The Most Powerful Holiday Gift

Most of us have heard of what’s called the Overview Effect. It’s a unique perceptual awareness for those who have traveled to space, and it produces a profound cognitive shift in an astronaut gazing down upon the Earth.

What I find so intriguing—actually, I would say “miraculous”—about the Overview Effect as people experience it is that even a single perceptual experience of Earth from space changes people, their consciousness, and sometimes even the course of their lives.

Two "over viewers," Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell and the original Star Trek Captain Kirk, William Shatner, help us understand how seeing the world differently can fill us with wonder and compassion and lead us to the transformational gift of forgiveness this holiday season.

Transcript

The Most Powerful Holiday Gift

Most of us have heard of what’s called the Overview Effect. It’s a unique perceptual awareness for those who have traveled to space, and it produces a profound cognitive shift in an astronaut gazing down upon the Earth.

The term was coined by Frank White, who wrote a book called the Overview Effect. In his book, White says he originally defined the Overview Effect in terms of the predicted experience of space settlers who would have a different philosophical point of view as a result of having a different physical perspective.”

What I find so intriguing—actually, I would say “miraculous”—about the Overview Effect as people experience it is that even a single perceptual experience of Earth from space changes people, their consciousness, and sometimes even the course of their lives.

This is exactly what happened to several astronauts. One, Edgar Mitchell, flew on Apollo 14. Mitchell described his Overview Effect as:

- A "sudden explosion of awareness" and an "overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness"
- “a profound sense of interconnection, an epiphany."

For Mitchell, this was a mystical experience of unification and wordless insight into the interconnectedness of everything.

As a result of his transformative experience, Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in 1973. His motivation for establishing IONS was:

- To scientifically study consciousness and its relationship to what we experience as existence and the 'external' world, and
- To explore "states of knowledge" related to inner wisdom, direct knowing, intuition, and implicit understanding.

Now, I have a theory about the reason why the Overview Effect has such an immediate transformational power and effect over so many people, and especially someone like Edgar Mitchell. See, I actually think that the Overview Effect is just another version of a Near Death Experience—an NDE, where people’s consciousness leaves their bodies temporarily, typically associated with a brief physiological death from injury or illness. They report experiencing a different state of consciousness that changes them.

In both the Overview Effect and NDE, a person finally sees reality without a human construct: in the NDE, it without the perception that they ARE a body and all of the literally made-up ideas about what that means.

In the case, of the Overview Effect, a person is removed from the human constructs about what they mistakenly believe the world is—the daily news about countries, corporations, pop stars and all the other illusions about the culture of the world they live in, and then they finally see the real world—the world made the Creative Forces of the Universe instead of the product of humans imagination. And It’s like walking out of a movie theatre after being in an immersive fictional world like The Matrix and immediately being hit with rain, or snow, or sunshine, and wind.

Here is example of why I think it resembles a Near Death Experience. Consider William Shatner, star of the original Star Trek in which he played Captain Kirk. He was among the first passengers who traveled to the edge of space in a Blue Origin capsule when he was 90 years old. When he got back, after seeing Earth from space, he said, “All I saw was death. It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered.”

That’s definitely not a typical reaction to the Overview Effect. And he did also acknowledge having a deep appreciation for Earth’s fragility and beauty.

But I want to focus on his use of the word “grief” to describe his feeling of looking down at the world from space because I think he saw a deeper truth that I want us to consider. As Frank White states at the very beginning of his book, “There are ways to get a taste of the Overview Effect without going into outer space.”

Yes, that’s true. I have experienced it by changing my own state of consciousness in a way that felt like I had left my physical body. And I understand what Edgar Mitchell experienced when he looked down with his consciousness while still in his body—the experience itself is beyond words.

And I also have felt a deep sadness looking into the awe-inspiring vastness of what I was perceiving and how insignificant and fragile I felt.

Having had this experience a view times—the transcendent awe and joy, as well as the grief, I too was changed. And I had a completely different understanding of some of the last words Christ spoke as he was dying:

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

That was the voice of Christ Consciousness in those waning moments of physical life on Earth.

The channeled material, A Course in Miracles, focuses a great deal on forgiveness. Here are a few things it teaches about forgiveness:

Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation. (ACIM, T-3.V.9:1)

There is the true “oneness” that Edgar Mitchell saw, no borders between countries, or separate oceans, or different cultures, or wars.

To forgive is to overlook. (ACIM, T-9.IV.1:2) Now, “overlook” strikes me as an interesting term in conjunction with the Overview Effect.

The course also tells us:

Forgiveness takes away what stands between your brother and yourself. (ACIM, T-26.VII.9:1)

To forgive is to heal. (ACIM, M-22.1:9)

Who forgives is healed. (ACIM, T-27.II.3:10)

That is why your sole responsibility must be to take forgiveness for yourself. (ACIM, T-25.IX.9:6)

Forgiveness removes only the untrue, lifting the shadows from the world and carrying it, safe and sure within its gentleness, to the bright world of new and clean perception. There is your purpose now. And it is there that peace awaits you. (ACIM, T-18.IX.14:3-5)

Those you do not forgive you fear. And no one reaches love with fear beside him. (ACIM, T-19.IV-D.11:6-7)

I’ll end with this one:

Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real. In this one sentence is our course explained. (ACIM, M-20.5:7-8)

In his last moments, Christ asked his Father to forgive the world, as he did.

This holiday season, I ask that you join me in giving the transforming and healing gift of forgiveness to at least 2 people, if you can:

First, another person for whom you have held any negative feelings this year; and
second, yourself.

I wish you joyful holidays and many blessings in the New Year.

Copyright © 2024 by Joe Kornowski