Mark Vernon - Talks and Thoughts: Recent Episodes
Mark Vernon
Assorted reflections on matters mostly to do with inner life, including spirituality and psychotherapy, consciousness and the divine. For more on see www.markvernon.com
The Odyssey movie is brilliant. The combination of spectacle and seriousness that characterises Christopher Nolan’s film-making makes this one a must-see. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
However, this telling is Nolan's telling. The opening title reads: “A time of apparent magic”, which is a clear signal. Throughout a psychological option is offered for the presence of gods, sorcery and monsters and, quite explicitly, a moral imperative provides coherence to the meandering story.
There are also, inevitably, elements from Homer’s original that are absent in the cinema epic and that gives me an entrée.
I discussion the significance of love, which matters because it is such a key part of the question of how, like them, we humans might live close to the gods.
I think about the significance of the blinding of Polyphemus, which is a dark awakening: human craftiness need no longer be tied to spiritual craft.
I recall the striking appearance of the Cave of the Nymphs on Ithaca, and the Neoplatonic understanding of its significance.
And then there’s the violence, which so much exceeds a moral response, as if hospitality, politeness and decency were enough.
Christianity has a different response, and the brilliance of Homer’s tale is implicit in that emergence.
For more on A Secret History of Christianity - https://www.markvernon.com/books/a-secret-history-of-christianity
Does art need to have a sacred dimension to be art at all? What are the sources of inspiration?
In this dialogue, which is the 102nd in the series, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, explore how meaning and beauty, truth and connection might be manifested in the arts.
What is the role of reverence and empathy, place and intelligence? Conversely, what is lost when art loses a reference beyond the human and mechanical world?
If art energizes the human spirit, encourages awareness, and revitalises symbols, how might it speak to us today of what it is be human and to live in a more than human world?
The conversation took place in The Garrison Chapel, Chelsea, and was organised by The King’s Foundation.
For more on Mark see https://www.markvernon.com
For more on Rupert see https://rupertsheldrake.com
Susanne Sklar and Mark Vernon explore William Blake's late, great poem, "Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion"
"Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through Eternal Death! and of the awakening to Eternal Life," Blake tells us the epic is about.
Albion features, as does the heroine Jersualem, as well as Jesus.
So how did Blake weave together these figures? How can the poem be read? What is its message and theology? What insights does it offer today?
Susanne's book is "Blake's 'Jerusalem' As Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body".
Mark's book is "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination."
www.markvernon.com
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
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
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
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?
“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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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/
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
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
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
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?
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”.
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:
-
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. -
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. -
Monos ho Jesus
-
The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.
-
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.
-
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. -
How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?
-
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 -
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. -
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.
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
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).
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
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?
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!
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/
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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.
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 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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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?
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/
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
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/
“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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
At the beginning of Idler Drinks (see www.idler.co.uk), I offer a thought. Here's the one from this week.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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.
- The Turing test has been passed, but it never was a very good test to start with.
- The AI industry thrives on the promise of tomorrow and is often led by those confusing themselves with gods.
- Our psychology, as well as theirs, needs considering more fully, too.
- AI models reality, as much science does. So don’t confuse AI models with reality.
- Human intelligence doesn’t much involve calculation but presence, not much patterning but more participation.
- We’re adaptive. Technology is surprisingly unadaptive.
- Attention is a moral act and how we attend deeply shapes what shows up.
- A cybernetic future might be the one coming, with AI recognised as tool not master.
- Our intelligence is deeply linked to striving and longing, desiring and loving.
- Our intelligence thrives with patience and experiencing, learning from now.
For more on Mark, particularly his work on spiritual intelligence, see www.markvernon.com.
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
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
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/
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
- be interested in darkness
- understand the imagination as concealing and revealing
- be embodied to be changed by sensing more
- love the minute particulars to know the universal
- monitor your experience of time
- look for the third awaiting to be seen or born
- be open to other intelligences, natural and supernatural
- reconsider the nature of suffering
- love the precipitousness of infinity, eternity
- 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
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
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.
