In January of 1971, I boarded a spacecraft and traveled to an airless world of brilliant clarity. The soil there is barren and gray, and the horizon always further than it appears. It is a static world that has only known silence. Upon its landscape human perspective is altered.

During the 15 years prior to the moment my friend Alan Shepard and I opened the door to the lunar module and descended the ladder to the dusty surface of the moon, my days had progressed more or less as I'd planned. But this wasn't the achievement of an individual, a space agency, or even a country. This was, rather, the achievement of our species, our civilization. Life had come a long way since it first sprang from the Earth's rock and water. And now, hundreds of thousands of miles away on that small blue and white sphere, millions of human beings were watching two men walk about the surface of another world for the third time in our history. These were momentous days, extraordinary for their audacity, extraordinary for the coordination of minds and skills that made them possible. A lot of hard work by some of the most brilliant men and women on the planet had culminated in making us a space-faring species. But what I did not know as Alan and I worked on that waterless world, in a mountainous region known as Fra Mauro, was that I had yet to grasp what would prove most extraordinary about the journey.

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, all that I had longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be. It was all there suspended in the cosmos on that fragile little sphere. What I experienced was 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 would take a radically different course.

What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me. And there was the sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental, but that there was an intelligent process at work. I perceived the universe as in some way conscious. The thought was so large it seemed at the time inexpressible, and to a large degree it still is. Perhaps all I have gained is a greater sense of understanding, and perhaps a more articulate means of expressing it. But even in the midst of epiphany I did not attach mystical or otherworldly origin to the phenomenon. Rather, I thought it curious and exciting that the brain could spontaneously reorganize information to produce such a fantastically strange experience.

By the time the red-and-white parachutes blossomed in the life-giving atmosphere of Earth three days later and our capsule splashed into the ocean, my life's direction was about to change. I didn't know it then, but it was. What lay in store was an entirely different kind of journey, one that would occupy more than 40 years of my life. I have often likened that experience to a game of pick-up sticks: Within a few days my beliefs about life were thrown into the air and scattered about. It took me 20 years to pick up those sticks and make some kind of sense of it all, and I now believe I can describe it with an adequate degree of comprehensibility and scientific validity. I like to think that this book is the result of both journeys.

* * *

Shortly after returning from the moon I was often invited to speak at various occasions. In lecture halls and auditoriums across the country two questions were inevitably asked. The first was, how do you go to the bathroom in space? The second was, what did it feel like to walk on the moon? The first was usually asked by children because they really wanted to know, and are less inhibited than adults. The second quickly became irritating simply because I didn't know the answer. It was certainly a sensible question — I was an astronaut, after all, one of 12 men to have walked upon the surface of the moon. People would naturally want to know. But when I finally asked myself why the question was so bothersome, it occurred to me that there were emotional realms lodged deep in my own psyche that I hadn't fully explored. I now find it interesting and a bit amusing that it bothered me at all. But it did, and for a very particular reason: Somehow I couldn't resurrect the feelings I had while there, though my thoughts and actions were easily summoned.

Years ago I began my flying career as a Navy pilot. On heaving black seas in the middle of the night I have landed large jet aircraft on rather small, converted World War II aircraft carriers — a situation in which, quite literally, your life depends on the cumulative experience you have acquired through many years of practice. It was intuition you depended on, it was feel adding to normal sensory data with which you guided your aircraft as you carefully tried to avoid a collision with the deck. But it wasn't a feeling that created emotion in the moment. Out of necessity, emotion had to be suppressed. What I lacked in my early years was an understanding of how intuition, emotion, and intellect all interrelate.

Not long after entering the lecture circuit, I asked two friends, Dr. Jean Houston and Robert Masters, to regress me under hypnosis so that I might learn a few things about myself. I wanted to know both why I didn't remember my feelings while on the moon, and why the question irritated me so much. Ultimately I wanted to understand what psychic-sensitive and highly intuitive people were aware of, and what they experienced. But first I had to examine myself — to examine all my wants and needs and flaws, and honestly describe myself to the point that I could say, yes, I am like that. Thus began an arduous study of my own inner experiences.

