Jung's Legacy: The Wisdom of
Eckhart Tolle and Richard Tarnas
by Peter Mermin, Ph.D.

Friday, November 13, 2009, 7:00 p.m.,  Lecture.
The Unitarian Universalist Church,
3975 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota
$10 Members   $20 Non-Members
$8 Students

     Among the many valuable offshoots of Jung's pioneering efforts in the field of depth psychology, perhaps his most enduring legacy regards his view of the nature of human consciousness and its connection to the world of apparent material reality. Whereas his mentor Freud had built an entire mechanical framework of the human psyche around hydraulics and internal conflict, Jung saw a more positive, forward-looking consciousness, one capable of transcending the individual's personal story, and tapping into the rich depth of collective human possibilities.

     In this lecture we will examine two contemporary thinkers who, albeit in differing ways, nevertheless share Jung's vision about the possibilities of consciousness as a force in co-creating the very nature of the so-called material world. Eckhart Tolle, in The Power of Now and in A New Earth, offers us the hope that the human race will come to realize that the "ego" is not who we really are, and that the real self, which exists only in the present moment, is the key to our ability to transform ourselves, and thereby to transform the earth. Richard Tarnas, in The Passion of the Western Mind and in Cosmos and Psyche, shows us, in the first book, human history as the unfolding of spiritual consciousness, and then, startlingly, in the second book, that spiritual consciousness is linked, in history, to astrological and archetypal patterns that seemingly go beyond "coincidence". Both Tolle and Tarnas have extended Jung's genius in truly novel ways.

Peter Mermin, Ph.D., Peter Mermin, Ph.D., grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. He attended Antioch College, majoring in Philosophy, particularly Existential and Humanistic Philosophy. He did graduate work at the New School for Social Research in New York, and has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Union Graduate School. Dr. Mermin taught Psychology at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island for 34 years. He currently teaches at The Lifelong Learning Academy/USF in Sarasota.