DiCarlo: You had alluded to the fact that we have accrued certain benefits from the dominant and prevailing world view and I'm wondering from a human developmental perspective, what has that world view allowed us to achieve?

Tarnas: It has allowed us to achieve autonomy. We have a responsibility in playing a role in our evolution, so that we can play a conscious role in that evolution-this is new. We also have a freedom to evolve in a certain way, to choose what kind of a world and world view we will grow within. All of us value that ability to revise our world view, to revise ourselves, to be endlessly self-revising in an attempt to become a better person and create a better world.

Another way of looking at this long development is in terms of the divine marriage, the hieros gamos that Jung spoke about. In order to have a marriage, you have to have a differentiation for the two to come together autonomously and join with one another in an act of love. This is also true for the human being in relationship to the divine and in its relationship to the world: that having fully differentiated itself, it is now in a position to embrace the matrix of its being freely and consciously. Rudolf Steiner used two words to sum up what he saw as the evolution of consciousness, and those two words were "freedom" and "love." I think that goes a long way towards describing what we are involved in right now. Having achieved our freedom, we are now in a position to embrace the whole in a kind of loving surrender of self to a larger whole which will preserve autonomy while also transcending the alienation that has been the downside of our forging an autonomous self.

DiCarlo: Would you say that the emerging world view is a regression in some way to that which was held during medieval times?

Tarnas: Of course there is more than one world view in the medieval period, but let's take Dante and Thomas Aquinas as representing the most comprehensive, rich, articulate renderings of the medieval world view....In this view, the human being had a central role in a meaningful, spiritually informed cosmos. It was a fixed and structured and hierarchical cosmos, and there was also a further ambiguity that was present. On the one hand, there was a negation of this world-the world, the flesh, and the devil were seen as something one needs to transcend in order to move towards the good Christian, celestial destiny. On the other hand, there was often a sense of the universe, nature and the human being as constituting an organic whole that the scientific and industrial revolutions destroyed.

I don't see what we are experiencing right now as a regression, although there are elements from the past, from the medieval. But there are also elements from archaic, ancient, traditional, and indigenous world views that are coming up once again to manifest in a new way. It's less a circular regression and more a spiral that takes up certain impulses and insights from these earlier periods and integrates them with all that has been positively achieved in the meantime. In that sense, there is an element of regression, but there is also a sense of moving forward. This is what one would call a dialectic, in which something from the past and something from the present come together and create the future. Two opposites converge to a create a third higher synthesis.

DiCarlo: You stated earlier that the Western mind has been characterized by the masculine perspective. What would that perspective be?

Tarnas: That perspective is driven by this heroic impulse to differentiate the human being from its primordial unity with nature and with the divine to form an autonomous, rational human self. It reflects an archetypal masculine impulse which, as I mentioned, has brought us to a point of great power, great critical intelligence, great autonomy, and also great crisis. There is something that Jung calls "enantiodromia," which is a term he draws from the ancient Greek Heraclitus, which has to do with the spontaneous shift of opposites. When you get to one extreme, then the opposite emerges, and this recovery and resurgence of the feminine that is happening in our time is an example of that.

DiCarlo: So the emerging world view I take it involves the re-claiming and integration of the feminine aspect of nature?

Tarnas: Yes, and the movement towards overcoming the alienation of the individual human being and human mind from the universe, from the world, from the matrix from which it has arisen. It is characterized by the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy and the movement towards a more unitive, participatory, world view.

DiCarlo: Could you elaborate on that?

Tarnas: The Western intellectual and spiritual tradition has been influenced by an archetypal masculine impulse that has been informing and impelling the Western mind since its inception with the ancient Greeks and the ancient Hebrews. This in many ways has led us to this very dramatic point of transformation.

The masculine, differentiating approach to the world, to the nature of reality, and to the nature of the relationship between the human being and the world has reached a point of crisis. Yet, we also see now, in many ways, the potential for great transformation and healing, a coming into wholeness by the tremendous resurgence of the feminine archetype. This is visible on many levels, and not just the obvious ones of feminism and the empowerment of women and the new openness on the part of men to feminine values. It is also visible in a whole different approach to life-our scientific theories of the human psyche, the new sensibility of how human beings relate to nature and other forms of life on the planet-all of these reflect the emergence of the feminine archetype on the collective scale of the culture which is manifesting as a new sense of connection with the whole. This ideally could result in the "hieros gamos"-the divine marriage-the coming together of the masculine and feminine on many levels: between the human being and nature, between intellect and soul, between men and women. It's an extremely multi-leveled, complex transformative process we're involved in right now.

