Whitehead and Archetypal Cosmology, Becca Tarnas
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This presentation briefly explores the ways in which Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy can provide one possible metaphysical basis for the practice and perspective of archetypal cosmology. Becca Tarnas is a doctoral student in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She also received her MA from CIIS in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, and her BA from Mount Holyoke College in Environmental Studies and Theater Arts. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on the synchronicity between the Red Books of C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien. She writes regularly on archetypal cosmology and is an editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology. Becca’s website is BeccaTarnas.com where she posts her current writings, paintings, and lectures.
Comments
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The unfortunate thing about this type of language is that it subjects to some authority who tells you, "Oh, you just need to look at it this way and it will make sense." Oh, you need to read more Jung. Oh, you just need to read you celestial charts from the moment of first breath of the child, etc, etc, etc. This deferment can sustain curiosity only for so long, but what does this point of view do when the curtain is pulled up? It says there is another curtain behind the curtain ad infinitum. How do you sustain this move then? You make the very make-up of the world one of mystery. And then you come full circle - you started out wanting to know about the world and ended up at the same place. Just go learn math and read physics.... yea, it's not certain, but it doesn't hide behind these pretensions. Also, you can't understand Whitehead without this background. Last, when you hear people say they were trying to understand a thinker and how they began to see what they were thinking based on some practice which the person reading them was already invested in, then you know something is awry - either self-delusion or duplicitousness - hopefully only the former.
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Becca uses her voice extraordinarily well. She's melodic and rhythmic. The melody matches the meaning (uptalk at the start of an idea, pitching down at its conclusion ) and so do her use of pace and tempo changes.
And her numerous dips into the vocal fry register make it sexy. -
It's really interesting, Whitehead's cosmology (as presented by the lovely Ms. Tarnas) seems to parallel much of the gnostics' beliefs. The primal chaos of the pure creative "realm" sounds like the pleroma. The first organizing principle she describes could be compared to the demiurge, and so on.
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Would you regard archetypes as eternal objects a la Whitehead or archetypes as created forms (created through a process of archetypalizing a la McLuhan (From Cliche to Archetype) or Mark Hansen's idea of the vibrational continuum (in "Feed Forward")? Or is their eternity a consequence (rather than a precondition) of their actualization? What is the place of (Whitehead's) God's Superjective nature? (The lure for feeling in the creative advance). This seems to correlate with Aurobindo's Supramental poise (whereas the Transcendent correlates to Whitehead's Primordial and Aurobindo's Universal poise correlates to Whitehead's Consequent nature). Nice talk!
24m 31sLenght
44Rating