Moondust Read online

  On the more far-out fringes of the organization, it had been noticed that the number of Moonwalkers, twelve, corresponded with the number of Jesus’ disciples. Things were getting weird down here in Florida and, by the decade’s end, with his creation slipping away from him and five kids to put through college, he began to distance himself from IONS. In 1982, he was removed as chairman.

  Last night, a brilliant sunset flared over the Gulf of Mexico and when it had finally burnt itself out, a vast Moon hung above the glassy water in its place. Years of living in a city where the sky is seldom clear mean that I still have to force myself to look up most nights, but this night the sky wouldn’t be ignored: there she was, a soapy white, with delicate traces of blue and the enigmatic shadows which so enchanted Galileo when he became the first person to view them through a telescope in 1609. His findings caused a sensation when he published them the following year, but it wasn’t until a generation later that the Moon’s features were given the lyrical names that we still use today. To Giovanni Battista Riccioli, preparing his lunar atlas in 1651, the shadows looked like seas, and so we have the Sea of Tranquillity, Ocean of Storms, Lake of Dreams, Bay of Rainbows … Mare Tranquilitatis, Oceanus Procellarum, Lacus Somniorum, Sinus Iridum. Someone called them the poetry of the Moon, which rides an ellipse around the Earth, but doesn’t spin, always presenting the same face, keeping the other one hidden. Thus, the “dark side” doesn’t exist: there’s only a meteor-battered “far” side, sometimes dark, sometimes light when it’s facing the sun – where, to this day, no one has trodden. Like the moons of other planets, our Moon has a proper name, too. She’s called Luna.

  What does it feel like to stand there? How extraordinary to think that only nine people on Earth right now could know the answer. And that one of them is so close by.

  Always that peculiar mix of apprehension and excitement at walking into a roomful of people I don’t know.

  It’s a light, warm Friday morning and the airy common room being used to greet and register “Seeding Spirit in Action” delegates is buzzing. Afterwards, I’ll try to recall who was there and mostly am left with a milky impression of Indian prints and open-neck shirts and smiles which bob about the room at varying heights, like bees tending flowers on a hedgerow. Nice people. On white Formica tables lie books and magazines and lots of leaflets with affirmative headings like “Celebrate” and “Yes!” and “We are explorers …” – the latter being a slick number decorated with beautiful people and butterflies and photos of IONS’s new “international campus,” which sits on 200 picturesque acres just north of San Francisco, because things have looked up in the past decade.

  A flyer catches my eye. It says:

  MEET the MAN!

  Reception with

  Dr. Edgar Mitchell

  Founder, Institute of Noetic Sciences

  Fundraiser for IONS

  Saturday 5 PM, Fox Hall

  I pick one up and the woman behind the table beams. “Oh, yes, you’ve gotta come and meet Edgar. Such a special man. He smokes roll-ups, you know.”

  What?

  And suddenly he’s here.

  Did I expect a fanfare and a shaft of light? No. I’m not sure what I expected. What I hadn’t anticipated was this sense of disorientation, which will turn out to be common among people seeing the lunar astronauts for the first time, and in this instant I understand how strange my project is. The undertaking we associate Mitchell and his tiny cadre with may have ended abruptly thirty years ago, but it has never been equalled since – in fact, with every passing year it has come to seem more eccentric and incredible. Science has advanced and technology leapt forward at a dizzying rate, but in this one domain, Deep Space, their domain, there has been … nothing. So while the world has changed, we have changed, the pictures and deeds of the Moonwalkers have remained ever present, yet frozen definitively in the imagination as they were then, making sight of them as they are now a shock. It’s like Dorian Grey in reverse: they have a real age and a Moon age and your first impulse is to stamp your feet and cry, “How dare you be old!” Thinking about this reaction later, I flush with embarrassment.

  For the man in front of me is old. He’s seventy-one, about five foot nine, with still-dark short hair, ruddy skin and a very modest paunch. He’s wearing khaki trousers and a dark green, logoless, vaguely eastern-cut short-sleeve shirt and has entered with an attractive, Latin-looking woman of roughly his Moon age, who turns out to be his current partner, Anna. His wire-rimmed spectacles and the curiously unmemorable parameters of his face are familiar, but the creeping estrangement of flesh from bone means that I wouldn’t have recognized him in the street. He moves easily, but there’s nothing commanding in his stance and he doesn’t seem to waste words or emotion as IONS officials slowly note his presence and move to greet him, which they do warmly. There’s a hesitancy in his smile, a sense of containment about him. In these moments, he looks shy.

