Richard Tarnas, "Cosmos and Psyche"

WARNING:- "Deep" thinking coming up, questions seeking no conclusions, no "facts" acknowledged without interpretation.....etc etc etc

Richard Tarnas has written a full history of Western Philosophy, "The Passion of the Western Mind", very good for those who like that sort of thing. Following this, he has written "Cosmos and Psyche" which takes up the story, applying its conclusions (!) to our modern world.

As I sip my coffee in Costa's and enjoy a Toastie, the book makes for light reading. Here is an excerpt that I find pertinent to what some might call "the human condition"...

"Let us, then, take our strategy of critical self-reflection one crucial and perhaps inevitable step further. Let us apply it to the fundamental governing assumption and starting point of the modern world view — a pervasive assumption that subtly continues to influence the postmodern turn as well - that any meaning and purpose the human mind perceives in the universe does not exist intrinsically in the universe but is constructed and projected onto it by the human mind.

Might not this be the final, most global anthropocentric delusion of all? For is it not an extraordinary act of human hubris — literally, a hubris of cosmic proportions — to assume that the exclusive source of all meaning and purpose in the universe is ultimately centered in the human mind, which is therefore absolutely unique and special and in this sense superior to the entire cosmos? To presume that the universe utterly lacks what we human beings, the offspring and expression of that universe, conspicuously possess? To assume that the part somehow radically differs from and transcends the whole? To base our entire world view on the a priori principle that whenever human beings perceive any patterns of psychological or spiritual significance in the nonhuman world, any signs of interiority and mind, any suggestion of purposefully coherent order and intelligible meaning, these must be understood as no more than human constructions and projections, as ultimately rooted in the human mind and never in the world? "

Do "we" assume such things?

What (if we do) is the result of assuming such things?

What are the alternatives to such assumptions?

Answers please, on a Postcard......and keep it brief.

Reading a little more of this book, Mr Tarnas is now drifting into Jung and Jung's interest and writings on synchronicity. I find it quite interesting, this in the context of the OP of this thread. This in as much as Jung saw such events in the external world, as distinct from the inner psyche, as providing a way out of the "subjective" nightmare of the modern mind.


Richard Tarnas writes:-

"Throughout most of his (Jungs) writings this engagement was understood as taking place within what Jung essentially regarded as the sacred circle of the human psyche. Eventually, however, Jung’s many years of studying synchronicities moved him to recognize this engagement as something that is enacted within the larger sacred circle of nature as a whole. In this perspective, not just the interior depths of the human psyche but also the interior depths of nature itself supports the unfolding of human spirituality and each person’s struggle towards individuation."

(Mr Tarnas explains that Jung noted parallels between synchronistic phenomena and the Chinese understanding of the Tao, the ancient Greek conception of the cosmic sympathy of all things, the Hermetic doctrine of microcosm and macrocosm, the medieval and Renaissance theory of correspondences, and the medieval concept of the preexistent ultimate unity of all existence, the unus mundus unus mundus - the unitary world)

I would also link all this with a post I made on another thread......

"Myths are found throughout our world, throughout all time. In Buddhism there are the Underground Bodhisattvas, who express the liberative potential within all of us, in the ground of the earth, in the psychological ground of being, ever ready to spring forth. As another has said, the image represents "the fertility of the earth itself and the wondrous, healing, natural power of creation, or the phenomenal world."

"For the earth brings forth fruits of herself" (St Mark) as the Bible tells us, speaking of the liberative qualities of spatiality and temporality.

The Bible itself speaks of the "lamb slain before the foundations of the earth", which - at least to me - suggests profound interconnections between temporal time and eternity."


Anyway, perhaps I could keep all this to my own notebooks. But others might be interested.

(From memeory, I think Mr Tarnas is fast approaching the point where he begins to associate much of this with astrology and star-signs, basically where I leapt off last time around. Much like when any one begins to speak of "vibrations". But each to their own - who knows? Think of this if anyone out there simply considers that I am wasting my time)

As mentioned somewhere in the two previous posts, Richard Tarnas moves on to astrology. Where, rightly or wrongly, I lost interest.

But the mythic dimension of life, and all things related, holds interest. At least, more than following the unfolding of Brexit.

I am dipping into another book on much the same themes as Mr Tarnas speaks of, and have found a couple of definitions of religion/spirituality that I find suggestive:-

Carl Jung suggests that the primary function of religion, is to provide an ‘extramundane’ point of reference to counterbalance the disenchanted reality of the ordinary everyday world, and to give the acts of life a deeper spiritual significance.


The second, by James Heisig (who writes primarily on subjects relating to the Japanese Kyoto School and that schools interaction with Western philosophy) speaks of spirituality as referring to the ‘essential temper of a person’. A spiritual orientation to life, he continues, ‘consists on the one hand, of an increase of moral insight into the complexities of life combined with a vision of hope for the future, and, on the other, of an awareness of being possessed by a reality transcending the conditions of concrete individuality’

Regarding the "essential temper of a person", I would say more often than not, such is a unquestioned collection of assumptions provided by our very own cultural times. "Without having any kind of conceptual grasp of science, philosophy, or religion — without having read a single theoretical book — one would still have a world view that broadly reflects the dominant assumptions about the nature of reality, assumptions conditioned by the prevailing scientific, religious, and philosophical understanding of the time and place in which one lives."

Anyway, enough for now.