser beam and how many lasers beams it would have been taken is totally irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that as Adler noted, the process which caused the image reaction was collimated, that is traveling in straight lines without diffusion.

Here is my very rough working hypothesis which means I haven't progressed far enough to call it a final or even contingent hypothesis.

The Resurrection caused the image but what then is the Resurrection? Christ's body in an initial dead state was revived by its transport into another form of existence which in other venues has been identified as either phase space or perhaps more accurately non-local space of another existence. That existence has been identified as six dimensions, not the sixth dimension of our existence.

In non-local space there no space, nor is there time. It is totally inaccessible by us or science with, it seems, one exception: Near Death Experiences (NDE).

It is in the SCIENTIFICALLY investigated NDE that we get a glimpse of non-local space. There is much in common in the NDE experiences of many. I might submit that it is what theologians called eternity. They are not all identical because the individuals are not identical. But what is common is a large number where there is a welcoming light that many identify as God, or Jesus or in the some NDEs who are Buddhists as Buddha.

Note that these experiences occur over duration of a few minutes not hours.

If my rough hypothesis has any relationship to reality, and the Resurrection was a transformation of Christ to a new existence, than the process of image formation involves its infusion with light and its "travel" to non-local space which would have been to our eyes, travel in all directions.

I once had an experience of attending as a Civil Air Patrol Cadet a two week summer encampment where I met a fellow cadet from Albany, I believe his name was Mel Friedman but that was about sixty years ago, He had won a science contest constructing tesseracts, a three dimension representation of a four dimensional cube. He offered to make one and we made one out of soda straws.

It was essentially two cubes connected at all corners soda straws at an approximate 45 degree angle. It reminded me of a stroboscopic picture I once saw in Life Magazine of a baseball player swinging a bat. It represented the cube traveling through time is the best way I can describe it.

Friedman told me it wasn't an accurate tesseract but an accurate one would have been too complex to build with soda straws. It would have been a small cube inside a large cube joined at the corners. It was traveling in all directions. 

 If the Resurrection was in fact the cause of the image; and if the image was in fact involved by collimated light to non-local space, than the issue of laser beams or pixels is irrelevant. The pixels are the width of outer layer (or contamination layer) of the individual threads. Hugh's objection and an explanation of how many lasers it would take is irrelevant.

Please note that the eyes are closed in the image. He is not alive. What we are seeing is truly an event horizon. The last instant when His dead body existed in this space-time continuum.

When I say instant, I am meaning nano-second, or maybe even a smaller division of our time if such exists.

In the analysis of the NDEs, what comes into play in reaching a conclusion as their meaning is the law of probabilities. That's not a problem. Quantum Mechanics is a study of the probabilities in our space-time continuum. See http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2009/06/god-of-probabilities-how-voting-fraud.html

If one thousand people with no interplay or interchange describe essentially the same thing, what is the probability they are each falsifying their recollection? It's nada.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES: 

For an explanation of why the carbon dating of the Shroud was a fiasco and must be discarderd see the 27 minute video at: http://www.shroud-enigma.com/

This is not a promo for my book "Quantum Christ" but if anyone is interested: http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html

Dave's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSotRPtPArI

The Princeton Global Consciousness Project referenced in my posting on the God of Probabilties has been discontinued at Princeton, the project continues to flourish under the direction of the Noetics Institute in California.   

 http://www.noetic.org/research/projects/global-consciousness-project

 Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Noetics Institute, has a video where he provides what appears to be pretty good evidence for the reality of a “Global Consciousness”.

 

The Coming of the Quantum Christ

 If you wish to order The Coming of the Quantum Christ:
CreateSpace
A hard copy full color version can be order from CreateSpace:

https://www.createspace.com/5049060

Smashwords

There are eight different formats that you can download on Smashwords and actually read a free sample.

Epub can be read by Nook and Adobe Digital Editions.  Mobi can be read by Kindle.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/509210

The Apocalypse of Selfishness: The Great “So What?”

“When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, 'There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and lowering.' You know then how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times?”
Matthew 16:2-4

It is my premise  that the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus, called Christ, and that it offers evidence that supports the claim of his resurrection within three days of his crucifixion. The scientific examination of the Shroud began with the Secondo Pia photographs in 1898. Until then,  the facts concerning the death and purported Resurrection were essentially matters of faith drawing on the four Gospels accounts, the Epistles of Christ’s apostles and oral traditions of cloudy provenance. There were even those who claimed that Christ never existed at all. Science has now provided a rock of fact to which believers may cling. But so what?

Here’s what: Humanity now faces an apocalyptical extinction as a species. Revelations and other apocalyptical writings have been until now mystical allegories and metaphors. But science is not prophesying in metaphors or allegories ‑ its prophecies of doom are based on hard facts.

The Apocalypse that threatens us is an apocalypse of selfishness. The heedless exploitation of our environment has resulted in multiple crises that demand immediate, concerted international cooperation and action, but the very apostles of selfishness that are driving humanity to the brink of extinction bar our way.

For prophecy of an apocalypse, let us turn to the current Roman Catholic Pope.

“Small yet strong in the love of God, like Saint Francis of Assisi, all of us, as Christians, are called to watch over and protect the fragile world in which we live, and all its peoples.
	Pope Francis ¶216 Evangelii Gaudium

Despite some criticisms from conservative elements in the Church, Francis has not retreated from his elevation of the environment to a religious issue. On May 21, 2014, Pope Francis told an audience; “If we destroy creation, creation will destroy us.”

