Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View
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Synopsis
A companion to The Passion of the Western Mind seeks to demonstrate the existence of a consistent correlation between planetary movements and human history, tracing ancient and modern events while making predictions about the future. Reprint.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
It never ocurred to me to take astrology seriously. Then some people I respect (Stan Grof and others)persuaded me otherwise. If meaning is integral to the structure of the universe and everything is connected then it is not too far fetched that the synchronicity of the planetary positions and the archetypes they represent become expressed in our lives through our natal charts and transits. This book mainly concerns the transits to our planet and illustrates the activity of the archetypal influences represented by the transits by historical events and movements. Tarnas does this well. He is as learned as you would expect from an author of a history of western philosophy. He loves his subject, he is prone to hyperbole. he's an enthusiast. My concern is that he may have just pulled examples from history to illustrate his theories. His hypothesis is brilliant and could be tested. A panel of historians blind to the astrology could rate eras and events according to criteria corresponding to the archetypal flavours proposed by Tarnas. If there was agreement between the historians and Tarnas then the case would be proven and this book would go down as a seminal text. At present it is just an interesting idea. A good read if you can forgive the rhetoric.
8 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Disappointing failure to include insights from Eastern Thought, particularly the Buddhist tradition
16 July 2009
Format:Paperback
As a fan of his previous book, The Passion of the Western Mind, this book was a big disappointment. How can anyone in the 21st century write a book about cosmos and psyche and take almost no account of the vast knowledge systems of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, yogas and meditation practices, especially working in the Centre for Integral Studies? Although Depth Psychology drew on theosophy, theosophy is based on a very simplistic and distorted understanding of the full depths of Buddhist and Hindu philosophical insights into the relationship with psyche and cosmos. Western modes of thinking and practice can no longer claim for themselves universalist truths. Just as Buddhist mindscience is having to encounter and take account of modern science, so western ways of understanding the meta narratives of human culture must now address the deep and profound insights encoded in Eastern thought. For example, any contemporary writer in this area of intellectual exploration must surely take account of the Buddhist tradition where the understanding of the inseparable union of 'emptiness' and 'inner luminosity' and the relationships between the inner and outer cosmos enacted in Buddhist tantra profoundly challenge western scientific materialism and attempts at the post modern transcendence of its limitations.
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48 reviews
158 of 167 people found the following review helpful
Stunning Visionary History: infectiously readable!
19 Jan 2006
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas (Viking) Students of Carl Jung and astrologers will find Tarnas's new work an extension of their own cultural psychology of cycles. To what degree the skeptical majority will be willing to read this large work and suspend of their skepticism long enough to seriously entertain Tarnas's correlations and conclusions is another matter altogether. Much as in his previous work, The Passion of the Western Mind, Tarnas has a gift for global statements and pattern-recognition often missed in less far-reaching histories. Essentially this work is an account of the postmodern mind or the cultural formation of self within the last 500 years with an eye towards the future. The book brims with intense learning, literary history, social movements, philosophical schools, scientific trends, business and economic inclinations, scientific developments, environmental changes in particulars are woven together in to decipherable patterns of cyclic development. Readers of Joseph Campbell's Masks of God will find in Tarnas a fuller account of modern creative mythology, often disguised in our world as history and ideology, science and religion. Like his preceding work, this volume is a work of speculative history as corresponding to the long cycles of the outer planets such as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. These 20 and 30 some odd year cycles offer a grid for Tarnas to notice uncanny correspondences between historical and cultural events in our globalized world which seems to demonstrate a collective unconscious and a human consciousness that will continue to change in profound and essentially unpredictable but radical ways in the future. Tarnas recognizes that we live in a time of incredible cultural and scientific ferment that will radically remake what human beings are and can do in the near futures. These times are fraught with great danger and great promise. Even if one is unwilling to seriously entertain the correspondences between astrological planetary cycles and world-historical events, the book is inspiring because of the way the author sees how we can grasp hold of our future and ride the cycles much as a surfer rides a wave. In many ways Tarnas' study represents one of the most sustained arguments for pattern and predictability in historical processes. One that may set historians on edge because it almost seems to be saying that noticing the cycles of the outer planets can reveal deep patterns of correspondence in terrestrial events. However one responds to this organizing claim in this study, Tarnas has created a great visionary historical work that will influence many, not only in the new age counterculture but also in the business entrepreneurial world of creative innovation and social engineering. If for no other reason, this work has importance as a continuation of Carl Jung's cultural psychology of archetypes and how they can be applied to the interpretation of contemporary events and social and cultural trends in the arts, business, politics, science and religion.
