Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

Making Sense of the Resurrection of the Body. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon

Tue, 05 May 2026 12:00:00 +0100

Many people report apparitions of their loved ones after death, and even of loved dogs and cats. But how do these after-death communications align with the Christian teaching of the resurrection of the body?

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore the evidence for the post-mortem appearances of humans and non-humans, and ask how it fits with the accounts of Jesus’s resurrection in the Bible.

The appearance of Jesus to the disciples and others is often taken as evidence of a physical revival of Jesus after his crucifixion but a subtler, arguably more compelling interpretation is that after-death communications are relatively common - which is the experience the disciples had. Then, the resurrection of Jesus shows something about the nature of the spiritual body, as Saint Paul calls the body that awaits us.

But what to make of the empty tomb that had contained the body of Jesus and the variety of activities Jesus reportedly engaged in after his resurrection, and what this might mean for existence after death and the presence of other worlds that are also here and now?

Find 100 more conversations with myself and Rupert online.

The King's Philosophy of Harmony: Explained. A Conversation with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000

For the 100th episode of The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon considered the role of harmony, wholeness and hope in the modern world. The event was held in-person as well as streamed online.

The evening took as its inspiration the work of King Charles, who can be called a philosopher king. It follows the February 6 release on Amazon Prime of the documentary “Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision”. But what is this philosophy?

Rupert and Mark explore new ways that are old of looking at the world, aided by science, poetry, and perennial wisdom traditions. How is diversity transformed by awareness of unity? How might the unfolding of life aid transformation? Spirit, imagination and intelligence much matter.

The conversation was held in the Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead.

For more of Mark and Rupert's conversations see - https://www.markvernon.com/talks

Sexual drives wreck lives. And yet, the erotic opens paths to paradise, shows Dante's Divine Comedy

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Christianity doesn’t do well with erotic love. The unease stems, in part, from the fact that the word “eros” doesn’t appear in the New Testament. The lacuna means that points of reference for discussions about sex are typically inadequate and thin. Command stands in for clear thinking.

Then, there is Saint Paul’s remark: “marry if you must” (1 Cor 7:8-9). His ambivalence has resulted in sexual relationships being hidden in marriage, hoping that there, they do less harm than good. Lady Hillingdon’s remark comes to mind, to lie back and think of England - the wit glossing oceans of suffering.

That said, there are remarkable exceptions to the handwashing, of which, in the Christian West, the shining example is The Divine Comedy. Dante’s understanding of the way romantic love can initiate a path to God is fearless, instructive and, because intrepid, transformative. We need it now for, as William Blake observed, “Our wars are wars of life & wounds of love.”

For more on Mark and his book about Dante's Divine Comedy - www.markvernon.com

Middle-earth and Modern Meaning: Tolkien, Barfield, and the Soul of Story

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:00:00 +0000

In this conversation, psychotherapist and writer Dr Mark Vernon is joined by philosopher Dr Robert Rowland Smith to explore the imaginative world of J.R.R. Tolkien and the often-overlooked influence of Owen Barfield - friend of C.S. Lewis and another Inkling.

Patron Saints and Genii Locorum. My 99th conversation with Rupert Sheldrake, plus details of the live 100th!

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Saints, bodhisattvas and genii locorum, or spirits of place, are the names in various wisdom traditions given to guardian beings who protect, assist and inspire. So what does it mean to call on these sacred beings?

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the role of patron saints who are associated with churches and shrines, days and names.

What powers might figures from Saint Mary to Saint Nicolas bring to us? How do we call upon them and how is their presence understood? Rupert and Mark explore the ways in which saints connect heaven and earth in individual lives, particular places and at various times of the year.

ANNOUNCEMENT

The next episode of The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues will be the 100th!

In celebration, Rupert and Mark will talk with an in-person audience that people will also be available to join via live streaming.

We will meet in the Parish Church of St John, Hampstead, on Sunday 15th February. The dialogue itself will start at 6.15pm and you are warmly invited to attend Choral Evensong at 5pm before.

DETAILS OF TICKETS - https://buytickets.at/thesheldrakevernondialogues/2010539

Rupert and Mark will consider the role of harmony, wholeness and hope in the modern world. Themselves inspired by the book, Harmony, co-authored by King Charles, they will inquire into new ways that are old of participating with the living cosmos, aided by science, poetry, and perennial wisdom traditions.

How is diversity transformed by awareness of unity? How might the unfolding of life aid transformation? Spirit, imagination and intelligence much matter.

Ramana Maharshi in the West and Transcendence Revisited. A conversation with Clare Carlisle

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

What is the meaning of religious experience? What do spiritual questers from the West find in India? Just what happened to Ramana Maharshi and others who are said to have awakened? And how does this fit with Christian teaching and belief?

I talk with Clare Carlisle who has recently published a book the mixes the personal and the philosophical. Transcendence for Beginners raises many questions that press for those draw to explore the nature of reality and the presence of the divine.

We talk about why Carl Jung didn’t visit Ramana Maharshi when he visited India. We ask whether the doctrine of the unique incarnation of Jesus can be reconciled with the Indian intuition that there are many incarnations of God. We explore how these things can be written about and taught, if at all. We ask about the significance of miracles and signs - and the risks of pursuing certain types of spiritual, ecstatic experience.

For more information about Transcendence for Beginners - https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=clare+carlisle+trasnedence+for+beginnings&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

For more information about Clare Carlisle - https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/clare-carlisle

For more on Mark's work - https://www.markvernon.com

New Born Wonder. Jesus, Owen Barfield, William Blake

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 08:00:00 +0000

How can we understand what is happening today from the perspective of what is sometimes called salvation history? What might be struggling to be born in our times? Why is a spiritual analysis - an unfolding of consciousness - key?

The talk was delivered at The School of Myth, “Wild Christ”, weekend with Martin Shaw, Rowan Williams, Heather Pollington and others.

I use the insights of Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner, to interpret developments across 3000 years of Christianity, given the movement of spirit began a millennia before Christ. I also take their lead on the value of William Blake to perceive the significance of what Blake called a “New Age” emerging now - which we might love, too.

My book unpacking Barfield’s interpretation of Christianity is “A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness”.

My book on Blake’s prophetic analysis of the dynamics active today is “Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination”.

For more see www.markvernon.com

The Quiet Revolution and the New Theism. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The mood has shifted. Subjects that were once taboo - like God - are now discussed openly. So if a new theism is abroad, what might it bring?

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon ask why individuals engaged in pursuits from cultural critique to theoretical biology are now actively interested in traditions such as Christianity and Platonism.

What is new about this turn and what is old? What does it mean in terms of understanding our humanity, the sciences and wider cosmology? And how can these new currents be best assessed and discerned?

Rupert and I have almost 100 dialogues online.
For more on Rupert see - https://www.sheldrake.org
For more on Mark see - https://www.markvernon.com

Tantric Blake. The magic and the mysticism of William Blake

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

An interview with Mark Vernon at the Harvard Divinity School with Adam Walker.

Mark Vernon's book is "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination".

Adam Walker’s YouTube channel is Close Reading Poetry.

Cleansing the Doors of Perception. William Blake, Romanticism and the Meaning Crisis

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The Romantic movement is a tragic movement. In response to the Enlightenment, poets and painters sought a return of feeling but failed in one crucial aspect: to ground the vision, to make clear how it is a means of truth.

The result is that, alongside the wonderful, powerful presence of reason in the modern world, runs a desire to intensify feeling is if that can bring back the meaning otherwise lost to the technological and abstract.

Only, ungrounded, Romantic feeling doesn't. Instead, too often, it leads to reactionary nationalism, fundamentalism in religion, hedonism and sentimentality, and modes of inner healing that offer exaggerated experience as a proxy for transformation.

William Blake spotted this tendency. He realised that Romanticism must come of age, to borrow the expression of Owen Barfield, by understanding the imagination as a way of knowing of and growing into the fundamentals of existence.

In this talk, delivered to the Centre for the Study of Platonism at the University of Cambridge, I explore how Blake conveyed the crucial awareness that might redeem the tragedy of Romanticism, so damaging alive in the modern world.

For more on Mark, and his book about Blake, "Awake!", see www.markvernon.com

Ode to Joy Podcast. A conversation with Paul Wilkinson and Mark Vernon. Music That Shapes Us podcast

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:00:00 +0000

A psychotherapist, philosopher and writer drawn to the wellsprings of both ancient and modern philosophy and the illumination of the inner life. His work moves between the timeless and the modern, exploring friendship and belief, wellbeing and wonder, and the quiet art of living with depth in a restless age.

His recent books trace paths through the visionary landscapes of William Blake, the awakening of spiritual intelligence, the pilgrimage of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the Christian imagination as seen through Owen Barfield — the Oxford Inkling and close companion of C.S. Lewis.

You can find out more about Paul via his website - www.paulwilkinson.co.uk

You can find out more about Mark via his website - www.markvernon.com

William Blake Masterclass at the Unherd Club. With Esmé Partridge, Mark Vernon and Florence Read

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:00:00 +0000

At a time of renewed interest in the spiritual, what could challenge the uninspiring notion of ‘cultural Christianity’? One answer is by embracing the esoteric.

William Blake, the painter and poet, has become a model for a new kind of rebellious spirituality. Though he spent his life in poverty and obscurity, Blake’s radical vision of the divine is now a cornerstone of modern mysticism.

Psychotherapist and podcaster Mark Vernon, author of ‘Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination’, and religion researcher, Esmé Partridge, talk in a masterclass, hosted by Unherd in London, on the meaning and mythos of Blake.

0:00 What world Blake was responding to
2:15 What did Blake mean by Newton’s sleep?
5:28 How did Blake see the natural world?
8:30 Why did Blake react against the Christianity of his day?
11:50 Understanding “The Garden of Love”
13:50 Understanding “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
16:50 Blake against the ills of today: sentimentality and unforgivingness
18:40 The road of excess and erotic desire
21:47 Navigating the contrary tensions of life
25:15 Blake’s mythological figures
29:30 What about Los and Jerusalem?
32:30 What about Blake’s view of politics and revolution?
36:50 How do you cleanse the doors of perception?
40:20 So in what way was Blake Christian?
43:46 How did William and Catherine support themselves?
46:52 How do we distinguish between imagination and fantasy?
49:51 How can Blake be helpful to modern psychology?
52:30 How can Blake help us reach for the eternal?
56:10 How can Blake bring meaning to life?
57:30 What would Blake make of Nietzsche?
1:00:00 What would Blake make of Spinoza?
1:01:30 Can we diagnose Blake and his visions?
1:03:20 What about Blake and cultural Christianity today?
1:05:30 What did Blake make about violence?
1:07:43 Can you say more about Catherine Blake?
1:09:30 Blake’s wit about his visions
1:10:54 Can you comment on Blake and Englishness?

Rouze Up Souls of the New Age! A conversation with Malcolm Guite on William Blake

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0100

“Man has no Body distinct from his Soul,” declared William Blake. “Nature is imagination itself!” The human face is the “countenance divine”.

Inspiring, yes. But what can we make of his sayings?

Mark Vernon sat down with poet Malcolm Guite to discuss how Blake’s ideas about the imagination challenge modern ways of perceiving the world.

They stress that dismissing Blake’s converse with angels dismisses the radicality of what he has to offer. They explore how the division between the subjective and objective, which Guite calls “epistemological apartheid”, is false and has terrible consequences for human beings, personally and politically. They argue that theology needs a revival of the imagination as the way we apprehend truths that put the fire into rational comprehension.

For more on Mark’s book, “Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination” see www.markvernon.com

For more on Malcolm Guite see https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com

0:00 Ways of knowing
01:46 Don't medicalise Blake!
3:30 The senses are inlets of soul
5:25 A fundamental, false division
12:07 Imagination makes real not makes up
16:35 Demystifying the imagination
20:48 Eternity in the present and particular
26:58 Reason the bound of energy: Geoffrey Hill on Blake
32:09 Blake's aphoristic philosophy
33:20 The renewal of Christianity
42:56 The generative teaching of Jesus
44:46 Energy and the Holy Spirit: Barfield on Blake
48:17 Albion crucifies the imagination
54:21 Contraries that create not conflict
58:29 Selfless perception

The Wisdom of the Imagination. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 11:00:00 +0100

Note: This upload is a correction to the previous file uploaded under this title!

The imagination is often regarded as a valuable but fanciful capacity. But what if imagination were not an optional extra, or even the possession of human beings alone, but a fundamental feature of reality?

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon draw on the ideas of William Blake to explore Blake’s insistence that “nature is imagination itself!”.

They discuss how the understanding of the imagination has contracted in recent times, though also how modern science is a remarkable exercise in the imagination. They consider matters from how the Platonic notion of ideas relates to cosmic and evolutionary novelty, to whether angels can be said to be imaginative and creative.

