The Cosmic Renaissance
Imagining Jesus Christ in India using midjourney (which still has trouble with hands)
I have been thinking a lot about this new, more spiritual age we seem to be entering: what to call it, how to talk about it, and even how to help foster its expansion. We talked a lot about it in two of my courses in the philosophy, cosmology and consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies this past semester. In a course with the same name we called it The Great Turning, using Joanna Macy’s phrase. In another course, we contemplated the possibility of a “Second Axial Age,” referencing a first Axial Age that took place circa 500 BCE around the time of the Buddha, Patanjali, the Upanishads, the Greek philosophers, and Jewish prophets. So, for my final paper in my Intro to PCC course I explored what spiritual traditions we might incorporate into the traditions of the first Axial Age to forge a new spirituality and world view: Bhakti Yoga, Tantra Yoga, and pre-Roman Christianity. I propose calling it The Cosmic Renaissance.
Here is an edited version of that paper. I will be talking about this on an upcoming episode of my podcast as well…
Infusing a New Renaissance with Heart
There is no denying that we are on the precipice of some monumental moment as a species. Our ecosystem is unraveling. Climate refugee populations are on the rise. And annihilation of the human species, or large swaths of it, seems like it is right around the corner. We can almost feel the hot breath of our climate catastrophe on our parched faces.
What if there is an archetypal world view that could offer the nurturing we need to heal, and at the same time, serve as a foundation for us to begin changing our behavior and building a better world? It is obvious that pure reason has reached its limits in this regard. So let us to cast our gaze back beyond the modern, planetary era for guidance.
Prior to the Renaissance, the biggest revolution in philosophy, religion, and human thought was what Karl Jaspers called The Axial Age. We live in a world as much shaped by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as by the Axial Age. But we are also living in a world shaped in the intervening millennia by Christianity and Islam, and increasingly in the last half century or so, by the evolutionary tributaries of Eastern Axial Age traditions.
As scholars and philosophers begin to understand the deeper, esoteric, more uncorrupted fundamentals within the Yog-Vedantic tradition, and in Christianity, as well as the symbiotic nature of these that we will explore in more detail, the time is ripe for a Second Axial Age that is both an iteration on the first and a deeper integration of the true teachings of the first.
But a new world view requires a hook. After all, materialism has a compelling hook: technological advances. Our smartphones and electric cars are part of the narrative of the benefits of reason, science, and material progress. The superiority of social, scientific, and technological progress is so core to our identity as modern citizens of the world that we rarely think about its deficiencies.
In contrast, what the ensouled world view has to offer is more subtle. It has to do with the heart and with our search for deeper meaning. The techniques are holotropic (practices like breathwork or kriya that move one toward unity and wholeness) and require practice, patience, curiosity, and trust. The primary selling point for an ensouled world is that it offers existential refuge, providing meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. But are most of us aware that we suffer from an absence of meaning? It seems as if nobody talks about it.
Part of the challenge is that we have a dearth of inspiring visionary leaders in our world. We no longer have any public intellectuals that people look to for guidance or solace. Instead, we live in a celebrity-obsessed culture; and none of them are leading the way into a better world view. Just as the world hurdles toward a catastrophe born of a loss of meaning, we seem to have lost our meaning makers. Or have we? Perhaps they are hiding in plain sight.
Astrology as a Hook
As we face this planetary crisis together, what can we do, as philosophers and cosmologists, to become agents of change? Is it even possible to set about changing the predominant world view? I think we can describe a beautiful, enticing, holistic, and nurturing world view, so that when people start looking for one they are enchanted by the one we have described. And we can lead people there with a popular practice that is already ensconced within the cultural zeitgeist and gaining traction in popular media: astrology. The hook, in other words, is astrology, whether archetypal or Vedic. And the warm, cozy, inviting world that astrology represents is a view and a cosmology that we might call the Second Axial Age.
Astrology has been gaining in popularity since at least 2012. Magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker have written articles about how Millennials, in particular, are into astrology. As of 2020, the astrology app industry was worth $40 million. This year, Spotify created a custom podcast experience around astrology. In some sense, astrologers are the new philosophers, alchemists, mystics, clerics, and priests of the modern era.
To appeal to the merely curious rather than those already converted, we need astrologers who are credible, reasonable, grounded, relatable, and deeply steeped in a robust practice of astrology with a strong lineage. In the same way that yoga teachers in the West slowly became the emissaries of a certain kind of secularized Hinduism, astrologers are the emissaries of an ensouled world view. Vedic and archetypal astrology can server as a gateway “drug” to a healthier, more loving, and nurturing world view.
In the remainder of this paper I will attempt to describe the kind of world view that I posit will be most effective in attracting people seeking an alternative to materialism. I will explore the idea of world view by first glancing back to the Axial Age, and then considering what the world view of a planetary wisdom culture might look like. In the interest of space, I will leave further discussion of popularizing astrology for another essay.
