
The people at the Offical Gereld Heard site sent me an email telling me about Pain, Sex And Time: A New Outlook On Evolution And The Future Of Man ia reissue of a book orginally published in 1939 .The webmaster there must know that I have been facinated with Gereld Heard for more than a decade, when I first was introduced to him by Professor John Codey of USF.
Here is what Cody said about Heard:
" An Anglo-Irish historian, philosopher, BBC science journalist, novelist and mystic seer, Heard (1889-1971) wrote over 30 books in the fields of science, history, religion, philosophy and fiction. A learned advocate of exploring taboo areas of nonconsensus reality, including psychic research, mysticism, pacifism, UFOs, synchronicity, homosexuality, terror, madness, and criminality, he saw these offbeat topics as sharing a common link to the mysterious role played by consciousness in molding our bewildering variety of reality maps, a view we may call "postmodern."
"Heard, who lived his last 34 years in Los Angeles, was also one of the first to interpret psychedelics as harbingers of this postmodern cultural breakthrough. He viewed mind-altering drugs, along with psychical research, the New Physics, ecology, holistic field theory, Gestalt psychology, semantics, and the sociology of knowledge, as part of a larger cultural mutation, a profound epistemological revolution in our postmodern psyche. Heard was convinced that only through research and ongoing experimentation can we test the significance of consciousness-changing drugs for society, therapy, education, invention, discovery, and religion."
Paul Cohen, the publisher wrote to me in July and told me the book has been out of print for nearly 60 years. and that "Pain, Sex and Time" has a new foreword by Huston Smith. The book was an early influence on Huston Smith as it precipitated his conversion from scientific materialist to mystic. He later went on to write the best-selling book on religion, The World's Religion, which has been for many years the most widely used text to teach religion.
I'm still waiting for my reviewiers copy. You can get the book through Amazon.
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