Mark’s new book is "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination". For more information see https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination.

Full-strength imagination. Romanticism come of age. Mark Vernon & Robert Rowland Smith talk Blake

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 20:00:00 +0100

Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination is now available worldwide.

To celebrate, Mark Vernon and Robert Rowland Smith discuss all things Blake from angels and images, to poetry and prophecy.

For more on the book see https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination

William Blake’s spiritual analysis of our times. A conversation with Jason Whittaker and Mark Vernon

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 15:00:00 +0100

I very much enjoyed speaking with Jason Whittaker, a profound lover of Blake, because we have our differences about how Blake speaks to us and, I hope, that is illuminating.

We discussed Blake the visionary and mystic, and resisting forcing Blake through the sieve of more recent psychology. We thought about how Blake speaks to us now, as a poet and analyst of the modern spirit. We examined the significance of the imagination and the nature of God for Blake.

For more on Jasons’s work see - www.jasonwhittaker.co.uk
For more on Awake! and Mark’s work see - www.markvernon.com

0:00 Introductions
1:36 How Blake speaks to us
5:35 Mystic or visionary?
7:45 On not psychologising Blake
9:40 Reading Blake’s poetry
11:54 Blake as a prophet of now
15:40 Understanding Blake’s characters
19:20 The significance of the imagination in Blake
23:12 Blake and God
27:03 Why deism matters
32:55 Infinite perception
37:46 Against the church
43:05 Dialogues and the expansion of perception

Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race! William Blake on an antidote to the mechanistic imagination

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0100

Why is the mechanical view of reality so strong? Why does billiard-ball atomism remain the default popular metaphysics?

William James was horrified by such “nothing buttery” and the way it substituted bare concepts for rich phenomena.

A.N. Whitehead famously – or perhaps not famously enough – described the problem as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”.

William Blake is another critic. “General Knowledge is Remote Knowledge. But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars. It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too.”

We should care about what Blake called “single vision and Newton’s sleep”. The antidote is to reestablish a relationship with presence. Poetry and imagery evoke the lived moment of experiencing and the fluid dynamics of that perception. Regain contact with that, regain contact with life.
This is the promise of Blake and others.

For more on Mark’s book, Awake!, and more of his work see - www.markvernon.com

William Blake and the Power of the Imagination. A talk at L'Abri, Sussex, England

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0100

Mark Vernon provides a fresh route into Blake, taking him at his word. Exploring his writings, artwork and life, Vernon illuminates Blake’s vivid worldview and shows how his thinking is still relevant for us today.

Please note that the ideas expressed in this lecture do not necessarily represent the views of L’Abri Fellowship.

What is really known about consciousness? A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0100

You may agree that the so-called hard problem of consciousness exposes the deep inadequacies of a materialist worldview.

But the alternatives - various forms of panpsychism, panentheism and idealism - raise rich and fascinating questions, too.

In this episode of The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore the leading edge of consciousness research, with Rupert just back from The Science of Consciousness Conference 2025 in Barcelona.

They discuss the impact of Indian researchers of consciousness and the proposals of microchip inventor, Federico Faggin. They consider trainings in extra-ocular vision and questions thrown up by the hit podcast series, The Telepathy Tapes.

One thing is clear: when the materialist paradigm passes, the science of consciousness will have only just begun.

For more on Rupert's work see - https://www.sheldrake.org/

For more on Mark's work see - https://www.markvernon.com/

Awake! William Blake and the Power of Imagination. A conversation with Jane Clark and Nikos Yiangou

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0100

In my book, I want to draw out two facets of William Blake, which I think get routinely sidelined now. My conversation with Jane Clark and Nikos Yiangou enabled us to explore these dimensions.

One is that Blake was a very sharp thinker. He had a very accurate and clear critique of the ideas that were beginning to bed down in his time and have really shaped our times in the modern Christian West.

A second is that he is a religious figure, which gets sidelined in two ways. He lived daily with perceptions of angels and other entities: the divine, the dead. I don't explain that away by pathologising Blake.

He is also a clear Christian mystic, a very important voice in Western Christianity since the Reformation - connecting us back to a mystical core, which again is very often sidelined.

For more about my book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination

For more about Beshara Magazine see - https://besharamagazine.org

A transcript is online here - https://besharamagazine.org/podcast/mark-vernon-awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-imagination/

0:00 Introductions
1:57 Blake as thinker and mystic
5:20 The power of the imagination
14:40 Blake and science
21:12 The interconnection of music and poetry
26:04 Innocence and wisdom
32:29 Blake's Christianity
39:57 Blake the philosopher

An Implosion of Light. Talking mystical experiences with James Harpur and Mark Vernon

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0100

James Harpur’s new book, "Dazzling Darkness: The Lives and Afterlives of the Christian Mystics", begins with an account of a mystical experience that happened to him - “an implosion of light”, as he describes it. That led to his book, Dazzling Darkness, in pursuit of the path that leads to ultimate reality: God.

Mark Vernon’s new book, "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination", is the result of Mark’s engagement with his local mystic, William Blake, as well as practices based on encounters and texts including The Cloud of Unknowing.

In this conversation they explore the nature of mystical experience, as well as the mystics that speak powerfully to them, from Saint Columba to William Blake, via Marguerite Porete and Teresa of Avila, Ramana Maharshi and Krishnamurti.

For more on James’s book, Dazzling Darkness - https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/dazzling-darkness/
For more on Mark’s book, Awake! - https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/awake/

0:00 Two books on mysticism!
01:55 James’s mystical experience
07:00 Mark’s encounter through contemplative practice
11:58 The Irish mystics that speak to James
18:00 Living the porous life
22:49 Mysticism after monasticism
29:30 Church life and mystical life
32:01 Seeking spiritual directors
33:00 The voice of Krishnamurti
40:32 The presence amidst the diversity
42:30 What happens after the ecstasy?
52:00 Sustaining the double vision

The most insightful poet that ever lived. Iain McGilchrist & Mark Vernon on William Blake

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:00:00 +0100

Iain McGilchrist calls William Blake “the least cosy of poets and one of the most insightful that ever lived.” Blake is cited more often than most figures in Iain’s great book, "The Matter With Things".

So what did Blake express that might much matter now? How did he understand key features of our humanity such as the imagination and inspiration, as well as the character of our day?

In this conversation, prompted by the publication of "Awake!", Iain and Mark often land on wonderful quotes of Blake to unpack them. ”To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” “As a man is, so he sees.” "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."

They explore Blakean imagery such as the spiral shape of Jacob’s Ladder. Contemporary concerns are central too, from architecture to AI.

Above all, they celebrate Blake as a figure who can guide our desires, aid us with the contraries of modern life, and sustain our faith that life is good, for all the ills that surround us.

For more on Iain’s work - https://channelmcgilchrist.com
For more on Mark’s work - https://www.markvernon.com

Mark’s new book on William Blake is “Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination” - https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination

0:00 No-one has imagination!
05:27 The narrowing of imagination
08:36 Fantasy and uncoupling
11:55 The misenchantment of the world
13:08 Place, space and architecture
16:26 Spiritually aware consumerism
19:43 The glowing presence of infinity
21:13 Cleansing the doors of perception
24:38 Speaking from the outside in
26:38 The failure of empathy and need for the sacred
31:24 Primary connection not separation
33:10 Blake’s orthodoxy
34:37 Jacob’s Ladder as a spiral
38:12 The good can hold the bad
39:55 Data, memory and AI
42:33 Memory that inspires
45:44 The enlivening of ritual
48:10 Blake on divine science
53:37 The character of things and insights
57:17 Distinctions without difference
59:28 Illuminating Blake and Dante

How to Live like William Blake!

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 18:00:00 +0100

A conversation from History with Chris Harding.

In Mark Vernon's new book "Awake!", he argues that we’re missing something from our view of the great visionary artist William Blake.

It’s that word - ‘visionary.’

Mark argues that Blake’s extraordinary art reveals an expanded experience of the world that Blake lived with every day: angels, fairies, realms beyond our own. Blake wasn’t, in other words, making it all up…

Mark says that we shouldn’t be afraid of the ‘supernatural Blake.’ We should embrace him - and even aspire to live a little as he did.

00:00 Introduction to William Blake
02:45 Blake's Life and Context
04:32 Blake and India
08:45 The Nature of Perception
13:06 Childhood Experiences and Spirituality
19:50 Blake's Relationship with Institutional Christianity
24:43 The Role of Forgiveness in Jesus' Teachings
26:05 Blake's Vision of the Human Form Divine
28:00 The Sacrificial Nature of Spiritual Awakening
29:28 Blake as a Social Critic
31:30 Blake and Science
35:21 The Dangers of Abstraction
36:19 Blake and consumerism
43:06 What does Blake offer us now?

Awake! Albion awake! And let us awake up together!

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 19:00:00 +0100

Recorded in St James’s Piccadilly, the church in which William Blake was baptised, with his life mask also present.

Thoughts on Blake’s great call to us today from the launch of my new book, “Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination”.

Top 10 William Blake quotes! The full countdown

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0100

A taste of Blake’s genius and what he might mean for us. Celebrating the release of "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination" by Mark Vernon.

The full countdown:

10.
I’ll sing to you to this soft lute, and shew you all alive
The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.

9.
I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

8.
Monos ho Jesus

7.
The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.

6.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

5.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

4.
How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

3.
It is right it should be so
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine

2.
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

1.
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find,
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find
This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found.

On the Right Track. Liberty from left-brained analysis. William Blake’s path of perceptual expansion

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0100

Acknowledging that there are complementary modes of perception has become commonplace. But left-hemisphere analysis can diagnose the problem without offering much sense of how better to incorporate the right.

Which is where William Blake comes in. He describes the narrowing of perception from the perspective of the wider involvement. The result is a guide to participation that is simultaneously a path of transformation.

He speaks of the sometimes useful but confined view called Ulro, which might give way to Generation – a second mode of perception – and then Beulah and, finally, Eternity.

In this talk, I consider how each is known and how the one might lead to the other.

For more on my book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination

Loosening the mind-forged manacles. William Blake in words and songs

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 13:00:00 +0100

A live conversation with Mark Vernon, Katy Carr and Dexter Bentley from the Hello Goodbye Show.

Who was William Blake? What might his music have sounded like? What did he say about the imagination? Why might he understand our predicament today?

Mark Vernon and Katy Carr joined Dexter Bentley on Resonance FM to talk William Blake on Saturday 31st May 2025.

Katy played six songs - her settings of the Introductions from the Songs of Innocence and also from the Songs of Experience, as well as The Lamb and TheTyger, and finally London and The Blossom.

For more on Mark see - https://www.markvernon.com/

For more on Katy see - https://katycarr.com/

For more on the Hello Goodbye Show see https://hellogoodbyeshow.com/

For more on the Idler - https://www.idler.co.uk/

Mark’s book is Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (out June 2025 in the UK, September 2025 in the US).

The saint who ripped reality and rose like a sun. Francis and the apocalyptic fears of chaotic times

Sun, 25 May 2025 17:00:00 +0100

Saint Francis was born into a world in a panic.
The stabilities of the feudal world had collapsed with the rise of mercantilism. The gap between rich and poor was unsustainable and a new underclass was tearing apart the fabric of society.
Then, there were the looming presence of the Mongols to the east and the transformative impact of the Islamic empire to the south - both conquerors plunging Christian Europe into an existential crisis.
Doomster prophets, ferocious disputes, wild hopes and messianic saviours were commonplace.
So what did the man from Assisi constellate in the extremities of his way of life? Who was this figure, beyond the sentimental portrayal that can so easily eclipse his intense radicalism?
This talk explores the discoveries made by his followers - the scientia experimentalist of Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Duns Scotus whose Franciscanism embraced Aristotelianism. It asks how the contraries embraced by Francis and the impossible path he traced might much matter now.
For more on Mark see - www.markvernon.com
His new book is Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination

Does nature really obey laws? A dialogue with Rupert Sheldrake

Tue, 20 May 2025 12:00:00 +0100

The conviction that the natural world is obedient, adhering to laws, is a widespread assumption of modern science. But where did this idea originate and what beliefs does it imply?

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the impact on science of the Elizabethan lawyer, Francis Bacon.

His New Instrument of Thought, or Novum Organum, published in 1620, put laws at the centre of science and was intended as an upgrade on assumptions developed by Aristotle.

But does the existence of mind-like laws of nature, somehow acting on otherwise mindless matter, even make sense? What difference is made by insights subsequent to Baconian philosophy, such as the discovery of evolution or the sense that the natural world is not machine-like but behaves like an organism? Could the laws of nature be more like habits? And what about the purposes of organisms, and creativity?

