Love and the World

Love the World

A Guide to Conscious Soul Practice

Robert Sardello

Contents

Getting Started

1.Taking the Side of the World

2.Individuality as Love

3.The Soul of the World

4.Time, Love, and the Soul

5.Grieving, Love, and the Soul

6.Dreaming and the World

7.Coming to Our Senses

8.Heart and Soul

9.Soulful Relationships

10.Community and Friendship

Notes

Copyright © Robert Sardello & Lindisfarne Books, 2001

Getting Started

This book presents a new psychology — a spiritual psychology. While new, it is based on the nearly forgotten definition of psychology as the science of the human soul. Soul in this sense is not something abstracted from our whole nature as beings body, soul, and spirit. It is not abstracted from our engagement with others and with the surrounding world — nor from our relation with the spiritual worlds. My working definition of spiritual psychology therefore runs as follows:

Spiritual psychology is an active practice that develops embodied, conscious, soul life to make that life open and receptive to the spiritual realms. This is done as an act of love toward ourselves, others, and the world.

This definition, I know, is very broad. Yet it took me eight years to come to these words, which summarize the content of this book.

Psychology, I want to claim, is more than the study of the human soul. One cannot conduct such a study without undergoing inner changes in the process. Psychology, since it is we who do it, necessarily implies that psyche studies psyche. It therefore belongs, by its very nature, to the realm of practice. It is not a theory wandering around seeking application. We must do our psychology rather than theorize about the soul. And, because soul is not abstracted from the world, the doing of psychology is the doing of love — consciously, actively, and for the sake of others and the world. It follows, too, that this is not only a book about psychology: it is also the very speech of psyche itself.

We live out our imagination of what constitutes being human. We think we know what human beings are: they are those people around us, apparently like us. Yet it may be difficult to put into words all we mean by this. The ancient and noble imagination of the human being as embodied soul and spirit, inseparably engaged with others, the world, and the spiritual cosmos, needs to be re-formulated in the language of present-day experience. The languages of cosmology, alchemy, religion, and myth all convey something of the fullness of what it is to be human. They really amount to cultural memories that tell us how, in order to be human, we must enter into deep relationship with something larger and more significant than ourselves. And it must be larger, not only than our individual selves, but also larger than any familial, collective, religious, political, or social organization that claims to provide meaning.

We need now to find the ways to speak this degree of fullness in our own everyday language. This task constitutes a second aspect of the book. What is referred to here as the experience of the “I” expresses this spiritual aspect of the soul — the capacity to experience ourselves, others, the world, and the cosmos as spiritual activity rather than just as complex combinations of material substance.

The word capacity is a kind of key. It refers to a general ability. We have, for example, the capacity to speak; it is an ability characteristic of being human. The moment a capacity is actualized, it is no longer general, but specific and particular. We have the capacity to experience everything as spiritual activity. It takes a special alertness to the “I” to particularize this capacity into actual individual experiences. This book shows, in many different ways, how to go about realizing this capacity, which is equivalent to exercising the ability to love in creative ways.

The soul, like the spirit, is a deed we humans do. And it is a capacity — the capacity for life to be meaning, both felt and known. This capacity is realized when we have a conscious sense for images that flows through all modes of experience — from sensing to memory to dreaming to thinking. I define the soul very simply as myself. Myself, however, has nothing to do with the usual way we imagine ourselves, which is not soul but ego. Rather, soul as myself is the direct and immediate felt sense of uniqueness, not that I am, but that I am being given, and given at every moment. We can know our soul only through a primary act of self-love, which is not to love ourselves as if we were objects to ourselves, but rather, the dedicated work of being present to our depths.

We can dedicate ourselves to the depths, which are the soul. This has been preserved as a tradition in psychology through the lively tradition of depth psychology with its emphasis on myth, symbol, dream, and image. Depth psychology, however, has ways looked to the past in the defining of soul. Depth psychology sets the spontaneous image-making qualities of soul life (such as appear in dreams and imagination) in relation to symbol systems and myths from earlier cultures. We know we are in soul, says depth psychology, when we find ourselves living the collective unconscious.

