sardello

Interview with Robert Sardello

This interview was conducted over the internet. Immediately following are my questions to Dr. Sardello. After that are his replies.

Dr. Sardello:

Thanks for consenting to answer a few questions, especially this way (since I've read your misgivings about the Internet). Please notice that I am using a different email address in order to avoid having to wade through hundreds of spams to find your responses. You can send them all at once, although it might work better in terms of follow-up to send your responses as you finish each one. Don't bother to do that if you write all the responses in one day, though.

I would like to be able to follow up once, but not extensively. I only have 850 words a week, but may make this a two-part column. My column is typically my personal take, from a psychological perspective, on pop culture and current events. So if my questions seem personal, that's usual for this column. I'm not sure whether I'll write this as a personal impression of your work or as a Q&A.

I ended up re-reading your "Freeing the Soul from Fear" this weekend. I've read your two previous books but not your latest. "Facing the World with Soul" is one of the few books I recommend to clients.

Some background: It seems clear that your departure from Hillman is over the spiritual aspect of soul. My own background at the master's level is in phenomenology and transpersonal psychology. Then I discovered Hillman's work and was completely taken with it. Then, while working on my dissertation, I became very disenchanted with Hillman's contempt for discourses about sexuality, gender and the body. I then became entranced with postmodern and post-structural theory, which effectively destabilizes any sense of abiding or reliable truth in the world, but has done much to entertain these other subjects.

This process amounted to a nekyia for me and, when I emerged (finished my dissertation), I felt reconciled to Hillman but spiritually bereft, yearning for the experiences of my earlier spiritual quest. I was also immensely depressed (and have remained so a year later).

1. In re-reading your work this weekend one thing that struck me was your repeated stress that the soul should not be treated with "sentimentality." You also talk about the "logic of the soul" (but in a way quite different from Giegerich, I believe; I'm reading his El Capitan Canyon Seminar now). Further, you speak of the thinking of the heart.

It strikes me that Hillman is often accused of being " too intellectual" but it would probably be fair to say, too, that his affection for the gods is rather sentimental.

Can you define and say a little about the danger of sentimentality, which in popular culture is certainly seen as an appropriate quality of the heart. (I'm thinking Valentine's Day, for example). Also: Is your affection for Sophia any different from Hillman's nostalgia for the Greek pantheon?

2. In "Freeing the Soul..." you offer a number of exercises. (The basic format seems very similar to my limited experience with Vajrayana Buddhism.) How do you see the approach here as different from the exercises in cognitive-behavioral therapy? Would it be fair to say that developing a practical therapy is part of your agenda? Is this compatible with depth psychology's mission to deepen "meaning" in life? Or, more simply put, perhaps: What does "depth" mean, what is its place in spiritual psychology?

3. "Freeing the Soul" shocked me with its virtual prescience when I re-read it this weekend. Everything you write about fear and terrorism has of course become intensified since the book was published. It's almost a cliché now that the Bush Administration has exploited Americans' fear to entrench its power and intensify its abuses of Democracy.

What has to happen for a broad reawakening in the culture? You write at length about the individual's response to fear, even what I'd call its homeopathic use, but what can people do as members of the polis to reverse what is happening to our government?

4. Can you explain what you mean when you refer to the moral quality of the imagination?

5. As I said above, one of my frustrations with Hillman has been his failure to address the body, although he does acknowledge its importance. I have spent a lot of time in southern Spain because of a virtual obsession with flamenco, which strikes me very much as a somatic psychology rooted in the underworld, with a powerful spiritual dimension too. I use the music in workshops a lot.

Coincident with my depression in the last year, I have required three surgeries: emergency surgery to remove my gall bladder, surgery to repair an abdominal hernia, and, worst of all, surgery on both my knees after I ruptured the patellar tendons in my legs in two separate falls on the same day. Meanwhile my mother is undergoing a protracted dying process.

This has left me reeling with the question of what "I've done wrong." Psychology tells me that I shouldn't be punishing myself with that question but I'm wondering what you tell people who undergo one calamity after another related to their physical being since you connect the body so intimately with the soul.

6. My own practice as a therapist is built around cultivating what you call artistic living (though, probably unlike you, I do work mainly with literal artistic types, especially in workshops). One thing I find very interesting in your work compared to Hillman is the subject of movement and the image. You seem to acknowledge, with him, that it is a primary characteristic of the image. Hillman, though, counsels us to "follow the image." Indeed his objection to art therapy is that it tends to freeze the image.