  And yet the instant he stands at the front of a lecture room, looks up and starts to speak, the years fall away like ice from a rising Saturn rocket. Today is given to five “pre-conference institutes,” which run concurrently between 10 AM and 4 PM and boast bewildering titles like “Awakening the Voice Within,” “Conscious Circle Work: Transforming the Media” and “Spirit in Action” – a facilitator for which, I can’t help noticing, is a twenty-eight-year-old named Ocean. But the last, “Frontiers in Consciousness Studies with Edgar Mitchell,” is the one for me and five minutes into it I’m already reeling at the breadth of his experience, which runs way beyond anything that would have been available to (or inflicted upon) my generation.

  He talks about the current “crisis of civilization” and our “rapid descent toward some new equilibrium,” then leaps back to his early career landing jet fighters on aircraft carriers, which sounds like the most terrifying occupation on Earth, thence to Sputnik, “which changed everything – up to then, we really didn’t know what was out there.” His voice is deep, with the assumed authority of a police chief briefing his team of detectives. Okay, the Meaning of Existence has been terrorizing the community for 200,000 years and it’s time to nail the bastard. Now, be careful out there … He describes the dire warnings there’d been about what space might do to the human body and the marvel of finding that the body set about adapting almost immediately. Looking back, he is struck and a little charmed by America’s naïveté at the time, as reflected in the movies of the late 1950s, with their space invaders and omniscient scientists and parents wringing hands over the relatively innocent rebellion of their teenagers. Prior to the 1950s, there was no such thing as a teenager.

  There was also the joy of finding that the eye was so much more powerful without an atmosphere to cloud it. He thinks this was one of the reasons why lunar astronauts found the return journey so moving, with the Earth in their sights. Only twenty-four people have ever left Earth orbit and seen her from the perspective of Deep Space – all American and all between the Christmases of 1968 and 1972. The difference between near and far is enormous: the orbital astronaut experiences the planet as huge and majestic, while from afar it is tiny, beautiful, and shockingly alone. In a rare instance of candor, Neil Armstrong once remarked that while on the Moon, he became aware that he could blot out the Earth with his thumb and when someone asked whether this made him feel really big, he replied, “No, it made me feel really, really small.” Which brings us to the “epiphany.”

  Edgar Mitchell was already interested in the paranormal, after being introduced to it by friends at MIT. It was a voguish field at the time, perhaps as a result of the questioning of convention that came with the Sixties, which fed a broader interest in Eastern mysticism and alternative readings of reality. So it was in the universities and on TV, but it never cut much ice at NASA, which is why there was embarrassment when word leaked out that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell had conducted a private experiment into it on the way to and from the Moon, “transmitting” mental images of randomly chosen shape
s to four people back on Earth at prearranged times. Unfortunately, his accomplices had failed to take account of a slight delay in the launch, so were out of sync with his attempted projections. In what looks a little like rationalization, the astronaut claims that the results were still significant, as the other subjects’ guesses were far wider of the mark than would be statistically expected, suggesting to him a subconscious knowledge that something was wrong. Whatever the case, Mitchell was betrayed by one of his collaborators and word leaked to the media shortly after splashdown. Another independent-minded Apollo astronaut assures me that, had commander Shepard known of Mitchell’s intentions beforehand, the younger man would certainly never have flown – not on any mission. But Ed kept it wholly to himself. No one at NASA had the vaguest notion that this hippy stuff was going on right under their noses. Curiously, Deke Slayton claims to have been more open-minded. “I thought it was worth a look,” he says. “Hell, NASA doesn’t know everything.”

  The epiphany led Mitchell to ask, “What was causing this exhilaration every time I looked out of the window?” It seemed that nothing in conventional science or religion could explain it in a way that satisfied him, but that nearly all religions had talked about it. Mainstream science, with its conventional view of mind and body as separate entities occupying distinct realms (the world of spirit versus the world of matter), is incomplete, while religion acknowledges the “transcendent experience,” but misinterprets it. It occurred to him that “God is something like a universal consciousness manifest in each individual, and the route to divine reality and to a more satisfying human, material reality is through human consciousness.” In time, he saw the kind of epiphany he had as “a latent event in every individual.”

