In 1971 the Apollo 14 mission took Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell for a walk on the moon. On the return flight, contemplating the "blue jewel-like home planet suspended in the velvety blackness", Dr. Mitchell experienced a life-changing sense of profound connectedness and the universality of consciousness. Leaving NASA, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, whose name derives from the Greek word "nous", meaning mind, intelligence or ways of knowing. In a 1981 statement he said "The vision of the institute is becoming a reality.. humans are creative beings, more spirit and mind than body, limited in our ability to create a satisfying future only by the limitations we accept for ourselves."
In his new book, he talks of how we need to revise our notions of truth to open up those limitations, and writes: "Most of us have accumulated this body of ideas that make up our belief systems through external authorities rather than through our own quest and original insight."
In a personal interview, Dr. Mitchell noted that social change is increasing rapidly: "Most everything is accelerating. I think in terms of systems theory, and civilization is simply a system; we're far from equilibrium, and the further you are from equilibrium, according to [Nobel Prize physicist Ilya] Prigogine, the more traumatic, the more accelerated, the more non-linear is the behavior of the systems. And that's exactly what I think we're experiencing. We're approaching what might be called a bifurcation point or a paradigm shift that is likely to become quite noticeable in the not too distant future."
Regarding the increased interest in entities, angels, channeling and other New Age material, he said "People are looking for solutions for what they perceive as a problem, and they're perceiving at what I call a non-local, intuitive level, viscerally. And naturally we have traditionally, because of our belief systems, looked external to ourselves for answers: to the father figure, the grandfather figure, the deity. That is our tradition. If we want to change things, we supplicate deity or external authority. And what we're suggesting here [in the book] is that's not appropriate. We have all the capabilities within ourselves. We're creating the problem, we can solve it, and we have the capabilities to solve it vertically."
He has a sense that some of the new technology such as mind machines is just substituting another kind of external authority, and that for accessing our internal resources "the meditative techniques are very very powerful; people have been using them for hundreds of years, and they work. But by and large our populace has not taken really seriously what the mystics or the religious leaders have said; we've used the exoteric, but not the esoteric forms, which are worldwide. When I commit to my personal journey and to society at large to be the very best I can be, then we see this internal, esoteric starting to work, starting to take over. But it's requiring us to perceive that we can do that, as opposed to relying on external authority to accomplish what needs to be accomplished."
