Moondust (9 page)

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.

After the dancing, a nice talk on the pre-European history of Florida gives way to a valedictory address by the outgoing IONS president Wink Franklin, who turns out to be an engaging and witty character and spends the first five minutes ribbing Edgar about the lunar-hoax theory. He's joking, obviously, but this will turn out to be a real issue for the Moonwalkers, because over the past three decades it has become the most widely believed conspiracy theory of them all, holding that the Apollo astronauts never left Earth orbit and that the landings were filmed in a studio in the Nevada desert. A hard-core cadre of writers and film-makers are behind most of the more seductive claims and as yet I have no notion of how closely they will follow my own journey, but they will – right to the end. Franklin grins as he says: “I'm sure many of you have heard Edgar tell his story about going to the Moon many years ago, and I guess some of you might even have believed it …”

And we all laugh, even Mitchell, then move on to other business, and at the end of an evening in which I find delight and disbelief in equal measure, I'll be marvelling at the fact that what I appear to have found in IONS is the place where Apollo and the counterculture it shadowed actually
meet.
In my wildest dreams it had never occurred to me that they would.

The next morning, I find Edgar sitting on a tree-shaded
bench outside the common room-cum-“noetic café” in the middle of the campus. A Marlboro Light is pinched Artful Dodger–style between his thumb and forefinger and amusement must show on my face, because he looks momentarily disconcerted, then takes a big drag and stubs it out. Most of the astronauts smoked back in the day, but while most, like the rest of us, have since given up, Ed's hung in there. I don't know why this should seem pleasing, but it does.

Everyone else is at gatherings or workshops and we're alone with the stillness of the morning. We begin by talking about the epiphany, which continues to hold such power for him. The feeling was one of bliss, almost like being in love, he says, lamenting the fact that in English we have words for anger, happiness, sadness, frustration, but not for this overwhelming sensation which has been at the root of all religion.

We spend a long time talking about Quantum Holography and this appealing idea that the information of the whole exists in every constituent part; that a little piece, a tiny particle, might contain all the information pertaining to everything that exists or has ever existed, if in diluted form. The conversation ranges across history and philosophy, different cultures and religions, and while he doesn't “Believe” in any conventional sense, there's an infectious
sacredness
to the way in which he speaks of the cosmos. Again I am reminded of William Blake, who used to have ecstatic “visions” and spoke of seeing “the world in a grain of sand.” Mitchell knows about Blake, saying, “lots of artists and writers have spoken about it, in lots of cultures,” and repeating his theory that it happens “when the brain is in resonance with the fundamental stuff of the Universe.” Then we're back on the zero-point field, where he tells me that there is no space and no time and it sounds like he's describing science fiction. Indeed, I will talk to scientists who tell me that he is, but I'm not sure how much I care, because his conception of the Universe strikes me as rather beautiful, almost a work of art in itself. Pressed on this issue, he admits that: “We haven't proved anything yet, just proposed an explanation for a lot of things we've written off because we couldn't make sense of them.”

He speaks quietly, with the measured urgency of Captain
Kirk addressing his Star Log and I quickly learn that he doesn't do small talk, becoming awkward and tongue-tied if you try to make him. He confesses that his family used to tease him about being so serious and he knows himself well enough to be able to joke about this. When I callowly wonder why he signed up to fly combat in the pointless American engagement in Korea, noting that it's hard to imagine an Ed Mitchell of my generation having done that, he is patient with me: he looks pensive for a moment, then describes a reality that hasn't touched my charmed life. He was drafted.

“I was gonna have to go to war, and I'd been flying since I was young, so I chose to do my service as a pilot, which is how I got where I was. The fact is, I didn't plan a military career. And it was only when Sputnik went up that we got involved in the Space Race. Becoming an astronaut is something that happened.”

His childhood is instructive to this, because Mitchell's mother was a devout Southern Baptist with a strong antiwar bent, who hoped that her eldest child and only son, born in September 1930, might grow into either a preacher or a musician. Ranching the plains of west Texas, the family had managed to prosper through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, but been hit hard when the wheat crop failed one year, necessitating a move to a little clapboard house with outside plumbing in New Mexico where the men drove spikes on the Santa Fe Railroad. Before long, they had moved again, prophetically it seems, to Roswell, New Mexico, where Mitchell senior gradually built up a cattle farm. In fact, cattle was in the family, for his grandfather was known abroad as “Bull Mitchell” on account of his trading skills and Edgar recalls other ranchers travelling to Argentina or Brazil and sending back postcards addressed only to “Bull Mitchell, New Mexico,” which would find him with no trouble.