(The following is the Preface to a book I have been working on for over two years. It speaks to Jesus’s resurrection as it is now understood through the results of Shroud of Turin research. Resurrection was a radiation event. There was no bodily resurrection from the dead. And that changes everything.)
There are a lot of things in this world that need liberating but the Shroud of Turin stands at the top of my list. That is why I wrote this book; to free the cloth from the bondage of false religious doctrine, inapplicable science, and chronic naysayers and showcase it as the world treasure that it is instead of the religious relic it is held to be. The Shroud is the key eyewitness to a story of a Jewish peasant named Jesus of Nazareth who, two thousand years ago, looked death square in the eye and proclaimed it had no hold over Him. When He died He took His body with Him and left behind instructions on how we can do it too, if we so choose. Then, Lord have mercy, God forgive us, His great accomplishment was labeled miracle, taking it out of reach of common man. This, to me, is the greatest tragedy in human history as billions of people have gone to their graves not understanding that death is an option. Whether they choose that option is irrelevant. Knowing that it is available is life and culture changing
The Shroud’s eyewitness account of what took place in Jesus’s tomb on the first Easter Sunday is far different than the biblical accounts. Its message is universal in scope and speaks to the illusion of death while the establishment (I call them the Shroud crowd) that now preserves and studies it is totally oblivious to the high stakes that are involved. A Shroud movie would be called Clueless in Turin. Resurrection is the natural way the human body is designed to exit the planet. To withhold this information from the world populace is the height of irresponsibility in light of the preponderance of information that attests to truth.
Resurrection is the natural way the human body is designed to exit the planet. To withhold this information from the world populace is the height of irresponsibility in light of the preponderance of information that attests to truth.
The Shroud as you may know is Jesus’s burial cloth although many willfully ignorant skeptics abound. A full length photo is shown in Appendix A. His faint image on it shows multiple bloody wounds from a crown of thorns and torso flogging, nail holes in the hands and feet, and the thrust of a military spear into the side. All are consistent with the biblical description of Jesus’s death ordeal and first century Roman crucifixion practice. The key issue is how His image came to be deposited on the cloth.
If Guinness kept records on attendance at Shroud of Turin presentations I would likely win the Blue Ribbon award. Reared Roman Catholic and taught by priests and nuns for fourteen years, I received a steady Shroud diet, beginning in middle school. All were church sponsored. The presentations always focused on those features which were visible to the naked eye, presented as tangible evidence of immense suffering and a miraculous bodily resurrection from the dead, a singularly unique event, I was told, in human history. I was taught that at some nebulous day in the future called the end of times I too will bodily resurrect. Every Sunday, on Holy Days and first Fridays, and frequent rosary recitations I affirmed my belief with the Christian Creed, “I believe….in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, Amen.” Then one day I attended a public forum Shroud conference where I learned of the many hiddenfeatures of the cloth. I walked away sandwiched in between new-found enlightenment on the one hand and disappointment and anger on the other. I learned a lot more about the cloth for sure and the latest research findings. I also realized I had been misled. The priestly class I put my trust in was asleep at the wheel. The truth embedded in the Shroud lies not in its visible features but in those which can’t be seen by the naked eye. There was no bodily resurrection; His body dematerialized into packets of energy which caused image formation. Resurrection was a radiation event.