"Enemies of the Human Race" William Blake on the disaster of atheism

Sat, 17 May 2025 08:00:00 +0100

William Blake opens the third part of his epic poem, Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, with an astonishing remark. “He never can be a friend of the Human Race who is the Preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion.”

The declaration is shocking because today, two hundred years since he first printed these lines, naturalistic explanations of morality and religion have become standard. Even amongst champions of Blake.

But what did he mean? What did he propose as an alternative? And why might that matter now?

An earlier version of this essay is in the current issue of Vala, the magazine of The Blake Society.

Mark Vernon’s new book is Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination - out in June 2025 (UK), September 2025 (US). Pre-order now!

Merely Christianity? Discerning the Spirit of a Revival. A conversation with Elizabeth Oldfield

Fri, 09 May 2025 18:00:00 +0100

There is undoubtedly a new spirit of interest in Christianity abroad in the presumed secular world. Some increases in church-going are even showing up in the stats. But what can be made of the curiosity? Is it straightforwardly to be welcomed? Are there dark sides to newfound enthusiasms?

Elizabeth Oldfield is the author of Fully Alive and host of The Sacred Podcast. She has been engaging with the presence of Christianity and religion in society for many years, not least when she headed up the think tank Theos.

Mark Vernon is the author of Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination amongst other books. His work as a psychotherapist draws him towards the inner significance of these changing times.

The discussion ranges over the varieties of Christianity that people might encounter from the evangelical to the Orthodox. They explore how they have encountered shifts in attitude and ask how to discern what is going on. Questions of the huge range of responses to Jesus emerge as does the widely different ways in which people read the Bible. What is ours to judge? What might the Spirit be up to?

For more on Ellzabeth’s work see - https://www.elizabetholdfield.com/ For more on Mark’s work see - https://www.markvernon.com/

The Unity of Being and the very great things Ibn ‘Arabi made of it

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:00:00 +0100

Ibn ‘Arabi is arguably the greatest philosopher in the Islamic world, though controversial; Seal of the Mohammedan Saints, as he is known, alongside Shaykh al-Akbar, he is becoming more important again, especially against a backdrop of fundamentalism.

Born into a noble family in Anadalusian, Moorish Spain, he adopted the Sufi way of life after a revelation. He was to leave Iberia and travel east across the Islamic empire. But what was his core teaching and understanding? What can he teach others drawn to a mystical participation in life?

Jesus is the only God. And so am I and so are you. William Blake’s mystical Christianity

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0100

The first in a series of talks I’ll be posting in anticipation of my new book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, out in June/Sept (UK/US).

Do consider pre-ordering! (Thanks: it really helps early sales and so bookshop notice.)

“The best overall study of Blake I have encountered in a very long time. A joy to read, well worthy of its extraordinary hero,’ says Rowan Williams.

Andalusia and machine anxiety. How new technology in Moorish Spain sparked insights that help us now

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0100

The extraordinary spread of Islam after 632 - from Central Asia to North Africa in a century - reached Europe from the eighth century, generating issues still energising to this day. Not ones of religion, though, but of technology.

Within a few generations, the devices of the new civilisation hit the Iberian peninsula: vertical axis windmills, the clocks of Ibn Khalaf al-Muradi, astrolabes.

Anxiety about machines, remaining to the present say, was born. Were we becoming uncoupled from the cosmos? How might our existence relate to our essence? Can the human mind still fit the divine mind?

But with the technology came ideas, those discussed and disputed by Al-Ghazali, Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas - all drawing on “the first teacher”: Aristotle.

Their questions about occasionalism, the eternity of the cosmos, and unified intelligence can help us now. These reflections reveal how existence flows from divine being, the momentary nature of time reflects eternity, many minds echo the one intelligence.

Their work offers us imaginative, spiritual space to refind participation with spirit and God as the millennia-long story of the machine continues.

Christ the turning point. Owen Barfield in a secular age. A conversation with Ashton Arnoldy

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 23:00:00 +0000

Owen Barfield was the genius Inkling, said CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. But why does he so much matter today?

They consider how Owen Barfield addresses the idea of secularism developed by Charles Taylor and why that might matter in a cultural moment that feels like a folk in the road.

They speak personally of how Barfield touched them and why his insights might matter to the psychedelic renaissance.

A central idea is that of polarity - moving beyond the dualisms that trap people, on the left and on the right, in a flatland mentality.

They ask how Barfield’s vision of final participation can be understood, even experienced, in language, in nature, with Indigenous traditions, in sacrament. They also consider how Rudolf Steiner, so important to Barfield, might be appreciated critically.

Fundamental is the Christian insight that the transcendent is also immanent, the many are reflections of the one, and that humanity shares in divine purposes.

For more on Mark, including his book on Barfield’s understanding of Christianity - www.markvernon.com

For more on Ashton - https://ciis.academia.edu/ashtonkohlarnoldy

0:00 Barfield's relevance today

06:47 Monotheism and the singular self

12:02 Encountering worlds of spirit

20:26 The task of integration

27:49 The ongoing Christian revelation

32:34 Steiner and politics today

44:03 The experience of polarity

49:22 Barfield and ecology

53:03 Taylor's interspace and imagination

56: 29 The divine power of language

01:01:08 Poetry and the evolution of consciousness

01:06:54 The past in the present and the future

01:11:09 Questions of identity

01:16:44 The future orientation of Christianity

01:21:09 Residual unprocessed positivism

01:25:38 Critical readings of Steiner

01:30:42 Concluding remarks

Living in an Age of Spiritual Crisis. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Much of the modern world has become uncoupled from the transcendent in a cultural experiment Nietzsche called the death of God. But might this spiritual crisis prove to be a time of rebirth?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, recorded live at an event organised by the Temenos Academy, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the evolution of wisdom traditions from west and east alongside the great modern enterprise called science and its continuing development.
As the materialist, progressive ideology that has dominated the sciences for two centuries wanes, and as scientific studies show that religious and spiritual practices have major benefits for physical and mental health, what insights might we cultivate, as we live in and through these times?
For more on the Temenos Academy - https://www.temenosacademy.org
For more on Rupert - https://www.sheldrake.org
For more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com

The Abolition of Man, That Hideous Strength, Till We Have Faces. CS Lewis as prophet of dark times

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 19:00:00 +0000

A discussion with Jason Baxter, Nicholas Colloff and Mark Vernon.

The Abolition of Man is a series of three lectures given by C.S. Lewis in defence of objective value, arguing that modernity has undermined our humanity by uncoupling intellect from instinct. With hearts divorced from minds, first the world empties of presence, then life empties of meaning and people become “men without chests”.

That Hideous Strength is a fictionalised version of the abolition, exploring the impact of transhumanism, aggressive rationalism, absent gods, and an inability to contemplate and know reality as it is.

Till We Have Faces also tells of a world in which humanity is veiled and power rules, though in which gods make unexpected appearances and humanity is restored by learning to bear the weight of being once more.

How do these works account for today? What remedies do they offer? Why might we keep reading them?

0:00 Introductions
01:47 The core ideas of The Abolition of Man
04:46 All truths cannot be relative!
09:38 The need for an aesthetic education
12:13 Owen Barfield on objectivity and subjectivity
20:02 Chivalry and recovering spiritual practices
28:25 A time in which everything is real
30:56 The core ideas in That Hideous Strength
39:48 The uninvited powers of material times
41:48 The need for wisdom communities
44:25 Why the Arthurian weaves in the story?
49:10 Learning about and learning from
53:21 Lewis's violence and the eruption of power
56:48 The core ideas in Till We Have Faces
59:45 The retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche
01:01:52 When truth is too much to bear
01:04:07 The recovery of humanity and the face of God
01:06:02 The value of myth and moving from the linear
01:09:30 Remaking or merely copying? A thought on Notre Dame
01:11:17 Emptying and the fullness of divine presence
01:12:58 Jane and Mark in the bridal chamber
01:15:35 When everything is the face of God

Jason is Professor and Director of Center for Beauty and Culture, Benedictine College. For more - www.jasonmbaxter.com
For more on Nicholas Colloff - https://ncolloff.blogspot.com
For more on Mark Vernon - www.markvernon.com

Evolution. From natural selection to omega point. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Darwinian evolution shapes modern biology, but the notion of evolution has a wider history, too.
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore linear and cyclical conceptions of human and cosmic evolution and ask what they can mean in the modern world, where innovation and evolution appear to be escalating.
They consider the significance of two main principles within evolution, that of diversity and creativity, and how these elements can be embraced. They also ask about the difficulty of talking about evolution today, given the presence of intelligent design and creationism.
An inability to discuss evolution in a wider context is a loss because evolutionary theory itself is sophisticated and interestingly contested, both in the realm of biology but spirituality: the so-called evolution of consciousness. The discussion includes the ideas of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and Owen Barfield, Karl Popper and Henri Bergson.
For other dialogues - https://www.markvernon.com/talks

Physics and reality. Francis Lucille on the nature of matter, the flaws of panpsychism & God

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Francis Lucille is teaching of Advaita Vedanta who brings together nonduality with science, amongst other subjects, his past having been in physics. Here, he talks with Mark Vernon about the universality of consciousness and how that fits with modern physics, theories of consciousness and the inspiration of wisdom traditions.

For more on Francis see - https://francislucille.com
For more on Mark see - https://www.markvernon.com/

0:00 Francis’s career in science and how that led him to nonduality
10:05 From Krishnamurti to Jean Klein
13:59 The difference made.by quantum physics
19:52 How pioneers. In quantum physics drew on eastern ideas
22.39 The limits of science and where metaphysics begins
32:11 Is there a science of consciousness?
37:21 Consciousness as basic, matter as derivative
39:06 Panpsychism and the thesis of emergence
48:05 The difference between meaning and information
53:13 The complexity of things and the simplicity of consciousness
01:01:37 The One in ordinary things, everyday awareness
01:04:41 Emanation in Plotinus, the dance of Parvati and Siva
01:08:40 On being children of light in the gospels

On Mysticism. With Simon Critchley on his new book, inc. figures from Mother Julian to Annie Dillard

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Mysticism is a modern word, as Simon Critchley discusses in his tremendous new book, On Mysticism. And its novelty is not a happy intervention in the history of mystics and their significance, Fundamental aspects of the insights pursued by figures such as Mother Julian and Meister Eckhart are obscured by the focus on peak or exceptional experiences. Our discussion seeks to gain a sense of recovery.

We dwell on Mother Julian, in particular, and her idea about sin and suffering, weal and woe, and what she really meant by all shall be well.

We think about the role of surrender in psychotherapy, writing and music, and the role of what Simone Weil called “decreation”.

We ask about how philosophy might move on from “bloodless critique” to “watering flowers”.

I think On Mysticism is a great book. It manifests the attention that it advocates and the revelations that come with active waiting.

For more on Simon’s book see - https://profilebooks.com/work/on-mysticism/

For more on my forthcoming book on William Blake see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination

0:00 What is mysticism, what is it not?
12:02 The role of experience in mysticism
23:49 Mother Julian on hazelnuts
35:57 Mysticism and psychotherapy
41:09 Mother Julian’s truly radical theology
45:58 Universalism and the mystical way
57:40 Selfhood and surrender
01:12:57 Socrates the mystic and modern philosophy

In Search of Wild Gods. Reflections on Nick Cave and Tom Holland in conversation about Christianity

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Nick Cave and Tom Holland discussed Christianity in an event organised by Unherd entitled In Search of Wild Gods on Thursday 9th January 2025. Chaired by Freddie Sayers, the conversation revolved around whether and why there is renewed interest in Christianity.

Tom Holland’s book Dominion has become a staple of learned comment, with its thesis that pretty much all the values that shape our society are Christian values. Nick Cave is currently on a global tour with tremendous, joyous, hard won songs conveying a distinctly revival feel. But are we in a culturally significant moment?

The answers they gave are much worth considering. What do they find in church? What do they not want to find? What is about the weird and wonderful that so appeals to Tom Holland? What is about the mystical and inexpressible that attracts Nick Cave?

The discussion brought little comfort for Christians who seek success by numbers or ecclesiastics hoping a panic about cultural Christianity will save the church. Rather, both Cave and Holland point to a kind of Christianity that opens onto the unknown, inspires the imagination, and enlarges the capacities of the human soul.

0:00 Why Nick Cave went back to church
6:15 How Nick Cave imagines God
9:30 Tom Holland's love of the weird
14:23 Holland's thesis about Christian values
17:10 Is there a Christian revival underway?
23:28 Christianity at its most compelling
28:13 Music as akin to religious experience

Meister Eckhart's Christmas Sermon One. Where is the Word born and how?

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Sermon One (in Walshe, Complete Mystical Works) has become known as capturing the essence of Meister Eckhart’s thought. “Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature.” And why does this lofty thought matter? “What does it avail me that this birth is happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.”
Eckhart, therefore, offers a corrective to the way Christianity and indeed Christmas is usually articulated today. Where does this birth take place? Not in Bethlehem, not in a stable, not around 4BC, not even from Mary, but primarily “in the very purest, loftiest, subtlest part that the soul is capable of”.
Only, is this itself not only too rarefied a form of Christianity, but one inadequate to our times, in denial of moral imperatives or simply a gospel of spiritual bypassing?
In fact, precisely the opposite is the case. Without that birth of the Word in the soul, Christianity’s moral meaning is lost, its injunctions become pathways to demoralisation, with the happiness promised transitory or elusive.
Eckhart, therefore, has crucial things to say to a church dedicated to filling people up with experiences and demands, as well as a time keen on practices that miss the stillness and silence he argues is fundamental.
Rather, alongside the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and Mother Julian, Eckhart preaches the direct and easy path, that depends not on our efforts but on a capacity to not know and stay before the ground from which the Word is born.
Unity with God is the purpose and promise of life - the secret that I feel is regularly absent in presentations of Christianity, though so much sought and needed.

Forms and the Reformation of Science. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Forms are all around us: clouds, flowers, creatures, even systems of thought and logical relations. And yet the nature of forms is rarely part of the modern scientific conversation.
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the importance of forms and how they work. The need for form to account for life as we know it has been eclipsed by the mechanical philosophy of modern science that turned instead to forces, extrinsic causes and abstract laws. But the case can be made that science needs to revisit the notion of forms. Rupert’s own work draws much from that imperative.
The existence of forms also matters in terms of explaining our relationship to others and the world around us. If the cosmos is more mind-like than matter-like than that means our sense of participation and communion is real.
Indeed, it might be said that when we study and contemplate, our minds meet the intelligence implicit in all things, which itself arises from the divine intelligence that shapes existence itself.

"Enemies of the Human Race." William Blake on how to know God

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 14:00:00 +0000

The new issue of VALA, the magazine of the Blake Society, is all about God. I've an article in it on Blake's mystical knowledge of God. "I am in you, you are in me, mutual in love divine."

Blake could hardly have been stronger in his views that naturalistic explanations for religion, and what would now be called non-real theologies, are inadequate - and, indeed, insufficient in accounting for the human imagination and yearning for the infinite.

Have a listen to the talk on what is misunderstood about Blake's view of God. And then read the article for why he thought non-theistic humanisms just won't do!

You can download VALA here - https://blakesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/VALA-5.pdf
My piece is entitled, "Enemies of the Human Race".

The gospel, sexual desire and the abuse scandals in the church. What has the erotic to do with God?

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury has highlighted the horrendous nature of abuse in the church and also the church’s difficulties in dealing with these individuals. But is focusing on individuals enough or trying to address these matters through safeguarding and moral injunctions?

Those elements are no doubt necessary. But I think also not sufficient.

Recent events have reminded me of the extreme naivety around sex that exists in conservative Evangelical circles. And no doubt in other contexts as well.

That can conceal deviant behaviour but is also a failure to understanding the nature of gospel, in my view.

In these thoughts, I explore how in mystical Christian traditions, as well as those with an interest in inner life and the path to God, the erotic is understood as a key mode of awakening and energy. For if sex is about wanting to have and be had by another, that is but a reflection of the yearning to be one with God, the true promise of the gospel: “oneing” with the divine, as Mother Julian and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing put it.

I turn to the insights of Plato, Origen, Dante and William Blake to draw out these themes. And also consider the parables of Jesus and his encounters with various individuals in the gospels as expressions of this deeper yearning, which he seems to have released in them and which might be foster in us, too - with discernment, honesty and wisdom.

0:00 My experience of Christian evangelical camps
2:50 Sex as a symptom of erotic desire for God
6:05 Plato’s insights about the body and why that is discarded
11:09 Origen on God’s kisses
14:09 The mystics understanding of “Onening”
15:05 Dante’s transformation of his desire for Beatrice
17:05 Blake on the erotic discovery that all things are holy
21:05 The erotic in the gospels and the notion of philia
21:40 Jesus’s encounters and his parables as desire for God
29:26 The abuse crises call for a lost Christianity

The Turn of the Tide. Martin Shaw & Mark Vernon talk about discerning the New Christian moment

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Martin Shaw and Mark Vernon return for a second conversation following Martin’s embrace of Orthodox Christianity. The first conversation, entitled The Mossy Face of Christ, can be found on my YouTube channel.

They discuss what is happening with the apparent resurgence of interest in Christianity, not least in relation to Martin’s new course, The Skin-Boat and the Star. How can we discern the times and best participate in it?

They explore the legacy of Christianity that can be such a block for people today and how the withdrawal of faith in contemporary culture may be a precursor to a rediscovery. They ask about the different styles of Christianity that are emerging amongst the so-called New Christians and how to discern the spirits.

Martin discusses the way in which his quest has not ceased but become more focused, transformed by unexpected depths. Mark asks about living in modern times and resisting the temptation to invoke a negative energy, but instead .

They explore the teaching of Jesus and being in the world whilst not wholly of it, as well as subversive acts of beauty that bring light and levity to the gravity of the moment.

For more on Martin Shaw see - http://drmartinshaw.com/
For more on Mark Vernon see - https://www.markvernon.com/

00:00 The unfolding of Martin's experience
02:32 The Skin-Boat gathering
06:44 Why Christianity puts people off
10:50 Understanding participation
15:07 Beauty and pinpricks of eternity
20:57 Being in the world and not of if
26:51 Political and spiritual power
32:04 What are you going to stand for
36:50 Finite life and infinite desire
40:40 Deepening the quest not ending it
41:39 The paths that lead to God
44:41 The centrality of devotion
49:01 Losing life to find it
55:47 Theosis in the western tradition
01:00:01 Mysticism and the Christianity of tomorrow
01:05:25 Injecting joy into the machine
01:10:10 The love that sees over horizons
01:15:17 Why Jesus stunned people
01:20:21 Dialogue and yearning for God

Purposes in nature and minds. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 13:00:00 +0100

One of the premises of modern science is that nature is devoid of purposes. Instead, purposeless explanations for phenomena are sought. And the strategy has proved hugely productive. Except that allusions to purpose never quite fade from the scientific imagination.
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore the ways in which the natural world is indeed full of purposes, both at the level of the so-called inanimate, as well as in the living world, and the reality we know most immediately and best, namely our own lives and consciousness.
The discussion ranges over a range of matters, from the growth of embryos to the attractive nature of gravity and the tendency towards order and beauty. An implication of the presence of purpose in nature and minds is a need to rethink phenomena such as matter and power. And there is an obvious reason that purpose keeps reappearing in scientific accounts, namely that purposes are present in all things.
Mark's discussion of David Bentley Hart’s book, All Things Are Full Of Gods, mentioned in the discussion can be found as an early post on this podcast.

Does the Consolation of Philosophy offered by Boethius, still work, 1500 years on?

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 16:00:00 +0100

The 1500th anniversary of the death of Boethius more than likely falls in 2024. He asks a key question: how to find true, lasting, reliable happiness?

His answer, The Consolation of Philosophy, was a mediaeval bestseller, massively influencial, and is also very readable.

So what do Boethius and, in particular, Lady Philosophy tell us?

All Things Are Full Of Gods by David Bentley Hart. A summary and discussion

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 20:00:00 +0100

All Things Are Full Of Gods is David Bentley Hart’s philosophical case for an idealist and theist understanding of consciousness, understood as an intertwining of mind, language and life. As he puts it: “Mind and life, and language too, are possibly only by way of a kind of “downward causation” that informs their “upward” evolution in particular beings.”

The book is also a careful debunking of materialist alternative explanations such as that mind emerges from matter, that consciousness is an illusion, or that consciousness doesn’t really exist at all; it is a careful examination of everything from eliminativism to integrated information theory, from the ideas of Daniel Dennett to those of Philip Goff.

Personally, I also hugely valued the book because it is, in a way, therapeutic. A nihilist cosmos has become default and it is not only intolerable to live in, it is gaslighting. A thought or experience is only possible because we have capacities for attention and intention, desire and perception, communication and participation - and following those qualities through, leads to the realisation that consciousness is not born in us, but that we are born in consciousness.

As on of his characters, Psyche, puts it: the mind’s “transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God.”

David Bentley Hart’s repeated point, as his interlocutors propose and take apart the materialist explanations, is that everything we might experience explodes with meanings. That is what mind does, in response to the life within which it is immersed.

That said, the book ends on a downbeat note. Psyche hopes the we humans “might yet learn to know themselves in a new way as spiritual beings immersed in a world of spirit, rather than machines of consumption inhabiting a machine of production, and remember that which lies deepest within themselves: living mind, the divine ground of consciousness and life, participating in an infinite act of thought and communication, dwelling in a universe full of gods and full of God.” The book is, of course, an invitation and nudge to do so.

How does memory work? A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0100

No one knows. Repeated experiments have failed to locate where memories are stored in the brain, casting doubt on the conventional assumption that memories are stored as material traces.

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss various kinds of memory, from episodic memory to habits. They consider how memory is linked to emotion and place, drawing on insights from Aristotle to AN Whitehead.

Rupert’s own work has led to the theory of morphic fields, within which all self-organising systems dwell. They also ask about Indian ideas of memory and how that is related to ideas about reincarnation and the possibility that everything that exists lives, in some way, in the memory of God.

0:00 / 19:22 What did Socrates teach? Or why you only understand Plato if he is decolonised

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0100

What Socrates taught is, of course, the wrong question. For, if there is one thing that Plato is quite clear about, it is that Socrates taught nothing. Something else is going on when you encounter this figure. So what is it?

In this talk I look first at common errors concerning Plato, such as that he pitched body against soul or thought poets were best banned. Other mistakes include treating his philosophy as a training in eudaimonia and reading his dialogues as stages in his philosophical development - the early ones being close to the historical Socrates, the middle ones being the mature Plato, the late ones being the disillusioned Plato. Similarly, Socrates did not seek definitions.

The irony, given the sensitivity to this charge often from philosophers who misread Plato, is that this is a colonial reading of Plato. Scholars like Julia Annas have shown that reading Plato changed during the period of the British empire, when texts like Plato’s Republic came to be treated as a manifesto for young minds in public schools being preparing to rule the world.

Before that, Plato Plato was understood not to have a message but instead a path. Roughly speaking, the aporetic dialogues - the ones that end in radical uncertainty - offer a preparation in the form of an undoing. Then, next, into that space, the visionary dialogues speak. I'm indebted to the scholar Sara Ahbel-Rappe for so clearly stating that Socrates stands for a mode of being, thereby imparting a taste for it, stirring a love of it.

Socrates can't give that presence, because it is already within you. This awareness actually already belongs to us, and we sense a distant yearning for it because of feeling separate from it, through ignorance or forgetting. The way back is to clear the space that makes us more ready to know it once more.

This is the meaning of the message Socrates received from the Delphic oracle: knowing yourself means knowing yourself, at base, to know nothing because all your theories or assumptions or certainties will turn out to be limited or straightforwardly wrong. Take that on board and then, regarding yourself as poor, come to know the richness of life, which is not eudaimonistic but rather theotic: a participation by contemplation, or theoria, in God.

That divine end, stressing the inadequacy of an isolated sense of our humanity, must be the fundamental reason why Plato is so widely dissed. He ready does offend, though in Socrates saw why that disquiet is so wonderfully worth undergoing.

To see a world in a grain of sand. Poetry & philosophy for a civilisation in distress. A conversation with Valentin Gerlier

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0100

What has poetry to do with philosophy? Why might poetry particularly matter now? How did figures from Plato to Einstein value the poetic voice?

Valentin Gerlier and Mark Vernon return for another conversation about the manner in which we humans are gifted with symbolic as well as cognitive imaginations. They ask why we keep returning to poets such as William Blake and William Shakespeare, how the wellspring of a civilisation is found in its mythos, and whether a literal age might be recovering the age of sense of transcendence that is also immanent.

In short, they ask why seeing a world in a grain of sand, and not just a grain of sand in a grain of sand, might matter.

Their first conversation was released as Heaven in a Wild Flower.

Hallam v the State, and free speech. The Just Stop Oil desecrations are calling to our humanity

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0100

Just Stop Oil and the imprisonment of Roger Hallam and others has provoked an outcry, on both sides of the dispute. And the heightened emotions have made me think. What's going on here? What is at stake?

I suspect that what’s being missed is something fundamental to human society and how we participate in a wider environment, and that can be discerned more fully by considering the true nature of freedom of speech.

I draw on a talk given by Joseph Milne at the excellent Temenos Academy. The archive of talks can be found here - https://www.temenosacademy.org/main-lecture-archive/

The approach is to consider what freedom of speech meant to our ancestors, so as to cast a light on the present. Aristotle's thoughts in the Politics is key, as speech for him is what makes human society - speech understood as a sharing the wider rationality and intelligence of the animate cosmos.

