Rocket Man

“And I think its gonna be a long, long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home.
Oh no, no, no, I’m a rocket man.
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone …”
   “Rocket Man”, Elton John

Do you remember when you were little, and you thought for the very first time you knew what you wanted to be when you grew up? I actually remember that day very clearly, for it was when one of my very first dreams took root. Which makes remembering when John Glenn orbited the Earth for the first time special, not only because it was around my 10th birthday but because it was about that dream.

In the early 1960’s I remember reading about the new space program in our little Weekly Readers in elementary school. And I became mesmerized with it. So I started reading everything I could find about it. Anything I guess an elementary school kid could understand. But I couldn’t get enough of it. When I got a book about what it took to be an astronaut, I was hooked. I wanted to go in space. One way or another I was going. I had to, or else… I just never realized it would be without my physical body.

That might be a shocking statement to some of you, but not if you have been following this blog. I have mentioned it, but not really in a lot of detail. And actually, the experience is not that easy to put into words. I think that is because it is the type of experience that is ‘above’ your mind. In other words, when traveling up inside in meditation through the spiritual hierarchy of creation, it is possible to get into the realms above where your mind exists. When you get to that altitude and then have a coherent experience it may not completely register in your ‘temporal mind’ structure. Thus making it hard to describe it in a way that involves your mind, because that mental structure may not have been involved in the experience at all. Make sense? I guess you could say, that this would be a transcendent experience, but I don’t especially like that term. It doesn’t really do it justice in describing it. In fact, it still seems a muddled description.

Another memory I have that relates to this took place when I was a senior in high school. I was working as a copy boy at a big city newspaper where my father was one of the editors. One April night when a lot of the staff was getting off, something amazing happened. All the teletype machines just quite typing and went silent. The deafening silence caught me off guard, because newspapers tend to be noisy places. And one of my jobs was to strip the machines of copy and get them to the right editors. This seemed to go on for several minutes, and then it happened. Special bulletins came across all the machines in a flurry of activity. Apollo 13 was in trouble, and it was possible they would not make it back to Earth. Of course, just three years before at the beginning of the Apollo program, Apollo 1, we lost three astronauts who never got off the launch pad. So the space program had already known tragedy. But to already be out in space, and not know if you could make it back. Wow, I remember wondering how that would feel, and being a little scared for them. I also remember everybody coming back to work, and having to work late to put out a special edition. The teletype machines stayed busy, and history was being made. Of course, the story was immortalized with Ron Howard’s movie, Apollo 13.

So let’s get back to the astronauts, because what some of them have experienced may help a bit. A number of these same astronauts who have gone into space were changed by their experiences out there. Some even describing it as a spiritual experience. Of course, probably the most famous of them all is Edgar Mitchell, as it changed what his life’s work became after his Apollo 14 mission and his walking on the moon. His famous Institute for Noetic Sciences has been on the forefront in the study of inner consciousness and how it relates to our outer cosmology. It seems like he’s lived quite an intriguing life, and would be an interesting fellow to converse with. Anyone know how to reach him?

Anyway, as of June, 2012 there have been 528 people from 38 countries who have gone into space, and only 12 have ever walked on the moon. That’s too bad, in a world where more than 7 billion souls live. And too bad most don’t seem to know that within the mechanism of their own physical bodies that there is a way to spiritually fly out into space and experience the amazingly wondrous feeling of creation’s magical high-way.

I guess in the end, the main thing I can communicate about this heavenly experience, is just how much better I feel up there. And how much more energy, and alive and awake I feel. And how much more ‘normal’ it seems, than being trapped on this revolving piece of rock. Is it possible that up there is truly where our destiny lies, or flies? Not grounded and beholding to this temporary way station called Earth? And that we’ve forgotten that, all wrapped up in the details our daily little lives down here?

I don’t know that for sure, but it sure feels that way when I’m up there. As always, happy flying, from one rocket man to another!