PSYCHE & COSMOS

January 23, 1997 a six-pointed star,
known as the Seal of Solomon
links the heavenly cosmology with
the earth's eastern horizon

The cosmology of the Hieros Gamos, the 21st century icon
predicted by C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli;
Delivered into contemporary thought by
Richard Tarnas, author of "Cosmos and Psyche,"
excerpted below:


"Humanity's 'progress of knowledge' and the 'evolution of consciousness' have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. for our whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all our facilities -- intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational -- enter the process of our knowing. How we approach 'the other,' and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including our own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate. Not only our personal lives but the very nature of the universe may demand of us now a new capacity for self-transcendence, both intellectual and moral, so that we may experience a new dimension of beauty and intelligence in the world -- not a PROJECTION of our desire for beauty and intellectual mastery but an ENCOUNTER with the actual unpredictably unfolding beauty and intelligence of the whole. I believe that our intellectual quest for truth can never be separated from the cultivation of our moral and aesthetic imagination.

As Goethe recognized, it is often the case that the very faculties we require for our knowledge can be developed only through our receptive engagement with what we wish to comprehend, which transforms us in the very process of our inquiry. Thus, the study of archetypal forms opens the archetypal eye. And thus, the open encounter with the potential reality of an ANIMA MUNDI makes possible its actual discernment. In this view, only by opening ourselves to being changed and expanded by that which we seek to understand will we be able to understand at all. Such a shift involves gradually opening our awareness to a dimension of reality that, thought potentially of deep significance, may at first seem scarcely perceptible, the subtle 'patterns which connect' --patterns of meaning within and without, the delicate and elusive, the repressed and denied, that which is obscured by our certainties, that which suggest and intimates rather than commands and proves. Such a transformation in our approach to life requires, as Jung says, a new openness to our OWN 'other,' our interior other: our unconscious, in all its plenitude of forms. For here, perhaps, we begin to encounter the interior mystery of the cosmos itself."

Richard Tarnas
"Cosmos and Psyche"