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It was then, while staring out of the window, that Ed experienced that strangest feeling he would ever have: a feeling on connectedness, as if all the planets and all the people of all time were attached by some invisible web. He could hardly breathe from the majesty of the moment. Although he continued to turn knobs and press buttons, he felt distanced from his body, as though someone else were doing the navigating.
There seemed to be an enormous force here, connecting all people, their intentions and thoughts, and every animate and inanimate form of matter for all time. Anything he did or thought would influence the rest of the cosmos, and every occurrence in the cosmos would have a similar effect on him. Time was just an artificial construct. Everything he's been taught about the universe and the separateness of people and things felt wrong. There were no accidents or individual intentions. The natural intelligence that had gone on for billions of years, that had forged the very molecules of his being, was also responsible for his own present journey. This wasn't something he was simply comprehending in his mind, but an overwhelmingly visceral feeling, as though he were physically extending out of the widow to the very furthest reaches of the cosmos.
He hadn't seen the face of God. It didn't feel like a standard religious experience so much as a blinding epiphany of meaning - what the Eastern religions often term an "ecstasy of unity." It was as though in a single instant Ed Mitchell had discovered and felt The Force.
He stole a glance at Alan and Stu Roosa, the other astronaut on the Apollo 14 mission, to see if they were experiencing anything remotely similar. There had been a moment when they'd first stepped off the Antares and into the plains of Fra Mauro, a highland region of the moon, when Alan, a veteran of the first American space launch, ordinarily so hard-boiled, with little time for this kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo, strained in his bulky spacesuit to look up above him and wept at the sight of the earth, so impossibly beautiful in the airless sky. But now Alan and Stu appeared to be automatically going about their business, and so he was afraid to say anything about what was beginning to feel like his own ultimate moment of truth.
they checked his 4 against their 6 and the correspondence between them was shown to be significant, with a one in 3000 probability that this was due to chance. These results were in line with thousands of similar experiments conducted on earth by Rhine and his colleagues over the years.