83 of 86 people found the following review helpful
I'm Convinced
27 Jan 2006
Format:Hardcover
When I read Tarnas' first book, "The Passion of The Western Mind," I was incredibly impressed by the depth of his insight, especially in the Epilogue, which expressed a whole constellation of profound ideas concerning the dialectical progression of world views and the relationship of self and world that I (and probably many others) had been blindly groping towards but had neither the breadth of knowledge nor the integrative power to articulate. In those thirty pages, Tarnas managed to formulate not only a tenable, but a rigorously convincing theory of how the subject-object dichotomy and the disenchantment of the cosmos (which he renders intelligible as the necessary price that we have paid for the individuation of the modern human subject) can be overcome. Since then, through years of study and thought, I have gone back to that Epilogue many times, always impressed, not only by the unique depth and clarity of the insights expressed therein, but by those insights' applicability to a vast number of unresolved intellectual and practical issues that constellate our current, postmodern world view.
After reading "Passion," I did some research on Tarnas and I discovered that he was interested in astrology. At first, I was disappointed that the man who had written "Passion" could believe in something as obviously naive and ridiculous as astrology. However, after reading several elegant and rigorously reasoned essays Tarnas had written about archetypal astrology, I was forced to reconsider my position. Over the next few years, I bought several books on astrology, and I found them to be interesting, though I remained unconvinced since the philosophical arguments contained in the books that I read (when they bothered at all) were generally cursory and unsophisticated.
Over the last few months, I have been waiting for "Cosmos and Psyche" with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, hoping that it would live up to the enormous promise of "Passion" while fearing that Tarnas might have gone a way that I could not follow. However, I have just finished reading "Cosmos and Psyche" and it surpasses all of my expectations. I think it can be safely said, without exaggeration, that this book could initiate a global transformation of world views on the level of the transformations initiated by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Not only is the argument the clearest, the most rigorous, and the most inspired feat of sustained philosophical inquiry I have ever read, but the sheer volume of the evidence that Tarnas presents blasted away the last lingering shreds of skepticism I had been holding onto. Anyone who reads this book will be stunned by the synchronistic (not mechanistically causal) correlations of events in human history with the movements of the planets. There are too many of these incredible revelations to list here. Just read the book. Even if you're ultimately unconvinced, which I find highly unlikely assuming that you're willing to question all of your most basic assumptions (the primary philosophical task), you will still be impressed by the consistently high level of discourse that Tarnas has brought to bear on this "outsider" (at least academically speaking) subject. It's impossible to say whether this book will have an immediate catalyzing effect or whether it will take decades for it to come to popular consciousness, but I sincerely hope that its genius is recognized sooner rather than later.
After reading "Passion," I did some research on Tarnas and I discovered that he was interested in astrology. At first, I was disappointed that the man who had written "Passion" could believe in something as obviously naive and ridiculous as astrology. However, after reading several elegant and rigorously reasoned essays Tarnas had written about archetypal astrology, I was forced to reconsider my position. Over the next few years, I bought several books on astrology, and I found them to be interesting, though I remained unconvinced since the philosophical arguments contained in the books that I read (when they bothered at all) were generally cursory and unsophisticated.
Over the last few months, I have been waiting for "Cosmos and Psyche" with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, hoping that it would live up to the enormous promise of "Passion" while fearing that Tarnas might have gone a way that I could not follow. However, I have just finished reading "Cosmos and Psyche" and it surpasses all of my expectations. I think it can be safely said, without exaggeration, that this book could initiate a global transformation of world views on the level of the transformations initiated by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Not only is the argument the clearest, the most rigorous, and the most inspired feat of sustained philosophical inquiry I have ever read, but the sheer volume of the evidence that Tarnas presents blasted away the last lingering shreds of skepticism I had been holding onto. Anyone who reads this book will be stunned by the synchronistic (not mechanistically causal) correlations of events in human history with the movements of the planets. There are too many of these incredible revelations to list here. Just read the book. Even if you're ultimately unconvinced, which I find highly unlikely assuming that you're willing to question all of your most basic assumptions (the primary philosophical task), you will still be impressed by the consistently high level of discourse that Tarnas has brought to bear on this "outsider" (at least academically speaking) subject. It's impossible to say whether this book will have an immediate catalyzing effect or whether it will take decades for it to come to popular consciousness, but I sincerely hope that its genius is recognized sooner rather than later.
108 of 115 people found the following review helpful
A superb, tour de force
11 Feb 2006
Format:Hardcover
Don't let the references to astrology in the other reviews turn you off toward reading this book. I am not particularly interested in astrology, and yet I found this book to be a breath taking, far ranging analysis of where Western culture and history have come from, where it is now, and where it is going. I have been looking for a book that could explain the spiritual dimensions of how, and why, the world has been forever changed. It is not simply a matter of having more technology today than we did 50 years ago. This goes back to the paradigm shift in how reality was viewed as the result of Copernicus' resurrection of ancient Greek philosophical theories of the Universe and our place in it. This book provides a well written, engrossing account of this story and how we got where we are today...and where we are going! Highly recommended!
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