Mysteries and death.

Shroud of Turin
By Kayla Webley
Be it fact or fake, the Shroud of Turin, a yellowed, 14-ft.-long (4.3 m) linen some believe to be Christ's burial cloth, has drawn millions to the Italian city. While the Shroud bears an image of a crucified man with wounds similar to those endured by Jesus, carbon-dating tests in 1988 showed the cloth was made between 1260 and 1390 and therefore could not have been used to wrap Christ's body. Still, the test results have not stopped pilgrims from flocking to take their 3-to-5-minute looks at the shroud this month in its first public viewing since 2000. Some say the tests may have been skewed and should be redone.

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~The ever unknown fact of the followers~


Anyway, as I believe that the subject of life and death should be openly discussed without the feeling of 'taboo' -- because,hey, we human will die eventually; I remember my very interesting chat about life and death with a friend whom father had passed away many years back. This friend had kept the ashes in an urn and it was kept there on an altar in the house.



However, the subject of my story today was the story about cremation and what happen next.
Okay, so, this friend of mine shared with me an interesting fact about what today's people do with their loved one's cremains.


The urn keeping will definitely be noble and done but now people actually have ways of preserving the ashes in a more interestingly nice and beautiful ways.
It is by having the ashes transformed into coloured crystals and with nice designs.


The colour however will naturally emerged from the essence of the cremains which determined by the minerals in the dead body plus other factors and chemical compositions.



Interesting.
I do not know whether in Malaysia anyone had done this before, or whether they have this in existence but this form of preservation is already getting a hit in the US especially with the younger generations.
This crystals will be some sort of keepsakes and i guess would somehow make the passing of people not so hurtful as they would be 'transformed' into another form of object which will be seen or touched ~ unlike ashes.

Unfailingly, when I heard or read stories about cremation and crystals, my mind will always flew back to a once a very close friend whom I had the chance to know in my early days of working. He is (was would be rather inappropriate since I do not know his actual whereabouts now) a person who had started his life from scratch to becoming one of the board of a huge public listed company in Kuala Lumpur. A great companion who is a go getter omnivorous to a calm and composed total vegan who later put away his worldly possessions to take a soul searching trip to Tibet.

His reasons for this spiritual journey?
Fulfilling his desperation in finding the missing thing in him that not money nor people can give. This turn was taken after the death of his maternal grandmother. The interesting part about this old lady was, when they cremated her, they had found some bluish and whitish crystals among the ashes of the lifetime vegetarian woman.
And according to Buddhists, this is a show of some special things about the person. They believe that the crystals are formed as a result of spiritual realizations of the person and act as a reminder to those left behind of their own essential nature of purity that can be manifested by itself thru good deeds and all.

Of course, scientifically, there must be some reasons behind the appearance of the crystalline-liked things. Which people nowadays can create thru several process but with certain chemicals components that will take weeks to create.
On the other hand, this sort of 'revelation' happened to his family there and then after the cremation, thus there must be some explanation to it....

God has certain ways of moving His servants.