At the Threshold of a New World View

We are living at the end of an era. The old structures of the world are cracking apart, the moment of creative chaos is upon us, and the drama of our time has become a great question: What new principles, what new structures—social, political, economic, intellectual, psychological, spiritual—will emerge to shape our future? Everything is at stake, from the deep ecology of our planetary biosphere to the deep ecology of the human spirit.

This drama is taking place within an invisible but powerful context that has been fundamentally shaped by our cosmology, understood in the broadest sense. For a culture’s cosmology is the encompassing framework, the metastructure of meaning, by which everything else is defined. The limits of our cosmological imagination define the limits of our existence. Will we live in a disenchanted, mechanistic, purposeless universe as a randomly produced oddity of isolated consciousness, or will we discover our embeddedness and creative participation in a living cosmos of profound unfolding meaning and purpose? World views create worlds: Our response to these questions will have enduring consequences.

Join Richard Tarnas this evening as we seek insights that might illuminate this challenging moment in our history, and provide a larger context for both understanding and action.

Richard Tarnas is a professor of philosophy and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He also teaches archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. Born in 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland of American parents, he is a graduate of Harvard University and Saybrook Institute. From 1974 he lived and worked for ten years at Esalen Institute, serving as its director of programs and education. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern that became both a best seller and a required text in many universities. His most recent book, Cosmos ] and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network in England.