GERALD HEARD,
British historian, philosopher, educator and science writer, born (d:
1971); Born Henry Fitzgerald Heard, Heard was a guide and mentor to
numerous well-known Americans, including Clare Booth 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.
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. During this period he was Science Commentator for the BBC for
five years.
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. In 1937 he emigrated to the
United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, Huxley's wife Maria and
their son Matthew Huxley, to lecture at Duke University. In the U.S.,
Heard's main activities were writing, lecturing, and the occasional
radio and TV appearance. He had formed an identity 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 Trabuco Canyon, located in the Santa Ana Mountains)
as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be
pursued. However, the Trabuco College project was somewhat short lived
and in 1949 the campus was donated by Heard to the Vedanta Society of
Southern California (Christopher Isherwood’s sanctuary), who still
maintain the facility as a monastery and retreat.
Heard was the
first among a group of literati friends (several others of whom,
including Isherwood, were also originally British) to discover Swami
Prabhavanada 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, Alcoholic Anonymous founder Bill Wilson first took LSD
— under Heard's guidance and with the officiating presence of Dr.
Sidney Cohen. 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) should be regarded as the fourth: the "humanic stage" of the
“total individual,” who is mentally dominated, feeling him- or herself to be autonomous, separate from
other persons. Heard writes this stage is characterized by "the basic
humanic concept of a mankind that is completely self-seeking because it
is completely individualized into separate physiques that can have
direct knowledge of only their own private pain and pleasure, inferring
but faintly the feelings of others. Such a race of ingenious animals,
each able to see and to seek his own advantage, must be kept in
combination with each other by appealing to their separate interests."
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.
According to Heard, the second maturity can be one that lies beyond
"personal success, economic mastery, and the psychophysical capacity to
enjoy life" (p. 240)
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 a meaningful “second maturity” recognized by his or her society,
but can then become a human of developed spirituality, similar to the
mystics of the past; and a person of wisdom.
But collectively
and culturally we are still in the transitional phase, not really
recognizing an identity 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."
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