edgar-mitchell

12
It had dawned on me from the earliest days of the institute that there
were two critical flaws in traditional thought structures that tended to
distort the Western view of reality: evolution and intentionality. Or so it
could be argued. Evolution as a general principle of the universe had already
been demonstrated, but only in this century. Moreover, it wasn’t yet
accepted by fundamentalist and traditional thinkers. The remaining key
lay in human intentionality. If intentionality in its strongest form of valid
mind-over-matter demonstrations could be found to confirm mystical lore,
and if it is a general human capability, then determinism and epiphenomenalism
were clearly outdated ideas. This certainly seemed to be sound,
simple reasoning, and so I set out on my own to discover which way the
evidence would stack up—for the traditional way of looking at things, or
for some new “myth” of our existence. I learned the lesson, however, that
simple and easy are not necessarily synonymous.
There were fundamental obstacles to be surmounted. The really pivotal
ideas concerning evolution and human intentionality had to be illuminated
in new ways if epiphenomalism was to be denied. Until the 20th century,
conventional wisdom from all quarters accepted that the universe was
basically in stasis, with change being only superficial whitecaps on an otherwise
deep, still, unchanging ocean. It wasn’t until Edwin Hubble discovered
the expanding universe in the 1920s that scientists proposed, and
seemingly verified in the 1960s, that a “big bang” of some sort initiated it
all. In the aftermath of this discovery, evolution as a general rule for the
universe was established. Darwinism was the door-opener, but it contained
a critical flaw: Life had not likely evolved as a result of mindless, random
mutation, but through an intelligent and intentional universal processes.
The concept of a dynamic, continuously changing universe, of which our
world is a part, fractured a major foundation block in most of the world’s
traditional thought structures. And now, just a few decades later, even
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