As an astronaut, Dr. Edgar Mitchell designed the lunar module, the actual craft that landed on the moon on all six Apollo missions. Then, on February 5, 1971, as a crewman on Apollo 14, he piloted that lunar module to the surface and cemented his place in history as the sixth man to walk on the moon. On his way home from the moon, an even more meaningful event occurred when he entered a transcendent state of bliss, an event so profound that he studied it for the rest of his life. He met with academic, scientific, and religious leaders for answers as to what happened to him. He wanted to explain the experience in scientific terms, so in 1973, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to explore the science of consciousness.
The concept that only one consciousness exists in the universe solidified in my mind when I interviewed him in 2008. We had a wide-ranging conversation about how he went from Astronaut to Psychonaut.
At one point, I asked him to outline the most important scientific discovery of the previous 10 to 15 years that mainstream scientists refused to believe. He didn’t miss a beat.
“As opposed to the view of classical science — Newtonian science — the mind has positive effects on physical reality. And the healing property is the most significant one in that we shape our health and wellbeing in large measure by the way we think and our belief systems.”
As he explained the latest science on the nature of the mind and consciousness, I experienced several “Ah!” inspiring moments. His belief in a unified consciousness throughout the universe lay at the core of his postulate of the nature of the mind. He believed scientific evidence indicated transcendence as the next step in human evolution.
Edgar Mitchell passed on to the last great place to explore on February 4, 2016.
A version of this interview first appeared in “Point of Light” magazine.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
When Apollo 11 landed in July of 1969, moon fever swept the planet. All eyes focused on the TV images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they walked on the moon. All eyes also saw NASA’s control room in Houston. Apollo 12 repeated that successful feat just four months later. NASA bumped Edgar Mitchell and Alan Shepard — America’s first man in space — from Apollo 13 to 14. After 13 launched, Mitchell sat in that control room, listened on headphones, and heard the iconic words, “Houston, we have a problem.”
An oxygen tank ruptured, which emptied the tank and disabled the electrical and life-support systems. The crew used the backup systems in the Lunar Module to attempt to steer the craft around the moon and back to Earth. The world held its breath for four days as Mitchell and NASA scrambled to bring three astronauts home alive.
Mitchell recalled this and many other adventures in his book The Way of the Explorer, first published in 1996, with the fourth edition released in 2008. It detailed a first-hand account of his exploration of space and his study of the cosmology, or origins, of the universe. His exploration of outer space led to the exploration of our inner spaces. After his adventures in space, Mitchell seized the opportunity to explore the last significant territory for scientific discovery. He found that little rigorous scientific study existed on consciousness and the nature of thought.
An experience he called an epiphany or a transcendental experience caused this realization. However, at the time, and for many years after, he could find no words to describe it. In our interview, Mitchell described that experience and why he founded IONS, a world leader in the scientific study of consciousness. He explained his hypothesis of how it all works — what glue holds the universe together. He also outlined the most critical recent scientific discoveries that society and mainstream science still don’t accept or believe.
A Life of Adventure
Edgar Mitchell’s life sounds like the stuff of boyhood dreams. He grew up on a ranch in New Mexico with stories of gunslingers and cowboys still fresh in the air. In two twists of irony I couldn’t make up, he lived very close to Robert Goddard, America’s pioneer rocket scientist, in Roswell, New Mexico, where the famous UFO crash occurred in 1947.
He attended Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in Pittsburgh. To pay his way, he worked in the steel mills, a job so demanding that he accelerated his academic pace to graduate in three and a half years. He joined the Navy and became a pilot. He landed jet fighters on aircraft carriers, which developed his nerves of steel. That came in handy when he went to war in Korea. After the war, he flew experimental craft with Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. He saw space as the next logical field for him to explore, so he signed on with NASA. After he earned a Ph.D. from MIT, he designed the lunar module, the spacecraft he piloted to the moon.
“The role of my life was to change course from time to time – somewhat unexpectedly,” he chuckled as he described his life. “From learning to fly, then going off to war unexpectedly. After the war, Sputnik went up, and I realized humans would be right behind robot spacecraft. That sounded interesting. So I moved in that direction, and the rest is history.”
