|
Perhaps we, as a civilization and a species, are undergoing a rite of passage
of the most epochal and profound kind, acted out on the stage of history with, as it were, the cosmos itself as the tribal
matrix of the initiatory drama. Perhaps humankind has entered into the most critical stages of a death-rebirth mystery. In
retrospect it seems that the entire path of Western civilization has taken humankind and the planet on a trajectory of initiatory
transformation, separating it from the larger community of life, from the cosmos itself, into a state of spiritual alienation,
into an encounter with mortality on a global scale—from world wars and holocausts to the nuclear crisis and now the
planetary ecological crisis--an encounter with mortality that is no longer individual and personal but rather transpersonal,
collective, planetary. It is larger than all of us. It seems that we are all entering into something new, a new development,
a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, and we cannot really know where it is headed.
I believe we have a
choice. There are many possible universes, many possible meanings, floating through us. We are not solitary subjects in a
meaningless universe upon which we can and must impose our egocentric will. Nor are we just empty vessels, as it were, on
automatic, playing out passively the implacable processes of history, of the universe, of our environment, of our genes. Rather,
we are all miraculously self-reflective creative participants in a larger cosmic drama, in a co-evolutionary unfolding of
reality. It is a complex process where both we and the universe are mutually creators and created. What seems to be unfolding
is not only a recovery of the soul of the world, the anima mundi, but a new relationship to it. Something new is
being forged.
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 tory transformation, separating it from the larger community of life, from the
cosmos itself, into a state of spiritual alienation, into an encounter with mortality on a global scale—from world wars
and holocausts to the nuclear crisis and now the planetary ecological crisis--an encounter with mortality that is no longer
individual and personal but rather transpersonal, collective, planetary. It is larger than all of us. It seems that we are
all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, and we cannot really know
where it is headed.
RICHARD TARNAS, Ph.D., demonstrates the existence
of a direct connection between planetary movements and the archchetypal patterns of human experience. He examines eras such
as the cultural rebellion as the 1960s and the French Revolution, the world wars, September 11 and its aftermath, bringing
us up to 2012 and beyond.
|
