Cosmos and Psyche Intimations of a New World View

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/cosmos-and-psyche-intimations-of-a-new-world-view/

Click Download Now

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York
10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Ontario, Canada M4P2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of

Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria

3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi–110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland
1310,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,

England

First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group

(USA) Inc.
Copyright © Richard Tarnas, 2006

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-1012-1347-6

Set in Fairfield LH Light

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or 4otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of
this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or
via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and
punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and
do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable
materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
 To my family and friends,
who waited patiently so long
Evening star, you bring all things which the bright dawn has
scattered…

Sappho
 Contents

Preface

I The Transformation of the Cosmos

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

II In Search of a Deeper Order

Two Suitors: A Parable
The Interior Quest
Synchronicity and Its Implications
The Archetypal Cosmos

III Through the Archetypal Telescope

The Evolving Tradition
Archetypal Principles
The Planets
Forms of Correspondence
Personal Transit Cycles
Archetypal Coherence and Concrete Diversity
Assessing Patterns of Correlation

IV Epochs of Revolution
From the French Revolution to the 1960s
Synchronic and Diachronic Patterns in History
Scientific and Technological Revolutions
Awakenings of the Dionysian
The Liberation of Nature
Religious Rebellion and Erotic Emancipation
Filling in the Cyclical Sequence
The Individual and the Collective
A Larger View of the Sixties

V Cycles of Crisis and Contraction

World Wars, Cold War, and September 11
Historical Contrasts and Tensions
Conservative Empowerment
Splitting, Evil, and Terror
Moby Dick and Nature’s Depths
Historical Determinism, Realpolitik, and Apocalypse
Moral Courage, Facing the Shadow, and the Tension of Opposites
Paradigmatic Works of Art
Forging Deep Structures

VI Cycles of Creativity and Expansion

Opening New Horizons
Convergences of Scientific Breakthroughs
Social and Political Rebellions and Awakenings
Quantum Leaps and Peak Experiences
From Copernicus to Darwin
Music and Literature
Iconic Moments and Cultural Milestones
Great Heights and Shadows
Hidden Births

VII Awakenings of Spirit and Soul

Epochal Shifts of Cultural Vision
Spiritual Epiphanies and the Emergence of New Religions
Utopian Social Visions
Romanticism, Imaginative Genius, and Cosmic Epiphany
Revelations of the Numinous
The Great Awakening of the Axial Age
The Late Twentieth Century and the Turn of the Millennium

VIII Towards a New Heaven and a New Earth

Understanding the Past, Creating the Future
Observations on Future Planetary Alignments
Opening to the Cosmos
Sources of the World Order

Epilogue
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
 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.
Cosmos and Psyche
 I

The Transformation of the Cosmos

In each age of the world distinguished by high activity,

there will be found at its culmination, and among the
agencies leading to that culmination, some profound
cosmological outlook, implicitly accepted, impressing its
own type on the current springs of action.

—Alfred North Whitehead

Adventures of Ideas

Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the

universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise
happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches
of the psyche.

—C. G. Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
 The Birth of the Modern Self

The modern self began to emerge, with astonishing force and speed, just
over five hundred years ago. There is scarcely a major figure or idea in the
preceding cultural and intellectual history of the West that did not contribute
to the formation of the modern self, nor has there been any aspect of our
existence subsequently untouched by its unique character and potency. One
can date the period of its emergence in many ways, but it is illuminating to
see that historical epoch as framed by two definitive, symbolically resonant
events, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man in 1486 and
Descartes’s Discourse on Method in 1637—that is, the extraordinary
century and a half that extends from Leonardo, Columbus, Luther, and
Copernicus to Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, and Galileo—climaxing, in
a sense, in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” We
could extend this crucial window, this threshold of transformation, by
precisely another fifty years to encompass the 1687 publication of Newton’s
Principia, by which time the full foundation had been laid for the modern
world and the sovereign confidence of the modern mind. Not just a
revolution had occurred but a new Genesis. Thus Alexander Pope’s telling
epigram for the Enlightenment:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.

