Richard Tarnas - Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

http://www.cosmosandpsyche.com/

With The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas gave the world what many scholars, from Joseph Campbell to Huston Smith, regarded as one of the finest histories of the Western mind and spirit ever written. Now, Cosmos and Psyche challenges the basic assumptions of the modern world view with an extraordinary body of evidence that points towards a profound new understanding of the human role in the cosmos.

Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View shines new light on the unfolding drama of human history and our own critical age. It also suggests a new possibility for reuniting religion and science, soul and intellect, ancient wisdom and modern reason in the quest to understand the past and create the future. Published by Viking Press 2006 (hardcover), and Plume 2007 (paperback).

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A NEW COSMOLOGY FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Contents

Preface xi

I The Transformation of the Cosmos 1

The Birth of the Modern Self 2
The Dawn of a New Universe 5
Two Paradigms of History 13
Forging the Self, Disenchanting the World 22
The Cosmological Situation Today 36

II In Search of a Deeper Order 51

Two Suitors: A Parable 52
The Interior Quest 64
Synchronicity and Its Implications 74
The Archetypal Cosmos 91

III Through the Archetypal Telescope 105

The Evolving Tradition 105
Archetypal Principles 114
The Planets 126
Forms of Correspondence 143
Personal Transit Cycles 150
Archetypal Coherence and Concrete Diversity 172
Assessing Patterns of Correlation 190

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Preface

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, Santayana declared, and the
metaphor is apt. The mind that seeks the deepest intellectual fulfillment does not
give itself up to every passing idea. Yet what is sometimes forgotten is the larger
purpose of such a virtue. For in the end, chastity is something one preserves not for
its own sake, which would be barren, but rather so that one may be fully ready for
the moment of surrender to the beloved, the suitor whose aim is true. Whether in
knowledge or in love, the capacity to recognize and embrace that moment when it
finally arrives, perhaps in quite unexpected circumstances, is essential to the virtue.
Only with that discernment and inward opening can the full participatory
engagement unfold that brings forth new realities and new knowledge. Without this
capacity, at once active and receptive, the long discipline would be fruitless. The
carefully cultivated skeptical posture would become finally an empty prison, an
armored state of unfulfillment, a permanently confining end in itself rather than the
rigorous means to a sublime result.

It is just this tension and interplay—between critical rigor and the potential
discovery of larger truths—that has always informed and advanced the drama of our
intellectual history. Yet in our own time, at the start of a new millennium, that
drama seems to have reached a moment of climactic urgency. We find ourselves at
an extraordinary threshold. One need not be graced with prophetic insight to
recognize that we are living in one of those rare ages, like the end of classical
antiquity or the beginning of the modern era, that bring forth, through great stress
and struggle, a genuinely fundamental transformation in the underlying assumptions

and principles of the cultural world view. Amidst the multitude of debates and
controversies that fill the intellectual arena, our basic understanding of reality is in
contention: the role of the human being in nature and the cosmos, the status of
human knowledge, the basis of moral values, the dilemmas of pluralism, relativism,
objectivity, the spiritual dimension of life, the direction and meaning—if any—of
history and evolution. The outcome of this tremendous moment in our civilization’s
history is deeply uncertain. Something is dying, and something is being born. The
stakes are high, for the future of humanity and the future of the Earth.
No recital is necessary here of the many formidable and pressing problems—
global and local, social, political, economic, ecological—facing the world today.
They are visible in every headline in our daily news, monthly journals, and annual
state of the world reports. The great enigma of our situation is that we have
unprecedented resources for dealing with those problems, yet it is as if some larger
or deeper context, some invisible constraint, were negating our capacity and resolve.
What is that larger context? Something essential seems to be missing in our
understanding, some potent but intangible factor or set of factors. Can we discern
the more fundamental conditions in which our many concrete problems might
ultimately be rooted? What are the most important underlying issues that confront
the human mind and spirit in our era? Focusing particularly on the “Western”
situation, centered in Europe and North America though now variously and acutely
affecting the entire human community, we can observe three especially fundamental
factors:

First, the profound metaphysical disorientation and groundlessness that
pervades contemporary human experience: the widely felt absence of an adequate,
publicly accessible larger order of purpose and significance, a guiding metanarrative
that transcends separate cultures and subcultures, an encompassing pattern of
meaning that could give to collective human existence a nourishing coherence and
intelligibility.

Second, the deep sense of alienation that affects the modern self: here I refer
to not only the personal isolation of the individual in modern mass society but also
the spiritual estrangement of the modern psyche in a disenchanted universe, as well
as, at the species level, the subjective schism separating the modern human being
from the rest of nature and the cosmos.
And third, the critical need, on the part of both individuals and societies, for a
deeper insight into those unconscious forces and tendencies, creative and destructive,
that play such a powerful role in shaping human lives, history, and the life of the
planet.

These conditions, all intricately interconnected and interpenetrating, surround
and permeate our contemporary consciousness like the atmosphere in which we live
and breathe. From a longer historical perspective, they represent the distillate of
many centuries of extraordinary intellectual and psychological development. The
compelling paradox of this long development is that these problematic conditions
seem to have emerged from, and be subtly interwoven with, the very qualities and
achievements of our civilization that have been most progressive, liberating, and
admired.

