Staying with the passage in the first post of the evening, Tarnas goes on to say:

"The modern experience was still vexed by a profound incoherence, with the dichotomies of the Romantic and scientific temperaments reflecting the Western Weltanschauung's seemingly unbridgeable disjunction between human consciousness and unconscious cosmos."

He closes the section a few lines later by adding:

"Modern man was a divided animal, inexplicably self-aware in an indifferent universe."

These passages beg a few key questions:
1. Are the cosmos unconscious, or (while not self aware) do they have aspirations?
2. If the cosmos have aspirations, are they nonetheless indifferent to humanity or simply singularly focused and so far beyond the realm of our understanding?
3. If the cosmos have aspirations, are they at odds with our own?
4. Are we "inexplicably" self aware, or rather ironically, or accidentally. Does the answer put us out of sync with the aspirations of the cosmos, or somehow preclude us from being a tool in the cosmic aspiration?