Rick Tarnas is a graduate of Harvard with a red diploma. After university, he lived and worked at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he studied with such legendary psychologists as Stanislav Grof, Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Houston Smith, and James Hillman, and later served as Esalen's Director of Programs and Education.
His first book, The Passion of Western Thought, which reflects Jung's ideas-a history of the narrative of Western thought from Ancient Greek to postmodern-became a bestseller and continues to be widely used in universities around the world. In 2006, he published his second book, Space and the Psyche: Hints at a New Way of Looking at the World, which won the Book of the Year Award from the UK Medical Research Network. In this book, Richard tries to combine the ideas of Plato and Jung in a new worldview of the twenty-first century.

Personal website cosmosandpsyche.com
Quotes:"While conducting research in the field of consciousness studies, we were surprised to find a stable and symbolically subtle connection between the time of major psychological transformations of people and planetary transits to their natal charts. Esalen offered a variety of intensive techniques and practices to stimulate psychological transformation processes, and hundreds of people came there during their life journey specifically to experience deeply transformative experiences, so Esalen proved to be an excellent laboratory for our research."
"We have concluded that astrological aspects do not act as a toggle switch for the light switch, but rather indicate archetypal wave forms that enter into an individual or collective psychic field and interact with the entire complex of archetypal dynamics that collectively operate in this field. Then they take shape and change under the influence of specific circumstances and creative reactions of the individuals and communities under consideration, and are expressed in the form of specific events and experiences."