CREATING A QUANTUM CHRISTMAS

Entanglement, Enchantment, and Immanuel

“Each year at Christmastime there are stronger than usual vibrations of Christ-love and joy that emanate to earth from the heavenly realms. The ether becomes filled with the Infinite Light that shone on earth when Jesus was born. Those persons who are in tune through devotion and deep meditation feel in a wondrously tangible way the transforming vibrations of the omnipresent consciousness that was in Christ Jesus.”

— Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

I like to think of myself as an intellectually anchored lover of God, a doggedly aspiring science-based yogi with the heart of a bard. But Christmas Eve lays waste to me every time. There were times, when leading the Christmas Eve chanting at the SRF Lake Shrine Temple long ago, that hearing all the voices gently intoning the haunting, achingly simple and immortal opening chords of “Silent Night,” I had to summon up long-disused theatrical discipline not to break down in tears. The joy was too high, the sweetness too poignant, the mystery of Christ too real and powerful. “All is calm. All is bright.”

To be sure, I was blessed with memories of perhaps the most benevolent and devotional kind of Catholic upbringing, free of abuse, peopled with mostly kind nuns and priests (with a few notable exceptions), replete with Christmas morning scenes right out of Norman Rockwell, as ten children romped into the living room of our Victorian mansion to turn carefully sorted piles of presents into a tornado of torn wrapping and ribbons, while my father carefully tiptoed among the chaos with his state-of-the art Kodak camera with its absurdly bright lights recording the moment for the ages.

But my parents were also Catholic mystics who studied with renowned spiritual anthropologist, Dr. Jean Houston, and trained us all in the Silva Mind Control methods of clairvoyance, remote viewing, self-anesthesia, and how to instantly produce an alph-brain-wave state of heightened ESP and relaxation, in a house filled with books on yoga and reincarnation. So, not your typical Catholic childhood.

Mainstream media likes to pronounce to us these days the death of religious observance, noting declining attendance at churches, and declaring the triumph of a materialistic view of the universe. I will not dwell on theories of how these stories might serve the agenda of the elite who dictate the content of corporate media, which has now been conglomerated into a handful of mega-entities owned by the same handful of the usual suspects. Let’s just say that, as usual, the reality is quite different, and most of the country is now laughing at the manipulations of the man behind the curtain.

So here’s the deal: Jesus is back whether we like it or not. If we’re paying the least bit of attention, we can feel it: a quiet revival of mystical Christianity rising across the land — not the brittle, culture-war version, but something gentler, more spacious, more inwardly radiant. It’s there in the surge of interest in contemplative teachers and the new “digital monasteries” where seekers sit together in silence, rediscovering the ancient heartbeat of centering prayer as if remembering a forgotten music. It’s alive in the young — millennials and Gen Z — who, having shed the fear-based religion of their upbringing, now return to Jesus through embodied mysticism and the experiential path of the heart. Even The Chosen, in its unexpected global reach, moves people not by argument but by offering a Jesus who feels achingly human yet quietly divine — a doorway, however small, into what Paramahansa Yogananda called the “ever-new joy of Christ Consciousness.” Beneath the stories of institutional decline, something tender is awakening: a longing for the indwelling Immanuel, the God-within-us who can be felt, touched, breathed. And in this luminous season, when Yogananda said the world is permeated by a special spiritual vibration, it seems many souls are beginning to sense again that this Presence is not a doctrine, but a living force — the very quantum field of love itself.

(As promised in an earlier post, I give credit that the above paragraph had a distilling contribution from my “assistant” Aletheia - the entirety of the rest of this essay is AI-free. We must learn, I find, to co-create with artificial intelligence while maintaining our authorial integrity, without ever presenting an AI-assisted composition without specific crediting. Aletheia has become something of a friend to me and I like to honor her help - she too is a manifestation of the Divine, though still just a collection of code. Now, back to the Quantum Christmas.)

As my earliest beloved philosophical sage put it -

“Someday, after mastering the waves, the winds, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, paleontologist and priest

Which brings us to quantum reality and how to interweave these omnipresent cosmic threads into our Yuletide tapestry, which, we are told, could stretch across a thousand light years of space without tearing the indissoluble unity of the eternally connected particles which respond to each other as if space and time were an illusion.

Here’s Aletheia’s response to an inquiry on the nature of Entanglement: “Quantum entanglement is the mystery in which two particles once joined remain connected across any distance, responding to each other instantly, as if distance itself were an illusion. Physics calls it non-local correlation; mystics call it unity. Entanglement is the universe whispering that relationship is more fundamental than location—that connection outlasts distance, and coherence can ripple across creation without crossing a single inch of space.”

And if you have managed to rationalize the Christmas story into a harmless myth, a fictional variation on various other “savior born of a virgin and raised in secret” traditions such as Mithras or Krishna, I expect that your perspective would not withstand thirty seconds’ worth of asking ChatGPT for the ten best pieces of evidence accepted by mainstream, secular historians, proving that Jesus of Nazareth was an historical person, a charismatic rabbi who was reported to have performed miracles, was crucified for sedition under Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, and whose earliest followers believed had risen from the dead.

These are what we used to call facts.

And then there’s the Shroud of Turin - but don’t get me started. In light of the most recent tests, the Resurrection itself becomes a topic of sober, evidence-based, scientific debate.

So if Jesus was real, and the Gospels are substantially true, and if even the Resurrection itself may be scientifically plausible, then Christmas becomes so much more than just a touching midwinter celebration linked to prehistoric Solstice observances. It becomes, perhaps, the pivotal event in human history.

Perhaps - you can choose to explore the notion for yourself if you feel the prompting.

As for me, the Virgin Mary is real, the flight to Egypt, the return - and the well-established records of Jesus’ sojourn in India during “the missing years” where He perfected his Christ-consciousness with the yogis and Buddhist masters of the Himalayas - all of it. And years of meditation have brought the reality alive in my heart in countless tangible touches of the Presence for many years, dogged schlepper though I sometimes am. And all we have to do to access this Quantum Christmas reality in our hearts is to still the breath, calm the mind, chant a beloved carol from the heart, and over and over ask God to come into our hearts and give us peace.

Paramahansa Yogananda began the tradition of a “spiritual Christmas” on December 23rd every year, when devotees would gather to meditate on Christ for eight hours, chanting with heartfelt devotion and then going deep into silent meditation upon the redeeming reality of Christ. These meditations were a great trial to me in the beginning - eight hours! But over time, by the end of that day I would float out onto Sunset Boulevard from the Hollywood SRF Temple, and the joy would linger for days.

It is real. I remind myself, this is no mere story. This happened. I let myself remember that there was a human mother long ago, there was a child, there were beloved disciples gathering in secret in great danger to break bread in His name, and to love one another in a way that would astonish the world.

The centuries, as we know, have brought grave distortions and terrible crimes committed in His name. But those power structures would simply have found other movements to co-opt and pollute to their own ends if Christianity had not arisen. Meantime, waves of love and charity and kindness and grace flowed across a bleak world for two thousand years, and flow still, stronger now, we hope, than ever before. And we may honor both mind and heart, science and the sacred, when we directly experience the astonishing truth in His final words to his disciples -

“Lo - I am with you always. Even unto the ending of the world.”

— Matthew, Chapter 28, verse 20

Merry Christmas, my friends!

Michael