In your own exercises, you hold the image in place and then extinguish it. I assume this is about developing the will and that, in turn, points to another difference in you and Hillman, who believes we are comparatively powerless under the influence of the gods.

Is this a fair characterization? Do we defy our own soul when we usurp authority over the image it presents?

7. Would you say a little about what you mean by "beauty." I notice that you object to Freud's almost 17 th century view of nature as the "miasma" but your attitude also seems rather romantic, too.

Thanks very much for taking the time to do this. I look forward to hearing you in Atlanta, something I've wanted to do for many years.

Cliff Bostock

It strikes me that Hillman is often accused of being " too intellectual" but it would probably be fair to say, too, that his affection for the gods is rather sentimental.

Can you define and say a little about the danger of sentimentality, which in popular culture is certainly seen as an appropriate quality of the heart. (I'm thinking Valentine's Day, for example). How do we avoid it? Also: How is your affection for Sophia different from Hillman's nostalgia for the Greek pantheon?

When it comes to the heart, present cultue is exaggeratedly either sentimental or completely cold. We live a split heart -- on the one hand, the science/medicine view of the heart as that pump that shoves blood around the body, which is a substance without metaphor; or, on the other hand, the sentimentalized heart of fantasy-love, jubilation, sweetness and light, sugariness, words without substance, which is heart as metaphor without substance.

Hillman cannot, I think, be faulted in either of these directions. His intellect, which is a highly feeling-intellect (not emotion, but feeling) made it possible for him to come to very new insighting of heart.

But, I think you have to have practices, not just be in the noble tradition of rhetoric, and not just developing pictures of archetypal backgrounds. He has no practices.

The danger of sentimentality is that it leaves the hard,cold, heart free to develop without question. The heart is not a pump, so that is a literalized metaphor that is a false metaphor in the first place. Or nearly false, The heart does partly work as a certain kind of pump, what is known as a battering-ram pump, not a piston pump that shoves fluid. The pump-action of the heart serves to equalize the pressure throughout the body. The heart registers the qualities of the blood as it moves in the body, but does not cause the movement. That is clear, for example, in embryology. Before the heart is even formed, there is the pulsing movement of blood. There is a lot of other evidence, all ignored by science. This is not a complaint about science but about the culture of science which does not question the phenomenon it works with but holds to all kinds of unexamined assumptions.

Sentimentality of heart, understood solely at the soul level, leaving behind the view of medicine, is problematic because it spits apart the "light" and the "dark". Hillman gets away with this because his sentimentality tends to be on the side of the "dark", but it is a split, nonetheless. Anytime things get split up like this, you are doomed to sympathy-antipathy. I don't think you will find kind words, and certainly not sentiment from Hillman for Apollo, for example.

In order to avoid this kind of split, and thus avoiding either sentimentalizing the heart on either side of the opposition set up, there has to be a working through of how the body is being imagined in the first place. That is, the work in archetypal psychology begins with the heart as imagined by Harvey, the pump, critiques that, and then develops some non-physical images of the heart. As always happens in archetypal psychology, the body we live, and thus the heart we live, is left behind, and we are led, without knowing it, into the regions of gnosticism, it seems to me. Platonic, Jim would say, but seems more dire than that.

There is, for example no understanding that the moment one says "body" or says "heart", what is implied is a conception of the body, a conception of the heart. And these conceptions are "conceptions about"; that is they are spectator views of the body. There is a huge difference between starting with "the body" and starting with pure body-awarness, the field-body, body as field rather than body as anatomical thing or floating metaphor. Whenever we use the word " body", there is an underlying assumption of meaning. Not philosophical but felt-sense of bodying. Hillman is great at verb-ing, but not with the body. Bodying, not body. The same with heart. Pure heart-awareness. Not awareness of the heart, but pure heart-awareness. What is that like? How do you enter into that field? What do you do there? We have worked through these questions in the School of Spiritual Psychology and our heart practices, meditations, are foundational for all that we do. We don't get caught in sentimentality because we don't begin with a mental conception, which is always going to be an opposition, and depending on what side of the opposition you land on, the other is "bad", and the "good" one is sentimentalized in order to try to make a case for it. There is a difference between starting with a phenomenon such as the heart and starting with a primordial phenomenon, such as heart-awareness.

You are right about my tending to sentimentalize Sophia. I have since stopped speaking of Sophia at all and have discovered the mode of Sophia-awareness rather than the "religious" or "feminist" or whatever concept of Sophia one begins with, which as concept, sets up that kind of invisible opposition and its attendant sentimentality. My book on Silence is the phenomenology of Sophia-awareness, though I don't speak the name in the book and feel we have to drop all such naming. Too much baggage, particularly around religious notions. I did not write the book thinking that I have found a way to hide Sophia from public view. Rather, I tried to begin with the primordial phenomenon of Sophia-awareness.

