Robert Sardello

Despite its beautifully rich prose, ‘Silence’ is a challenging read. The author invites us to experience silence as a companion presence, a creative, heart-felt experience that renews, restores, and deepens the body’s response to the internal and external world. Drawing on images and ideas from the Trails of St Anthony, Anthroposophy developed by Rudolph Steiner), Depth Psychology and the phenomenology of German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the book uncovers the subtle qualities of show more silence, exploring the phenomenon as a source of unfathomable wholeness and revitalization. show less

The brief lived journal that came out of the short experiment called The University of Dallas under the inspiration of James Hillman in the late 70s. It is filled with rather dismal academic articles and Hillman lite ideas.

Even more academically dismal than the 1979 edition.

Amazon.com Review:

Robert Sardello is considered a leading philosopher on the soul, having inspired both Thomas Moore's and James Hillman's writings. Once again he departs from common spiritual assumptions in this intelligent and smoothly written handbook, Freeing the Soul from Fear. One of the more popular attitudes toward the soul is that it's a permanent element of the human being, Sardello explains. As a result, current spiritual guidance often discusses how to reconnect with our show more impermeable souls through meditation, honoring suffering, and returning to a sense of enchantment.

As important as this reconnection is, Sardello believes that it does not go far enough. Rather, we should recognize the soul as a vulnerable entity and commit to strengthening its core. And what weakens a soul the most? Fear. Fundamentally, it contracts the soul's ability to love. And above all else, love comes from the soul--"an experience through which another person, or a spiritual being, or God lives within us," Sardello explains. Chapter by chapter, Sardello examines how perennial fears (such as money, relationships, and death) as well as contemporary fears (Y2K, terrorism, and time collapse) affect the soul. He then offers concrete suggestions for overcoming soul-debilitating fears through love and imagination. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly:

In contrast to most popular self-help books, such as Gerald Jampolsky in Love Is Letting Go of Fear, Sardello counsels that the challenge is not to escape fear but to confront, embrace and transform it. A psychologist and co-founder of the School for Spiritual Psychology, Sardello (Love and the Soul) offers a largely philosophical treatise on the soul's relationship to fear, supplemented with visualization exercises geared toward improving the use of the imagination in understanding the soul and its dilemmas. Whereas most current writing on the soul is based on Jung's depth psychology, Sardello favors the work of Jung's contemporary Rudolph Steiner, who went further in acknowledging the effects of the outer world of relationships and culture on the soul. In Sardello's view, fear is not a transitory feeling or experience but a permanent, objective presence. Among the topics he explores are the effects of fear on the body; "perennial fears," such as money worries; fearful relationships; and the fear of suffering and death. A former colleague of Thomas Moore and James Hillman, Sardello presents some innovative ideas, such as his view that the practice of therapy has been a cultural testing ground for a new empathy-centered way of human relating. However, these notions are rendered less interesting than they might have been by his penchant for abstraction and his occasionally pedantic tone. Agent, Katie Boyle, Veritas Literary Agency. (Nov.) - Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. show less