Quotessence
Home / Authors / Richard Tarnas Books
Richard Tarnas

Richard Tarnas Books

Historian

Related Quotes

“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 the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all out faculties–intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational–enter the process of knowing. How we approach "the other," and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate.”

KnowingHolism
Book:Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View
Create image

“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.”

Spiritual PhilosophyPhilosophia PerennisEternal TruthRichard TarnasThe Cosmic Role Of Mankind
Book:Cultural Crisis and Transformation: Exploring Archetypal Patterns in World News and Culture
Create image

“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)”

ArtLeonardoRaphaelMichelangeloTransformation Of ConsciousnessRichard TarnasCosmos And PsycheThe Renaissance
Book:Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View
Create image

“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.”

BelieveWellsEnoughLightSufferingFallI BelieveImaginationLossMoralGreatnessCapableShadowTasksTragedyWideOur TimeContradictionAestheticResurrectionRecognizingRebirthNobilityRegenerationHubrisSuffering And Death
Author:Richard Tarnas
Create image

“[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.”

MenWorldWayMadeSelfFacesUniverseViewsEnvironmentEgoConsciousCrisisPsychologicalMortalsDestructiveThrownMeaninglessSolitaryExistentialWorld ViewSelf DestructiveExistential CrisisSoulless
Author:Richard Tarnas
Create image