Overview Effect

June 8, 2008

In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the

little understood phenomenon sometimes called the " Overview Effect " .

He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of

universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeing of bliss,

timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him. He describes

becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent

atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and

to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an

intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species,

and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that

rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. He was not

the first—nor the last—to experience this strange " cosmic connection " .

Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk

outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: " When you go around the Earth in an

hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with

that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so

powerfully that you're the sensing element for Man. " Schweikart,

similar to what Mitchell experienced, describes intuitively sensing

that everything is profoundly connected.

Their experiences, along with dozens of other similar experiences

described by other astronauts, intrigue scientists who study the

brain. This " Overview Effect " , or acute awareness of all matter as

synergistically connected, sounds somewhat similar to certain

religious experiences described by Buddhist monks, for example. Where

does it come from and why?

Andy Newberg, a neuroscientist/physician with a background in

spacemedicine, is learning how to identify the markers of someone who

hasexperienced space travel. He says there is a palpable difference

in someone who has been in space, and he wants to know why. Newberg

specializes in finding the neurological markers of brains in states

of altered consciousness: Praying nuns, transcendental mediators, and

others in focused or " transcendent " states.

Newberg can actually pinpoint regions in subjects' gray matter that

correlate to these circumstances, and now he plans to use his

expertise to find how and why the Overview Effect occurs. He is

setting up advanced neurological scanning instruments that can head

into space to study--live--the brain functions of space travelers. If

this Overview Effect is a real, physiological phenomenon—he wants to

watch it unfold.

Newberg's first test subject will not be an astronaut, but rather a

civilian. Reda Andersen will be leaving the planet with Rocketplane

Kistler. She says, that as one of the world's first civilian space

adventurers, she is more than happy to let Andy scan her brain if it

can help unlock the mystery. Why do astronauts all seem to experience

a profound alteration of their perceptions when entering space, and

will it happen for Rita and the other civilian explorers as well?

After decades of study and contemplation about his experience, Ed

Mitchell believes that the feeling of " oneness " with the Universe

that he and others have experienced is a consequence of little

understood quantum physics.

In a recent interview with writer Diana deRegnier of American

Chronicle, Mitchell explains how the event changed his life and his

entire perspective on the world and how each of us fits into the

grand scale of the cosmos.

" Four hundred years ago. the philosopher Rene Descartes came to the

conclusion that physicality, spirituality, mind and body belonged to

different realms of reality that didn't interact. Now, that served

the purpose to get the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals

so they could disagree on material things with the church and without

the fear of being burned at the stake. So that ended that, but it did

cause, for four hundred years, science to consider consciousness and

mind a subject for philosophy and religion and not a subject for

science.

Now, one of the things that happened, in the 1940s, was the

mathematician, physicist, Norbert Wiener (MIT, Massachusetts

Institute of Technology) for the first time really defined

information as the negative of entropy, and entropy as the idea of

the universe is running down and wastes energy. But, Wiener defined

information as the negative of entropy, and that's wonderful but it

didn't go far enough. "

Mitchell says that in an attempt to fill in some of the missing gap,

the 2008 revised edition of his book The Way of the Explorer explores

the largely ignored science of human consciousness. Using what he

calls the " dyadic model " he outlines the " two faces " of

energy. " Instead of being two separate things, it's the energy as the

basis of our existence in matter. And, it's the basis of our knowing

and information, " Mitchell explains.

" We had not had, in science, a definition of consciousness. The only

definition of consciousness from the dictionary is that at its basic

level it is awareness. Consciousness means to be aware, and then we

have different levels of consciousness depending upon how complex the

substance is. It has been demonstrated many times over in

laboratories that basic awareness is demonstrable at the level of

plants, at simple bacteria, at simple life forms.

This is done with Faraday cages. It's shown that this information at

this deep level, at the quantum level, can transcend electromagnetic

theory. And, now we're getting into quantum physics and we don´t want

to go there at this point. But it's a very fundamental notion that

awareness is at the very basis of things. "

Mitchell believes that perhaps both the theologians and scientists

have missed the mark.

" All I can suggest to the mystic and the theologian is that our gods

have been too small; they fill the universe. And to the scientist all

I can say is that the gods do exist; they are the eternal, connected,

and aware Self experienced by all intelligent beings.'

In response to DeRegnier questioning whether or not Mitchell believes

in the idea of God, he responds that while he does not believe in the

traditional " grandfather figure " version of God, " we do have great

mystery about what is the origin of the universe, how it came to be.

There's a great deal of question as to whether the big bang is the

correct answer to the way the universe arose, and under what auspices

and conditions. I don't think we have the full answers to that yet.

Hopefully in due course we'll be able to find a much better way to

describe all this. "

But while Mitchell does not claim to know how to perfectly interpret

his experience, he is certain that it was a glimpse into a largely

ignored reality: People, places and things are all more closely

connected than they sometimes appear. He also mentions the need for

better stewardship of our precious planet.

" The great thinker Buckminster Fuller, philosopher, now deceased but

for a goodly portion of the twentieth century, pointed out at the

beginning of our space exploration that we are the crew of `space

ship earth'. But we 're a crew of mutiny and how can you run a space

ship with a mutinous crew? "

Posted by Rebecca Sato

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