The Center of Earthosophy
The School of Spiritual Psychology announces a new endeavor –The Center of Earthosophy. Presence to the Wisdom of the Spiritual Earth brings about conscious living within an expansion of embodied soul life that places unitive sensing of the living, angelic presence of Earth as our most primary experience. Our culture’s deranged connection with the Earth indicates the strong urgency to bring this form of presence to ways of conduct in the world. This contemplative way of practical living, oriented always to the spiritual worlds while capable of engaging the Spiritual Earth, can be the way through the adverse times we are now within and will be into the future.
The Center of Earthosophy offers the possibility of creatively making a new imagination of life, one that is in complete harmony with the rhythms, tones, movements, and unfolding of the spiritual Earth and the invisible spiritual worlds that encompass us. As world turbulence and fear increases in frequency and intensity we are likely to find that exteriorized answers are not of any help unless they are a natural outflow of the interiority of soul presence. Courage of heart is the way of the future. This way of being with Earth – through the creative imagination – differs considerably from any existing depth ecopsychology, and even traditions of honoring the Sacred Earth. Earthosophy holds to the always-existing, always evolving unity of Earth-Human and the means for being present within this complex, unfolding, purpose-oriented union in body, soul, and spirit.
The Facilitators
Robert Sardello, Ph.D. and Cheryl Sanders, Ph.D., co-directors of the School of Spiritual Psychology are the lead faculty. Other faculty are sometimes brought in for individual sessions. (For fuller descriptions of the credentials of the faculty, see the Home tab.)
2012 Courses in Earthosophy
Foundations of Earthosophy:The Earth-Wisdom Tradition
See “Course Tuition” Tab under “Center of Earthosophy” for
Registration.
March 15-19, 2012
June 7-11, 2012
September 13-17, 2012
December 6-10, 2012
Enrollment Limited to 12 people
This course inaugurates the Center of Earthosophy of the School of Spiritual Psychology. Earthosophy is the devotional dimension of Spiritual Psychology. We invite you to learn Spiritual-Earth-praying, Spiritual-Earth-ritual, Spiritual-Earth-healing, Spiritual-Earth-meditating, Spiritual-Earth devotion. We enter into the living, unanswerable, always unfolding question: Who is Earth? Spiritually, Who is Earth? And, with that felt question, we enter the further question – How do we come into direct, immediate, bodily presence with the Presence of Earth.
There are Wisdom Traditions who know Earth in this manner – the American Indian, the Celtic, the Shamanic, and the esoteric stream known as the Saturn Mysteries. But, we, this culture, do not know Earth as Spiritual Earth, a Who. Those who revere Earth intuit that Earth is not just the inert stage upon which life happens, but rather, all that lives, including human beings -- are organs of the wholeness of Earth we live within – not on. We attend, closely, to Earth Wisdom traditions as guides of the coming-to-be.
With these guides, in this course we enter the deep tradition of Feminine Wisdom as Earth Presences. Sophia, Mary, The Black Madonna, Mary Magdalene, Our Lady of Guadalupe – we propose, are here, present, as the spiritual-living Earth. There are other traditions, of course. We provide ONE way, the bodily way of feeling, knowing, sensing, perceiving Earth as Spiritual Earth – in full, wakeful awareness. To develop these capacities of awareness will provide available soul capacities to do so within the feminine aspects of any spiritual tradition. In fact, much of our method derives from the Sufi tradition.
These Earth Presences are also embodied Soul Capacities – We must find the manner in which these presences are already within the embodied soul and awaken to those capacities, which then allow being with Earth in utterly new ways – as our ever-present nurturing companions.
The Course content:
Sophia – The soul capacity of creative-receptive intuition; Earth as Integral Wholeness
Mary – The soul capacity of body receptivity; Earth as Spiritual Matter
The Black Madonna – The soul capacity of underworld awe; Earth as Unending Depth
Mary Magdalene – The soul capacity of spiritual earth-love; Earth as Love
Our Lady of Guadalupe – The soul capacity of surrender; Earth as All-Giver
If you have questions, please contact: soulschool@embarqmail.com
EXTENDED WEEKEND EARTHOSOPHY COURSES – 2012
Entering Relationship with Celestial Earth: Becoming a Spiritual Human Being
May 3-7, 2012
See “Course Tuition Tab” under “Center of Earthosophy” on
Main Page for Registration
We are destroying Earth because we really don’t see who Earth is. When we look at anything of the Earth, we have made Earth into an object. When we look at Earth and Earth looks back, then we encounter Her. Earth is an angelic presence, the heart of the cosmos, in resonance with the human heart. We establish the validity of this statement and go on to the practices for experiencing Her.
