Charles Lindbergh: Aviation, the Cosmos, and the Future of Man

http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=1991

Intimations of Cosmotheism: Aviation, the Cosmos, and the Future of
Man
History; Posted on: 2004-02-08 21:17:15 [ Printer friendly ]

by Charles A. Lindbergh

This piece is the second in a series of articles which will
illustrate some of the earlier intimations, in the works of other
writers and thinkers, of the central ideas of Dr. William Pierce's
philosophy, Cosmotheism.

Here the great aviator, scientist, and patriot Charles Lindbergh
speaks of the advancement of man on the eve of our race's first
steps on another world in 1969; he hints at a higher type of man
whose dawn may be seen if we can "contrive a new process of
evolutionary selection," and speaks of an awareness that our lives
-- and even Life itself -- may only be way stations on a journey of
increasing consciousness, the next stage of which even our best
minds cannot yet imagine. -- K.A.S.

AVIATION AND ASTRONAUTICS were once my prime interests. As a student
pilot, at the age of 20, when aviation was much more dangerous than
it is today, I concluded that if I could fly for ten years before
being killed in a crash, I would be willing to trade an ordinary
lifetime for that experience. In the '30s, I assisted Robert
Goddard, the father of spatial conquests. Standing with him on New
Mexico plains at the foot of his converted-windmill launching tower,
it seemed to me that the greatest adventure man could have would be
to travel out through space.

What motivates man to great adventures? I wonder how accurately
these motives can be analyzed, even by the participants themselves.
When I think of my own flights in the early years of aviation, I
realize that my motives were as obvious, as subtle and as intermixed
as the waves on oceans I flew over. But I can say quite definitely
that they sprang more from intuition than from rationality, and that
the love of flying outweighed practical purposes -- important as the
latter often were.

For instance, I believed that a nonstop flight between New York and
Paris would advance aviation's progress and add to my prestige as a
pilot -- with ensuing material rewards. In seeking financial backing
for that 1927 flight, I argued that it would bring closer the golden
era of air transport I felt was bound to come. But without my love
of flying and adventure, and motives I cannot even now discern
clearly, it was a flight I would never have attempted.

Then, as the art of flying transposed to a science, I found my
interest in airplanes decreasing. Rationally I welcomed the advances
that came with self-starters, closed cockpits, radio and automatic
pilots. Intuitively I felt revolted by them, for they upset the
balance between intellect and senses that had made my profession
such a joy. And so, as intuition had led me into aviation in the
first place, it led me back to an early boyhood interest, the
contemplation of life.

Gradually I diverted hours from aviation into biological research.
How mechanical, how mystical was man? Could longevity be extended?
Was death an unavoidable portion of life's cycle or might physical
immortality be achieved through scientific methods? What would be
the result of artificially perfusing a head severed from its body?
This question, especially, intrigued me and resulted in my working
intermittently for several years in the Department of Experimental
Surgery of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There, in
collaboration with the great surgeon Alexis Carrel -- he developing
the operative techniques, and I the design of equipment -- I
constructed an apparatus that, for the first time, could pump
synthetic blood through organs without the entrance of infection.

To me, my years at the Rockefeller Institute involved great
adventures. They convinced me that the cycle of life and death is
essential to life's progress, and that physical immortality would be
undesirable even if it could be achieved. I found the mechanics of
life less interesting than the mystical qualities they manifest.
With these conclusions, I began studying supersensory phenomena and,
in 1937, flew to India in the hope of gaining insight to yogic
practices.

But the approach and explosion of World War II immersed me in
military aviation and international politics. Man's fundamental need
of survival, for both individual and group, separated me from
projects I would have carried out in peaceful times. After our
fighting war was over (I had worked on the production of bombers and
fighters, and flown 50 combat missions with the Army Air Force and
Marines), the cold war with Russia held me to militarily oriented
tasks -- the study of new weapons, the reorganization of the
Strategic Air Command, the essential need of developing
intercontinental ballistic missiles.

