The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 14: Touchdown
(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)
(Note: Chapter 14 follows Chapter 13 of The Light Beyond The Mountains posted on 7th July, in which I discussed the circumstances surrounding Ingo Swann’s book Penetration, which purported to tell the true story of his involvement in a covert surveillance operation of the Moon, using the remote viewing method he had honed under the CIA-backed psychic spying programme that kicked off in the early 1970s)
Chapter 14: Touchdown
Edgar Dean Mitchell was an aeronautical engineer, a cool, level-headed test-pilot long before he entered NASA’s astronaut programme. He served as Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 14, which landed on the Moon’s Fra Mauro Highlands region on 5th February 1971 and became the sixth man to walk on its surface. It comes as a surprise, then, that this quiet, ostensibly left-brain-driven Right Stuff technologist was a pioneer in the field of consciousness research, a twist in his CV that came about when something inexplicable happened to him on the way back from the Moon.
In his book, ‘The Way of the Explorer’, he describes the nature of what he called his ‘grand epiphany’ during the three-day journey back to Earth – an experience, he says, that was ‘nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness.’
He wrote of it: ‘I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me.
‘There was the sense that our presence as space travellers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental, but that there was an intelligent process at work’ – the universe, in other words, Mitchell’s experience told him, was conscious.
By splash-down, he knew his life’s direction was about to change - as, indeed, it did. He devoted the rest of it to the most impenetrable mystery of existence – the origins of consciousness. This is the story that he tells in The Way of the Explorer.
In relation to my own journey to understand phenomena on the screen of our perception – the interface as described by Don Hoffman – Mitchell had locked on to something particularly interesting: the process via which we rendered the swirling, invisible information and energy patterns that underwrote the visible universe into Hoffman’s icons: the symbols of compressed data representing our everyday reality.
He documented these in a paper towards the end of his life called ‘Nature’s Mind: The Quantum Hologram’, a hypothesis for integrating into the scientific framework a phenomenon - consciousness - deemed ‘beyond scientific description’.
Mitchell saw this in much the same way Susskind, t’Hooft, Hoffman and others did: as 2D information encoding 3D/4D information into what we perceived as physical form, with our brains, acting as quantum computers, doing the decoding.
The information carried by the quantum hologram, aka the universe’s hidden informational or ‘non-local’ aspect, Mitchell wrote, ‘encodes the complete event history of (an) object with respect to its three-dimensional environment’, with the percipient and the source of the information, the object, forming a ‘resonant relationship’ in order for the information to be accurately perceived. Non-locality, termed ‘spooky action at a distance’ by Einstein, not only describes the phenomenon of entanglement between two particles, no matter how far they are moved apart – but other ‘impossibilities’ besides such as remote viewing.
What Mitchell, Hoffman and even dyed-in-the-wool physicist Carlo Rovelli all agreed upon was the importance of this relational aspect between percipient and perceived – what Mitchell describes as the ‘phase conjugate paths’ connecting them.
In this reciprocal pathway there is an exchange of data, even if the perceiver is a human and the perceived is a rock. Once the connection is established, ‘cognition occurs with respect to the perceived object and meaning assigned.’
Mitchell goes on to say we cannot, very obviously, query a rock about its side of the relational experience - ‘the phenomena, however, are rooted in natural (and primitive) non-local physical processes which are fundamental.’ He then adds for clarity: ‘The evolved complexities of perception, cognition etc. associated with a brain, obviously, as yet, have no analogous label to describe the experience of simple objects.’
But, it seemed to me, in the information exchange between human and rock – or any ‘conscious agent’ as described by Hoffman - lay both a possible explanation for the way in which we rendered 3D objects – icons - into physical existence on our ‘space-time interface’, and a method via which meaning – new data - fed back into the system – if, for a moment, we dared to allow ourselves to consider the universe as a kind of giant, self-learning artificial intelligence. Or an infinite neural computer.