photo: Dr. Edgar Mitchell
www.edmitchellapollo14.com
On the Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show, Kala Ambrose speaks with authors, explorers and researchers, delving into topics of ancient mysteries, metaphysical explorations and new discoveries from science and spiritual arenas. Transcribed here is an interview Kala conducted with Dr. Edgar Mitchell about his book The Way of the Explorer. *Special Thanks to TaDa Transcripts for providing the transcript of this audio interview.
Kala: Welcome to the Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show. Our guest tonight is Dr. Edgar Mitchell, astronaut and author of The Way of The Explorer. The story is an Apollo astronaut’s journey to the material and mystical worlds. Welcome, Dr. Mitchell to the show.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Thank you and it’s a pleasure to be with you.
Kala: It’s a pleasure to have you on the show. It is exciting just to speak with an astronaut. I remember I had the opportunity one time to meet one of your friends, Alan Shepard.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: We were very close.
Kala: Yes, and to meet with him, it was so exciting. I always thought to meet someone that had been where so few of us are able to go. Again, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show tonight as well. We'd love to start by talking about your book. What prompted you to write the book?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well, I felt that some of the things that I had been doing, or words that I had been talking about and telling people about in my various travels,-- I'm on a lecture about it continuously-- and people asking about things, so it seemed right to write it up.
Kala: It’s such an interesting progression; how you started as a Navy Captain. From what I read and knew, you always wanted to fly at a pretty young age. Is that right?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Yes, I was exposed to aviation early in my life and was fortunate enough to be able to, even though I worked for it. I’ve washed airplanes at nighttime and I worked for it. I was able to indulge at an interest of mine.
Kala: How did that come about for you? How were you able to go from being in the Navy and flying until the day that you found out that you were going to become an astronaut?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well, that was kind of hard work also. To tell the story briefly, I graduated from college in exactly 1952. I finished my course that began end of ’51. The Korean War was on at that point, and the draft board advised that I was about to be drafted and I wasn't ready to do that; to go to the army, and when I just married….and I was not applying. The only opportunity I had for that, since I was already a pilot, was to enlist in the Navy, go to a boot camp, and get my commission as an officer, then go to fly school. I served my duty during the 1950’s. At the end of October 4 in 1957, when I was coming back from sea duty in the South Pacific, Sputnik went up. I realized that humans would be right behind robot aircraft or spacecraft even though I really had no plans of being in aviation or a professional aviator and certainly not in the military. When Sputnik happened, I had to change my whole outlook on life and I decided that this might be an interesting thing to do.
Kala: Indeed, and of course I want to ask the questions that everyone asks. What did that feel like for you the first time you were in space and could look outward and see the Earth? Was it as tiny as we imagined? Did it seem so fragile?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Oh, yes, of course. This experience really occurred mostly on the way home after the work on the surface of the Moon had been done. My job was being the lunar module pilot and so I was responsible for lunar surface activity, and the lunar spacecraft. When we started home, I completed the largest portion of my job. I got the chance to look out the window more than the other guys. My responsibilities were of a systems engineer in a well functioning spacecraft so I got to enjoy the scenery a little bit and we set that up for our listeners on the way home when we were at we call barbecue mode, acid thermal control. We were oriented perpendicular to the flight path and the plane to the ecliptic. This was the plane of the Earth the Moon and the Sun rotating to keep the thermal balance from the spacecraft. This allowed, every two minutes, the picture of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and a 360-degree panorama of the magnificence of heaven and that was quite a truly awesome experience to see. This happened because I had studied astronomy while getting my doctor’s degree at MIT. I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth. I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules in the body of the spacecraft and my partner's bodies had been manufactured or prototyped at least in the formation of stars and suddenly that was not just intellectual knowledge that was affecting me visually. It was a wow! Those are my molecules. And as a result, I had to rethink it over to what’s this all about and it’s accompanied by a sense of ecstasy and absolutely brilliant joy. I’ve never had such an experience. As we continued all the way home, and I got the chance to look out the window, I realized that we were the first generation of space players. Humans had been asking converging questions about existence forever, about who are we, where are we going how do we get here, what's this really all about. I realized that our answers to this question rooted into science were probably incomplete and flawed, because science is only really about 400 years old. We are in the state of the modern days and the answers that are coming out of our cultural cosmology are mainly rooted in religion or perhaps archaic and flawed and, as a new space touring civilization, perhaps we needed to re-ask this questions about who are we, how did we get here, what this really is all about. This was the emphasis, for when I got home to start finding out what this experience is all about, and that was the beginning to become engaged for almost for 40 years now, in the Institute of Noetic Sciences. In trying to understand, I just kind of reused consciousness and what is it that brings the tools of scientists to understand this type of phenomenon.
