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Gerald Heard

Henry Fitzgerald Heard commonly called Gerald Heard (October 6, 1889 - August 14, 1971) was a historian, science writer, educator, and philosopher. He wrote many articles and over 35 books.

Heard was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans, including Clare Boothe Luce and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, in the 1950s and 1960s. His work was a forerunner of, and influence on, the consciousness-development movement that has spread in the Western world since the 1960s.

Life and work

The son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, Heard was born in London. He studied history and theology at the University of Cambridge. After working in other roles, he lectured from 1926 to 1929 for Oxford University's extra-mural studies program. Heard took a strong interest in developments in the sciences. In 1929, he edited The Realist, a short-lived monthly journal of scientific humanism (its sponsors included H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Julian Huxley, and Aldous Huxley). In 1927 Heard began lecturing for South Place Ethical Society, and from 1932 to 1942 he was a council member of the Society for Psychical Research.

He first embarked as a book author in 1924, but The Ascent of Humanity, published in 1929, marked his first foray into public acclaim as it received the British Academy’s Hertz Prize. From 1930 to 1934 he served as a science and current-affairs commentator for the BBC. In 1936 he played a minor part in the development of the Peace Pledge Union. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley and Huxley's wife Maria, to give some lectures at Duke University. In the U.S., Heard's main activities were writing, lecturing, and the occasional radio and TV appearance. His pattern was set as an informed individual who recognized no conflict among history, science, literature, and theology.

Heard turned down the offer of a post at Duke, settling in California. In 1942 he founded Trabuco College (in the Santa Ana Mountains) as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be pursued.

Heard was the first among a group of literati friends (several others of whom, including Christopher Isherwood, were also originally British) to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta. Heard became an initiate of Vedanta. Like the outlook of his friend Aldous Huxley (another in this circle), the essence of Heard’s mature outlook was that a human being can effectively pursue intentional evolution of consciousness. He maintained a regular discipline of meditation, along the lines of yoga, for many years.

In the 1950s, Heard tried LSD and felt that, used properly, it had strong potential to 'enlarge Man's mind' by allowing a person to see beyond his ego. In late August 1956, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson first took LSD — under Heard's guidance and with the officiating presence of Dr. Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist then with the California Veterans Administration Hospital. According to Wilson, the session allowed him to re-experience a spontaneous spiritual experience he had had years before, which had enabled him to overcome his own alcoholism.

Heard is also responsible for introducing the then unknown Huston Smith to Huxley. Smith became one of the preeminent religious studies scholars in the United States. His book The World's Religions is a classic in the field, sold over two million copies and is considered a particularly useful introduction to comparative religion. The meeting with Huxley led eventually to Smith's connection to Timothy Leary.

In 1963, what some consider to be Heard's magnum opus, a book titled The Five Ages of Man, was published. According to Heard, the prevalent developmental stage among humans in today’s well-industrialized societies (especially in the West) is the fourth: the “total individual,” who is mentally dominated, feeling him- or herself to be autonomous, separate from other persons. In modern industrial societies, a person, especially if educated, has the opportunity to begin entering the “first maturity” of the humanic “total individual” in his or her mid teens. However, according to Heard -– based on his decades of studies, his intuition, and his many years of reflection –- a fifth stage is in the process of emerging: a post-individual psychological phase of persons and therefore of culture.

Heard termed this phase 'Leptoid Man' (from the Greek word lepsis: "to leap") because humans increasingly face the opportunity to 'take a leap' into a considerably expanded consciousness, in which the various aspects of the psyche will be integrated, without any aspects being repressed or seeming foreign. A society that recognizes this stage of development will honor and support individuals in a "second maturity" who wish to resolve their inner conflicts and dissolve their inner blockages and become the sages of the modern world. Further, instead of simply enjoying biological and psychological health, as Freud and other important psychiatric or psychological philosophers of the “total-individual” phase conceived, Leptoid man will not only have entered the “second maturity” of the complete individual but will become: a human of developed spirituality, similar to the mystics of the past; and a person of wisdom.

But we are still in the transitional phase, not really beyond the super-individualistic fourth, "humanic" phase. Heard's views were cautionary about developments in society that were not balanced, about inappropriate aims of our use of technological power. He wrote: "we are aware of our precarious imbalance: of our persistent and ever-increasing production of power and our inadequacy of purpose; of our critical analytic ability and our creative paucity; of our triumphantly efficient technical education and our ineffective, irrelevant education for values, for meaning, for the training of the will, the lifting of the heart, and the illumination of the mind.

Heard died on 14 August 1971 at his home in Santa Monica, California of the effects of several earlier strokes he had, beginning in 1966.

References

Bibliography

Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes
The Ascent of Humanity
The Emergence of Man
Social Substance of Religion: An Essay of the Evolution of Religion
This Surprising World: A Journalist Looks at Science
These Hurrying Years: An Historical Outline 1900-1933
Science in the Making
The Source of Civilization First published by Cape (London)1935
Exploring the Stratosphere
The Third Morality
Science Front, 1936
Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man
The Creed of Christ: An Interpretation of the Lord's Prayer
Training for the Life of the Spirit
The Code of Christ: An Interpretation of the Beatitudes
A Taste for Honey (fiction published under H.F. Heard, 1941)
Man The Master
A Dialogue in the Desert
Murder by Reflection (fiction published under H.F. Heard, 1942)
Reply Paid: A Mystery (fiction published under H.F. Heard, 1942)
The Recollection
A Preface to Prayer
The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales (fiction published under H.F. Heard, 1944)
The Gospel According to Gamaliel
The Eternal Gospel
Doppelgangers (fiction published under H.F. Heard, 1947)
Is God Evident? An Essay Toward a Natural Theology
Prayers and Meditations: A Monthly Cycle Arranged for Daily Use, 1949 ed.Gerald Heard
The Lost Cavern and Other Tales of the Fantastic (fiction published under H.F. Heard)
The Notched Hairpin: A Mycroft Mystery (fiction published under H.F. Heard)
Prayers and Meditations: A Monthly Cycle Arranged for Daily Use (edited by Gerald Heard)
The Black Fox: A Novel of the Seventies (fiction)
Is God in History?
Morals Since 1900
Is Another World Watching? The Riddle of the Flying Saucers
Gabriel and the Creatures (UK edition entitled Wishing Well)
The Human Venture
Training For a Life of Growth
The Five Ages of Man: The Psychology of Human History