IVELAK

It was the experiencing of unity, of feeling at one with the universe, of recognizing that I was star-matter, literally a physical construct of the universe; that was the key thing. I had studied stellar formation and how the furnaces of the stars and galaxies created our chemical elements, but I suddenly realized that those were my molecules being manufactured and prototyped in those stars.

As I looked at the planet from the moon, and from our spacecraft, it was kind of a signal event in human consciousness, a symbol that we were evolving into a new level of humanity. The pictures that we took of the earth are the most published pictures in the history of humankind. They’re enormously widely published pictures. Why? It’s because they speak to us at a rather deep, emotional level and they beg the questions, ‘How did we get here? How do we fit into all this?’ Those are the questions I was asking when I came back to earth. Instead of being an intellectual experience, it became a very deep, personal, emotional one, a knowing.