Mitchell, NASA, and the rest of America exhaled with the successful recovery of Apollo 13. Mitchell felt the future of the entire space program rested on his shoulders, along with Mission Commander Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa, who would stay in the command module and orbit the moon. Mitchell knew that the next flight — his flight – must go perfectly. Americans would not tolerate another failure.
On January 31, 1971, Apollo 14 left Earth with a moon landing set for five days later. Only two events during the mission prevented that perfection. Both involved Mitchell.
First, Mitchell performed an ESP experiment without NASA’s knowledge or approval. He wanted to keep the experiment secret until the results could be examined. Still, one team member on Earth couldn’t resist the urge to brag about the experiment to the media before Mitchell returned. In one media minute, reporters turned a brilliant astronaut scientist into a crackpot.
NASA said little about the ESP experiment, even when Mitchell published the results six months after their splashdown in The Journal of Parapsychology.
Perhaps NASA gave Mitchell a pass because of the second event when he saved the mission. A computer glitch attempted several times to abort the lunar landing. Mitchell manually entered 80 lines of code that averted a crisis, rescued the mission, and saved NASA’s public reputation.
But for Mitchell, his life’s most incredible, impactful event lay ahead.
The Epiphany
Mitchell and Shepard spent over 33 hours on the moon. They moonwalked for over nine hours on two trips outside the module, which included Shepard’s famous golf shots. With the mission complete, the lunar module lifted off the moon and docked with the command module. The three-day journey home began. With a light workload, Mitchell described how he filled his time. “I had a chance to look out the window, be a tourist, and contemplate. And to see the magnificence of the heavens as only you can in space. Outside the earth’s atmosphere, the stars are ten times as bright and ten times more numerous than on any mountaintop.”
“We flew in the plane of the ecliptic — the plane that contains the earth, the moon, and the sun – but oriented perpendicular to it and rotating to keep thermal balance on the spacecraft. That allowed the Earth, the moon, and the sun to pass through my window every two minutes, plus a 360-degree panorama of the heavens — just a mind-blowing experience!
“I realized from my training in astronomy at both Harvard and MIT while getting my doctorate that matter is created in star systems. I realized the molecules of my body, my partner’s bodies, and the molecules of the spacecraft were all prototypes of some ancient generation of stars. That was a profound emotional experience – of feeling connected with all of that. It was accompanied by ecstasy, and that was the experience found rooted in ancient lore.”
This experience caused another unexpected change in his life. The need to understand it consumed him. Although it had mystical components, he sought to understand it through the skeptical lens of science. For the next ten years, he met with spiritual and religious leaders, mystics, shamans, and psychics.
“I didn’t know what this experience was. It was so powerful. I started looking in the science literature and, of course, found nothing. Then, I started looking in the religious literature, and I didn’t find a good description there. So, I asked some scholars at Rice University. I told them my experience and what I was looking for, so they started digging in the literature to help me find an answer. Within a few weeks came up with a description from the ancient Sanskrit of the experience of seeing things in their separateness but experiencing them viscerally and internally as a oneness, a unity accompanied by ecstasy, and the name in ancient Sanskrit was ‘Samprajñata samādhi.’ When they described it to me, I said, ‘Well, that’s exactly what I seem to be experiencing!’”
In his book, he said that all the descriptions seem “to surround the experience but not actually touch it.”
When asked to elaborate, he said, “I think it’s something we have to personally experience.”
He paused and fumbled for words.
“You know it’s like the ecstasy of a sexual orgasm. You don’t know what that is until you experience it. The same thing is true for this type of experience.”
Just like a sexual orgasm, Mitchell believed the design of the human body allowed anyone to experience transcendence, not just the sages and prophets.
“I think the amazing thing is that nature evolved in such a way, and nature is structured in such a way that allows us to have these types of transcendent experiences. That, of course, is a great mystery – a great cosmological mystery of how all of this evolved with the intricacy and beauty we experience in nature.”
Later in his life, Mitchell entered the transcendent state at will. “I have been able to recreate the experience many times while in a relaxed state or a meditative state when the pressure’s off – yes, I can recreate that experience, and it’s quite wonderful.”
