Gerald Heard played a seminal role in establishing the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology

"I am writing in regard to your website about Gerald Heard. One of the little-known facets of his remarkable life is not documented there. In 1938 Gerald Heard began corresponding with two outstanding Quakers of the day Howard Brinton and Elined Kotschnig. Ms. Kotschnig was a Jungian analyst who had been to Zurich and had met Carl Jung. She recognized that Jung had much to say to Quakers. This correspondence took the form of a mimeographed newsletter. As a result of this correspondence, the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology ("FCRP") was established in 1943. This organization is still in existence today.

"The mimeographed newsletter became the organization's publication Inward Light. Gerald Heard was on the Editorial Board for a few years. Together with Howard Brinton and Paul Tillich, Heard was the plenary speaker at the 1950 conference. Inward Light is no longer published. Selected issues, together with our history and information about our conference, is at our website, http://fcrp.quaker.org."
Richard A. Bellin, FCRP Registrar and Website Coordinator, Washington, D.C., Apr. 2011

Read More

Master teacher-revealer of celestial navigation

"Gerald Heard is a master of objective knowledge, comprehending a broad range of subject matter, and integrating the humanities and the sciences with the subjective reaches of his keenly alert and intuitive personal experience. In his mercury-like intelligence and comprehensive understanding we find a startlingly original and lucid thinker with a twinkling resonance that delights us with his uniquely engaging manner. He handles complex ideas so adroitly, yet wears his erudition as effortlessly as a skillful juggler. He is a master teacher-revealer of celestial navigation... Heard’s entire journey was a continuing expansion beyond all man-made boundaries of finite form, space, time, and matter. He accomplished this not by a solitary 'flight from the alone to the Alone'; rather, his was the inclusive comprehensiveness without condemnation or exclusion of every particular step on each rung of the broad ladder of ascent to more inclusive viewpoints."
Clifford P. Wolfsehr, Thorp, WA, Mar. 2010
(This is an excerpt from Mr. Wolfsehr's lengthier, eloquent contribution, which can be read here.)

Read More

Gerald Heard was unrivaled as a catalyst for the propagation of Vedanta

"Gerald Heard was unrivaled as a catalyst for the propagation of Vedanta, largely because he sparked the interest of people who would, in turn, reach millions of others. He was also uncannily prescient about the future of American spirituality, and his role in accelerating the evolution of consciousness in the West was huge, thanks to his impact on key movers and shakers in the consciousness movement."
Philip Goldberg, spiritual counselor, interfaith minister, and author of American Veda, Los Angeles, CA, Nov. 2009

Read More

Gerald Heard's work represents a call back to that inner meaning of life

"Everyone is finally realizing (again) that the world is really messed up, and the only way to fix it is to find what's truly meaningful inside ourselves and not in the things we buy, programs we watch, or cell phone conversations we have. Gerald Heard's work represents a call back to that inner meaning of life."
A Contributor from Pennsylvania, Mar. 2008

Read More

Only God could have invented Gerald Heard

"It's unusual enough for a practicing mystic, who is clearly in touch with God, to have even minimal rhetorical skills. That he should be spellbinding would be asking way too much. But when he is also Irish, and a science commentator for the BBC, and goes on picnics with Greta Garbo and is the unmistakable model for fictional characters in novels by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, you begin to see that only God could have invented Gerald Heard."
Peter Shneidre, Hollywood, CA, Aug. 2007

Read More

Gerald Heard's ideas expound inner peace and spiritual understanding

"I found he had a philosophy of spirituality that he wrote about. He was way before his time...his ideas are different than most of the writers of that genre because he was extremely educated and introspective and sincere, and he combined science with 'mysticism.' Gerald Heard's ideas expound inner peace and spiritual understanding."
Anne Q., Palm Springs, CA, Jan. 2007

Read More

Selected Endorsements

H. G. Wells, pioneering science-fiction writer
"Heard is the only man I ever listen to on the wireless. He makes human life come alive."

