edgar-mitchell

Down and In 83
way home. 1 And through the years I would learn that significance can be
found in the routine as well. You don’t have to journey to the moon to
experience it. In the vague chaos of everyday life, ideas come to you in the
middle of the night, in the shower, in dreams. Sometimes they are pulled
together, and made whole, irrespective of the original sequence of their
sources. They are life’s little everyday epiphanies. Sometimes they can shape
and alter a life forever.
During the weeks and months that followed the moonshot, I read literature
on the nature of religious experiences, as well as the very limited
scientific offering outside of religious and mystical writing that dealt with
the nature of human consciousness. I also met with renowned psychics
and highly intuitive men and women to discuss what it was that they experienced
during moments similar to what I experienced. After a few weeks
into this work, I knew I was on to something, though I still didn’t know
precisely what. At times I felt as though I was on the precipice of resolving
a grand mystery.
Intuitive insights, ESP, and epiphanies, I knew, are just different names
for perceiving information. As an engineer, I understood information as
simply a pattern of energy. Consequently, it was evident that epiphany and
metanoia are natural phenomena. I also came to realize that they are common
to religious mystics and agnostics alike when considered in terms of
information and how it is managed by an evolved organism (humans). It
occurred to me that the ways of managing information in this manner
could be similar to the way energy and matter are managed in nature; that
is, increasingly complex forms of matter evolve increasingly complex forms
of information. If the physical means driving evolution of information could
be revealed, the significance couldn’t be overstated: We would then comprehend
what brought about such an ephemeral yet life-changing sense of
understanding. Clearly this should have been, I felt, the domain of scientific
inquiry, yet there didn’t appear to be any serious effort being made at
answering such questions. Evolution and even life itself has traditionally
been considered to be driven by random processes and natural adaptation
to the environment, not systematic processes. I was now convinced otherwise,
but where was the evidence
Mystics refer to such events as “religious experiences.” Scientists scarcely
address the subject at all, eschewing subjective events altogether. Somehow
nothing I read seemed to capture the essence of what I wanted to
know, and I realized that it would be necessary to form a new structure of
thought for myself. At the same time, I wanted it to be consistent with the
methods of science and still not ignore experiences reported by mystic
traditions throughout the millennia. Yet I couldn’t tacitly assume that either
religious or scientific approaches to such events would necessarily
corner the right answers.