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CIIS Professor Emeritus and founding director of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Richard Tarnas returned for his beloved annual lecture exploring the deeper currents of our time.
On February 6, Professor Emeritus and founding director of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Richard Tarnas returned to CIIS Public Programs to share his annual lecture exploring the deeper currents at work in our time. In this year’s talk, Richard set out a perspective on the complex nature of the human journey that has served as the implicit framework and underlying context of his yearly state-of-the-world reports. His starting point was one of C. G. Jung’s most crucial contributions to psychology: the recognition that the unfolding of a human life is at a deep level a spiritual journey, and that this individual journey is embedded within a collective human journey that is itself informed by powerful archetypal forces and principles, all in complex interplay. This archetypal dimension appears to be expressive not only of the human psyche, but of the cosmos itself.
For the past several years, Richard has shared with the CIIS community his archetypal weather reports on the state of the world. These sessions, which drew thousands of viewers, combined an analysis of world historical trends and contemporary developments with Jung’s depth psychology and cosmological explorations. Richard’s archetypal approach to astrology asks profound questions about the unfolding of the year to come, and how it is embedded within much larger, ever-changing cycles that shape both our personal and collective lives. Richard often offered these annual talks back in the early 2000s, addressing the community in Namaste Hall on campus. In 2020, in the depths of the early pandemic, he felt moved to return to the subject, prompted by the sweeping transformations underway both sociopolitically and celestially. This series of livestream talks used symbolic formations such as “the changing of the gods” to help gain purchase on the many upheavals of the present. His 2024 talk, below, offers an in-depth introduction to archetypal astrology, drawing on Tolkien to ask how we “decide what to do with the time that is given us.”
Richard Tarnas, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at CIIS, and the founding director of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program in which he taught for 30 years. His courses explored the history of ideas, depth psychology, archetypal cosmology, cultural history, and the evolution of consciousness. Formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute, he is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern that is widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network. He is also the co-editor with Sean Kelly of Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof. Richard Tarnas is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and served on the Board of Governors for the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
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