DiCarlo: Would you say that in terms of human development, we re-capitulate these historical world views in our maturation from infant, to child, to adolescent and to adult?

Tarnas: Yes. I think that's another way we can better understand this process, that what a whole culture goes through in some way reflects what each individual goes through. For example, Wordsworth's great poem "Intimations of Immortality" is a beautiful rendering of a person's gradual shift in world view, from the numinous, sacralized, enchanted vision of the child, who is born trailing clouds of glory, still having that kind of archetypal consciousness in early infancy and childhood, and then gradually, as one gets to be more and more of an adult, more and more socialized into the conventional ways of looking at the world, of experiencing separation between the human being and the world. There's a kind of disenchantment of the world to the point where the adult human being looks out on "the light of common day" to use Wordsworth's terms. So there is a certain way in which this individual process very beautifully describes the trajectory that Western civilization has traveled.

It has gone from the enchanted world view of the pre-Greek indigenous cultures, and even to a great extent the Greeks-the Homeric sensibility-where we can find a certain sense that heaven and earth were not totally separated in the Greek consciousness. In both ancient Judaism and Christianity, and even in the medieval period, there is a certain enchantment of the world. But as the Western mind develops, as in the eighteenth century Enlightenment, with the sovereignty of the rational and scientific-there is a gradual and thorough disenchantment which eventually leads to the crisis in world view in our own century-and, I believe, the potential for a second birth.

DiCarlo: Two births?

Tarnas: Yes, there are two births to consider. First there is the literal one, the physical one: the birth of the human being out of nature, the birth of Western civilization out of the ancient archaic cultures of the Mediterranean. Then there's a second birth, which comes only through a death. And that second birth is a spiritual birth. It's the initiation of the twice-born. And that requires a sacrifice. It requires a death, which I believe we, as a civilization, are deep in the middle of right now.

DiCarlo: If as some leading edge scientists are suggesting, consciousness can affect reality, then is it not true that whatever a person's world view is, he or she would be able to gather evidence to support it?

Tarnas: I do believe that consciousness has a tremendous role. Each individual's consciousness, and also the collective consciousness of a culture and its basic presuppositions and a priori principles, plays a large role in constellating reality.

When you are in a given world view, you discover data and you gather evidence that will be to a great extent configured in accordance with the basic principles with which you are approaching reality. There is a sort of self-reinforcing circularity to the process of human knowledge. This is why it is so important to become conscious of the presuppositions with which you are approaching reality. If anything, this insight increases human responsibility in creating one's world.

The spectator theory of reality, which William James and many 20th-century thinkers have criticized, says that we can see, know, and test reality as someone who is fully, objectively separate from that reality-that we can be spectators outside of it. Yet in fact, we are always in the middle of reality. We are affected by it as we are affecting it. So subject and object are much more mutually implicated than it otherwise might seem to the naive empirical mind. This perspective puts an even greater burden of responsibility for becoming conscious of one's principles of interpretation. It is also tremendously freeing. It shows that reality is not a "given" that we are trying to know from outside, as it were. Rather, we are playing a role in creating it, and therefore we need to bring the values and the aspirations that we believe would create the most life-enhancing world and world view. We need to bring that to the epistemological equation.

So things like faith, hope, empathy, and imagination and aesthetic sensibility are critical human faculties and values that play a role in how we know reality, and therefore play a role in what reality becomes for us.

DiCarlo: If I am understanding you correctly, you are implying that a world view can be selected?

Tarnas: I believe we do play a role in selecting or forging our world view. It's a participatory role, it's not a "Captain of My Ship" role with absolute autonomy. It is participatory.

DiCarlo: What criteria would you use for selecting a world view?

Tarnas: The criteria I would suggest are: does it serve a larger understanding of self so that it's not just the narrow "skin-encapsulated ego," to use Alan Watts's terms? Does it serve a larger sense of self that connects each human being with the rest of the human community, with the rest of the community of living beings and with the rest of the cosmos? So there's a larger and larger sense of identity that can become encompassed and served in our world view.

DiCarlo: It strikes me that a given world view is more or less appropriate given humanity's collective stage of development, which would therefore suggest that all world views are relative-there's no right or wrong world view. Would you agree?

Tarnas: That's a very tricky question. They are all relative, but relative to what? They are relative to each other, they are relative to changing values. I believe that the world view of Dante in the 14th century is a different world view than, say, Thomas Jefferson's in the late 18th century, but that doesn't mean that one is superior to the other, or that one is right and the other is wrong. Each world view needs to be approached, in a sense, as a great work of art, so that we try to understand it with as much empathic appreciation as possible, to understand its human consequences, to let its meaning unfold rather than making some sort of snap judgment or even a judgment after a period of time, but one that somehow puts one world view in a lower position than another, or judges that one is wrong and another is right. I think reality is much too complex, too ambiguous, too mysterious to be making those kinds of judgments, and in fact my sense is that reality itself is shifting. World views are relative to that evolving reality that is ultimately coming out of some great mystery of the cosmos.

