Introduction
by
Robert Simmons
It may not be too much to say that reading Love and the Soul saved my life. That it changed my life unalterably is a certainty.
In November of 2004, I was with my wife Kathy in the Florida Keys, hoping that sunshine and sea air would help me fight the illness I feared was killing me. None of my doctors knew why, but my digestive system had almost stopped working. Eating anything produced huge quantities of painful gas, and no matter how many calories I ate, I was losing three or four pounds a week. From July to that November, forty pounds had melted off me, and I was so weak I could work only two or three hours a day. I was possessed by fear, and obsessed over my constantly changing symptoms. Most nights I slept only a few hours.
During this rather forlorn vacation in the balmy islands, my wife had been reading a book we had picked up after hearing someone talk about the work of Robert Sardello. “When he spoke,” the woman had said, after hearing him at a conference, “he was in touch with something, almost like he was listening for his own next words.” She went on to describe her impressions from reading Love and the Soul. That was the first time we heard the name Sophia mentioned, referring to the Soul of the World.
One morning Kathy said to me, “I want us to stay here at the cottage today, and I want to talk with you about this book.” The day passed as we sat together on the porch for hours, reading excerpts and intimately discussing the implications of the astonishingly new yet hauntingly recognizable images and ideas Sardello presented. We do not live only for ourselves or within ourselves, he said. We are in continual, ever- changing relationship with the world, and our destiny is to live in the constant creating activity of love, our souls in partnership with the Soul of the World. Somehow, as soon as I read it, I knew this to be so, and it gently dislodged me from the panicky obsession with my illness. The day passed, and for the first time in months, I experienced no symptoms. The relief and joy I felt was palpable. I almost dared to think that I was cured.
But it was not quite that easy. That night all my symptoms, and overwhelming fear, came back. It was the worst crisis of the whole illness. After the afternoon’s great rush of hope, I struggled with pain and panic most of the night, thinking I might die right then. But morning did come, and from that day forward, for no outward reason, I got a little better each week. A few weeks after I returned home, my doctor had a flash of insight and tried a new therapy. It began to work, and by February I had almost fully recovered. And I was ardently reading, and rereading, Love and the Soul. What the medicine was doing for my body, Sardello’s book was doing for my heart.
I recount this story to try to indicate that this is not an ordinary book that is “about” something. To receive the gift of this book, one must enter it, and let it enter oneself. Reading these pages can set in motion deep stirrings in one’s psyche, in places one has forgotten, or perhaps never known. Sardello guides the reader into recognition of our dilemma and our potential, our deficiency and our destiny. Careful never to condemn, he shows us how the past psychological study has been primarily the examination of our fragments, with insufficient attention given to the whole. Even more, he reminds us that we do not exist in isolation. There is no person who is somewhere other than within the world, so to study the human being while leaving out the World Being is the greatest fragmentation of all. This forgetting lies at the root of our maladies and poisons even the best efforts of what Sardello terms our “noble egotism.” The saving grace is that love is still offered to us, and we still can develop the capacity to create through love––to co-create with her, Sophia, Wisdom, the Soul of the World. Our compass is the heart, and when we look to it, we can find our way.
One of the author’s goals is “taking depth psychology out of the consulting room and into the world.” This is essential for work in the realm of soul to avoid the pitfalls of narcissism, fantasy and exploitation of the Earth. Even though we are in deep relationship with the world, it is not the same as ourselves, and we cannot “create our own reality” out of whole cloth as numerous New Age books pretend. Nor, Sardello tells us, is it possible for us to sustain our attempts to dominate and control Nature, as Freud urged. This sort of activity has taken the world into peril. Archetypal psychology’s approach, which turns away from the world and toward purported gods within, feeds isolation from and fear of the world. Sardello’s premise is that the world has soul, as we do, and that we are called to engage the World Soul in opening fully to each moment, creating what is coming to be. His view offers us a destiny far more wonderful than anything we could imagine without Sophia. (Imagine a marriage in which one’s spouse was an obedient robot, versus one in which she or he is a lively, intelligent partner. This is a faint echo of the difference.) Turning toward the world means feeling her suffering and experiencing our grief. All of this, however, frees us. The grief and suffering were already there––feeling them liberates us from the tension of holding them out of conscious awareness, or denying their reality. Through the work Sardello urges, we can begin to see and dissolve the dreary tyranny of ego habit, moving toward the constant spontaneous creating activity of our true, whole self, which he terms the I.
