Sardello in Focus

IN FOCUS:
ROBERT SARDELLO

Robert Sardello is a pioneer in bringing the concept of Soul back into consciousness. Building on the works of Jung, Steiner and on his collaborations with James Hillman and Thomas Moore, he wishes to evoke a sense of the world as soul-filled and alive. Through his School of Spiritual Psychology, and courses taught in many locations, Sardello uses careful and closely-reasoned deliberations to pull open complex issues of our time so that we can breathe again as soul-and-spirit-embodied beings in this gracious world.
This past March, Banyen sponsored a talk by Robert Sardello on fear as an impediment to soul-growth, which provoked much thought and discussion. We hope to have him and his partner Cheryl Sanders return for at least one extended workshop this Fall. He is the author of Facing the World with Soul, Love and the Soul and the forthcoming Freeing The Soul from Fear, as well as editor of The Angels. See Robert Sardello, Jungian, Archetype & Shadow Work.
The following article is a condensed version of a talk he gave last June at the Findhorn Foundation's conference on the millennium and millennial thinking. He moves from opening comments on soul and spirit to a consideration of what mediates between the two: love.

The Soul of Love
BY ROBERT SARDELLO

There's a strong tendency within us for the life of spirit to go its own way separate from the life of soul. In doing so, spirit then first of all infects us with a very deep longing which we feel can somehow be satisfied by something in the outer world. But, everything we find that we think will satisfy that longing turns out not to satisfy it.
   It also, on its own, develops into a kind of mania. There's no absence of spirit in the present world. There's an abundance of spirit in the present world, but it doesn't have the container of soul, so all the technology and architecture and cities is spirit-filled, but it's manic because it doesn't have the vessel of the soul that can properly hold it.
   On the other hand, if soul develops without the capacities of spirit, we tend to become quite self-absorbed and filled with a very deep sense of sorrow, feeling like someone did something to us, and if we could only find out who did that to us in our past, our sorrow would be solved. All the therapies developed around trying to solve the problem of sorrow in our lives. Some of that is certainly helpful, but finally, soul without spirit remains in the realm of sorrow and can lead to self-absorption.
   When we look at the ways we tend to imagine the millennium, we see that it's very much along the lines of this kind of split between spirit and soul. When the millennium is imagined as a time in which there will be unconditional love and unity and peace, that's a little bit one-sided on the side of spirit. On the other hand, when we see a kind of apocalyptic imagination, where everything will crumble and be destroyed and go into chaos, that's soul without the sense of spirit.
   The work of spiritual psychology is how do we hold together soul and spirit? When we do find the ways to begin to do that, a third path opens up, which is the path of the heart, the path of love through the world.
   I'm going to try to say something concerning the evolution of love in the world. This evolution is not in the form of a kind of progression from earlier to later forms of love. As you well know, love is an extremely entangled kind of phenomenon. We have to begin to try to imagine multiple loves rather than just love.
   Love first enters as a kind of bodily wisdom that we can think of broadly as sexual love, as an attraction, as the love of the body for the body. Our bodies love bodies. And, as you know, at that level it can be quite impersonal, it can be any body. It's a wonderful experience which should not be denied or in any way cut off, for instance, as you walk down the street, to feel this wonderful attraction of the body for the body. Love enters the human world in this form as a kind of instinct. But, even at the human level it's a very different instinct from any other instincts. If I get hungry or thirsty and don't eat or drink for two weeks, I'll die. If I feel this bodily attraction that has a strong sexual dimension to it, if I don't have sex, individually at least, I won't die. And, even though that, for some of us, is a revelation (which I actually hate to make public, because I've used the line a great deal, "If I don't have sex tonight I'm going to die"), the fact is we won't die.