Kala: When you shared that experience, did you share it with the other astronauts, with people in NASA?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Not at that time, because it was too elusive, it was too personal to not understand and not to exist. Wow! Over the years as we have talked and got into understanding ourselves and understanding how a person is affected. We've talked about it and it turns out we've all had this similar type of experience, although we might not describe it in exactly in the same way and that seems to be the analogy of the Explorer. This seems to be the history of our religious tradition also, and they are rooted in these types of experiences when you try to explain them and understand them with an explanation based in our culture. The experiences and explanations are quite different as if you have a dozen people watching that on the street, you'll have half a dozen different stories about what happened. The same things happen with this type of accidental impression and personal type of experience.
Kala: Yes, like words do not describe trying to tell someone what falling in love feels like if they never had the experience.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: When you haven't had it, exactly.
Kala: You spoke about in your book how intuition works and how in the military as a pilot, that you had periods of intuition. The feeling occurs when people are in an experience like that and what comes at a moment that helps you survive in certain very stressful situations like war. I would imagine police officers and firemen speak about this as well. It seems that there is another level for men and women who have been in the service, that there is some type of intuition. Would you say that?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well, I think its characteristic is rooted in, our basic nature and learning how to utilize it properly. We have words for it probably; a gut feel, sixth sense and so forth. Learning how to use it properly, it is a vital part of our make up as a human being and that's one of the reasons I've been with my Institute of Noetic Sciences …was to delve into these types of experiences. So that we can use the tools of science to understand in an intricate way in my work for the last years or so.
Kala: How long has the institute been in operation?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well we organized in late 1972 and opened the doors in early 1973. It's celebrating its 35th anniversary this year and I know it has been much success in many countries in the world with large number of followers and people interested in our work from all over the world.
Kala: What does the Institute mostly work on and what would be the greatest accomplishment that you think has happened?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: We started out with a notion to understand what is the nature of consciousness. For 400 years since the time of Newton and before Descartes who was a philosopher in the church in the late 16th century concluded that body and mind belong to two different realms of reality that didn’t interact. The Inquisition at that time hounded the intellectual. They no longer burn people at the stake for disagreeing with the church, but the downside is that for 400 years, science has only concerned itself with material things, and that the mind –consciousness-- is simply beyond the realms of science. We have lived that way for 400 years and it’s only in the early beginning of the 20th century that Einstein, Max Blanc, and the explorers --early thinkers of the 20th century-- that we realized the partition of reality called body and mind belong to different realms. It is simply wrong; they are really aspect of the same tray. I’d helped that along, but for most of the 20th century, the dogma of separation of mind and consciousness from science has been the dogma of science. Only in the very recent years has that been significantly changed.
Kala: I like the way that you describe that as the dogma of science because dogma is the term you so often use for religion.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well, science has its dogmas.
Kala: Yes, both of them can, and really, it’s just the difference of having an open mind, versus closing down to new experiences.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well, it’s very hard when we are still a pretty primitive species. We think we're pretty bright, after a few thousand years, but in large measure, we're just barely out of the trees. At the end of the 19th century, for example, the physicists of that period came to the conclusion that virtually all the laws of physics have been discovered, and there's really nothing more to learn about the way the universe is put together. This is such a huge fallacy, of course. A hundred years later, the universe is even more mysterious with our newer ways of looking at in our telescopes and our ability to go into space and go into the deeper aspects of nature than it was a hundred years ago.
