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Gerald Heard

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Henry Fitzgerald Heard commonly called Gerald Heard (October 6, 1889 - August 14, 1971) was an historian, science writer, educator, and philosopher. Heard wrote many articles and authored over 35 books. Heard was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans, including Clare Boothe Luce and Bill Wilson (co-founder of A.A.) 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.

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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 1937 he emigrated to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, to accept the chair of historical anthropology 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 left this post at Duke, settling in California. In 1942 he began founding, soon building, 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 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 is the fourth: the “total individual,” who is mentally dominated, feeling him- or herself to be autonomous, separate from other persons. However, according to Heard – based on his many years of studies, his intuition, and his many years of reflection – a fifth stage is in the process of emerging: a post-individual phase of persons and of culture. Heard termed this stage 'leptoid man' because humans will increasingly '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 entering a "second maturity." 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 (having entered the second maturity) will be a human of developed spirituality, similar to the mystics of the past.

Heard died at his home in Santa Monica, California of the effects of several earlier strokes in August 1971.

Books

See also

External link

 

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