“Planetary democracy does not yet exist, but our global civilization is already preparing the place for it: it is the real Earth we inhabit, connected to the sky above us. Only in this arrangement can the reciprocity and community of the human race be newly created, with respect and gratitude for that which transcends each of us and all of us together. The authority of a world of democratic order cannot simply be built on anything other than the renewed authority of the universe.”
Vaclav Havel
So how do we rediscover this “authority of the universe”? How can we engage in a transformational process that would lead to a more integral world? One factor, I believe, is that we need to radically broaden our ways of knowing, our epistemology. We need to move beyond the very narrow empiricism and rationalism that characterized the Enlightenment and still dominates the mainstream of science today. We need to arrive at—to use one catch-all term—a broader epistemology of the heart. We need ways of knowing that combine imagination, figurative and archetypal insights, intuition, aesthetic sensitivity, revelatory or epiphanic capacity, capacity for kinesthetic knowledge and empathic understanding, capacity for openness to the other, capacity for listening. A highly developed awareness of empathy is indeed essential if we are to overcome the barrier between subject and object. We need to be able to enter into what we are trying to know, and not hold it as an object, distant from us. In the words of biologist Barbara McClintock, we need to develop a “feeling for the organism.”
Our best philosophy of science has taught us to what extent our epistemology shapes our world. Not just reason and empiricism, but also hope, faith, and compassion play a major role in shaping reality. And that is perhaps the fundamental message of our unexpected eclipse of the world that the modern Enlightenment has produced: that at the heart of knowledge lies a moral dimension. To assume that purpose, meaning, and conscious intelligence are exclusively human attributes, and that the great cosmos is a soulless void, reflects an invisible act of cosmic arrogance on the part of the modern self. In essence, our task may be to shift our relationship to the universe from “I-it” to “I-thou.”
Try a thought experiment: imagine that you are the universe, a deep, beautiful, soulful universe, and that you are being addressed by two different epistemologies, two seekers who are trying to know you. Would you open your deepest secrets to a seeker—that is, a methodology, an epistemology—who approaches you as if you were unconscious, completely devoid of intelligence or purpose, subordinate to him; who relates to you as if you existed only to be used by him, for his own aggrandizement; and whose motivation for knowing you is driven essentially by the desire to predict and control you for his own benefit? Or would you open your deepest secrets to a seeker—an epistemology, a methodology—who sees you as a being at least as intelligent, powerful, and full of mystery and soul as he is, and who seeks to know you by uniting with you to create something new?
The postmodern mind has begun to recognize the extent to which our often hidden assumptions play a crucial role in shaping the reality we seek to know. It is clear to me that if the universe is anything like a mystery, as I believe, then under the pressure of mainstream science it will always provide only a very partial and flawed vision of what it is. At the dawn of modern science, Francis Bacon introduced quite bluntly what eventually became the dominant form of epistemology in the Western world: he said that in order for science to progress, it was necessary to wrest its secrets from nature by a method of violent interrogation comparable to torture in a vice; nature must be “coerced,” “bound to serve,” made “a slave” (Merchant, 1980). As we well know from contemporary animal experiments, this is not just a metaphor (Schopenhauer once said that animals live in a hell in which human beings are devils). Contrast this ruthless, objectifying strategy with an esoteric, mystical form of communication with nature, with entering into a participatory way of understanding the universe, characterized by aesthetic pleasure, intellectual ecstasy, the flowering of the imagination, empathic harmony, hermeneutic trust instead of suspicion. Thus, knowledge becomes an act of love.
I believe we have a choice. There are many possible universes, many possible meanings that move through us. We are not abandoned subjects in a universe devoid of meaning, upon which we can and must impose our egocentric will. Nor are we simply empty vessels, as we once were, for the automatic, passive expression of the intentions of the world soul, the anima mundi. Rather, we are creative participants, interpreters, both autonomous and yet ever-immersed in a coevolutionarily unfolding reality. It is a complex process in which both we and the universe are both creators and created. What seems to be unfolding today is not just a rediscovery of the anima mundi, but a new relationship to it. Something new is emerging; it is not just a “regression” to a premodern state. We seem to be moving towards a worldview that is a dialectical synthesis of the world and the self, a new vision of the universe, reflected today in many scientific and philosophical impulses that lead us to a new participatory, holistic paradigm.
From this perspective, epistemologically speaking, we are not ultimately separate from the world, projecting our structures and meanings onto an otherwise meaningless world. Rather, we are the organ of self-revelation of the universe itself. The human self has been formed into an autonomous intellectual and moral self and is now in a position to recognize itself as a creatively intelligent bolt embedded within the larger context of the anima mundi. We are beginning to realize that we play a key role in the unfolding of the universe through our own cognitive processes and choices that are linked to our own psychic development. So our inner work—our moral awareness and responsibility, our confrontation with our shadow, our integration of the masculine and the feminine—is of fundamental importance within the universe that we can create.
