December 1995, Little Silver, NJ. I was busily shoveling snow out of my parent's driveway over winter break from college when my mom called me "Stefan, Dr. Mitchell is on the phone!" Breathless I ran inside and took the call...It turned out that Edgar Mitchell, the 6th person to set foot on the moon, was an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, the same university where my mentor Larry Burk's father graduated. Larry Burk, MD was a Radiologist at Duke University Medical Center and served as faculty advisor for the Mind-Body Medicine Study Group I founded, which was a forum for inviting and sponsoring leading integrative health practitioners to enlighten and inspire the undergraduate community.
What inspired the call? I had phoned Dr. Mitchell to informally interview him about his latest book in its final editing stages. In this book he proposed a dyadic model of consciousness, and this was subsequently named The Way of The Explorer. A dyadic model states: "any model of consciousness that is rigorous and complete must be compatible with both the way that we experience consciousness subjectively and consistent as well with what we know about the physical world through the protocols of science. "
He forwarded me a pre-publication galley draft, not intended for distribution. The subject book was especially relevant to my recent travels based with Dr. Burk to an "Intuition in Business" conference we attended in fall of 1995.
This conference was so-sponsored by the Intuition Network and Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) which Dr. Mitchell played a role in founding. The purpose was to explore consciousness and develop applications for what we discovered.
I love to learn from world-class minds of leading individuals. Interacting with Mitchell was definitely a rare privilege.
Years later, I heard Mitchell speak at the Professional Division conference of The Monroe Institute, around 1998. During the Apollo 14 mission, Mitchell conducted some of the very first documented ESP and parapsychology experiments, which I cited in my dissertation: Dream Homes - Dreams that seem to predict real estate sales.
In one of my first conversations, Mitchell acknowledged acclaimed anthropologist, human potential trainer, and U.N. delegate Jean Houston for her work. He participated in her Possible Human workshop years prior, which appeared to have inspired him.
Mitchell is a controversial figure for taking a public stance that some UFOs are geniunely extraterrestrial beings. For example on Dateline NBC in 1996 he spoke out against the government-sponsored suppression and disinformation about this topic.
Mitchell also appeared in the documentary the Phoenix Lights, which chronicled arguably the world's most famous UFO sighting, reported by thousands of Arizona residents. /Although the local authorities deny this event, science cannot explain away the phenomena. (Some of the most famous footage of this event occurred within a mile of my residence in Scottsdale, just west of me on Camelback mountain. This mountain is clearly visible from my balcony and looks like 2 peaks of a pyramid, hence the name- Camelback.) Twice during her public appearances I met Lynn Kitei, MD a hard-nosed Radiologist who personally filmed the footage from the balcony of her Paradise Valley home and suddenly became a believer.
One of the lessons I learned from meeting Dr. Mitchell is to be true to yourself, be true to your deepest held convictions even if they go against prevailing public opinion. Based on his personal experiences, Mitchell is convinced of the existence of extraterrestrial life even if the mainstream media denies it or ridicules him.
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