DiCarlo: If, as you point out in your work, the fields of science, philosophy and religion have helped to sculpt the traditional Western world view, what have been the major influences behind the development of the emerging world view? Who have been some of the more prominent personalities in this unfolding drama?

Tarnas: It depends how far back we want to take it. For example, in a way you can go back all the way to people like Socrates and Moses who are still affecting us in terms of the basic Promethean impulse of rebelling against oppressive structures and creating moral and intellectual autonomy for the human being. This is still an operating, underlying impulse in our current world view shift.

More recently, the thinkers of the late 19th century and early 20th century, like Freud, Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche, set the stage for the postmodern transitional period. I use the word "post-modern" to describe the era that we're in, with the understanding that the term postmodern describes a transitional era. It is an age between world views. Everything is pretty much up for grabs right now. There are many world views in contention. There is much transition. There's a sense of disorientation. There is a deconstruction, or tearing down of many long-established principles, and this is as it should be. This is what marks the period of radical transformation that a cultural world view needs to go through in order to re-constellate itself with a higher level of coherence and greater depth of meaning. And today we now seem to be reaching a new moment, a cyclical acceleration, in this transformation, and perhaps a culmination.

There was a speech that was given by Vaclav Havel a while back that was printed in the New York Times. It's amazing how close his vision of the transformation is to my own. Often when I read Havel I feel like he's a brother. He points out that with the ecological crisis, with the collapse of communism, with the collapse of the conventional scientific assumption that science has or will have in time complete, objective, comprehensive answers to the problems of human reality-these great collapses are happening right now, while new forms of thinking are emerging such as the Gaia hypothesis and the anthropic principle, and, I believe, the tremendous shift in terms of the masculine/feminine dialectic that I mentioned. Look at what's happened in the last 30 and 40 years, in terms of the human exploration of space and seeing the earth for the first time from without-these are all signs of really radical, major shifts that are occurring in our self-understanding and in our world view. What's going on right now is virtually unprecedented. There are some partial precedents, such as the end of classical antiquity, or the beginning of the modern era, or even the beginning of Western civilization, but the fact is, the human species is facing its own mortality on the planet in a way it never has had to before. And this suggests that we are at the end of a long trajectory that is coming to some kind of dramatic climax right now.

In science, in philosophy, in religion, the arts-in all of these are major signs of this shift of world view. It's taking place on all these levels.

DiCarlo: What would you say is the essence of the traditional world view-the prevailing and dominant paradigm as it were-and how has it contributed to some of the problems we are now facing?

Tarnas: That world view has been defined by an emphasis on the progressive advance of the human being in history and its relationship to nature, in which the dominant impulse has been to increase knowledge of the world in order to gain control of that world and nature for human benefit. It is reflected in a Promethean impulse towards greater and greater human autonomy, freedom, self-determination, an adventurous exploration of new horizons, an impulse towards always overcoming the past. And it has emphasized individualism, promoted the separation of the human being from nature, and elevated reason over emotion, imagination, and communal identity.

Now this impulse has been valuable and essential to much of the best of who we are and what we've accomplished, but it has also caused great problems, especially in the one-sidedness of this development which has resulted in a disenchanted world view in which the human being is ultimately alienated, existing in a world that is seen as having no intrinsic spiritual meaning, no intrinsic purpose. We are not at home in this world, we're simply an ephemeral species that lives on a meaningless speck of dust on the edge of one galaxy amongst billions.

This world view has created major psychological and spiritual problems for humanity and an enormous ecological crisis and we clearly need to be addressing what it is about this world view that has created these problems. In many ways, the problems and the crises that are arising are too big for human beings to fix using the old engineering model of, "Well, we'll just figure out the cause of the problem and fix it using our rational intelligence." Clearly, every move that is made to fix one thing, such as antibiotics, creates new problems that we could not have predicted in advance. So these events are in fact making way for a new world view. You have to go through a sacrifice, you have to go through a death, you have to go through some kind of destruction and deconstruction of a whole world view if something new is going to be born. That just seems to be the way of the cosmos. I have deep faith in the ultimate positive character of what this transformation will be; on the other hand, I don't know how much suffering, how much of a global crisis, we will have to go through before this new world view emerges. A lot of this is still in question. It's a race, as someone has said, between education and catastrophe. How aware will we become of the role we are playing in creating the crisis? How much inner work do people do? How much inner exploration? How much psychological, interior work do people do to make possible this great transformation on an interior level so that it doesn't have to be naively and destructively acted out in the world? Because some kind of death has to happen. There's the death and rebirth of a sacramental initiation, and then there's the death that is acted out on a much more destructive and problematic way in the world.