It was this complex historical drama that I explored in my first book, The
Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of Western thought that followed
the major shifts of our civilization’s world view from the time of the ancient Greeks
and Hebrews to the postmodern era. In that book, published in 1991, I examined and
attempted to understand the great philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas and
movements that, over the centuries, gradually brought forth the world and world
view we inhabit and strive within today. As with many such works that seem to take
hold of their authors until they are completed, I was moved to write that book for
more reasons than I fully grasped when I began the ten-year task. But my principal
motive from the start was to provide, for both my readers and myself, a preparatory
foundation for the present work. For while The Passion of the Western Mind

examined the history that led to our current situation, Cosmos and Psyche addresses
more precisely the crisis of the modern self and modern world view, and then
introduces a body of evidence, a method of inquiry, and an emerging cosmological
perspective that I believe could help us creatively engage that crisis, and our history
itself, within a new horizon of possibility. I hope this book will point towards an
enlarged understanding of our evolving universe, and of our own still-unfolding role
within it.

R.T.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF COSMOS AND PSYCHE — RICHARD TARNAS

Richard Tarnas was born in 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland, of American parents. He grew up in Michigan, where he studied Greek, Latin, and the classics under the Jesuits. In 1968 he entered Harvard, where he studied Western intellectual and cultural history and depth psychology, graduating with an A.B. cum laude in 1972. For ten years he lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Huston Smith, and Stanislav Grof, and later served as director of programs and education. He received his Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute in 1976. From 1980 to 1990, he wrote The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of Western thought which became a best seller and continues to be a widely used text in universities throughout the world. He is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he currently teaches. He also teaches on the faculty of the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and gives many public lectures and workshops in the U.S. and abroad.

Birth information:
February 21, 1950
12:30 PM
Geneva, Switzerland

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"It is hard to think of many books written in the past century that will still be read two hundred years from now. Cosmos and Psyche will top that short list. It is majestic, sweeping, and profound. This will be a book for the ages. It will stand over time with the seminal expressions of the human spirit."

—William Van Dusen Wishard
author of Between Two Ages:
The 21st Century and The Crisis
of Meaning

"This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a book."

—Mary Hynes
CBC Tapestry

"Cosmos and Psyche is an epoch-making work. It combines impeccably meticulous scholarship and extraordinary clarity of thinking and writing with deep creative vision. The evidence contained here represents the most significant challenge I have seen to the materialistic paradigm of modern science."

—Stanislav Grof, author of Psychology of the Future

"What more important message could there be for our time? If you want to understand more deeply the currents which have shaped and are shaping our world, then this passionate, brilliant, and luminous book is essential reading."

—David Lorimer, Scientific and Medical Network Review

"Breathtaking in the scope and scale of its vision, this extraordinary book shatters our cosmological assumptions as it awakens us to a living universe and its creative intelligence. Tarnas succeeds masterfully in bringing his encyclopedic knowledge forged in writing the critically acclaimed Passion of the Western Mind to the task of discerning the archetypal pulse of history. Spellbinding, eloquent, compelling, Cosmos and Psyche will be a marker for an entire generation."

—Christopher Bache, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies,
Youngstown State University, author of Dark Night, Early Dawn

"Some rare books, presenting very challenging evidence after decades of research, have the power to transform a whole culture. It happened with the groundbreaking works by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. It may happen now with Cosmos and Psyche. Searching beneath the depths of the psyche Tarnas has found the heights of the cosmos. This book will radically transform the way we see cultural and political history, individual life journeys, and our sense of participation in the universe."

—Jordi Pigem, author of La odisea de Occidente (The Odyssey of the West)

"Cosmos and Psyche opens doors in the reader’s mind, doors towards the future. Yes, it records, analyzes, and interprets events of the past, but its primary relevance points towards the future. Its thorough research fulfills a function that is central to the genuine, hard-nosed pursuit of human knowledge: ‘the elicitation of disbelief and the celebration of surprise’ (Lewis Thomas). Richard Tarnas dares to be far ahead of conventional thought. He broadens our horizons until we suddenly see with delight vistas and connections we never expected. Here at last is a world view which – in contrast to prevailing ones – has a future."

—David Steindl-Rast, author of Belonging to the Universe

"With this book Tarnas has succeeded in unveiling what only a few years ago might have seemed impossible: an accessible bridge between the mainstream high culture and an emerging world view that returns the soul to the cosmos."

—Renn Butler
New Age Journal Reviews

"A profound and beautiful book. Could there be a hidden order to our universe that conventional science has completely overlooked? With rich historical scholarship and exquisite prose, Tarnas has written a work that not only challenges our ways of thinking about the world but is a transformative experience in itself. A brilliant tour de force that will ignite debate for years to come."

—Ray Grasse, author of The Waking Dream

"Beyond the depths of our inner experience, even beyond the wonders of the natural world, Cosmos and Psyche confronts us with the astonishing challenge of discerning meaning in the very order and structure of the physical universe. Reconnecting the heavens with the human psyche may well be the ‘last frontier’ in the re-enchantment of the cosmos. Richard Tarnas’ magnum opus sets the grounds to meet, and ultimately overcome, that deepest of all dualisms. The opening of the archetypal eye has never received a more powerful and elegant expression."

—Jorge N. Ferrer, author of Revisioning Transpersonal Theory

"Tarnas not only possesses a staggeringly comprehensive reservoir of cultural and historical knowledge, he is a lucid, beautiful writer who can sustain not only the interest but the excitement of the reader for hundreds of pages at a time."

—Frederick J. Dennehy
Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter