{"id":6686,"date":"2025-06-16T17:40:53","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T17:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/in-search-of-the-spiritual-soul-for-a-new-culture\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T20:53:22","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T20:53:22","slug":"in-search-of-the-spiritual-soul-for-a-new-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/in-search-of-the-spiritual-soul-for-a-new-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"In Search of the Spiritual Soul for a New Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Address by don Stefano Tardani<\/em><\/p>\n\n<p>The attack on the institution of the family and on the true good of life has taken place through the deceptive culture of the ephemeral, of immediate and compulsive pleasure, and not least through the culture of death.<\/p>\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<p>The cultural and moral confusion of today has exploited systematic doubt and distrust, relegating faith, along with its rational and ontological roots, to individual opinionism. In this way, the fragmentation of the truth of things and of their connection to transcendence has occurred for every other human or religious value. <\/p>\n\n<p>On January 19, 2012, Benedict XVI said to the bishops of the United States during their ad limina visit: \u201cWhen a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery and to close the doors to transcendent truth, it inevitably impoverishes itself and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to a reductive and totalitarian reading of the human person and the nature of society.\u201d <\/p>\n\n<p>To help the family recover and also to regain its central place in society for the defense and development of human life, it is necessary to reclaim positions of value and consensus with a change of course and a conversion of today\u2019s cultural revolution \u2014 a kind of \u201ccultural counter-revolution\u201d that restores the light of truth, goodness, beauty, and the transcendent dimension.<\/p>\n\n<p>We must join forces and resources, including financial means, for the advent of a new culture of truth and goodness, a new culture of life and the family, of their preciousness and uniqueness.<\/p>\n\n<p>We must take up again that delicate thread of the good of life, entrusted by God to the human spirit. In today\u2019s confused world, only the experiential rediscovery of the spiritual soul can stop the abuse of self-determination \u2014 only something that is at the root of freedom itself and of our cognitive capacity, namely, the root of the human spirit. <\/p>\n\n<p>Its manifestations or characteristics can be identified by answering this question: \u201cWhat does the spirit, the spiritual soul, do in the human being?\u201d The human spirit, of course, should not be confused with the presence and action of the Holy Spirit, who is God, one with the Father and the Son, and who comes to the aid of our human spirit and into our life. <\/p>\n\n<p>Thus, purely as examples and not exhaustively, I list here what the spiritual soul, in human freedom, can do, love, and seek:<\/p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>It loves and seeks the meaning of things, the \u201cwhy\u201d;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks truth, goodness;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks the eternal and immortality;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks harmony, light;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks freedom, gratuity;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks fidelity and kindness;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks justice and order;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks beauty, power, and life;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It animates life and the best within it;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It animates self-awareness;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It transcends chronological time;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It makes the past present and brings the future into the present;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks in a personal way;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It seeks the ultimate reason;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It perceives its own existence not only as consciousness (self-consciousness) but even more deeply as the awareness of being aware;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It seeks spiritual reality;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It loves and seeks God.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>Yet one thing is to deduce and affirm, as we must, all this; another thing is to demonstrate its action, for example, in the development of the human embryo compared to the embryo of another mammal.<\/p>\n\n<p>The search for the existence of the spiritual soul in the human being and for its observable and scientifically demonstrable manifestations is precisely the task and mission pursued by the IRIS-3 Foundation with its interdisciplinary and international research institute.<\/p>\n\n<p>Matter and spirit, united, give life to the human being. And it is precisely the reality of the spirit that gives man his inalienable dignity, his highest values, the greatness of his freedom, his thought, his knowledge, and his self-awareness. This is the spiritual soul, created by God \u2014 the pneuma, the spirit \u2014 very different from the psychic soul, psyche or mind.   <\/p>\n\n<p>Our research is aimed at demonstrating the existence of the spiritual soul, of the spirit (pneuma) present in the human being: it is the spirit that constitutes the human being in his identity and uniqueness and makes him capable of his progress and of every discipline.<\/p>\n\n<p>It is not enough, in fact, that we affirm the reality of the spiritual soul, of the human spirit, in prayer, in relation to Grace, in theology, and in matters of the Church.<\/p>\n\n<p>It is necessary to affirm it, demonstrate it, and indicate it also in human life, so that this life is not destroyed by denying the One who created it \u2014 God. We must point to the existence and action of the spiritual soul in every science and in every discipline in order to overcome atheistic materialism on one side, and on the other, the emerging and deceptive spiritualistic immanentism. This is the purpose of the IRIS-3 Research Institute.  <\/p>\n\n<p>It is true, we have nothing with which to measure the spiritual soul! It is true, because we have nothing superior to the spiritual soul that could \u201cmeasure\u201d it \u2014 nothing spiritual with which to grasp it. The soul is not like the world that we can measure.  <\/p>\n\n<p>The difficulty in \u201cmeasuring\u201d the spirit lies precisely in the fact that it is the spirit itself that \u201cmeasures\u201d reality, and so it does not allow itself to be \u201cmeasured\u201d by instruments. <\/p>\n\n<p>And yet, there is a way to show the existence of the spiritual soul in the human being! It is that the spiritual soul measures itself \u2014 by giving signs of its action in the human being and in all disciplines that knowledge and progress have achieved.  <\/p>\n\n<p>Being self-revealing, in fact, it presents itself by unveiling itself and can show us its presence and action, as in self-awareness, freedom, and the good from which it comes.<\/p>\n\n<p>Our research is of the utmost importance. The spiritual soul, the spirit, in the human being is indeed truth, love, and power \u2014 the \u201cimage\u201d of God who created it immortally. <\/p>\n\n<p>The spiritual soul is the foundation of our personal being and nourishes the psychic consciousness: where the psychic consciousness ceases to perceive itself, spiritual consciousness begins.<\/p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The state of spiritual consciousness is experienced in deep prayer of Communion with God and adoration.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Also, \u201cThe Therapy of Being and of the Person\u201d \u2014 a spiritual therapy carried out within the Research Institute \u2014 reveals and refers back to spiritual consciousness and its power. Both the patients and the practitioners of this therapy experience the unveiling of the spiritual soul in being, beyond psychic consciousness, and experience that this further spiritual level exists, capable of healing inner and deep wounds. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The spiritual soul, being the image of God who is Truth, Love, and Power, lives by this light of God. All human values would not exist without the spiritual soul, which gives form and substance to values. Values are like the manifestation of the spiritual soul: when the spiritual soul is covered and hidden from generations, all the values of life and of the human person, of social life, including those of the family, are covered and hidden. It is the human spirit that makes us \u201chuman,\u201d for without the spiritual soul there is no human characteristic nor humanity. It is the spirit that humanizes us. Without the rediscovery and listening to the human spirit, every human progress is a dangerous deception for humanity, because it is fundamentally inhuman!     <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>With a prophetic spirit, we have therefore established this Foundation with its Scientific, Interdisciplinary, and International Research Institute.<\/p>\n\n<p>It is a great and challenging project that we have begun to undertake with God\u2019s help, and with the help of collaborators and resources, including financial support, from those who wish to sustain this step forward in the understanding of the human being \u2014 the image of God \u2014 and of how humanity\u2019s path can advance in goodness and truth. <\/p>\n\n<p>By joining efforts, this research can produce extraordinary gifts in many fields, not only in knowledge and learning across all disciplines, but also in human life itself, in order to discern and pursue the true good of our future. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Address by don Stefano Tardani The attack on the institution of the family and on the true good of life has taken place through the deceptive culture of the ephemeral, of immediate and compulsive pleasure, and not least through the culture of death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6599,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conference-may-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6687,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6686\/revisions\/6687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iris3.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}