Edgar Mitchell quotes:

The evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident and that indeed an alien craft did crash, and that material was recovered from that site. We all know that UFOs are real.All we need to ask is where do they come from, and what do they want?

The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill, are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individual generally remains thereafter in the existential state of awareness, the deep internal feeling of eternity is quite profound and unshakable.

We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.

Entanglement can best be understood as this: When subatomic matter is in a process together, subsequently the subatomic particles go apart from each other and go across the universe. When they do this, they will remain entangled. That means if you do something to one, the other one responds immediately, instantaneously.

When I went to the moon I was a pragmatic test pilot. But when I saw the planet Earth floating in the vastness of space the presence of divinity became almost palpable and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident.

I have trust that we humans can resolve the problems that we have created. There is a Sanskrit saying that I subscribe to and I like very much, that "God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in the animals, and thinks in Man."

At the end of October 4 in 1957, when I was coming back from sea duty in the South Pacific, Sputnik went up. I realized that humans would be right behind robot aircraft or spacecraft even though I really had no plans of being in aviation or a professional aviator and certainly not in the military.

We do need different types of propulsion to get to Mars. I wrote one of the first Ph.D. theses on that in the 1960s.

We need a community of nations capable of space flight because we all have to be off this planet sometime in the future. Our sun is going to burn out eventually, and we are not in a sustainable situation.

I theorize that there is a spectrum of consciousness available to human beings. At one end is material consciousness. At the other end is what we call 'field' consciousness, where a person is at one with the universe, perceiving the universe. Just by looking at our planet on the way back, I saw or felt a field consciousness state.

Unfortunately, religions have become a part of the problem instead of part of the solution. We have fought our wars in the name of God, questioning whose God is the best God and whose exploration of this deeper reality is the best explanation. That defies everything that this deeper reality teaches.

The best experience that we have on Earth is the fact that we have scientific stations, weathering over stations down in the Antarctic for almost the entire 20th century to learn how to exist in exceedingly hazardous conditions; and the Moon is far more hazardous than Antarctica. At least they have water there.

I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.

We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do, in due course, if we were to survive. All of that will take place, in due course, and we will be able to explore solar system. We will be able to go beyond it, provided we get our act together and learn to live as a civilization.

Perhaps people need to understand some history here. Rene Descartes, in the late 16th, early 17th century, postulated that body, mind, physicality and spirituality belonged to different realms of reality that didn't interact. On a positive side, it got the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals and they quit burning them at the stake for disagreeing with the Church.

It's starting to catch hold, and in large measure it's because we're starting to understand that much of what we have talked about in ancient mythology and mystical experience and so forth can pretty well be modeled within the world of quantum physics. That's a 20th century phenomenon also.

We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.

I think of the universe as the body of God, and the creative capability we see and can exhibit as the mind of God. I will use this phrase to describe our system, that it's a creative, intelligent, self-organizing, learning trial-and-error, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system.

Most 20th century academic physicists, and academia as a whole, simply did not want to touch the subject of consciousness. We have seen psychology grow up, and we've seen the development of neurophysiology and other much more sophisticated science, but only in the recent years have the tools of quantum mechanics been applied to anything representing human scale size.

Well, in the sense of the traditional notion of God, coming out of Christianity and Islam and the Abrahamic religions, I do not hold with that concept of a God or deity. In that concept, I'm agnostic. Okay, I don't know the answer, let's find the answer.

There's an old saying, "We can mess it up and God cleans it up." I haven't noticed a deity of any sort cleaning up our messes. We're going to have to do it ourselves, particularly since we have created most of these problems just by the genius and creativity that we've expressed and experienced here in this modern period. We've done it, and we've got to straighten it out.

On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.

The quantum hologram is a mechanism to explain this concept of the ancients of the Akashic Records. It also explains Rupert Sheldrake's work among animals [his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, leading to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory].

The downside was that for 400 years, science has grown up, has arisen and developed as a purely materialist concept and avoided the subject of mind and consciousness, leaving it to the realm of religion. Only with the founding of quantum science in the early part of the 20th century have we realized that the Cartesian Duality is wrong, that body, mind, physicality do interact and they're interrelated.

I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real.

I've been very involved in this quantum holographic formalism and helping to explore it as explanatory of the very root of our perceptual capabilities. It is postulated, for example, that this very basic entanglement, at the quantum level, at the level of subatomic matter, is really a part of quantum mechanics.

What we're starting to see is a quantum biology, it being applied in biology and cosmology and a host of other sciences, because it does really pertain to how we know. It really helps bring epistemology, which is how do we know what we know, out of the realm of philosophy and brings it into the realm of science.

There is a major problem of unsustainability of our environment, and we're seeing it in our natural resources, peak oil is probably upon us, and it can't be sustained. We're on an unsustainable path, and at this point in history we are responsible for that. We're going to have to change our ways. We're going to have to think through this problem.

