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Pendle Hill Pamphlets
A Quaker Mutation
“A Quaker Mutation” is a critical evaluation of the Society of Friends and of Pendle Hill by a brilliant, forward looking thinker, who here sets forth his own surprising and revolutionary theory of the kind of education, especially adult education, which can help a new order to arise out of present world conditions.
33 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 12, 2017
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About the author
Gerald Heard
61 books11 followersGerald 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 13, 2023
Written in 1940.
The paper questions the long-term viability of Quakerism and proposes a solution. Based on subsequent pamphlets, Heard's writing here and elsewhere had were influential in the thinking of some future pamphlet authors. There seems to be timely relevance to the current Quaker practice in my opinion (albeit one of most ignorance and on the sidelines).
"Social service is an essential symptom of a living religion but it is a by-product." (p. 8) [Do I agree with this?]
Heard argues that individualism and small group experience of the spirit within is also Quakerism's weakness because without the authority to sustain the institution/organizational framework, the following will wane. An evangelism becomes required – which pushes the external rather than the internal (or, he argues, a psychology of the religion that can be transmitted). Absent the study of the earliest Christianity, Quakerism missed the opportunity to embrace "the essential value and difficult technique of mental – not merely physical – silence...whose function is to release deeper and wider levels of consciousness." (p. 18)
Here Heard seems to be embracing the benefits of meditation and a power in the unsaid: "there is a silence more fruitful than speech, and this silence will be covered over and lost if its nature is not understood.” (p. 18)
"Deliberate thought is essential to remedy and check spontaneous, inaccurate thinking." (p. 20)
Heard then turns to explaining his call for a psychology within a religion. "The subconscious mind, it is now realized, controls not merely our mind and body, but also our apprehension of the outer world. We now see that we are not directly given objective reality; we do not perceive things as they actually are." (p. 22)
"It is already obvious that individualized democracy, based on mutual self-interest, does not create a society so strong and so aware of its common and self-transcending aim that it can resist totalitarianism. A society resting on mutual self-interest is not merely unable to rise beyond a certain level of cohesion and sense of purpose. Its solidarity actually grows less, because the intensity of the irreconcilable individualism in each constituent is increased not allayed, by the appeal to his self-interest as the motive of social endeavor." (p. 26)
Heard identifies three findings regarding education:
1. in a changing world, education must be lifelong: we all have to re-educate ourselves every decade, every year. Therefore, a system which only educates the younger age-groups is utterly inadequate.
2. a system which still attempts to stock the mind and to mold and mobilize the will solely through the surface areas of the will and mind is utterly inefficient.
3. the individual is an arbitrary division of humanity and that we can only live and learn appositely if we do so in an organic social unit. (pp. 27-28)
The paper questions the long-term viability of Quakerism and proposes a solution. Based on subsequent pamphlets, Heard's writing here and elsewhere had were influential in the thinking of some future pamphlet authors. There seems to be timely relevance to the current Quaker practice in my opinion (albeit one of most ignorance and on the sidelines).
"Social service is an essential symptom of a living religion but it is a by-product." (p. 8) [Do I agree with this?]
Heard argues that individualism and small group experience of the spirit within is also Quakerism's weakness because without the authority to sustain the institution/organizational framework, the following will wane. An evangelism becomes required – which pushes the external rather than the internal (or, he argues, a psychology of the religion that can be transmitted). Absent the study of the earliest Christianity, Quakerism missed the opportunity to embrace "the essential value and difficult technique of mental – not merely physical – silence...whose function is to release deeper and wider levels of consciousness." (p. 18)
Here Heard seems to be embracing the benefits of meditation and a power in the unsaid: "there is a silence more fruitful than speech, and this silence will be covered over and lost if its nature is not understood.” (p. 18)
"Deliberate thought is essential to remedy and check spontaneous, inaccurate thinking." (p. 20)
Heard then turns to explaining his call for a psychology within a religion. "The subconscious mind, it is now realized, controls not merely our mind and body, but also our apprehension of the outer world. We now see that we are not directly given objective reality; we do not perceive things as they actually are." (p. 22)
"It is already obvious that individualized democracy, based on mutual self-interest, does not create a society so strong and so aware of its common and self-transcending aim that it can resist totalitarianism. A society resting on mutual self-interest is not merely unable to rise beyond a certain level of cohesion and sense of purpose. Its solidarity actually grows less, because the intensity of the irreconcilable individualism in each constituent is increased not allayed, by the appeal to his self-interest as the motive of social endeavor." (p. 26)
Heard identifies three findings regarding education:
1. in a changing world, education must be lifelong: we all have to re-educate ourselves every decade, every year. Therefore, a system which only educates the younger age-groups is utterly inadequate.
2. a system which still attempts to stock the mind and to mold and mobilize the will solely through the surface areas of the will and mind is utterly inefficient.
3. the individual is an arbitrary division of humanity and that we can only live and learn appositely if we do so in an organic social unit. (pp. 27-28)
Displaying 1 of 1 review