Tähenduse teejuhid (Maps of Meaning) is an Estonian language monthly newspaper that is distributed with the country's largest daily Postimees. The first issue came out in September 2020. The centre of gravity of each number is a ca 4000-word interview. The conversation with Richard Tarnas appeared in the 42nd issue of the paper (May 2024). Here are seven highlights from this interview. The first comes from my brief introduction, the other are direct quotes.
1. Briefly, “The Passion of the Western Mind” - which thanks to the major efforts of the translator Tanel Pern is since the last autumn available in Estonian - is a kind of book “that makes you fall in love with philosophy”. That’s how the author of “The Mountain of Silence” Kyriacos Markides put it in a recent private conversation. Falling in love - and we are all to varying degrees experts in that - is not a rational process, for we enter into that with all our being, not only with intellectual abilities. The transition from Cartesian to Goethean epistemology is principally similar, explains Tarnas in his second interview with us.
2. In some ways Nietzsche absorbed everything that had preceded him. He really knew Greek philosophy and the history of Western philosophy. He really knew Christianity and was keeping up with the sciences of his time. The Enlightenment and Romanticism both lived in him, they were clashing in him. All this enabled him to climb up very high up the mountain. Or you could say he climbed very deep down into the abyss, into the depths and brought back treasures for us. That's why for example Thus Spoke Zarathustra has probably been one of the single most influential books for serious 20th century European thinkers.
3. Freud was able to bring up the unconscious first through hypnotism and then through free association, Jung brought in the added idea of active imagination, both of them were paying tremendous attention to dreams. Grof found that psychedelics are much more powerful in uncovering the unconscious than methods employed by Freud and Jung, hence they also have greater healing potential. Since indigenous cultures have used psychoactive plants in healing practices long before depth psychology came about, Grof genuinely embraced their experience.
4. In the spring of 1976 an artist who had participated in one of Grof’s seminars suggested that we use test subjects’ birth charts as explanatory variables. Birth charts are precise astrological diagrams representing the positions of major celestial bodies at the time of person’s birth. By that time we were pretty open minded. The results were absolutely stunning! The precision, accuracy and consistency of the correlations between the archetypal qualities of our experiences as interpreted by the astrological tradition and the positions of the planets at that time left little room for doubts.
5. The first axial age gave rise to the great cultural and religious traditions of the world: Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism but also Greek philosophy and Taoism. In each case, they develop their own lineage and perspective, their own ethical and cosmological perspective. Initially they are fairly isolated from each other. For many centuries there is often a certain estrangement between them. Globalisation has changed things in a profound way. Both Cousins and Berry emphasise the necessity of the ecumenical dialogue between great religious traditions.
6. In the second axial age the sacred reconnects to the imminent world. You can see it in ideas about Gaia, in growing ecological consciousness, in greater interest towards indigenous cultures which have never lost the sense of the sacredness of the earth and the imminent world in the first place. Technically we have what is called a panentheistic revolution in theology. Panentheism melts the dualism of body and mind, inside and outside, immanent and transcendent.
7. I was totally surprised that “The Passion of the Western Mind” turned out to be so successful. It was adopted as a text for understanding the history of philosophy in many universities not only in the United States but also in Europe, South America and China, also in South Korea, Middle East and Turkey. That was not my goal. I just felt like I needed to write it. It kind of came through me. I sensed that I was driven in that work by something larger than myself. Hillman would have probably called my daemon, some other person would have named it telos, a pull from the future - there are many ways of expressing it.