  Now, if all that’s a bit heavy, consider this. For the drive south, to get me into the mood of the period, I’d popped into a record store and bought a CD which I hadn’t heard in a number of years. The Psychedelic Sound of the 13th Floor Elevators had been released in 1966, the year Ed Mitchell entered the Astronaut Corps, and, to my great amusement, the sleeve notes began with the words: “Since Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically in separate unrelated groups – science, religion, sex, relaxation, work, etc….” This, they go on to contend, is a bad thing. Of course, the Elevators’ prescribed remedy for this conceptual downer was truckloads of LSD, with the result that these natives of Austin were not loved by the Texan authorities and eventually fell apart when their most iconic member, singer-guitarist Roky Erickson, was committed to a mental institution after one trip too many. All of which leads me to two thoughts: first, that while Ed Mitchell might have been working in a vacuum in space, he wasn’t back here on Earth – his ideas were not mainstream, but they were around; and second, that the more he talks about his epiphany, the more it sounds to me like that ancient tribal ritual known in Britain as “knocking back a tab of ecstasy.” Could his euphoria have been the result of a simple chemical process, the ecstatic release of serotonin in an overexcited brain?

  As the talk progresses, Mitchell acknowledges Timothy Leary and the drug culture of the Sixties, saying, “it appears that those [ecstatic] states of mind can be naturally derived, you don’t need psychedelics to do it.” What he’s suggesting is that these states are not delusional, or even purely private, but are manifestations of real, physical processes in which the subject tunes in and turns on to the Universe itself. Behind this claim is a new and still highly speculative cosmology called Quantum Holography, which appears to be based on extensions of ideas mooted by the distinguished Princeton physicist Professor John A. Wheeler, who was a colleague of Einstein’s and originator of the term “black hole.” Mitchell doesn’t mention Wheeler by name, but he does say that the quantum hologram was “discovered and experimentally validated” in Germany by Professor Walter Schempp while he was working on improvements to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanning technology.

  Underlying Mitchell’s conception of the hologram is the discovery in the early part of the last century that at the atomic and subatomic level, the elements of the Universe do not obey the laws of Newtonian physics. The study of the laws governing this realm is called quantum mechanics and one of its big mysteries is the apparent fact that if you separate two particles, they continue to maintain some sort of nebulous connection, even if they end up at opposite ends of the Universe: in the jargon, they “resonate.” This property is called “nonlocality” and Einstein objected to it on the ground that the particles (or whatever force connects them) would have to move faster than the speed of light for it to be true, but it’s since been pointed out that Einstein, like Deke and NASA, didn’t know everything. A great deal of time and effort has been spent trying to explain the mechanism by which this happens, but no one yet has.

  Professor Wheeler addressed this difficulty by suggesting that the fundamental stuff of the Universe might not be energy and matter, as conventional physics holds, but information – with information being defined as patterns of energy. This suggests the further, more shocking possibility that a Universe which appears to us as three-dimensional (four if you count time) is in fact two-dimensional, flat, like a hologram: that just as a trick of light allows three-dimensional images to be carried on a flat piece of film in a hologram, the cosmos is composed of “information” painted across a vast, two-dimensional canvas which we know as “infinity.” It’s hard to imagine a more alien idea (Descartes’s suggestion that our world could simply be the trick of a malevolent demon seems comforting in comparison), but its advocates claim that recent studies of black holes provide evidence for it.

  As I understand it, Mitchell’s distinctive contribution to the theory is to suggest that the canvas of infinity either consists in, or is connected to, what is called the “zero-point field,” the field of quantum fluctuations, of energy that exists at a temperature of absolute zero and fills all space, even where we previously thought there was nothing but void. The existence of this “field,” sometimes called “vacuum energy,” is widely acknowledged, but Mitchell’s contention that it “sustains the form and existence of matter at the quantum level” (which is to say, keeps it together), and is in permanent resonance with everything, is not. If he is right, then the old conceptual division between mind and matter that has underpinned Western science and thought since Descartes’s time (it’s been called “Cartesian duality” after him) is illusory.