Aldous Huxley, prominent author
"Gerald Heard is that rare being — a learned man who makes his mental home on the vacant spaces between the pigeon-holes. He has looked into a score of specialties and, out of what he has seen there, has constructed a comprehensive picture of the world — a picture in which the most diverse elements of reality take their places and are seen in significant relationship."

W. Somerset Maugham, famous playwright, novelist, and short-story writer
"Gerald Heard is a scintillating talker. One of his happiest gifts is that when you attend one of his lectures you do not feel that you are listening to a prepared address, but to the most natural, brilliant and stimulating conversation."

G. Lowes Dickinson, historian and Cambridge Fellow
"If [the reader] derives from the book as much interest and vision and I have done myself he will not regret any trouble he may take in mastering the author's meaning." (From Mr. Dickinson's introduction to Gerald Heard's The Ascent of Humanity.)

Christopher Isherwood, popular novelist
"Gerald Heard is one of the very few who can properly be called philosophers, a man of brilliantly daring theory and devoted practice."

Professor Huston Smith, noted authority on the world's religions
"I determined that the book [Pain, Sex and Time] had so radically changed my point of view, that I wouldn’t read anything else written by him [Gerald Heard] until after I received my degree, but once my PhD was in hand, I would read everything."

Dr. (Hon.) Rhea A. White, founder/director of The Exceptional Human Experience Network
"By far the person that has influenced me most is the former BBC science commentator and practicing mystic, lecturer, and spiritual advisor, Gerald Heard. It was not only his ideas that influenced me but his very being, which was distinctly numinous and unlike anything I had previously experienced or have since. In Gerald Heard I experienced what I would call the aura of sanctity."

Willard L. Sperry, former Dean, Harvard Divinity School
"Gerald Heard is a man of mature culture, of many contacts and keen understanding of the modern mind. He feels deeply the spiritually poverty-stricken state of our modern world, and our need of a rebirth of personal religion. The simple directness of all that he thinks and says stirs both the imagination and the conscience of those to whom he speaks."

William H. Sheldon, American psychologist
"Considering the whole panorama of human life, historic, anthropologic and archeologic, Mr. Heard may well be the best informed man alive. He is certainly one of the ablest lecturers and one of the most articulate speakers among English speaking people."

Dave Brubeck, world-renowned jazz composer
"Gerald Heard had a brilliant mind...I can truly say he broadened my vision of religion and spirituality."

John Haynes Holmes, former minister of the Community Church of New York
"Gerald Heard is a scientist, seer, and a saint. The combination is impressive. Mr. Heard speaks with precision and clearness on profound themes."

The New Christianity
"To many thoughtful readers of this generation, Gerald Heard's books give the impression of a mind almost uniquely profound, sensitive and original among contemporary writers. His mastery in the fields of anthropology and psychology makes for fresh and creative interpretations of history; and his remarkable equipment is utilized in a way to establish more firmly the realities of religious faith."

Ellery Queen, from the March 1947 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
"Gerald Heard is the spiritual godfather of this Western movement [i.e., the Vedanta philosophy during the 1940s]... Mr. Heard's controversial books are brilliantly and provocatively written."

Georg Feuerstein, noted yoga authority
"Heard's work—and he published a number of insightful books — was one of the ideological sources of the human potential movement and was also instrumental in the spreading of Vedanta in the Western hemisphere."

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

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement
"Gerald’s The Five Ages of Man [is] where he can be seen as the savant, the repository of the most encompassing cosmology of his generation."

Charles E. Vernoff, Emeritus Professor of Religion at Cornell College, Iowa
"Gerald Heard — as Huxley's spiritual mentor — must be acknowledged as true grandfather of the New Age. I believe Gerald's vision both preceded and transcended the attempted spiritual revolution of the 1960's."

Philip Goldberg, prolific author, interfaith minister
"Gerald Heard was unrivaled as a catalyst for the propagation of Vedanta, largely because he sparked the interest of people who would, in turn, reach millions of others. His role in accelerating the evolution of consciousness in the West was huge, thanks to his impact on key movers and shakers in the consciousness movement."

Read More