Richard Tarnasis the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he currently teaches. Born in 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland, of American parents, he grew up in Michigan, where he received a classical Jesuit education. In 1968 he entered Harvard, where he studied Western intellectual and cultural history and depth psychology, graduating with an A.B. cum laude in 1972. For ten years he lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with Stanislav Grof, Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Huston Smith, and James Hillman, later serving as Esalen's director of programs and education. He received his Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute in 1976 with a dissertation on LSD psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and spiritual transformation. From 1980 to 1990, he wroteThe Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of Western thought from the ancient Greek to the postmodern which became a bestseller and continues to be a widely used text in universities throughout the world. In 2006, he published Cosmos and Psyche- Intimations of a New World View, which received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network in the UK. Formerly president of the International Transpersonal Association, he is on the Board of Governors of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. In addition to his teaching at CIIS, he has been a frequent lecturer at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and gives many public lectures and seminars in the U.S. and abroad.
Praise for Cosmos and Psyche
“Breathtaking in the scope and scale of its vision, this
extraordinary book shatters our cosmological
assumptions...Spellbinding, eloquent, compelling.”—Christopher
Bache, professor of philosophy and religious studies, Youngstown
State University
“Majestic, sweeping, and profound. This will be a book for the
ages.”—William Van Dusen Wishard, author of Between Two Ages: The
21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning
“This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a
book.”—Mary Hynes, CBC Tapestry
“What more important message could there be for our time? If you
want to understand more deeply the currents which have shaped and
are shaping our world, then this passionate, brilliant, and
luminous book is essential reading.”—David Lorimer, Scientific and
Medical Network Review
“Cosmos and Psyche is an epoch-making work. It combines impeccably
meticulous scholarship and extraordinary clarity of thinking and
writing with deep creative vision. The evidence contained here
represents the most significant challenge I have seen to the
materialistic paradigm of modern science.”—Stanislav Grof, author
of Psychology of the Future
Praise for Cosmos and Psyche
"Breathtaking in the scope and scale of its vision, this
extraordinary book shatters our cosmological
assumptions...Spellbinding, eloquent, compelling."-Christopher
Bache, professor of philosophy and religious studies, Youngstown
State University
"Majestic, sweeping, and profound. This will be a book for the
ages."-William Van Dusen Wishard, author of Between Two Ages: The
21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning
"This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a
book."-Mary Hynes, CBC Tapestry
"What more important message could there be for our time? If you
want to understand more deeply the currents which have shaped and
are shaping our world, then this passionate, brilliant, and
luminous book is essential reading."-David Lorimer, Scientific and
Medical Network Review
"Cosmos and Psyche is an epoch-making work. It combines impeccably
meticulous scholarship and extraordinary clarity of thinking and
writing with deep creative vision. The evidence contained here
represents the most significant challenge I have seen to the
materialistic paradigm of modern science."-Stanislav Grof, author
of Psychology of the Future
According to Tarnas, acclaimed author of The Passion of the Western Mind, history is on the verge of a major shift, comparable to the one wrought by Copernicus and Galileo, but a seemingly antiscientific one: an astrological turn that can only be understood thorough chronicling planetary alignments as they correlate to the rise of the modern mind over the last 500 years. Understanding planetary alignments, for Tarnas, is crucial to the world's future and requires "a genuine dialogue" with the cosmos, by "opening ourselves more fully" to "the other," to ancient and indigenous epistemologies, even "to other forms of life, other modes of the universe's self-disclosure." Filled with philosophical, religious, literary and scientific thinking ranging from Luther and Kepler through Hemingway and even Hitchcock and Dylan, Tarnas's book is not only sweeping in subject but dense and sometimes painfully slow going. It requires at once a strong background in the history of modern thought, an advanced knowledge of astrology, a willingness to withhold skepticism about the role of planetary alignments of the past in understanding life today and the avoidance of imminent world catastrophe. Tarnas's call to redefine what we consider as "legitimate knowledge" will resonate in some sectors, but it will be a tough sell with the more scientifically hardheaded. (Jan. 23) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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