For more than a hundred years, the various fields of psychology have sought methods for healing the individual soul. Today, the being in need of care is the world. All the organizing forms that ought to enrich life with beauty, purpose, and depth no longer do so. To heal ourselves we need to reimagine the world.
Beginning with the myth of Sophia--the "Soul of the World"--Sardello evokes a sense that the world is filled with her presence. He suggests that the soul's primary aspects--its arts of concentration, meditation, imagination, and contemplation--do not belong simply to individual consciousness, but constitute a surrender of subjective, personal states to the consciousness that is the soul of the world. He shows how we can begin to approach daily life in a new way by practicing these arts. The chapters that follow establish a psychology of the world.