Kala: Absolutely. More to explore inside of ourselves and outward.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Absolutely, and that, too. We have unknowns all over the place. This is a magnificent universe we live in and very complex and interval and non-linear. We've tried to understand many of these issues with our classical science and it simply doesn't yield. We can get approximations but only now that we are really starting to make progress in the beginning of the 21st century, and starting to really understand much, much more about the nature of the universe but it is still very complex.
Kala: I was wondering, it seems to me that for a while, there was a great avenue of space exploration and so much going on and that it seems to have stopped so cold and of course I know there was a tragic event that happened with one of the space shuttles. You talk in your book as well as about the terrible accident and why aren’t we traveling more, why aren’t we going further with more space shuttle trips.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well, we will in due course, but it so happens that if you really look at the details of it, John Kennedy did create the Apollo Program, going to the Moon, somewhat out of time, ahead of its time. Actually as a civilization we really weren’t ready to do that yet. It was a political move, because the Soviets had gone into space and Kennedy realized that we didn’t want to be second best and so we set out to this really, really ambitious mission to go to the Moon. That’s fine. We did it. That's wonderful, but I have pointed out a few times in my lectures over the years, that we will go to Mars, in due course, and back to the Moon, in due course. When we do that, it’s going to sound a little when we say, “I came from the United States, Canada, or Brittain, or Germany, or Israel, or Russia. No, we came from the Earth and we haven't got our act together yet because we're still too busy killing each other over whose god is the best god. We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do, in due course, if we were to survive. All of that will take place, in due course, and we will be able to explore solar system. We will be able to go beyond it, provided we get our act together and learn to live as a civilization. Right now, it’s hard to think of that, or that we use the word you may think of as civilization.
Kala: It’s interesting we see a lot of sci-fi movies that show where they talk about how the world comes together as one world when faced with an outside threat. We see this in wars as well when people are band together for that purpose like in World War II.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Yes, we have to get beyond that and realize that we're all in this together and that we're all made out of the same thing created in star systems and we got to learn how to do it differently. In an evolutionary aspect, we have to learn how to do it better if we will survive.
Kala: It seems that in the late 20th century we made great leaps and bounds. Some people look at that and say some things happened at Roswell and that there was alien technology that moved us up ahead and, yet, in the 21st century, we seem to be moving more slowly Do you answer questions about alien technology and these types of things?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well, I’m not quite sure alien technology is involved. I am fairly well aware that we have been visited but the real problem that we're dealing with here is the fact that we have to get ourselves together. That's really the main thing, and that's the big problem at the moment. We haven't got our act together and, as a civilization, we are not on a sustainable path. At every measure, human activity is on an exponential growth curve. The rate of change is moving faster and exponential growth cannot continue in a finite space and we live in a finite space. The evidence proves that we're overwhelming the environmental systems that support us. We’re starting to face a shortage of fresh water, the edible fish of the sea will be gone in another four years or so if we don’t change our ways. We are on the fast path of destroying our nest, home planet, and we've got to wake up to that fact and start doing something about it.
Kala: It would be wonderful if everyone can get the opportunity to be in a spaceship like yours and to see the Earth and put that into perspective like that moment, that ah-ha moment of understanding that it’s just one planet and we're all together.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: There's a great deal of effort going on at this moment with the beginning of entrepreneurial space flight such as with Branson, Bob Bigelow, and a few other entrepreneurs.
Kala: Yes.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: In trying to create space systems, there’s also a parallel to that, a major effort to help people realize the benefit of the big picture such as seeing ourselves from that view from space, seeing yourselves from the mountain top as it were, and to get this jolt. This new way of seeing things is what we really need to do. And let's hope it takes off and people get hold of that idea and we can develop that idea better, before it goes.
