THE WAY OF THE EXPLORER
Excerpt from Chapter 1, "View from the Velvet Blackness"

During the fifteen years prior to the moment my friend Alan Shepard and I opened the door to the lunar module and descended the ladder to the dusty surface, my days had progressed more or less as I'd planned. But this wasn't the achievement of an individual, a space agency or even a country. The was, rather, the achievement of our species, our civilization. Life had come a long way since it first sprang from the earth's rock and water. And now, hundreds of thousands of miles away on that small blue and white sphere, millions of human beings were watching two men walk about the surface of another world for the third time in our history. These were momentous days, extraordinary for their audacity, extraordinary for the coordination of minds and skills that made them possible. A lot of hard work by some of the most brilliant men and women on the planet had culminated in making us a space-faring species. But what I did not know as Alan and I worked on that waterless world, in a mountainous region known a Fra Mauro, was that I had yet to grasp what would prove most extraordinary about the journey.....

Excerpt from Chapter 9, "Into the Vacuum"

A wonderful quietness drifted into the cabin, the satisfying glow of a job well done. The lion's share of my own work was complete, and all I had to do was monitor the spacecraft systems which were functioning perfectly. Now there was time to quietly contemplate the journey. I could lie back in weightlessness and watch the slow progress of the heavens through the module window. My mind ebbed into that quiet state I had longed for on our trek to the rim of Cone Crater. There was a vast tranquility, a growing sense of wonder as I looked out the window, but not a hint of what was about to happen.

Perhaps it was the disorienting, or reorienting, effect of a rotating environment, while the heavens and earth tumbled alternately in and out of view in the small capsule window. Perhaps it was the air of safety and sanctuary after a two-day foray into an unforgiving environment. But I don’t think so. The sensation was altogether foreign. Somehow I felt tuned into something much larger than myself, something much larger than the planet in the window. Something incomprehensibly big. Even today, the perceptions still baffle me.

Much of my thought and feeling at the time has undergone a process of alchemy. Contemplation and the process of resurrecting memories has perhaps served to illuminate the shadows of such a peculiar event. But the tableau is so vivid as to have lost none of its clarity. It looms in my memory with extraordinary resolution. There was the initial awareness that the planet in the window harbored much strife and discord beneath the blue and white atmosphere, which betrayed its peaceful and inviting appearance. On a small peninsula of southeast Asia a brutal civil war was being waged within the thin canopy of foliage. This was a war that commanded the attention of another country defined by invisible borders on the other side of the planet. I knew that my younger brother and his Air Force colleagues were flying their missions there. Then looking beyond the earth itself to the magnificence of the larger scene, there was a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught. My understanding of the separate distinctness and the relative independence of movement of those cosmic bodies was shattered. There was an upwelling of fresh insight coupled with a feeling ubiquitous harmony –a sense of interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding our spacecraft. Particular scientific facts about stellar evolution took on new significance.

This wasn’t a “religious” or otherworldly experience, though many have tried to cast similar events in that mold. Nor was it a totally new scientific understanding of which I had suddenly become aware. It was just a pointer, a signpost showing the direction toward new viewpoints and greater understanding. The human being is part of a continuously evolving process, a more grand and intelligent process than classical science and the religious traditions have been able to correctly describe. I was part of a larger natural process than I’d previously understood, one that was all around me in this command module as it sped toward earth through 240,000 miles of empty black space.....

Excerpt from Chapter 30, "Towards the Future"

When we one day venture to the red planet and the cameras are turned back on that shimmering blue dot, the explorers on the spacecraft will not be willing nor capable, I believe, of referring to themselves as either astronauts or cosmonauts, or claim any nationality with heart-felt patriotic pride. Their nationalism will dissolve as earth recedes from view and man-made boundaries fade with distance. They will only be able to call themselves explorers from planet Earth.

But until that time comes, until the day presidents and prime ministers around the globe propose a mandate stating that humankind will make that next giant leap, we will dream and continue to make modest forays into the near heavens. A more ambitious day will inevitably come. Perhaps it will be our children or grandchildren, or even their children, but one day a craft from this shimmering blue dot will lower into a pale red Martian horizon. As the engines blow away dust, and our progeny prepare themselves in the gravity of another world, they will slowly open the door of their spacecraft and walk beneath the same sun that rose that morning over New York, Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi. They will do this so that their children's children may one day live and work there.

Months or years later, they will return home to a grateful planet where they will write about what it was like walking about the face of that world. The work will be translated into the various languages of the world. More men and women will follow, and experience and stories will accumulate in their wake. All the while, new technologies will be borne, and the internal and external frontiers will be pushed back a little further. Then, gradually, imperceptibly, but inevitably, the shimmering blue dot will slowly recede in the view of the spacecraft that will carry our children's children throughout the ghostly white of the Milky Way. Still others will follow, and with them the ancient stories of their predecessors. Then they will leave the galaxy in order to make themselves in the image of God........

Inside jacket synopsis:

An Apollo astronaut’s remarkable quest to reconcile science and religion in a self-organizing universe......

On January 31, 1971, Apollo 14 lifted off from Cape Kennedy, and three days later, Edgar Mitchell and Alan Shepard walked on the lunar surface. It was an audacious time in the history of mankind. For Mitchell, however, the most extraordinary journey was yet to come.

As he hurtled earthward through the abyss between the two worlds, Mitchell became engulfed by a profound sensation-“a sense of universal connectedness.” He intuitively sensed that his presence, that of his fellow astronauts, and that of the planet in the window were all part of a deliberate, universal process and that the glittering cosmos itself was in some way conscious. The experience was so overwhelming Mitchell knew his life would never be the same.

The direction his work would take for the next twenty-five years was another journey of sorts, one that would carry him inward as he explored the ineffable mystery of consciousness and being. Having been reared in a Southern Baptist family and gone on study the revolutionary sciences of the day a MIT, he felt the need to reconcile what had always been thought of as separate in his life and in the Western mind-science and religion. Consequently, in the early 1970s, Mitchell left NASA to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences. The Institute allowed him to initiate research in areas of study previously neglected by mainstream science. Through his work, Mitchell began to construct a theory that could explain not only the mystery of human consciousness, but the psychic event as well-what the spiritualist refers to as “miracle” and the scientist dismisses altogether.

His story culminates in a new “dyadic” model of reality that brings consciousness into the equation of how our self-aware universe works. What he reveals through this model is that we live in a universe that is not predetermined by the laws of physics, nor preordained by deities, nor infinitely malleable. While human intentions are generally subject to the laws of physics, these laws are also influenced by mind.

From the vantage point of an extraterrestrial, Mitchell brilliantly delineates how mankind’s exploration of both outer and inner space represents the next epoch in the evolution of life itself, a process over which human beings have increasing control. The Way of the Explorer traces the progress of two remarkable journeys. Together they fundamentally alter how we understand the miracle and mystery of being, and ultimately reveal mankind's role in its own destiny.