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In 1968, Apollo 8 went to the moon.
They didn’t land, but they did circle the moon.
I was watching it on television,
and at a certain point one of the astronauts casually said,
“We’re going to turn the camera around and show you the Earth.”
And he did, and that was the first time I had ever seen
the planet hanging in space like that, and it was profound.
I think that for me, like for many other people, it was quite a shock.
I don’t think any of us had any expectations
about how it would give us such a different perspective.
I think the focus had been: we’re going to the stars,
we’re going to the other planets, and suddenly we look back at ourselves
and it seems to imply a new kind of self-awareness.
One of the astronauts said, “When we originally went to the moon,
our total focus was on the moon,
we weren’t thinking about looking back at the Earth.
But now that we’ve done it,
that may well have been the most important reason we went.”
Oh golly, I remember going through launch,
which is an overwhelming experience.
The engines cut off, I felt myself floating out of the seat,
I floated over to the window, looked out,
and we were coming up over the coast of Africa.
And that’s when it hit me,
I’m in space.
And I just got incredibly excited because it’s something
I had dreamed about since I was six years old.
I think you start out with this idea of what it’s going to be like.
And then when you do finally look at Earth for the first time,
you’re overwhelmed by how much more beautiful it really is
when you see it for real.
It’s just this dynamic, alive place that you see glowing all the time.
It was truly incredible to be up there,
doing what I’ve always wanted to do my whole life.
And then to glance back at our planet, and see that view,
was just tremendous.
I can only describe what I’ve seen.
Looking down at the Earth you see that line that separates day into night
slowly moving across the planet.
Thunderstorms on the horizon casting these long shadows as the sun sets.
And then watching the Earth come alive
and you see the lights from the cities and the towns.
The events you see from space, like flying over thunderstorms,
looking at them from the top,
were spectacular, like a firework show going on
and you’re looking at it from the very top.
Shooting stars going below us, or dancing curtains of auroras …
it’s just very hard to describe all the colours, the beauty, the motion.
My job as Lunar Module pilot
was to be responsible for the Lunar Module itself,
and responsible for the science on the moon.
So when we started home,
I had a little more time to look out the window than the other guys,
because most of my responsibilities were completed.
We were in a particular mode called the ‘barbecue mode’,
so we were flying like this, and rotating like that.
What that caused to happen was every two minutes
a picture of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun,
and a 360 degree panorama of the heavens
appeared in the spacecraft window.
I had studied astronomy, and I had studied cosmology,
and fully understood that the molecules in my body,
and the molecules in my partners' bodies, and in the spacecraft
had been prototyped in some ancient generation of stars.
In other words, it was pretty obvious from those descriptions
that we’re stardust.
Well that was pretty awesome, and powerful.
Particularly since I had a little more time at this point
to be reflective, and to think about it.
Awe is one of those words I think you have a better understanding of
once you see it too.
I felt like using the word awesome was totally appropriate
when it came to describing what the planet looks like.
To have that experience of awe is, at least for the moment,
to let go of yourself, to transcend the sense of separation.
So it’s not just that they were experiencing something other than them,
but that they were at some very deep level integrating,
realizing their interconnectedness with that beautiful blue-green ball.
And this is why the astronauts, particularly in the International Space Station,
often say that much of their free time is filled with what they call ‘Earth gazing’
– just staring out at the Earth.
They can stare for hours,
because the changing scenery, the interactivity of the biosphere,
all of this, has an incredible aesthetic impact.
The beauty of seeing Earth as a planet,
as opposed to being down here among it, is a wonderful experience.
You then start to get into what we call the Big Picture Effect,
or the Overview Effect.
I was flying cross-country, from the East coast to the West coast
in the 1970s, and I was looking out the window.
And as I was looking down at the planet, the thought came to me:
anyone living in a space settlement, or living on the moon,
would always have an overview.
They would see things that we know, but we don’t experience.
That the Earth is one system, and we’re all part of that system.
And that there is a certain unity and coherence to it all.
And I immediately called it the ‘Overview Effect’.
You do, from that perspective, see the Earth as a planet.
You see the sun as a star.
We see the sun in a blue sky, but up there you see the sun in a black sky.
So you are seeing it from a cosmic perspective.
We’ve been evolving since the beginning of civilization
to a larger and larger perspective of life on the Earth.
But the next natural evolution is understanding the life in space.
That is the fact that the Earth, as Buckminster Fuller used to famously say,
is a spaceship: Spaceship Earth.
We are in space already, it’s just that we haven’t brought that
into our perspective as we live here on Earth.
The Overview Effect is simply the sudden recognition that we live on a planet,
and all the implications that brings to life on Earth.
When we look down at the Earth from space we see this amazing,
indescribably beautiful planet.
It looks like a living, breathing organism.
But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile.
Because you go outside on a clear day, and it’s the ‘big blue sky’
… it’s like it goes on forever.
How could we possibly put enough stuff into it
to fill it up with things that really change it?
And yet, you see it from space, and it’s this thin line
which is just barely hugging the surface of the planet.
