From the Moon to Kenshō

“It wasn’t until after we had made rendezvous with our friend Stu Roosa in the Kittyhawk command module and were hurtling earthward at several miles per second that I had time to relax in weightlessness and contemplate that blue jewel-like home planet suspended in the velvety blackness from which we had come.

“What I saw out the window was all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, longed for, all that I once thought I had ever been and ever would be. It was all there suspended in the cosmos on that fragile little sphere.

“I experienced a grand epiphany accompanied by exhilaration, an event I would later refer to in terms that could not be more foreign to my upbringing in West Texas, and later, New Mexico. From that moment on, my life was irrevocably altered.

“What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness.”

— Dr. Edgar Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey Through the Material and Mystical Wolrds

A/k/a, kenshō in outer space.