After leaving NASA in 1972, I founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California. This would fund much of the scientific research that I wanted to see accomplished to help me better resolve the complex insights from my experiences in space. Since then the institute has thrived, but it has been a bit of a challenge, at times, to keep it from becoming a church. Some of the folks I've come across in my lifetime have held some eccentric and dogmatic beliefs about space, the cosmos, and the ultimate nature of reality. And on many occasions it has seemed as though I was expected to become a high priest in some kind of new religion. Frivolous connections were made between the fact that 12 men walked on the moon and that there were 12 disciples of Jesus. Furthermore, I wore a beard at the time, and the absurdity seemed to expand into the messianic realm. So I shaved the beard. From the very beginning I realized I had to be suspicious of everything I heard, and everything I knew — or even thought I knew. It was of particular importance to retain my individuality and not become enamored with any particular established thought structure along the way. Evidence would set the direction. I came to recognize the effects of my own belief system and the powerful role of enculturated belief systems in general; I needed to reexamine accepted thought with new eyes.

To those around me at the time, I suppose I would have seemed a rather unlikely candidate for this second journey. During the Korean War I was a Navy pilot, and for some time afterward a test pilot. After the flight of Sputnik in 1957, I chose to alter that course and sought a role in the space program. The training required for a jet pilot and astronaut is somewhat incompatible with that required for a modern-day Shaman. And that's more the way I saw myself as I settled into this new journey, and how I see myself today.

This is not merely a romantic idea, but rather the role I have chosen as an explorer to better understand the universe, having had the privilege of seeing it from an extraterrestrial point of view. Though the course of the journey has turned me inward, I've tried to retain my scientific sensibilities. My life's purpose, I now see, has been to discover, to reveal, and interpret information, first in outer space, and now in inner space. I have always dealt in the here and now in a meat-and-potatoes sort of way; I've wanted to solve problems simply because they were there and were intriguing.

This is all by way of saying that the purpose of this latter journey has not been to form another cult (the world has plenty), but to reveal more accurately and more fully the structure of reality as we experienced it in the late 20th century as an emerging spacefaring civilization. When I returned from the moon I saw perhaps a little more clearly how our traditional modes of understanding did not adequately explain our modern-day experience. We needed something new in our lives, revised notions concerning reality and truth. Most of us have accumulated this body of ideas that make up our belief system through external authorities rather than through our own quest and original insight. Our beliefs were, and still are, in crisis.

To have lived in the 20th century is to have witnessed the extraordinary miracle and folly of humankind firsthand. There hasn't been a century that approaches the height of its achievements nor the depths of its mayhem and despair. Ours has been a century of demystification, manmade miracles, and man-made catastrophe — most never previously thought to be possible. And those of my generation have perhaps seen the most. We have seen the world evolve from the simple, gray years of the Great Depression and World War II, through the incandescent Nuclear Age, born over the glassy sands of the American West where Poncho Villa and Butch Cassidy roamed on horseback just a few decades earlier. Progress has been swift and severe. We've lived through the silent terror of a war that was never fought, then presided over one fought over ideology against a proxy opponent in a distant jungle, and are now engaged an era of organized global terrorism the likes of which has never before been experienced. We have seen men catapulted into outer space without knowing what they would find there; we've seen men climb mountains of the moon, where they beamed the picture back to millions of magic boxes in living rooms, taverns, shops, and kitchens around the world. Whoever said the Age of Miracles passed long ago hasn't been paying attention.

What our children won't see is the trajectory of this evolution, its defining arc; that story must be recorded for them in the living pages of books or other media. There will be no horse-drawn plows or penny farthings in the coming centuries. Our lives will eventually pass, recorded only on celluloid and the page, silicon, or digitally, as a kind of artifact-cave drawings from the 20th century. Religions of the world will loom, then fade-or remain, depending upon their ability to adapt to the ever-changing notions about reality they were created to discover.

