Even the most skeptical skeptic will enjoy reading Richard Tarnas’s new book “Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View.” In it, the cultural historian and professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies uses astrology and planetary correspondences to illustrate patterns in world events, reminding us that the stars do, in fact, light the way for humanity on its spiritual evolution and struggle with maturity.

“I believe that humankind has entered into the most critical stages of a death-rebirth mystery,” Tarnas says. “In retrospect it seems that the entire path of Western civilization has taken humankind and the planet on a trajectory of initiatory transformation into a state of spiritual alienation, into an encounter with mortality on a global scale–from world wars and holocausts to the nuclear crisis and now the planetary ecological crisis–an encounter with mortality that is no longer individual and personal but rather transpersonal, collective, planetary.

“It is a collective dark night of the soul, a deep separation from the community of being, from the cosmos itself. We are undergoing this rite of passage with virtually no guidance from wise elders because the wise elders are caught up in the same crisis. This initiation is too epochal for such confident guidance, too global, too unprecedented, too all-encompassing; it is larger than all of us. It seems that we are all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, an entrance into a profoundly different way of being in the cosmos.”

Read more from Shelley Ackerman’s interview with Tarnas here.