consciouschoice.com/2007/03/...0703.html

"... In his influential book, Pain, Sex and Time (1939), the
British polymath Gerald Heard defined three stages in human
evolution — physical, technical and psychical...."

[From Ego to We Go

By Daniel Pinchbeck

When I was in my twenties, literature was my ruling passion,
and my heroes were writers like Fitzgerald, Kerouac,
Virginia Woolf and Henry Miller. I longed to emulate the
passionate intensity of their prose, and the “negative
capability” which infused their characters with
recognizable life. When I passed through the crucible of my
own transformational process, I lost interest in novels and
discovered a new pantheon of intellectual heroes. These
days, I find the same level of electrical engagement that I
used to find in novels in the works of thinkers whose
central theme is the evolution and possible extension of
human consciousness. This varied group is made up of
mystics, physicists, philosophers, cosmologists and
paleontologists — the roster includes Rudolf Steiner, Carl
Jung, Edward Edinger, Jean Gebser, Teilhard de Chardin, F
David Peat, Sri Aurobindo and Gerald Heard.

For me personally, most contemporary fiction, like most
current film, has an increasingly retrograde quality. In
their efforts to make their audience identify with a
particular drama or trauma or relationship saga, these
products seem almost nostalgic. We live in a culture that
continually seeks to entertain or at least distract us with
an endless spew of personal narratives, whether paraded on
lowbrow talk shows or parsed in literary novels. If you step
outside of the cultural framing, you suddenly become aware
of the mechanism that keeps us addicted to the spectacle —
and, above all, hooked on ego. Our entire culture is
dedicated to inciting and then placating the desires and
fears of the individual ego — what the media critic Thomas
De Zengotita calls “the flattered self.”

Although they use different language to define it, the
various theorists on the evolution of the psyche all agree
that the crux of our current crisis requires that we
transcend the ego. They suggest that the stage of material
progress and scientific discovery we attained in recent
centuries is not the end of human development, but the
launching pad for another stage in our growth. However, this
next stage differs from previous phases in one essential way
— it requires a “mutation in consciousness” that can
only be self-willed and self-directed. According to this
paradigm, it is as if physical evolution has done billions
of years of work on our behalf, to get us to this point.
Right now, it is our choice whether we would like to go
forward, or fall by the wayside like untold millions of
other species, who over-adapted to one set of conditions,
and could not recreate themselves as their environment
changed.

In his influential book, Pain, Sex and Time, the British
polymath Gerald Heard defined three stages in human
evolution — physical, technical and psychical. “The
first is unconscious — blind; the second is conscious,
unreflective, aware of its need but not of itself, of how,
not why; the third is interconscious, reflective, knowing
not merely how to satisfy its needs but what they mean and
the Whole means,” wrote Heard, who believed we were on the
cusp of switching from the technical to the psychical level
of development. As we enter the psychic phase, we shift
“from indirect to direct expansion of understanding, at
this point man’s own self-consciousness decides and can
alone decide whether he will mutate, and the mutation is
instantaneous.” Originally published in 1939, Heard’s
book has just been reprinted in the US; it was James
Dean’s favorite work, and inspired Huston Smith to turn to
religious studies.

Despite its antique provenance, Pain, Sex and Time remains
“new news” for our time. Heard viewed the immense
capacity of human beings to experience pain and suffering,
and the extraordinary excess of our sexual drive compared to
our actual reproductive needs, as signs of a tremendous
surplus of evolutionary energy that can be repurposed for
the extension and intensification of consciousness, if we so
choose. “Modern man’s incessant sexuality is not
bestial: rather it is a psychic hemorrhage,” Heard wrote.
“He bleeds himself constantly because he fears mental
apoplexy if he can find no way of releasing his huge store
of nervous energy.” Heard foresaw the necessity of a new
form of self-discipline, a training in concentrating psychic
energy to develop extra-sensory perception, as the proper
way to channel the excess of nervous hypertension that would
otherwise lead to our destruction. He thought that we would
either evolve into a “supraindividual” condition, or the
uncontrolled energies would force us back into
“preindividuated” identifications, leading to
nationalist wars and totalitarian fervors, and species
burn-out.

A sign I saw at last year’s Burning Man put it succinctly:
“From Ego to We Go.” As the climate changes and our
environment deteriorates, we are being subjected to
tremendous evolutionary pressures that could push us beyond
individuation, into a deeply collaborative mindset and a new
threshold of psychic awareness. Seventy years after
Heard’s manifesto, whether or not we want to evolve as a
species remains an open question. But the choice is in our
hands.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A
Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
(Broadway Books, 2002) and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
(Tarcher/Penguin, 2006). His features have appeared in The
New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wired and
many other publications.]