What is not commonly known about Edgar Mitchell

Edgar Mitchell has been talked about a lot recently, due to his appearances in some interviews.

I'd like to share today what is not commonly known about Mr. Mitchell.

This comes from a book called "The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe" by Lynne McTaggart.

In her bibliography, she states the source for her information was a book by Mitchell, "The Way of the Explorer - An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds."

She writes that during the return voyage back to Earth, Mitchell had the following experiences.

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.

Whew I can't believe I just typed all that from my book. hehe

Anyway, the book goes on to talk about how Mitchell had an interest in the works of Dr. Joseph B. Rhine, a biologist who studied ESP.

While Mitchell's fellow astronauts were sleeping, Mitchell would take out a notepad and focus on one of the Zener symbols. Square, circle, cross, star and a pair of wavy lines. He would mentally project a symbol he had randomly chosen at a specific time and write it down on his little notepad. His six colleagues on Earth were to try and pick up on what Mitchell was transmitting and would write down their results of what Mitchell sent.

Turns out he was only able to do four sets of experiments, so when he got back to Earth

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.

So I found that interesting.

But what bugs me about this story.... is that isn't it true that astronauts cannot take things with them into the capsules from Earth and that they are to never take anything with them when they return, like notes? Wouldn't other people find these notes and ask him, "What's this, Mitchell?" How could he keep that a secret?

But Mitchell does have some credibility to his name, after he received a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, and was a test pilot and instructor. And grew up in Roswell, NM.

Anyway, I just thought I'd add a little bit of background on Edgar Mitchell, so when you see/hear him in interviews, you can get a better idea of where he's coming from and why he feels the way he does.

Oh, and he was the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

www.noetic.org...

[edit on 7/27/2008 by Ceara]

Thanks for typing all that out.
I appreciate it.
Very moving experience in a very unusual situation.
A life changing experience, I'm sure.
Maybe what it takes to have the guts to go ahead and speak his mind on these important subjects.

All the astronauts take stuff into space with them and, no doubt, bring it back.

I don't think NASA pat searches them before they climbed aboard these missions. These men were sitting on top of rockets that might or might not work the way they were designed. You can't blame them for trying to personalize their experiences in their own ways.

[edit on 7/27/08 by Sleuth]

reply to post by Ceara




This seems to me a thinly veiled attempt at discrediting Dr. Mitchell by associating him with the "new age"
movement.

reply to post by Ceara


Thank you for sharing that. Colonel Gordon Cooper was interested in a lot of that stuff after he witnessed his UFO and saw a picture of one landing. He waited until he retired from the USAF, but his book "Leap of Faith" is very good reading.
We can only dream about what the astronauts experienced.

It sounds like Einstein's Unified Universe Theory. They didn't call Einstein a New Ager.

Edited for content

[edit on 7/27/2008 by kidflash2008]