We have to begin to try to imagine multiple loves rather than just love.
   The instincts lie in the realm of our bodily wisdom. But in the realm of love, which enters the body in its instinctual way, it already has a particular difference. There's a modicum of freedom. It means not only can we receive pleasure in love, it also makes it possible to give pleasure. That's due to this slight opening of freedom within the phenomenon of love.
   Now wisdom is very important here, because love enters the human world through this mode of the wisdom of the body precisely in order that as other modes of love develop, the body will never be abandoned. The body is to be taken and transformed through the various modes of love but it is never to be abandoned. As you know some spiritual traditions and practices don't quite understand this and get into all kinds of trouble because they don't really know how to work in a healthy way with the body. I should also point out that this love that's kind of a wisdom of the body is also in no way, however, opposed to celibacy. It's possible to be completely celibate and completely alive and sexual in one's body.
   There's much that we still have to constantly work at in this mode of love, the primary thing being to again experience the full sexuality of our being and not limit that to the genitals. The phenomena that are occurring in the realm of sexual love in the present world are a kind of wonderful challenge to that. That sex is so filled with dangers in the present world prompts us to develop bodily expressions of love that are full and intimate and deep but are not limited to genital sexuality.
   A second golden thread of love is the way love initially is a particular force in the blood. The way we meet someone and fall in love and marry and so on, that mode of love is quite recent. That's only been around for about 800 years. Prior to that time people did not meet strangers. They came together out of blood lines, tribal and familial lines. That's love as a force from the blood.
   Of all the modes of love that we'll talk about, this mode of love as a force in the blood is the only form of love that is to be outgrown. For example, nationalism's have to do with this force of love in the blood. When a form of love that was appropriate for a given time continues in a time when it's no longer appropriate, then it turns destructive.
   On the other hand, we also know of course that it's much easier for us to love someone who is of our own blood. Our own children are easier to love than someone who is not of our blood. People, for example, who are adopted very young in their lives, who may go searching for their birth parents when they're 30 or 40 years old have an overwhelmingly strong experience when they find them.
   In family life, much of the phenomena of abuse that we see everywhere occurring is based upon a now-degraded imagination where children are still imagined as "my possessions." This unfortunately means one can do what one wants. One of the tasks we have is that of re-imagining family in a way in which every individual in a family is truly experienced and perceived as an individual--not "my" child or wife or husband. It really requires a re-imagining of family, not simply trying to go back to something that belongs to the past. That's the second golden thread of love where there's much work to be done.
   A third golden thread of love concerns this amazing phenomenon of what is it that's going on when my body loves this body more than any body else. That's emotional love and is mediated through the soul life and has to do with the soul work we have to do with somebody else. It's love as karma. Steiner says--and it's an amazing thing when you work with it--he simply says many times that love is a debt.
   Well, as you know, it's not initially experienced as that at all. That's because of this mediating realm of the soul that works through fantasies.
   In the realm of emotional love it's never just you and me. It's you and me and a fantasy. Here our task is to begin to determine, every moment we can, what is the fantasy that we're in. When we first meet somebody we don't feel we have a debt to this person, we feel they are the most marvelous extraordinary being in the world. That is the fantasy, the imagination of the soul that brings us together.
   Once we're together for a while the fantasy changes. The queen now is also the witch and the king is also the dragon. If we're not present to what fantasy am I in with another person then all kinds of difficulties arise in relationships. This really was the realm that Jung worked within, because he understood that soul is fantasy, psyche is fantasy. Whereas Freud's basic myth is the Oedipus myth, Jung's is the myth of Eros and Psyche. That's a beautiful myth, but it basically says whenever there is love there is Psyche--fantasy, imagination.
   Often when people first encounter that this is work, that's when they split, just when the karmic work is to begin. That's when people feel they can't get possibly through this. One has to learn how to determine whether this is simply an abusive relationship or is this work that they have to do together, something which has to be worked through.
   A debt can last a day or a lifetime. So, one day when you wake up one morning and the feeling is gone, simply not there any more, perhaps the debt is completed, then what do you do? That's another time when people split, when perhaps the work there is to now discover a different mode of love to live together in.

In the realm of emotional love it's never just you and me. It's you and me and a fantasy.
   A third difficulty in this realm for many people, even though the feeling connection is gone, they develop habits to get along together. When the feeling is gone many people live out of these habits for the rest of their lives missing the opportunity to go to the next mode of love we have to develop.
   The fourth golden thread, fraught with all kinds of confusion in the present world, is called self-love. Self-love is simply present with us to the extent we have some sense of our own individuality. It is not something that can ever be given from the outside to another.
   When self-love is healthy it's the avenue towards self-knowledge. Anyone who begins a spiritual path does so out of self-love. There is a necessary initial kind of egotism involved in taking up a spiritual path, because that's the way we begin to develop self-knowledge. We don't know ourselves like we know other objects in the world. We know ourselves through developing the capacities of love.
   One of the confusions in our present world is that self-love becomes directed out towards the other person in a kind of unconscious way. We say to someone, "I love you," not in the least bit realizing that basically all we're saying is I love me in you. When I find myself in the other person and when that person then goes away part of me is gone, which produces this enormously strong co-dependent phenomenon.
   Self-love then has to be developed through some kind of spiritual discipline. In our present world there's a great deal of confusion that takes the form, for example, of developing self-esteem for people, affirmations, self-esteem education in the classrooms. That really can't work because it's trying to develop something for someone else that has to be developed from within. Just as much as telling someone every day they're no good, telling someone in the wrong way that they're the most wonderful person in the world and how much you love them, produces people who later on in life may do all kinds of good things in the world but for completely selfish motives.
   These are the modes of love that we know of thus far. When we meditate on them we discover something quite interesting: that love pervades the body, the blood, the emotions and the self. We then discover that human beings are beings of love, who can create through the capacity of love.
   All of these other forms have a gift quality to them. We have learned over many, many ages how to rely on the gifts of love. We say that no matter what happens love will get us through and as long as we love things will work out. We have this kind of understanding that we're being carried by love.
   Now we're entering a time when these golden threads of love seem to be receding. In these various forms love doesn't seem to work any more. We're finding more and more difficulties. Much of psycho-therapeutic work is unfortunately oriented towards trying to restore these other modes of love.
   We're now to develop the capacity to create love out of the forces of our own soul. That will not develop automatically. This capacity to create love out of our own soul forces takes a very circuitous route. This shows up all over the world. When we look at the world we have to say that love doesn't work. Yet, it is working in a way that we have to become acquainted with. As these golden threads that are the gifts of love recede, it's as if to tell us, "Now you do it, on your own."