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Our Consciousness Journey

Written by Lisa ReaganFriday, 01 March 2013 00:00 - Last Updated Wednesday, 25 February 2015 11:15

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s epiphany of oneness inspired him to explore the frontier of innerspace: human consciousness. Forty years later, Mitchell’s research institute and Pathwaysreaders are still blazing trails.

Moon dust floated throughout the command module as the Apollo 14 astronauts piloted thespacecraft into a slow spin, exposing all sides of the Kitty Hawk to the sun’s rays and pointingits five rotating windows toward a luminous, blue-andwhite planet. Settling in for the three-dayflight home, Captain Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, shifted his thoughtstoward the expansive view outside the spacecraft and reflected on the lunar mission’saccomplishments.

“This wasn’t the achievement of an individual, a space agency, or even a country,” Mitchellwrote in his autobiography, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey Throughthe Material and Mystical Worlds. “This was, rather, the achievement of our species, ourcivilization. Life had come a long way since it first sprang from the Earth’s rock and water.”

What happened next, when the veil of moon dust settled in the cabin as the command modulehurtled through the heavens at 36,300 feet per second, would catapult Mitchell into a previouslyunimaginable frontier of scientific exploration: human consciousness.

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The Earthrise Epiphany

“What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelmingsense of universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy ofunity. It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itselfwere manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in theheavens about me. And there was a sense that our presence as space travelers, and theexistence of the universe itself, was not accidental, but that there was an intelligent process atwork. I perceived the universe as in some way conscious,” wrote Mitchell.

By the time the red-and-white parachute safely splashlanded the Kitty Hawk in the PacificOcean, Mitchell’s life had been transformed into a game of pick-up sticks. “Within a few days mybeliefs about life were thrown into the air and scattered about,” he wrote. “It took me 20 years topick up the sticks and make some kind of sense of it all.”

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The undeniable wholeness of the earth dangling in infinite space entered into the world’spsyche in the nowfamous photos entitled “The Blue Marble” and “Earthrise.” In Earthrise: HowWe First Saw Ourselves, British historian Robert Poole writes that NASA was unprepared forthe paradoxical reaction the photos of earthrise provoked. “Rather than turning people’s eyes ona future in space, it refocused them on Earth.... Fifteen months later came the first Earth Dayand the start of an ‘eco-renaissance’ devoted to preserving and protecting ‘Spaceship Earth.’”

While many of Apollo’s astronauts reported deeply spiritual experiences upon seeing their homeplanet from outer space, it was Mitchell who followed through on his earthrise epiphany with acommitment to investigate his insight of wholeness and consciousness by leaving NASA and itsastro-futurist vision in 1972 for the unchartered frontier of inner space. In 1973, Mitchell foundedthe Institute of Noetic Sciences, IONS: a new era’s mission control for inner space exploration.“Noetic,” from the Greek nous, means “inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjectiveunderstanding.”

The Launch of Inner Space Exploration

In the beginning, Mitchell wrote, his commitment to exploring inner space and humanconsciousness with all the rigor of a trained scientist was hampered by the initial public desire todeify him and his moon-walking colleagues. “Frivolous connections were made between the factthat 12 men walked on the moon and that there were 12 disciples of Jesus. Furthermore, I worea beard at the time and the absurdity seemed to expand to the messianic realm. So I shavedthe beard.”

Mitchell set out to question the foundational constructs of materialist science, but quicklydiscovered the way forward began with questioning his own. “I came to recognize the effects ofmy own belief system and the powerful

role of enculturated belief systems in general; I needed to reexamine accepted thought with neweyes.”

Embracing his heretical hunch fully, Mitchell decided that “the story of ourselves as told by

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science—our cosmology, our religion—was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that theNewtonian idea of separate, independent, discreet things in the universe wasn’t a fully accuratedescription. What was needed was a new story of who we are and what we are capable ofbecoming.”

Challenging the scientific orthodoxy of the time— historically, a death sentence for mostinstitutions and academics—the initial results of IONS’ first decade produced more questionsthan answers:

- Does consciousness exist beyond the human brain? - Is it true that everything is interconnected at some subtle level? - How does the body really heal? - What are human beings capable of?

