We have lost an awareness that our own individual soul is a part of the WORLD SOUL.

"There has been a recent resurgence in spirituality in the West, what some would call an 'awakening' . . . Yet we still have little understanding of the spiritual dimension within the natural world, or of how our individual soul relates to the larger dimension of the World Soul (what the ancients called the 'anima mundi') . . . Instead we are caught within a contemporary consciousness that focuses on the individual self, no longer even aware of our deep bond to the sacred within creation.  We may have begun to reclaim an understanding of how to relate to our own soul and experienced the meaning and sense of purpose that can come into our life through this relationship . . . But we have little awareness of the relationship between our individual soul and the WORLD SOUL.  We have forgotten the ancient teaching that says that the individual is the microcosm of the whole . . . While there may be a growing awareness that the world forms a single living being - what has been called the Gaia principle - we don't really understand that this being is also nourished by its SOUL, the Anima Mundi - or that we are a part of it, part of a much larger living, sacred being.  Sadly we remain cut off, isolated from this spiritual dimension of life itself.  We have forgotten how to nourish or be nourished by the Soul of the World.  And while there is a growing ecological movement that reminds us that we are guardians of the planet, this guardianship is interpreted as looking after our PHYSICAL environment and its myriad inhabitants, rarely addressing our inherent responsibility of the SACRED within creation.  Instead, in only relating to our planet from a physical perspective, much of the ecological movement perpetuates the concept of the earth as something solely physical, without sacredness or SOUL, and so reinforces the divorce of matter from spirit.  While we may remember the sacredness of human beings, we have forgotten that the Earth is also sacred, and that its Soul can speak to ours."

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee,

Sufi teacher

"Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth"

Photo: The La Sal Mountains, fog, sandstone cliffs, and a housing development near Moab, Utah; December 2, 2013

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