Even in our time, we still cling to the idea of the supernatural, the demonic, the divine. We use it when science seems to offer no acceptable explanation. In medieval times there was no science, only religion. Since Rene Descartes, each belief system has been allowed to proceed down a separate, noninterfering path. And for 400 years they have enjoyed a peculiar independence, as Descartes believed thought and matter were of two different realms. This dualistic philosophy has allowed Western science and religion to evolve as we now know them. The Church has left science to the scientist, the scientist has left religion to the theologian, and they have more or less peacefully coexisted (with a few notable exceptions) ever since.

It isn't an overstatement to say that Descartes opened the way for Newton and the early classical scientists, then much later Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and finally the new model of quantum mechanics. It is this revolutionary scientific model that finally penetrated the veil of religion by demonstrating that the act of observation could affect the observed. These realms of thought must not merely coexist in the mind of the scientist and the theologian, but must be allowed to become integrated-simply because they are so obviously intertwined. Sooner or later this reconciliation is inevitable, as the scientific method has shown itself powerful enough to discover its own flaws. I have come to believe evolution has progressed such that we must now assume a large measure of conscious control in our own evolutionary process, as human volition is in fact a fundamental characteristic of nature.

I am one of a growing handful of human beings to have seen the Earth from the point of view of an extraterrestrial. In the heavens there is no up and down, no east or west. Earth is but a beautiful blue speck in the midst of a vast emptiness marked by luminous celestial bodies. We inhabit but one of those celestial bodies; one of the most organized — for all we know. From the heavens, in 1971, the Earth looked peaceful and harmonious, but of course all was not as it appeared. Conflict that threatened our very survival lay below. Weapons were poised, ready to annihilate life as we knew it at a moment's notice; environmental crises were lurking just beyond public awareness. The common root of these mushrooming dilemmas, I believe, has been conflicting, out-dated, flawed ideology and dogma, with roots in antiquity.

It has occurred to me that human destiny is still very uncertain, that the veneer of civilization is yet exceedingly thin, and our current actions are not sustainable. Believing as I do that the universe is an intelligent system, and understanding the absurd and tragic fate that may await us, I have wondered if we are prepared for our own survival, if our own collective consciousness is yet highly enough evolved. Our universe seems to learn by the blunt process of trial and error. But I now understand that we have a certain degree of control over the evolutionary process and can influence our own course. But the only way to accomplish this is by bringing into question the very way we think about consciousness and the universe; by questioning many fundamental assumptions underlying civilization.

This is a challenging story, one that requires a certain dedication on the reader's part, as it contains thought from various scientific and religious disciplines. That, in fact, is at the very core of this book: a synthesis of scientific and religious modes of thinking, a movement toward the creation of commerce between the two so that the structure of the universe itself is more fully revealed. But I think it is first necessary that I tell you something of myself, and in so doing, reveal my motives for the unusual course of my life — I should say, my two lives. The first I now see was spent in the interest of taking a physical journey, while the second has been consumed by a spiritual and intellectual quest. It has taken both, I believe, to arrive at the conclusions I've drawn from the sum of my experiences concerning the nature of reality. The results I have fashioned into a model, a dyadic model that describes the universe I experienced as accurately as anything I can come up with.

The narrative is not meant to be pedagogic, and my conclusions are only based upon a proposed model of reality that I believe deserves wider consideration, and which, since this work's initial publication, have received substantial validation. The book requires a degree of openmindedness and a willingness on the reader's part to investigate abstract realms of thought and arcane ideas. Perhaps above all else, it asks the reader to see himself or herself as a part of an evolving universe, and as an extraterrestrial, just as I saw myself when I gazed about, suspended in the heavens almost 40 years ago.

My mother wanted me to be either a preacher or a musician. She was an artist by temperament and a farm wife by necessity. She didn't see much benefit in the making of war, and I suppose I've never forgotten that. I also suppose I've tried to resolve this conflict from the very beginning.

I was born into what had been a prosperous ranch family in the midst of the Great Depression and in the Dust Bowl. Lives tended to be brutish and short here on the plains of West Texas where the individual seemed so exposed to the harsher acts of nature. Daily life was primitive, and these were especially difficult times. The Southern Baptist faith of my mother and grandmother provided the hope that with hard work, prosperity would return. As my father would say, we were not poor — only short on cash.