Reply #5: It's interesting.... [View All]

[BrendaBrick]

You wrote: "shroomed once...and had the experience while sitting in a thicket of ivy that the molcules/atoms of the cells of the leaves were no different than my own body, we are all light beings

I have also that experience more (especially lately) in my waking life it seems too, but on a more macrocosmic level i guess."

Cool!

This reminds me once of a lecture I went to, probably in the mid 90's, given by Edgar Mitchell promoting his new book: "The Way of the Explorer".

I was taken by his account of what he felt while out in space. Here's a little something about it:

EXPLORING CONSCIOUSNESS WITH EDGAR MITCHELL

By Robert Yehling

(Appeared in Science of Mind Magazine, April 2003)

Edgar Mitchell joined millions of men in the history of humankind by embarking on a vision quest. It’s a quest he continues to live every day in his Florida home, and at lecture podiums throughout the world. On his particular odyssey, the defining journey, he realized a number of things on the spiritual and mental dimensions, and formed his life’s mission from them. Like his predecessors on mesas, open plains, Outward Bound adventures and deep Amazon forests, Mitchell’s quest confirmed many perceptions and hunches, and changed many others. Unlike those others, his particular experience took place a world away—literally.
In 1971, while walking on the moon as lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, Mitchell began to experience the revelation that would lead him to create one of the greatest works in our world today. He stared at the blue and white circle above the horizon, Earth, and felt a connectedness to the people and the universe. As the resident astrophysicist of the mission, he dutifully completed his collecting of rocks and science experiments, but the feeling built.
Mitchell and commander Alan Shepard blasted off from the lunar surface and rendezvoused with command module pilot Stu Roosa in lunar orbit. The feeling built. He spent the next three days and 250,000 miles staring out the window of the command module, traveling deeper and deeper into the feeling that linked his mind and body cells to the void of space and interstellar light that he saw.
The feeling overwhelmed him.
“It was an epiphany in space, the transcendent expression, that I later learned was samadhi. I didn’t know it then,” Mitchell explained. “It was the experiencing of unity, of feeling at one with the universe, of recognizing that I was star-matter, literally a physical construct of the universe; that was the key thing. I had studied stellar formation and how the furnaces of the stars and galaxies created our chemical elements, but I suddenly realized that those were my molecules being manufactured and prototyped in those stars.
“As I looked at the planet from the moon, and from our spacecraft, it was kind of a signal event in human consciousness, a symbol that we were evolving into a new level of humanity. The pictures that we took of the earth are the most published pictures in the history of humankind. They’re enormously widely published pictures. Why? It’s because they speak to us at a rather deep, emotional level and they beg the questions, ‘How did we get here? How do we fit into all this?’ Those are the questions I was asking when I came back to earth. Instead of being an intellectual experience, it became a very deep, personal, emotional one, a knowing.”
Mitchell experienced sabikalpa samadhi, which, according to Indian yoga master Paramhanasa Yogananda in his book Autobiography of a Yogi, is the realization of self, others and the universe as divine beings connecting with divine consciousness — and recognizing the relationship...

The rest here, if you're interested:

http://www.wordjourneys.com/portfolio/edgar.htm

Also, an interview he gave: "The View from SPACE":

http://www.motorcityfreegeek.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=107&Itemid=108

Though I think he has been getting some slack for some of the things he talks about and his Institute of Noetic Sciences, - still - no one can deny him what he felt!!!

Also interesting to note that many Native tribes practiced(s) the ingestion of mushrooms as a type of vision quest here at 'home'.