Justice, then, is an exercise in the bonds of friendship, which is very different from an exercise in rights and the will to power.

The limits of social contract theories, the mainstay of modern understandings, are on display. And what we need to recover are other ways of speaking freely - modes of dialogue and discourse that aren't primarily about proposition or facts, but commitments, relationships, devotions, celebrations.

Chance and accidents, indeterminism and prayer. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:00:00 +0100

Randomness and luck, fate and providence. How do these facets of life relate to one another? Or is everything, actually, mechanically determined with synchronicities, say, being no more than coincidences?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the ways in which philosophers and scientists, ancient and modern, have imagined and explored notions of causality and sympathy in nature, alongside fortune and calamities.
The ideas of Aristotle and Boethius provide a striking background against which to consider more recent scientific work.
Rupert also demonstrates how fields can influence seemingly random effects using a Galton Board - a remarkably profound analogue for, say, practices such as prayer.

Cultural Christianity kills. Taking Blake's Christianity seriously. William on Jesus

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0100

At one level, Blake is clearly Christian. It’s even trivial to say so. And yet, his identification with Jesus is often sidelined, even written out, of accounts of the poet's work today.

There are many reasons for this neglect: an understandable disillusionment with Christianity; the replacement of participative Christianity with cultural Christianity and its stress on moral law; the rise of atheism in the 19th century; the colonisation of literary studies with secular assumptions.

But Blake is quite clear: without the divine vision, focused on Jesus the imagination and the centrality of the continual incarnation, the golden string he offers us today, will not lead to heaven's gate.

So what type of Christianity does he champion? How does he communicated it? And why is it still so needed, 200 years on.

This talk was originally given to the Blake Society.

0:00 Introduction
0:47 The centrality of a continual incarnation
6:00 His links with Orthodoxy and mystical Christianity
9:44 The place of Jesus
11:31 Transfiguration as a foretaste of Eternity
12:34 The divinity of the woman caught in adultery
14:36 Jesus in the poem Jerusalem
16:00 "I have power to raise from death"
18:50 The breath divine or Spirit in Blake
19:58 Union with Jesus
21:25 The purpose of forgiveness
24:00 The meaning of self-annihilation
27:54 Inspired by the Gita
29:31 A commodious Christianity
33:26 The failure of naturalism and the cosmos as a closed system
38:34 The inhumanity of atheistic humanism
40:33 Mystical Christianity and participation with nature
44:09 Ethical Christianity divides: religion hid in war
46:53 "Thy own humanity learn to adore". Restoring humanism
49:18 "There is a moment in each day". Blake's apocalypse is now

Trans activism, transhumanising, economic transition. Proxies for vision & the lost soul of politics

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0100

Three “trans” issues seem to be proxies for vision in contemporary politics, feeding the sense of despair and disillusion.

Trans activism, which is not the same as trans pathology.
Transhumanising, the techno-utopian dream of tomorrow.
Transitioning the economy, moving from extractive consumption.

All three are about qualities of relationship:
- to our bodies
- to our minds
- to the rest of the natural world.

And I wonder if all three are missing a common element: an understanding of soul.

I draw on thoughts made by Rowan Williams at the Realisation Festival 2024.

My previous thoughts on disillusionment in politics can be found in my feed, too, looking at Plato on beauty, Aristotle on ethics, Jesus on being in the world but not of it, Dante on civilisational decline, Blake on abstraction, and Barfield on literalism.

Cut off in the literal age. Owen Barfield & Carl Jung on alienation and political disillusionment

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 17:00:00 +0100

There is a link between rising levels of mental-ill health and political disillusionment. Feeling cut off is not just an economic and psychological problem, but is a symptom of a wider alienation arising from modern consciousness.

Owen Barfield argued that contemporary political problems are fundamentally due to estrangement not only from others but from ourselves, due to a loss of soul and spirit to materialism and literalism.

As Carl Jung put it, the gods have become diseases – diseases of the collective as well as individual psyche. The pre-political must address this crisis of anthropology if politics is to be restored.

This is the sixth thought in which I’ve turned to a guide to illuminate the overwhelming feeling of malaise in this democratic year.

Look at others on my YouTube channel: Plato on beauty, Aristotle on ethics, Jesus on being in the world but not of it, Dante and civilisational decline, and William Blake on the rise of abstraction.

To Generalise is to be an Idiot. William Blake on politics, disillusionment and abstraction

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0100

William Blake lived during the period in which the modern world was born. A prophet, he detected the tendencies that now powerfully shape our age. The love of abstraction was high on his list of troubles.

Such generalisations profoundly shape politics today. Politicians sell themselves on whether they will boost the economy, drive up growth, fight inflation, and I think the rhetoric is itself alienating, dumbing, dreary. Vision departs, imagination declines, disillusionment becomes the norm.

Accept for when it doesn't - hence the rise of popularism, too.

Abstractions infect the arts and humanities, as well. They have become a way of life. So what is Blake's analysis?

God, sexuality & the psyche. CS Lewis and Sigmund Freud tabletalk. Thoughts on Freud’s Last Session

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0100

The new movie Freud’s Last Session is well worth a watch, particularly if either man is of interest.

The issues you might expect are aired between them, not least belief in God. But also the more shadowy sides to their lives - Lewis’s relationship with Janie Moore, Freud’s with his daughter Anna.

I enjoyed it, though also wondered if they might have discussed other things and found common ground.

There’s more about the film here - https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/freudslastsession

Rendering to Caesar. Jesus on politics and the kingdom that is within

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 19:00:00 +0100

I've been thinking about politics and disillusionment that seems most characteristic of now, in the West at least, and thinking about the prepolitcal - what politics needs to work well.

I've thought about Plato on beauty and Aristotle on ethics in previous posts.

Now a third guide, Jesus on... which isn't immediately easy to say. And that's the point.

Some would say that Jesus and politics is easy to define.
- a preference for the poor
- the prosperity gospel
- or Christian exceptionalism and oppressive regimes.

But the heart of Jesus and politics is not in practical policies or polities, I believe. He was in the world but not of the world. He stood for something more than was immediately obvious or practical He constantly acted so as to respond to the moment but so as to allow more to come in.

That was why he talked of the kingdom that is near, revising apocalyptic expectations and ushering the transformation of the self.

I mentioned David Lloyd Dusenbury's book, I Judge No One - see here https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/i-judge-no-one/

And my book, A Secret History of Christianity - see here https://www.markvernon.com/books/a-secret-history-of-christianity

The fullness of life. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 19:00:00 +0100

At school, we learn that being alive is to possess certain functions, from respiration to reproduction. But what is life and why can the word “life” be used more widely than referring only to biological life?
In the latest episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon consider the meaning of saying that stars have a lifecycle, and that rocks and atoms can be ascribed a biography, in that they undergo processes of becoming.
They discuss A.N. Whitehead’s argument that so-called inanimate objects need to be considered as organisms and that life must also include the experience of being alive, which is to say consciousness and mentality.
The powers of nature and the connection of all life, not least in terms of the idea of Gaia, lead them to ask how God can be said to be the origin and sustainer of life. Asking what life is dramatically expands the notion of life and the awesome nature of being alive.

Ethics and the failure of politics, or why ethics is part of the problem. A dispatch from Athens

Fri, 31 May 2024 11:00:00 +0100

Disillusionment with politics is probably the most obvious feature of the current mood. This is, in part, because politics has collapsed onto anxiety about material improvement and lost sight of much more. In a secular society in which this facet of wellbeing is increasingly hard to deliver, politics appears therefore to be failing.

So now is a good moment to consider what is sometimes called the pre-political - the more that politics needs.

A second thought reaches back to Aristotle who asked about the relationship between ethics and politics. He agreed that democracy is the best political system but also that it isn't self-justifying. The deeper question of why it is the most "friendly" polity needs to be asked.

But there is a problem with ethics, today. It has been weaponised, used to divide, deploy to stop thinking rather than encourage an engagement with the muddle of life.

Ethics has become part of the disillusionment, I think.

So in this thought, I ask why and what alternatives there might be. Which is where Aristotle can be a guide.

Beauty and the failure of politics. An election dispatch from ancient Athens

Fri, 31 May 2024 11:00:00 +0100

Disillusionment with politics is probably the most obvious feature of the current mood. This is, in part, because politics has collapsed onto anxiety about material improvement and lost sight of much more. In a secular society in which this facet of wellbeing is increasingly hard to deliver, politics appears therefore to be failing.

So now is a good moment to consider what is sometimes called the pre-political - the more that politics needs.

And a first thought comes from Plato, who would highlight the matter of beauty. He felt that if you lose touch with that, you lose touch with too much, and a loveless, ugly society would follow.

Why does beauty matter? How come it is so unfashionable now, even embarrassing? What is it to be educated in beauty? Where can it be found?

Force Fields. Behind the fog of maths. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Thu, 09 May 2024 18:00:00 +0100

Einstein remarked that there was physics before Maxwell and physics after Maxwell, the difference being the introduction of field theory. So what difference did fields make and, more to the point, what are they?

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore how electromagnetic, gravitational and quantum fields shape modern science. Together with Rupert’s idea of morphic fields, which contain an inherent memory, they discuss how fields have revived Aristotle’s notion of formal and final causes and look at the fact that fields aren’t energetic or material causes.

They draw on ancient notions of soul to ask how fields can be part of an expansive notion of science, which has long depended on invisible entities to understand nature. Fields as realities in themselves are rarely discussed by scientists, their nature hidden behind a fog of mathematics. But fields fascinated figures like Faraday and Maxwell and might fascinate us again.

For more conversations with Rupert and Mark see https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks

The enchanted vision. An invitation to read about love

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0100

To read the essay, go to Aeon magazine's website, or https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-there-was-love-we-can-move-with-its-power

Matter is frozen light. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 16:00:00 +0100

The everyday stuff called matter turns out to be both more fascinating and stranger than we usually assume. In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon ask just matter is, beginning with contemporary ideas from quantum physics, in which matter is frozen light, as the physicist David Bohm put it.

They consider the relationship between matter and gravity, as well as matter and ancient notions of potentiality, which turn out to be surprising relevant today.

The differences between quantity and quality offer another conversational thread, with the discussion also drawing in wider questions, such as the nature of matter within the philosophy of panpsychism, and also the etymological links between matter and mater, or mother, revealing factors about material of which most are unconscious today.

For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks

Whose revival? Which Christianity? CS Lewis & Owen Barfield on the renewed interest of belief in God

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 14:00:00 +0100

There is much talk of a revival of Christianity amongst secular intellectuals, at least in my cultural bubble. That may or may not be sociological significant and church attendence figures stay in marked decline. But what interests me is not so much the numbers as the spirit of the renewed interest. What is the feel of the Christianity being discussed, what attitudes does it embody, what spiritual does it represent?
CS Lewis and Owen Barfield discussed these things and, then, Barfield teased out differences between them after Lewis’s death. He characterised that as the difference between an analytic and romantic rationality, which produces separate even oppositional understandings of God, Jesus, salvation, this world, the imagination, the human and the creation as a whole.
I think that their “oppositional friendship” might illuminate our now, which I try to tease out in this talk.
Recorded in St Mary Magdalene church, Stapleford Park

0:00 The revival now and the differences between Lewis and Barfield
4:25 The Christian story as chasm or participation
8:08 Salvation or participation?
11:20 Exclusive Christianity or porous Christianity?
13:45 The role of reason and the imagination
17:11 Following the head or the heart?
21:21 Analytical and Romantic, allegorical and mythological approaches to truth
27:39 The appeal of Lewis, simplicity and joy
32:02 Polarities, oppositions and Trinitarian perception
35:40 Different experiences of time, culture wars and choice
39:02 What of the future of Christianity?

Strangeness is the new real. Martin Shaw & Mark Vernon in conversation

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 16:00:00 +0000

A couple of years back, Martin Shaw had a visionary experience that led him to Christianity. We talked about it as the Mossy face of Christ - https://youtu.be/8luN8bDDRBs?si=c7jHUt-Ih5xKlVWq

So it was great to talk again about what's been happening. Which is much. The conversation ranges over what might be happening now with Christianity, Martin's recent participation in the Symbolic World Summit, the strangeness, weirdness and terror of Christ, being in the world but not of it, and the importance of myths, stories and fairytales.

