Cosmos and Psyche Quotes

“Humanity's "progress of knowledge" and the "evolution of consciousness" have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all out faculties–intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational–enter the process of knowing. How we approach "the other," and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.
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― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“The very nature of the objective universe turns any spiritual faith and ideals into courageous acts of subjectivity, constantly vulnerable to intellectual negation.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“our intellectual quest for truth can never be separated from the cultivation of our moral and aesthetic imagination.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“I believe that the disenchantment of the modern universe is the direct result of a simplistic epistemology and moral posture spectacularly inadequate to the depths, complexity, and grandeur of the cosmos. To assume a priori that the entire universe is ultimately a soulless void within which our multidimensional consciousness is an anomalous accident, and that purpose, meaning, conscious intelligence, moral aspiration, and spiritual depths are solely attributes of the human being, reflects a long-invisible inflation on the part of the modern self. And heroic hubris is still indissolubly linked, as it was in ancient Greek tragedy, to heroic fall.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“knowledge to be ultimately emancipatory rather than constricting, bringing a potential increase of personal freedom and fulfillment through an enlarged understanding of the self and its cosmic context.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“The evidence suggests not that the planets themselves cause various events or character traits, but rather that a consistently meaningful empirical correspondence exists between the two sets of phenomena, astronomical and human, with the connecting principle most fruitfully approached as some form of archetypally informed synchronicity.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“The suggestive patterning and often delicate precision of detail in such coincidences notoriously escape the net of objective assessments and experimental tests. Synchronicities seem to constitute a lived reality the experience of which depends deeply on the sensitive perception of context and nature.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“the tricksterlike unpredictable spontaneity of the divine,”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Astrology,” he stated, “represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“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...”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“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. (p. 4)”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once. This may be the task we must begin to engage if we wish to gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of human consciousness, and the history of the Western mind in particular: to see that long intellectual and spiritual journey, moving through stages of increasing differentiation and complexity, as having brought about both a progressive ascent to autonomy and a tragic fall from unity – and, perhaps, as having prepared the way for a synthesis on a new level. From this perspective, the two paradigms reflect opposite but equally essential aspects of an immense dialectical process, an evolutionary drama that has been unfolding for thousands of years and that now appears to be reaching a critical, perhaps climactic moment of transformation. (p. 14)”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“In effect, the objective world has been ruled by the Enlightenment, the subjective world by Romanticism.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Thus the arising in us of an archetypal complex can serve as a window to a universe, indeed a door and a pathway, but it can also serve as an enclosing wall, an impermeable boundary and barrier that effectively creates a limit to our universe of possibilities. Only a critical awareness of that potential boundary, and an act of the imagination to transcend it, can open the horizon of our universe. I have found that such an awareness is mediated most effectively by a recognition of the dominant archetypal complexes and dynamics of a given time, whether for an individual or an entire civilization, and that this recognition is extraordinarily enhanced by a knowledge of what planets are in alignment at what time and for how long, an informed understanding of which can provide a crucial, irreplaceable perspective on the shifting archetypal dynamics of life.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View