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 is my new book, released December 2022.
This is a short thought on step three, which is concerned with how our sense of individuality, or oneness, can be known as a mirror of the unity of all things. This perception, in turn, facilities awareness of an abiding simplicity running through all complexity.
For more on the book see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps
Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps is my new book, released December 2022.
This is a short thought on step four, which is about how beneath and through the ups and downs of everyday life, that vitality which can be called our soul, can be detected a wider being, which can be called spirit.
For more on the book see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps
Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps is my new book, released December 2022.
This is a short thought on step six, which is about how spiritual intelligence understands the value of virtue over ethics or morality. This preference is because virtues don't primarily tell us what to do, but rather connect must fully with the nature of things.
For more on the book see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps
Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps is my new book, released December 2022.
This is a short thought on step seven, which is about different types of time. Chronos, or clock time, dominates the world today. But there are other kinds, including kairos, which sees every moment as revelatory and is needed in times of change.
For more on the book see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps
Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps is my new book, released December 2022.
This is a short thought on step five, which is about death. Any wisdom tradition worth considering will have much to say about death, both as an end to mortal existence and as a daily experience.
For more on the book see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps
Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps is my new book, released December 2022.
This is a short thought on step one, which concerns the big history that we tell ourselves about ourselves. In short, the dominant big story is driven by a crude Darwinism that writes out spiritual intelligence, though there is good reason from the science to conclude that's wrong.
For more on the book see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps
Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps is my new book, released December 2022.
This is a short thought on step two, which asks about the nature of our freedom. Spiritual intelligence understands that, whilst good to have, freedom is not ultimately about choice or voice, but aligning with what's good, beautiful and true. This is where true freedom is found.
For more on the book see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps
Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps is my contribution to aiding the recovery of the full range of human capabilities and consciousness. Artificial, rational, even emotional intelligence are not enough to ground us, valuable though they be. We need not just know-how, but know-that our lives are grounded in a spiritual commons.
The steps I outline here, and explore fully in my book, are to do with story, freedom, simplicity, soul, death, virtue and time.
For more on the book see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps.
The secular historian, Tom Holland, has made the case that atheistic humanism is, at heart, an off-shoot of Christianity. In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon ask how that can be so.
After all, contemporary humanists are inclined to blame Christianity for all ills, not thank Christianity for seeding values they share. Rupert and Mark agree that there is much in what Holland argues. For example, the tendency to evangelise for western values, as well as fall into dispute over what they might be, mirrors Protestant Christianity.
But Mark is also wary of Holland’s theory, both as history and also because it risks presenting Christianity is a moral creed, not a revelation of the relationship between the human and divine. (A recent speech that Holland gave outlining his ideas can be found at Unherd.com and the website of the think tank, Theos.)
For more in our longstanding series of dialogues see https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues and
https://www.markvernon.com/talks
Peter Owen Jones is a writer, broadcaster and priest. His new book is Conversations With Nature.
We discuss falling in love with the natural world once again, what difference this might make to the climate crisis, how Christianity has failed to respond in any significant way to environmental collapse, though also has an answer, if we are prepared to give no thought for the morrow, value the falling sparrow, and follow the way.
William Blake's sense of participation, imagination and divine return are also in the mix.
For more on Peter's book, Conversations With Nature, see https://www.clairviewbooks.com/viewbook.php?isbn_in=9781912992416
For more on Mark Vernon, see www.markvernon.com
The Last Judgement, William Blake argued, is not a terrifying forthcoming rapture but an awakening present moment, “Whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth".
For more on William Blake, Dante and other things see www.markvernon.com
For more on John-Paul Flintoff - https://flintoff.org.
And his latest book - https://spckpublishing.co.uk/london-psalms.
For more on Mark Vernon & Owen Barfield - https://www.markvernon.com/consciousness.
