Henry FitzGerald Heard, commonly called Gerald Heard (October 6, 1889 – August 14, 1971), was a historian, science writer, educator, and philosopher. He wrote many articles and over 35 books. Wikipedia
Gerald Heard said in his book Pain, Sex and Time: “[T]he unscientific assumption [is] that the outer world as directly apprehended by the senses is reality, an assumption which is ruling our present civilization. . . . We cannot put right either our economic or our political systems until we cure our strangulated individualities. The first sign of returning sanity, the first symptom that we are attaining the essential objectivity toward our acute problem, is when we begin to realize that our societies are projections of ourselves and that our first radical contribution to a new social order . . . will be made, and will only be made, when we undertake the reintegration of ourselves and set ourselves to continue our evolution by enlarging consciousness. Once that is attained, once we have a real psychology, inevitably there will appear a sane economics and a worthy politics.”
Heard also goes on to say that “expansion of consciousness is as unfamiliar an idea to most as was Copernican’s idea that the earth rotates around the sun rather than the other way around. We cannot imagine that the way out of our dilemma, that the escape through the net of outer events which seems to have us toiled, lies in ourselves any more than practical minds and common sense in Copernicus’s day could image an earth rotating around the sun. This means not merely that we must understand that we happen to things rather than that things happen to us, but that until we have direct experience of the enlarged consciousness which transcends not merely individuality but Time, we see events under a completely stultifying misapprehension.”