Edgar Mitchell’s research: Cook excerpt #19

Nick Cook writes: Ordinarily, we would say that of the two aspects of the NDE identified earlier - the ‘material aspect’, involving earthly impressions, and the ‘trans-material aspect’, in which the experiencer perceives phenomena in dimensions beyond our world⁵⁶ – only the former, because it relates to material ‘stuff’, can be brought back, discussed by a witness under cross-examination, and checked against the known, material facts.

But here, the research of a leading academic was hinting at an alternative: a set of data pointing to evidence of ‘permanent post-death survival’ in the trans-material realm might be cross-checkable via these two sets of experiencers, NDE’ers and past-lifers, if only a means could be devised of evaluating the evidence veridically.

Dr Pim van Lommel, who, as we saw, spent his career at the sharp end of the near- death experience, doesn’t refer to the survival of human consciousness post-death, but instead to what he terms a ‘continuity of consciousness’. The real question, he and others broadly agree, isn’t about how consciousness goes on when we die, but about the existence of an all-connected, all-knowing state with no beginning and no end, which, under certain conditions, happens to manifest in our 3D/4D reality as an out-of-body, shared-death or near-death experience – and has come to be known by millions. The core features of these experiences are similar, suggesting we need to look on them in the way van Lommel urges us to – not as distinct and unrelated, but as evidence of some property of our condition that is non-local, infinite and unbound.

Here, I took a short diversion into the research journey of Apollo 14 astronaut, Dr Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the Moon, and for two essential reasons.

First, the scientific evidence I had amassed outside of the mainstream materialist view – which, had failed to my satisfaction to provide an adequate explanation for a reality that encompassed all the ‘icons’ on the user-interface of our experience – seemed to point, as the US Army’s Gateway paper had, to the universe as being ‘quantum holographic’ in nature; and Mitchell had formulated just such a theory.

The first glimpses of it came to him in a ‘peak experience’ on the way back to Earth in Apollo 14, when he became filled with a profound sense we were part of a living, harmonious, sentient cosmos, in which everyone and everything was connected.

This vision was a very long way from the cosmos of our textbooks – we and the matter of the universe, Mitchell maintained, were in a resonant relationship in which information was constantly being exchanged between perceiver and percipient.

The medium that facilitated this exchange, he said, was the zero-point field – the foam of quantum potential and unmanifest energy that arose from, and vanished back into the quantum vacuum – the substrate beyond which physics can’t see.

Our capacity to tap this data, Mitchell said, hinged on the ability of our brain and central nervous system, functioning as a quantum computer, to derive two fundamental aspects of the data held in the field: the material and the immaterial⁵⁷. The former, vested in its particle aspect, emerged as physical and local – energy that did work and matter we could see and touch; while information held in the particle’s ‘alter-ego’, the wave function, allowed us to sense and intuit non-locally, universally and psychically.

It was the second aspect of the exchange that provided us with our experience of the paranormal, Mitchell maintained, including the OBE and the NDE. In ‘The Way Of The Explorer’⁵⁸, the book that he wrote in 2008 that sought to portray his life’s journey through the lens of what he called a dyadic model of the universe⁵⁹, he described the OBE as ‘likely a trick of the psyche’ – a survival mechanism - that allowed us to dissociate when faced with an uncomfortable, traumatic or life- threatening situation.

‘The classic near-death experience,’ he wrote a few paragraphs later, ‘seems to be but an extension of the OBE’. This carried with it the emergence of archetypal images that ‘provide assurances of well-being and eternal survival.’ This information, conveyed often by entities with religious and cultural significance to those that it affected, he said, was recovered ‘either from the deep subconscious or from non- local memory, rather than being evidence of ‘discarnate entities from other realms’.

Whilst this tallied with key elements of the ‘exchange of light’ phenomenon we encountered earlier – the possibility that phenomena around a dead or dying person were symbolic, archetypal communications from the collective unconscious (or perhaps, even, from the universe), rather than from a person who had transcended bodily death – it seemed an uncharacteristically bleak portrayal of our place in eternity from a man who’d sought to integrate his scientific and spiritual worldviews for much of his life.

The fact that Dr Mitchell had gone on to become Chairman Emeritus of Eternea60, an organisation that espouses the survival of consciousness beyond the brain and body, told me his view of consciousness’s capacity to ‘go on’ wasn’t as stark as these two statements made out. But it raised an important point: if the universe is quantum holographic, could it be that our consciousness continued as a kind of ‘infinite hologram’ – a feelingless shadow of our earthly essence as opposed to one that held our awareness? And if it was the former, would this constitute true survival?

56 The ‘material aspect’ and the ‘trans-material aspect’ discussed earlier, from Leslie Kean, quoting Holden, on p.97 of Surviving Death. 

57 From Chapter 5, Nature’s Mind: The Quantum Hologram, by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, in Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence, Volume 1, The Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, FREE, Inc. 

58 The Way of the Explorer, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, The Career Press, Inc, NJ, USA, 2008.
59 An evolutionary cosmological model using energy and information as fundamental concepts. 60 http://www.eternea.org

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.