The Nurturing World View That Vedic Astrology Points To
In this Introduction to Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness course we explored archetypal astrology and archetypal cosmology, whose world view can be described as ensouled, nurturing, and participatory. Its underlying world view and associated archetypes come from the broader Western astrology tradition. However, in contrast with the Vedic archetypal pantheon and mythology, Western cosmological mythology does not offer a robust origin story that we can adapt to our new cosmology.
For this reason, it is helpful and informative, as we seek to describe the nature of the participatory Cosmos that astrology invitees us to enter, to look to the Vedic tradition, which offers a richer, more balanced cosmology and world view. Yoga and the sacred archetypes it shares with Vedic astrology are a fertile source for developing a robust world view, especially if we include developments that come after the Axial Age, as I explain below.
A Note on Terminology
The grand spiritual tradition in India known to most today as Hinduism was originally and more accurately described as yoga: both a state of unity and a set of practices for experiencing directly a state of cosmic unity. It was only when Europeans began to colonize India that they found the need to give name to a set of geographically diverse beliefs and practices that ancient Indians simply called “sanātana dharma” or “the eternal way.”
An inclusive name that modern-day Indian scholars use to describe Hinduism is “Yog-Vedanta.” This term nicely encapsulates the various streams of yoga / Hinduism and is sufficiently inclusive, yet still distinguishing Vedanta or Neo-Vedanta as a separate tributary. In this essay, I will use “Yog-Vedanta” and “yoga” interchangeably, occasionally resorting to “Hindu” or “Hinduism” where it is appropriate.
A note regarding the Tantrik tradition originating in Kashmir around the fifth century CE: Due to the confusion created by several prominent figures in the 20th century in applying the word ‘tantra’ to conscious sexual practices, I will use “classical Tantra” in this essay. Where I omit the ‘classical’ modifier, the reader can safely assume I mean classical Tantra. In addition, following Christopher Wallis’s lead, when using tantra as an adjective, I will spell with with a ‘k’ to further distinguish it from Neo-Tantric practices.
Finally, I use the Sanskrit word ‘bhava’ in this essay because, like many Sanskrit words, it captures a set of related and constellated concepts well. It is a state of being or presence in which one adopts or cultivates a specific attitude; it is where one infuses one’s entire being with a particular essence or vibration. As we will see, I am recommending a devotional, heart-centered bhava.
An Axial Age, Expanded
In 1949, Karl Jaspers published Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History), in which, building on similar ideas from nineteenth century European scholars, he coined the term “Achsenzeit” (Axial Age) to foreground a simultaneous flowering of new philosophical and spiritual ideas in the sixth century BCE too numerous and transformative to be a coincidence. Jaspers’s examples include Confucius and Lao-Tse from China, the proliferation of The Upanishads and the emergence of the Buddha in India, Zarathustra in Persia, the appearance of Jewish prophets in Palestine, and the flourishing of Greek philosophy with Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato.
Richard Tarnas affirms the cosmic alignment of these developments astrologically and archetypally as taking place during a rare triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, combining the archetypal influences of cosmic epiphanies and intense, deeply evolutionary spiritual innovation, transformative on a grand scale across time and space.
From our perch in the early 21st century, the crucial piece missing from Jasper’s framing of this pregnant spiritual moment in human history is heart, a sense of nurturing, a sense of the Cosmos being motherly. I think giving people this sense of a loving, nurturing Cosmos and a connection to the Divine Feminine (or Divine Lunar) is essential for offering a vibrant new world view and creating a profound vision of a vibrant planetary era.
A New World View
Since the mid-20th century, we have been in a century-long Neptune-Pluto sextile, making this moment most comparable, astronomically, to the year 1500, when the modern self was born. If we are entering a new Axial Age, then this will necessarily require or precipitate another transformation in the experience of the numinous, just as the first Axial Age did. Aside from the Enlightenment, what have been the most relevant and evolutionary developments missing from that first Axial Age?
Thirty years ago, Ewert Cousins built on Thomas Berry’s proposal for a Second Axial Age by suggesting that this second age will integrate a cosmic dimension and exhibit a unity of tribal consciousness (a horizontal dimension). According to Cousins, it will also necessitate a vertical perspective, plunging its “roots deep into the earth.”
The crucial piece that I would add to Berry’s and Cousins’s augmentation is a heart-based bhava necessary to counteract and balance the intellect of the past half millennium. In a word, love—the loving nourishment of an archetypal mother. Therefore, a Second Axial Age will rest upon, and reinforce, a world view that sees the Cosmos as infused with an infinite intelligence and a divine sentience that responds to Tarnas’s second suitor: a person with devotion who understands, because of a direct experience of the numinous, that life is a creative collaboration with the Cosmos, a loving dance (Tarnas 39). This Cosmos is not the Old Testament’s wrathful old man in a far-removed heaven passing judgment but a playful, loving presence that responds to our elevated desires. It is also more lunar: holistic, connecting, valuing emotions, and sensual.
