It is with sadness and deep respect, that we announce the death of
Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, 6th man to walk on the moon, a hero and a visionary who died last Thursday February 4.
After his Apollo 14 mission in 1971, he founded the California-based
Institute of Noetic Sciences. On its website announcing Mitchell's death, it states:
"...this experience (in space) radically altered his worldview: Despite science's superb technological achievements, Mitchell realized that we had barely begun to probe the deepest mystery of the universe—the fact of consciousness itself. He became convinced that the uncharted territory of the human mind was the next frontier to explore, and that it contained possibilities we had hardly begun to imagine. Within two years of his expedition, Edgar Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973."
Current President of IONS, Cassandra Vieten wrote this in her
in memoriam of Edgar Mitchell:
"When he returned from space forty-five years ago, Apollo 14 Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell committed his life to supporting a sustainable future. He worked tirelessly to understand and promote what he viewed as an absolutely necessary collective shift in consciousness. To those of us who knew him well, Edgar was an enthusiastic, loving, dedicated, courageous, generous, and brilliant man who inspired us to be bold in our exploration of the further reaches of human potential, to fearlessly challenge inadequate paradigms, and to carry his spirit of adventure into investigating our inner lives.......
.....As Mitchell gazed at Earth floating in the vastness of space and contemplated the history and hopes of humankind on that lonely blue sphere, he was engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness.
“I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science—our cosmology, our religion— was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discreet things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description. What was needed was a new story of who we are and what we are capable of becoming.”