Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

"Only with that discernment and inward opening can the full participatory engagement unfold that brings forth new realities and new knowledge. Without this capacity, at once active and receptive, the long discipline would be fruitless. The carefully cultivated skeptical posture would become finally an empty prison, an armored state of unfulfillment, a permanently confining end in itself rather than the rigorous means to a sublime result.

It is just this tension and interplay—between critical rigor and the potential discovery of larger truths—that has always informed and advanced the drama of our intellectual history. Yet in our own time, at the start of a new millennium, that drama seems to have reached a moment of climactic urgency. We find ourselves at an extraordinary threshold. One need not be graced with prophetic insight to recognize that we are living in one of those rare ages, like the end of classical antiquity or the beginning of the

modern era, that bring forth, through great stress and struggle, a genuinely fundamental transformation in the underlying assumptions and principles of the cultural world view. Amidst the multitude of debates and controversies that fill the intellectual arena, our basic understanding of reality is in contention: the role of the human being in nature and the cosmos, the status of human knowledge, the basis of moral values, the dilemmas of pluralism, relativism, objectivity, the spiritual dimension of life, the direction and meaning—if any—of history and evolution. The outcome of this tremendous moment in our civilization’s history is deeply uncertain. Something is dying, and something is being born. The stakes are high, for the future of humanity and the future of the Earth."

Tarnas, Richard (2006-01-19). Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View . Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.