Gerald Heard

Henry FitzGerald Heard (6 October 1889 – 14 August 1971), commonly called Gerald Heard, was a British-born American historian, science writer and broadcaster, public lecturer, educator, and philosopher.

He wrote many articles and over 35 books.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, he acted as the personal secretary of Sir Horace Plunkett, founder of the cooperative movement, who spent his last years at Weybridge, Surrey.

Naomi Mitchison, who admired Plunkett and was a friend of Heard, wrote of that time: "H.P., as we all called him, was getting past his prime and often ill but struggling to go on with the work to which he was devoted. Gerald [Heard] who was shepherding him about fairly continually, apologized once for leaving a dinner party abruptly when H.P. was suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion".

In the mid-1920s, Heard began a romantic relationship with socialite Christopher Wood, the young heir to a large grocery fortune, with whom he lived in London; by around 1935, however, Heard had declared himself celibate, through he continued to cohabit with Wood periodically until the 1950s.

Horace Plunkett owned real estate in the U.S. states of Nebraska and Wyoming, and left some properties to Heard in his will.

Heard 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.

After working in other roles, he lectured from 1926 to 1929 for Oxford University's extramural studies programme.

In 1927 Heard began lecturing for the South Place Ethical Society.

Heard took a strong interest in developments in the sciences and, in 1929, edited The Realist, a short-lived monthly journal of scientific humanism whose sponsors included H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Julian Huxley, and Aldous Huxley.

During the 1930s he became the first science commentator for the BBC.

As a young man, he worked for the Agricultural Cooperative Movement in Ireland.

From 1930 to 1934, he served as a science and current-affairs commentator for the BBC.

In 1931 Heard had initiated an informal research group to look into developing group-mindedness or group communications, which became known as The Engineers Study Group because several of its members were engineers who afterwards were involved in the early development of computers.

Naomi Mitchison also participated actively in the group.

From 1932 to 1942, Heard was a council member of the Society for Psychical Research.

After 1936, Heard broke with Mitchison over her outspoken support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and her attempt, together with other members of the group, to run arms to Republican Spain.

In his last letter to Mitchison, Heard expressed his sympathy for the victims of the war in Spain but compared the taking of sides in a war to "The relatives of a patient suffering from a deadly disease believing that he is curable by a hedge doctor (...) I am convinced that the way civilization is going is fatal, and the usual remedies only inflame the disease".

Meanwhile, Heard played a minor part in the development of the Peace Pledge Union.

Heard became well known as an advocate for pacifism and argued for the transformation of behaviour through meditation and "disciplined nonviolence".

In 1937 he emigrated to the United States to give some lectures at Duke University.

Heard was accompanied by Aldous Huxley; Huxley's wife, Maria; and their son Matthew Huxley.

In the United States, Heard's main activities were writing, lecturing, and the occasional radio or television appearance.

He had developed an identity as an informed individual who recognised no intrinsic conflict among history, science, literature, and theology.

Though he lectured at Duke, Heard turned down the offer of a post there and traveled west to settle in California.

Heard was the first among a group of literati friends (several others of whom, including Christopher Isherwood, were also British) to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta.

Heard became an initiate of Vedanta.

Like that of his friend Aldous Huxley (another in the 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.

He took interest in parapsychology and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

Heard concluded that the impediment to be addressed was "the problem of letting in a free flow of comprehension beyond the everyday threshold of experience while keeping the mind clear."

Heard was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known people from the 1940s through the 1960s, including Aldous Huxley, Henry Luce, Clare Boothe Luce, and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In 1942, he founded Trabuco College as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be pursued.

It was essentially a cooperative training center for the spiritual life.

Living as a freelance scholar, Heard had enjoyed security in America by way of what he had inherited from Horace Plunkett as well as his own family.

He used some of his inherited resources toward this most ambitious of projects.

His work was a forerunner of, and influence on, the consciousness development movement that has spread in the Western world since the 1960s.

The son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, Heard was born in London.

He grew to be an earnest, disciplined, resolute young man.

He studied history and theology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with honours in history.