The first decade also saw inroads into the holistic health sphere, with IONS sponsoring aconference on the new field of psychoneuroimmunology at the University of California andpublishing the instantly popular Health for the Whole Person: The Complete Guide to HolisticMedicine. The inner-space adventure was just beginning.

Exploring the Edges

IONS’ second decade birthed the curtain-ripping Causality Project, which argued that thescience of the day was incomplete and ignored important anomalies that could affect alldisciplines and inquiries. For example, an inconvenient and foundation-crushing fact formaterialist science was what quantum physics call “the observer effect”: the proven principlethat the act of observation can affect the phenomenon or system being observed.

Comfortably standing on the razor’s edge of known and unknown science, IONS perceived itsmission to champion new perspectives on the relationship of mind, matter and spirit, andpushed forward. The insights of the Causality Project were presented in Global Mind Change:The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century, written by IONS’ first president, Willis

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Harman. The book announced:

“Revolutions are generally thought of as large-scale, bloody upheavals involving wholecountries and societies. But there are quieter revolutions that begin in the individual mind andcreate the kind of change that may be even more significant. By deliberately changing theirinternal image of reality, people are transforming the world. Right now we are living through oneof the most fundamental shifts in history—a change in the actual belief structure of Westernindustrial society.”

Twenty years into the territory of human consciousness and based on IONS’ research insights,IONS’ second president, Winston “Wink” Franklin, made a “noetic” bet:

- That reality is more than physical, - That everything and everyone are profoundly interconnected, - That our individual and collective capacities are virtually limitless, - And that we participate daily in our own evolution, individually and collectively.

At the halfway mark, Franklin’s bet paid off in spades. Over the next 20 years, IONS wouldwitness its cultural impact expand: in popular television documentaries on consciousness andhealing that coincided with the establishment of the National Institutes of Health’s Office ofAlternative Medicine; with the creation of a worldwide community; and through applied scienceprograms and the beginnings of practical tools for conscious living in the 21st century.

Did you know? Every issue of Pathways and the Pathways Connect Dialogue and ResourceGuide carries a sprinkling of moon dust—the echo of an Apollo astronaut’s earthrise epiphanyand his revolutionary commitment to explore the frontier of inner space and our humancapacities.

Pathways to Family Wellness celebrates the Institute of Noetic Sciences’ 40th anniversary thisyear and extends our gratitude for IONS’ pioneering research that inspires adventures inconscious living for our Cultural Creative readers and Pathways Connect Gathering Groups!

In this feature, we highlight IONS’ origins in an Apollo command module hurtling through space,

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40 years of epic, paradigm-busting research into human consciousness, and IONS’ generouscontributions to the human race of practical tools for thriving as a 21st-century citizen in acomplex and changing world.

Cultural Creatives

At the end of its second decade, IONS funded a book that would have a profound effect on theparticipants of the conscious living movement (including Pathways readers). Cultural Creativeswere identified for the first time in 2000 by social scientists Paul H. Ray and Sherry RuthAnderson in their research-based book Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changingthe World .

Ray and Anderson defined Cultural Creatives as people who “care deeply about ecology andsaving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about self- actualization,spirituality and self-expression. Surprisingly, they are both inner-directed and sociallyconcerned; they’re activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more than otherAmericans.”

The identification of Cultural Creatives and the role they play in shifting the cultural worldviewtoward wholeness, healing, wellness and sustainability helped activists from a cross-section ofmovements understand their frustrations in pushing against an entrenched, unsustainableparadigm and toward a vision, as the book describes, brought forward from within themselves.But the book came with a warning for Cultural Creatives: They were doomed to believe theywere alone and powerless until they became aware of their role and their numbers.

