Facing the world with soul (Studies in imagination)

....because it's nicely written, zeroing in as it does on the things and details in life: light on theory, thick on getting the most out of the phenomenology of everyday experience.The pleasant "Dear Friends" letter format will work for some readers but not perhaps for others; also, while a lot of the concepts are review if you're well up on archetypal psychology, the applications are novel; the chapter that deals with cancer and AIDS as "cold" manifestations is very interesting.

Sardello begins his discussion of Soul of the World by framing his observations in a series of "Letters" to the reader. They are essays which begin with an explanation of What is World Soul?; include the topics of the built environment, education, medicine, money, technology, things, violence, beauty, and food; and end with a discussion of Hermetic Consciousness. Throughout he makes a case for changing our attitudes, our habits of seeing beauty, things, disease, the world as nouns to seeing them as verbs instead; "moving from a perception of things as entities to things as activities". He asks the reader to suspend understanding and intention in favor of attending and entanglement--to increase imagination to effect transformation, rather than to hide or seek to change or to find solutions. He suggests that this is not done by turning away from the world toward inner work but by learning to see the presence of everyday things, to see what is actually present vs. inventing theories. The best ideas, in my opinion, have to do with: Beauty vs. the notion of energy; making of the world by attention to it; the particularity of EACH inside a concept of wholeness; and "no longer looking at a thing, but being seen by it". The book departs from other New Age literature in that it does not advocate transcendence away from or out of the body (or the world) into a kind of spiritual hubris, but rather argues for loving the world better "as is". This viewpoint requires a different kind of consciousness and lots of responsibility. It also insists on exercising consistently the activity of imagination, of which Sardello reports the Sanskrit root meaning to be the "ever-changing ensnaring play of appearances". Sardello builds upon the work of James Hillman.