We live in an age of emergency, exacerbated by a collapse of meaning. Writer and psychotherapist, Mark Vernon, examines the type of intelligence that, whilst often dismissed and overlooked, is crucial to understand and cultivate if we are to survive and thrive in our times.
Spiritual intelligence is the foundation of who we are and our particular type of consciousness. It is the perception identified across wisdom and religious traditions, and known by many names, which can be summarised as the awareness of awareness, and so of being itself. It is the foundation of peace, even in the face of death, as well as purpose and solidarity. The challenge today is to recover and live according to that knowledge.
Examining themes from the nature of consciousness to the experience of time, the emergence of our species and the teaching of spiritual adepts, the book is an antidote to rampant AI and a complement to emotional intelligence. It is written without presuming religious commitments in readers and draws on a mix of sources, from the writings of mystics to the films of Pixar, the work of scholars including Iain McGilchrist and Robin Dunbar, and experience gained from the author's own practices, particularly psychotherapy. It advocates pilgrimage and improvisation, virtues over morality, and big histories that do not turn the story of our species into a bleak struggle for survival.
The seven steps will help readers identify spiritual intelligence within themselves, unpack why it matters, and suggest how a wider trust in it may be revived. Each chapter ends with a short practice or question.
"In Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps, Mark Vernon draws on the understanding of numerous individuals and cultures, weaving them into a text that leads the reader on a journey into the very heart of their self and, at the same time, to the reality that lies behind and is expressed as the world. Each chapter guides us more and more deeply into the perennial understanding that lies at the foundation of our civilisation." Rupert Spira
ISBN 978-1-80341-032-6
Published by Iff Books
For more on Mark - www.markvernon.com
Rishi Sunak is Britain’s first Hindu leader. His success is a conspicuous manifestation of the deep links that exist between Indian and English culture.
It reaches back William Blake, an early reader of the Bhagavad Gita after it was translated into English. His angel-morphic figures and Vedantic impulses would have been developed with his reading, helping him to restore the unitive sense of reality to English Christianity, much lost after the Reformation.
As Jesus tells Albion in Blake’s epic poem, Jerusalem: “I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love."
For more on King Charles and Kathleen Raine see - https://www.markvernon.com/awakening-in-a-caroline-age-king-charles-william-blake-kathleen-raine
A number of public figures, in literature and ideas, have recently been talking about discovering Christianity, or perhaps it'd be better to say, being discovered by Christianity.
So what's going on with this renewed interest? Why now? How can this be talked about? What kind of Christianity are they being draw to and captured by? And what does their experience say about the inadequacies of much Christianity in modern culture?
These questions are asked by Elizabeth Oldfield, host of The Sacred podcast and former director of Theos. Mark Vernon, who often writes and talks about Christian things, is intrigued by and feels something of their lively reality.
For more on Elizabeth - https://www.elizabetholdfield.com
Mark more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com
C.S Lewis is not the apologist and writer you might assume, if Jason Baxter is right. Plato, Boethius and Dante mattered immensely to a man who felt more at home in the medieval world, and longed to inspire the modern world with a half-forgotten theophany.
His friend, Owen Barfield, also anticipated a transfigured today, one in which participation with divine life was known by ourselves and within the inside of the whole world.
Christianity itself would recover its experiential, mystical core, the friends hoped, and be less eclipsed by credal and moral formulations.
In this conversation, Jason Baxter and Mark Vernon explore matters from Christian Platonism and the Incarnation, to the Eschaton and the strangeness of miracles.
What might Lewis and Barfield have talked about in private? How closely are the soulmates' visions entwined? Why does Christianity need to recover its oddness and surprise, drawing on the past and being drawn by a renewed future?
Jason Baxter's book's include The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, full details here - https://www.ivpress.com/the-medieval-mind-of-c-s-lewis.