We create our own reality because of our inner emotional - our subconscious - reality draws us into those situations from which we learn. We experience it as strange things happening to us (and) we meet the people in our lives that we need to learn from. And so we create these circumstances at a very deep metaphysical and subconscious level.

Death may simply be an alteration in consciousness, a transition for continued life in a nonmaterial form.

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty.

We are not alone in the universe. They have been coming here for a long time...

When I learned that aliens really do exist, I wasn't too surprised. But what did shock me when I started investigating extra-terrestrial reports a decade ago is the extent to which the proof has been hushed up. It isn't just the US government which has kept quiet about alien visits. It would be arrogant of an American like myself to assume that ETs would only choose to visit my country. Indeed, I've heard convincing stories about governments all over the world that know of alien visits - including the British government.

I am very, very incredulous about what I see. I can't throw caveats in. I don't make blanket statements.

Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate, sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth ... home. My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.

I have been privileged to be briefed and to know that we have been visited [by aliens]. I do not have first hand experience in this regard, but I have been on investigating teams and I have been briefed by insiders who do know.

I've talked with people of stature-of military and government credentials and position-and heard their stories, and their desire to tell their stories openly to the public. And that got my attention very, very rapidly.... The first hand experiences of these credible witnesses that, now in advanced years are anxious to tell their story, we can't deny that, and the evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident, and that indeed an alien craft did crash, and that material was recovered from that crash site.

Science is methodology. As a belief system it's disastrous.

We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.

There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomenon, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural... we should strive to fill those gaps of ignorance.

We are creating the future. It is not determined. If we get our act together and solve our current problems, we could have a sustainable, abundant future. If we don't, we could wipe ourselves out. We are on the verge of doing it with our current politics. It is regressive, going back the other way.

Transcendence gets you beyond ego. If you go beyond ego, you see all of this in a more decent perspective and you can start to put all the pieces together. We haven't done that yet. Not as a civilization.

The U.S. Government hasn't maintained secrecy regarding UFOs. It's been leaking out all over the place. But the way it's been handled is by denial, by denying the truth of the documents that have leaked. By attempting to show them as fraudulent, as bogus of some sort. There has been a very large disinformation and misinformation effort around this whole area. And one must wonder, how better to hide something out in the open than just to say, 'It isn't there. You're deceiving yourself if you think this is true.' And yet, there it is right in front of you.

Yes, we have been visited and it appears that our visitors are prepared to help us if we allow them. It is a benign contact, however there are those who think that we also have been visited by those who do not wish us well, but I can't speak to that. I just know we have been visited, and I believe that we're being observed, and perhaps we can be helped in a crucial time if we're ready for that.

We all know that UFOs are real. All we need to ask is where do they come from, and what do they want?

I think I've reached the point that I'm convinced enough of the reality of the ET presence and I'm not going to deny it and shy away from it.... It is time to open this up to the public.

We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it's creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us.

The transcendent experience is brotherly love, nature, harmony and unity. Cultures, in trying to define it, try to define an external deity as opposed to the process.

When you transcend the transcendent states, you get past the ego structure, and at that point you don't need laws, you have "morality!" You have inborn, natural ethics, because it is built on Love.

The ancient traditions, even Christianity, say God is Love. There is symmetry here. The fundamental step where you get into this transcendent state is this feeling of ebullience, love and caring and unity.

To kill a citizen of our own country is evil, but to kill a citizen of another country is 'good.'

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.

We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.

Our ignorance, and it is based on the egos we have. It is the unwillingness to go beyond ego.

Undoubtedly we will go on to Mars in due course, provided we don't blow ourselves up with our stupidities in the short run. That's a possibility, too.

Another way to think of this is there are now 6.8 billion people on this planet, and half of them weren't even born when we went to the moon, and so they don't have the perspective.

The main problem is that we, as an Earth civilization, have not come to understand ourselves - see ourselves in a cosmic sense at all.

It was a beautiful, harmonious, peaceful-looking planet, blue with white clouds, and one that gave you a deep sense of home, of being, of identity. It is what I prefer to call instant global consciousness.

Let me put it in a rather larger picture framework. Let's go to the longest time frame, the time frame of the life of our sun. As a star, our sun is about halfway through its life cycle. In the long run, we only have a couple of billion more years likely that we can inhabit this planet. By that time, we're going to have to be out of here before our sun dies. Now, I don't think we need to wait that long, and we certainly shouldn't wait that long. At the moment, we are not on a sustainable path.

Certainly whatever climate change and global warming means, we've got a big issue here. Right now, this civilization or this period that we're in is probably going to need the resources off our planet, perhaps the resources from the asteroids, perhaps there will be some on the moon, perhaps some on Mars that we can utilize for our own uses here.

I experienced an ecstasy of unity. I not only saw the connectedness, I felt it and experienced it sentiently. The restraints and boundaries of flesh and bone fell away.

