Daring to Create Soulful Relationships

(c) 2001 Sheridan Hill)

We like to say that love will save the day, but how could it possibly do so without our participation? Living as we do in an age where fears of violence and concerns for the end of the world are predominant, there is no work more important than to discover where our individual responsibilities rest. What are we to do about all this trouble in the world?

 Robert Sardello’s fourth book, “Love and the World,” addresses the necessity of the individual “I” and its relationship not just to the world but to world soul. Along the way, he debunks popular notions of soul (he has been known to say, "It is not a pet that we care for.") He carefully dismantles pervasive, romantic notions of spiritual love and leads the reader into a new way of imagining individual nature and soulful relationships.

To follow Robert Sardello’s writing and to attend his workshops is to participate in the ongoing creation of one of today’s most original thinkers. I have not found another author who so eloquently steps out of the accepted structure of spiritual clichés, and synthesizes ancient wisdom while speaking intelligently from the heart of the future. Sardello uncovers new worlds for depth psychology, and weaves them into his knowledge of spiritual realms. He throws away absolutely nothing while maintaining that to live, to love, and to not know is the real work of the day. 

Suppose that soul is not yours or mine, but rather a quality in the world that we
enter into? What if soul has a connection with the current of the future
that has been largely overlooked, and each human individual is the living,
loving connection between soul and the future of the world?

What is felt in the new millennium as an emerging, urgent turning toward soul is, Sardello contends, a calling for us to realize our capacities as creators in the world. In order to do this, we must discover what it means to love (not “I love myself” or “I love you” but simply “I love,” and what self knowledge is. Goethe said, “Man knows but himself insofar as he knows the world, for he sees the world but in himself, and himself in it alone.” Sardello observes that one knows another only insofar as one knows the world, and our relationship with the world is rightly characterized by a never-ending curiosity for truth and the ability to observe the world through a heart that thinks.

Many spiritual movements encourage us to go within—and stay there. Truly original spiritual thinkers like Sardello maintain that today, like never before, the world calls us to participate in it—and to do so with love. “When Earth is considered a resource rather than a source, love is actually diminished. Using the world uses up love, for Earth is love.”

Paradoxically, our individual nature arises from the stream of love: it is both singular and inclusive of the world. Intimate relationships are transformed when what connects two people is felt as the soul of the world and not memories nor fantasy.

“We are each alone in the world, completely separated from others. A healthy relationship starts from this basis and does not attempt to resolve this unbridgeable gap in a direct way.  Whenever it does try to do so, something from the past is trying to be enacted—for example, the union one had or never had with one’s parents—and what is thus felt as intimacy is actually divisiveness. This gap is bridged in the best possible way through meeting the other person, not soul to soul, but through coming together in the place of the World Soul as mediator. If the world can be experienced as soul-filled, then a meeting of individuals can take place in soul.”

In desperately seeking a soul connection with others, we cling to our own insecurities and omit the world. Sardello would have us ask: How can I love you in a way that frees you?  “In loving the world, we find ourselves loving one another. Then, we may not need to make a project out of remaining close, for the world is always at hand…."

To understand Sardello, one must have an open heart and the ability to imagine ourselves, the world, and soul in a way that we have never seen before. This new idea of intimacy involves a rich feeling life, in which the emotions are distinguished from a kind of feeling that transcends the subjective.

"Not what do I feel and what do we feel about each other, but how does what we are making together feel--is it whole, comprehensive; does it belong to the world, or is it being imposed on the world; are we still working out of imagination, or have we begun to lose the focus? These and a thousand questions like them can form a new mode of intimate conversation.”