One day during Xmas break, while writing a term paper at home, I tuned into WILL-AM, the radio station of the University of Illinois, to hear, by chance, Gerald Heard talk about the evolution of consciousness "Eureka!" I had found a humanist train of thought along secular lines. Heard gave me an alternate route to intellectual maturity.
In his books (The Sources of Civilization; Pain, Sex and Time. among others), he captured my imagination consistently in manifold revelations.
An example (my words, not his). There had to be a first time when one lone individual ancient man conceived of the motive power of the horse. He must have climbed a ledge with some trepidation where the herd came by and jumped onto the back of one animal. The other men who saw in the herd a man-form on one animal could not comprehend such a unique feat; the legend of the centaur may have formed there and then, the man-horse. Heard called it an ancient double-exposure of perception. Such is at the base of "egression" into a new frame of consciousness. I began to think of the "firsts" of all things human, and the nature of evolution.
My weaning from the received fundamentalism of the Christian religion began by observing that seriously taking the fundamentalism into practice was not going to work and that I began to differ with other believers from that moment.
There was so much hypocrisy in everyday usage among those I observed that I was vindicated in my judgment to stop investing organized religion and received morality with any credibility. The gulf between ideas preached and action practiced grew larger every year of study.
To actualize ideas became a goal. Question authority, speculative statements, theses, beliefs. Operationalize ideas into good and bad practice and the impracticable. Actively listen by recasting the received idea in terms satisfactory to the speaker. Define terms operationally. Complicate yourself in a complex world. Look for alternatives. Find another more practicable basis of morality.
And that attack on my thought processes engendered by Heard woke me up, rather suddenly, to alternative possibilities.
The chance hearing of that speech by Gerald Heard clinched my break with the religionists. Others write in the same vein, Shaw's "Preface" to Androcles and the Lion; Gould, Jaynes, etc. But that fundamentalism also remains in my experience history as a strong tendancy to fundamentalism, to what is fundamental, elemental, transferred to many other modes of thinking and aspects of life.
The key product of my Heard experience is the evolution of consciousness.
Thus, my epiphany, the Heard thing, is the kind of sudden awakening that Chauvin has in the first act, at the crack of the firing-squad rifles that conicides with Chauvin's birth pangs bringing to life his vision, the ideological, incorporeal Chauvin, the IChauvin (Ideological Chauvin) stepping gloriously forth. (I recalled another theatrical moment, the crack of lightning onstage during the seamen's chorus in Wagner's opera, Die Fliegende Holländer.
Epiphany is essential to the evolution of consciousness, like a mutation (punctuated equalibrium), only a rather sudden experience in an "egression" (Heard's word) into a new frame of reference, rising to a new level of consciousness.
(Last updated on January 30, 2006 )