But the dawn had already begun to break in Pico della Mirandola’s
Oration, the Renaissance manifesto for the new human self. Composed for
the opening of a great gathering of philosophers invited to Rome by Pico
himself, the Oration described the Creation in a characteristically
Renaissance synthesis of ancient Greek and Judaeo-Christian sources,
combining the biblical Genesis and Plato’s Timaeus for its mythic narrative.
But Pico then went further, in prophetic anticipation of the new form of the
human self about to be born: When God had completed the creation of the
world as a sacred temple of his glory and wisdom, he conceived a desire for
one last being whose relation to the whole and to the divine Author would
be different from that of every other creature. At this ultimate moment God
considered the creation of the human being, who he hoped would come to
know and love the beauty, intelligence, and grandeur of the divine work.
But as the Creator had no archetype remaining with which to make this last
creation, no assigned status for it within the already completed work, he
said to this final being:

Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function
peculiar to thyself have We given thee, Adam, to the end that
according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest
have and possess what abode, what form, what functions thou
thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and
constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou,
constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in
whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits
of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s center that thou
mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world.
We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal
nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as
though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself
in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.

Thus the brilliant Pico, twenty-three years old, gave the prophecy. A
new form of human being announces itself: dynamic, creative,
multidimensional, protean, unfinished, self-defining and self-creating,
infinitely aspiring, set apart from the whole, overseeing the rest of the world
with unique sovereignty, centrally poised in the last moments of the old
cosmology to bring forth and enter into the new. In the decades that
followed, the prodigious generation that emerged immediately after this
prophetic declaration brought forth the decisive moment that in childbirth is
called “crowning”—that dramatic stage when the head of the new child
begins to appear. Within the time span of a single generation surrounding
the year 1500, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael created their many
masterworks of the High Renaissance, revealing the birth of the new human
as much in da Vinci’s multiform genius and the godlike incarnations of the
David and the Sistine Creation of Adam as in the new perspectival
objectivity and poietic empowerment of the Renaissance artist; Columbus
sailed west and reached America, Vasco da Gama sailed east and reached
India, and the Magellan expedition circumnavigated the globe, opening the
world forever to itself; Luther posted his theses on the door of the
Wittenberg castle church and began the enormous convulsion of Europe and
the Western psyche called the Reformation; and Copernicus conceived the
heliocentric theory and began the even more momentous Scientific
Revolution. From this instant, the human self, the known world, the
cosmos, heaven and earth were all radically and irrevocably transformed.
All this happened within a period of time briefer than that which has passed
since Woodstock and the Moon landing.

It was of course no accident that the birth of the modern self and the
birth of the modern cosmos took place at the same historical moment. The
Sun, trailing clouds of glory, rose for both, in one great encompassing
dawn.
 The Dawn of a New Universe

It must have been a breathtaking experience to have been among those

earliest scientific revolutionaries of the modern era, Copernicus and his
immediate successors—Rheticus, Giese, Digges, Bruno, Maestlin, Kepler,
Galileo—as they first began to grasp the stupendous truth of the
heliocentric theory. The sense of cosmic upheaval and wonder would have
been nearly inexpressible. A view of the Earth and its place in the universe
that had governed the human mind virtually without question for untold
thousands of years was now suddenly recognized to be a vast illusion. We
in the twenty-first century, long accustomed to living in the new universe
those Renaissance visionaries first revealed, must call upon a profound act
of the intellectual imagination to enter again into that dramatic moment of
transition between worlds. To have it suddenly dawn upon one that the great
Earth itself, the most obviously stationary and immovable entity in the
cosmos, upon which one had lived in changeless solidity all one’s life, was
in fact at that moment moving freely through space, through the heavens,
spinning and circling around the Sun in an immensely expanded universe—
no longer the absolute fixed center of that universe, as had been assumed
since the beginning of human consciousness, but rather a planet, a
wanderer, an exalted celestial body in a new cosmos whose dimensions and
structure and meaning were now utterly transfigured: such a revelation must
have filled the mind and spirit with an awe seldom known in human history.

Yet it is not just the sheer magnitude of the Copernican revelation that
so easily escapes us today. We also tend to forget, and conventional
histories of the Scientific Revolution tend to overlook entirely, the degree to
which the original discovery was charged with intense spiritual
significance. The early scientific revolutionaries perceived their
breakthroughs as divine illuminations, spiritual awakenings to the true
structural grandeur and intellectual beauty of the cosmic order. These were
not merely abstract conceptual innovations or empirical findings of purely
theoretical interest. They were not, as had been true of astronomy since