“Because they’ve been so invisible in American life, Cultural Creatives themselves areastonished to find out how many share both their values and their way of life,” write Ray andAnderson. “Once they realize their numbers, their impact on American life promises to beenormous, shaping a new agenda for the twenty-first century. What makes the appearance ofthe Cultural Creatives especially timely today is that our civilization is in the midst of an epochalchange, caught between globalization, accelerating technologies and a deteriorating planetaryecology. A creative minority can have enormous leverage to carry us into a new renaissanceinstead of a disastrous fall.”

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Recognition of the role of Pathways readers and their potential in organized, local groups asCultural Creatives was the direct impetus for the creation of Pathways Connect GatheringGroups. More than 300 groups exist globally and can be found in our online directory.

Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D., IONS’ research director and author of Mindful Motherhood: PracticalTools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year, says that supportivecommunity is one of the most important things parents can have to help them stay balancedand grow a healthy family.

“We must create a tribe of others who can help us stay awake and aware, and true to ourdeepest instincts, values and goals as parents, especially when choosing a new way to parent,or if you have a non-traditional family (divorced, single-parent, LGBT or older parents),” saysVieten, a psychologist, mind-body medicine researcher and mom. “Whether in a moms or dadsgroup, through babysitting exchanges with like-minded parents, or increasingly on the Internet,it’s important to have connections that can support us when we feel uncertain or overwhelmed.”

In 2011, Pathways partnered with IONS to bring the first ever Mindful Mothering Conference tothe newly founded Museum of Motherhood in New York City. Beginning in 2013, Pathwaysreaders and group members will be able to join Vieten for online teleconferences. The MindfulMotherhood Project, based on the book and Vieten’s research, offers facilitator training as wellas continuing education training for practitioners.

Shift Reports: Evidence of a World Transforming

If, by now, you are feeling inspired by IONS’ 40 years of insights, but wishing for a set ofCliffsNotes to help you catch up, then you’re in luck. IONS’ Shift Reports are two 80-pagesummaries of the most important aspects of the global shift, with generous white space, charts,graphs and pull quotes to help you breeze through the last four decades of mind-blowingconsciousness research and insights.

The first Shift Report, subtitled Evidence of a World Transforming, has this to say aboutmaterialistic science’s story of who we are and what we are capable of: Its purpose has been

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fulfilled, and, therefore, it is no longer needed. The 2007 report concludes:

“Materialist science represented an evolutionary leap from a mind-set that relied on religiousauthority for verifying truths to one that valued an objective search for knowledge. In this globalage of rapid change and transformation, it is time for another such leap…[to] include therigorous study of subjective, inner experience, a renewed appreciation for meaning andpurpose, and a recognition that the world of consciousness is far more mysterious andinfluential than we have ever imagined.”

The second Shift Report, from 2008, subtitled Changing the Story of Our Future, presents“evidence of the crucial role that consciousness plays in any effort to advance toward a moreglobally sustainable and just civilization. Voting is good, but changing one’s mind and heart isbetter….By changing those beliefs, we can change the future.”

Worldview Explorations, WE

In 2011, I spent a week on IONS’ EarthRise campus to become a trained facilitator of theWorldview Explorations project, WE. The take-home message of IONS’ 40 years ofconsciousness research shows that “the most powerful step people can take toward achievingtheir highest potential is the willingness and ability to understand new perspectives.”

This program presents the practical tools for entering the process of exploring one’s ownworldview, a process that has been likened to a fish recognizing the water around it. Tricky, butpossible.

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WE is now taught as a drop-in curriculum module in more than two dozen high schools anduniversities, from Oakland to Palestine. Its purpose is to help us:

- Stop to explore the landscapes in which we dwell - Acquire new tools for observing the world around us - Learn together how to navigate in uncharted realms - Share diverse perspectives in order to enlarge our collective understanding - Refresh ourselves by drinking from the deep well of things as they are

Each quarterly issue of Pathways is transformed into a study guide for our global gatheringgroups. The WE training and Shift Reports appear as foundational moon dust in our PathwaysConnect Dialogue and Resource Guides. These condensed guides help us to consider ourconscious-living challenges with context and strategies for shifting our views to a place ofwholeness and wellness. (You can read past articles on the Worldview Explorations project inPathways’ online archives.)

