As the Paradigm Shifts Two Decades of Consciousness Research By Edgar Mitchell

The theme of this conference is Global Mind Change. What are we changing from and what are we changing to? Looking back 21 years, 6 months, when I was returning from my lunar odyssey, I felt it was a wondrous privilege to look at this planet and to have the insight that something very interesting and strange and different is going on here. Humankind had broken the bonds of gravitation, and for the first time in its history had left its home planet and ventured into space.

The insights for me at that point were several. But the deepest ones were "This universe isn't put together the way we thought it was. It is somewhat different than I've been taught. My science is incomplete and basically Earth-centered, and our religious cosmologies are incomplete and perhaps flawed in some regard." I realized that if we are going to be so daring as to go into space and experience the vastness of a cosmos around us, then it's best we get the picture right about who and what we are, and how we got here, and where we're going.

I came back from space with a puzzlement: I could see this planet Earth, but I could not see political boundaries—couldn't see what was causing humans to be so relentlessly harsh with each other. All boundaries suddenly disappeared and what appeared in their place was intelligence, harmony, creativity; in my view of space they were palpable. In one moment I realized that this universe is intelligent. It is proceeding in a direction and we have something to do with that direction. And that creative spirit, the creative intent that has been the history of this planet, comes from within us, and it is out there—it is all the same. Now, we don't really understand this very well at all. And I realized that because of our misunderstanding we are creating some conditions on this planet that need to be corrected. Yet I felt confident that humankind, in due course, would start to find a way to make those corrections.

But still, I came back puzzled about these insights, puzzled about what to do, puzzled about whom to ask to help. And then the pieces started slowly falling into place. I founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973, and its work over twenty years led to this wonderful group that you represent today.

So what has changed in twenty years? It's been a pretty interesting time. When we started this endeavor, classical psychology hardly recognized that a subconscious existed. The way the mind works was still largely viewed as a black box. You put in an input, and you measured an output. Good engineering, but a lousy way to test living people. However, that was the prevailing paradigm in science.

At that time it was considered "off the wall" to talk about intelligent life out there in the universe. Earth was still the single repository of life. The scientific reasoning was that we were a unique accident, and the theological reasoning was that Earth was God's crowning creation. So the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere was just not thinkable. Yet today I know few people who do not realize that the probability is very high for intelligence and life throughout the universe.

Again, twenty years ago people like Elmer Green and Alyce Green were struggling to gain acceptance for a very advanced notion called biofeedback. No one was really prepared to accept the idea that you could train yourself to control your autonomic nervous system, and yet today that's become part of mainstream wisdom. Also at that time Carl Simonton had what was considered a way-out notion—that one's attitude could affect one's health and well-being. And now, although not all of Western medicine recognizes the role of attitude in health and well-being, the idea is gaining acceptance. The Institute supported the early work of these and other pioneering researchers.

Another way to view where we've come from has to do with the rate of change of human activity, which can be described in terms of geometric progression. Let me show you an example of this—if you take a penny and double it every day for 30 days, you come up with more than $10,700,000. Human activity on this planet has been shown to follow this kind of progression—but the period in which this "doubling" occurs has been decreasing. For example, starting with 25 million people just before the Christian period, it took almost a thousand years for the doubling of human population. Then that time period shrank to about 750 years. More recently, between 1900 and the early 1950s, the population doubled; it will have tripled by the end of this century.

Turning to the concept of invention, Buckminster Fuller estimated that by about 10,000 BC major inventions were occurring every couple of hundred years or so. By the beginning of the Christian era, they may have been happening every fifty years. By about 1700 the time period was reduced to thirty years. In our current period, as you well know, major inventions are taking place virtually monthly. And a similar thing has been happening with the growth of information.

The message I want to emphasize is that for the first time ever the period of doubling of all human activity has been reduced to less than a human generation. This is something that has never happened before! We humans just aren't accustomed to that rate of change. The engine is winding up, and up, and up, getting faster and faster. How long can we endure this rate of change?

We all know that this pace became so fast and so furious that our institutions are breaking down. Nothing seems to be working. We're getting ahead of ourselves. And the question is, what in the world are we going to do about it?

