May 9-10, 2008: Richard Tarnas
LECTURE
Jung's concept of synchronicity represents one of the most strenuous efforts of the twentieth century to construct a bridge across the chasm between mind and matter, self and world, psyche and cosmos. In popular culture, the concept has been surprisingly widely embraced. The term and the phenomena it describes play no small role in the way many individuals make sense of their lives. In the face of the disenchanted modern world view, the search for a ground of purpose and meaning that transcends human subjectivity has become an urgent spiritual priority. For many today, synchronicities are directly relevant to this search. The concept has also had a unique impact in the intellectual world, from religious studies to physics. In tonight's lecture, Dr. Tarnas will summarize the origin and history of the concept in Jung's work, discuss the experiential dimension of synchronistic events, and address their larger metaphysical and perhaps evolutionary implications.
WORKSHOP -- Art, Culture, and the Planetary Archetypes
As Jung recognized, astrology provides profound insight into the deep patterns of human experience and of our cultural history, but such insight depends on a capacity for rich archetypal perception, something that involves not only thinking but also the emotions, the imagination, the aesthetic intuition, the body, the whole being. Because music and the arts engage all these dimensions, this workshop will use representative works of music and the other arts with the powerful lens of archetypal astrology to explore and illuminate the deeper character of major cultural figures and historical eras. The workshop's aim is to provide information that those new to astrology can immediately integrate into their lives, and that advanced students can use to deepen their grasp of the range and subtlety of archetypal astrological analysis. Above all, our time together will be devoted to getting to know more profoundly the planetary gods. Our focus will be on increasing our direct understanding and experience-intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, emotional, and somatic-of these archetypal powers of the world soul, the anima mundi.
RICHARD TARNAS, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches archetypal studies and the history of Western thought and culture. He was the founding director of the Ph.D. and Master's program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He also teaches on the faculty of the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. He is the author of Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (Viking, 2006).