Hello everyone, in Part II of this conversation with Richard Tarnas we go more into his story, and in particular how he got from Harvard to Esalen, his studies in Depth Psychology(Freud and Jung) at Harvard from 1968- 1972 and getting an introduction into the hotbed of the Sixties counter-culture, the influence of Ram Dass(Richard Alport), Alan Watts and others, finding his way to Esalen and working with Stan Grof, Joseph Campbell, Hillman, Huston Smith and others. The Death/Rebirth Mystery, and ‘Anima Mundi’ and ‘Çosmos’.
Richard Tarnas is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he has recently become Emeritus Professor. Born in 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland, of American parents, he grew up in Michigan, where he received a classical Jesuit education. In 1968 he entered Harvard, where he studied Western intellectual and cultural history and depth psychology, graduating with an A.B. cum laude in 1972. For ten years he lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with Stanislav Grof, Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Huston Smith, and James Hillman, later serving as Esalen’s director of programs and education. He received his Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute in 1976 with a dissertation on LSD psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and spiritual transformation. From 1980 to 1990, he wrote The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of Western thought from the ancient Greek to the postmodern which became a best seller and continues to be a widely used text in universities throughout the world. In 2006, he published Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, which received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network in the UK. Formerly president of the International Transpersonal Association, he is on the Board of Governors of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. In addition to his teaching at CIIS, he has been a frequent lecturer at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and gives many public lectures and seminars in the U.S. and abroad.
Richard Tarnas Part II: From Harvard to Esalen