edgar-mitchell

11
You bring your own history to the table when trying to make sense of
such puzzling moments. The perception of experience is, after all, subjective.
While putting myself through a rather rigorous course of reading, I
contemplated my own formative years and religious upbringing. I saw how
they could throw shadows over what I was trying to illuminate, how there
was a history steeped in culture that colored my vision. My boyhood was a
traditional Christian one full of wonderful ancient myths that largely dictated
my sense of morality. And there were the cultural myths of the Old
West, the pioneer myths in particular, handed down from great-grandfather,
to grandfather, to my father, and finally to me. These were myths in the
form of stories of self-reliance, stories of heroism on the frontier, of sin
and redemption, the relationship between good and evil—almost all of
which were overseen by a paternalistic godhead. They were stories that
provided instruction, stories that subtly shaped judgment.
They were also stories that could lend a particular bias to my own
interpretation of how the human mind and the universe itself are fundamentally
structured. Though the myths that shaped and guided my formative
years were useful to me as a young man, I saw how they fell short of
explaining the questions I was now asking. Yet they were still the prism
through which I tended to interpret the world around me. And they were
a basis requiring accommodation. What I needed was a new myth, a new
story that could more accurately describe a larger world, one surrounded
by billions of other worlds, a story that was compatible with our 20th
century, compatible with an emerging spacefaring civilization. I also realized
that myth, when it is new, has always carried the label of Truth.
In the fall of 1972 I made a radical departure from what I had done
for the past 20 years. I left NASA altogether and became a full-time student
of that infinitely broad field of study that has been contemplated
89