Richard Tarnas Quotes & Sayings

The very nature of the objective universe turns any spiritual faith and ideals into courageous acts of subjectivity, constantly vulnerable to intellectual negation. — Richard Tarnas

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the universe. — Richard Tarnas

I believe our task is to develop a moral and aesthetic imagination deep enough and wide enough to encompass the contradictions of our time and history, the tremendous loss and tragedy as well as greatness and nobility, an imagination capable of recognizing that where there is light there is shadow, that out of hubris and fall can come moral regeneration, out of suffering and death, resurrection and rebirth. — Richard Tarnas

The Modern Self must confront the shadow of hubris. — Richard Tarnas

education is a process through which truth is not introduced into the mind from without, but is "led out" from within. — Richard Tarnas

The discovery of the unconscious is a great spiritual undertaking. — Richard Tarnas

And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.
— Richard Tarnas

Cognition begins with sensation. — Richard Tarnas

The forms of mathematics, the harmonies of music, the motions of the planets, and the gods of the mysteries were all essentially related for Pythagoreans, and the meaning of that relation was revealed in an education that culminated in the human soul's assimilation to the world soul, and thence to the divine creative mind of the universe. — Richard Tarnas

The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection. — Richard Tarnas

Knowledge based on the senses is therefore a subjective judgment, an ever-varying opinion without any absolute foundation. True knowledge, by contrast, is possible only from a direct apprehension of the transcendent Forms, which are eternal and beyond the shifting confusion and imperfection of the physical plane. Knowledge derived from the senses is merely opinion and is fallible by any nonrelative standard. Only knowledge derived directly from the Ideas is infallible and can be justifiably called real knowledge. — Richard Tarnas

the striving (and anxious) Christian, deprived of the Catholic's recourse to sacramental justification, could find signs of his being among the elect if he could successfully and unceasingly apply himself to disciplined work and his worldly calling. Material productivity was often the fruit of such effort, which, compounded by the Puritan demand for ascetic renunciation of selfish pleasure and frivolous spending, readily lent itself to the accumulation of capital. Whereas traditionally the pursuit of commercial success was perceived as directly threatening to the religious life, now the two were recognized as mutually beneficial. — Richard Tarnas

[Having] appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ... Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe ... and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view-i.e., in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomized, soulless, and self-destructive. — Richard Tarnas

Ours is an age between worldviews, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated. Yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like — Richard Tarnas

Above all, we must awaken to and overcome the great hidden anthropocentric projection that has virtually defined the modern mind: the pervasive projection of soullessness onto the cosmos by the modern self's own will to power. — Richard Tarnas

Astrology is the Via Regia to the enchanted cosmos. — Richard Tarnas

I believe that the astonishingly consistent and nuanced reality of the planetary correlations with the archetypal dynamics of human life is one of the most compelling intimations we have that we live in a meaning-laden and purposeful universe. — Richard Tarnas

At the foundation of Hegel's thought was his understanding of dialectic, according to which all things unfold in a continuing evolutionary process whereby every state of being inevitably brings forth its opposite. The interaction between these opposites then generates a third stage in which the opposites are integrated - they are at once overcome and fulfilled - in a richer and higher synthesis, which in turn becomes the basis for another dialectical process of opposition and synthesis... Hegel's overriding impulse was to comprehend all dimensions of existence as dialectically integrated in one unitary whole. In Hegel's view, all human thought and all reality is pervaded by contradiction, which alone makes possible the development of higher states of consciousness and higher states of being. — Richard Tarnas