Episode 96 - Richard Tarnas guest (Part 1) – 5 of 7 On the Road of “2012 NOW – Empowering the Transformation”

Transcript

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational. You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification. A breath of fresh air! Much love and respect.” – Amit Kapadiya

In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, we featured a special series of dialogues with myself and other elders in the weeks leading up to and including the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. 2008 elections. Those dialogues can be listened to separately on this site or as gathered as a series on my website www.livingdialogues.com under the collective title “Engaged Elder Wisdom Dialogues”. They address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for creating and sustaining a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)

In all my Living Dialogues from their inception I talk in various ways about the call to generate dialogues across generational, ethnic, gender, religious, wealth, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out -- required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that we all are called to play in our evolution for it to take place.

This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative ways of living and sharing together, to engage the deep spirit and spirituality of our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”™.

And that is what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN, SOBONFU SOME. TED SORENSEN, ROBERT THURMAN, DAVID MARANISS, DAVID BOREN, GEORGE LAKOFF, TOM HAYDEN, JAY INSLEE, BRACKEN HENDRICKS, BOB GOUGH, VAN JONES, BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, LESTER BROWN, DAVID MENDELL, DEBORAH TANNEN, JOHN GRAY, ARI BERK, SUSAN JACOBY, JOSEPH M. MARSHALL III, JOHN O’DONOHUE, BRANT SECUNDA, MARK ALLEN, MICHAEL BECKWITH, ROBERT SITLER, JOHN MAJOR JENKINS AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.

All the best, Duncan.

P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the appreciations received from you.

"Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions, through the work of western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning, a dia – flow -  of logos - meaning, beyond what any one individual can bring through alone, so join us now as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues.

Duncan Campbell: Welcome to Living Dialogues. I’m your host Duncan Campbell, and with me for this particular dialogue I am truly delighted to have as my guest, my great friend and colleague, Richard Tarnas, cultural historian and professor of philosophy and depth psychology, whose first book, The Passion of the Western Mind, became both a bestseller and required reading eventually at many universities. A graduate of Harvard University, he is the founding director of the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and also teaches on the faculty of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara.

About his first book, The Passion of the Western Mind, Joseph Campbell had this to say: quote, “The most lucid and concise presentation I have read of the grand lines of what every student should know about the history of Western thought. The writing is elegant and carries the reader with the momentum of a great novel. A noble performance”, close quote. With respect to Cosmos and Psyche, his masterwork published in 2006. William Van Dusen Wishard, the author of Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning, said, quote, “It is hard to think of many books written in the past century that will still be read 200 years from now. Richard Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche will top that short list. It is majestic, sweeping and profound. This will be a book for the ages. It will stand over time with the seminal expressions of the human spirit”, close quote.

And as you know Rick of course, we have done several deep dialogues about both Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche, subtitled Intimations of a New World View, and this is a particularly timely dialogue we’re now doing to follow on those earlier dialogues because it is in preparation for a great gathering that we’re going to have in Fort Collins, Colorado, May 29 and May 30 of this year, 2009, entitled 2012 Now: Empowering the Transformation. And in leading up to that, since you are one of the presenters, I am one of the presenters and I also serve as master of ceremonies, I have also orchestrated this pilgrimage dialogue if you will, a series of dialogues that are On the Road to 2012 Now.

And that is really in the tradition, it occurred to me Rick, of something you would be very familiar with, which is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was one of the great medieval works in which Geoffrey Chaucer broke with tradition, where the focus of most literature until that time had been on the noble class Boccaccio’s Decameron, the nobles fleeing the plague and that collection of stories, and Chaucer was the first to group a set of shared stories under the rubric of, or the framing of a pilgrimage, and here he has his characters leaving London and walking and spending the night at various inns and they’re walking on a pilgrimage toward the cathedral of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, and so as they continue to walk toward the object of their pilgrimage, they are in effect on the pilgrimage already, and as they share stories there is a revelation of the deep commonality of the human spirit. One of the great breakthroughs of Jeffrey Chaucer was to have characters that extended through all social classes. He had The Millers Tale, The Wife of Bath, The Knight’s Tale and so on.

And so, here we are, embarked on a series of Pilgrimage Dialogues, which are part of our 21st century evolution of consciousness where all of us together come into this gathering, and all of those virtually listening on the internet or on the radio are participants on this great psychic unfolding and co-creators of the energy field that is emerging already from this intentionality.

And so with that background, I’m going to ask you Rick maybe to tell a little bit about your own personal journey that led you here, and then we’ll embark on this journey together with shared stories and bring the ostensible subject matter, which is the event of the December 21st, 2012 end of the Long Count calendar of the Mayans into a larger framework of the Primordial Tradition, the great tradition of archetypal astrology in the western world, which you have really revivified in your masterwork, Cosmos and Psyche.

Richard Tarnas: Well thank you for welcoming me here Duncan, and good to be back in this series…

Duncan Campbell: Yes.

Richard Tarnas: I, in thinking about the journey that I’ve taken here, I suppose when, I could look right back to the fact that I come out of a European Christian and Catholic background for which, of course, Chaucer was embedded in and that was the whole processional and the sacred festivals that went through the year where it’s characteristic of that world as they are of any good indigenous society that lives in a sacralized world. So there’s that in the background.

