Dr. Edgar Mitchell is a graduate of MIT with a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics. His career as a scientist, test pilot, naval officer, astronaut, author, lecturer, and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization which sponsors research into the nature of consciousness, has been extraordinary. Copies of Dr. Mitchell's book, The Way of the Explorer may be purchased at the Exploring Enlightenment Conference in July in Sunnyvale, where he will be speaking.

When Edgar Mitchell gazes up at the moon, he sees much more than most of us—a world he not only walked upon, but which was, curiously enough, the springboard for an even more profound journey into the cosmos and inside himself.

In Dr. Mitchell's book, The Way of the Explorer, he describes what he experienced as he looked out the window of the spacecraft, while hurtling earthward after walking on the moon.

"It was all there suspended in the cosmos on that fragile little sphere. What I experienced was a grand epiphany accompanied by exhilaration, an event I would later refer to in terms that could not be more foreign to my upbringing in west Texas, and later, New Mexico. From that moment on, my life would take a radically different course.
"What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity.... I perceived the universe as in some way conscious. The thought was so large it seemed inexpressible, and to a large degree it still is."

I spoke recently with Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, and we discussed his peak experience in space and how it still affects him 33 years later. He reports that what he experienced was nothing short of the magnificence of the universe, which was truly overwhelming.—Paula Bailey

Paula Bailey: Please tell us about your own "transformation."
Edgar Mitchell: I realized that the molecules of my body and my partners, and the molecules of the spacecraft were prototyped in some ancient generation of stars. And suddenly, instead of being an intellectual experience, it was an emotional experience, followed with an ecstasy! So my question was: Wow! What kind of a brain/body is this that causes this sort of experience?

How did you answer that question?
It was only after I came back to earth and started researching the mystical literature that I realized that the experience that I was having all the way back home had a name. It's called samadhi in the ancient Sanskrit—the samadhi experience. That's pretty wild!

Was your experience different from that of other astronauts?
Many of my compatriots, like Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin in particular, had very much the same experience, but they described it as looking on the face of God, which is a traditional, mystical or religious way of expressing such experiences. Others came back and began to express their sense of personal amazement and emotion through creativity—painting and poetry, for example.

Is the samadhi experience perceived differently when filtered through different belief systems?
What you are perceiving is information, and giving meaning to that information is what the conscious being is all about. It made me realize that in asking ourselves the deep questions, who are we, how did we get here, and where are we going, which every generation needs to ask, we probably needed to look at it from a new perspective now that we are a space-faring civilization. There wasn't anything in the scientific literature about this, so I began asking the question, what am I going to do about this? So that's the reason I started the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Could you tell how long the experience lasted?
When I wasn't working, and I did have duties in managing the spacecraft, but less so than my two partners since they were doing some other science experiments. Basically, my job was being a systems engineer on a well-functioning spacecraft, so I didn't have a lot to do except look out the window and enjoy the view!

I have to also point out that coming back, as in going out, we were in so-called barbecue mode, which meant that the spacecraft was oriented perpendicular to our flight path and rotating in order to keep thermal balance on the spacecraft. Which meant that the earth, moon, the sun, and the planets all went through the window every two minutes. We got a panoramic view, every two minutes, and a powerful, powerful experience.

It also made me realize that our story of ourselves, as taught by our science, is largely incomplete, and perhaps flawed. And our story of ourselves, as taught by our religious cosmology, is archaic and most certainly flawed. So the point is, since we are now a space-faring civilization, maybe we'd better re-answer those questions.

How did it transform you personally?
It's very simple, it's given me a life's work of trying to understand the nature of consciousness. From a cosmological point of view, how did all this come about?

Was that personally difficult for you?
No, it's such a burning desire that there was no choice. It was something I had to do. You'll hear me speak about it and read about it in the book—ineluctable is that which you cannot ignore.

Did your values change?
Well, they've deepened, in the sense that having the samadhi experience means that the first thing you recognize is what the mystics have always said, that in some mysterious way the universe is totally interconnected. You live that, and you feel that. And you recognize that what we do to each other, we do to ourselves. Kind of like the traditional near-death experience—you feel a compassion, you are more sensitive to nature, to the universe itself. So your values are deepened, and they become more there, and you have to live them.

I just can't imagine being out there looking back at earth. When I look at pictures of earth, it's so beautiful. It's like it was a special intention.
It's reaching you, and you have to ask, why are we so emotional about it? It's reaching to a fairly deep level of our psyche, some sort of spiritual question at a deep level.

Even the question of why all the conditions are so perfect for life to exist here—it's almost like the earth maintains these critical levels so life can go on.
That goes clear back to the Gaia hypothesis and James Lovelock's concept that essentially the earth is a living organism. It behaves like a living organism. It monitors itself. Some of the work that I have done and we have discovered recently, helps explain that, the so-called quantum holographic work. It's been well-known for 75 years that matter at the atomic level is emitting and re-absorbing photons all the time. Mostly, quantum physics has studied single emissions and single particles and their trajectories and how they combine, split and so forth, but the kicker here is that if you study it as a group phenomenon, you discover, and the experiment has been validated, the information about the event history of that object is being carried.

That tells us that nature preserves its experience. In other words, it's a non-local phenomenon. So the universe is connected non-locally via the quantum hologram, information is shared throughout and that happens to explain all psychic events and perceptions, and even gives a new theory about why we perceive anything at all. I'll be talking about this at the Exploring Enlightenment Conference in Sunnyvale in July. The whole point is that this mechanism shows that the quantum properties of non-locality and coherence aren't just properties of sub-atomic matter, but pertain to all matter.

This idea is just now really starting to take hold in the scientific community and we are starting to understand the basic implications. It opens a whole field of trying to apply quantum principles, particularly to bio-matter, and we're learning a whole host of new things. Until very recently, particle physicists have said quantum physics doesn't pertain to our scale size. Now there's quite a number of well-qualified people starting to recognize the truth of it, so there's a lot more work that we can and will be doing in the future, bringing these quantum properties in and trying to understand them, from the point of view of quantum biology. It pertains very strongly to consciousness studies, and to the big bang theory. It's deeply into question if the big bang is the right approach.

What do you think did happen?
There are several approaches. We are working on quantum cosmology, which shows how the universe could arise out of a zero-point field spontaneously. Something had to initiate the big bang, some sort of self-initiating process. That seems quite feasible. Are we talking about the beginning of the universe or are we talking about a continuous process happening, which makes a lot more sense.

Interesting work! What are the fundamental questions that have driven your life?
It's that question of learning. Learning what's going on, learning how it all works, has been my driving motivation throughout my life. I went into the space program, kind of like the bear going over the mountain to see what he can see. All I can say is that I'm curious.

Curious, indeed! That was some mountain, and I think Edgar Mitchell saw a lot more than your average bear!