I served for seven years as a member of scientific ballistic-missile
committees, first under the Air Force and then under the Department
of Defense. At the end of this time, with Atlases and Titans in
position, with Minutemen coming and Polaris submarines under way, I
felt our United States had achieved the indestructible power to
destroy any enemy who might attack. But I had become alarmed about
the effect our civilization was having on continents and islands my
military missions took me over-- the slashed forests, the eroded
mountains, the disappearing wilderness and wildlife. I believed some
of the policies we were following to insure our near-future strength
and survival were likely to lead to our distant-future weakness and
destruction. Also, I was tired of windowless briefing rooms,
Pentagon corridors and the drabness of standardized airbases. I
wanted to regain contact with the mystery and beauty of nature.

I resigned from the ballistic-missile committee and declined a
position in the new civil agency being set up for the development of
space. I decided to study environments, peoples and ways of life in
various areas of the world. To make this possible, I returned to my
prewar position of consultant to Pan American World Airways.

Wilderness expeditions in Africa, Eurasia and the American
continents brought me to an appreciation of nature's extraordinary
wisdom. I found myself in the fascinating position of moving back
and forth between the ultracivilized on the one hand and the
ultraprimitive on the other, with a resulting clarity of perspective
on areas between -- a perspective that drove into my bones, as well
as into my mind, the fact that in instinct rather than in intellect
is manifest the cosmic plan of life.

Then, a few months ago, I received an invitation from Apollo 8's
astronauts to attend the launching of their mission to orbit the
moon. This plunged me back into astronautics as World War II had
plunged me back into aviation, though for a period of days instead
of years. I was literally hypnotized by the launching. I have spent
most of a lifetime in close contact with test flying and
man-controlled power; but I have never experienced anything to
compare to that mission of Apollo 8.

Three miles away from the pad, where I stood watching with
free-from-duty astronauts, the size of the rocket still seemed huge.
When ignition came, clouds of smoke and flame churned like a storm's
convulsions; and when the sound waves struck me, I shook with the
earth itself.

Above that flashing, billowing chaos, the prow of the rocket rose.
In it I visualized the three men I had lunched with hours before,
strapped into position like test pilots, tensed to emergency
procedures and to the dials of the instruments they watched, men
actually launched on a voyage to the moon! For a moment, reality and
memory contorted and Robert Goddard stood watching at my side. Was
he now the dream; his dream, the reality?

During the first seconds of the Apollo's inching upward, my
sensation was intensified by a vision of the last launching I had
witnessed, that of a big military missile which rose three or four
feet, faltered, and then crumpled into explosion -- an explosion
seemingly less violent than that smothering the whole aft end of the
Apollo.

My body staggered with the rocket's effort to lift above its tower,
relaxed as it leapt upward into air, thrilled as the ball of fire,
with its astronauts, diminished in the vastness of space. Here,
after epoch-measured trials of evolution, earth's life was voyaging
to another celestial body. Here one saw our civilization flowering
toward the stars. Here modern man had been rewarded for his
confidence in science and technology. Soon he would be orbiting the
moon.

Talking to astronauts and engineers, I felt an almost overwhelming
desire to reenter the fields of astronautics -- with their
scientific committees, laboratories, factories and blockhouses,
possibly to voyage into space myself. But I know I will not return
to them, despite limitless possibilities for invention, exploration
and adventure.

Why not? Decades spent in contact with science and its vehicles have
directed my mind and senses to areas beyond their reach. I now see
scientific accomplishment as a path, not an end; a path leading to
and disappearing in mystery. Science, in fact, forms many paths
branching from the trunk of human progress; and on every periphery
they end in the miraculous. Following these paths far enough, and
long enough, one must eventually conclude that science itself is a
miracle -- like the awareness of man arising from and then
disappearing in the apparent nothingness of space. Rather than
nullifying religion and proving that "God is dead," science enhances
spiritual values by revealing the magnitudes and minitudes -- from
cosmos to atom -- through which man extends and of which he is
composed.

Forty-two years ago, bucking a headwind on a flight in my monoplane
between New York and St. Louis, I tried to look into the future
beyond man's conquest of the air. As the wheel had opened land to
modern travel, and the hull the sea, wings had opened the relatively
universal sky. Only space lay beyond. Could we ever extend our
travels into space? If so, it seemed we must develop rockets and
their jet propulsion. Such dreaming and reasoning brought me in
contact with physicists, chemists and engineers in the explosives
industry -- and eventually with Robert Goddard. Who then could
foretell that, as soon as 1968, men would hurtle around the moon and
back?

