Lecture: Spiritual Psychology of Love
Love must not forget that she is Wisdom’s sister. This lecture explores this enigmatic statement, developing an archetypal picture of Wisdom, Sophia, as the intelligence of the cosmos and how love is meant to develop in close connection with World Wisdom. We will consider love’s long but necessary separation from Wisdom and a path of return. We will describe the multifarious ways in which the human soul is beset with the sufferings and joys of love-sexual love, love as a force in the blood, emotional love, self-love and love resulting from work towards individuation. We will see how love interpenetrates all aspects of human reality, bringing about the ever-present possibility if identifying one realm of love as the totality, leading to tragic consequences. The future of love will be explored from the viewpoint of archetypal psychology.
Workshop: Love, Intimacy and the Imagination of the Heart
We will extend the understanding of the evolution of love developed in the lecture to a consideration of love between individuals and love for the sake of the world. In our time, relationships of an intimate nature are becoming more and more difficult. We will explore some of our cherished illusions concerning love, see what is involved in creating love rather than expecting to fall in love, and work towards developing an imagination of the heart.
We will explore the loss of the soul in the senses in the modern world, and how love becomes ever more difficult in a simulated world in which images are readily given rather than created through inner soul work. Meditative soul practices for recovering the soul of inner senses through developing a conscious imagination of the heart will be suggested. The special difficulty of obsession as an opening of the heart without proper preparation is explored and a path of healing suggested. The format will be conversational.
Robert Sardello, Ph.D., is co-founder of the School of Spiritual Psychology based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a traveling school that offers courses founded in archetypal psychology. Dr. Sardello worked for a number of years with James Hillman and Thomas Moore, and practiced psychotherapy for over twenty years. He teaches at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and at the Chalice of Repose Project, a training program in Missoula, Montana, for working with the dying through sacred music. He is the author of Facing the World with Soul and Love and the Soul: A Guide to Creating an New Future for Earth.