Reviews for Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man

From Parabola - Spring 2005, by Marvin Barrett

   Gerald Heard is a name virtually unknown today. That was not always so. As Huston Smith indicates in his eloquent foreword to this volume, which has been out of print for sixty years, Heard's was once a voice to be listened to. Smith's first encounter with Pain, Sex and Time, six decades ago, kept him up all night, he recalls and converted him "from a scientific worldview to the vaster world of the mystics."

   Other converts included Aldous Huxley, the era's prime literary cynic. Auden and Isherwood also fell under Heard's spell, eventually deserting his syncretic approach to faith in favor of the more specific appeal of Christianity and the Vedanta. Even H.G. Wells, a convinced secularist regularly tuned in to Heard's broadcast as science editor of the BBC.

   However riveting his message, though, Heard was never an easy read. What he characteristically asked of his readers in the concluding pages of his many books was nothing less than metanoia, conversion to the life of the spirit.

   Heard's technique was that of the old-fashioned evangelist. His catalogue of mankind's narrow escapes, from prehistory to the present day, was meant to scare you our of your wits. Doomsday was at hand, and then at the last moment you'd be offered the alternative—salvation through meditation, the practice of the presence, prayer. The juxtaposition of fear and hope was startling and compelling then, and it remains so today.

   As for the pain and sex of the book's title, they are not only the physical and mental agony that mankind is heir to and the feckless fun of indiscriminate lovemaking. Heard saw them as repositories of energy, that energy that mankind requires for its continued evolution. "Unless we can find an end really adequate to our means," Heard warns, "a true meaning and purpose of life as an entirety, the only choice before us now is either individual neurosis or mass neurosis."

    Heard's view of the human situation when he wrote this book was justifiably grim. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were at the peak of their power. World War II was imminent and according to Heard's own estimate,

Man is cut off from any union with, or insight into reality. Hence he creates the analytic, mechanistic science which today gives him infinite means and no ends, unlimited powers and no sanctions. At length he can only perceive with general despair what at the beginning he wished to believe from private greed—a world which is completely amoral and yields its unlimited resources to those least trammeled by tabus.

   But if Heard skirted despair, he never embraced it. A chapter heading, "The Historic Evidence for the Evolution of Consciousness,"  gives some indication of the books hopeful, wide-ranging thrust.

  Like Huston Smith, I too first encountered Pain, Sex and Time many decades ago. In my case, as a young naval officer waiting to be shipped overseas in World War II. That encounter was also a life-changing moment for me. Now, though well into old age, I still feel the excitement of Heard's message. It is my hope that the youth of a new age every bit as threatening and chaotic as the one I faced in the 1940s will find in these pages an illuminating vision of where the human race came from and where it might still aspire to go.

The mind is effected and agitated...first there are bewilderments, labourings, wanderings, darkness, then horror and trembling. This passes and a divine light displays itself.

   True when spoken by an anonymous Greek youth millennia ago. True when Heard quoted it in this challenging book. True now.

Marvin Barrett is the author of Second Chance: A Life After Death.

From Theosophical Society In America, July-August 2002 by Huston Smith

"...The second unforgettable night came from reading the first book on mysticism I had ever encountered: Gerald Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man. It presented mysticism and the mystical worldview. From its opening page, that book took me over, and I found that from the soles of my feet all the way up, I was saying “Yes! This is the way things are!” As for my scientific worldview, which I had been so gung-ho for, it collapsed that night like a house of cards. So I crossed the frontier into mysticism. Mysticism was not in high regard in the middle of the twentieth century. I had an undergraduate degree in religion and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion, and I had never been required to read any mystical text. That wouldn’t be possible today, because now mysticism is everywhere. I’m sure that the mystics were listed in the bibliography of suggested readings in some of my course books, but whoever gets to those? Because mysticism was not fashionable in academia then, I turned to the closest thing to it: world religions..."

