Required reading for those walking the spiritual path, Gerald Heard's Training for the Life of the Spirit methodically outlines the entire course of the aspirant's journey. Heard provides a time-tested roadmap for the wayfarer: "There is a purpose in evolution-to evolve consciously, to evolve consciousness. That evolution is achieved only by the skilled, conscious training of our spirits." The aspirant works to subdue their ego: "For in so far as we are emptied of self, so far are we freed from accident. Our habit patterns, our moods...our natures can be reconditioned, re-freed. We will be inwardly reunited, our fissured selves re-fused." Training for the Life of the Spirit contains Gerald Heard's essential observation: "Our whole life must become intentional and purposive, instead of a series of irrelevant events, adventures, and accidents, happy or unhappy."Here one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century presents in simple terms the idea that man has a way out of the present chaos through a further evolution of his consciousness.Gerald Heard provides the basic concepts, the points of attack, the regimen, and the vision for undertaking training for continued growth in awareness, understanding, and grasp of Reality. It is these goals that comprise the Life of the Spirit. This is above everything a practical book. Heard's comments on the theory of spiritual life are incisive and profound, but theory is not his main emphasis; he intends to lead his readers to actual experience of higher consciousness. First, he says, conduct must be corrected; then character must be set right. But these first two steps on the Way serve only to make possible the third: the opening of consciousness onto the uplands where contact with the Supreme Reality disperses all doubt. This book is an exploration at great depth by a man who spent a long lifetime in dedicated and brilliantly successful practice of this science of the spirit.

Training for the Life of the Spirit

Politics & Social Sciences

Gerald Heard

Philosophy

SteinerBooks

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 &amp; Brothers, 1939
Pain, Sex and Time was James Dean’s favorite book.
Pain, Sex and Time has been out of print for 60 years.

Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man (Provenance Editions)

Religion & Spirituality

Monkfish Book Publishing

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Books by Gerald Heard