A Loving, Nurturing Cosmos
In this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the well-springs of the comprehension of love.
— Saint John of the Cross
The materialist world view does not offer much sustenance to the citizens of our modern world. Its emptiness is a hollow void, rather than the vibrant fullness of the Hindu or Buddhist emptiness. We, as a collective, are The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, searching for a heart and being handed a mechanical timepiece by an impostor instead. With the death of God, we in the West lost our last source of existential sustenance. Of course the Abrahamic traditions had been stripped of much spiritual nourishment for centuries anyway. Take Christianity, for example. The wrathful senex figure of the popular religious imagination was not a terribly nurturing archetype to begin with. This was the separation that Jesus Christ was attempting to heal with his teachings: God the Father is solar and lunar, and has sent the Holy Spirit to comfort us, to hold us, to dance with us.
People today are starved for a cosmology and a world view that nourishes them. What is missing from both scientific materialism and modern religion sapped of all its transcendental juice (not to mention most of Western philosophy) is heart. The central lesson of the last two millennia is that any new, ensouled world view must necessarily be heart-based, infused with universal love. Equally important, an ensouled Cosmos would be nurturing and spiritually nourishing, like an archetypal mother. In this view, the Cosmos cradles us and loves us unconditionally, it comforts us when we need comforting.
We do not need to create a new spirituality or world view out of whole cloth. Instead, we can draw from strains of existing traditions to formulate a Second Axial Age ethos, one that embodies the qualities we have just described.
Classical Tantra
In the state of ānanda, one does not differentiate the object of awareness from oneself, and so by loving it, one is loving oneself, one is loving the very power of awareness that is God.
— Christopher Wallis, Tantra Illuminated
The Tantrikas of Kashmir, from approximately 550 BCE to 1100 BCE, saw creation as a divine play (Lila) of pure love by a divine feminine expression of Totality: The Goddess. They believed that a loving consciousness is the fundamental ground of being. The Tantrik “View” is a superb encapsulation of the sort of world view that we can agree upon and apply to any religious or spiritual tradition that has room for idealistic monism, as we enter this new era:
All that exists, throughout all time and beyond, is one infinite divine Consciousness, free and blissful, which projects within the field of its awareness a vast multiplicity of apparently differentiated subjects and objects: each object an actualization of a timeless potentiality inherent in the Light of Consciousness, and each subject, you and I, the same plus a contracted locus of self-awareness. This creation, a divine play, is the result of the natural impulse within Consciousness to express the totality of its self-knowledge in action, an impulse arising from love.
With its practices for accessing the transcendent through the manifest and celebrating the material world fully, classical Tantra contains both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Of primary importance in Tantra is direct experience of a divine reality with both transcendent and immanent aspects (Shiva and Shakti) through sacred rituals (puja) and connection with the Divine through the senses, in addition to more inward practices (a more lunar bhava).
It is this direct experience of a numinous realm with an explicitly nurturing lunar nature that makes some form classical Tantra an essential component of a new planetary wisdom culture world view. Furthermore, Tantra is well-suited for adaptation to a modern, planetary wisdom culture because it is a framework, a mode of practice and a world view, that can be applied to any religion or spiritual system. The classic example is the importation of the Tantrik view and mode of practice to Buddhism with Dzogchen, where some deities are female and even the Buddha has both solar and lunar qualities. It has also influenced Jainism and even the Indian flavor of Islam.
Bhakti Yoga
In fifteenth century Bengal, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu popularized the bhakti mode of yoga and the chanting of The Mahamantra (Great Mantra) Hare Krishna. Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu, an ancient archetypal god seen as the sustainer in the traditional Yog-Vedantic trinity. So this sense of a sustaining Cosmos has been present since the origins of the Yog-Vedanta tradition going back some four or five thousands years, perhaps originating with a more earth-based, shamanic flavor of yoga. This Bhakti tradition continues today as part of the larger Vaishnavism subdivision of modern Hinduism.
In the following century, Goswami Tulsidas translated The Ramayana into the vernacular Awadhi language so that it too would be accessible to the common man. He is famous for authoring The Hanuman Chalisa, a lengthy devotional mantra for working with Hanuman, an incarnation of Shiva, and Lord Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu / Krishna.
Bhakti Yoga includes both of these tributaries, and is the path of devotion, often referred to as the yoga of love. As with classical Tantra, the Bhakti tradition uses sacred rituals and ceremonies to cultivate a devotional bhava and a deeper experience of unity with the Divine, with the Cosmos. And, like classical Tantra, chanting mantra features heavily in Bhakti practices. The overarching view is heart-centered. Bhaktas access the infinite through the finite, archetypal forms of Krishna and his consort Radha, Hanuman, Rama, and Sita.
