1 post tagged “jung/myth/framing/innerwork/shadow/efm”

For further reflection on our previous discussion, I offer an essay by Richard Tarnas; Is the Modern Psyche Undergoing a Rite of Passage? I encourage you to read the whole thing. I find his identification of our current conflicts as a struggle between "the myth of progress" and "the myth of the fall" to be quite insightful. The reality is that there is truth to be found in both interpretations, but for the sake of our debates, we have chosen to block the truth of the other, and so have avoided the hard work of integration.In regards to our previous discussion, I wanted to highlight just a few of Tarnas' passages, as he articulates the "something new" much better than I ever could:...We can gain deeper insight into the polarity of these two historical perspectives, as well as their possible synthesis, by examining carefully the underlying structure of the modern Western world view. If we were to isolate the particular characteristic of the modern world view that distinguishes it from virtually all premodern world views, what we might call primal world views, I believe we would have to say that the fundamental distinction or difference is this: The modern mind experiences the world in such a way as to draw a radical boundary between the human self as subject and the world as object. The subject-object divide, the sense of radical distinction between self and world, which we could call Cartesian for shorthand, is fundamental to the modern mind. The modern mind is constituted upon it. Modern science, from Bacon and Descartes on, is deeply founded on the conviction that if one is to know the world as it is in itself, then one must cleanse one's mind of all human projections, such as meaning and purpose, onto the world.By contrast, in the primal world view, meaning and purpose are seen as permeating the entire world within which the self is embedded. The primal human walks through a world that is experienced as completely continuous between inner and outer. He or she s...