Mark Vernon's books include A Secret History of Christianity on Owen Barfield, full details - here https://www.markvernon.com/books/a-secret-history-of-christianity
A renewed interest in Christianity? Old traditions of myth and place revived?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon consider the significance of recent conversions, as confessed by figures such as Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw, as well as the prominence given to Christianity by writers such as Marilynne Robinson and Jordan Peterson.
They explore what has been called the “rewilding” of Christianity and whether traditional apologetics has run out of steam. Are surprisingly common religious encounters with divine and supernatural presences becoming more acceptable? What of the challenge to mainstream forms of Christianity coming from the pens of Radical Orthodoxy and, unexpectedly, C.S. Lewis? And what might full strength Christianity invite and promise?
This ripple of fresh encounters with Christianity won’t stop the general decline of church-going in the West. But maybe that very decline is making space for reinvigorated spiritualities.
For more on Rupert, including other dialogues with Mark, see - https://www.sheldrake.org
For more on Mark, including other dialogues with Rupert, see - https://www.markvernon.com
Elizabeth Oldfield’s podcast, The Sacred, can be found on podcast feeds. Her conversation with Paul Kingsnorth, along with many others, is a rewarding listen.
I discuss this take on the parables and Jesus’s wit more fully in my book, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness (John Hunt Publishing).
I owe the expression to Elizabeth, but the nature of “full strength Christianity” is a regular concern of my thoughts on Dante, William Blake, Owen Barfield and, indeed, Jesus.
Bernard Carr is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London. He has worked on black holes with Stephen Hawking, alongside other aspects of cosmology, and has also been president of the Society for Psychical Research.
I begin this conversation by asking about Owen Barfield’s questioning the principle of uniformitarianism in science, the assumption that the laws of physics, as well as space and time, are the same in all times and places.
I also raise the thought of another physicist, John Wheeler: “We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past”
Bernard carefully unpacks the various ways to address these matters. The conversation ranges from how physics might be extended to link materiality and mind, the significance of different experiences of time, whether Dante’s experience can inspire physical insight, and how language and everyday experience offers clues to the nature of reality which any theory of everything must embrace.
0:00 Did Stephen Hawking enjoy The Theory of Everything movie?
3:30 Why the theory of everything in physics really isnt’
6:15 What do we see looking back across space and time?
10:30 What relativity tells us about the relationship between observer and observed?
14:40 Awe and wonder, the beauty of the universe
15:17 The relationship between the outside world and our experience of it
18:31 To what extent do observations change reality itself?
21:08 Is the universe fuzzy before observers?
25:30 The link between consciousness and cosmological constants
29:35 The two slit and delayed choice experiments
31:48 John Wheeler and the choice of light from quasars
40:08 The pyramid of complexity and the fine-tuning
41:35 Is consciousness excreted by the brain?
42:39 Consciousness as fundamental
46:52 Evidence for the brain as a filter of consciousness
48:54 Dante’s experience of dimensions of consciousness unfolding
52:01 The essence of mystical experience
53:03 The hierarchy of consciousness and the specious present
57:31 The significance of self-consciousness and navigating scales of consciousness
1:00:53 Why am I me and not you?
1:05:40 Unity and separation in ordinary experiences of time
1:07:34 Hints of connection, telepathy and non-locality
1:10:37 Beauty and the experience of cosmic union
1:12:30 The history of physics and the demolition of common sense
1:15:44 Four-dimensional reality and the end of “out there”
1:21:00 Extra dimensions after Einstein
1:24:40 The significance of branes and bulks and the ubiquity of space
1:29:15 The heart of Bernard’s approach: phenomenal dimensions and higher dimensions
1:33:34 A flash of perception in early life
1:34:55 Barfield and the evolution of human perception
1:38:19 Meaning, connection and spiritual experience in science
1:40:27 Hints from language and the origins of language
1:44:05 Physics must expand to accommodate mind
A little known, astonishingly personal article by King Charles provides a remarkable window onto his soul.
In it, he speaks of an extraordinary power and hope that might not only steady a moment of constitutional transition, but even calm a period of widespread and deepening social anxiety.