Anybody who’s ever gone into space says the same thing.
Because it really is striking, and it’s really sobering to see this paper-thin layer,
and to realize that that paper-thin layer is all that protects every living thing
on Earth from death, from the harshness of space.
There’s this very poetic concept that a lot of people express:
that there are no boundaries from space.
And I’ve heard a lot of my astronaut colleagues say that.
Unfortunately, it’s not true, you do see boundaries.
They’re mostly the result of human impact:
you can see erosion and clear-cutting of forests.
It’s a long litany of environmental impact that we’ve had on our planet.
That’s something which, when you see it from a cosmic perspective,
makes you really appreciate the concept of Spaceship Earth,
and that we’re all here together.
After I came back, and tried to understand what this experience was all about,
I could find nothing in the science literature about it,
and nothing in the religious literature that I looked at.
So I turned to the local university and asked them to help me with what I saw.
When they came back to me a few weeks later, they said,
“Well, in the ancient literature we found a description called ‘savikalpa samadhi’.
That means that you see things as you see them with your eyes,
but you experience them emotionally and viscerally,
as with ecstasy, and a sense of total unity and oneness.
And I said, well that’s exactly what the experience was.
And so it was rather clear to me, as I studied this, that it wasn’t anything new,
but was something very important to the way we humans were put together.
Many of the great wisdom traditions of the Earth have pointed
to what we’re calling the ‘Overview Effect’.
That is to say they have realized this unity, this oneness,
of all life on Earth, and of consciousness and awareness.
Within the Western tradition, I think it’s quite new, and quite shocking
because there’s been much more of a sense of separation.
But if you look at other non-Western cultures, especially in Asia,
the emphasis on those has always been on the realization that the self
and world are not separate from each other, that they’re really interconnected:
that the individual self, and the species as a whole,
is a manifestation of the larger whole.
As you go into your mind in a contemplative way,
the sense of the living reality of the planet becomes obvious.
You become more in tune with the natural world.
This is very akin to the direct perception that the astronauts have,
so it’s no wonder that many people have likened the Overview Effect
to a spiritual or meditative experience, although it’s not exactly that.
It’s a cognitive shift, that very often can produce a kind of meditative experience.
I’m sure we all interpret it somewhat differently.
I know some of the fellows go right to a religious explanation.
I didn’t, I went to more of a science explanation.
I think all that’s wonderful – that’s what it takes to build a civilization.
This view of the Earth from space – the whole Earth perspective
– is, I think the symbol for this age.
And I believe what’s going to happen is there’s going to be
a greater and greater interest in communicating this idea.
Because, after all, it’s key to our survival – we have to start acting
as one species with one destiny,
we are not going to survive if we don’t do that.
We’re seeing very clearly that if the Earth becomes sick, then we become sick.
If the Earth dies, then we’re going to die.
People sense that something’s wrong, but they’re still struggling
to go back and find out what the real roots of the problem are.
And I think what we need to come to is a realization that it’s not just
fixing an economical or political system, it’s a basic worldview,
a basic understanding of who we are that’s at stake.
And a part of that is to come up with a new story, a new picture,
a new way to approach this, and to shift our behaviors in such a way
that it leads to a sustainable approach to our civilization
as opposed to a destructive approach.
It is a fragile planet, and if we don’t take care of it, and we don’t work together,
then we are going to have bigger issues than we have now down the road.
On a grand scale, we’re basically all living in this one ecosystem we call Earth.
And everything you do on one side of the ecosystem affects the other side,
and that is a new way of living for most of humanity.
We humans are responsible for ourselves,
and if we are endangering our future then we’ve got to learn how to do it differently,
and to go forward into a sustainable period.
Right now that seems very difficult – very difficult to see how it’s going to be
– but we’ve go to work on it.
When I was above the space station,
looking down at the space station, looking down against the Earth,
and seeing this amazing accomplishment,
I was thinking ‘wow’.
There were fifteen nations that worked together
to build this amazing orbital complex in space.
If we can take these fifteen nations, and do this amazing accomplishment,
imagine what we can do by working together,
by setting aside our differences for a common goal,
to overcome some of the challenges facing our planet.
We have this connection to Earth – I mean, it’s our home.
I don’t know how you can come back and not in some way be changed.
It may be subtle, you see differences in different people
in just the general response when they come back from space.
But I think collectively everybody has that emblazoned on their memory
the way the planet looks.
You know, you can’t take that lightly.
You realize you’ve been blessed by the opportunity to see that.
It really does look like this really beautiful oasis out in the middle of nothingness.
And if you have a chance for your eyes to adjust,
and you can actually see the stars and the milky way,
it’s this oasis against the backdrop of infinity
– this enormous universe behind it.
It’s really a very moving experience to be able to see that with your eyes.
You look back at it, and it’s placed perfectly from the sun to take care of us,
and you kind of take that reverse role on about, well,
we need to be taking care of it too,
so it can continue to do that for us.
I don’t know how you can’t have a greater appreciation for it
after you see it that way.