Though of course, by taking the more characteristic path of modernity into the modern engagement with a cosmos that’s been shaped by the scientific revolution in our collective psyche and by kind of absorbing, as anybody who gets a good, or received a good 20th century education received a kind of forging of a skeptical and critical intellectual engagement with life and the world, and so that move went into a very different relationship to these mysteries, and I suppose its been my journey with, it’s not unusual, it’s very similar to so many others over the last 50 years, is a journey in which one in a sense moves from that kind of childhood womb of meaning into the, into “the light of common day”, to use Wordsworth’s famous phrase, the Romantic poet, and then through longer, deeper transformative process, one comes back into relationship to a mystery that perhaps, we could say, points to the existence of an ensouled cosmos after all, but perhaps a little more complex and multidimensional and extraordinary than our childhood version of it -- and one that in some sense represents the synthesis of the, of the more modern and scientific and rational and materially empirical synthesis of that with the more mythopoetic spiritually informed consciousness that is characteristic of the shamanic traditions and the Romantic cultural tradition within the West.

So in a way my journey has kind of reciprocated that, which I think so many of my, our, contemporaries of the last century have had an experience like that. I could point out the big stages within that for me were certainly in the late 60’s and early 70’s when I was at Harvard as you mentioned in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge was like every college university center in, certainly in the United States and England and really I think most Europe and most of the world. These were centers of tremendous counter-cultural ferment and new ideas and radical changes of perspective and practice were taking place, and it was also the time of the psychedelic revolution where sacred medicines were coming into widespread use, and in that process, many, many people’s worldview was opened up radically.  And at the same time the great Asian mystical traditions were entering very strongly into the Western consciousness, coming from Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism and Sufism as well.

So in all those respects there was quite a transformation of consciousness, you know, that is still unfolding in our time, and on top of that, or I should say for me, mediating that was the decision I made after leaving college to do my graduate education out here in California, and I then met Stanislav Grof and began ten years of living and working and studying at the Escalon Institute in Big Sir, California where many remarkable teachers were, you know, Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Houston Smith; and Stan Grof was very significant Scholar in Residence there during those years, and I eventually became the director of programs.

But for all the time that I was there I was also a student, and, you know, basically kind of assimilating these extraordinary extremes of thought and understanding that were really kind of opening up the more constrained vision that has been the price that we’ve paid for the conventional modern mode of consciousness that has brought us, you know, many technological and scientific gifts, but at the same time at a price, a price of what we could use to perhaps sum up most concisely with the word ‘disenchantment’, “the disenchanted universe” that’s Max Weber’s famous term, to describe the universe that emerged out of the scientific revolution and the kind of rational objectification of the world and the eclipsing of that of those dimensions of mystery that cannot be comprehended or penetrated by the reductionist mind. That’s a bit of a journey description that brings us up anyway into the 1970’s and 80’s, and from then on it was my own sort of personal writing and research that came out of that gestating matrix, or womb, of processes that I’d been through up until that point.

Duncan Campbell: It’s a very wonderful summary and explanation that you give there as the very fine cultural historian and philosopher that you are, and it’s very similar to my own journey, as you and I know, as we’ve mentioned before. We found ourselves together in many of these same places at different times. You and I were both at Harvard in Cambridge. I was there from ’67 to ’70 in the Law School, and you were there ’68 to ’72 as an undergraduate; and we were both there during the two years of the Harvard Strike during the Vietnam era. And also as you point out, all this tremendous ferment was taking place also in that pillar, we might say, of the rational mind that is Harvard University, one of our great universities, dedicated to the search for knowledge through reason; and I would say that the Law Schoo, if anything, was even a bit more a temple of rationalism than the undergraduate curriculum…

Richard Tarnas: Yes.

Duncan Campbell: But they were both heavily marked by that. For instance, the Harvard Philosophy Department in those days was dominated by the English analytic philosophers who were very different than the existentialist philosophers or those influenced by Nietzsche or the Romantic era, George Frederick Hegel, for instance, and Heidegger and so on, who were really absent for the most part from the Harvard curriculum (although I had studied them all in the more progressive, and less modernist-establishmentarian, Philosophy Department at Yale in my undergraduate years there).

And it was really in the margins of that Harvard university curriculum in the late ‘60s that people like yourself and myself, who became seekers of a larger truth, who were open to the beginning inroads of the mystical Eastern traditions that began to show up on or near campus, that also were exposed to the other indigenous traditions that began to filter through, and I think it’s very interesting that both of us then moved out west in the United States. I wound up going to Colorado, where I became a student of a Tibetan teacher who was bringing with him a particular very refined and evolved spiritual system from the East that’s now become quite common knowledge with the emergence of the Dalai Lama and the old Tibetan tradition, Robert Thurman, popularizing it and so on. And you went all the way out to California and joined with Stanislav Grof, one of the great pioneers in consciousness research whom you lived and worked with there in the same house for a number of years. And you opened to the natural world by going to California, out of that kind of cerebellum, where it really was the, you might say, the heritage of our Atlantic European culture in the Cambridge University environment. It was very much…

Richard Tarnas: The neo-cortex of the Western self, you know, all the universities throughout the land."

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell