The Scale of Connection

By Paulina Villasuso Villalobos

Edgar Mitchell says: “we live in a world that's an intelligent, self-organizing, creating, learning, trial-and-error, participatory, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system.”

Mitchell was an astronaut, the sixth man to walk on the Moon, and part of NASA's Apollo 14 mission in 1971. He recounts that, during the expedition, his work was largely done by the time they were on their way back to Earth, and he had time for Earth-gazing: the spacecraft rotated on its own axis at .3 degrees per second, allowing him a complete panoramic view of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and space. He then came to the following realization: “the molecules in my body and the molecules in my partner's bodies and in the spacecraft had been prototyped in some ancient generations [of] stars. In other words, it was obvious from those descriptions [that] we're stardust.” His conclusion, at that moment, was not a discovery. Mitchell had studied cosmology and astronomy and clearly understood the premise. However, seeing himself from space, facing the Earth and surrounded by stars, allowed him to understand that statement in personal terms: he came to know cosmological interconnectedness through his own experience.

Once he returned to Earth, he began searching through scientific and religious literature for something that could explain this sensation but found nothing. In ancient literature, however, he encountered concepts such as samadhi, which refer to this transcendent state of unification between the self and its surroundings. He found other concepts from different ancient cultures, and each of them had a name for that indescribable sensation of cosmic unity that arises in a state of consciousness. This concept, rooted in so many cultures, the Overview Effect for astronauts, became what drove him to dedicate his life to researching consciousness and matter as a unified duality.

This fervor for understanding the interconnectedness between us and the other(s) was not unique to Mitchell. Many other scientists and intellectuals have asked the same question. One of them, Jacobo Grinberg, produced one of the most sublime examples of this inquiry: the Transferred Potential experiment, in which he was able to record that two human brains can communicate instantaneously across space, without physical means, provided there had been a previous emotional or meditative connection between the two people.

What am I trying to get at with all of this? Interconnectedness with what we are and with what surrounds us is not a human possibility, nor an idea or experience we might adopt; it is, in fact, inherent to our nature. Human beings have always been interconnected, but we are not always conscious of this fact. The Earth, this planet suspended in space, belongs to a universe much larger than we can possibly imagine. Reaching a state of heightened awareness to comprehend it requires a deeper connection with ourselves and with what surrounds us.

Today, information and the written word reveal something we once thought impossible: language is not always the best way to connect with the other(s). Any well-regulated system of signs lets us name things, lets words bear witness to what we see, what we feel, what moves us. García Márquez wrote on the first page of One Hundred Years of Solitude, “the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point,” bearing witness to a time when there was no way of attesting to what was happening. But long before that, there was an even more radical text, text will take only as literature: the Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That is, for the world to exist, for the beings within it and the lives of those beings to exist, we need language to name everything we are, so that there can be a creator and an after to nothingness.

The problem with the word is that it is not limitless. Rules are not eternal, nor are the utterances of any human being, no matter what language they speak. Being speakers limits us as human beings. Mitchell said that when he began researching the experience he had just lived through in space, he found that every culture, in its ancient forms, had a concept for the Overview Effect. However, in practice, when people who have not lived through this experience use the concept, each means something different by it. It is through perspective that religions and civilizations are created, but in the beginning, before the Word, we were one. What matters here is that not everything can be shared through organized systems of signs. That is, we must experience the deepest sensations for ourselves so that no doubt remains; everything else will always be perspectives, limiting words attempting to explain that which belongs to consciousness.

Today, through art, through conversations with friends, through jokes shared with our grandparents, through laughter and tears and embraces and breath, through spaces that turn leisure or weariness into wonder, we find that this kind of reflection—this innate capacity for profound connection—is possible. In a world shaped by exhaustion and by the deeply ingrained ideology of individualism, there is always a natural rhythm of community among living beings, visible and invisible, between the animate and the inanimate: an overwhelming, indescribable sense of connection to that which makes us feel small and vulnerable. In other words, when a person connects with something beyond the surface through moments, experiences, contexts, or interactions—they honor the need to be vulnerable; they embrace the virtue of being human. This feeling may seem thankless because it serves no purpose in the ideology of eternal happiness, nor does it place the self at the center of the world. But it humanizes the way we move through life and turns us into tiny pieces of the same universe: inhospitable and often unintelligible yet always connected.

We need that connection. We need to recover that perspective, that innate vulnerability that moves us toward life.