edgar-mitchell

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Since I was a boy, I’ve lived, in a way, two lives, and inhabited two
different worlds. And I’ve always felt at home in either. The dawn of my
life was dedicated to the process of physical exploration, where I actually
moved about and lived. Eventually I managed to wander as far from home
as I possibly could. But once I had returned from the moon and experienced
that strange insight, I understood that this phase of my life was
drawing to a natural close. Perhaps, similar to the American public in 1971,
I had enough as well. Nothing I could do on earth could quite compare. I
was home now. Anything else, any attempt at exploration for the sake of
exploration, would quickly take on a deadening redundancy. After traveling
so far, all other destinations seemed like pale shadows of a grander
journey from which I’d already returned.
Somehow my attention was drawn down and in, deep into that vast
realm of infinitely small spaces. The private experience of expansiveness
that I had felt during our return from the moon in particular drifted into
focus. There had to be some significance to it, something more than could
be explained as mere elevated emotion, heightened awareness, or
mountaintop experience, though I frequently used the latter term to
describe it myself. The experience was too intense, too complete in its
alteration of my sensibilities. It was somehow defining, but I was simply
left puzzled in its aftermath. Something extraordinary had happened, and
I didn’t know what it was.
As the Congressional funds for the Apollo Program ran dry and the
lunar missions drew to a premature close in the early 1970s, I turned my
attention to the larger related questions about the basic nature of this “consciousness”
we humans enjoy. The most neglected fields of consciousness
studies lay in the realms of the mysterious states of mind that allow for
epiphany and the psychic event. I read, groping in a way, for a satisfactory
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