Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life (Studies in Imagination)

For more than a hundred years, the various fields of psychology have sought methods for healing the individual soul. Today, the being in need of care is the world. All the organizing forms that ought to enrich life with beauty, purpose, and depth no longer do so. To heal ourselves we need to reimagine the world.

Beginning with the myth of Sophia―the “Soul of the World”―Sardello evokes a sense that the world is filled with her presence. He suggests that the soul’s primary aspects―its arts of concentration, meditation, imagination, and contemplation―do not belong simply to individual consciousness, but constitute a surrender of subjective, personal states to the consciousness that is the soul of the world. He shows how we can begin to approach daily life in a new way by practicing these arts. The chapters that follow establish a psychology of the world.

Robert Sardello, PhD, is cofounder (with Cheryl Sanders-Sardello, PhD, in 1992) of the School of Spiritual Psychology. At the University of Dallas, he served as chair of the Department of Psychology, head of the Institute of Philosophic Studies, and graduate dean. He is also cofounder and a faculty member of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, as well as author of more than 200 articles in scholarly journals and cultural publications, and is a former faculty member of the Chalice of Repose Project in Missoula, Montana. Having developed spiritual psychology based in archetypal psychology, phenomenology, and the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner from more than thirty-five years of research in this discipline, as well as holding positions in two universities, Dr. Sardello is now an independent teacher and scholar, teaching throughout the US, Canada, and the UK, as well as the Czech Republic, Philippines, and Australia. He is a consultant to many educational and cultural institutions and a dissertation adviser at numerous academic institutions. He is author of several books, including Facing the World with Soul (2003) and Love and the World (2001).