Love and the World review for Parabola By Sheridan Hill

Love and the World: A Guide to Conscious Soul Practice

"In the realm of soul logic, what is healthy is usually at first unsettling.... A sign of health is that more questions are raised than are answered, and that the nature of such questions does not carry the character of doubt but rather the inspiration to go yet further.?--Love and the World

Love and the World, Robert Sardello’s fourth book, is the logical presentation of these notions: that world soul exists; that soul has a connection with the current of the future that has been largely overlooked; and that the human “I” is the verb between soul and the future.

Sardello's great talent, perhaps his genius, is to penetrate the wisdom of the ancients, weave it into the precepts of new thinkers (central among them is Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian esotericist) and present us with practical, spiritual tools that are both timeless and carefully forged for this moment. At the same time, he makes it clear that there is no easy fix.

In this and previous books, Sardello’s writing offers immediacy, synthesis and depth.

The book skillfully traces world soul through dozens of spiritual traditions, details how psychology has stopped short of addressing soul, and explains how to go about the continuous creative act of love. This love requires a new sense of self--one that does not exist for its own sake but rather to serve the soul of the world.

“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 primary myth expressing world soul, Sardello writes, is told in all cultures of a spiritual being called Sophia. Sophia is Isis, she is archetypal wisdom. She is the world as imagination, the world coming to be. Sophia appears apocalyptically in Revelations 12:1-2 as a pregnant woman clothed in the sun, the moon under her feet, a crown of twelve stars on her head, crying out in pain as she is about to give birth.

What is felt in the new millennium as an emerging, urgent turning toward soul is, Sardello contends, preparation for a Sophianic world. It is time, he writes, to realize our capacities as creators in the world who are neither plagued by a sense of separateness nor motivated by a hungry ego.

Sardello effectively argues for a reuniting of art, science and religion. He repeatedly calls for psychology to be re-imagined with a primary interest in what is coming to be rather than what has passed. He reasons that people enter therapy to find a new way of being and that on a daily basis we meet the world not only with what lives from the past but also with an intuition of what is coming.

Through Sardello’s eyes, the Grail stories make a picture of the possible future of the human being. “Each of us already is the Grail. We just have to realize it….” The future, then, is a soul-filled, timeless activity that we engage in by consciously practicing love, which is the essence of our being.

Helpful distinctions and connections are made between individual and universal aspects of love, soul, and self. “True self-love is an activity without an object…living individuality [stet] is living ever increasingly into the world with immediate perception uncategorized by concepts from the past; it follows that loving is the same as being ever more aware of the world as activity in which the I is engaged.”

A chapter devoted to grief as the activation of conscious soul life shows a masterful understanding of the etheric body and its relationship to the physical body, the ego, to all of humanity and the living being of Earth.

Subsequent chapters illustrate that the heart is an organ of perception, discuss soulful relationships, and introduce a way of working with dreams that emphasizes not content but the creative dreaming consciousness.

Sardello’s refreshing insights on soul and spirit in literature, psychology, and mythology arise from 20 years’ work as a depth psychologist, including as a cofounder of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture and of the School of Spiritual Psychology. As James Hillman said, “Whatever Sardello touches breaks open with new meaning.”