Edgar Mitchell Quotes

I think our science is a marvelous tool. Of course it has its politics, its failings, its mistakes, like all other human endeavors, but I think the methodology of our science - using it to postulate and to use the proper approach of creating falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them to see if they ring true, and then progressing by finding the anomalies to our theoretical structure, and then improving our theoretical structure to take care and test the anomalies - is the way to go, because that helps us discover wha I think of the universe as the body of God, and the creative capability we see and can exhibit as the mind of God. I will use this phrase to describe our system, that it's a creative, intelligent, self-organizing, learning trial-and-error, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system. Well, in the sense of the traditional notion of God, coming out of Christianity and Islam and the Abrahamic religions, I do not hold with that concept of a God or deity. In that concept, I'm agnostic. Okay, I don't know the answer, let's find the answer. Yes, we have been visited and it appears that our visitors are prepared to help us if we allow them. It is a benign contact, however there are those who think that we also have been visited by those who do not wish us well, but I can't speak to that. I just know we have been visited, and I believe that we're being observed, and perhaps we can be helped in a crucial time if we're ready for that. I have been privileged to be briefed and to know that we have been visited [by aliens]. I do not have first hand experience in this regard, but I have been on investigating teams and I have been briefed by insiders who do know. I believe we have these capabilities. It doesn't mean that we will use them. Our future is not assured here. It's not clear that we will survive our own folly, but we have a rare opportunity to do that if we listen and see the messages that nature is showing at us right now, that the finiteness of our own resources and our own planet are showing us right now. I have trust that we humans can resolve the problems that we have created. There is a Sanskrit saying that I subscribe to and I like very much, that 'God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in the animals, and thinks in Man.' To bring the tools of science and to recognize that the flaw in the Cartesian Duality and to bring the tools of science to look at this question of mind and consciousness and to explore it using the tools of science �' instead of saying, as has been the tradition for 400 years, that consciousness is not a proper subject for science to look at. The answer to the nature of our existence is somewhere in the middle, and that, of course, is what we're looking for: how to see ourselves in a new picture of ourselves and understand the questions that humans have asked forever, 'Who are we, how did we get here, where are we going, and what's the nature of this reality that we're in?' One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter. Unfortunately, religions have become a part of the problem instead of part of the solution. We have fought our wars in the name of God, questioning whose God is the best God and whose exploration of this deeper reality is the best explanation. That defies everything that this deeper reality teaches. We have to learn that service to the greater good is the greatest satisfaction. That idea is at the basis of all the great traditions dating back into history. When you get inside yourself - and you really find that deep inner peace that's rooted in love - then you can't live a life that we see being manifested in the large parts of the world right now. Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach. There's an old saying, 'We can mess it up and God cleans it up.' I haven't noticed a deity of any sort cleaning up our messes. We're going to have to do it ourselves, particularly since we have created most of these problems just by the genius and creativity that we've expressed and experienced here in this modern period. We've done it, and we've got to straighten it out. Our success and our understanding is that all beings are right inside, the deeper we go inside ourselves. There's a saying that Unity uses that I have always liked: 'Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.' We all have to be a part of this. We have to be the initiator. We can't wait. I also see an undercurrent - and perhaps the Indigo Children are another aspect of this �' that's moving in the right direction that I thought was really predominant during the last 35 years since I started Noetics. So we do see quite a few people bucking the tides. At the moment, however, the political system, in my opinion, is going in the wrong direction. We have what is happening as a result of the current administration in our country, which I think has taken us in a totally wrong direction, postulating totally wrong things. The quantum hologram is a mechanism to explain this concept of the ancients of the Akashic Records. It also explains Rupert Sheldrake's work among animals [his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, leading to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory]. The ancients had a term in the mystical tradition called the Akashic Records, which was suggestive that nature didn't lose it's experience, that the information accumulated was available forever. The most basic act of awareness or knowing that we can demonstrate in science. I postulate that that is the very basis of why we're conscious at all, that it is this relationship at the quantum level as matter evolves into more complex form, including plants and animals and living substance and ourselves, that this area of consciousness as an awareness becomes more and more complex. Entanglement can best be understood as this: When subatomic matter is in a process together, subsequently the subatomic particles go apart from each other and go across the universe. When they do this, they will remain entangled. That means if you do something to one, the other one responds immediately, instantaneously. I've been very involved in this quantum holographic formalism and helping to explore it as explanatory of the very root of our perceptual capabilities. It is postulated, for example, that this very basic entanglement, at the quantum level, at the level of subatomic matter, is really a part of quantum mechanics. What we're starting to see is a quantum biology, it being applied in biology and cosmology and a host of other sciences, because it does really pertain to how we know. It really helps bring epistemology, which is how do we know what we know, out of the realm of philosophy and brings it into the realm of science. We call our intuition our sixth sense, but in reality it would be called our first sense, because it's rooted in quantum nature of reality. It was around long before our solar system and our planetary system were even formulated or even organized. It is at the basis of how our normal sensing works. So instead of being our sixth sense or even �' using the parapsychological term �' 'extrasensory perception,' it's not. It's at the basis of our perception, and that's the quantum world. I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across. It was a dogma throughout most of the 20th century that quantum science only applied to subatomic matter, and we now know that not to be true. One of the major discoveries was Quantum Holography. Most 20th century academic physicists, and academia as a whole, simply did not want to touch the subject of consciousness. We have seen psychology grow up, and we've seen the development of neurophysiology and other much more sophisticated science, but only in the recent years have the tools of quantum mechanics been applied to anything representing human scale size. The downside was that for 400 years, science has grown up, has arisen and developed as a purely materialist concept and avoided the subject of mind and consciousness, leaving it to the realm of religion. Only with the founding of quantum science in the early part of the 20th century have we realized that the Cartesian Duality is wrong, that body, mind, physicality do interact and they're interrelated. Perhaps people need to understand some history here. Rene Descartes, in the late 16th, early 17th century, postulated that body, mind, physicality and spirituality belonged to different realms of reality that didn't interact. On a positive side, it got the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals and they quit burning them at the stake for disagreeing with the Church. It's starting to catch hold, and in large measure it's because we're starting to understand that much of what we have talked about in ancient mythology and mystical experience and so forth can pretty well be modeled within the world of quantum physics. That's a 20th century phenomenon also.