Episode 97 - Richard Tarnas guest (Part 2) – 6 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 counsels 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 this is Part two of my dialogue with Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche, in our dialogue entitled On The Road of 2012 Now. We begin by repeating the last six minutes of Part One to flow into this continuity of Part Two. Welcome once again.

Richard Tarnas: And I think Obama represents a collective shift in which we’re perhaps a little more ready than we were before to see the more complex reality, rather than to see there, any particular problem as having a simple black versus white or yes or no solution, and it’s, involves much more of a intricate deep thoughtful patient response to the complexity of life and synthesizing the opposite.

So if I could then link that up with your subsequent point about where we are today and how a different view of the cosmos could be helpful to us right now, it, in both cases the challenge seems to be for this powerful human spirit that has taken the form in modernity of a kind of Promethean solar hero rebel that is breaking forth into new horizons of freedom and knowledge and self-realization, but has done so at a cost of both cutting off history, tradition, the past, the wisdom of other cultures of the indigenous ancestors, and has also done so at the cost of cutting off the recognition of the intelligence and soul of the whole, that is of nature and the earth and the cosmos, and instead presumed these qualities as being only human, as if only human beings, exclusively human beings had the properties of intelligent purposeful awareness and capacity for emotion and meaning and spirit.  And by arrogating these things to the human self and saying that the universe is nothing but disenchanted atoms and genes and black holes that are accidentally, has somehow brought forth this oddity of human consciousness. We’ve created both a spiritual and psychological crisis for the modern self, isolated in its prison of estrangement, but we’ve also brought forth a very real biological ecological global crisis because the tyranny of the separated self, empowered by this incredibly powerful technology, has been wreaking havoc to its own self-destructive consequence.

So I think there’s a real common, there’s really a common thread here that connects up the, the generational historical cultural challenges that we went through 40 years ago and are again now engaging perhaps with greater wisdom and experience, and the larger challenge of modernity and post-modernity, which is to come into a more participatory reciprocal engagement, with the larger whole of life, rather than to presume our separate superiority, which is a kind of recipe for hubris and disaster.

Duncan Campbell: And that’s really a theme that I want to touch on as we continue with our dialogue, is the notion that you put forth of participatory epistemology, a fancy and yet very elegant term for how we know, if epistemology is the study of how we know, the great discovery of re-enchanting the universe and reopening to awakening our indigenous knowledge -- which is that the entire cosmos is infused with a soulfulness, an Anima Mundi, we might say, of the cosmos, that everything is infused with consciousness, with spirit, and being able to actually experience that and not to experience the world only reductively through the rational mind, we open up a whole huge vista here in our experience that means we’re in dialogue with a living universe at all times and we can be receptive to the revelations of that universe -- rather than trying to impose the grid or super-impose the grid of an ideology, of a religion, of a particular worldview that becomes either/or and exclusive, instead of paradoxical and holding the space for a multitude of different perspectives with the confidence that out of that holding of that space, a logos or a coherence, a higher resolution, appreciating the integrity of all the differences will emerge.

And here Barack Obama, unique among all the candidates, in a sense brought back to life the motto of the United States, which is E pluribus unum: “Out of the many, we are one” -- which had not been paid attention to for generations in our political discourse. He also was the only candidate to say, “Yes we can, together we can”, and that “I am here as an expression of you”, rather than the adolescent hero model – “I will fight for you” --adopted by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain based on polling that they thought was going to work. They didn’t realize that the adolescent mind was ready to make a leap forward, and their polling showed them that if they were quote, “a fighter” and they said, “I will fight for you”, to the populace already accustomed to being disempowered and not having access to shaping their own lives, well in that case I’d better have a champion go to bat for me.

But actually it went way beyond that. The great paradigm shift was that when Barack Obama said, “Together we can, you know, white people, brown people, yellow people, red people, black people, all of us together, able, disabled, gay, straight, we together can shape our world and shape our planet in a kind of harmonious vision that is our highest aspiration”, and people responded to that.  So he became in a sense the deep elder within the political dialogue, far wiser and full of a great equanimity and hope at the same time, very different than the other candidates who were older and quote, “more experienced” than he.