A New Quest Begins
Mitchell asked himself some other questions to help him understand what happened to him. “In our space flight, I recognized that our cosmologies – our story of ourselves – as told by our science and as told by our cultural cosmology rooted in religion were probably incomplete and perhaps flawed. If we were at the beginning of a space-faring civilization, maybe we needed to re-ask these questions again after all these centuries — now that we can see ourselves from a different perspective and see if we come up with different answers about ‘Who are we?’ and ‘How did we get here?’ and ‘Where’s all this going?’ So that’s been my interest for the last 35 years since the space flight.”
Mitchell believed that cosmology, the study of the origins of our universe, would unlock the mystery of how humans became hard-wired for these peak experiences. He knew he needed to study the universe’s origins to understand what he considered the next step in human evolution. This led him to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization designed to bridge the gaps between cosmology and consciousness.
To explain how those gaps occurred, Mitchell went back 400 years, before Newton and the establishment of modern science. “Remember that at that time, the Inquisition was on the back of anybody that dissented from the church and burning them at the stake.
“Rene Descartes, a cardinal of the church, concluded, and it was published and accepted, that physicality and spirituality were two different realms of reality that didn’t interact. The positive part was that it got the church off the backs of the intellectuals and allowed what we know as modern science to arise. What happened is they left the intellectuals alone as long as they stayed out of the realm of mind-consciousness-spirituality. So religious scholars and scientists have walked down opposite sides of the same street for 400 years until the beginnings of quantum mechanics early in the 20th century when it became quite apparent that mind and matter do interact. But even then, the physicists of the 20th century simply would not touch consciousness as a proper matter for scientific inquiry until late in the 20th century.
“In the early days of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, I studied the transcendent type experience – which several of us had in space. I talked to the spiritual leaders of various traditions and cultures around the world and discovered that somewhere in the ancient lore of each culture, these transcendent-type experiences can be found.
“The problem is that whereas the transcendent-type experience is very much the same in all cultures, the definition of it in each culture is different than the next culture. That’s the basis of religion, and we fight about whose God’s the best God and whose explanation of transcendent experiences is a better one!”
When asked if we should accept these experiences as normal, Mitchell said, “Exactly. And I’m quite convinced that they are necessary for proper evolution on this planet, to start to get away from these violent approaches to settling conflicts that seem so dear to us – we’ve been using them forever. But they’re precisely the wrong approach, and they fly in the face of everything that comes from the transcendent experience. And once you’ve had one of those experiences, you can’t go back! We see them in the near-death experience, when people claim the out-of-body experience, and certainly, the mystical traditions and the meditations coming out of many of the traditions are a good breeding ground for these types of experiences.”
Points to Ponder
With three and a half decades of consciousness research, Mitchell integrated his findings with the latest theories of today’s most progressive scientists – those with a more synthesized view of the cosmos and cosmology. Mitchell believed a simple dividing line existed between old and new thinking – Newtonian and quantum thinking. One camp thinks consciousness is a byproduct, an accident of matter. The standard scientific dogma, Epiphenomenalism, Mitchell explains in Explorer, believes that consciousness cannot influence physiological processes. That theory falls apart in the face of the preponderance of scientific evidence over the last century, especially discoveries of the previous two decades.
The old dogma began to unravel with the study of quantum mechanics and the discovery of the principles of quantum entanglement or non-locality — the non-local transfer of information. Telepathy. Mitchell described some examples, one called the Twin Effect. “Twins on different sides of the globe, without talking or anything, wearing the same color clothes or having the same types of thoughts. Or mother and dad go out for dinner in the evening, and halfway through dinner, momma gets all upset, saying, “Something’s happened to Johnny!” and sure enough, she calls home, and the babysitter says ‘Yes, he fell out of the chair and bumped his head.’
“So we know we can’t screen that type of information, and that’s properly described with quantum mechanics, which calls this non-local information. As it turns out, much of the aspects of our consciousness – the way we’re put together – we’re non-locally interconnected, and we’re starting to understand and recognize that in quite a different way than has been recognized in the past. Except in the mystical experience of centuries ago when they described the Akashic records and came up with various mythologies and metaphors to help explain our existence. Many of those now are yielding to scientific analysis as we start to bring the understanding of quantum mechanics into it.”
When asked if we could accept telepathy and other psychic abilities as proven science, Mithcell said, “Oh yes. There’s not any question that many of these psychic functions are very valid, and they are rooted in the quantum world.”
