The Third Morality

by Gerald Heard

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332 pages, Hardcover

First published August 9, 2015

About the author

Gerald Heard, born in London on October 6, 1889, of Irish ancestry, was educated in England, taking honors in history and studying theology at the University of Cambridge. Following Cambridge, he worked for Lord Robson of Jesmond and later for Sir Horace Plunkett, founder of the Irish Agriculture Cooperative movement. Heard began lecturing from 1926 to 1929 at Oxford University's Board of Extra Mural Studies. In 1927 he began lecturing for South Place Ethical Society. From 1929 to 1930 he edited "The Realist," a monthly journal of scientific humanism whose sponsors included H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and Aldous Huxley. In 1929 he published The Ascent of Humanity, an essay on the philosophy of history that received the prestigious Hertz Prize by the British Academy. From 1930 to 1934 he served as the BBC's first science commentator, and from 1932 to 1942 he was a council member of the Society for Psychical Research.

In 1937 Gerald Heard came to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, after having been offered the chair of historical anthropology at Duke University. After delivering some lectures at Duke, Heard gave up the post and soon settled in California where from 1941 to 1942 he founded and oversaw the building of Trabuco College, a large facility where comparative-religion studies and practices flourished under Heard's visionary direction. Trabuco College, 30 years ahead of its time, was discontinued in 1947, and the vast properties were subsequently donated to the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

During the 1950s, Heard's main activities were writing and lecturing, along with an occasional television and radio appearance. His broad philosophical themes and scintillating oratorical style influenced many people and attracted a legion of interested persons. But chiefly he maintained a regular discipline of meditation for many years, as the core of his mature beliefs centered around the intentional evolution of consciousness.

A prolific writer, Heard penned some thirty-eight books, the most important of which are his pioneering academic works documenting the evolution of consciousness, including The Ascent of Humanity (1929), The Social Substance of Religion (1931), The Source of Civilization (1935), Pain, Sex and Time (1939), and his last book, The Five Ages of Man (1964). He also wrote several popular devotional books, including The Creed of Christ (1940) and Training for the Life of the Spirit (1941-42). Under the name H. F. Heard (H. F. for Henry FitzGerald, his given name), he wrote a number of mysteries and fantasies, including A Taste for Honey (1941) and The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales (1944). Following five years of illness, Gerald Heard peacefully passed away at his home in Santa Monica, California, on August 14, 1971.

Reviews

[Abraham Katzoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reason is not a map, but a motor, and to be sure that one is going to
have the motor-force to proceed along the plan indicated
and approved one has to appeal to the will.

“It is added, however, that whoso climb by this path of personal devotion to a God must learn, as soon as they
approach enlightenment, that they have been worshipping a projection of the creative nature which is within
his own his Christ,
To retain anthropomorphic methods is then only to
postpone an essential step in spiritual development. It must be taken sooner or later and the advantages of
postponement, the advantages of making this provisional
and temporary hypothesis, are, we see, generation by
generation becoming less. To-day those who cling to
anthropomorphic projection find themselves confronted with far more difficulties than they are presented with
Solutions. "”

“

The mind involved in ways and means,
full of the management and negotiation of individual
relationships still resounding and vibrating with the surface contacts of its personality with and against other;
such a dazed and deafened mind must be in the silence for some time before the re-echoings of the world's hubbub die down such a surface, flurried and cross-hatched, must be left to calm before it can settle
to smoothness and translucency”

We have to do more than shut out the surging clamour of the present world. We have to hear so clearly a deeper music that we can sing it against the prevailing discord until others can catch up the theme and the discord be drowned in
the new harmony.
This, in brief,, is both to shut out the tumult and yet
be present in the crowd”

“In- deed, so much advance in self-control has been dis-
appointingly slow because of our intellectualist vanity which would not recognize that the dictates of the surface will produce only surface results and even when the whole system is made so to obey, it is arrested and not co- ordinated.”

The authentic result of co-ordination between mind and body through the subconscious is illustrated when
the afterwards " I felt no fear and was practician says :
surprised I was taking such an attitude for granted. I felt I had only to keep quiet, not interfere, but back up with my fullassentwhatwasgoingforward. Insome
way I seemed a spectator in the background”

“In the nervously inhibited (a common mental paralysis in our age in which the sensitive are mostly dominated by anxiety and fear),
alcohol, by destroying their caution which may be excessive can release pent energies, and they become fluent and assured but never as assured and fluent as they might be, would they face and rid themselves of their anxiety and be able to say in perfect soberness : " One to me is shame and fame."

Whether, then, it is right or wrong to wish so to act becomes an academic question. Right or wrong is a
matter of seeing things as they are or as we mistake them to be. For with the third cosmology and its ethic we arrive back at the point where what is morally right
is, and can only be, what is scientifically right. Truth
and goodness come again together. This is the goal of that sanity to which Buddhism looked forward when it
taught that understanding was the fundamental morality, because he who had insight must in the end discover
the two enlightening and emancipating truths, that he and all life are one and that he and all life create
sorrow, disappointment and pain by building up a world of craving, a world composed by the selective and trans-
mutative power of greed and fear.