edgar-mitchell

20
The Way of the Explorer
From the heavens, in 1971, the Earth looked peaceful and harmonious,
but of course all was not as it appeared. Conflict that threatened our very
survival lay below. Weapons were poised, ready to annihilate life as we
knew it at a moment’s notice; environmental crises were lurking just beyond
public awareness. The common root of these mushrooming dilemmas,
I believe, has been conflicting, out-dated, flawed ideology and dogma,
with roots in antiquity.
It has occurred to me that human destiny is still very uncertain, that
the veneer of civilization is yet exceedingly thin, and our current actions
are not sustainable. Believing as I do that the universe is an intelligent
system, and understanding the absurd and tragic fate that may await us, I
have wondered if we are prepared for our own survival, if our own collective
consciousness is yet highly enough evolved. Our universe seems to
learn by the blunt process of trial and error. But I now understand that we
have a certain degree of control over the evolutionary process and can
influence our own course. But the only way to accomplish this is by bringing
into question the very way we think about consciousness and the universe;
by questioning many fundamental assumptions underlying civilization.
This is a challenging story, one that requires a certain dedication on
the reader’s part, as it contains thought from various scientific and religious
disciplines. That, in fact, is at the very core of this book: a synthesis
of scientific and religious modes of thinking, a movement toward the creation
of commerce between the two so that the structure of the universe
itself is more fully revealed. But I think it is first necessary that I tell you
something of myself, and in so doing, reveal my motives for the unusual
course of my life—I should say, my two lives. The first I now see was spent
in the interest of taking a physical journey, while the second has been
consumed by a spiritual and intellectual quest. It has taken both, I believe,
to arrive at the conclusions I’ve drawn from the sum of my experiences
concerning the nature of reality. The results I have fashioned into a model,
a dyadic model that describes the universe I experienced as accurately as
anything I can come up with.
The narrative is not meant to be pedagogic, and my conclusions are
only based upon a proposed model of reality that I believe deserves wider
consideration, and which, since this work’s initial publication, have received
substantial validation. The book requires a degree of openmindedness
and a willingness on the reader’s part to investigate abstract
realms of thought and arcane ideas. Perhaps above all else, it asks the
reader to see himself or herself as a part of an evolving universe, and as an
extraterrestrial, just as I saw myself when I gazed about, suspended in the
heavens almost 40 years ago.