The Frontier of Family Wellness

From Worldview Explorations to Cultural Creatives; from Shift Reports showing Evidence of aWorld Transforming to Mindful Motherhood; from Consciousness and Healing (the book andDVD) to a 10-year research study and survey of world faith leaders presented in the book,Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Everyday Transformation (see our interview with MarilynSchlitz in the sidebar), IONS’ pioneering research has played a formative role in theconscious-living movement and in our readers’ daily lives.

As IONS has questioned the foundations of materialist science, so has Pathways invitedpioneering scientists, researchers and activists, such as our editorial board advisor, BruceLipton, Ph.D., to question the impact of materialist science and its resulting consumer culture onall issues that affect our children’s health.

It is materialist science, and its disconnected view of the physical world from its innateintelligence, that has spawned a consumer culture whose conformist demands leave parentsconfused and uninformed on what exactly wellness and wholeness are. In advocating for

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conscious parenting, Lipton’s work appears regularly in Pathways.

A cellular biologist and internationally recognized authority in bridging science and spirit, Liptonexplains how our genes are not deterministic (a materialist science view), but are selectedbased on the environment of the cell. In a human body, the cell’s environment is determined byperceptions, and those perceptions are based on beliefs.

In addition to encouraging parents to examine their own beliefs, Lipton advocates the need forparents to create a supportive perinatal environment for their children to ensure their long-termsuccess and well-being. In a previous issue of Pathways, Lipton connected the dots betweenhuman consciousness and child wellness:

In today’s world, we judge our success by material possessions, which is understandable in aworld based on Newtonian physics that says ‘matter is primary.’ And we measure howsuccessful we are by how many toys we end up having, how much we own—this gives us ourstatus in a hierarchy. Well, the problem with this is that this is not really where health andhappiness come from. Health and happiness come from inner harmony.

When a human is born, they’re already filled with an intuitive knowledge of centuries andcenturies of people beforehand. A child has wisdom. Their cells have wisdom. If we listen to thatwisdom, it’s very instructive. If we ignore it because of our hubris and think, ‘We are intelligent,the baby’s not intelligent, we’ll tell the baby what to need,’ then what we’re really doing isstepping on Mother Nature’s natural intelligence. So, it’s really incumbent upon us to let go andfollow the natural instincts. When you’re living in harmony, you can feel it. When you’re pushingon the system, if you’re sensitive enough, you can feel you’re doing that. What we really requireis the sensitivity to recognize that a child is extremely intelligent.

We have stopped listening to nature. And this is the biggest problem that humanity is facing.Our inability to understand nature has led to a state where human civilization is facing extinctionbecause of the way we are damaging nature and destroying the environment without owningthe truth—we are the environment. It’s time to return to the natural understanding, to the innateintelligence of the entire world, not just of the baby that’s born. The entire world, the entirebiosphere, is an intelligent system. And right now, the least intelligent unit appears to be thehuman, but we’re being forced to look at life in a different way.

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In Pathways, we recognize that our adult consciousness is the soil our children spring forth fromand flourish. And as Edgar Mitchell found, it is in the questioning of our own beliefs that we findthe trailhead for our pathways to family wellness. As Cultural Creative families—exploring ourworldviews, bringing forth the vision of wholeness within ourselves, mindfully caring for ourchildren, and aware that our daily choices matter because we are participating in a connectedand conscious world—we find empowerment naturally, and model this understanding forourselves, our communities and for the next generation.

From our readers and staff, thank you, Captain Edgar Mitchell, for your courageous choice tobegin an epic, inner space adventure. And thank you, IONS, for 40 years of frontier scienceinsights you have and will continue to contribute toward our global family’s expandingawareness of our innate intelligence, our collective consciousness and our exciting capacity forchange.

Why and How Do We Shift?