Kala: I agree. Getting back to your mission on Apollo 14, what was your mission about ? I know it was a lunar landing and you were out for nine days, what was the purpose of that particular mission?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: To put that into the perspective with the first two landing missions to the Moon, the first one, Apollo 11, was to make sure that we could land do it safely, get off, grab a few samples, and come home. The second mission, Apollo 12, their mission was to prove that we can pick a spot and land precisely where we wanted to and do useful work and get home. Our mission was to build upon success on those two missions and to start science on the Moon. We were the first scientific mission primarily to study the lunar geology and to bring back large amounts of lunar samples. We set up a scientific station with a telemetry so that it can tracked from Earth and to do a geology traverse on foot up to a nearby crater called Colon Crater which was 2 km away from our space craft and to bring back samples from it and so that was our mission. And missions following us of course had a little more to go further, faster and carry back more material than we did. However, we were the first to do science on the Moon.
Kala: I don’t think we can speak of something more historic than that mission. I think it’s amazing.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: Well, the whole point was to start to be able to do something and make it useful and see how long it will work.
Kala: Will we do more on the Moon, do you think? Will we have a base there?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: There has been a plan. There's a lot of talk about it and it is currently planned to go back to the Moon in two years. There are several different efforts besides our own government, and there are several efforts involved. But, yes to go back to the Moon, set up a station, see what we can do that is useful, and continue exploration. Of course one of the major values of this when this is done is to give experience on the planet and to get experience on another planet. Obviously, this is a dead planet and we need to learn how to survive there, and do useful work .If we're going to explore our solar system, which we will in due course, we need to have that if ever we were to colonize and do useful work on some other planet: Mars, or our Moon, or a larger planet. We have to have experience doing that. So those are some of the challenges that we face right now. To do this kind of work.
Kala: Is the biggest problem how we would react physically as far as losing muscle mass and that type of thing?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: The best experience that we have on Earth is the fact that we have scientific stations, weathering over stations down in the Antarctic for almost the entire 20th century to learn how to exist in exceedingly hazardous conditions; and the Moon is far more hazardous than Antarctica. At least they have water there. You can melt snow into water but on the Moon, you don’t even have that. You have to take everything or find ways to manufacture and put it together there. And that's considerably a more hostile environment
Kala: Much less being able to breathe.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: And also something like that. And plus you can breathe and you can take you oxygen .
Kala: It'll be amazing. Do you think that we will see in our lifetime people living there?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: I believe so, again if we get our act together, and start operating like a civilization instead of warring kids and tribes.
Kala: When you say that, when we get our act together, do you feel there are certain minds that we need to pull together to create the change and technology to sustain this?
Dr. Edgar Mitchell: We have to get pass the greed, we have to evolve past these problems that we currently experience and recognize that we are on this planet and in this universe together. We got to learn to cooperate instead of compete to the death, as it were. Once we start to learn that lesson, we will be able to start to make progress. Let me put a very scary thought to most people out there. Just remember, as we look into the heavens and all these star systems we can see up through our telescopes, such as the Hubble telescope. Our Sun is just an average Sun, one of just billions and billions and billions and billions of galaxies, in galactic clusters into the world and it has a finite lifetime. It's just about half way to its lifetime now. Admittedly, that's still a couple of billions years away until the time our Sun extinguishes and dies but it will and so will our species. If we're going to survive as a species, we must get things pulled together. Understand this, we must be off this planet in a finite period of time, and that means we've got to pull together and get things going even though that is a long distance in the future. The message that comes out of this is that all of this is finite and our lifetime is finite.
Kala: Yes, I love what you write here in your book on page 198. You say "the mystic, in his or her search, is simply looking for an explanation of where the spirit world goes when one opens the eyes and finds the beauty, ecstasy, and inter-knit of the creator and unseen dimensions only accessible to the mind. Considerable popular thought suggests that it is in these unseen realms where science and ...
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