”˜Distilled Spirits’ traces birth of New Age spirituality

Gerald Heard is the most influential religious thinker you’ve never heard of.

Without Heard, some of the major spiritual developments of 20th-century America — the introduction of Eastern mysticism, the development of the human potential movement and the spiritual use of psychedelic drugs — might never have happened. And at least one skeptical California newspaperman named Don Lattin might never have sobered up, stopped using, and found a measure of serenity and faith.

All bear the fingerprints of Heard, who has been called “the godfather of New Age” — an Englishman born at the end of the Victorian era who migrated to California and died here in relative obscurity.

Read it all.