Astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s New Cosmology Inspires a Quantum Leap

In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s televised speech before a joint session of congress challenged members to appropriate funds for landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. Those words stirred the spirit of imagination and exploration in Edgar Mitchell. By 1966, the former naval officer, aviator, test pilot and aeronautical engineer had joined Project Apollo as one of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s fifth group of astronauts.

In 1971, as the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, he and Alan Shepard walked on the moon while their crewmate Stuart A. Roosa orbited its surface aboard the mission command module Kitty Hawk. The sixth person to walk on the moon, Mitchell, the author of The Way of the Explorer, co-founder of the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS) and chairman of Quantrek, Inc., logged nine hours of lunar surface exploration time, more than any other astronaut.

More than 50 years later, it is possible to debate whether the last living member of the Apollo 14 crew, whose accomplishments have secured him a place in the annals of aerospace legend, will be more remembered for exploring inner space than outer space. As an inductee of the prestigious Leonardo da Vinci Society for the Study of Thinking, Mitchell belongs to an elite group of the world’s greatest living thinkers.

His induction honors  40-plus-years of intellectual pursuit, dedication and a tireless search to discover common ground between science and spirit within the inner reaches of human consciousness. The catalyst for this search was Mitchell’s desire to gain a deeper understanding of the transformative awakening he experienced on the ride back to Earth.

No longer preoccupied with work tasks, Mitchell gazed intently out the window of the command module as it rotated to maintain thermal equilibrium with the sun. During every two-minute rotation, he observed the Earth, Moon and Sun passing by, as well as a magnificent, 360-degree panorama of star-filled heavens. His realization that the molecules of his body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been born in an ancient generation of stars elicited a visceral experience of being interconnected with all things and a state of spiritual ecstasy.

The results of his personal explorations led Mitchell to co-found IONS in 1973. The nonprofit parapsychological research institute looks at spiritual experiences from the view of quantum science, and performs scientific research into a transcendental potential capable of inspiring global civilization to collective systemic actions that move toward a more sustainable future.

Through Quantrek, Mitchell collaborated with a stellar interdisciplinary team of degreed scientists that used scientific methods to study the quantum hologram (QH) model, which Mitchell calls “nature’s mind”. Focused primarily on the quantum attributes of nature’s mind—entanglement, coherence, resonance and non-locality—Quantrek’s research succeeded in accelerating the advancement of knowledge regarding the ultimate nature of reality. By embracing the goal of empirically establishing a unified theory of nature that incorporates the phenomenon of consciousness and a synthesis of thinking capable of linking disparate schools of thoughts in physics, Mitchell was able to describe a new cosmology that holds a promise for a necessary evolution of how we see ourselves in relation to the reality around us.

Mitchell’s nature’s mind model holds great potential for demonstrating empirically that everything in the universe is part of the same whole and derived from the same source. This means that human beings, when compelled by scientific findings, may come to realize that in this interconnected and interdependent universe, what one does to others, one does to oneself. This interconnected and interdependent universe may bring us full circle to reconsider an insightful statement made by the president in his “Moon Shot” speech. “…In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon…it will be an entire nation.”

In July 1969, when the U.S. population was only about 200 million, the collective imagination of 600 million armchair explorers worldwide enthralled and entrained with the image of Neil Armstrong taking one giant leap for mankind. It is possible that Mitchell’s new quantum hologram cosmology might also be capable of igniting another collective moment, in which we all take one more quantum leap in a collective consciousness that benefits all of mankind.

 

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell is a keynote speaker for the IONS 16th International Conference, Jul. 22 to 26, at the Hilton Oak Brook Hills Resort. For more information on the conference, presenters and The Science of Being: The Spirit of Community theme, visit Noetic.org.