  Now we come to the bit that I like, because the most important implication of all this, Mitchell reports with an arching of his eyebrow, is that “we are quantum matter, not just classical matter, and it appears that we can recover nonlocal information.” He points out that such a thought hasn’t always seemed exotic: after all, what is prayer if not “information intended to be received nonlocally”? And this is what he thinks happened to him on the way back from the Moon. For the first time in his life, he was in resonance with the Universe, as can also happen when people meditate, experience telepathy, or believe they’ve been reincarnated (“they’re merely tapping into the information – that’s why there are so many Cleopatras and Caesars!”), all of which are dismissed by conventional science simply because it has no way to make sense of them. In this way, Mitchell feels he can further explain ESP, the occult, and Jung’s “collective unconscious”; can make sense of near-death experiences and telekinesis, of Sheldrake, Geller, et al. It’s like there’s a huge hard disk in the sky, which we can hook up to, resonate with, if we know how. And this is what we’ve called God. The Universe is conscious, because we are, and it learns, because we do. Nature is about information, process, sharing: pretty much what the mystics have been telling us for millennia. So Teddy Pendergrass – or was it Barry White? – was right. Everythang really is everythang.

  Mitchell takes it further, though. With such an understanding of the cosmos, “we can try to create a world with more tolerance, satisfaction and openness,” he says. This will be the “Wisdom Society” of his and IONS’s dreams. “True spirituality” and “true
science,” he says, are looking for the same thing. “We must think of consciousness as a process.” For the record, the “U.S. quantum physics community” is skeptical of all this, because Mitchell’s reading is “hidden in the traditional formulation; you have to get to a deeper level to see it.” In fact, I will learn that most mainstream U.S. scientists still consider his interpretation of the available data to be way out on the margins. These days he mostly finds himself working with German, British, and Belgian physicists, who, he says, are more open-minded. I remember that the biologist James Lovelock, who in the early 1970s developed the Gaia hypothesis (that the Earth and its ecosystem should be thought of as a single organism), worked for NASA as well.

  Suddenly I hear a sharp clap of hands and look up from my notebook to see Mitchell grinning broadly. I glance at my watch and see that four hours have passed.

  He runs his eyes around the room and teases, “Got it?” at which his audience smiles and nods with an insouciance that I take to mean “Look, we’ll take your word for it.” I myself feel as though I’ve just completed the New York Marathon by bouncing along it on my head and am stewing in the melancholy knowledge that I’m going to have to read up on quantum mechanics when I get home. All the same, I’ve enjoyed Mitchell’s discourse and now I introduce myself to him as he gathers his papers. We chat for a while, then agree to convene the next morning for a proper conversation. As I leave the room, I hear someone gushing to a companion “… and that was when I got into biofeedback!”

  Only in the evening, at the Conference Opening Gathering, do I begin to appreciate what I’ve stumbled across here in Florida.

  I stroll in late to find two women whom I’d guess to be in their early fifties banging drums and hauling some of the 200-odd attendees to the front of the hall for a Dance of Universal Peace. I try to slink down the side wall inconspicuously, but it’s no use – I am a sitting duck by virtue of my lateness, doomed to spend the next half hour twirling around in a big circle with several dozen people whom I don’t know, chanting “I am sunlight/I am shining,” and if in the end I learn to enjoy it by imagining that I am on my way home from Woodstock, I also can’t help noticing that Edgar Mitchell remains anchored to his seat as if stapled to it by Zeus himself. Before the weekend is out, I will have pretended to be a singing tree at an “Embracing the Circle” workshop, and panicked when a faith healer asked, “To what god do you pray?” and an image of the former Conservative Secretary of State for Health Virginia Bottomley popped into my head (what the …?). I will have listened to a young hippy tell a story which ends “if it’s possible that talking to fruit flies can bring peace, imagine what it could do for people” (audience members nod sagely), been “presenced” by Tibetan singing bowls, and had conversations about paranormal experiences that a few magic mushrooms might have rendered intelligible, but probably wouldn’t have. Yet I will also have met many bright, warm and well-informed people: people who were young adults when Edgar Mitchell went to the Moon and watched his journey from the perspective of a counterculture which they’ve never abandoned or broken faith with. There are left-field scientists and academics, humanitarian and civil rights activists and every complexion of New Ager. To find an astronaut, let alone a Moonwalker, keeping this kind of far-out company strikes me as extraordinary. That I never once see Mitchell patronize, dismiss or condescend to even the more dippy elements seems even more so.