Here depth psychology can serve to further develop that moral impulse that has been slowly shaped in Western consciousness by its religious traditions. For, as the Mexican poet Octavio Paz put it, “the examination of conscience and the regret that accompanies it, which is the heritage of Christianity, have been and still are the single most powerful medicine against the diseases of our civilization.” (Paz, 1991) I believe that there will be a fundamental experience of regret—and we know that it is a necessary element in the experience of death and rebirth—a long regret, a constant weeping, a grief, and a mourning. It will be a grief of masculinity for femininity; of men for women; of adults for what has happened to children; of the West for what is happening in every other part of the world; of Christianity for pagan and indigenous peoples, Jews and Muslims; of whites for people of color; of the wealthy for the poor; of human beings for animals and for all other forms of life. It will be our own woe for that shadow and for that ignorance in our relationship to others that plagues even the best of us, including our revered ancestors and teachers. It will be a fundamental metanoia, a self-transcendence, a radical sacrifice to make this transition happen. Sometimes, when we talk about the emergence of a new paradigm and a new worldview, we focus on the intellectual dimensions of this shift; they are indeed crucial. But I believe we cannot underestimate the fundamental importance of the moral dimension in making this great transformation happen.
Let us now return to the original polarity of the two mythical historical perspectives – heroic progress and tragic fall – that have shaped our own self-understanding. I have already suggested that part of our task is to be able to see both of these meta-narratives at once, to realize both as truths, as partial images of the whole. Yet I also believe that for us today this does not mean merely intellectually understanding this coincidence of opposites in our historical evolution. It is rather a matter of experiencing, rather it means going through suffering through the struggle of opposites within our consciousness. In other words, we must endure a kind of crucifixion, becoming a vessel through which the consciousness of our time and future will resolve its contradictions within our minds and our spirits, within our bodies and our souls.
As Marie Louise von Franz once expressed it in the spirit of Jung and Hegel: through extreme suffering in the great clash of opposites – while fully accepting the workings of this dialectic within us – we can sometimes reach a place where those divine opposites spontaneously come together. I believe that much of the tension of our time comes precisely from this dialectical activity, from this collision of opposites, which inexorably pushes us towards the birth of something new.
Are we ready to do it? We cannot be absolutely sure that it will happen. No authentic initiation process begins with certainty of its outcome. It is by no means certain that we will successfully pass through that eye of the needle, that planetary death of the ego. For in the near future it seems that we are living in a time of great drama. We seem to be engaged today in a kind of race, as HG Wells put it, between education and catastrophe, but which I would describe as a race between initiation and catastrophe.
Jung once said that "if the encounter with the shadow is the 'apprentice's test' of psychological development, the encounter with the anima is the 'master's test.'" I believe this is a statement of profound significance for our own historical moment, pointing not only to the need for repentance and moral regeneration but also to the sacred marriage (hieros gamos) of the masculine and the feminine, both of which will require sacrifice and the death of the ego. What seems to be required at the threshold of this evolution of ours is a great self-transcendence, a recognition not only of the heroic grandeur of our modern project but also of its arrogance.
All of this points to a new reading of our Western story of solar heroic progress in the larger context of tragedy and perhaps something even greater—perhaps something Shakespearean in the grandeur of its moral and aesthetic conception. Of course, that is itself a mythic perspective. What I want to remind you of, however, is that not only the human psyche but also the cosmos itself can be archetypically, mythically shaped. And perhaps that is the deepest act of trust that is required of us at this historical moment—to open ourselves to the possibility that our universe can contain a moral and aesthetic dimension in its unfolding being, that it is not only capable of embodying, for example, the intelligence of Newton and Einstein, as our Enlightenment view of the universe, searching for a grand unified equation, assumes, but that it can also embody the intelligence, imagination, and heart of Shakespeare. Therefore, I believe it is our task to develop a moral and aesthetic imagination deep and broad enough to encompass the contradictions of our time and our history, the immense loss and tragedy as well as the greatness and sublimity, an imagination that can recognize that where there is light, there is also shadow, that out of our arrogance and fall there can arise moral regeneration, out of our sacrifice and death resurrection and rebirth.
(This text is the final sub-chapter of Richard Tarnas's text "Is the Western Mind Undergoing a Rite of Passage?", which was published in Czech in Space review No. 86 / June 2010, pp. 99-120. Translated by Jiří Zemánek.)