This extended-weekend course helps sensing Earth again, directly, immediately, bodily, through the creative imagination resulting in the intelligence of the heart through body-knowing. Such sensing changes us – and Her, deeply, permanently. In our time together, we expose our unconscious treatment of Earth as either object or idol. We develop the simple and therefore illusive capacity of sensing and perceiving in the absolute present, free of the attachments of the ego which is always creating psychic projections that we naively take as real and are attempts to possess what is wildly free. Sometimes, most of the time in this culture, such possessions are at the gross level of projection – Earth as resources, as mass of physical substance, that which responds to our physical experiments.
In dissolving the illusions of ego attachments, we do not become ‘ungrounded’, floating, without a sense of ‘self’, but rather we become dynamic, unselfconscious, sometimes unpredictable but never controllable – just as Nature. Encountering Earth also throws whatever spirituality guides us or we have adopted into new and living forms, deepening them as we find that, more than likely, our spirituality has neglected to take the Spiritual Earth into imagination. Guided by the writings of Henry Corbin and Charles Upton, the themes to be explored include:
The Way of Sensory Bodily Presence
October 25-29, 2012
At this moment of the opening of a new century, a new millennium, we are all so very busy, captured by the illusion of productivity, the myth of scarcity. We are compelled to work and achieve and grow, grow, grow as the only indicator of success and health. "Stress" has become the foundation of the emergence of increasingly more diseases, added daily to our count of what can kill us.
We carry our body to a physician for the quickest fix possible so we can get going again before someone grabs our place.
This extended-weekend course will be the moment we learn the true meaning of what the body is doing every moment, in relation to ourselves, each other, the very world around us. Living forgetfully of what brings the world toward us, we obliterate the sensed world in favor of the conclusion we know of anything sensed. If I know that is a tree, I don't look at the awe and majesty of this growing life form, I dismiss it as tree and get on with what is more interesting, like, what I am doing, who I am, what vitally important thing I have to sell today for my company. Not that we would go around all the time in wonder, that would be to be caught in a kind of astonished trance, that also would be egoistic, and not really be in relationship with the world.
The sense of the world is what we do, but all our senses have now become captured by our conclusions, judgments, the past, what we have been told, what we think we know. But how we sense the world matters, in fact it is vital, because the Earth senses our sensing, and is affected by what we are carrying within our body as unconscious conclusions about everything. This masked, unconscious relationship to everything, originating in our sensory presence, gives rise to the possibility of indifference, abuse, even destruction of all that is living. We give over the possibility of being part of the healing, by our ignorance of nature being itself, and especially of the being of Earth. Our assumption that we are too small to make a difference is the origin of what is destroying an entire planet. Now we can begin to awaken to what is accomplished by sensing Earth, by experiencing how Earth senses us as part of Her, and what this means to the whole of everything.
Themes to be explored include:
- Why are there 12 senses?
- The Mystery of 12 in Relation to the Cosmos and the Earth
- What are "Disruptions" in the Senses / Why do They Matter to the Earth?
- Spiritual Gifts of the Senses that are the Foundation of the Earth
- Pulling the Teeth out of Cultural Forms: Religion, Politics, Medicine, Education: (The Bodily, or World Senses)
- Cosmic Revelations and Personal Intimations - or - Why What We Sense Matters...Who We Think We Are / Where do We Think We are Going/Why we are not Just "on" the Earth
- What Are Our Senses Really Telling Us Every Moment? (The Middle Senses in Relation to the Whole)
- When We Die Do We 'Lose' Our Sense-Ability and Does the Earth still Exist for Us?
- How We Know the Other (The Higher, or Spiritual Senses) How the Earth Gives us the Other