Rumor has it that Dr. Katherine Solomon, the noetic scientist in Dan Brown’s novel The LostSymbol, was inspired by Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D. A real-life noetic scientist, Schlitz isthe immediate past president and CEO of IONS, and now serves as its global ambassador and senior scientist. Noetic science is mentioned heavily throughout Brown’s book, hisfollow-up to The Da Vinci Code. Below, Dr. Schlitz explains a 10-year study’s revelations onhow and why we experience epiphanies that shift us toward a greater consciousness andexpanded capacities for wellness:

IONS did a 10-year project looking at consciousness transformation. And we looked at thecatalysts that shift someone. It can be anything...people describe something as mundane as washing dishes, or as in the case of Edgar Mitchell, as profound as coming back from themoon, that would allow a moment of reflection to say, “Wow! I just feel there is something morehere.” It could be the death of a loved one or the loss of a job, a divorce...all of these can behelpful to disrupt our steady state. It’s really beautiful when we can move our conversationabout something that is traumatic into something that can help us grow and evolve, becausethat’s a worldview shift. It’s how we define the situation. One person can see it one way, and

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another person can see it another way. It is how we can begin to own the power of theinterpretation of the experience.

After we looked at the catalysts, we looked at the preconditions, those things we can cultivatein ourselves that would make us more open to see things from this relationship-centeredmodel, rather than from this separation model. In addition to the basic precursors, such ascuriosity, playfulness, meditation or ways to quiet the mind, we discovered there weredifferent practices people used to shift from these limited perspectives to one where there is amuch greater interconnectedness, a whole-systems type of thinking.

We interviewed some 60 masters from different world traditions to discuss their practices andhow they can help people make these life-enhancing changes. Although you may expect thetraditions to offer widely different perspectives, there were many commonalities. Essentially weidentified four components:

Intention. I set an intention to come into this place of interconnectedness and see my place inthe whole.

Attention. Where are we placing our attention? Pay more attention and become aware ofwhat we are not attending to. This gives us a sense of humility that we aren’t seeingeverything, even when it’s there. Practicing attention can look like contemplation, meditation,turning off the TV and taking a walk, or moments of reflection with your family. Those are justsome of the many forms. The essence is that we are consciously shifting our attention.

Building New Repetitions. Neuro‑science tells us that our behaviors become neuropathwaysthat become habit-making grooves in our brains. As we build new habits, there isneuroplasticity, which is our capacity to build new grooves in the brain— and we begin tothink and respond in new ways with less reactivity, more gratefulness, and more forgiveness.

Guidance. It may be a teacher or a book, or it may be—and often is—some means of slowingdown enough that we can shift our attention toward our inner experiences. We can begin totrust our own guidance, and begin to listen to that noetic voice within us that can help us tocalibrate what’s true and useful for each of us.

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I like to think of those four pillars as wrapped in the arms of surrender. Because ultimately,transformation isn’t about everything changing outside of us, but more about our capacity to respond with resilience to what is so.

The Final Frontier: IONS Explores How Death Makes Life Possible

IONS continues its paradigm-busting investigations into taboo topics in 2013 with its latest filmand book project, Death Makes Life Possible. In IONS’ new documentary, Schlitz unveilscenter stage the overwhelming accumulation of science that shatters the Western cultural belief in the unknowable finality of death, and instead points to evidence of life as a continuumof consciousness, with birth and death functioning as entry and exit points to a brief humandrama.

Schlitz says it is the current shift in consciousness, a “Spiritual Renaissance” in the West, thatis ushering in a desire for understanding death. “It is at the meeting place of science andspiritual wisdom traditions that we are discovering a new paradigm of reality and what it means to be fully human,” she says. “We are discovering that simply contemplating death canmake us happier, healthier and better citizens…. As we confront our mortality we are midwifingthe difficult birth of a multidimensional transformation—physical, spiritual, psychological, social and ecological.”

In bridging outer scientific revelations with inner spiritual wisdom, Deepak Chopra joins Schlitzas a co-producer of the film. Chopra, a pioneering mind-body physician and founder of theChopra Center for Wellbeing, has written more than 65 books, with 19 New York Timesbestsellers. Chopra says that he is “confident this movie will change your perception of deathand, ultimately, your experience of death.”