DiCarlo: What might be some of the specific ways individuals can reclaim the feminine?

Tarnas: One way is through inner, psychological exploration, through experiential methods of psychotherapy, through meditation, through the holotropic breathwork that has been developed by Stan Grof. These are ways of mediating the reconnection with the unconscious, where, for many people, the feminine has been repressed and suppressed.

Another way is through parenting, through playing an intimate, participatory and caring role in the raising of one's children. Being present and being as conscious as possible, at the birth of one's own children helps us reconnect to the feminine dimension of the psyche that's in all of us. In relationships between men and women, that extra degree of awareness, treating women as having the same degree of autonomy and richness of spirit and intelligence and potential as every man.

In spiritual terms, becoming more aware of the feminine dimension of the divine, whether through studying other eras-the Goddess spirituality that is being uncovered archaeologically and historically-or through one's own spiritual path.

Also, in becoming more aware of one's body, and honoring and caring for it. Honoring the imagination. Perhaps above all, approaching nature in a new way. Not as something that is unconscious and purposeless and without any intrinsic value except as raw material for human exploitation, but rather, viewing nature as our mother, as something we have been born from, possessing at least as great a mystery and intelligence and soul as we ourselves are embued with.

DiCarlo: You have stated that the Western mind, as it begins this fundamental shift in world view, must be willing to open itself to a reality, the nature of which could shatter its most established beliefs about itself and about the world. Could you mention some of these beliefs?

Tarnas: One I just mentioned, that nature is completely mechanistic and unconscious and impersonal, and that somehow the human being is utterly unique in being the sole locus of conscious intelligence in the universe. There are a lot of developments challenging this assumption, such as the Gaia hypothesis, which goes a long way towards making sense of evolution and life on earth in ways that refute the presupposition that the only kind of entity that can act with a self-regulating intelligence is the human being or other individual organisms but not the earth itself.

Depth psychology, which in the last 20 or 30 years has evolved into transpersonal psychology and archetypal psychology, coming out of the work or Freud and Jung, has moved to a place where a lot of basic modern presuppositions-the separation of the psyche from the world, of the individual human being from the community of human beings-are all being shattered. We are just starting to see that within each individual human being, his or her psyche is rooted in a much larger psyche, that our consciousness participates in a collective consciousness that is shared by all human beings and is rooted in nature, the world, and the cosmos. This sense of separation of the individual mind is something that is gradually being shattered right now.

DiCarlo: Would you say that the emerging world view tends to reduce the gap between science and religion?

Tarnas: Very much. It's remarkable how traditional scientists, often in their mature years, when they no longer have to prove anything to anybody-when they've already gotten their Nobel Prize-start developing their spiritual side and start connecting it with their scientific interests and insights. Many of the most cutting-edge scientists, like the late David Bohm or Rupert Sheldrake, are clearly informed- as was Einstein-by a spiritual understanding.

To the extent that Western religion is hung up on a fundamentalist, literal interpretation of the Bible, there is always going to be a major problem in reducing the gap between science and religion. Problems also arise from fundamentalist scientists who get hung up with the idea that their particular view of reality, or their particular view that they think mainstream science approves, is reality. They take that view as literally and absolutely true, rather than as tentative, partial, and fallible. There will always be a major gap between science and religion as long as science and religion are authoritatively led by fundamentalists of each stripe.

But more and more sophisticated thinkers in both the religious and scientific worlds are way past that. There's a great quote by Robert Bellah in his book Beyond Belief which I use in my book: "We may be seeing the beginnings of the reintegration of our culture, a new possibility of a unity of consciousness. If so, it will not be on the basis of any new orthodoxy, either religious or scientific. Such a new integration will be based on the rejection of all univocal understandings of reality, of all identifications of one conception of reality with reality itself. It will recognize the multiplicity of the human spirit," and I would add the multiplicity of reality, "and the necessity to translate constantly between different scientific and imaginative vocabularies. It will recognize the human proclivity to fall comfortably into some single, literal interpretation of the world and therefore the necessity to be continuously open to rebirth in a new heaven and a new earth. It will recognize that in both scientific and religious culture, all we have finally are symbols. But there is an enormous difference between the dead letter and the living word."

Certainly in psychology, through people like Jung and Grof, there has been a real awakening to the spiritual dimensions of the human psyche. An awareness that as you get deep enough in there, you transcend a purely secular understanding of the human mind and start seeing the reality of religious experience, of spiritual beings, of a spiritual level of human experience that is absolutely basic. To deny that is to live in an artificially constrictive world view.