Duncan Campbell: Rick, I just want to thank you for these two great masterworks, The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche, and all the gifts that are given in them, and for the perseverance and the great patience, openheartedness and open-mindedness that you describe on your own journey you had to develop, from your initial education as an intellectual and one who is well-educated in the modern mind, to open up to these insights. It’s been a great journey. It’s a great journey to take with you when we read these books, and it’s a great pleasure to spend this time together and to have you as a personal friend.

Rick Tarnas: Duncan, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Your knowledge of 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 it, that is a kind of parallel to the whole attitude towards life and towards the cosmos that I think certainly my book is trying to support. And I think our whole spiritual challenge of our civilization at this time is, as you say, to move into a more dialogic 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 here in Boulder with you, is a kind of microcosm of this larger dialogical imperative really, that calls us in our time.

Duncan: Well, thank you so much, Rick. It is really a wonderful opportunity to celebrate all of us together with all of our deep listeners in an alive universe, and in a cosmos full of beauty and wonder and possibility.

This Part 3 of my dialogues with Richard Tarnas (Scroll down to hear prior Programs 31 and 32 on this Site) 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, which we discuss in Programs 31 and 32 below. In this Program 47, I start with a detailed introduction that summarizes from the perspective of the Living Dialogues’ theme and viewpoint what Rick calls “participatory epistemology” and I call “participatory dialogue”.

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.

And be sure to listen to next week’s Living Dialogue Program 48 with myself and Michael Meade, when we will explore the role of myth through the ages from indigenous mind through the modern mind and into the newly emerging ‘third consicousness’ (sometimes called ‘noetic’, ‘supramental’, ‘integral’, etc.). These themes are the thread running throughout the vision and practice embodied in all Living Dialogues. All other programs in this series will be of interest on these themes, but particular ones you might wish to click onto listed on the right hand column next to this Program 47 are those with Richard Tarnas (31 and 32), Rupert Sheldrake (6 and 8), Steve McIntosh (25 and 26), Michael Dowd (28), Vine DeLoria, Jr. (29), Stanislav Grof (30), Paul Ray (37), Duane Elgin (40, 41, and 42), and Lynne McTaggart (43 and 44).

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM. TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

To order a full transcript of this program you can contact me at my website: www.livingdialogues.com or at [email protected]. Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program. All the best, Duncan