"In man is a store of evolutionary energy and that
energy can give rise to his further, purely psychical evolution. Pain and pleasure, agony and lust, are the
two fundamental polar sensations which lie at an equally rudimentary level. Only when this dazing sensationalism is
transcended, can consciousness experience sustained intensity of being. This
process indicates a possible ending of pain, a possible solving of the problem
of sex, and also the possibility of a completely new step in evolution."
Written during a time of new extremes in mechanization,
economic depression, and totalitarian politics, and published in the first year
of the result of these forces, World War II, Gerald Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time was a plea for mankind
to take charge of its destiny in order to avoid his prophesied collapse of human
enlightenment, which either did or didn’t happen in the decades since the war,
depending on your point-of-view. Surely
Heard’s hopes would be dashed if he could see the dumbing down of Western
civilization, with its lust for ease and entertainment, matched by the rise
of jihadist terrorism and its contempt for art and education. Heard had a profound influence – via Aldous
Huxley, Huston Smith and Alan Watts – on the growth of interest in Eastern
mysticism in the West in the forms of Zen Buddhism, yoga and transcendental
meditation, which at best brought to the sensitive a healthy alternate spirituality
to the crass culture of consumerism in capitalist democracies, and at worst
spawned the fuzzy trend of New Age that sent its victims on a path
to superstition, self-delusion and cultism. Pain, Sex and Time is really four books
in one, and the combination only works if you are persuaded of its premise; if
not it seems they’d be better off as separate works. The first section presents the essence of
Heard’s theory that the human body’s extraordinary sensitivity to pleasure and
pain indicates a reservoir of energy that serves no natural purpose, since the
body has completed its evolution, and can therefore be redirected to higher
purposes, specifically the honing of sensory and mental abilities. Next Heard outlines a historical overview of advances
in human consciousness, moving through Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek systems and into
the Middle Ages. Third, he lists a variety of techniques that have been and can be used by those of a mind to train and experiment on their own or in small groups. The final section of
the book is more of a manifesto in which Heard gets very specific about the
function and organization of a new Utopian religion that will produce what he
calls the “neo-Brahmin,” who is presumably the gentle and exalted counterpart
to the Nietzschean superman. While Heard’s
scholarship and insights are fascinating and often brilliant, I was concerned
about his extremely meager citations.
The book has no index and very few footnotes, meaning that its ambitious
assertions are presented as self-evident and rarely backed up. Personally I can’t abide any proposal for a
list of tenets that the gifted few ought to embrace, (and I don’t agree that
sexual energy is nothing but a functionless surplus), but I definitely applaud
any attempt to encourage a thoughtful and farsighted philosophy for the human
race. If only there were enough of a receptive
readership in our barely literate, impatient and anti-intellectual era.
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