Along the path of Love and the Soul, there are many unexpected turns. Sardello’s narrative mirrors the spontaneity he describes, leading the reader again and again to novel clearings within the forest of the life we thought we knew. Our ideas of what we are, what our bodies are, what dreams are and how we imagine every moment of life are questioned and reimagined with a compelling vividness that invites one into new, provisional, living visions. It takes effort to follow these trails, but the reward is the bringing of new life to the bland sameness for which we have given up the chance to dance with the unknown. I think of it as a dance, because it contains the elements of rhythm, inner impulse and alignment with one’s partner through full attention to each gesture made together, one moment flowing into the next in an activity of beauty. This dance leads us into individuality and into love, and the task of the individual–-transforming the world through love.
So why doesn’t it work? Why are we not already living in a transformed world of beauty and harmony? After Sardello introduces us to the three traits of the holy Trinisophia as reflected in the human being––reason, imagination and memory––he addresses this question, saying that the root of our plight is, perhaps surprisingly, freedom. Sophia is said to have freely chosen for the world united by and in her to have fallen apart, in order to allow and encourage the re-membering of all her parts through the free acts of individual, self-aware souls. That’s us! Our development of fully conscious soul life is at the same time the achievement of the destiny of Sophia.
Of course, it is very possible that this will not happen. Sardello points out past times in which the rising of a sophianic world has been thwarted. The condition of much of humanity now seems far from the partnering self-awareness to which we are called, and he acknowledges this. Yet, like the Grail knights whose trails also lace through the book’s narrative, the author is undaunted by seemingly overwhelming difficulty. He sets about to reflect to the reader the half-asleep amnesia of our condition, and to bring us into awareness of capacities we have forgotten, or never knew we had. The injunction is to work inwardly and outwardly, to develop in unity with the world for the sake of the world. This is immeasurably better than “inner work” for one’s own sake, which remains trapped in egotism and its isolation.
Stepping back for a moment, one sees that the task here attempted is enormous. Sardello has set out to show us that we ourselves are not what we thought we were, that the world is alive and ensouled, that we have a destiny conjoined with the world, and that coming to that destiny means turning ourselves inside out and outside in, It entails actively, imaginally sensing everything in a participatory way, and developing senses and capacities of which we are either dimly or not at all aware.
An analogy: Imagine someone who has spent the first thirty or forty years of life confined to a white-walled room with only a television inside (a condition perhaps different from our own only in degree!). Now imagine introducing yourself to that person and trying to invite him or her out of the room and into the world. Think of the atrophied sensing capacity of someone who had never dipped toes into a stream, smelled a rose, heard a bird singing or tasted anything fresher than a TV dinner. Try to imagine telling that person about the possibilities inherent within a life filled with actual relationships, real pleasure and pain, not merely confined to what has been programmed. Think of the fear the person might feel when first considering leaving the white room. Think of the anguish that individual would have to bear in order to see clearly all that has been lost because of having existed in what so far has been largely a counterfeit of life. Imagine the strength of the impulse to turn away from that awareness and go back to the relative comfort of being half-asleep. The programs, at least, are predictable, but the outside world...that looks risky! Yet you, the person who has been in the real world, know how infinitely preferable it is to the half-existence of the poor soul confined in this virtual reality. You exhort him to come to his senses. You remind her of her purpose. You suggest ways of awakening dormant capacities. You encourage fresh imaginations of the awaiting world, and explain that everything played in on television is unreal, or at the very least, in the past. You watch in awe and joy as the person takes the first steps out of confinement, into the world. Or you shudder with despair as the prisoner elects to stay in his cell. Now, take this analogy and magnify it a thousand, or a hundred thousand times. Then you are, I think, in the shoes of someone carrying the sort of understanding Sardello is attempting to convey.
Such an understanding waves out into many dimensions of life. Sardello shows how the epidemic of codependency stems from the condition of being out of touch with our bodies, and the confused attempt to experience touch, which winds up deepening our armoring. He reveals that another epidemic, addiction, grows out of the conflict between the soul’s urge for new experiences and the ego’s fearful need for control. Some of this fear comes from our having literally “lost our senses,” and the consequent feeling that we cannot rely on the world. Sardello utilizes Steiner's description of twelve (not five––this alone points to what we have lost) senses and lays out a path for recovering the soul of the inner senses. Through this, he says, our outer senses are accurate and can be relied upon once again.
As we go on, we reach the country of the heart. We learn that the heart interiorizes the world, and that the imaginal heart can also be called the I. Sardello says, “The synthesizing action of the heart continuously creates a unity of the inner world and the outer world, Moments in which we perceive this unity are moments of the experience of beauty.” He calls the heart “the organ of psychic attention” and says that practicing this sort of attention first involves shifting the habitual sense of our awareness from the head to the area between the heart and solar plexus. I have a little story to tell about this.
