FROM Lewis Keizers book, THE PNEUMATIKON: There are some indications that for any civilization to conquer space, it must have also conquered its own unenlightened motivations. The environment of the universal matrix of space itself may stimulate and evoke enlightened consciousness in space explorers. For example, a voyage to the Moon resulted in peak experiences with major and permanent expansions of consciousness for the Apollo 14 astronauts. Here is Paula Bailey’s interview with lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences because of the profound effect he and others had experienced in space, which for him he described as samadhi. 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. Its called samadhi in the ancient Sanskrit—the samadhi experience. Thats 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 wasnt anything in the scientific literature about this, so I began asking the question, what am I going to do about this? So thats the reason I started the Institute of Noetic Sciences.251 If the spiritual consciousness of the Apollo 14 astronauts was so greatly enhanced by a trip to the Moon, how much more might deep space travel enhance the spiritual consciousness of technically advanced explorers from another planet? upworthy/some-strange-things-are-happening-to-astronauts-returning-to-earth?c=huf1
Posted on: Fri, 16 May 2014 15:32:04 +0000
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