And so it’s in that spirit that we’re approaching this 2012 conference, that if we engage the world, not only with our mind, not only trying to dominate or control it or protect ourselves from unexpected contingencies, but if we engage with our heart and our soul as well, we become open to its revelations, and so we know more as a result and we can actually dance with this energy of transformation, rather than being frozen in fear at the fact that things are changing with the rapidity that they’re changing.

And so one of the great images of the Fall election was John McCain quote, “interrupting” his campaign to sort of have photo opportunities of rushing around the Capitol in Washington, D.C., hither and yon, but with nothing to say about our economic crisis when he sat in the meeting in which President Bush had called all the candidates together and other people in the Cabinet to talk about the economy, so he gave the impression of charging about without directionality or wisdom.  And that’s very much the kind of response that one can expect from the mind or the consciousness when it is fearful and uncertain of how to approach transformation.

And so since that’s really the topic at the heart of our conference is transformation rather than information, we’re basically coming together with a certain intentionality and understanding that at this point in history each and every participant in a gathering is an essential part of the energy field of consciousness that is going to be awakened there. No longer are we coming to these conferences to hear the charismatic CEO or the professor or the teacher or the great orator tell us what to do. We’re coming together to evoke that authentic person in ourselves, like a Barack Obama, from obscurity, into the present, and to evoke from him an articulation of our highest aspirations, rather than to be there like goslings being fed from the Moses on the mountain traditional paradigm.

Richard Tarnas: But to pool the wisdom of the whole there.

Duncan Campbell: Exactly. And this is going to be one of the real breakthroughs I think in this conference because right from the beginning we will instruct all of ourselves that we are all there together to create and participate in a field of energy that will be revelatory, and this is the deep meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’. It’s not destruction, it’s not the end times in the sense of termination. ‘Apocalypse’ literally means ‘lifting the veil’ or ‘revelation’.  So even as the imperfections and the non-sustainable actions of our financial system managers and of our energy system managers and of our health care system managers are being revealed to us, this is step one of the revelation, the revelation of what is not sustainable; but step two is the revelation together that we can evoke of how to go forward.

And so that will be the focus of our intentionality and the understanding and trust that if we come together like that, we will together, just as Obama said, create a way forward, it will be revealed to us in our Gathering, and that really fits, I think, perfectly that we engage the world, not as one dimensional political activists, and then there are other people that meditate in another reality, but really like Drew Dellinger and yourself and myself and the participants in this conference where we’re going to take on big issues like 2012 and what it might mean as a gift from the Mayan culture to our present situation. But we’re going to take it on in a multidimensional way, with its political implications, its cultural implications, its implications for our energy system, for our personal spiritual infrastructure, as well as our outer infrastructure, how we get our food, how we get our energy and so on. So as we come to the end of this dialogue, perhaps Rick you would like to just say what you’re anticipating here and why you might be looking forward to participating in this gathering.

Richard Tarnas: You mentioned the word ‘revelation’, revelatory, epiphanic, epiphany kinds of experiences; all these need to be part of the larger whole of human knowledge, and we lose a crucial part of the, we lose the possibility of engaging the larger mystery of life if we do not permit this larger participation by all the human faculties in the active knowledge, and then that active knowledge becomes more of a, an existential engagement with life that is more capable of relationally evoking and understanding of the whole, rather than an objectifying imposition of our demands, our needs to exploit and take the resources of the whole just for our self-enhancement. In a way, what I’ve suggested is in a parable I gave in Cosmos and Psyche…

Duncan Campbell: Yes, exactly.

Richard Tarnas: thought experiment, is this, you might be thinking of it too, this parable of the two suitors…

Duncan Campbell: I was just about to invite you to tell that because I think it expresses perfectly in parable form just what you’re saying."

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell