Intuition and the Creation of a Better World

Tarnas, Richard

We need to move beyond the very narrow empiricism and rationalism that were characteristic of the Enlightenment and still dominate mainstream science today. We need to draw on - to use a single encompassing term - the wider epistemologies of the heart. We need ways of knowing that integrate the imagination, the intuition, the aesthetic sensibility, the revelatory or epiphanic capacity, the capacity for kinesthetic knowing, the capacity for loving. We need a deeply developed sense of empathy if we are to overcome the subject-object barrier. We need to be able to enter into that which we seek to know, and not keep it ultimately distanced as an object. We need, to use Barbara McClintock's phrase, a feeling for the organism ...

Richard Tarnas, 'The Great Initiation', in Noetic Sciences Review, Vol. 47, Winter 1998

The remarkable modern capacity for differentiation and discernment that has been so painstakingly forged must be preserved, but our challenge now is to develop and subsume that discipline in a more encompassing, more magnani­mous intellectual and spiritual engagement with the mystery of the universe. Such an engagement can happen only if we open ourselves to a range of epistemologies that together provide a more multidimensionally perceptive scope of knowledge. To encounter the depths and rich complexity of the cosmos, we require ways of knowing that fully integrate the imagination, the aesthetic sensibility, moral and spiritual intuition, revelatory experience, symbolic perception, somatic and sensuous modes of understanding, empathic knowing. Above all, we must awaken to and overcome the great hidden anthropocentric projection that has virtually defined the modern mind: the pervasive projection of soullessness onto the cosmos by the modern self's own will to power.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and psyche, intimations of a new world view, p. 41. NY, Viking, 2006

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