Richard Tarnas Quotes

“Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once. This may be the task we must begin to engage if we wish to gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of human consciousness, and the history of the Western mind in particular: to see that long intellectual and spiritual journey, moving through stages of increasing differentiation and complexity, as having brought about both a progressive ascent to autonomy and a tragic fall from unity – and, perhaps, as having prepared the way for a synthesis on a new level. From this perspective, the two paradigms reflect opposite but equally essential aspects of an immense dialectical process, an evolutionary drama that has been unfolding for thousands of years and that now appears to be reaching a critical, perhaps climactic moment of transformation. (p. 14)”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“When God had completed the creation of the world as a sacred temple of his glory and wisdom, he conceived a desire for one last being whose relation to the whole and to the divine Author would be different from that of every other creature. At this ultimate moment God considered the creation of the human being, who he hoped would come to know and love the beauty, intelligence, and grandeur of the divine work.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cultural Crisis and Transformation: Exploring Archetypal Patterns in World News and Culture

“Within the time span of a single generation surrounding the year 1500, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael created their many masterworks of the High Renaissance, revealing the birth of the new human as much in da Vinci's multiform genius and the godlike incarnations of the David and the Sistine Creation of Adam as in the new perspectival objectivity and poietic empowerment of the Renaissance artist; Columbus sailed west and reached America, Vasco da Gama sailed east and reached India, and the Magellan expedition circumnavigated the globe, opening the world forever to itself; Luther posted his theses on the door of the Wittenberg castle church and began the enormous convulsion of Europe and the Western psyche called the Reformation; and Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory and began the even more momentous Scientific Revolution. From this instant, the human self, the known world, the cosmos, heaven and earth were all radically and irrevocably transformed. All this happened within a period of time briefer than that which has passed since Woodstock and the Moon landing. (p. 4)”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“When God had completed the creation of the world as a sacred temple of his glory and wisdom, he conceived a desire for one last being whose relation to the whole and to the divine Author would be different from that of every other creature. At this ultimate moment God considered the creation of the human being, who he hoped would come to know and love the beauty, intelligence, and grandeur of the divine work...”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View