From Outer Space to Inner Space by Dr. Edgar Mitchell

Author:Dr. Edgar Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633412804
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

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After a few years of maintaining a comfortable distance from day-to-day operations of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and its projects, I began receiving phone calls from various board members, asking if I would consider more active participation once again. The institute's membership had swelled to more than 10,000, and with the new blood came pressure for even more diverse activity—and perhaps loss of focus. At least some people thought so. My secular viewpoint, they felt, would be healthy.

As I began to assimilate myself and my ideas into this new and larger board, I came to feel more at home. I'd routinely donated portions of my collection of space memorabilia to the institute throughout the years, which helped raise funds, and spoke about its projects to my audiences as well. A sea change seemed underway in popular thinking. By the mid-1980s, the early ideas that had begun in the margins of American society were now more widely accepted. A keen interest was forming around what 20 years ago seemed so fantastically arcane.

But I had never given up on my personal study. An area of concern had been how the belief concerning the demarcation between physical and mental events had evolved historically. This was a critical idea, as I was beginning to be quite sure that at this arbitrary boundary between mind and matter, both the classical scientific paradigm and theological thought break down. They each have something entirely different to say about how mind and body interact. It was also important for me personally because I saw how for the past 35 years I had attempted to live in both camps.

Without being fully conscious of where it would lead, I was constructing my own model of reality. We all do this in one fashion or another, tying together bits of information to make our world more coherent. My desire had been to reconcile my experience in space with my experiences with Uri and Norbu, so that I might see how they could exist within the universe we observe around us. This was a deliberate process. I wanted to know the underlying nature of the samadhi and psychic phenomena, what it was that made them at once possible, mysterious, controversial, and compelling. Like all of humanity, I had two vehicles of discovery: science and intuitive inner experience.

Years after I undertook this project I would refer to my interpretation as the dyadic model, as it dawned on me one day that this was the recurring concept that embodied the essence of how such phenomena tie together and operate through natural processes.1 As I worked I tried to cull lapses into romanticism so that the fundamental structure of nature could be more honestly reexamined. The model was, in a way, a synthesis of all I had learned in the last few years, a construction of all the theory that appeared to fit together in a natural pattern. It was a summation and also a work in perpetual progress. As new information became available, such a model would have to accommodate it in one fashion or another.

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