The good folk at the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS) has posted the lovely short video below in honour of the passing of their founder, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. As they explain in “In Memoriam: Edgar Mitchell, ScD, PhD“, Edgar Mitchell’s view of the heavens on the journey home from the Moon delivered an epiphany, inspiring him to create IONS as a research centre that could deliver “a new story of who we are and what we are capable of becoming”.
From the video:
I had completed my major task for going to the Moon, and was on my way home, and was observing the heavens and the Earth from this distance…
As we were rotating I saw the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and a 360 degree panorama of the heavens. The magnificence of all of this – what this triggered, in the ancient Sanskrit, is called samadhi. It means that you see things with your senses the way they are, but you experience them viscerally and internally as a unity and a one-ness, accompanied by ecstasy.
All matter in our universe is created in star systems. And so the matter in my body, and the matter in the spacecraft, and the matter in my partner’s bodies, was the product of stars.
We are star-dust, and we’re all one in that sense.
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