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Worldview studies

[A] mood of universal destruction and renewal...has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos--the right moment--for a "metamorphosis of the gods," of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science....So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human.

-C.G. Jung

The "metamorphosis of the gods" to which Jung is refering is a transformation of our culture's worldview--a sort of death-rebirth process of societal views and values.  Because we are rarely aware of the most basic assumptions that comprise our cultural values it is difficult to develop a maturely critical awarness of them and how they guide our lives at the most basic level.  We believe that the work of developing a critical awareness of our worldview assumptions will not only aid in living more self-aware lives, but will facilitate the broader evolution of our culture.

 

The past 150 years have borne numerous brilliant critical perspectives on this topic: from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Richard Tarnas and Ken Wilber, as well as the important feminist and environmental critiques evident in such thinkers as Carolyn Merchant or Evelyn Fox Keller.  In this same time, there have been numerous visionaries suggesting possible ways to correct the failings of the modern western worldview.  Teilhard de Chardin, Rudolf Steiner, A.N. Whitehead, Mircea Eliade, and Eckhart Tolle have all offered inspiring and influential perspectives.  This body of work explores:

  • The need for science and religion to reconcile and inform each other

  • How the western world has lost the sense of the sacredness of the natural world and how crucial it is to reclaim that feeling

  • A perspective that see the universe as evolving, and humans as important participants in this epic process

  • How the trajectory of the modern worldview has been based on a subjugation of "the feminine" and how a reclamation of the feminine is essential to our psychological, social, and planetary health

 

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