A Conversation With... Dr. Edgar Mitchell

The Monthly Aspectarian: I've long thought that the image of the planet from off the planet, that picture that everybody has seen--usually you can see mostly Africa--that image of the planet as seen from off of it, is kind of a signal event in human consciousness that tells us that we're evolving into a new level of humanity.

Edgar Mitchell: I totally agree. There's several of those pictures, not only that one where you see Africa primarily--although that one's very popular. I often say in my lectures that those pictures, the first from space, have turned out to be the most published pictures in the history of humankind. Since that period, hardly a day can go by in any major city in the world in either their print media or television, that you see those pictures. That's been going on for thirty years now. They're enormously widely published pictures. The question is, why? It's because they do speak to us at a rather deep, emotional level and they ask, beg the question not only How did we get here? but How do we fit into all this?

TMA: Just the change in consciousness that it triggers ... I know you've been asked a million times, but would you describe once again what it was like to watch Earth rise?

EM: You see those Earthrises when you're orbiting the moon. This happens every time you go around. That's quite an awesome experience. There's some very lovely pictures taken of that. Most of the time, remember, on the surface of the Moon, the Earth is directly overhead and it's very hard to see it in a pressure suit. You have to hang onto something and lean way back. So most of the really compelling, fascinating pictures and descriptions of Earth come after the lunar mission is over and you can relax a little bit and be a tourist and look at things. When you're on the surface doing your work, you're just too bloody busy to do that! You're following your checklist, your protocol, to get your work done. But on the way home when the work essentially has been finished, generally successfully, you have a chance to observe that. You have a little extra time to look out the window and admire Earth. There's a lot of time to reflect on your mission and on what you've done, and absorb the utter magnificence and beauty of the whole process.

TMA: One of the striking features of seeing the Earth from that point of view is that, except for coastlines and a few rivers, there are no national boundaries.

EM: That is a very fundamental observation. Of course, the great thinker and inventor Buckminster Fuller was the one who coined the phrase Spaceship Earth to make an analogy between the planet and flying in space. He correctly pointed out that often the crew of Spaceship Earth is in mutiny. That doesn't bear very well for good functioning. It's quite true of our planet that we spend more time creating conflict against each other and against our total habitat than we have of resolving them. That's why Earth is in rather significant crisis right now.

TMA: I've thought over the years that we should use some of the satellites we have up there to beam down a continuous, real-time image of the planet that would be broadcast over cable and satellite channels. If anybody with a TV could just look at the planet from off of it, any time that they wanted, in real time, that would have a significant effect.

EM: I think you're right. I could sure look at it. I suspect some people might get bored with it eventually, but yes. If you're willing to be an observer, you need to do that. It would be a magnificent experience for people to have that opportunity.

TMA: Correct me if I'm wrong, but previous to your experiences, you were rather more a straight test pilot, scientific kind of guy...

EM: That's correct.

TMA: ...and it was a significant personal transformation you underwent. What was it like? Some of the people that you previously ran with must have thought you'd gone a bit goofy.

EM: Well, there was speculation. [laughter] The major task of the people who were lunar module pilots on the Apollo flights was to be responsible for the lunar spacecraft itself and for the operational work on the lunar surface " we had to be the experts on that. When all that was completed, we really had more time than the Commander in the Command Module pilot, because they still had experimental work to do. We had more time to be introspective, gawky tourists. Virtually all of us had a profound experience out of that. The interesting thing is, we expressed it in different ways. In talking with most of the people, we had very similar experiences but our reaction to it " for example, Jim Irwin, now deceased, is well known; he became very Fundamentalist and expressed his experience in very traditional religious terms. Charlie Duke, Apollo XVI, did the same thing, relatively speaking. Alan Bean on the other hand, on Apollo XII, turned to his art and became a lunar artist. Myself, being more steeped in science and with doctoral degrees in science and engineering, turned more to philosophy and the science of it to express and find out what was going on. But we all had very similar experiences.

TMA: You went on to found the Institute for Noetic Sciences.

EM: I retired from NASA in late '72 and immediately began organizing what became the Institute for Noetic Sciences. We actually opened the doors in early '73.

TMA: Please talk about your work there and what has been accomplished.

EM: As a result of the experience I've been describing of looking at the cosmos from the point of view of an ET and seeing Earth as it is in the heavens, the precise experience for me was to recognize that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft--I had studied steller formation and knew how the furnaces of the stars and galaxies created our chemical elements--I suddenly realized that those were my molecules being manufactured and prototyped in those stars. Instead of being an intellectual experience, it became a very deep, personal, emotional one, a knowing. That was such a profound experience that I went into a different realm of seeing things.

I later came to realize through my research that what I was experiencing is called, in the ancient literature, a spontaneous samadhi experience, to use the Sanskrit language word for it. This means that you can perceive the synthesis of things, but you experience their interconnectedness at a deep emotional level. It's very profound, life changing. That's what caused me to change my affiliation with NASA and form the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I realized from that moment, our cosmology from science—our understanding of ourselves, who we are and how did we get here--was incomplete and possibly flawed. And that our cultural expression, maybe religion, our cultural cosmology was archaic and certainly flawed. The questions: How do we resolve this? What is it that we have to understand? It became immediately clear that we don't really understand why we're conscious beings or how we came to be conscious beings. That was the impetus and basis of study from which I founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, using the tools of science to manage that research.

TMA: What was found out? What have been the high points?