Some months after reading Love and the Soul, my wife and I enrolled in one of the courses offered by Robert and Cheryl Sardello’s School of Spiritual Psychology. (It is located in their large, lovely home in North Carolina, and I recommend going there to anyone who feels deeply called to work toward developing the potentials this book describes.) Following the first residency, the morning after we returned home to Vermont, I took a walk along a nearby country road. I felt inwardly softened, expanded by the first session, and I was also holding a notion that I had felt since childhood, which had resurfaced on the trip home. I had always felt a concern that the world was in peril, and a longing to somehow “save” it. Though experience and cultural indoctrination had forced me to table such a grandiose idea, deep down I had never forgotten it. As I walked I decided I would try out some of this heart attentiveness, and interiorizing of the world. And I held the question, if I could save something of the world, what would I choose? What I did was simple enough. As I walked, my attention was caught by various creatures and things––chickens in a yard, geese honking overhead, an apple tree, a collapsed barn. As I noticed each one, I said to myself, “I’d save these chickens...” Or those geese, or this tree, or that barn. I placed each of them imaginally within the area of my heart. All of those little gestures of imagination felt good, good in my heart, as if a bit of the world was now inside me. Near the end of my walk, I thought, “I can put anything I want in here; why not the whole world?” So I did that. There was plenty of room, and I felt my love for the world as a warmth in my chest, very intimate.
In the next moment I was astonished by what happened. Inexplicably, but without a shred of doubt, I felt the world loving me back! It was also as if she was acknowledging with gratitude my own little turning toward her. In that moment I knew within myself what Sardello had been saying––the Soul of the World is a feminine being, she is both inside and outside us, and her way is the way of wisdom transformed in love. Her soul cannot be separated from ours. She is wisdom and love, and she always in danger, and she will not defend herself.
Robert Sardello knows this, and works gently and diligently, within this book and his other writings and activities, to cherish her, to free her and to give himself to her destiny. I aspire to that way of life, and it does not surprise me that my journey along this path so far has healed my body and opened me ever more deeply to love and to soul, which are not different from one another. Nothing is finished. The heart, the soul, goes on to the next step, the next beat, in reverent, joyful awareness, stopping for nothing, holding nothing back.
––Robert Simmons, June 19, 2008
by
Robert Simmons
It may not be too much to say that reading Love and the Soul saved my life. That it changed my life unalterably is a certainty.
In November of 2004, I was with my wife Kathy in the Florida Keys, hoping that sunshine and sea air would help me fight the illness I feared was killing me. None of my doctors knew why, but my digestive system had almost stopped working. Eating anything produced huge quantities of painful gas, and no matter how many calories I ate, I was losing three or four pounds a week. From July to that November, forty pounds had melted off me, and I was so weak I could work only two or three hours a day. I was possessed by fear, and obsessed over my constantly changing symptoms. Most nights I slept only a few hours.
During this rather forlorn vacation in the balmy islands, my wife had been reading a book we had picked up after hearing someone talk about the work of Robert Sardello. “When he spoke,” the woman had said, after hearing him at a conference, “he was in touch with something, almost like he was listening for his own next words.” She went on to describe her impressions from reading Love and the Soul. That was the first time we heard the name Sophia mentioned, referring to the Soul of the World.
One morning Kathy said to me, “I want us to stay here at the cottage today, and I want to talk with you about this book.” The day passed as we sat together on the porch for hours, reading excerpts and intimately discussing the implications of the astonishingly new yet hauntingly recognizable images and ideas Sardello presented. We do not live only for ourselves or within ourselves, he said. We are in continual, ever- changing relationship with the world, and our destiny is to live in the constant creating activity of love, our souls in partnership with the Soul of the World. Somehow, as soon as I read it, I knew this to be so, and it gently dislodged me from the panicky obsession with my illness. The day passed, and for the first time in months, I experienced no symptoms. The relief and joy I felt was palpable. I almost dared to think that I was cured.
But it was not quite that easy. That night all my symptoms, and overwhelming fear, came back. It was the worst crisis of the whole illness. After the afternoon’s great rush of hope, I struggled with pain and panic most of the night, thinking I might die right then. But morning did come, and from that day forward, for no outward reason, I got a little better each week. A few weeks after I returned home, my doctor had a flash of insight and tried a new therapy. It began to work, and by February I had almost fully recovered. And I was ardently reading, and rereading, Love and the Soul. What the medicine was doing for my body, Sardello’s book was doing for my heart.