I don't see any relation at all between the exercises in "Freeing the Soul from Fear" and cognitive-behavioral therapy. I honestly don't know anything about cognitive-behavioral therapy, so I can't respond very well except to say that the exercises, even though not explicitly stated at that time because I didn't have the language, all deal with the felt-sense of certain experiences of fear and bringing balance to excessive presence of fear. The exercises are not mental. They are in the realm of Feeling. Not feelings, but Feeling. Feeling is something we do, it is an aspect of the primordial phenomenon of heart-awareness. Feelings are something we have and are mental concepts of Feeling. Psychology is forever working with mental concepts of phenomena, not the phenomena itself. This error has drastic consequences. For example, depression. Depression is first of all a felt-sense of the body and the way the world is unfolding for someone. We suffer depression to the extent that we do not allow ourselves to be depressed -- to actively follow the depressive process. The depressive process is our most natural form of meditation, not raising us into the light but help us to feel our way down to the innermost core of our being. It is the way to the non-verbal, and it is not surprising to find it close to highly verbal individuals. The depressive process is the veery process by which we digest the meaning of events at a level deeper than words, letting things "get to us" and change us. It is the process of deepening.

Once depression becomes medicalized, it also becomes a concept. And, then we begin living the concept. We go to the psychologist and he pronounces us depressed. We now have a concept for a living process and the concept freezes the process, making it impossible for the process of deepening to proceed. We are stuck, not in depression, but in the concept of depression.

All forms of treatment for depression imply that something must be done about it or done to the sufferer. This actually isolates the sufferer. We bear an illness when it is shared. We suffer an illness when we are alone, isolated by the diagnosis. The word "bear" also means to "give birth". Bearing an illness concerns giving birth to something new that is trying to unfold in our lives.

It was only in the 1950'S that the word "depression" began to be used as a diagnostic category. Diagnosing symptoms as the expression of a "thing", allow pharmaceutical companies to label and market anti-depressant drugs claimed to target this illness. Depression, from that point on has no meaning. It is assumed to be some kind of terrible thing that must be eliminated.

I am not trying to develop a practical therapy, but rather to re-imagine psychology as a doing rather than as thinking about the psyche. I'm concerned with how psyche acts. This stance is inherently therapeutic. In particular, we are developing a Spiritual Therapeutics, a new way of being with others in service that relies on listening to symptoms for the primordial phenomena they reveal. It is based on the notion that illness are meaningful, that they are the primary way, if we can follow the illness, bear it, new dimensions of life unfold.

The question you ask, "what is depth", and what is its place in Spiritual Psychology is a great question. I think that depth refers to the vertical dimension of the felt sense of bodyiing, that it goes inward, but also upward. Depth, as far as the soul is concerned is not just down. That is the mistake of "depth psychology, one that goes back to Jung. He had no place, really for spirit. While he considered spiritual phenomena, he did so alway, and explicitly, from the viewpoint of soul. Spiritual Psychology does not just mean an interest in the spiritual content of soul experience. It means that there is a primordial experience, the spirit-soul experience, in which soul live unfolds toward and is pulled by regions of unknown possibility and is not being shoved around by the past, not even the deep past, the archetypal imagination. There is no talk in depth psychology about the prototypal imagination. In doing therapy for over twenty years I never met one person, one patient, not one, whose interest was not in the future, in what he or she could become. And yet, when a person comes to therapy, he or she is forced, forced by the unexamined assumptions and prejudices of therapy to go into the past. I know the notion. We are stuck by something that happened to us in the past, or we are stuck because something in the deep past, the archetypal past is not given recognition. That assumption has no way out. You cannot get to the future by going to the past. That is very clear, and simple logic, even phenomeno-logic. Spiritual Psychology is much more interested in desire, longing, hope, and even more, the ways in which what we are to be is always already with us, in the present, and re-configuring the past. The hitch is, because it is the future, the not-yet, the realm of possibility that is affecting us, it has not content. The moment something we are being pulled toward has a content, it is known, and belongs to the past. That is why the only way into this future-time current of the soul, the spirit-soul, is through the heart, through learning to enter into the space of the heart where we no longer "know" in the usual mental ways, but feel, first the bodying forth of the body, feel our body as open system rather than closed container, and second, feel heart-awareness. What follows from finding the way to Feeling is the act of creating, which is the only way we can bring what is fully Felt, but not known to openness. That is, when we live from the heart, we feel alive in our being, purposeful in our actions, but are called upon to artistically make Feeling express in the world rather than re-enact old patterns endlessly, or re-enact the patterns and the jargon and the formals we learn in therapy.

