The Strongest Force in the Universe Isn’t Gravity. It’s Disbelief.
By Dr. Peter Cummings | AstroMD
Edgar Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the Moon. Explorer. Scientist. Naval aviator. But what haunted him most wasn’t space. It was belief.
While Apollo 14 was a technical triumph, Mitchell returned to Earth haunted by something far more unsettling than anyone at NASA expected. Not aliens. Not UFOs. Not some ancient lunar mystery.
Mitchell returned obsessed with belief. Or more accurately: disbelief.
You know the official version of Apollo 14: rocket launch, Moon landing, science experiments, splashdown. Perfect. But Mitchell had carried a secret experiment with him into space. In the tiny windows of downtime, alone in the vastest emptiness any human had ever touched, Mitchell tried to do something deeply weird. He tried to send his thoughts back to Earth.
Telepathy. ESP. Call it whatever you want. Mitchell wasn’t careless or casual about it. He used random number sequences, controlled targets, and willing participants back on Earth. He was testing the untestable.
The results were not easily categorized as success or failure. Instead, what emerged was a strange and well-documented pattern known in psi research as psi-missing.
It’s the opposite of intuition. Participants didn’t guess randomly — they guessed consistently wrong. As if something inside them was resisting the truth on purpose.
The pattern was too consistent to dismiss as chance, too clean to ignore, and far too unsettling to explain within the conventional models of science.
Mitchell left Earth believing that the universe was a machine. That thoughts stayed inside heads. That reality was built from particles, math, and vacuum.
But sitting in that spacecraft — untethered from Earth, untethered from gravity, staring out into forever — he felt something else entirely: connection.
And that’s when the paradox hit him.
If the mind was just meat, if thoughts were nothing but synaptic firings locked inside a skull, then ESP shouldn’t work. But if the mind was more like an antenna — receiving and broadcasting within a field of consciousness — then the real question wasn’t whether signals were being sent.
It was: What’s blocking the signal?
Mitchell saw this paradox unfold again in something far more personal.
At a conference, he introduced his devout Christian mother to Norbu Chen, a Tibetan-trained American healer who practiced a blend of Buddhist and shamanistic techniques. Mitchell was skeptical, but curious.
Norbu placed his hands over her head, chanting softly.
His mother relaxed. Trusted. Opened.
The next morning she burst into Mitchell's room declaring,
"Son, I can see!"
She read her Bible without her thick glasses. Cried with joy. Crushed her old lenses beneath her heel. Mitchell was stunned, but he was also cautious.
Days later, she called him with a question.
"Is Norbu a Christian?"
Mitchell answered honestly: no.
Her voice changed.
Her certainty returned.
And so did her blindness.
Disbelief crushed the miracle faster than science ever could.
She believed it had been the work of Satan. And in the face of that certainty, her body obeyed. The gift was gone. Her thick glasses returned.
This incident left a profound impression on Mitchell.
He began to suspect that the strongest force in the universe wasn’t gravity. Or electromagnetism. Or even thought.
It was disbelief.
Disbelief is armor. It protects us from uncertainty — but at a cost.
What Mitchell discovered is that the more certain we are that something can’t be true, the more perfectly we filter it out of reality.
Psi didn’t fail because the universe was empty. Psi failed because human minds were full. Full of noise, full of stories, full of certainty.
We do not believe what we see.
We see what we refuse to disbelieve.
Mitchell did not stop there.
He founded IONS — the Institute of Noetic Sciences — not to chase ghosts, but to follow that thin, glimmering thread between mind and matter.
To ask the question science still recoils from: What if consciousness isn’t made by the brain — but woven into the universe itself?
But the real battle wasn’t for data. It was for permission.
Permission to see.
Permission to question.
Permission to not know.
Edgar Mitchell walked on the Moon. But he discovered the heaviest gravity field in the universe was never out there.
It was in here.
Inside us.
Disbelief is the heaviest force in the universe.
And it’s still pulling us down.
Near the bottom of the post you say, “To ask the question science still recoils from: What if consciousness isn’t made by the brain — but woven into the universe itself?”
Most scientists do indeed recoil from this, because they have been unable to discover consciousness in their experiments. Energy fluctuation, perhaps so. Consciousness or mind, no.
Part of the problem is that scientists typically define consciousness in terms of matter/energy, as in the quote above: not madeby matter. And if not itself a form of matter/energy, it will not be found woven into matter/energy either except as signs of imagination. It would seem that consciousness, even scientifically defined, is not the same kind of substance as matter, nor can it be a substance that matter somehow creates, exudes, or exhibits (to whom?) and so forth. Yet, it seems part of the definition of consciousness that there must be something quasi-material that is itself either conscious or that passes for consciousness itself. But that is not necessarily true.
As I recall from listening to him once, The theoretical physicist Amit Goswami suggests that matter comes from consciousness (or from mind). He is not alone. Didn’t Max Planck say he believes matter comes from beingness and not the other way around. There is a substantial history to this kind of thinking: the Mind-only school of Buddhism, the Yoga sutras, perhaps some of the pre-Socratics, George Berkeley (the world as an idea in the mind of God), Leibniz’ perception-based monads, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and many others.
The basic idea is that it just seems a lot easier to imagine how mind can imagine matter, than it is to imagine how matter can, … uh … “have” this amazing sense of being that we all seem to take for granted.
My own perspective is a little more abstract, maybe a little more flexible, and maybe more cautious, particularly about terminology and how such ideas are interrelated.
It seems to me that reality, being, and awareness are all exactly the same thing. Reality contains unreality (illusions), being contains existence (perceives ‘existing’ things), and awareness contains experiences. I use the idea of being in the more abstract sense, “self-knowledge of reality,” by which I mean both the way reality knows itself, and the way reality knows experience: directly, without need for words or gestures. Notice, I am not talking about “a being” or “beings,” this is about pure being in and of itself. Reality is nondual, so being is also nondual. Being, in and of itself, is exactly what it seems to be when examined closely and calmly: ultimate self-realization.
Also, I use the more abstract concept of container and content (my exposure to set theory) to define significant relationships. So, Reality contains unreality. In other words, illusions are real illusions because reality contains and illuminates illusions. Or, ideas about the world are real ideas because real awareness contains and illuminates all experiences including ideas. How? Metaphorically, reality-being-awareness (almost a sentence in itself) is like a theater within which all other things come and go; it is where space and time appear.
I think that makes sense, but it requires a shift in perspective and practice exercising the terminology. The main components, or obstacles if you will, are these six distinctions:
Reality and Unreality (Illusions),
Being and Existence (individual things),
Awareness and Experience,
Container and Content ,
True and False,
Absolute and Relative.
What do these words refer to? The six on the left are related to one another in the same way the six on the right are related to one another. It is just a bunch of words, of course, unless you can actually see it in yourself and in the world around you. Many very famous people have made just such a claim.
This does not explain telepathy, of course. George Berkeley was faced with a similar problem, “how is it that two people in a room both perceive the same table?” … just imagine them in different rooms.