My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.

So, we've gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn't slowed down yet.

Our success and our understanding is that all beings are right inside, the deeper we go inside ourselves. There's a saying that Unity uses that I have always liked: "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." We all have to be a part of this. We have to be the initiator. We can't wait.

The universe is a self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial-and-error learning, participatory, interactive, non-locally interconnected and evolving system.

Eventually we must leave Earth-at least a certain number of our progeny must as our sun approaches the end of its solar life cycle. But just as terrestrial explorers have always led the way for settlers, this will also happen extraterrestrially. Earth is our cradle, not our final destiny.

Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.

I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across.

The Big Bang has gone away, but as far as Super String, that is suspicious for me. It all starts out with the notion of Big Bang, which if it were true, starts out with incredibly high temperatures. So they think [we] need to get these high temperatures for this broken symmetry; all this broken symmetry reunited, and we do not have enough energy in the whole galaxy to get to those temperatures, to prove their point. To me, that is the single flaw in Super String theory.

It's been written about as "the overview effect." All I can give you is my perspective, but most all of the people who have been in space start to see the world without boundaries. You start to think about how we can keep doing these things we're doing that are destructive of the environment and destructive of the planet. It causes you to start to think things in a quite different way than we had before.

There are types of energy which lie outside the electromagnetic spectrum. Unfortunately, these research efforts have not been given recognition. For the most part, they have been performed by individuals without any support, whose work lies at the threshold of present-day science, and who are years ahead of science which is already established.

Space exploration must be undertaken not only out of simple human curiosity but also to further the survival of the species. The twentieth century has seen the unprecedented development and proliferation of magnificent technologies. Many of them, through design, ignorance, or misuse, are capable of destroying life as well as enhancing it. Space exploration alone holds the promise of eventual escape from a dying planet, provided we wisely manage our resources in the meantime and actually survive that long.

It was a dogma throughout most of the 20th century that quantum science only applied to subatomic matter, and we now know that not to be true. One of the major discoveries was Quantum Holography.

If we don't take care of our customers, someone else will.

Dr. Lipsenthal is a profound explorer of our inner and outer worlds. Enjoy Every Sandwich will help you heal your fear of death and embrace the true joy of life's extraordinary journey.

You get out there in space and say to yourself: that's home. That's the only home we have, and the only one we're going to have for a long time

I think our science is a marvelous tool. Of course it has its politics, its failings, its mistakes, like all other human endeavors, but I think the methodology of our science - using it to postulate and to use the proper approach of creating falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them to see if they ring true, and then progressing by finding the anomalies to our theoretical structure, and then improving our theoretical structure to take care and test the anomalies - is the way to go, because that helps us discover what the universe.is all about and our relationship to it.

I call it "the big picture effect." Getting to see earth as a small planet and to see it in that perspective, seeing it in the heavens as a planet as opposed to being down here among it, most of the people, in fact, I guess all of the people who have had that experience, shift their thinking.

In my opinion, fundamentalist Christians are just as bad as fundamentalist Islam and, at the very core, neither religion is like that.

The transcendent experience is common to every culture in the world.

I'd like to discover Truth - when I can latch on to something that I think is true.

I think it laughable, frankly, that the physics community comes up with a theory for everything. There isn't one theory for everything. There is not one explanation. We may eventually have several theories that can tie things together nicely but there is not a single theory of everything.

I believe we have these capabilities. It doesn't mean that we will use them. Our future is not assured here. It's not clear that we will survive our own folly, but we have a rare opportunity to do that if we listen and see the messages that nature is showing at us right now, that the finiteness of our own resources and our own planet are showing us right now.

The answer to the nature of our existence is somewhere in the middle, and that, of course, is what we're looking for: how to see ourselves in a new picture of ourselves and understand the questions that humans have asked forever, "Who are we, how did we get here, where are we going, and what's the nature of this reality that we're in?"

The most basic act of awareness or knowing that we can demonstrate in science. I postulate that that is the very basis of why we're conscious at all, that it is this relationship at the quantum level as matter evolves into more complex form, including plants and animals and living substance and ourselves, that this area of consciousness as an awareness becomes more and more complex.

The ancients had a term in the mystical tradition called the Akashic Records, which was suggestive that nature didn't lose it's experience, that the information accumulated was available forever.

We have what is happening as a result of the current administration in our country, which I think has taken us in a totally wrong direction, postulating totally wrong things.

We have to learn that service to the greater good is the greatest satisfaction. That idea is at the basis of all the great traditions dating back into history. When you get inside yourself - and you really find that deep inner peace that's rooted in love - then you can't live a life that we see being manifested in the large parts of the world right now.

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.

The quantum fluctuations within a zero-point field can start the process that builds the process, which builds into matter, an irreversible process. We have some evidence that suggests that. We don't have a Big Bang, but we have a lot of little pops! A continuous set of little pops!