What has to happen for a broad reawakening in the culture? You write at length about the individual's response to fear, even what I'd call its homeopathic use, but what can people do as members of a polis to reverse what is happening to our government?

A broad reawakening of culture requires something far more than a new content to focus on. It would not really matter if we move from Bush to something extaordinarily idealistic, such as a politics that takes global warming seriously, is against war and killing, works to disempower the corporations, and moves meaning away from money back to life. Such a focus, if it works out of the same mode of consciousness as we collectively live now, would produce only more of the same. What must happen for the reawakening of culture, I think, is the recognition that we are lost, and the capacity to stay lost, follow the lost, let it unfold into the fullness of what we are to become as a people. There is no reversal when the region of lostness has been entered. It is a truly exciting time.

Can you explain what you mean when you refer to the moral quality of the imagination?

I know this may be the most important thing of all to develop an understanding of. I'm not there. In a way, it is too big. It means, basically, that everything we do, even the smallest imaginable thing, impresses as felt-sense and image as felt-sense into body, and then into world and then into universe. If we could really feel that our actions have such real effects, we would have to re-orient our imagination totally. This notion is found in spiritual traditions, and is the real meaning of "karma", though karma is so trivialized and misunderstood that it does more harm than good to locate this question of moral quality of imagination within that context. However, there is something here that relates to your former question above about the reawakening of culture. Culture will reawaken when it realizes that those who have died are intensely interested in the world and what happens to the earth. And can help. There is a dawning pop interest in these sort of things, an interest that has already been literalized by a couple of terribly phony television shows. And, culture will reawaken when we don't just hold to a belief or disbelief in reincarnation, but find the evidence in our felt experience. It is something to be "known" from within rather than the simplistic talk concerning who one was in a former life.

Coincident with my depression in the last year, I have required three surgeries: emergency surgery to remove my gall bladder, surgery to repair an abdominal hernia, and, worst of all, surgery on both my knees after I ruptured the patellar tendons in my legs in two separate falls on the same day. I'm still recovering. Meanwhile my mother is undergoing a protracted dying process.

Well, where something goes wrong is where something is right. That is, where things happen that we cannot do anything about is exactly where a new form of consciousness, a spirit-soul consciousness is trying to be born. Something is not awry. That is so only from the only human point of view, and usually, accompanying that, from the point of view of our unexamined materialistic outlook. And, I am trying to suggest something much more than saying, well, once you know what these things are really about you will then see how important these experiences are. That outlook, in a way, trivializes such pain. It is in the bearing that what we are to be in our incompleteness unfolds. I think that the feeling "I've done wrong", is in a way, quite a right response, but absolutely must not be understood or lived at a superficial level, either by you or by some theapizing of you. Every time I have experienced major catastrophes such as this, life unfolds in a totally different and unknown direction. That is these are threshold moments, these are moments of initiatory experience. The real work is to keep the opening open and not immediatly close down the space by making judgments about it. Thus, if you say "I've done wrong", and make that at self-judgment, then the space closes immediately because you have told yourself something that is now a content and the unknown space has become know. If, on the other hand, when you say "I've done wrong" you feel the future-felt sense of that phrase, it is already saying if you now continue with the kind of consciousness you have been in, then in the future "you have done wrong."

6. My own practice is built around cultivating what you call artistic living (though, probably unlike you, I do work mainly with literal artistic types, especially in workshops). One thing I find very interesting in your work compared to Hillman is the subject of movement and the image. You seem to acknowledge, with him, that it is a primary characteristic of the image. Hillman, though, counsels us to "follow the image." Indeed his objection to art therapy is that it tends to freeze the image.

Is this a fair characterization? But do we defy our own soul when we usurp authority over the image it presents? If you agree with Jung that psyche is image how can you deny it autonomy?

