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

by Gerald Heard, Huston Smith ((Foreword by)

Pain, Sex and Time explores evolution and postulates the possibility and means of a future evolution of the mind. First published in 1939, its philosophy converted a generation of leading thinkers from the scientific worldview to the perspective of the mystics. Gerald Heard (1889-1971) was a well-known British polymath and science commentator for the BBC. He later toured and lectured prolifically in the United States. Heard wrote thirty-eight books including The Ascent of Humanity, The Social Substance of Religion and A Taste for Honey, a detective story which sold over half a million copies. Referring to Heard’s influence on Western notables, Ellery Queen wrote, “Gerald Heard is the spiritual godfather of this Western movement.” Aldous Huxley (from his 1939 review of Pain, Sex and Time ): “Gerald Heard’s book represents a significant attempt to reinterpret in contemporary terms and in the light of modern knowledge the teachings, practical no less than theoretical, of the traditional religious philosophies...” Professor Huston Smith, (from his 2004 Foreword to Pain, Sex and Time ): “Overnight, the book in hand converted me from the scientific worldview to the vaster world of the mystics. I applaud the decision to bring this book back into print.” In this absorbing and provocative book, Gerald Heard shows that a fissure in human consciousness, which has been rapidly widening for 400 years, is the cause of modern man’s tragic dismay. Believing his problem external, when it is really in his own mind, man at last faces a “veritable Copernican revolution” psychologically. Science tells us that man is the only animal capable of continued evolution. It shows further that he can evolve in only one way—mentally. Pain, Sex and Time is then a new outlook, a new promise for the future, a new exploration of those strange and little-known powers of human consciousness of which man is becoming increasingly aware. Harper & Brothers, 1939 Pain, Sex and Time was James Dean’s favorite book. Pain, Sex and Time has been out of print for 60 years.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology

400 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2004

About the author

Gerald Heard, born in London on October 6, 1889, of Irish ancestry, was educated in England, taking honors in history and studying theology at the University of Cambridge. Following Cambridge, he worked for Lord Robson of Jesmond and later for Sir Horace Plunkett, founder of the Irish Agriculture Cooperative movement. Heard began lecturing from 1926 to 1929 at Oxford University's Board of Extra Mural Studies. In 1927 he began lecturing for South Place Ethical Society. From 1929 to 1930 he edited "The Realist," a monthly journal of scientific humanism whose sponsors included H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and Aldous Huxley. In 1929 he published The Ascent of Humanity, an essay on the philosophy of history that received the prestigious Hertz Prize by the British Academy. From 1930 to 1934 he served as the BBC's first science commentator, and from 1932 to 1942 he was a council member of the Society for Psychical Research.

In 1937 Gerald Heard came to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, after having been offered the chair of historical anthropology at Duke University. After delivering some lectures at Duke, Heard gave up the post and soon settled in California where from 1941 to 1942 he founded and oversaw the building of Trabuco College, a large facility where comparative-religion studies and practices flourished under Heard's visionary direction. Trabuco College, 30 years ahead of its time, was discontinued in 1947, and the vast properties were subsequently donated to the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

During the 1950s, Heard's main activities were writing and lecturing, along with an occasional television and radio appearance. His broad philosophical themes and scintillating oratorical style influenced many people and attracted a legion of interested persons. But chiefly he maintained a regular discipline of meditation for many years, as the core of his mature beliefs centered around the intentional evolution of consciousness.

A prolific writer, Heard penned some thirty-eight books, the most important of which are his pioneering academic works documenting the evolution of consciousness, including The Ascent of Humanity (1929), The Social Substance of Religion (1931), The Source of Civilization (1935), Pain, Sex and Time (1939), and his last book, The Five Ages of Man (1964). He also wrote several popular devotional books, including The Creed of Christ (1940) and Training for the Life of the Spirit (1941-42). Under the name H. F. Heard (H. F. for Henry FitzGerald, his given name), he wrote a number of mysteries and fantasies, including A Taste for Honey (1941) and The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales (1944). Following five years of illness, Gerald Heard peacefully passed away at his home in Santa Monica, California, on August 14, 1971.

Reviews

[Abraham Katzoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

CONCLUSION OF HIS THESIS.

The only possible meaning of life is that here, under Time, human consciousness discovers itself. The Universe exists for the emergence and development of free creative consciousness. That being the meaning of Time and the phenomenal world, to coerce individuals to make them behave and to compel them to do right, is to frustrate their growth and make futile the evolutionary purpose in that particular. If men can think that the purpose of life, or the only attainable purpose in life is a Utopia where, unknown number of generations of fine men have suffered and committed crimes to achieve it, there will be a conflict less, pain after an less, appetitive world filled with aimless populations scampering about, feeding, sleeping, courting, procreating and dying, without a notion what the whole thing means and why they are born and why they die; huge droves of animals handicapped in the enjoyment of senseless pleasure by an awkward relic of intelligence, curiosity and wonder, waiting, turned out to grass, until the cosmic frost cuts them off if anyone can believe in such a self-stultifying daydream no doubt he may use, as Communists believe, any means. It does not matter, if you stultify man's power of curiosity and wonder, his need for liberty, his right to experience, if his consciousness is insignificant, if his mind is merely an epiphenomenal accident, excessive steam given off by a physical engine when it is kept from running about. But if consciousness, ever more awareness and the increasing apprehension of a supra-physical world, is man's only adequate aim and goal, and is the aim and goal of Life through him, then any

attempt to drive him, even toward awareness, must defeat the end. We cannot, then, say that if we provide the service, mankind will choose to avail itself of that service. The Buddhist saying, "All the Buddhas point the way but because it is the way, everyone must tread every step of it himself," has in it that realism and patience which marks the highest oriental thought and which is so hard for the febrile occidental to realize. Indeed, we must go farther. How ever hardly we strive to see the future, free of our present material prejudices, and to understand how minds more advanced than ours would think and act, we cannot be at all sure as to how the world would appear to them or what line of conduct they would pursue.

"If I were God" means only if I were omnipotent. But were I omniscient also, then my utter power would be matched and balanced by my complete vision. I should see things sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza knew we must all desire, if we would see them as they are, but which we may never attain to till we are, at the very least, passionless. The question as to whether the new higher type (into which men must mutate if they would carry on evolution) will really alter the main stream of history and give humanity a future, can, perhaps, best be answered by another question, crude but crucial: "If we were God would we do more than God does?"

We can make preparation. We can get ourselves ready by transcending the self so as to see things as they really are. We may hope that in the end all frustration and futility will be resolved. We must not, however, rule exactly where and when and how that can be. To attempt to do more than to emerge and be prepared is to be like a chick in the egg, when the time has come to break its way out, losing time and energy, which are for it both strictly limited, to pause and speculate about the vast world outside and how to behave once there. So the simile of the egg again returns and closes us in. We must turn to our work, our actual effort to work our way out, to attain liberation.

[David Michael Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

That Heard could have been so incredibly prescient in 1939 is extraordinary. His historical accounts at the beginning of the book were a bit ponderous and academic for my taste, but the concluding chapters regarding the next necessary stage of human evolution -- a leap in consciousness -- seems, to me, the pressing issue of our era.

[Balthasaradell · Rating 5 out of 5]

couldnt finish it. but i feel that i have to. but i feel that i didnt understand it at times. and at other times i felt like i was acutely aware that this genre called new age has been around for at least 80 years already. so whats really goin on?

[Kurtamyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascinating review of the past 2,000 years of human history although I disagree with the author's concept of how to address the world's woes