Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCES
try a frontier science workshop
PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA
It's an obligation for science to begin to look, and look critically but open
mindedly, at the possibility that our minds are more powerful than we pre-
viously understood.
—Marilyn Schlitz, director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences
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Perhaps the biggest sleeper hit of 2004 was the indie film
What the Bleep Do We
Know!?,
which imaginatively explained the emerging science of quantum physics. By word
of mouth alone, it grossed more than $12 million and sold more than a million DVDs. The
movie's runaway success didn't surprise the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), though. This
organization has been doing major scientific research in consciousness and human possibility
for more than 30 years.
The institute also happens to have a 200-acre retreat and education center in Petaluma,
California, just north of San Francisco, where you can take workshops on creativity, intuition,
and other leading-edge ideas to learn how your beliefs, thoughts, and intentions affect the
physical world. Lest you think this is some airy-fairy New Age mumbo jumbo, be advised that
everything taught at the institute is backed by years of solid science. It works with more than
65 universities and has its own labs and staff of research scientists.
Apollo astronaut Capt. Edgar Mitchell, an MIT grad and nominee for the Nobel Prize in
2005, founded the institute in 1973. Two years earlier, the pragmatic young test pilot, strapped
to his seat on the Apollo 14 mission to the moon, had had what he described as an epiphany.
Looking back at Planet Earth, he became engulfed by a profound sense of universal connec-
tedness. He knew from the depths of his being that reality was far more complex, subtle, and
inexorably mysterious than conventional science had led him to believe. Upon his return, he
devoted himself to exploring what he called the “next frontier”: the uncharted territory of the
human mind. He gathered a group of scientists whose mission became to explore the inner
cosmos of the mind with the same level of rigor and commitment that had previously been
applied to understanding the physical universe.