Is Francis right? Was his statement hyperbole or prophecy? Creation destroying us! Is he prophesying an Apocalypse?

The Shroud of Turin and the Resurrection

It is often stated that the Shroud of Turin doesn’t prove the Resurrection. That’s correct. But on Easter it is proper to discuss what the Shroud does prove in connection with the Resurrection. It certainly supports the possibility of the Resurrection and is consistent with it.

How so?

Analysis through the decades by forensic pathologists confirms two facts about the mysterious image on the Shroud: the crucified man represented by the image was in a state of rigor mortis and evidence of putrefaction is not present.

The relevance of these two observations established that image was not formed later than 48 hours after the crucifixion. Under normal circumstances, rigor mortis would be released (the taut muscles relaxed) at about 48 hours. That’s when by products of putrefaction would be secreted by the body, putrefaction having caused the rigor mortis to be released. Thus the conclusion that the image was created within 48 hours of death is reasonable.

Do these two facts prove the Resurrection? No. They only prove that the image was created within 48 hours of Christ’s death. The issue resolves to the process by which the image was created on the Shroud. There is no known process by which the image was created. It is an incredible delicate darkening of the very outmost exterior of the linen fibers of the Shroud and may have been a darkening of a uniform residue left from the retting of the linen fibers. It has surprisingly sharp definition.

No one has been able to duplicate the image with sufficient definition to say that problem has been solved. Personally, I tend to hypothesize a process created by light of some kind. But I only hypothesize.

We have still a way to go, but the evidence of the Shroud indicates that before 3:00 PM in the afternoon of that first Sunday, something happened to the body of Christ that left a mysterious, inexplicable image on his burial cloth that has never been duplicated or satisfactorily explained by any process that could have been completed by 3:00 PM.  

The simple fact is that the circumstances of the image may not prove the Resurrection, but they certainly lend support to its occurrence.  It’s called circumstantial evidence. Anybody have a better idea?

Happy Easter.

The Triumph of Love

Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not knows not God; for God is love.
	St. John 4:7-9

 A.   Cosmic Love

(1)   Before the daystar, I begot thee[i]

On December 25^th of each year, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. It is not the precise date of his birth. However, it does give Christians, at least, cause to celebrate in the face of the tightening grip of Winter (at least in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway).

Among the hymns sung Christmas is the French hymn Canitque Noel (O Holy Night). It captures the mystery of the night and its enduring message of Jesus birth in these words:\

“Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”

Chapter 15 identifies the soul with the reflective consciousness described by Teilhard. It also identifies “original sin” as selfishness, one of the driving forces of evolution. Before humanity evolved with a reflective consciousness, there was no sin. Metaphorically, the first sin was Cain’s murder of Abel, an angry selfish response to God’s favor being bestowed on his younger brother that Cain thought should have been his.

The “sin and error” which the caused the world to pine were the bitter fruits of selfishness which, like the paths of glory, lead but to the grave.[ii]

Christian theology describes Jesus as the Son of God, the second person of a Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (One God in three persons). Having been taught from an early age that we can never truly understand this divine mystery, I will not try to explain it here. However, I have asked myself, if we are made in the image and likeness of God, where is the holy trinity of  our personality?

I came up with some tortured metaphors, if not answers. There is human psychological dysfunction of multiple personalities demonstrated in the 1957 movie The Three faces of Eve. Freud found three aspects to human personality: ego, super ego and id. How far of a reach is three persons in one God?

As Chapter 15 demonstrates, nothing appears as it seems in the Newtonian universe. The concepts of Quantum Mechanics including Quantum Information have turned traditional macro physics on its ear.

On January 4, 2005, The New York Times published the answers of a several scientists to the question: “What do you believe even if you can not prove it?”

Richard Dawkins, who in the Introduction to this book was anointed the “Atheist Pope” replied

“I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all “design” anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.”

There is one problem. Certainly, the laws of physics both Newtonian macro and Quantum Mechanical micro were formed within a microsecond of the Big Bang. For Dawkins to hypothesize a role for the application of “Darwinian natural selection” to that infinitesimally small microsecond would be nonsense. It’s safe to say that Darwinian natural selection played no role in the creation of the basic quantum forces of our existence and the rules of physics that govern ‑ and design ‑ our existence. At the quantum level, consciousness plays a role. There is no role for consciousness at any stage of Darwinian Natural Selection,

Rosenbaum-Kuttner in Quantum Enigma quoted the answer of cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman to the same question:

“I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.”

This book has defined God as the primordial consciousness which birthed the cosmos. In attempting to unlock the mystery of creation of both the Universe and our own consciousness, we have to rely on such objective facts as we can ascertain and the inferences and conclusion we can draw from them. The written Gospels are in themselves material facts whatever their veracity. So too is the Shroud of Turin. Can these material facts help us untangle the Gordian knot of our own existence. Do they in fact verify each other?

Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. He claimed to offer a way to the eternal life: that way was love. In the Introduction, it was stated that a Tennessee Williams remark ‑ that most important moments of life are when we break out of our own egoistical shell and really sense the presence of another person ‑ was in fact a definition of love.

Is such a definition real – or practical?

(2)   The Prophet of Love

---

[i]  Psalm 109:3, Douay-Rheims edition

[ii] Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard".