edgar-mitchell

74
The Way of the Explorer
to do was monitor the spacecraft systems, which were functioning perfectly.
Now there was time to quietly contemplate the journey. I could lie
back in weightlessness and watch the slow progress of the heavens through
the module window. My mind ebbed into that quiet state I had longed for
on our trek to the rim of Cone Crater. There was a vast tranquility, a
growing sense of wonder as I looked out the window, but not a hint of
what was about to happen.
Perhaps it was the disorienting, or reorienting, effect of a rotating
environment, while the heavens and Earth tumbled alternately in and out
of view in the small capsule window. Perhaps it was the air of safety and
sanctuary after a two-day foray into an unforgiving environment. But I
don’t think so. The sensation was altogether foreign. Somehow I felt tuned
into something much larger than myself, something much larger than the
planet in the window. Something incomprehensibly big. Even today, the
perceptions still baffle me.
Much of my thought and feeling at the time has since undergone a
process of alchemy. Contemplation and the process of resurrecting memories
has perhaps served to illuminate the shadows of such a peculiar event,
but the tableau is so vivid as to have lost none of its clarity. It looms in my
memory with extraordinary resolution. There was the initial awareness
that the planet in the window harbored much strife and discord beneath
the blue and white atmosphere, a peaceful and inviting appearance. On a
small peninsula of Southeast Asia, a brutal civil war was being waged within
the thin canopy of foliage. This was a war that commanded the attention
of another country defined by invisible borders on the other side of the
planet. I knew that my younger brother and his Air Force colleagues were
flying their missions there. Then, looking beyond the Earth itself to the
magnificence of the larger scene, there was a startling recognition that the
nature of the universe was not as I had been taught. My understanding of
the separate distinctness and the relative independence of movement of
those cosmic bodies was shattered. There was an upwelling of fresh insight
coupled with a feeling of ubiquitous harmony—a sense of interconnectedness
with the celestial bodies surrounding our spacecraft. Particular scientific
facts about stellar evolution took on new significance.
This wasn’t a religious or otherworldly experience, though many have
tried to cast similar events in that mold. Nor was it a totally new scientific
understanding, of which I had suddenly become aware. It was just a pointer,
a signpost showing the direction toward new viewpoints and greater understanding.
The human being is part of a continuously evolving process, a
more grand and intelligent process than classical science and the religious
traditions have been able to correctly describe. I was part of a larger natural
process than I’d previously understood, one that was all around me in
this command module as it sped toward Earth through 240,000 miles of
empty black space.