ANTARES

It's Philosophy in Pubs (PIPS) at the Swan and Rushes, Infirmary Square this evening. The theme of our enquiry is “Exploration Unlimited” and the stimulus is a poster of Apollo 14’s LEM (which was called Antares) on the surface of the moon. I once met the man who flew that Lunar Module to the surface of the moon: Edgar D Mitchell (on the right of the photo, above). He was the sixth man to walk on the moon. I met him briefly in 1991 at an inter-faith conference in London hosted by the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University. He was one of several speakers that day. Others included John Cleese, who read from Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and managed to make us all laugh by emphasising the contrast between the view of life described in that introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and the self-centred materialism of our Western ways; Hayley Mills (who was a childhood heroine of mine, having starred in Swiss Family Robinson, the first movie I ever went to see in the cinema - at the Tivoli in Crow Road, Partick); and Clarke Peters, Master of Ceremonies, sashaying on and off stage in his white suit and white shoes (a hard look for mere mortals to carry off, but he was the very quintessence of style). He had become well known then for having written the book for the hit West End musical Five Guys Named Moe. He went on more than a decade later to star as Detective Lester Freamon in The Wire, hailed by a host of critics as the greatest ever TV show. So there were a good few people gathered there who had been, were then, or would go on to be, influential figures in my life.

During the evening programme, Edgar Mitchell popped out to have a cigarette (these were the days when you could smoke in public buildings. He was in the lobby of the conference venue smoking alone and I had gone to the loo. As a child of the space age, I ate, breathed and slept the whole space programme. I was just the right age to be swept up in it – I was nine when Apollo 11 went to the moon. Yes, lots of kids from that time were fascinated by the space race, but as an adult, it’s never left me (even very recently, when I bought a blu-ray player, the first disc I bought to watch on it was In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary featuring interviews with virtually every surviving Apollo astronaut. I remember being in the loo, just awestruck by the fact that one of my childhood heroes was standing just outside. More than anything, I just wanted to be able to get back out there before he finished that cigarette. When I got outside, I managed to get a moment alone with him. I said the kind of thing he must have heard a thousand times (and I told him that I knew he’s have heard it a thousand times), but it didn’t matter to me right then. I had my bag with me, and in it I had a copy of a book I’d recently been working on and that had just been published, Meditations of the Blessed Beauty (a compilation about the splendour of God from the writings of Baha’u’llah). I gave him a copy, just to try and pay him back some small something for what he and his colleagues had given to my world. After Mitchell returned from the moon, he dedicated his efforts to promoting different aspects of the paranormal: ESP, remote viewing, global consciousness, UFOs and alien contact. Mitchell is a prominent supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly - which would be a first step towards a "world parliament". While I wouldn’t claim to be on message with all these, I've long found it interesting how many astronauts turn to some form of spirituality after their exploits beyond the earth.

Clare is facilitating this session of PIPS; after the meeting, she gives me the poster – that's nice of her!