This new psychology, however, shows a different relation of soul and time. The conjunction of soul and spirit in the human being is experienced as a felt current, coming toward us from the future. We know that we are in soul and open to the spiritual realms when, in a fully awake and conscious state, we live in the time of patient, not-knowing anticipation. This quality of not-knowing is a further act of primary love, and is akin to the experience of falling in love. When we fall in love, all is new, unknown, oriented toward what is to come, without knowing or needing to know what that might be. We step over the line of knowing based on past experiences, personal or collective, and enter into not-knowing, where for anything to make sense we now have to consciously feel the creativity of loving. Much of the world is in total confusion because we are being asked to develop this new capacity of living through conscious loving for the first time. Nothing makes sense anymore — relationships, economy, religion, civilization, education — the whole of the world now seems to be crumbling. And it is. But this is not the end. It is the beginning of having to develop entirely new capacities. I give numerous examples of how to go about doing this, and how to begin our development in a profound experience of love.

Besides re-imagining spirit and soul, this new psychology is fully embodied. The psychological tradition that has upheld the importance of soul, the depth psychology of C.G. Jung, also has the unfortunate distinction of being decidedly gnostic. I mean that a significant thread of Jung’s psychology stems from that ancient religious tradition that views the body and the world as evil. The Gnostic religion holds the view that we are trapped in the body and in the world and the primary task is to find our way out and back to the fullness. Because the psychology of Jung and its further development have this gnostic streak, they typically have little to say about the body-as-soul. The view presented in this new psychology you are about to read is that the body is good and the world is good; more than that, the body and the world are sacred, holy, of soul and spirit substance. The chapter on sensing works to help us experience the body as not finished, but in the act of coming to be, every moment. The human body is being created in the acts of sensing. Sensing is the activity of the coming together of self with world, the meeting. Body is formed where world and self meet one another.

Jung’s psychology cannot understand such a notion; consequently, there is no psychology of sensation in depth psychology. And Freud’s psychology, while wonderfully affirming body, in its origins had a too mechanical notion of the body. A new imagining of the body is necessary if we are to find our way toward a fresh valuation of the world. The body, as described in this work, is an expression of love, and if we reach and search for spiritual love without realizing that love already permeates our organism, then we are practicing escapism rather than love.

This new psychology is also a world psychology. We have for too long now confined the notion of soul to the interior of the human being, leaving the world to the exploitation of need and greed. If there is no soul in the world, then the notion of the human being as having soul is nothing more than pious abstraction and bad theory. The notion of soul and spirit put forth in this writing weaves a fabric with the whole of the world. There is a very special myth expressing the World Soul, the stories told in all cultures of a spiritual being called Sophia. In all such stories, Sophia is not just another goddess. She is the world-as-imagination; she is the world-coming-to-be. She is God’s light, and not “his” as his possession, but that through which God is able to see himself and to know himself and thus able to love all of creation, for God is love. That is what is at stake in this new psychology — as we work to experience this world in its intimate relation with the spiritual worlds.

All of the facets of this new psychology come together beautifully in the legendary tales of the Grail. I take the reader through just a small part of this story. The Grail stories, particularly Parzival, do not merely depict the world of chivalry and romanticism and wars. Rather, using the clothing of these twelfth-century images, they make a picture of the possible future of the human being. The Grail, while mysterious, is clearly not an outer object to be found somewhere. Each of us is already the Grail. We just have to realize it, and this process of realization is a task; it is our ongoing, daily work. It is our daily bread as well — a bread we share with others.

I am not the first to come up with this new psychology. All of the threads of it are to be found in the amazing work of Rudolf Steiner and the anthroposophy that he founded. No one, however, has read Steiner with a psychological vision, and I must say, I feel this has been to the detriment of the valuable work of anthroposophy in the world. When anthroposophists express an interest in psychology, they have the usual notions of psychology in mind, hoping to update it to match the findings of Rudof Steiner.

Psychology needs more than that; it needs to be totally re-visioned, top to bottom. We need to do more than try to apply anthroposophy to psychology. Anthroposophy provides the basis for re-imagining psychology altogether. This psychology can also work back and re-enliven the way anthroposophists work. This book presents a first effort in that direction.

A word about the goal of spiritual psychology. Can people be helped with spiritual psychology? Is there an alternative to the psychotherapies offered by current psychology? Yes, but helping will be quite new and different. It will be a therapeutic psychology of service. That is where the re-founding of psychology as a spiritual discipline of soul life in the world leads. What service is, however, will also have to be re-visioned. Taking the position presented in this book, it will be possible to come upon the other person as truly mysterious. It will be possible to meet the other person as the Good who brings out the good that is my own essence, knowable only in acts of service. And this act of serving, in turn, does not serve the other person as a separate self, but works toward the creation of love in the world.

Copyright © Robert Sardello & Lindisfarne Books, 2001