Tarnas' father, also named Richard Tarnas, worked as a government contract attorney, former president of the Michigan Federal Bar Association, and professor of law. His mother, Mary Louise, was a teacher and homemaker. The eldest of eight children, he grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where he studied Greek, Latin, and the Classics at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy.
Tarnas is the founding director of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where he remains a core faculty member as of 2020[update].[8]
Tarnas' second book, Prometheus the Awakener, published in 1995, focuses on the astrological properties of the planet Uranus, describing "the uncanny way astrological patterns appear to coincide with events or destiny patterns in the lives of both individuals and societies".[9] Tarnas suggests that the characteristics associated with the mythological figure Uranus do not match the astrological properties of the planet Uranus, and that a more appropriate identification would involve the mythological figure Prometheus.
In 2006, Tarnas published his third book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. It claims that the major events of Western cultural history correlate consistently and meaningfully with the observed angular positions of the planets.[10] The book received favorable reviews in Tikkun magazine,[11] in an anthroposophical journal,[12] and in the web magazine Reality Sandwich (by Daniel Pinchbeck),[13] but was panned in the Wall Street Journal.[14]
Tarnas featured in the 2006 film Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, a documentary about rediscovering an enchanted cosmos in the modern world.[15]
In 2007 a group of fifty scholars and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area formed the Archetypal Research Collective for pursuing research in archetypal cosmology. An online journal, Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, edited by Keiron LeGrice and Rod O'Neal, began a year later, based on the research orientation and methodology established in Cosmos and Psyche.[16] Advisory-board members include Christopher Bache, Jorge Ferrer, Stanislav Grof, Robert A. McDermott, Ralph Metzner, and Brian Swimme. Contributors have included Keiron Le Grice, Richard Tarnas, Stanislav Grof, and Rod O'Neal.
In 2007 John Cleese and Tarnas gave some public lectures together at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and in Santa Barbara. The lectures discussed regaining a connection to the sacred in the modern world.[18] Cleese and Tarnas then taught a seminar at CIIS called "The Comic Genius: A Multidisciplinary Approach".[19]
American Astronaut Susan Helms cited Tarnas' The Passion of the Western Mind as one of the five 'classic American books' that inspired her career as an astronaut.[20]
Bibliography
By Tarnas
Books
LSD psychotherapy, theoretical implications for the study of psychology, 1976[21]
Birth and rebirth: LSD, psychoanalysis, and spiritual enlightenment[22][23]
"Uranus and Prometheus" Spring, 1983 psycnet.apa.org
"The Transfiguration of the Western Mind in Philosophy and the Human Future" Cross currentsISSN0011-1953, 1989, vol. 39, no3, pp. 258–280 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life, New Rochelle, NY
"The Transfiguration of the Western Mind" ReVision, 1990
"The Masculine Mind" Only Connect: Soil, Soul and Society, 1990
"The Western Mind at the Threshold," The Quest, Summer 1993 (also published in Re-vision, Vol. 16, 1993)
"The Western World View: Past, Present And Future" in R. E. Di Carlo (Ed.), Towards a New World View: Conversations at the Leading Edge., 1996
"The Great Initiation", Noetic Sciences Review, Vol. 47, Winter 1998
"A new birth in freedom: A (p)review of Jorge Ferrer's Revisioning transpersonal theory: A participatory vision of human spirituality" Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2001
R Tarnas, E Laszlo, S Gablik, "The Cosmic World-How We Participate in Thee and Thou in Us" Revision 2001
Foreword to Revisioning Transpersonal Theory by Jorge Ferrer, 2002; SUNY
"Two Suitors: A Parable" ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness 2007 Heldref Publications
"The modern self and our planetary future: a participatory view" symposium De Binnenkant van Duurzaamheid 2008
"The Planets" Theoretical Foundations of Archetypal Cosmology, 2009 - archaijournal.org
"The Ideal and the Real" Theoretical Foundations of Archetypal Cosmology 2009
"World Transits 2000–2020" archaijournal.org
Video
Tarnas, Richard; Pacifica Graduate Institute (2006). Jung, Cosmology, and the Transformation of the Modern Self (DVD). Santa Barbara, Calif.: Depth Video. OCLC642056090. Recorded at Pacifica Graduate Institute on April 8–9, 2006.
About Tarnas
Sean M. Kelly, "The Rebirth of Wisdom" Review of The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal pp. 33–44 jstor.org
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Meaney, Thomas (2006-01-21). "Writer's Block: Cosmos & Psyche". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. ISSN0099-9660. Retrieved 2015-08-27. [...] his new book has less in common with responsible scholarship than with the senescent Isaac Newton's ramblings about alchemy.