Chopra, who penned the film’s title, explained its meaning: “Without death there can be no present moment, for the last moment has to die to make the next one possible. There can beno present love, for the last emotion has to die to make a new one possible. There can be nopresent life, for the old cells in my body have to die to make new tissue possible.

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“This is the miracle of creation, which in every second is one thing: life and death joined in aneternal dance. Without death, that would guarantee a universe with no change for renewal.Fortunately, creation wasn’t set up that way. We live in an endlessly re-created universe.”

In his book, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof, Chopra scoffs at the idea of science’sability to truly explore the dimensions of death. “Science is still burdened by spiritualmaterialism, the belief that any explanation of God, the soul, or the afterlife is valid only ifmatter contains the secret. This is like saying we can’t understand jazz until we diagram theatoms in Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.”

“Consciousness is a huge mystery and we are only just now taking it seriously as a science,and that science needs to mature a little bit because it wants to reduce everything to thebrain,” says Schlitz. “Science is very influenced by the dominant paradigm of materialism, but itis now being informed by spiritual insights. This is one of the extraordinary things of ourtimes: Never before have so many ways of approaching reality come into contact.

“There is a changing perspective about our consciousness and our interconnectedness. Weare caught in the middle of that paradigm shift. It’s not entirely clear where it is going. But where we go in the movie and the book is the notion of a new story.

“We have all the beauty that comes from these wisdom traditions, and the insights and thepractices and the cultivation of a lifestyle that comes from those traditions. We have theopportunity to look at what is true for us individually through the Western, scientific,criticalthinking approach, and that is beautiful, too.

“So, watching these worldviews come together and then talking with someone, like Stuart Hameroff, author of The Quantum Soul, who talks in the film about our souls taking on theprinciples of the quantum universe—we are seeing that things that people talked aboutthousands of years ago are finding legitimacy in these theoretical physics experiments.”

It is Chopra who integrates the science through spiritual wisdom and reveals the unfolding ofa new story of human experience as a seamless and continuous whole. “The most importantthing we need to understand is, what is death? Who dies?” says Chopra, discussing the film.“And in order to understand that, we also need to understand who is born. Death is not the

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opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. Life is the continuum of birth and death. Thereare many ways to understand this.

“At the most fundamental level of nature, or the whole universe, is a discontinuity, whichmeans it’s going on and off. You have particles and you have waves. Nobody contests that. Aparticle is supposedly a thing which has units of mass and energy. And a wave is not a thing, ithas no units of mass and energy, it’s a bunch of numbers. Schrödinger’s wave equation is themost important equation in all of science, in all of mathematics, and what it describes is theprobability distribution of space-time events, which appear as particles. If you leave a particle alone—which means you don’t watch it or it’s not interacting with other particles—it evolvesinto a wave. And then you go and ask our scientist friends, a wave of what? And the bestanswer you can get is, it’s a wave of possibility, it’s a wave of potentiality, it’s a wave of probability. And then you ask them, where is it? And they can’t tell you, depending on theirtraining, the school they come from, they’ll say it’s in Hilbert Space. What’s Hilbert Space? It’smathematical space. The fact is, the wave is not a thing, and it has no units of mass and energy. It’s a possibility. And it’s transcendent. It doesn’t exist in the realm of space-time. Onlywhen it collapses, whatever the reason for the collapse, when the wave collapses it becomes athing. If you leave it alone it becomes a wave again.

“The human spirit is degraded when we confine ourselves to the span of a lifetime and theenclosure of a physical body. We are mind and spirit first, and that places our home beyondthe stars.

“Knowing that I will return to the field one day to find my source provides me withimmeasurable confidence in the purpose of life,” says Chopra. “As fervently as any devoutbeliever, I have faith in this vision. My faith is renewed every time I have a moment ofwitnessing, in which I can touch the silence of my own being. Then I lose all fear ofdeath—indeed, I touch death right now, and gladly.”

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This article appeared in Pathways to Family Wellness magazine, Issue #37. View Article References View Author Bio To purchase this issue, Order Here .

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