I recount this story to try to indicate that this is not an ordinary book that is “about” something. To receive the gift of this book, one must enter it, and let it enter oneself. Reading these pages can set in motion deep stirrings in one’s psyche, in places one has forgotten, or perhaps never known. Sardello guides the reader into recognition of our dilemma and our potential, our deficiency and our destiny. Careful never to condemn, he shows us how the past psychological study has been primarily the examination of our fragments, with insufficient attention given to the whole. Even more, he reminds us that we do not exist in isolation. There is no person who is somewhere other than within the world, so to study the human being while leaving out the World Being is the greatest fragmentation of all. This forgetting lies at the root of our maladies and poisons even the best efforts of what Sardello terms our “noble egotism.” The saving grace is that love is still offered to us, and we still can develop the capacity to create through love––to co-create with her, Sophia, Wisdom, the Soul of the World. Our compass is the heart, and when we look to it, we can find our way.
One of the author’s goals is “taking depth psychology out of the consulting room and into the world.” This is essential for work in the realm of soul to avoid the pitfalls of narcissism, fantasy and exploitation of the Earth. Even though we are in deep relationship with the world, it is not the same as ourselves, and we cannot “create our own reality” out of whole cloth as numerous New Age books pretend. Nor, Sardello tells us, is it possible for us to sustain our attempts to dominate and control Nature, as Freud urged. This sort of activity has taken the world into peril. Archetypal psychology’s approach, which turns away from the world and toward purported gods within, feeds isolation from and fear of the world. Sardello’s premise is that the world has soul, as we do, and that we are called to engage the World Soul in opening fully to each moment, creating what is coming to be. His view offers us a destiny far more wonderful than anything we could imagine without Sophia. (Imagine a marriage in which one’s spouse was an obedient robot, versus one in which she or he is a lively, intelligent partner. This is a faint echo of the difference.) Turning toward the world means feeling her suffering and experiencing our grief. All of this, however, frees us. The grief and suffering were already there––feeling them liberates us from the tension of holding them out of conscious awareness, or denying their reality. Through the work Sardello urges, we can begin to see and dissolve the dreary tyranny of ego habit, moving toward the constant spontaneous creating activity of our true, whole self, which he terms the I.
Along the path of Love and the Soul, there are many unexpected turns. Sardello’s narrative mirrors the spontaneity he describes, leading the reader again and again to novel clearings within the forest of the life we thought we knew. Our ideas of what we are, what our bodies are, what dreams are and how we imagine every moment of life are questioned and reimagined with a compelling vividness that invites one into new, provisional, living visions. It takes effort to follow these trails, but the reward is the bringing of new life to the bland sameness for which we have given up the chance to dance with the unknown. I think of it as a dance, because it contains the elements of rhythm, inner impulse and alignment with one’s partner through full attention to each gesture made together, one moment flowing into the next in an activity of beauty. This dance leads us into individuality and into love, and the task of the individual–-transforming the world through love.
So why doesn’t it work? Why are we not already living in a transformed world of beauty and harmony? After Sardello introduces us to the three traits of the holy Trinisophia as reflected in the human being––reason, imagination and memory––he addresses this question, saying that the root of our plight is, perhaps surprisingly, freedom. Sophia is said to have freely chosen for the world united by and in her to have fallen apart, in order to allow and encourage the re-membering of all her parts through the free acts of individual, self-aware souls. That’s us! Our development of fully conscious soul life is at the same time the achievement of the destiny of Sophia.
Of course, it is very possible that this will not happen. Sardello points out past times in which the rising of a sophianic world has been thwarted. The condition of much of humanity now seems far from the partnering self-awareness to which we are called, and he acknowledges this. Yet, like the Grail knights whose trails also lace through the book’s narrative, the author is undaunted by seemingly overwhelming difficulty. He sets about to reflect to the reader the half-asleep amnesia of our condition, and to bring us into awareness of capacities we have forgotten, or never knew we had. The injunction is to work inwardly and outwardly, to develop in unity with the world for the sake of the world. This is immeasurably better than “inner work” for one’s own sake, which remains trapped in egotism and its isolation.
Stepping back for a moment, one sees that the task here attempted is enormous. Sardello has set out to show us that we ourselves are not what we thought we were, that the world is alive and ensouled, that we have a destiny conjoined with the world, and that coming to that destiny means turning ourselves inside out and outside in, It entails actively, imaginally sensing everything in a participatory way, and developing senses and capacities of which we are either dimly or not at all aware.
