{"id":2331,"date":"2011-09-25T20:19:25","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T01:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2331"},"modified":"2011-09-25T20:23:36","modified_gmt":"2011-09-26T01:23:36","slug":"space-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2331","title":{"rendered":"Space Vision"},"content":{"rendered":"

It turns out that many of the US astronauts who have been up in the Freedom space station for several months have had vision problems<\/a>. About one third have reported some level of vision impairment after coming home. Most have gotten better over time, but NASA is worried that more permanent damage would be done on a very long space mission, such as a trip to explore Mars. <\/p>\n

Likewise, it turns out that 36 astronauts who were on “high radiation missions”<\/a>, including the Apollo moon astronauts, experienced cataract problems. This was due to their heightened exposure to cosmic rays and other particles from the Sun and from space, given that they spent time beyond the earth’s magnetic shielding. (The space station astronaut problems stem more from brain fluid shifts caused by prolonged weightlessness — they are in low orbit and aren’t as severely exposed to radiation).<\/p>\n

But interestingly enough, the deep space missions had another type of \u201cvision\u201d effect — vision in a spiritual sense. It turns out that a majority of the Apollo astronauts who visited the moon reported having powerful holistic experiences<\/a> during the flight to and from Earth. Many of them reportedly feel that their lives were changed due to the experience of seeing the earth from afar. <\/p>\n

The guy who really went off the deep end<\/a> was Edgar Mitchell, with his “noetics”<\/a> and his ESP and UFO speculations. But several of the other “right stuff” fellows have spoken publicly (if more soberly) about their spiritual and religious interpretations of being in the heavens, of achieving ‘heightened states of awareness’. <\/p>\n

It’s too bad that these space pioneers had to risk their earthly vision in order to gain what the Zen people call \u201cenlightened vision\u201d. Personally, I’m content to sit quietly in the local zendo, right on the Earth’s surface, with my eyes closed. It’s not thrilling like space flight, and I can’t say that I have had all that many \u201cpowerful holistic experiences\u201d. But at least my eyes have gotten some rest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It turns out that many of the US astronauts who have been up in the Freedom space station for several months have had vision problems. About one third have reported some level of vision impairment after coming home. Most have gotten better over time, but NASA is worried that more permanent damage would be done […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2331"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2331"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2333,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2331\/revisions\/2333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}