friends (several others of whom, including Christopher Isherwood, were also British) to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta. Heard became an initiate of Vedanta. Like that of his friend Aldous Huxley (another in the circle), the essence of Heard's mature outlook was that a human being can effectively pursue intentional evolution of consciousness. He maintained a regular discipline of meditation, along the lines of yoga, for many years. He took interest in parapsychology and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. Heard concluded that the impediment to be addressed was "the problem of letting in a free flow of comprehension beyond the everyday threshold of experience while keeping the mind clear."<ref>Heard, Gerald, "Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mind?" in Psychedelic Review" Issue Number 1, Summer 1963, pp. 8. Millbrook, NY:International Federation for Internal Freedom.</ref> In 1942, he founded Trabuco College as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be pursued. It was essentially a cooperative training center for the spiritual life. Living as a freelance scholar, Heard had enjoyed security in America by way of what he had inherited from Horace Plunkett as well as his own family. He used some of his inherited resources toward this most ambitious of projects. The idealistic experiment required land, and Heard bought 300 acres in Trabuco Canyon, in the Santa Ana Mountains. Heard was the guiding light and a helpful resident sage but, by nature, he was neither an organizer nor a manager. Felix Greene, a nephew of Christopher Isherwood, had filled those roles. Professionally, Greene ultimately pursued a career in journalism and film-making, but at the founding of Trabuco, he had exercised some talent in the planning of architecture and land-development. Soon after the very able Greene left the community and got married, the practical side of life at Trabuco College began to slide. Heard deeded the land and facilities to the Vedanta Society of Southern California, which still maintains the facility as a Ramakrishna monastery and retreat. Psychedelics In 1954 Heard tried mescaline and, in 1955 tried LSD. He felt that, used properly, these had strong potential to "enlarge Man's mind" by allowing a person to see beyond his ego. In August 1956, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson first took LSD—under Heard's guidance and with the officiating presence of Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist then with the California Veterans Administration Hospital. According to Wilson, the session allowed him to