We mentioned Martin's new course The Skin-Boat and the Star as a practical manifestation of what has been happening for him. For more on that see here - https://schoolofmyth.com/five-weekend-programme/

For more on Mark's work see - https://www.markvernon.com

0:00 The reviving of interest in Christianity
2:53 Report from the Symbolic World Summit
6:53 Christ, fairytales and reconnecting with the source
14:21 How to keep Christianity strange
21:33 From ideas to encounter
24:11 Being in the world but not of the world
29:08 Passions of the soul and Rowan Williams
37:38 Knowing stories and inhabiting stories
43:48 From persona to presence
47:56 Good fruits not good works
49:26 Martin's new course and the imaginative edge
52:44 What puts people off Christianity?
54:01 Proxies for the Spirit
58:17 Limits and more, growth and depth
01:04:21 Romanticism coming of age
01:12:13 Jonathan Pageau, Malcolm Guite, Iain McGilchrist and others on the new course

Christspiracy. The documentary's claims about Jesus & Christianity put to the test, w Kameron Waters

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The makers of Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy are back. Christspiracy is another profoundly disturbing film detailing the industrial abuse of our animal kin. Expect more horrific carelessness and exploitation on a mass scale.

Only this time, Kip Andersen and Kameron Waters not only go global but look back in time. “This is plausibly the most significant new discovery about Jesus Christ, in the last 2,000 years,” says the blurb.

But can that be right? Has justified outrage at the treatment of our fellow creatures got the better of them? Initially, I wasn't convinced. But then Kameron Waters reached out to me and we had this long conversation.

See what you think.

[Spoiler alert - we thoroughly discuss the Christian details in the film.]

For more on Christspiracy see https://www.christspiracy.com

For more on Mark, and his work on early Christianity and Jesus via the ideas of Owen Barfield, friend of CS Lewis, see http://www.markvernon.com/consciousness

00:00 Introduction
02:20 Where to see the documentary and how
04:33 The treatment of animals as a religious concern
12:26 The prehistory of hunting, sacrifice and temples
21:15 What did Jesus do when cleansing of the temple?
34:10 What was the cause of Jesus’s death?
44:38 Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the vegetarian Nazarene?
58:37 Kameron’s own Christian journey
01:05:42 But did Jesus really not eat fish?
01:13:40 Ichthus, Pythagoreans and the 153 fish
01:24:00 What did Paul mean by vegetarians are weak?
01:31:05 Engaging with the film, engaging with the tradition

The Nature of Energy. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Energy is a key organising principle in modern science, the conversation of energy being a grounding and universal law. But what is energy?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon examine the history of the idea and the word. In science, energy is a relatively recently notion, emerging in its current form in the 19th century, drawing much on mechanics.
The word itself was coined by Aristotle, in the 4th century BCE, carrying a sense of vital actuality and living presence. That meaning is still remembered in Orthodox theology, which describes the energeia of God.
The conversation ranges over the promiscuity of energy in the natural world to the spiritual notion of energy, including the subtle energies of the body. The implications of shaping the idea of energy through mechanical metaphors also has important ramifications, from the descriptions of economics and the efficacy of psychology to the experience of God.
Further, the most recent physics argues that energy is not conserved after all as the universe expands.
For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
http://www.markvernon.com/talks

Participation renewed. Discussing The Riddle of the Sphinx, new essays from Owen Barfield

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 08:00:00 +0000

I talk again with Landon Loftin and Max Leyf about the genius insight of Owen Barfield.

The Riddle of the Sphinx (Barfield Press) is a new collection of talks and essays about the great friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

We discuss Barfield's take on analysis and analogy, Darwinian and other kinds of evolution, the significance of Rudolf Stein, and Barfield's notion of final participation.

Landon and Max are the authors of What Barfield Thought.

For more on my books, including A Secret History of Christianity, see www.markvernon.com

0:00 The new book of talks and essays
02:08 Plato, Aristotle and the evolution of analogy and analysis
13:31 Participation and the limits of modern science
23:30 Barfield's critique of Darwinian evolution
33:47 When the mind changes, the world changes
38:03 Evolution as a moving image of eternity
42:51 How can we participate in evolution?
52:18 Barfield and the significance of Rudolf Steiner
01:03:45 Grappling with the esoteric
01:10:14 On the way to final participation
01:17:16 Barfield on the meaning and revelation

Apocalypse? It's now! Good news & secular salvation, climate crisis & time. With Gunnar Gjermundsen

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000

How can Christianity address the climate crisis? Isn’t the objectifying of nature and the drive to improve our lot a secular legacy of Christendom? And isn’t individual conversion more or less irrelevant in a time of systemic crisis?

I was delighted to be sent an essay by Gunnar Gjermundsen that asks these questions and more. His insights are wide-ranging, integrating, inspiring and challenging, focusing on a Christianity that is not so much moral as transformative, inviting us to consider again the sayings of Jesus, via theologians such as Maximus the Confessor and psychotherapists like Donald Winnicott.

In this discussion we unpack his argument in broadly three moves.

First, an analysis of current anxieties that, at heart, are to do with time. A linear view of history has fostered a hope of panicky escape, sacrificing the present for the future as a false substitute for eternity, with devastating consequences for ourselves and the world around us.

The problem needs to be addressed at root, which comes in a second section exploring the misunderstanding of eschatology as an event to come and be feared, rather than an unfolding now, to be welcomed. We explore Jesus’s teaching as well as how it came to be so profoundly misunderstood.

The third section draws in psychological insights, particularly in terms of considering the schizoid, addictive and dread-filled nature of the modern psyche, and turns again to the Christian tradition and the remarkable notion of the kingdom of God that is near, and being born again.

The apocalyptical has become a master metaphor for the contemporary imagination, inducing fatalism and denial. Christianity has a vision to undo this terror via the transformation of our consciousness and experience of time. The apocalyptic is not to come but is an unveiling in every moment, a theosis, of the eternal present.

And we can live by that alternative.

The essay we are discussing is Living on This Earth as in Heaven: Time and the Ecological Conversion of Eschatology, published in Modern Theology, online - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/moth.12930

Gunnar Gjermundsen works in the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo - https://www.tf.uio.no/english/people/aca/gunnargj/

For more on Mark Vernon’s work, see http://www.markvernon.com

Practicing paradise, or refusing wretchedness in Lent

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Western liturgies are obsessed with sin. "There is no health in us", or words to that effect, begin and end most services, particularly in Lent.
Jesus's wilderness experience was actually about something else - practicing paradise, to use to the phrase of Douglas Christie.
It's a time to reorientate attention, not wallow in guilt and re-embed shame. The kingdom is near. Eyes that see, ears that hear, can awaken.

The Speed of Gravity. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Isaac Newton is best known for his theory of gravity. And yet, the great scientist also insisted: "ye cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know.” In other words, notions like gravity, and force in general, are deeply mysterious phenomena.

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon ask just what gravity might be. The conversation begins with a feature of gravity that is typically overlooked by physicists, namely that gravity has a speed which is far faster than the speed of light.

They consider how gravity might be linked to the notion of levity, a link that can be renewed again. Newton himself was inclined to regard gravity as the divine will in the cosmos and was also influenced by the belief in daemons, particularly the entity called Eros or love. These are go-betweens in the universe, in the case of Eros, attracting all things and securing the many as a whole. Panpsychism and final causes are other themes that arise.

Contemplating the mysteries of modern science, often hidden in plain sight, leads naturally to deeply meaningful considerations about the nature of the world in which we live.

The paper Rupert mentioned, The Speed of Gravity, can be found here - https://www.intalek.com/Index/Projects/Research/TheSpeedofGravity-WhattheExperimentsSay.htm

For more conversations between us see
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
http://www.markvernon.com/talks

How rituals of love can aid death and dying. A conversation with Madeleine Pennington

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The rituals around death and dying are changing in the UK and across the developed world. Medical care advances, which is for the good, though can mean to a loss of other kinds of wisdom about this facet of life. People’s beliefs and convictions about death are also in a state of flux.
The think tank, Theos, has extensively researched this changing landscape, so I was very glad to speak with Madeleine Pennington from Theos about their discoveries, particularly from the perspective of design. This conversation is one of several I am having looking at how designers can foster love in human affairs, personal and social.
We discussed the turning away from the ritualisation of death and its effects, the power of rituals to raise aspects of human experience to awareness, and how the grieving process and holding periods of silence can be aided by design.
For more on the work of Theos see - https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk
Madeleine Pennington has written here too - https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/research/2023/11/27/love-grief-and-hope-emotional-responses-to-death-and-dying-in-the-uk

Nondualism & enchantment, acting & UFOs (Rupert Spira & Meister Eckhart too). Talk with Jamie Robson

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

A conversation with actor, Jamie Robson, whom I met through the work of Rupert Spira.

00:00 Meeting through Rupert Spira
03:26 Nondualism and Christian mysticism
06:02 Nondualism and acting
15:00 Being and doing
19:40 Detachment and Meister Eckhart
26:48 Two modes of perception in Iain McGilchrist and others
32:43 Double vision and a re-enchanted world
37:30 UFOs and levitation as cases
49:45 Everyday re-enchantment
52:07 British Weird Wave film
59:33 Cultural shifts?

Love at the meeting of cultures. A conversation with Chine McDonald

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Born in Nigeria and raised in the UK since the age of 4, Chine McDonald is well placed to explore love in different cultural contexts, and what happens when differences meet.

We talked about how differences show up particularly in relation to the practicalities of loving, from house design to how people talk at funerals, as well as wider questions such as images of God and the critiquing and idealising of different traditions.

Our conversation is one of many I'm conducting as part of a project looking at how love can be fostered by design, funded by the Fetzer Institute.

Chine is Director of the think tank Theos, having previously worked at Christian Aid and as a journalist. She is the author of God is Not a White Man: and other revelations, and regularly contributes to programmes on the radio. She studied Theology and Religious Studies at Cambridge University.

For more on Chine - https://www.chinemcdonald.com/
For more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com/

Humanity’s role in nature. Are we more than just a problem? A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Environmental degradation caused by technological progress is in the news almost everyday. So can any sense be made of an ancient intuition that human beings are not just part of nature but have a distinctive and positive role to play in nature?

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss issues from the significance of consciousness to cosmic emergence in order to explore a vision of humanity in nature that goes well beyond our life being the meaningless byproduct of random processes.

Humanity contributes to the diversification and beautification of the natural world, even as monocrops undermine that enrichment, too. Alternatively, religious traditions add a layer of meaning to natural processes that science alone can’t provide, from expressing divine creativity to returning that blessing in the praising of God. Panpsychism, strong emergence and Charles Darwin’s appreciation of the excessiveness of nature are other themes in the conversation, making a case for humanity’s place as participant in the remarkable abundance that surrounds us.

For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
and http://www.markvernon.com/talks

On the Incarnation or the real meaning of Christmas. Conversation with Russell Jefford & Mark Vernon

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 18:00:00 +0000

Christmas risks losing its meaning not only because of the commercial frenzy but because of the way it is talked about in churches.

In this conversation, Russell Jefford talks about his discovery of the understanding of the incarnation conveyed in the writings of the early church fathers. They were unknown to him as an evangelical Christian and have refreshed his love of Christianity now.

Together with Mark Vernon, they consider the iconography of the nativity. Why is Jesus born in a cave? Is that a coffin rather than a manger? They consider phrases of three key figues in particular:

St Nazianzus "He who Is, comes into being, and the uncreated is created" (Oration 38.13)

St Irenaeus "He sanctified every age by the resemblance we have with him" (Against Heresies 2.22.4)

St Athanasius "He became man that we might become God" (On the Incarnation 54)

The humanification of God enables the deification of humanity. Salvation is thought of as recapitulation, the divine sanctifying humanity through the various stages of life. The work of atonement is the work of incarnation, as both are manifestations of God, grabbing our attention as to our true nature through the life of the body.

For more on Russell’s work and teaching days see https://ordinarytheology.com/

For more on Mark’s work see https://www.markvernon.com/

Loving and knowing in indigenous ways of life. A conversation with Melissa Nelson

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

“A worldview that understands indigeneity is a paradigm of regeneration, a worldview rooted in enduring values in what we call our original instructions, common themes of reciprocity, of gratitude, of responsibility, of generosity, of forgiveness, of humility, of courage, of sacrifice, and of course love. But these values are not just words, we need to live them.” Melissa Nelson

In this conversation with Melissa, we explore various facets of what she summarises in the quote above. The original instructions of indigenous knowledge are rooted in a reciprocal and relational way of being in the world, an integration of knowing and loving. The creatures of the world, with the landscape and sky, are living records preserved in oral traditions, spoken by participating in rituals and stories.

We discuss the consciousness prompted by creatures and places and how that varies between different peoples, across place and time. We look at the notion of the erotic and the role of human beings within the wider ecology, and also how a synthesis between modern scientific and indigenous ways of knowing might weave together to enrich our love and, therefore, being in the world.

We talked everything from eagles and turtles to love and participation.

Melissa K. Nelson is a Native ecologist, writer, media-maker and Indigenous scholar-activist. She is the President/CEO of The Cultural Conservancy, which she had directed since 1993. In 2020 she joined Arizona State University as a Professor of Indigenous Sustainability, after working since 2002 as Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University.