The article was a tribute he wrote to the poet and William Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine, subsequently published in Resurgence magazine.
In this talk, I unpack what the new king said and ask why it matters.
Sam Harris raised the question of the location of heaven, not least in the space age, when "up there" is not straightforwardly a good answer.
Jonathan Pageau responded eloquently, noting that up is, of course, an analogy that might guide us towards the way in which earth and heaven are different dimensions of participation in divine reality. The ancients knew earth and heaven phenomenologically rather than just physically.
Here, I offer a different conception again, that I think is useful now - taking a lead from Jesus's remarks that the kingdom is within, that praying is best done in secret, and that withdrawal and reflection are key to discerning the divine, heavenly presence.
I consider how the Platonic notion of ascent, from The Symposium, is actually an mistaken gloss on what Diotima actually explains to Socrates. Love's path to Beauty is, in fact, one of subtly, awakening and understanding.
And then I consider Dante's journey through the planetary spheres in Paradiso. Again, whilst metaphors of movement are present, the dynamic that Dante tracks is one of perception: the more he understands of the divine light within himself, the more he understands and knows how he is closer to heaven than he ever suspected.
I enjoyed Jordan Peele's movie, Nope. But what is it saying?
NOTE: This comment is full of spoilers!
William Blake saw himself as a prophet, which means that his writings challenge, even repulse, on occasion.
However, Blake's harding sayings are the moments when his greatest vision stands before us. They are worth wrestling with, if he is to become more than a poet with a compelling line that we might grab as a proof quote.
In this talk, I consider how Blake's vision of nature, politics and humanity sits uncomfortably alongside the received wisdom of today, in both secular and Christian domains.
**“Without man, nature is barren,” he writes in the Proverbs of Hell.
Golgonooza “continually building & continually decaying desolate,” he writes in Jerusalem.
“They were as Adam before me, united as One Man,” he also sees in Jerusalem.
In the light of the infinite, that Blake longs to awaken in us, they speak of the higher dimensions of the cosmos that are to be discovered; of a politics of expectancy not utopia that awaits; and how the divine might be an imaginative intimation within us.**
We will also need **the freedom of forgiveness, Blake insists, as well as a new science, built on the capacity to see how how all is animate, intelligent, alive.
But that can stir the perception of God's activity as the true nature of our act activities, and so lead to an overcoming of the threatened self, to yield to the one life which is the truth of all life.**
The Book of Job has been used to retell the Christian story, as with Carl Jung's Answer to Job. It can also be sought for what it says about suffering.
The Hebrew tale inspired William Blake in a distinctive, brilliant way. It helped him to diagnose the modern predicament and its religious errors. Job's suffering and patience led Blake to a mature statement of his spiritual perception, found in his 21 illustrations.
In this set of reflections, I ask what Blake shows us in each of his plates, and how Blake charts a path from a mistaken religiosity of rite and righteousness to one of awakening and participation in the human form divine.
Creation is not about separation, Blake avers, but manifestation. Christianity is not about sin but sleep. Humanity does not enlarge God's consciousness. Rather, humanity can awaken to its being-in-God.
Baruch Spinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither.
In her latest book, Spinoza’s Religion, she reads his masterpiece, the Ethics, to show that being-in-God lies at the heart of his nondual perception of reality.
The book unfolds a powerful philosophical vision for the modern age—one which Carlisle argues overcomes "philosophical pathologies", from reductive materialism to nihilistic atheism, as well as putting crucial questions centre stage, such as how to live a joyful, fully human life.
For more on Clare Carlisle - https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/clare-carlisle
For more on Mark Vernon - https://www.markvernon.com
This is a talk I gave at the Weekend University.
For more on Mark Vernon - https://www.markvernon.com
For more on my book about Jung - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/19267016-carl-jung
0:00 His distinctiveness
10:02 Dreams
16:34 Archetypes
29:41 The Self and Collective Unconscious
39:40 Synchronicities
The Scientific and Medical Network organised a gathering on Friday 8th July to mark Rupert’s 80th birthday and reflect on his work.
