Tarnas is describing participation before it becomes a concept — the condition you are already in before any theory arrives to name it. The soul does not peer outward at a world that happens to have meaning scattered through it; it is constituted inside a meaning that precedes and exceeds it. This is what makes the anima mundi idea genuinely unsettling rather than simply beautiful: it removes the spectator's position. You cannot stand outside the world psyche to evaluate whether it exists, because whatever is doing the evaluating is already one of its inflections.

What tends to happen, though, is that this participatory condition gets quickly converted into something the ego can use — a cosmology, a felt sense of connection, a practice of attunement. The living matrix becomes a resource, and the project of drawing on it replaces the harder recognition that you are not the subject of this story in the way you imagined. Embeddedness means the world psyche is as much defining you as you are reading it. What Tarnas is pointing at is less a discovery than a dis-illusion of the sovereign position — the position that depth psychology has been dismantling, in its own idiom, since Freud made the ego a tenant rather than a landlord.