Now, again, I try to penetrate the future. What travel may, someday,
take place beyond our solar-system space? What vehicles can we
devise to extend the range of rocket ships as they have extended the
range of aircraft? Scientific knowledge argues that space vehicles
can never attain the speed of light, which makes a puny penetration
of the universe within a human lifespan; and that, therefore, cosmic
distances will confine our physical explorations to those planets
which orbit the sun.

As wings and propellers once limited man to earth's thicker
atmosphere, scientifically established principles now seem to limit
him to the space-territory of the minor star he orbits. We are
blocked by lack of time as we were once blocked by lack of air. Mars
and Venus may mark dead ends for spaceship travel, unless we break
through physical laws and construct still-more-advanced vehicles.

But by establishing these new planetary "dead ends," are we cracking
open the entrance to another era, as aviation cracked open that of
astronautics -- one that will surpass the era of science as the era
of science surpassed that of religious superstition? Following the
paths of science, we become constantly more aware of mysteries
beyond scientific reach. In these vaguely apprehended azimuths, I
think the great adventures of the future lie -- in voyages
inconceivable by our 20th Century rationality -- beyond the solar
system, through distant galaxies, possibly through peripheries
untouched by time and space.

I believe early entrance to this era can be attained by the
application of our scientific knowledge not to life's mechanical
vehicles but to the essence of life itself: to the infinite and
infinitely evolving qualities that have resulted in the awareness,
shape and character of man. I believe this application is necessary
to the very survival of mankind.

Science and technology inform us that, after millions of years of
successful evolution, human life is now deteriorating genetically
and environmentally at an alarming and exponential rate. Basically,
we seem to be retrograding rather than evolving. We have only to
look about us to verify this fact: to see megalopolizing cities, the
breakdown of nature, the pollution of air, water and earth; to see
crime, vice and dissatisfaction webbing like a cancer across the
surface of our world. Does this mark an end or a beginning? The
answer, of course, depends on our perception and the action we take.

Every era opens with its challenges, and they cannot be met
successfully by elaborating methods of the past. Our technologies
become inadequate; but among our sciences -- paleontology, genetics,
physics, astronomy, atomics -- are those that still can point a way,
shaping concepts of life, time and space.

We know that tens of thousands of years ago, man departed from both
the hazards and the security of instinct's natural selection, and
that his intellectual reactions have become too powerful to permit
him ever to return. It seems obvious that to achieve the maximum
scope of awareness, even to survive as a species, we must contrive a
new process of evolutionary selection. We must find a way to blend
with our present erratic tyranny of mind the countless, subtle and
still-little-known elements that created the tangible shape of man
and his intangible extensions. Through the eons these elements have
raised the human complex to a sensitivity which recognizes that both
the material and the ethereal are varying forms of basic essence.

That is why I have turned my attention from technological progress
to life, from the civilized to the wild. In wildness there is a lens
to the past, to the present and to the future, offered to us for the
looking -- a direction, a successful selection, an awareness of
values that confronts us with the need for and the means of our
salvation. Let us never forget that wildness has developed life,
including the human species. By comparison, our own accomplishments
are trivial.

If we can combine our knowledge of science with the wisdom of
wildness, if we can nurture civilization through roots in the
primitive, man's potentialities appear to be unbounded. Through his
evolving awareness, and his awareness of that awareness, he can
merge with the miraculous -- to which we can attach what better name
than "God"? And in this merging, as long sensed by intuition but
still only vaguely perceived by rationality, experience may travel
without need for accompanying life.

Will we then find life to be only a stage, though an essential one,
in a cosmic evolution of which our evolving awareness is beginning
to become aware? Will we discover that only without spaceships can
we reach the galaxies; that only without cyclotrons can we know the
interior of atoms? To venture beyond the fantastic accomplishments
of this physically fantastic age, sensory perception must combine
with the extrasensory, and I suspect that the two will prove to be
different faces of each other. I believe it is through sensing and
thinking about such concepts that great adventures of the future
will be found.

Charles A. Lindbergh
July 1969




(illustration: The Spirit Soars by artist Richard Krause)


Source: Kevin Alfred Strom




http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=1991



--

Kevin Alfred Strom.

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