I would like to suggest to you that the current turmoil—the breakdown of the ozone layer, global warming, the destruction of the rainforests, the economic slump—all of these ills are symptomatic of an underlying problem that has not yet really surfaced. We keep looking to our political system for leadership and change, but in this case we're not going to find it. New ideas aren't being born at that level—they're being born at the grassroots level. They're coming from here, in this room, from people like yourselves.

Changes will come because the "paradigm shift" that we've been talking about for over twenty years seems to be upon us—people's deepest beliefs, values and thinking are changing. The term "paradigm shift" was popularized by Thomas Kuhn around 1962 in reference to scientific revolutions. The notion is a little more difficult to define in reference to our social structure, but the idea is still the same—that our deepest understanding about who we are and where we're going is being primed for change.

One example of a paradigm shift in a society is what happened in the Soviet Union a year or so ago. It was not obvious ahead of time that such change could happen. Some of us, many of us, were feeling that something would have to change, sooner or later, but nobody could have predicted the time-frame in which it happened. Yet there was something coming up from within the people—a changed idea, a changed belief, a changed set of values—which could not be predicted because no one dared talk about it in a totalitarian state. But when the moment arrived, and the system was about to be pushed backwards, an upwelling of a new idea whose time had come pushed it the other way.

The rest of the world, I believe, is about to go through a similar sort of thing. It's going to be pushed in a different direction. We don't know exactly how things will come out. We only know what our values and our beliefs are. And clearly the belief system that we're departing from has to do with separateness—the so-called Newtonian mechanistic universe—and a three-layered universe with remote deities in the heavens, humanity in between, and everything else down below. That is not the world we live in. It undoubtedly served our ancestors well and brought us to where we are today. But as we now look at things, at the developments in science of the last twenty to thirty years, we recognize that the old models and the old forms have to be modified to account for who and what we are.

The model we have been dealing with over the past twenty years (and well before that) was a scientific model which said that everything can be reduced to just matter or just energy. Everything is really energy, with matter a form of energy. Further, according to this model, consciousness as we experience it is simply epiphenomenal. That is, it's a by-product of brain activity, it's not really fundamental.

And yet all religious traditions the world over have said in one way or another, "No, this is not so. Consciousness itself is what is fundamental and energy-matter is the product of consciousness". This is the basic issue we have been dealing with for a long, long time without really being able to clearly resolve it one way or another.

It would probably have been okay for the mechanistic model to continue except that it doesn't allow consciousness to have any fundamental influence. Our Western economic and social models are increasingly based upon this mechanistic scientific model. The unfortunate part of this, of course, is that virtually all of our moral systems, our value systems, and hence our judgments of what is truly important in this life don't come from that scientific model. They come from the other model, from our cultural and religious traditions. So we've had two models making mutually exclusive assumptions about who and what we are.

In a very real sense we've created a schizophrenic society. That is part of the underlying cause for the mess we're in today. It's not just that the ozone layer is opening up. It's not just that it's getting warmer outside with global warming. It's not just that species are being wiped out at an alarming rate and the rainforests are being chopped down. It is that our fundamental understanding of who we are is flawed. If you're going to build a new understanding and solve these problems you can't just put band-aids on the old model. You can't patch things up with a little mercurochrome and hydrogen peroxide. If we are to have a global mind change, we have to build on a firm foundation with a consistent model of who and what we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

But how do we do that? We do that right here, starting with ourselves. The best we can possibly do is change ourselves. And when we have started that process of re-examination and change within ourselves the rest of the world will start to follow. We don't have to be activists in the street demanding a new point of view (although I have no objection to that). But I would suggest that we will do just as much good by changing our own minds—by understanding, learning, growing, meditating, putting together support groups. If we change our heads about who we are—and can see ourselves as creative, eternal beings creating physical experience, joined at that level of existence we call consciousness—then we start to see and create this world that we live in quite differently.

Edgar Mitchell is the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a pioneer in modern efforts to expand the role of science toward understanding and accounting for consciousness and inner experience. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon as an Apollo astronaut and is a co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers. Dr Mitchell is the author of Psychic Explorations.