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Duncan Campbell with Richard Tarnas 

Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of an Evolving New World View and Initiating A New World View Through Dialogue

In part 1 of the dialogue with Richard Tarnas, we highlight the facet of “depth archetypal astrology” as reclaimed and so richly and innovatively reformulated in Rick’s monumental Cosmos and Psyche. This makes a key contribution to the next step in our contemporary awakening: leveraging and going beyond the integration of the core enduring insights of our indigenous and modern minds, to a conscious awareness that we are participant co-creators of reality in ever-evolving interactive dialogue with the cosmos itself.

In this Part 2, Rick and I talk about the little-known extensive use of depth astrology by C.G. Jung in his clinical work and his realization that the collective unconscious functions as a kind of anima mundi, or world soul, evolving and maturing over time as it is energized through various cosmic constellations. We also give examples of some archetypal constellations that have repeated throughout history with amazing synchronicity – such as the alignments in the paradigm-shifting 1960-1972 period and the previous similar combination in the energy field of the 1787-1798 period, which saw the creation of the United States, the French Revolution and the Mutiny on the Bounty. We discuss the planetary alignments and the energies of 1981-1984 and their recurrence in 2001-2004, which were also present at the beginnings of the Vietnam War (1964-67) and World Wars I and II. As in the traditional arena of our individual psyche, the point of having such cosmic awareness, particularly in turbulent times, is to consciously identify the larger archetypal patterns at work in the individual and collective psyche, and to transform and enact their possibilities in the most life-enhancing and conscious way. (This was effected, for instance, by the worldwide anti-nuclear war demonstrations in the “1984” Reagan era, when in response the U.S. shifted to open negotiations with the “Evil Empire”, rather than continuing to fall back into the era’s “we = good; other = evil reactivity and nuclear escalation of the Cold War).

This Part 3 of my dialogues with Richard Tarnas is itself a kind of prequel, as is Rick’s prior book The Passion of the Western Mind, to his later work Cosmos and Psyche.

In this dialogue we further illuminate the critical importance and history of the emergence of the modern mind with its stress on empowering the individual sense of self, following the indigenous emphasis on the collective, in allowing us to now be able to transcend and include the essence of these prior perspectives in a new “both-and” third consciousness.  This new consciousness is further emerging and blooming in the 21st century beyond the late 20th century ‘post-modern’ bridge phase of the modern mind (what Rick refers to as an “era between eras”).

This third consciousness is both brought about and characterized by dialogue and co-creative participation with the universal consciousness in both its material and subtle energy manifestations.  (“Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation” is a trademark phrase of Living Dialogues.)  It is from this perspective that we can appreciate the great contribution Rick Tarnas has made in Cosmos and Psyche, showing how a contemporary deep and expanded ‘archetypal’ astrology can be supremely relevant to all aspects of our personal and public lives, helping to revivify the unifying worldview aspect of the ancient understanding of “as above, so below” on a planetary scale, threading through the work of modern depth psychology from Freud through C.G. Jung, James Hillman, Stanislav Grof and others in the fields of philosophy, science, spirituality, and cultural transformation.

[>] Click here to listen Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the Dialgoues

Duncan, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. The fields we cover always makes the dialogue just flow so beautifully, and also there’s something about the very nature of a dialogue as you do that is a kind of parallel to the whole attitude towards life and towards the cosmos that I think certainly my books is trying to support and I think our whole kind of spiritual challenge of our civilization at this time is to move into a more dialogical mode with each other, with other cultures, between male and female, between generations and between humanity and other forms of life and with the cosmos itself, so in a sense I think maybe what we’re doing here as a personal dialogue and that you do with so many people who visit with you, is a kind of micro cosmo of this larger dialogical imperative really that calls at our time.

- Richard Tarnas

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