SBCC Center for Lifelong Learning presents depth psychologist Richard Tarnas at the next CLL Mind & Supermind lecture, Humanity’s Rite of Passage, 7:30-9:30 p.m., Monday, May 8, in Tannahill Auditorium at the CLL Schott Campus, 310 W. Padre St.

Tarnas will draw on philosophy, religion and cultural history to seek a larger context for both understanding and action.

Joseph Campbell called Tarnas’ best-selling book The Passion of the Western Mind: “The most lucid and concise presentation I have read, of the grand lines of what every student should know about the history of Western thought.”

Tarnas’s lecture will explore how our civilization, indeed the Earth community itself, seems to be on the threshold of a fundamental transformation.

This impending transmutation bears a striking resemblance to what takes place on the individual level in initiatory rites of passage, near-death experiences, spiritual crises, and critical stages of what C.G. Jung called the individuation process.

Can we find a place of equilibrium, an eye in the storm, from which we can engage this time of intense polarization and radical change? What is the role of those “heroic” communities, which carry principles and perspectives that transcend the mainstream modern world view?
 
“Dr. Tarnas has an incredible body of work, and we can’t wait for the community to see what he has in store for this lecture,” said Andy Harper, executive director for CLL.

“The CLL Mind & Supermind series has been exploring fascinating areas of human psychology and consciousness for more than 35 years, and this lecture is a great time to jump in and join us,” Harper said.

Tarnas is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he currently teaches. He is a graduate of Harvard University and earned his Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute.

He is on the Board of Governors of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He has been a frequent lecturer at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and gives public lectures and seminars in the U.S. and abroad.

In addition to writing The Passion of the Western Mind, Tarnas is the author of Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, for which he received the Scientific and Medical Network’s Book of the Year Prize.
 
Register for Tarnas’s talk online at www.theCLL.org. Admission is $20. For more information, call 687-0812, or email info@theCLL.org. CLL is online at www.theCLL.org.

— Angel Pacheco SBCC Center for Lifelong Learning.