Cosmos and Psyche

I just have unlimited respect, as so many people do, for your work.

You are a cultural historian, an astrologer, well-known for your books, The Passion of the Western Mind, Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our Worldview, and importantly also Cosmos and Psyche, Intimations of a New Worldview.

You've been a professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the founding director of its graduate program on philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness.

Did I get anything wrong there since I'm working from web sources?

Um, so anyway, it's very, yes, that's out there.

And I pretty sure my birth data is included there too.

I've read, uh, four of your books that obviously, uh, cosmos and psyche and, The Passion of the Western Mind, and also the Prometheus book and your wonderful edited book and tribute to Stan Grof, which I just loved.

And between the last time we talked and now, I look back on our last conversation and I realized I just was so, I won't use the word, but I don't have it, but I was so naive.

We tend to think of a worldview as abstract, but the picture we carry of reality shapes how alone we feel, what we believe our suffering means, and how much freedom we imagine we have within the patterns of life.

My guest is Richard Tarnas, a philosopher, cultural historian, and author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche.

Rick spent a formative decade at Esalen, the Big Sur Institute where psychology, spirituality, philosophy, and early psychedelic research met.

Working there with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, he began exploring possible correspondences between psyche, history, and the movements of the planets.

And so I usually recommend particular astrologers that you can get a reading from online.

And then there's resources online too.

in books, I wrote Cosmos and Psyche as basically a bridge work that Passion of the Western Mind, my first book that we were talking about earlier, The History of Western Worldviews, that was kind of a preparation for Cosmos and Psyche because it gave an understanding of, you know, evolution of worldviews and of archetypes from Plato on to, you know, etc.

But Cosmos and Psyche sets out foundations of archetypal astrology but applies it to history and the larger patterns of history right up through our time.

The planets don't necessarily cause anything.

I just read that Richard Tarnas quote again from Cosmos and Psyche that somebody had posted.

They don't cause things.

It's just that they are a depiction of what is archetypally happening at the time.