Pain, Sex and Time

This is a book by Gerald Heard. The subtitle is: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man.

Catchy title, no?

The book starts off rather well. It proposes that man must make the next step in evolution - mental/expanded consciousness - or degenerate or destroy himself. Note that Heard wrote this around the start of WWII.

The pain and sex in the title has to do with excess energy present for doing this next step that we are failing at doing, hence problems with these. The time part is that it is an illusion - not much done with this that I noticed. He seems to say that when we are intellectually occupied, we are less worried about sex, have less sensitivity to pain and are not as aware of time - he may be on to something here.

Heard then reviews history (including evolutionary history of life) to shown that his points have merit. There are some interesting items here.

Things get a little sketchy and hard to follow near the end - even his sentence structure gets hard to follow - when he starts talking about how to achieve the next step. His method is hard to explain, but it based on explicit effort in special communities. Apparently, he even attempted to found one in California in the 1940's which did not catch on - this is not to say that his ideas were wrong.

Heard was a rather interesting character - see the biographical information in the book. He was friends with Huxley and involved in the Vedanta Society. Meditation was very important to him in later life.

Worth a read, but be prepared to trudge through some rough spots, especially towards the end. The summary at the very end is fairly informative about the book as a whole.

If you read it, let me know if you think I missed anything. I had very high hopes when I started it, but kind of lost them in many respects as I finished it.