An analogy: Imagine someone who has spent the first thirty or forty years of life confined to a white-walled room with only a television inside (a condition perhaps different from our own only in degree!). Now imagine introducing yourself to that person and trying to invite him or her out of the room and into the world. Think of the atrophied sensing capacity of someone who had never dipped toes into a stream, smelled a rose, heard a bird singing or tasted anything fresher than a TV dinner. Try to imagine telling that person about the possibilities inherent within a life filled with actual relationships, real pleasure and pain, not merely confined to what has been programmed. Think of the fear the person might feel when first considering leaving the white room. Think of the anguish that individual would have to bear in order to see clearly all that has been lost because of having existed in what so far has been largely a counterfeit of life. Imagine the strength of the impulse to turn away from that awareness and go back to the relative comfort of being half-asleep. The programs, at least, are predictable, but the outside world...that looks risky! Yet you, the person who has been in the real world, know how infinitely preferable it is to the half-existence of the poor soul confined in this virtual reality. You exhort him to come to his senses. You remind her of her purpose. You suggest ways of awakening dormant capacities. You encourage fresh imaginations of the awaiting world, and explain that everything played in on television is unreal, or at the very least, in the past. You watch in awe and joy as the person takes the first steps out of confinement, into the world. Or you shudder with despair as the prisoner elects to stay in his cell. Now, take this analogy and magnify it a thousand, or a hundred thousand times. Then you are, I think, in the shoes of someone carrying the sort of understanding Sardello is attempting to convey.
Such an understanding waves out into many dimensions of life. Sardello shows how the epidemic of codependency stems from the condition of being out of touch with our bodies, and the confused attempt to experience touch, which winds up deepening our armoring. He reveals that another epidemic, addiction, grows out of the conflict between the soul’s urge for new experiences and the ego’s fearful need for control. Some of this fear comes from our having literally “lost our senses,” and the consequent feeling that we cannot rely on the world. Sardello utilizes Steiner's description of twelve (not five––this alone points to what we have lost) senses and lays out a path for recovering the soul of the inner senses. Through this, he says, our outer senses are accurate and can be relied upon once again.
As we go on, we reach the country of the heart. We learn that the heart interiorizes the world, and that the imaginal heart can also be called the I. Sardello says, “The synthesizing action of the heart continuously creates a unity of the inner world and the outer world, Moments in which we perceive this unity are moments of the experience of beauty.” He calls the heart “the organ of psychic attention” and says that practicing this sort of attention first involves shifting the habitual sense of our awareness from the head to the area between the heart and solar plexus. I have a little story to tell about this.
Some months after reading Love and the Soul, my wife and I enrolled in one of the courses offered by Robert and Cheryl Sardello’s School of Spiritual Psychology. (It is located in their large, lovely home in North Carolina, and I recommend going there to anyone who feels deeply called to work toward developing the potentials this book describes.) Following the first residency, the morning after we returned home to Vermont, I took a walk along a nearby country road. I felt inwardly softened, expanded by the first session, and I was also holding a notion that I had felt since childhood, which had resurfaced on the trip home. I had always felt a concern that the world was in peril, and a longing to somehow “save” it. Though experience and cultural indoctrination had forced me to table such a grandiose idea, deep down I had never forgotten it. As I walked I decided I would try out some of this heart attentiveness, and interiorizing of the world. And I held the question, if I could save something of the world, what would I choose? What I did was simple enough. As I walked, my attention was caught by various creatures and things––chickens in a yard, geese honking overhead, an apple tree, a collapsed barn. As I noticed each one, I said to myself, “I’d save these chickens...” Or those geese, or this tree, or that barn. I placed each of them imaginally within the area of my heart. All of those little gestures of imagination felt good, good in my heart, as if a bit of the world was now inside me. Near the end of my walk, I thought, “I can put anything I want in here; why not the whole world?” So I did that. There was plenty of room, and I felt my love for the world as a warmth in my chest, very intimate.
In the next moment I was astonished by what happened. Inexplicably, but without a shred of doubt, I felt the world loving me back! It was also as if she was acknowledging with gratitude my own little turning toward her. In that moment I knew within myself what Sardello had been saying––the Soul of the World is a feminine being, she is both inside and outside us, and her way is the way of wisdom transformed in love. Her soul cannot be separated from ours. She is wisdom and love, and she always in danger, and she will not defend herself.
Robert Sardello knows this, and works gently and diligently, within this book and his other writings and activities, to cherish her, to free her and to give himself to her destiny. I aspire to that way of life, and it does not surprise me that my journey along this path so far has healed my body and opened me ever more deeply to love and to soul, which are not different from one another. Nothing is finished. The heart, the soul, goes on to the next step, the next beat, in reverent, joyful awareness, stopping for nothing, holding nothing back.
––Robert Simmons, June 19, 2008
