Cosmonaut’s Perspective

Yuri Gagarin, former military pilot and the first human in outer space, a Russian born and brought up in the erstwhile Soviet Union, who, with his family and his entire village had suffered the Nazi invasion, had this to say when he looked at Planet Earth from his Vostok-1 capsule in 1961: “Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.”

He was barely 27 years old when he made this observation. His eyes not only saw what was before him, but also experienced the expansiveness of being human. Although Gagarin’s remark came from a pioneering experience, being the first human to step outside the planet and take a long-distance view, many cosmonauts and astronauts after him have had the same feeling, that we need to see the bigger picture, where geographical boundaries and other humanmade barricades melt away to reveal a composite whole. Naval aviator and Nasa astronaut Edgar Mitchell theorised that there is a spectrum of consciousness available to human beings. At one end is material consciousness.

At the other end is what we call ‘field’ consciousness, where a person is at one with the universe, perceiving the universe. Just by looking at our planet on the way back. Mitchell said that he saw or felt a field consciousness state. The question is, how can we inspire a political heavyweight like Russian President Vladimir Putin — who is busy heaping violence on Ukraine and its people — somehow experience this field consciousness state?