He explained how, in 1994, researchers discovered that every physical object emits energy photons. Called ‘quantum holography,’ these photon emissions carry unique information of a holographic nature about the object that emits it. “We can say at this point what the ancients called the Akashic records was fueled by that sort of information. That seems to be the basis for telepathy, remote viewing types of exercises – it’s fundamental quantum information.”
Mitchell prefers the term ‘intuition’ to ‘psychism.’ He explained, “We call it our sixth sense, but we really ought to call it our first sense, as the quantum world existed before the birth of the universe.”
A Postulate to Contemplate
With all these years of study behind him, I asked for his functional hypothesis about how all this worked. “I have a postulate that I work with. The idealist interpretation is that consciousness is the fundamental stuff – and the extreme interpretation of that is that consciousness is the ONLY stuff, and that matter is simply an illusion. Now, that’s an extreme. The other extreme is scientific materialism, which says consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of the coming together of matter due to an accident. Those are the two extremes. I reject both of those extremes and say that the truth is somewhere in between.”
I asked if these two extremes reflect the extreme positions of the evolution vs. creationism debate. “Well, yes, they’re reflected in that. But neither evolution nor creationism by themselves reflects those two extremes. You have to go further than that. But certainly, evolution comes out of the scientific approach.”
“One of the things that have happened very recently with this discovery of quantum holography and the work that’s been done is that it very clearly demonstrates that nature is a learning system, not a randomly mutating system like the basic Darwinian theory. This quantum holographic formalism we’re using and studying in great detail these days shows exactly how that takes place, and many papers have now been written on them.”
As we humans learn, the universe learns. As the universe learns, we evolve. Mitchell wrote that only raising consciousness can save the world. “Well, that’s pretty fundamental,” he said matter-of-factly. “We have to change the way we think about it. Hopefully, our experience with these transcendent experiences will allow us to start to act for the greater good instead of totally in greed, which we seem to be doing so much these days.”
When asked for his best advice to someone who wants a transcendent experience, Mitchell said, “Search for it; there are many avenues. Find people that are compatible. Study. Meditate. All of these approaches lead in the right direction. How to make it happen? I don’t have the answer.”
The New Realities
At the end of the interview, I asked Mitchell for a brief outline of the current scientific evidence related to topics or beliefs that the old scientific dogma continues to dismiss, even though many people find them valid, helpful, and valuable.
Astrology: “This interconnection that we’re talking about – things being interrelated – I’m sure is what led the ancients to come up with astrology. They could see very subtle relationships that weren’t obvious.”
Energy healing: “I have worked with energy and energy healing quite a bit, and it’s quite viable.”
Life after death: “Life after death or survival of consciousness is a very fundamental area, and there’s not enough evidence at this point to say one way or the other. There’s some that believe, and so it’s a matter of belief; it’s not a matter of science at this point.”
Energy vortexes or other power places: “There are people that seem to experience that. We don’t know yet how to measure such energies from a scientific perspective, but many people agree on the so-called power spots on the earth.”
Kinesiology: “Certainly, it’s a powerful technique – exactly how it all works, we don’t understand yet.”
Mind/emotion/body connection: “Certainly the fact that we store experience in our body – store feelings and react to it – is in many ways the root cause of our illness. Getting our thinking structure straightened out, having our belief system straightened out, and then good bodywork helps cap it off.”
UFOs: “Well, I hope we’re about to lift the veil of secrecy because there are some of us who have studied this, who have been briefed on it at fairly significant levels – and yes, we have been visited. And it’s quite possible – I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s possible – that some of the sightings are homegrown rather than alien. I’ve met with officials mostly from this country but also read the accounts of other countries and their government and military officials who have been open about it. Certainly, from Belgium, France, Brazil, Mexico, and the Soviet Union, we have pretty good records.”
Climate change: “Part of it, I am sure, is natural events that we can’t do much about, but we’re contributing to it ourselves, and that part we need to do something about. Rather than ‘global warming,’ let’s call it ‘climate change’ because it affects different parts of the earth in different ways. We are simply not on a sustainable path as a civilization based on our population growth, our consumption, and our overuse of non-renewable resources. We’re just about to destroy our environmental system and our non-renewable resources, so we’re going to have to look farther afield and change our behaviors if we expect to survive. And there’s a host of different approaches and certainly a different paradigm we have to think about if we’re going to survive.”