A synopsis of the first set of main points from the book Cosmos and Psyche, by Richard Tarnas.  This article acts as a preface of sorts, laying out a background - a historical evolution and combination of crucial insight throughout recorded time, bringing us to an edge of understanding today.

PART 1

The Birth of the Modern Self

The modern self began to emerge just over 500 years ago.

The Dawn of a New Universe

The heliocentric discovery became the impetus for magnified confidence in human reason.

Two Paradigms of History

Two diametrically opposed myths: that of Progress or Ascent, and that of The Fall.  Both are fully valid, yet represent partial aspects of a larger metanarrative.

Forging the Self, Disenchanting the World

The achievement of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation.

The Cosmological Situation Today

In a disenchanted cosmos, nothing is sacred: reductive values colonize the collective human imagination.

PART 2

Two Suitors: A Parable

We must awaken to the pervasive projection of soullessness onto the cosmos.  It is time to adopt an approach to the nature of the cosmos that values: a cosmos intelligent and noble, a worthy being, permeated with mind and soul, imbued with moral aspiration and purpose, endowed with spiritual depths and mystery.

The Interior Quest

The depth psychology revolution mirrored the Copernican revolution (heliocentric discovery).  It displaced the conscious self from the center and revealed a much larger realm of the unconscious.  It subverted both orthodox science and religion while extending the range of inquiry for both.  It also provided new ways of articulating encounters with the numinous.

Synchronicity and its Implications

Synchronicity possesses a special relevance for the schism in the modern world between subjectivity and the objective world.  It poses a challenge to the philosophical foundations of science and holds implications for the psychology of religion.  Recognition and integration of synchronicities moves the psyche from one-sidedness toward greater wholeness.  Synchronicity suggests that meaning can be carried by the outer world as well as the inner.  The underlying meaning in synchronistic phenomena is archetypal in nature.  

Archetypes are fundamental governing principles, innate symbolic forms, dispositions that unconsciously structure and impel behavior on personal and collective levels.  Further, archetypes are patterns of meaning that inform both psyche and matter.  In acknowledging sychronistic phenomena and archetypal in-formation, the psyche participates with an ensouled world which shares the same ordered principles of meaning.

The Archetypal Cosmos

Astrology is a cosmological perspective which posits a systematic symbolic correspondence between planetary positions and the events of human existence.  Astrology recognizes an "ecology of mind", which is cosmically embedded.  A core of the astrological tradition - planetary correspondences with specific archetypal principles, and the importance of major geometrical alignments between planets - has substantial empirical basis.

Archetypes are multidimensional and multivalent in nature: their coherency and consistency give rise to a plurality of meaning and manifestation.  Active archetypal principles are powerful and radically participatiory in nature.  

Astrology is archetypally predictive, as opposed to concretely predictive.

A consistently meaningful empirical correspondence exists between two sets of phenomena, astronomical and human, with the connecting principle most fruitfully approached as archetypally-informed synchronicity.