0:00 Introductions
01:13 What is indigeneity?
02:33 The names of tribes and nations
04:27 Stories in the landscape
06:06 The teaching of the eagle
07:17 Relational and reciprocal worldviews
10:25 Bridging worlds and the notion of love
12:47 Oral cultures and universals
15:01 The sun and turtles: beyond metaphor to participation
25:20 The link between love and knowledge
29:21 Expanding the erotic
32:42 The role of human beings
38:01 Science and indigenous ways of knowing

What can love look like in an era of crisis and fear? With Clare Martin, St Ethelburga's Centre, London

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Clare Martin is co-director of the St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, located in the heart of the City of London. In this conversation, we spoke about what love can look like in the public square, particularly in contexts of crisis and conflict, and how encounters between peoples can be designed so as to foster love as a resource and active dynamic.
The conversation ranged over the importance of stories, histories and the design of places, so as to aid people being more vulnerable and truthful to one another. Intention is also crucial, from reverence to respect, so that difficulty can become generative. And such tension is not just an incidental matter but, in an age of crisis and fear, stresses the spirit of any engagement.
St Ethelburga’s is a religious foundation, working in an interfaith context, so questions such as prayer and invocation also come to mind. Love, then, is not only a moral matter but an elemental openness to more.

Jesus the Imagination. Taking William Blake’s Christianity seriously. Essay at blakesociety.org

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0000

VALA can be downloaded as a pdf here - https://blakesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/VALA-04.pdf
My essay is at p60
For more on Mark - www.markvernon.com

Love, power and public life. A conversation with Claire Gilbert & Mark Vernon

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

What is the role of love in public life? Can it have a place given the scrutiny faced by leaders and the processes of bureaucracies? Or is love what we need to face the huge challenges of today, from distrust of public institutions to the environmental crisis?

Claire Gilbert is the author of several books, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, has served on several public and advisory bodies, and is the Director of the Westminster Abbey Institute. In this conversation, we talk about soulfulness as well as morality in public life, for which Claire is convinced there is a deep yearning. We cover questions from how to design safe and inspiring places that allow people to ask about love of their work, to the role character, contemplation and vision.

We ask about how fear, despair and forgiveness might be part of a more loving approach to public life, as well as reconsidering the nature of power, which can be compassionate and stimulating as well as coercive.

This is part of series of conversations Mark is conducting as part of a project investigating how design might help nurture more loving relationships at a personal and social level.

For more on Claire see - https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-biographies/dr-claire-foster-gilbert

Principles of love and the wisdom of constellations. With Robert Rowland Smith & Mark Vernon

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Constellations, also called family systems, is a way of visualising the dynamics of love that operate in any group that has to do with creativity or life.

A constellation workshop brings people together to look at predicaments with which people are wrestling, be they personal or organisational. The goal is to find a design that releases and acknowledges the love that yearns to find a way forward, though can be thwarted or become stuck.

In this conversation, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon, explore what in the constellations world is called the orders of love. They ask how love, because it manifests as a dynamic or spirit, is seen and fostered by rituals and gestures. The right distance between people may be as important as the right connection. The manner in which events and times are remembered or honoured can be crucial.

The dialogue suggests that love won’t be pinned down and that becoming more conscious and aligned with the field of love, within which we all live, is crucial. Seeing how this is so is not only expansive for the individual but vitalising for the whole.

Such collaboration is aided by principles akin to principles of design and which are discovered by testing and exploration, and proven by the beauty and truth released.

For more about Robert, including Simple Truths, https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com

For more about Mark http://www.markvernon.com

The extension of mind through space and the sense of being stared at. Conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 18:00:00 +0000

Do our minds reside solely inside our heads, or perhaps bodies? Or do they extend into the wider world, perhaps even reaching to the stars?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the extended mind theory, taking a lead from recent work of Rupert’s on the sense of being stared at, and also the problems that contemporary science has with understanding vision.
The discussion considers new research carried out by Rupert and others, as well as the theories of A.N. Whitehead. The way in which science since Maxwell has considered light as moving backwards as well as forwards in time is explored, alongside the way that William Blake described how we see, which itself fits the ancient understanding, that seeing is an active process of engagement, not a passive mode of reception.
Rupert references two published papers.
One is on the nature of visual perception, co-written with Alex Gomez-Marin, online here - https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/The-Nature-of-Visual-Perception.pdf.
The other is on directional scopaesthesia, co-written with Pamela Smart, online here - https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Scopaestheia-and-Its-Implications-for-Theories-of-Vision.pdf.
For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues and https://www.markvernon.com/talks

How to make friendship work. A conversation with Robin Dunbar

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 15:00:00 +0000

Robin Dunbar is an Oxford evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about friendship, amongst other things, not least in relation to “Dunbar’s Number”.

We talked about what friendship is, and how it differs from other loves. We explored the varieties of friendship that people experience, and why metaphors such as “circles of friends” are so significant.

Numbers are illuminating when it comes to understanding the dynamics of friendship, not only Dunbar’s Number, but also other threshold numbers – 5, 15, 50, 150, 500. Get those group sizes right, and much will be gained.

We also asked about why social media seems to corrosive to friendship, how notions of friendship do and don’t vary across cultures, why gender differences in attitudes to friendship seem so robust, and whether we need rituals of friendship to guide this most important of relationships.

Robin referenced the seven pillars of friendship. These are language or dialect, geography, educational experiences, hobbies and interests, moral or spiritual viewpoints, political views, sense of humour and taste in music.

Desire is the way. Thoughts on Bishop Barron at ARC in London

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Bishop Barron is another figure I think worth listening to, who spoke at ARC in London, alongside Jordan Peterson. Like Peterson, he simultaneously leaves me as wary as enthused.

I’ve explained where that took me with Peterson in another short talk. Here’s where I’ve ended up in response to Barron, which interesting is also, in my view, with a richer, fuller sense of Christianity untamed, unleashed.

In short, you might say that Barron has his diagnosis right but his antidote wrong. And like Peterson, the misstep turns matters such as freedom and responsibility, and the side-lining of forgiveness and love.

My thoughts in response to Jordan Peterson are in this podcast. A written version of this talk can be found at my website, www.markvernon.com

Faith & responsibility or love & response. Thoughts on Jordan Peterson at ARC in London

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0000

All in all, there is much to consider in Jordan Peterson’s latest passionate suggestions. I think he is right to present a vision of the human good coming from the future, thereby calling us and shaping a meaningful life now. The human self needs a sense of itself that exceeds an otherwise atomised, lonely individualism.

However, in may view, Peterson celebrates faith and responsibility at the risk of losing love and response.

In this talk, and in the spirit of dialogue, I try to show why the full Christian vision matters, and the inclination to secularise is risky. Distortions inevitably appear. Love and response is reduced to faith and responsibility. Judgment is replaced by an exertion of will. Forgiveness is sidelined. And grace becomes the assertion of moral order.

A written version of the talk is online here - http://www.markvernon.com/faith-responsibility-or-love-response-thoughts-on-jordan-peterson-at-arc-in-london

Loving AIs. Reducing risk & building intelligence. Mark Vernon talks with Eve Poole

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Thinking carefully, not just apocalyptically, about AIs requires a combination of skills - technological, sociological, psychological, philosophical, organisational. So I was delighted to talk with Eve Poole, who is a rare individual capable of bringing all these elements into her work.

Our central question was how to build AIs so as to design out risk and design in love. It turns out that the two elements are deeply connected.

We began by thinking about the nature of the threat and opportunity. In her book, Robot Souls, Eve draws attention to the "junk code" that, ever since the Enlightenment, has been designed out of artificial thinking processes but which it is increasingly clear, needs to be designed back in.

Quality decisions, let alone careful world-building, needs emotional, embodied and loving intelligence, alongside the purely transaction and rational.

We consider how virtue ethics can inform the debate, and may do better than the purely utilitarian calculus that shapes things now. Similarly, we ask about the centrality of cooperation, too, as opposed to the competitive assumptions that tend to dominate.

We think about how AIs are born in particular cultures and so reflect the cultures of technology companies and wider society.

And we are never far from the deep question of the nature of intelligence, proposing that love and judgement are actually more central than reason and free will. For AIs to work in the real world, they will need those qualities. Therein lies hope.

For more on Eve's book, Robot Souls, see https://www.routledge.com/Robot-Souls-Programming-in-Humanity/Poole/p/book/9781032426624

For more on Mark's work see www.markvernon.com

Can we do without organised religion? A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0100

Churches are in decline, certainly in the western world. People tend not to think to turn to a priest for spiritual insight or advice. But is a lived relationship with the sacred and wisdom traditions denuded as organised religion disappears?

In this Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogue, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon talk about religious institutions for good and ill. Rupert picks up on a new book by Alison Milbank, Once and Future Parish, to ask how churches can maintain connection with the seasons, place and community, and speak to the whole of our humanity in its rituals and rites of passage.

The conversation explores the wariness of organised religion, from its moralising and hierarchical manifestations, to its distorted message, inclined to treat religion more as a fearsome threat than a visionary promise. The perils of a privatised spiritual questing are set alongside the paucity of contemporary church life, though if it can be hard to live with organised religion, it seems also hard to live fully without it.

For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues and http://www.markvernon.com/talks

A Thought on Comedy in a Time of Tragedy

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0100

At the beginning of Idler Drinks (see www.idler.co.uk), I offer a thought. Here's the one from this week.

Christ consciousness and final participation. Max Leyf, Landon Loftin & Mark Vernon. #OwenBarfield

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 18:00:00 +0100

Owen Barfield talked of an evolution of consciousness towards final participation. But what is that state or quality awareness? How does it relate to the life of Christ? How was it described by Rudolf Steiner? Can we see and know intimations of it now?

In this second discussion with Landon Loftin and Max Leyf, we explore the ideas of freedom and individuality, modernity and language, kenosis and romanticism come of age to press Barfield’s great insight and see whether we can help give it voice.

For more on Landon and Max’s book see https://wipfandstock.com/9781666736762/what-barfield-thought/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLoftin%20and%20Leyf%20have%20provided,on%20his%20fellow%20Inklings%2C%20C.%20S.

For more on Mark’s book see http://www.markvernon.com/consciousness

Love and Attachment Styles. A conversation with Robert Rowland Smith & Mark Vernon

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 16:00:00 +0100

Why do we love? Is love inevitably a foolhardy endeavour? Or does it lead to a knowledge of reality beyond reason?

In this discussion, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon discuss the ideas of Freud and Lacan, Bowlby and Winnicott, who had differing ideas about the nature of love and where it leads.

Is love the idealisation of another, which inevitably leads to frustration and loss? Is love the realisation of a wider reality which, without it, we would neither feel drawn to or be prepared to know?

And why are love and suffering so intimately linked, so that strangely it promises our greatest fulfilment and worst fears?

For more on Robert - https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com
For more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com

Heaven in a Wild Flower. Plato, Cusa, Shakespeare & Blake. Valentin Gerlier & Mark Vernon

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0100

What golden thread might link these writers across the centuries? Why might each matter now?

Taking a lead from Valentin’s book, Shakespeare and the Grace of Words, we explore how the finite and infinite meet in dialogue, analogy, play and contrary, arguing that Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, Shakespeare and William Blake directly address our times of crisis and separation.

For more on Valentin’s book see www.routledge.com/Shakespeare-and-the-Grace-of-Words-Language-Theology-Metaphysics/Gerlier/p/book/9781032121406
He teaches an MA in Poetics of Imagination: https://campus.dartington.org/poetics-of-imagination/
His substack is https://graceofwords.substack.com/

For more on Mark see www.markvernon.com

The book on Plato I mention is Plato: A Very Short Introduction by Julia Annas.
For more on The Temenos Academy see www.temenosacademy.org

The Unconscious. A conversation with Mark Vernon & Robert Rowland Smith

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0100

What is meant by the unconscious? Is it even a "thing"? Why does it seemingly originate with Freud? How useful is the concept? How can it be worked with?

In this discussion, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon explore the history of this central notion in psychoanalysis. They look at the different articulations of it, particularly in Freud and Jung, and ask how it links to other ideas such as the field, inspiration and the divine.

Are vertical metaphors the right metaphors, as when people talk of "depth psychology"? Is the subconscious just the unconscious lite? What is the difference between the personal and the collective unconscious? Is there really a difference?

Will a time come, as a time once was, when human beings felt no need to refer to this surprising, alluring and pervasive dynamic?

For more on Robert - https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com
For more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com

How to teach prayer. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 20:00:00 +0100

Prayer, alongside meditation, is an integral part of religious traditions. God can be prayed to but also saints and angels.

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert and Mark ask whether and why prayer is not widely discussed, how prayer can be practiced, and what prayer might be.