Like other Yog-Vedanta traditions (as well as astrology) Bhakti represents a cosmology and world view that is ensouled, a universe that is participatory and accessible experientially through various archetypes, but with love and devotion. Although Bhakti is more solar than the lunar Tantrik tradition, they are both fairly balanced in that regard.
Jesus Christ and Christianity
A nurturing and loving inflection of Judaism began to take shape with Jesus and the Christian tradition. Prior to Abraham, the people of the Middle East worshipped a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses. But the Abrahamic God and religious ethos of the first millennium BCE was very solar, evolving from El, the sun god: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, sovereign, holy, pure, and harshly punishing.
Jesus Christ sought to change that by presenting God as a loving and nurturing father who loves and forgives. Of course this was a somewhat solar expression of nurturing, where God is the Father and sends his only Son. Jesus attempted to impart an impression of the ensouled world of God that was also lunar and heart-based, not too dissimilar from the Yog-Vedantic view, as contemporary yogis like Yogananda beautifully illustrate.
Within Christianity, The Holy Spirit is how God the Father becomes manifest. It is the immanent numinous field that sustains us. And Jesus manifested to remind us of that reality: Jesus told us that everyone can directly receive the Christ Consciousness that he represented through the Holy Spirit. But, in order to draw from the Christian tradition, we need to resurrect the loving Jesus from before the Romans corrupted his teachings to quash other beliefs. Jesus came to guide us to self realization by understanding that the Cosmos acts through us, just as it did through him.
How We Foster a Planetary Wisdom Culture
In a way, fostering a planetary wisdom culture that includes an ensouled, loving, nurturing Cosmos is simple. We can start small: Open our hearts and then help others to open theirs. There are many practices for doing that. The Work That Reconnects offers a beautiful set of practices, based in part on Buddhist practices.
Part of my intention in bringing classical Tantra, Bhakti Yoga, and pre-Roman Christianity into the conversation around a Second Axial Age is to show how, especially with classical Tantra, there is a non-denominational, universal framework and bhava we can describe and promote that can be adapted to any existing religious tradition. Love, devotion, and the archetypal mother are universal. They are simple and relatable.
We can help foster a new planetary wisdom culture then, by starting small: Practicing heart-centered astrology; talking about a loving, nurturing, motherly Cosmos. And then build community around that.
Ken Wilber suggests that once a world view reaches ten percent saturation it starts to accelerate into the mainstream, creating a tipping point. That figure has not been proven in any meaningful way that I am aware of. But it is a useful mental coat hook to hang our optimism on.
What’s In a Name?
As any brand consultant will tell you, names matter. Throughout this essay I have been referring to a “Second Axial Age.” I think we can do better. A good name will be approachable and resonate with the bleeding edge of the archetypal zeitgeist, conveying a sense of positive change, a brighter future, wholeness, and the very nature of the world view we are cultivating. For example, the word ‘Gaia’ does this well in connection with an ecological approach to the earth, and has carved out an ideological parcel that has been embraced by a large number of people—it has a certain ideological gravity. Of course it took time to catch on.
“Second Axial Age” is perfectly serviceable where we are only speaking to other philosophers. But, objectively it is obscure and clunky. Instead, as I have been contemplating the fact that we are going through a death-rebirth process collectively, I have been thinking of a rebirth, a renaissance. A renaissance of cosmic proportions. A “Cosmic Renaissance” perhaps. In any case, my focus in this essay is not the naming of a new view but defining it. I leave this task to the mythologists, philosophers, and brand consultants.
Conclusion
As Richard Tarnas suggests at the end of Cosmos & Psyche, we must allow ourselves to be “changed and expanded by that which we seek to understand.” We must open our minds and our hearts. That is the only way to usher in a new, life-sustaining and life-celebrating age. Astrology requires both analytical abilities and intuitive abilities. It encourages and often provides a direct experience of the Divine.
Of all the philosophies and perspectives we have studied this semester, it seems that astrology is best situated to serve as an entry point into a new world view, as Richard Tarnas suggests in Cosmos & Psyche. Astrology is rapidly gaining in popularity and, once new adherents understand its solar and lunar, Western and Eastern, philosophical and cosmological underpinnings, then it will open up a whole new world.
The Divine Feminine began to take shape in ancient India with the Tantrikas. Although it survives in parts of India today, more solar expressions of the great Ground of Being dominate. Humanity needs to reform its relationship with the lunar mother principle. This is why the Gaia universal is so perfect. By expanding on this archetype with a bigger one for the Cosmos, what yogis call the “cosmic womb,” we can begin to understand how the entire universe loves and nurtures us.
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