Bodily resurrection versus radiating away, does it really make a difference? Absolutely it does. Bodily resurrection ¾ a crucified corpse rising intact from a burial slab ¾ is a true miracle. Radiation, on the other hand, is the natural way the human body is designed to gracefully exit the planet. That it is, is adamantly rejected by the Shroud crowd and most everyone else in Western culture. I confirmed the naturalness to my satisfaction in a three week stay in Tibet in summer 2018. I went there to investigate the 1998 death of an eighty year old Buddhist Master whose body did what Christian theologians and Shroud science says can’t be done; it radiated away. The two thousand year old phenomenon is known as rainbow body and is covered in detail in Chapter Three. My trip was successful beyond my wildest imagination for I found not only the event I went to study, but four others to boot, including eyewitness interviews and the confidence that comes from knowing the phenomenon is universally accepted in the Tibetan monastic community. Moreover, I discovered a school that actually teaches how to make the body radiate away. Can you believe it? A school that teaches how to not-die. I became fully awake (and further angered) upon discovering that the Tibetan teachings draw from the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Thomas is a Gnostic text written thirty to fifty years after John’s Gospel. Early Church fathers referred to it as an abyss of madness and blasphemy against Christ for it stood in sharp denial of the Christology that was being installed. Some modern scholars think the Gospel of John was written to discredit and silence a large Jesus following that believed resurrection was a natural event. The fact that the only extant version of Thomas was found buried in the Egyptian desert implies that it was a target of elimination in early Christianity and speaks to the wide popularity of the movement as a serious competitor to the Christian ideology we celebrate today.
I tell you, it is a chilly, goose bumpy feeling, a life changing experience to stand over the exact spot where a human body radiated away. I have come to understand, with good cause, that the ambient environment at the spot where dissolution took place has been disturbed.
My visit followed in the footsteps of a well-known, highly regarded, highly educated, ordained Catholic priest, Father Francis Tiso, who investigated the Tibetan Master’s death one year after it happened. Father Tiso concluded, as did I, rainbow body actually happens. With that understanding, the Shroud sheds its miracle status with tangible proof of what is naturally possible when the Thomas teachings are followed. That which is called miracle resurrection is actually natural. It is a means of graceful departure that is available to every living human being who is willing to follow prescribed methods.
I am deeply troubled that Catholic leadership and Shroud researchers adamantly reject the idea of a human body naturally radiating away. They lack the ability to see the facts and, even worse, don’t understand the collateral damage their ignorance causes. The Church, trapped in foundational, non-debatable, non-retractable doctrine, has lost all capacity for creative thought. Shroud researchers, heavily influenced by Church doctrine, harbor and aggressively defend an old school, nuts and bolts, classic science mindset that makes no provision for a human body radiating away. But it happens and has been since Jesus’s time. My (and Father Tiso’s) arguments to the contrary are not contested; even more insulting, they are flat out ignored like the ostrich that sticks his head in the sand. Observation is the ultimate trump card in a science project but it falls on deaf ears and blind sight in Shroud research. If an observation conflicts with a perceived scientific law, it is the law, not the observation that is at fault. There is no place for miracle in a scientific inquiry. Observations rule.
Shroud research is not your typical research project. The use of the word research is misleading. Rather, it is a melting pot of ideas and opinions from bone fide scientists, pseudo scientists who mistake belief for fact, apathetic theologians, scholars, medical professionals, philosophers, critics, bloggers, vloggers, and pod casters, all working without central project oversight. Other than research, work is actually a communal, ad infinitum data gathering exercise with no one to separate the wheat from the chaff and arrive at conclusion. It is a rudderless ship that, unknowingly, is spreading its error throughout the globe. Communal efforts are not known to produce consensus results. Unless something changes a few hundred years from now I’m afraid the umpteenth International Shroud of Turin Conference will take place as experts gather to debate the authenticity of the cloth and the latest theory on how the image of a crucified man got on it. Could it be Jesus? And, by the way, another billion or so people will have passed away without ever understanding the true meaning of life and death. The Catholic Church, the owner of the Shroud, is the logical choice for project manager. It is, however, notable by its absence in the inquiry, even though, I can assure you, its leadership is fully aware of the rainbow body phenomenon. I personally told them and, for good measure, reminded them of Father Tiso’s similar work. I understand the sacrosanct nature of religious doctrine. But, is it right when the sanctity is taken to the level that denies man knowing that death is an option? I guess it is as they say, “Never ask a question if you can’t afford the answer.”