A wonderful question, full of "I don't know's". Those exercises were devised when I was more under the influence of Rudolf Steiner's work, who I admire beyond expression. He is by far the most important cultural figure in centuries. And he is not recognized by the culture and is totally literalzed by anthroposophists. At any rate, "will", building the capacities of the will does not at all mean "willfullness". Will is the deepest aspect of our bodily being. It is the body-as-unconscious. For example, all I have to do is have the intent of getting up from my chair and walk to the door, and I can do that. That is an act of will, will in the sense of the body's knowing what to do. How this happens, how in the world an intent gets moved into the very depth of the muscles of the body, which, in its incredible wisdom knows what to do without my having to think it through, is utterly amazing. Will in this sense is the spirit aspect of the body. Thus, in the exercises, making an image and then extinguishing it is based on the notion that when an image is dissolved it does not disappear. If for example, you look at a burning candle and then close your eyes, there will be an after-image of the candle. It comes and goes, comes and goes, and gradually fades. Where does it go. It does not just disappear. It goes into the spiritual worlds, which are not "up there" somewhere, but all around us. The spiritual worlds "understand" images. The beings of the spiritual worlds don't understand discursive language. That is why all of the great religious texts are poetic. It's not just that what is received is too much for discursive speech. it's because that is the way it comes. So, making an image and then extinguishing it and then waiting, waits for the response from the spiritual world, which comes by way of the will of the body. A new capacity is born. It is actually easy to verify. If I pray and pray and pray and don't seem to get an answer, it is interesting instead to pray in images, in felt-images. And then wait. Something will come if we begin to pay attention. It will never be a literal answer to the prayer, but will be unmistakable Felt as a response.

7. Would you say a little about what you mean by "beauty." I notice that you object to Freud's almost 17th century view of nature as the "miasma" but your attitude also seems rather romantic, too.

My approach to beauty in previous writing was romanticized, I think. I now think it is simply the innerness of everything, felt in silence as Silence.

8. Do you think your work requires a certain level of development? Does it address pathology, like schizophrenia or PTSD? I guess I'm asking the same question I asked Ken Wilber years ago: Does spirtual development follow or occur simultaneously with psychotherapy? And what do you call your work in its practical application?

Psychotherapy does not necessarily bring about spiritual development. Not even soul development. And we would have to delve into the assumptions concerning pathology. I don't hold to such a notion as it is now understood by psychology, psychiatry, and mostly not even by depth psychology. I guess it is safe to say that since spiritual psychology works with the spiritual soul, the spirit-soul, spiritual development and soul deepening occur simultaneously.

Here is a blurb that is for the Silence book that speaks to your question:

"This is a breakthrough book. In SILENCE Robert Sardello modestly, elegantly--and magisterially--brings thirty years of work in phenemonological, soul-based spiritual psychology to a new level at which what was implicit before becomes explicit: spiritual psychology is not just another theory, it is a path to a new reality. Walking it--not just reading, but doing--readers will enter a new creation where all things are made new. Through nine short chapters--each a meditative journey in itself--Sardello phenomologically unveils silence to be the ground of the world. Each chapter gives practices whereby we can begin to enter into and engage the being of silence ever more deeply and widely and begin to discover the healing and revelatory wholeness in which we live and move and have our being. This is a work of the heart for those who seek the wisdom of the heart for sake of the heart of the world. Read it and do it! " (Christopher Bamford, uthor of The Voice of the Eagle: The heart of Celtic Christianity and An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West )

And here is another one:

"Sardello's Love and the World was an exciting, heady experience. It verified and strengthened all I had experienced in eight decades, re-charged my faith iin life and brought about a revision of a manuscript I had been immersed in for several years. Sardello's work Silence has proved, and is proving to be, quite the opposite. It stopped my world. There was nothing in the work that I could use, extract and purloin to my purposes. Silence stripped me to an embarrassed nakedness that was uncomfortable. From the introduction on a sharp twinge of an 'anguished longing' long buried within me surfaced, however, slowed my reading to a snail's pace, and forced me to abandon my usual goal-orientation through which I looked at any new writing. The book opens a door within that catches me unaware and anew every time I start reading. I feel quite inadequate to make any statement other than recognizing that this book and its Silence is the key. The key to what, however, I don't know. The work sets a momentum into order every time I pick it up, one which asks only that I stay open to that momentum and drop my ingrained pattern of looking to see where it might lead or "whats in it for me?" I haven't encountered this kind of book before and I don't know whats in it for me, only that I have a longing to stay open to it. Such a testamonial may be of small use for drawing people to the book - but even purpose of such a noble nature as that seems dishonest in the light of the book itself, and words 'on its behalf' break down. I daresay the work will speak for itself. I can't speak for it except to pray it finds a very wide audience and works its magic thereon." (Joseph Chilton Pearce )

What these quotes are saying that the work itself is the application. There is nothing outside the work. You know, like poetry. Poetry is very, very applicable. It is its own application. There is nothing outside the poetry that is the application. The question "does it have practical application" assumes that in itself it is not practical.