A Burst of Conscious Light

The author is a medical doctor with a background in physics who is a leading scientific expert on the Shroud of Turin. The title refers to his hypothesis that the imprint on the Shroud was created by a directional burst of conscious light, which he then contextualises in relation to the spiritual mystical light experienced in NDEs and which is perhaps the essence of consciousness, as arguably also understood by many of the leading 20th-century physicists. He takes the view that the Shroud does indeed manifest the imprint of Jesus Christ as a pre-eminent being of light in a spiritual sense. He gives a lot of detail on the Shroud, which readers will have to assess for themselves as there is inevitably a speculative as well as an empirical angle. He regards mind and matter as part of a continuum and consciousness as irreducible to artificial intelligence since it entails awareness and understanding, not simply information. It is this awareness that he regards as the fundamental ground of all existence that is then unfolded as separation in time.

For the author, empathy is the clue for undoing the separation between subject and object that originally emerged from no'thing'ness. Mystical experience of the light enables direct apprehension not only of truth and love, but also of order, peace and unity. Drawing on the work of Andrei Linde and others, the author suggests that 'we as conscious beings are both the creators of the "now" and of time itself', noting that 'if time is a property of consciousness, then consciousness could not be created by or in time.' (p. 130, pp. 146 ff.) This is where his philosophy of free will comes in as the actualisation of a potential option with parallels to the quantum wave collapse. (p. 154) In the epilogue, 'Natural versus Artificial', the author reiterates his conviction that the mind cannot be a product of the brain and criticises the misguided materialistic vision of uploading consciousness into machines as 'a deadly and ill-informed denial of our true nature as human beings.' The stakes are high, and this book makes an original contribution to the question of the spiritual nature of the human being.