They share personal practices of prayer and explore the agency of angels and saints. They ask about the entities that people report encountering when using psychedelics, alongside other questions such as how to pray for people and what can be expected from prayer.

The desire to pray seems to be an almost universal human impulse. Much more might be made of it.

For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks

Falling in love with your therapist. On transference & countertransference

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 19:00:00 +0100

Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon discuss these two dynamics of projection. Transference and countertransference have become core to psychoanalysis, though Freud and others were initially very wary of them. So what are the limits to using the feelings that fill a therapy room?

How can the set-up of the room itself affect such things? How can transference and countertransference be unethically manipulated, not least when feelings of love are activated?

And also, how do these experiences relate to the uncanny, even so-called paranormal types of awareness and perception?

10 ways to understand AI

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 08:00:00 +0100

AI can be understood by the many, not just the few. We don’t need to respond to technologist and media hype via fear and the call for another lockdown, this time on AI development.

I hope ten points are illuminating.

1. The Turing test has been passed, but it never was a very good test to start with.
2. The AI industry thrives on the promise of tomorrow and is often led by those confusing themselves with gods.
3. Our psychology, as well as theirs, needs considering more fully, too.
4. AI models reality, as much science does. So don’t confuse AI models with reality.
5. Human intelligence doesn’t much involve calculation but presence, not much patterning but more participation.
6. We’re adaptive. Technology is surprisingly unadaptive.
7. Attention is a moral act and how we attend deeply shapes what shows up.
8. A cybernetic future might be the one coming, with AI recognised as tool not master.
9. Our intelligence is deeply linked to striving and longing, desiring and loving.
10. Our intelligence thrives with patience and experiencing, learning from now.

For more on Mark, particularly his work on spiritual intelligence, see www.markvernon.com.

Narcissism. Good and Bad Therapy. A series of conversations with Robert Rowland Smith & Mark Vernon

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0100

What exactly is narcissism? Why is it so debilitating and troubling? Must everyone face narcissistic impulses and needs?

In this discussion, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon explore the origins of narcissism in ancient myth and contemporary psychoanalysis. They explore the variety of pathological narcissisms, how it can be treated and whether a society increasingly online is at risk of becoming more narcissistic.

For more on Robert - https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com
For more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com

The Scandalous Radicality of Owen Barfield’s Thought. Landon Loftin, Max Leyf & Mark Vernon

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:00:00 +0100

Owen Barfield was the friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. He championed the importance of imagination and poetry. But what can be missed is the transformative depth of his ideas. They can revolutionise our perception of everything.
Landon Loftin and Max Leyf are the authors of What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield. In this conversation with Mark Vernon they ask how Barfield invites us to reconsider the meaning of everything from the human face to ancient history, from music to the person of Jesus. They ask about Barfield’s relationship with Lewis and other figures, such as Rudolf Steiner.
Barfield had an answer to the alienation many experience in today’s world. His remedy was born of his own escape from depression. He realised modernity need not be rejected but itself contains the portals of participation that lead back to the divine.

For more on the book, What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield - https://wipfandstock.com/9781666736762/what-barfield-thought/
For more on Mark's book, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness - https://www.markvernon.com/consciousness

End of Life Experiences. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 13:00:00 +0100

Terminal lucidity is the phenomenon of individuals who are dying receiving a surge of life, perhaps to say goodbye, as their death approaches. So what is the nature and meaning of such well-attested experiences?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon use Rupert's recent paper examining terminal lucidity in animals, to open up a discussion of phenomena from post-mortem contacts to the resurrection of Jesus.
Rupert's paper can be found here - https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Experiences-of-Dying-Animals_Parallels-With-End-of-Life-Experiences-in-Humans.pdf
For Lesley Kean's book Surviving Death see - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246583/surviving-death-by-leslie-kean/
For Dale Allison's discussion the resurrection see - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/resurrection-of-jesus-9780567697561/

What makes a place safe to talk? Psychotherapy and the frame. Robert Rowland Smith & Mark Vernon

Fri, 19 May 2023 10:00:00 +0100

Safety, confidentiality and trust are key parts of psychotherapy. That almost goes without needing to be said. But what is enabled by these qualities of the frame? How do they open up less conscious thoughts and feelings?

In this second conversation about psychotherapy, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon explore this space of real encounter, which is paradoxically safe so as to allow the less safe to emerge. They ask how the frame feels sacred, how it can be spoiled or abused, and how it might enable the rebirth of souls.

For more on Robert - https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com
For more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com
For more on the Philosophy Slam - https://www.philosophyslam.net

How Jesus can save us from AI

Sun, 14 May 2023 12:00:00 +0100

The anxiety about AI has reached hysterical proportions. Luminaries are declaring that every last human being is at risk. Which suggests a panic not about the future, whatever it may bring, but about the present, and what has already been lost.

What has vanished, for some, is a living sense of what it is to be human. As William Blake knew, when machine ways dominate, human beings flip from hope to despair, from elation to desperation.

The question that seems to hard to answer is just what it means to be human. Drawing on a recent book, I Judge No One by David Lloyd Dusenbury, as well as my latest, Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps, this talk looks to the life of Jesus for inspiration.

Figures from Dostoevsky to William Blake have recognised he lived at an existential edge, in this world whilst simultaneously making present another world, not of control and moral anxiety but of gift and eternal expansion.

The vision is practical and, in an era in which the sense of being human is clearly at risk, fundamental and pressing.

For more on I Judge No One by David Lloyd Dusenbury - https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/i-judge-no-one/
For more on Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps

Monarchy, diversity & William Blake. An Idler Drinks thought

Thu, 11 May 2023 14:00:00 +0100

William Blake was against the monarchy. But might his Georgian loathing of the homogenising, conforming tendency of tyrannical rule have been utterly transformed by the coronation that opens the Carolean era?

My piece at The Idler, "The Marvellous Oddity of the Coronation" is here - https://www.idler.co.uk/article/the-marvellous-oddity-of-the-coronation/
For more on Idler Drinks - https://www.idler.co.uk
For more on Mark Vernon - https://www.markvernon.com

Good & Bad Therapy. Or, have we reached "peak trauma"? A conversation with Robert Rowland Smith

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 17:00:00 +0100

Therapies of various kinds are routinely in the news. And there is much to be said for the ease with which people talk about mental ill-health.

But psychotherapy, in particular, can also received critique. What works on the couch? How do different traditions and techniques foster change? And is all that can happen to us well viewed through the lens of trauma?

Clearly, there is trauma in the world and too much of it. But there are other ways of approaching suffering. Maybe we are at a moment when they might be brought into the conversation, too?

For more on the Philosophy Slam, which Mark and Robert offer, see https://www.philosophyslam.net

For more on Robert see https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com

For more on Mark see https://www.markvernon.com

In Praise of Praise. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 14:00:00 +0100

Why do people offer praise and gain from it? Does God require, even demand praise? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert and Mark discuss what can be wrongly implied by praise and what it might mean as an immensely rich practice.

Mark confesses to having been put off the notion, as if adulation were demanded by a divine narcissist, which Rupert responds to by considering the etymology of praise, shared by words such as appreciation and interpretation. The discussion develops to consider how praise is a disclosing activity, arising from a spontaneous perception of wholeness, beauty and existence itself.

They consider how praise is linked to attending, and the ways in which we reach out to see the world, even as the world reaches back to us, much as William Blake described when seeing "heaven in a wild flower". And they address the question of why and how God is associated with praise. Praise, it turns out, is highly praiseworthy.

During the discussion the Boyle Lecture 2023 by Rowan Williams is mentioned, online here - https://youtu.be/5u9WGaWTgU8
The book on Shakespeare by Valentin Gerlier is also referenced, details here - https://www.routledge.com/Shakespeare-and-the-Grace-of-Words-Language-Theology-Metaphysics/Gerlier/p/book/9781032121406

For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see - https://www.markvernon.com/talks and https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues

Synchronicity and Carl Jung’s metaphysics. #CollectiveUnconscious #GermanIdealism #BernardoKastrup

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 18:00:00 +0000

A review and discussion of Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup, considering what’s conscious and unconscious, personal and collective, caused and evoked, and also asking about the tradition of German Idealism, within which Bernardo persuasively situates Jung.

Carlo Rovelli is interestingly, importantly wrong about Anaximander

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 17:00:00 +0000

There is a myth that science and religion are locked in conflicted. And it's a battle that science must win.

The physicist, Carlo Rovelli, is an eloquent purveyor of the myth and uses the Ancient Greek philosopher, Anaximander, to perpetuate the confrontation.

However, Rovelli has a problem. His case rests on a set of assumptions that look increasingly untenable and untrue, and even undesirable.

In fact, Anaximander can help us understand where modern science, for all its genius, goes wrong.

Freeing Perception. 10 Ways of Living Iain McGilchrist's Work

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 20:00:00 +0000

So you've bought into the great insights of Iain McGilchrist, as explored in The Master and His Emissary, and also, The Matter with Things.

You understand that the key ability is “presencing the world”
- comprehending, not merely calculating
- experiencing, not merely modelling
- attuning, not merely measuring
- understanding, not merely manipulating
- living and dying, not merely being on or off.

But what now to do? How not to live?

What’s needed is a conversion of awareness. So here I suggest 10 ways in which our experience might be transformed, not by fixing perception, but by paying attention to how we perceive and experience, and cultivating more expansive modes of awareness.

1. be interested in darkness
2. understand the imagination as concealing and revealing
3. be embodied to be changed by sensing more
4. love the minute particulars to know the universal
5. monitor your experience of time
6. look for the third awaiting to be seen or born
7. be open to other intelligences, natural and supernatural
8. reconsider the nature of suffering
9. love the precipitousness of infinity, eternity
10. know life is a comedy that survives, embraces tragedies.

Drawing on great adepts such as Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, and particularly on Dante and William Blake.

0:00 intro
02:17 be interested in darkness
06:45 understand the imagination as concealing and revealing
13:01 be embodied to be changed by sensing more
17:05 love the minute particulars to know the universal
19:17 monitor your experience of time
22:30 look for the third awaiting to be seen or born
25:45 be open to other intelligences, natural and supernatural
32:37 reconsider the nature of suffering
37:00 love the precipitousness of infinity, eternity
43:46 know life is a comedy that survives, embraces tragedies
48:45 summary in conclusion

What is objectivity? A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Objectivity has come to be regarded as a prime ingredient of reliable knowledge. But what is objectivity, how has it arisen, and is the notion in need of reform? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert and Mark consider the recent work of the philosopher, Richard Gunton. With colleagues, Richard examines older understandings of objectivity in science and proposes an alternative which is truer to scientific work. In particular, the reductive idea that links objectivity with replication seems increasingly untenable, given the replication crisis in science. Instead, linking objectivity to representation provides a fruitful way forward.

Rupert and Mark consider facets of the history of science, not least the difference between so-called primary and secondary qualities, as well as how science is actually carried out, with the role that imagination and aesthetics bring to innovation and insight. Might a new notion of objectivity be not only good for science but also become part of overcoming modern alienation from the world?

Richard Gunton’s paper is co-authored with Marinus Stafleu and Michael Reiss and is entitled "A General Theory of Objectivity: Contributions from the Reformational Philosophy Tradition."

For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks/talks-with-rupert-sheldrake

Harry & Psychotherapy. British & American traditions. Reflecting on differences, conflicts, tensions

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Prince Harry is caught in a media storm. But within the mix of sympathy and loathing lie transatlantic differences in psychological and psychotherapeutic traditions.

What is sometimes called Self Psychology plays a bigger role in the US, focusing on the healing potential of empathy, idealisation and narrative. This shapes therapeutic and cultural styles. It seems as if Harry has, in part, turned to this tradition to find healing.

In British and European traditions, a different approach tends to dominate. Called Object Relations, it is more inclined to challenge the individual and foster a capacity to see how they are situated in a network of relations that is sometimes supportive, sometimes not.

I wonder whether something of these differences is playing out in the different receptions of Harry's story, and also in the psyche of one painfully public man.

A New Axial Age? A conversation with Beth Macy & Mark Vernon

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 17:00:00 +0000

To celebrate the release of his new book, Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps, the Pari Center invited Mark Vernon, to talk about his new work with Beth Macy.

They discuss the notions of spiritual intelligence, the spiritual commons, the Axial revolutions, the presence of suffering, and whether we are in a new Axial Age now.

For more on Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps

Beth Macy has been a manager, leader, consultant or participant in organizations experiencing difficult issues. David Bohm’s dialogue has been core to her research, writing, consulting and teaching for nearly three decades. Living in the USA (Texas) she is a contributor in the forthcoming Holoflux:Codex – Form/Movement/Vision inspired by David Bohm (Pari Publishing).

For more on Mark Vernon see - www.markvernon.com

Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps. Step Seven - Befriending Irruptions