From White Crane Journal 

Reviewed by Toby Johnson, author, GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe
tobyjohnson.com

Contributing editor, White Crane - A Journal Of Gay Spirit, Wisdom & Culture
 

 Pain, Sex and Time was originally published in 1939. It was an important book at the time. The cover of the 2005 rerelease notes that this was actor James Dean’s favorite book. And the Foreword by religion scholar Huston Smith reveals that it was this book that set Smith on his path of studying the world’s mystics.

Gerald Heard (1889-1971) was a well-known social commentator in Great Britain in the first half of the 20^th Century. He was a BBC announcer with a marvelous voice who captivated many, including, notably, H.G.Wells, with his reports on science. He was author of 38 books. He came to America in 1937 with his friend Aldous Huxley; he taught briefly at Duke University then moved to Los Angeles. Always interested in religion, he there met Swami Prabhavananda, founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. It was he who brought Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, John Van Druten and others to the Vedanta Circle.

In the early 40s, he created Trabuco College, a kind of experiment in modern monasticism and academia, a college of comparative religion and research into meditation techniques. He was an openly gay man, though in the modulated style of pre-liberation days, and wrote about homosexuality as an evolutionary, spiritual phenomenon.

Pain, Sex and Time was one of his cardinal books. In it, he argues that evolution in human beings has ceased to be physical and become psychological and partly voluntary. Human beings can intentionally expand their consciousness by use of meditative, ascetical, and intellectual techniques. Heard used the term “consciousness-dilation.” (It was Heard who introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline.)

Gerald Heard is then one of the central figures in the development of contemporary ideas about the evolution of consciousness and about the nature of gay spirituality. His writings are certainly of interest to historians of ideas. Though now largely forgotten, he was one of those pivotal homosexuals who changed the world by his presence and by the force of his mind and personality.

Pain, Sex and Time is an interesting book. It’s quite instructive to discover that ideas about the nature of the mind and spirituality and religion that seem so very modern in fact were current in the 1930s. It’s also—unfortunately, but maybe not surprisingly—a difficult book to read. And this in itself is quite instructive. The style comes across as dated and a little quaint; there are too many references to current events and themes of intellectual scholarship that are just incomprehensible today; the sentence structure is too complex; and the tone of voice wordy and old-fashioned. There’s a reminder here to contemporary writers to avoid dating their material by transitory references and trendy styles (though, perhaps the lesson is also that such datedness is unavoidable).

Most of the book is an explication of history and religion, showing how the goals, especially of a secret order of initiates, has always been the dilation of consciousness in the service of all humankind. The discussions of Egyptian, Essene, Yogic, Fakiristic, Sufi, and Gnostic traditions are interesting and insightful. Heard was especially concerned with how intentional techniques, like meditation, asceticism and even tantric sex (mentioned tangentially) work to heighten consciousness. In this, he saw the practical direction that religion and spirituality should be taking to further evolution of mind.

Heard hypothesized the evolutionary development of a type of person he calls the Neo-Brahmin, “the new prophetic type and forerunner of the succeeding world order,” who is characterized by 1) height of integrity, 2) clear understanding of the meaning of life and the direction of evolution (toward greater consciousness), and 3) a power of appeal and charisma. Though Heard does not seem to say so explicitly, the descriptions sound like the ideal of our contemporary gay spirituality movement. (I wonder if I failed to recognize semi-veiled clues in the text to homosexuality.)

This book is a little bit of a challenge, the tone occasionally annoying or just befuddling. But its scope and brilliance is also entrancing, and its argument appealing. Especially for fans of Isherwood, Auden, Huxley, and that influential circle of 20^th century thinkers, this book is a must-read. And, even if you can’t devote the time and concentration to a thorough reading, just picking it up and reading a page at random is a delightful and mind-dilating experience. I invite you to join in the enjoyment. Actually studying the book is an exercise in the consciousness-expansion that is its subject matter.

[1]. Ed. note: The introductory piece to Pain, Sex and Time states that Heard, “was celibate by choice for the latter decades of his life.”

[2]. Ed. note: According to Aldous Huxley: A Biography by Sybille Bedford (1974), it was Huxley who first took mescaline in May 1953 (p. 527) through Dr. Humphrey Osmond, not Heard. Heard did not take the drug until November 1953 (p. 562).