image copyright Gail Atkins
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.”
-- Einstein
Interconnection
When Dr. Edgar Mitchell shot up into space in 1971, as part of the three-person
Apollo 14 crew, the nature of consciousness was not on his mind. As a boy who grew up in rural New Mexico, who became a military officer with the U.S. Navy and a man of science at Carnegie Mellon and MIT and NASA, Mitchell was not a counter-culture
revolutionist. But something happened to him in space that profoundly affected
him – and he wanted to understand why.
As he described in his book, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey
Through the Material and Mystical Worlds : “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… There was an
upwelling of fresh insight coupled with a feeling of ubiquitous harmony – a sense of
interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding our spacecraft… an extension of the same universal process that evolved our molecules. And what I felt was an extraordinary personal connectedness with it. I experienced... an ecstasy of unity … I was overwhelmed with the sensation of physically and mentally extending out into the cosmos.”
After his return from space, Mitchell wanted to understand what his experience of “ecstasy of unity” might mean about the universe. His subsequent decades of research led to the conclusion, in The Way of the Explorer, that 1) scientists need to embrace
the idea that there is an awareness connecting everything, and that 2) our conception of “Godliness” has been too small for a cosmos that is far more intelligent, immense and conscious than we’ve acknowledged.
Once upon a time, Isaac Newton gave us guideposts that led us to understand Laws of the Universe – physical rules that predict how we move through the world. Centuries later (between world wars), an entire quorum of physicists tangled over deeper mysteries of the universe, having reluctantly discovered Newton’s laws didn’t work at the quantum level.
The universe, they discovered, is interconnected. It is not, it turned out, built of separate blocks. In the words of respected physicist Niels Bohr at the time, particles have no “independent reality in the ordinary physical sense.”
Spooky Action at Distance
Einstein, for one, was very unhappy with the picture that quantum physics was trying to bring into focus. He admired the mysteries of the universe, but believed in Newton’s concreteness. He said he did not like to think that God “played dice” and created an unordered structure to life. For example, “the idea that an electron… by its own free decision chooses the moment and the direction in which it wants to eject is intolerable to me. If that is so, I’d rather be a cobbler or a clerk in a gambling casino than a physicist.”
Yet after particles were capable of being split apart, physicists determined that the “pattern” of the universe was even more unfathomable than they originally feared. Separated particles are interconnected in some odd way that Einstein dismissively referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” He died in 1955 still seeking more concrete answers.
Basically the quandary, then and now, is this:
How do particles, after being split, still “communicate” with once-connected particles that could be thousands of miles away?
Experiments do demonstrate that this happens. But no one has yet been able to explain how.
Physicist David Bohm put it this way in 1975: “Inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and... relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.” In other words, the universe is more like a weave (or an Indras net, imagined in the image above) than separate spools of thread. What happens “here” affects “there.”
If the universe -- including our physical bodies, and all living and non-living matter -- are made of interconnected “star dust,” is it possible that “consciousness” is also connected? Is there a collective conscious? It is a wave-like field of interconnectedness, Edgar Mitchell believes, with which he felt ecstatic unity during his return journey from the Moon.
After decades of researching what everyone from Western scientists to Eastern mystics have to say on the subject, Mitchell’s theory is that scientists will start to understand the deeper mysteries when we are able to recognize that the universe is Evolving… perhaps communicating through the wavelengths of all of its interconnected “parts.”
What
Do the Physicists Say?
Amazing group of physicists gathered to discuss quantum mysteries -- this photo taken in 1927, Einstein pictured in front row near center.