Shroud research, and I use that term loosely, takes place in an old school, classic science mindset. Classic science excels at building roads and bridges, launching satellites, processing chemicals, producing wind machines and so forth, but studying a corpse-less death is beyond its scope. Shroud inquiry is not about building skyscrapers or putting men on the moon. It is a job for the modern science that evolved in 1900-1930 out of the revolutionary, avant-garde thinking of iconic Albert Einstein and his peers. Classic science is blue collar nuts and bolts. Modern science has a philosophical flare that rests on the understanding that all matter is a derivative of consciousness. In other words, at the very ground of existence, the atom, the building block of matter, is just a thought. All matter is a derivative of consciousness, a fact which Gospel of Thomas teachings and Tibetan rainbow body practices take full advantage of. This one understanding totally changes the approach to Shroud evaluation but it might as well be written in prehistoric cave script for the amount of attention it attracts.
How can it be? How is it possible that a tiny group of non-theistic, ascetic monks with shaved heads, wearing wooly robes, quietly tucked away beyond the Himalayas in a land that is stark enough to be called the third pole, considered ignorant under Western norms, knows how to die without leaving a corpse behind while Western high flying science and theology knows not. Not only knows not, but shows zero interest in knowing while adding a large measure of arrogance at the very suggestion that anything of value can be learned from a bunch of meditating cave dwellers. (The eighty year old Master I just referred to spent seventeen years of his life living in a cave.) Coming from the school of hard knocks, I can tell you; it’s a jungle out there when it comes to liberating the Shroud.
Religion and science’s casual, ho-hum attitude about the Shroud is a world scale tragedy for it denies common man the knowledge of what life and death are really all about and the central role of mind in human experience. The Shroud establishment is not only far removed from fact, it is oblivious to the great damage it causes in the human populace that looks to it for truth and guidance. When you consider all of the people who went to their graves without understanding the potential they have to defeat death just as Jesus did, the casualty list would be greater in number than all of the wars that have taken place over the course of human history. My hope is that this book will serve as a wakeup call.
So, as you can see, liberation of the Shroud is a high stakes endeavor with major religious, spiritual, and scientific implications. A summa cum lade graduate of the school of hard knocks, I conclude that the ignorance which surrounds resurrection as a natural event is so deeply imbedded in obstinate, non-creative, mainstream mind that a grass roots, culture changing movement will be required to liberate it. The contemporary establishment simply lacks the capacity and motivation to see the connection between natural rainbow body and so-called miracle resurrection. It’s in that connection that we find the true nature of reality. The liberating culture lies in the open minded, free thinking millennial and Gen Z populations with their seeming delight in challenging old fogey, “we-have-always-done-it-that-way” attitudes with notable disdain for any movement that hints of institutionalization. Having mostly rejected religion, it is they who can carry the true message of the Shroud. Modern Shroud establishment is a lost cause. That which happened to Jesus on the first Easter Sunday can happen to common man. Whether he/she chooses that option is irrelevant. At least they will know an option is available. And, that simple knowledge changes everything. The path is the destiny.
The lunacy, in light of hard information to the contrary, of a first Easter Sunday miracle, must cease. The Shroud’s time is now, and none too soon. The current Pope’s message of change is resisted by a stubborn, resilient, old school infrastructure. Meanwhile, fringe Catholic sects pursue an alternate Christology and youth revolt to teachings that don’t resonate with fact, as they should. Truth, like the sun, can be hidden; but you can’t make it go away.
The Shroud is not a religious relic. It is a world treasure, its own Power Point slide that testifies in living color to the folly of modern resurrection doctrine, the true nature of reality, and the illusion of death. Every living human being in the world has the right to know about it and, as soldiers of Christ, we are obligated to make it known.
The Shroud’s time starts now!
1 thought on “LIBERATING THE SHROUD”
Oh God, Tom! Your words are so powerful and right on point! Thank You so much for your ever shining TRUTH !!
Eternally Grateful,
Annette
Annette Cloutier,
Author, Praey To God