EM: Well, it's been a thirty-year quest. We still don't have all the right answers, but to reduce it to its quickest explanation, just in the last few years we've discovered something called the quantum hologram, which seems to be a major discovery to bring a scientific understanding of this subjective or inner experience. At least it's a major contributor to why consciousness as we experience it is what it is. It's a quantum physical mechanism. In other words, you have to understand quantum physics to be able to really understand how it works. But let me just give you a few comments about it.

First of all, it's a non-local structure. What that means, for example, is whereas for thousands of years mystics have been saying that somehow the universe and everything in it is interconnected in some mysterious way, that way corresponds to what has been discovered and known in quantum physics for about seventy-five years. What hasn't been understood is how it applied to human beings. It's called non-locality that the universe has interconnection--which Einstein calls "spooky action at a distance" but which seems to be that which we're looking for and talking about--that will help tie the scientific experience and scientific expression with the mystical experience. To me that's very important. That's what we've been looking for, for a long time.

TMA: How do you see it becoming useful?

EM: In this study of consciousness, it's become very clear early in the game that the esoteric or deep, mystical experience is at the core of all religion. It has been discovered that this deep, mystical experience, samadhi, the deep recessess of the mind, these states of consciousness, which I'll now call it, have been present and have been used in every culture in the world. We call that the esoteric experience.

The exoteric is the cultural expression and institutional communication of that. The exoteric is religion or the political form; the esoteric is the personal, experiential form. The experiential form is the same; the interpretation and meaning is different. What has been our greatest excuse for war over the centuries has been religious differences, how we justify our conquest, our terrorism, our violence, our preying upon other human beings and nature by using a religious argument " because 'my God is better than yours, my viewpoint is better than yours." Look at what's going on right now. It's the same issue. The whole point was here, that we are all interconnected through this process that we call in science "non-locality," and we're now understanding in a more scientific way, consistent with the other sciences we understand, is how that takes place. It's the first time in history that we've been able to do that.

TMA: How do you see it being used in this time, and what are the possibilities in the current situation?

EM: I'm not sure we can use it yet because not enough people are familiar with it. For example, I just received a proposal across my desk in the last two days asking support for a Peace-Conflict Resolution Center in Cypress. They''re already operating, they're just trying to expand people's awareness of it based on the very principles we're talking about ... getting significant leaders, religious people, to find ways to reach agreement. That's clearly what is needed.

We're not dealing with a short-term process here, we're dealing with a long-term process. The real question is, can we do it quickly enough, soon enough to prevent us from destroying ourselves? There is a likelihood that any conflict like we are experiencing in the Mideast or like we're experiencing on our territory, that if we're not very wise and very careful, it can expand into a nuclear exchange and eventually a nuclear exchange is going to reduce civilization, as we know it, to rubble. And most of the planet as well.

There aren't any panaceas right now. There is a learning process, an awakening process, an awareness process to understand that we're all interconnected. To understand these fundamental truths that I hope we're teasing out in a slowly painstaking way through modern science " looking at the inner experience and trying to create bridges to all of the exoteric or religious expressions of that esoteric experience " and helping people understand that it is the same thing.

TMA: My working model currently is that if we can reach a critical mass of mass consciousness, things can flip-flop.

EM: That is absolutely true. We've been working on that. We did a study in my Institute about five years ago--it needs to be updated--a demographic study called the Paul Ray Study for the sociologist that did it. It showed that the number of these people that we call the Cultural Creatives were increasing. [See The Monthly Aspectarian (issue of December 2000), at lightworks.com for an interview with the co-author of that study.] At the time of the study, they were increasing about one to one-and-a-half percent annually. That was some years ago. The very people we're talking about and needing to inform are growing at a fairly rapid rate. There's hope, but we're still dealing with a slow, difficult process.

TMA: What's cutting edge for you right now?

EM: To continue to deepen this understanding of the quantum hologram, because it seems to be the interconnecting information mechanism in nature at the quantum, non-local level. It seems to express why we have intuitive, psychic experiences at all. It may be the reason that we have subjective experience at all. There is an enormous amount to work to be pursued here in order to use the scientific methodology to uncover and reveal these ideas.

TMA: Are you more optimistic or pessimistic at this point?

EM: I always try to be an optimist. I recognize the potholes in the road that could possibly be there and that we might not make it, but on the other hand, I have faith in humankind that we will make it.

TMA: Have you evolved a meditative practice of your own?

EM: I've been a meditator for almost thirty years now. I've experimented with most of the various meditative practices and their techniques--I call it a technology--for conditioning and processing mental process. Yes, time-honored, wonderful ones, and yes, I've developed my own, depending on what the need is at any given moment, in order to get the information or the peace of mind or the connectedness or the coherence of mind that is necessary for a particular situation.

TMA: Do you have a statement of essence? PLEASE, GUY - ESSENCE OF WHAT?

EM: We've touched upon most of it. I think the real message here is that humankind has to take responsibility for their actions, and for the results we're getting. Particularly in the Western world, we tend to have a feeling that "We can mess it up but the big problem is God's problem and God can clean it up." That's just not so. It's just not the way things are. We're going to have to be responsible for ourselves and the way we have managed the planet, which at the moment isn't very well.

Since we have the creative capability, we have the ability to become aware to resolve the problems ourselves rather than nature just going on business as usual ... and letting nature do it for us. Nature's method might be a little harsh. We do have the capability to do what we need to resolve these issues. We just have to get on with doing it.