Meeting The Mystics: My California Encounters with Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley

by Sissela Bok, Ph.D.

In April 1955, a month before I was to be married, at age 20, to Derek Bok and fly from Paris across the Atlantic to take a chance on finding lasting happiness in a new life, in a new country, I sat down to ask, in my journal, about my hesitations and questions: Would I, after leaving friends and family, be able to find new roots in America? Would I seize the opportunity to grow, flourish, give myself for what I love? Above all, would I at my death look back and discover that I had found happiness by making others happy?

Now I am 80, and these three questions still serve as touchstones as I remember encounters with people who helped me think through each one. Among them were Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, whom I met soon after arriving in the United States. Derek had known them since childhood; now he wanted to introduce them to me.

When we went to Gerald Heard’s house in Santa Monica for lunch, we timed our visit to take place after his morning meditation. I had never seen anyone so knowingly inhabiting the role of a mystic. Christopher Isherwood wrote in his diary in 1939 of seeing Gerald again after some years… [Ed. – this excerpt is omitted.]

That was the Gerald I met—66 years old at the time, sitting under a tree in his garden, his lined face serene as he completed his meditation, his eyes twinkling with pleasure at seeing Derek, whom he had known since first arriving in Los Angeles from England in the late 1930s. Derek recalls how Gerald would sit with him and his older brother and sister in their garden as dusk fell, telling ghost stories such as “The Monkey’s Paw,” and the sheer terror and thrill when Gerald, at the crucial moment of this story, would reach out and clutch his arm. Derek loved him as a family friend, relished his dazzling conversation, and admired his breadth of knowledge, without finding the slightest appeal in his efforts, through strict spiritual disciplines, to achieve “union with the divine in himself.”

As a 19-year-old college student, having been asked to write about what he had done during spring vacation, Derek had told of hearing Gerald speak at a Vedanta temple just off Hollywood Boulevard: “Listening to Gerald is always a wonderful experience, not only because he is our lifelong friend but also because he is easily the best speaker I have ever heard.”

There were very few seats left in the temple, and those who did not find seats would have to hear Gerald’s voice piped into an overflow room: At last, a door behind the altar opened, and Gerald appeared—a slight man with deep, sunken eyes and a beard which made one wonder what he would look like clean shaven. He began to speak. The esoteric and the exoteric. I leaned forward, trying to concentrate on each sentence. Out tumbled the words, arguments, facts, examples—drawn from history, art, religion, science. What a difficult task he had chosen, trying to convince the audience that they must abandon all that they had hitherto valued and sought after in order to find meaning in their lives. … A few, perhaps, were convinced—the strange and the malcontent, grasping for a dogma to lean their lives against.

That day at lunch, I came to know just what Derek meant as I listened to Gerald speaking in his clear, resonant British voice with perfect enunciation, as if he were giving a lecture to us alone. A spellbinder, he had a way of providing one with a sense of being more vibrantly alive for having talked with him, feeling both more harmonious and more stretched intellectually and emotionally in his presence.

As we drove away from Gerald’s house, Derek and I talked about the multitude of ideas he had led us to think about—from extrasensory perception and psychical research to what it takes to fully reconnect with and release one’s creativity. Then we went bowling and were cheered—though not really surprised, given what Gerald had intimated about enhancing one’s inborn human potential—to find that we both bowled much better than usual. Perhaps, we speculated, talking with Gerald had somehow lifted our games, however temporarily.

We had too few chances to visit him again before he died in 1971, at 81, after a long illness. But I have a sense of having carried on a dialogue with him over the years, as I have listened to tapes and recordings of his lectures and read a number of his books. With titles such as The Third Morality, Man the Master, and The Five Ages of Man, stuffed and overstuffed as they are with speculations, the books remain tantalizing, however hard to fathom some of their conclusions might be. In The Five Ages of Man, for example, Gerald speaks in cosmic terms of a fifth stage of human development, that of the postindustrial (or “leptoid”) man who has the opportunity to take a leap into vastly expanded consciousness, close to that exhibited by the great mystics of earlier times. But exactly what characterized that kind of consciousness? And just how does it resemble that of the great mystics?

Gerald often invoked a line in Matthew Arnold’s sonnet “To a Friend” that refers to Sophocles as one “Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.” Perhaps the last time Gerald did so was in a brief posthumous homage to his friend Eva Greene, coeditor of The Chance of a Lifetime: An Anthology for the Ageless. In 1966, when he composed the piece, he was himself one of the older readers for whom Greene had assembled the passages in her book. After quoting Marcus Aurelius’s saying that “Life is a stranger’s sojourn, a night at an inn,” Gerald suggests that whether one is an absolute ruler or a private person, life’s one pivotal choice is to be either a pilgrim or a vagrant, a wanderer who has lost his way. And when it comes to seeing life as a journey, Greene herself can give her witness to the Stoic advice, respice finem, consider the end, the goal… [Ed. – this excerpt is omitted.]

This piece speaks more directly and personally to the reader about themes that Gerald had cared about all his life, but that mattered more than ever now that he could see his life drawing to a close. He had been a sojourner and a seeker, not a vagrant who had lost his way. It mattered to consider the end, the goal. Respice finem. But it now mattered equally to take the several meanings of those words: not only to consider but also to respect the end, and to look at the end as not only a goal but also the end of his life. It is here that seeing life steadily and seeing it whole comes in, along with the metaphor of a life as a tapestry, the pattern of which becomes apparent only when one stands back to look at it as a whole. One must have the end in sight even in the last stages of living.

For Gerald, the hoped-for end was that of mystical enlightenment allowing him to escape the “wheel of life”—of life, death, and rebirth as affected by one’s past deeds— and he was quite specific when it came to the actual practices that would lead to such enlightenment. In addition to rigorous, life-long meditation, they included resistance to the three obstacles of addictions, possessions, and pretensions. At the same time, he had nothing against accepting the munificent help others offered in order that he might pursue his scrupulous practices undisturbed. In the early 1940s, he bought a tract of land in the Trabuco Canyon in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, some 60 miles south of Los Angeles. In this serene location, he started Trabuco College, an ashram, with Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and other friends and acolytes. It was meant to serve as a “club for mystics,” a retreat for the pursuit of comparative religious studies and practices.

One might see the three men among the visitors in white robes solemnly engaged in morning prayers or perambulating about the grounds. The reigning guru for the group, in addition to Gerald himself, was Swami Prabhavananda, who in 1930 had founded the Vedanta Society in Hollywood.

Reprinted with the kind permission of Sissela Bok. From The American Scholar, Volume 84, No. 2, Spring 2015. The section from Dr. Bok’s article about Gerald Heard is reprinted above.

Copyright © 2015 by Sissela Bok. 

Sissela Bok, Ph.D., a writer and moral philosopher, has led a distinguished academic career. A former professor of philosophy at Brandeis University, Dr. Bok most recently served as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Throughout the decades, she has received numerous awards, medals, and honorary doctorates. A prolific author, Dr. Bok received two awards for her 1978 classic work, Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life. Her most recent book is Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (Yale University Press, 2010).