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert and Mark Vernon discuss the day, recalling remarks made by speakers including Merlin Sheldrake, Jill Purce, David Lorimer and Pam Smart.
They discuss a variety of themes seminal to Rupert’s work, from science as the calling to share in a living cosmos to the business of coping with sceptics, which is not without its amusing as well as tricky moments.
The conversation celebrates the richness of an engaged and free approach to the study of the natural world, with its many mysteries, often active immediately around us everyday.
I was delighted to meet David Wengrow at the Idler Festival. His coauthor, David Graeber, was a great friend of the Idler.
David Wengrow and I spoke about their revolutionary, fascinating and inspiring book, The Dawn of Everything. It challenges the concensus history and prehistory of humanity, as found in writers such as Steven Pinker and Noah Yuval Harari.
As one questioner from the audience stressed, this is so important for freeing ourselves from their deterministic anticipations of the future.
But I have critiques of the new story as well. David Wengrow's responses to them were illuminating, I felt, and I hope my thoughts were interesting to him.
My fuller discussion of the book itself can also be found on this podcast.
Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, starring Mark Rylance, is brilliant. But what can be made of its violence and passion, humour and hedonism, tragedy and emptiness?
Returning to the source of the famous words after which the play is named provides a clue. William Blake is right to invoke. He has something to say...
0:00 Vedantic Christianity in the Bible, as the gospel
7:58 The natural is already supernatural, our desire is for the infinite
18:26 The Trinity and nondualism as the circle of glory
23:07 Jesus and the Incarnation
29:08 Salvation as theophany
33:34 Paul and the Spirit of God within us
36:58 Creation is in eternity, returning in time
40:32 More on how we might know these things
45:03 Worship as beauty, reverence, longing, delight
47:43 Suffering and living in a violent world
55:22 Eschatology as our eternal Yes to God
57:58 The immanence of transcendence in Christian life
1:05:57 Guarding against inflation and emergent notions of God in history
1:16:05 Judgment, action and freedom
A set of reflections liberally drawing on You Are Gods by David Bentley Hart (Notre Dame Press, 2022).
Bentley Hart says that the book could equally have been subtitled, Studies in Vedantic Christianity, which I take as a lead.
What might traditional Christian themes such as God and Jesus, Salvation and Spirit, Creation and Grace, Worship and Judgment look like within such a perspective?
A summary might be that the gospel is the discovery and realisation that, as Jesus puts it, You are gods. And that the kingdom is not here or there, but within.
As Bentley Hart puts it himself: “We are nothing but created gods coming to be, becoming God in God, able to become divine only because, in some sense, we are divine from the very first.”
But what might that mean, what does that look like, how can we know?
0:00 Imagination and the Imaginal in the modern world
7:20 Different kinds of power: agency, allure, contraries
10:40 The revival of myth-telling but in the first person singular
15:30 Paul’s rediscovery of Christianity
21:40 The mossy face of Christ and what happened
34:04 People’s reactions to Jesus: contraction and expansion
39:04 Paul’s discovery of mystery in an Orthodox Church
46:27 What does this rediscovery of Christianity mean to him?
51:56 What does this mean for the “Christian curious”?
54:50 The shamanistic presence of Malcolm Guite
58:28 Mark’s journey in and around Christianity with Owen Barfield
1:05:25 A turn to William Blake
1:08:10 The transcendent possibility bubbling up again
1:12:57 The diversity of traditions and the entry of spirit
It's often remarked that the age of New Atheism has passed. But what is emerging in its stead?
In this wide-ranging conversation, Martin Shaw discusses, for the first time, his recent encounter with the figure of Jesus and steps towards a form of Christianity very different from his evangelical upbringing.
Power and freedom, history and myths, the Inklings and the imagination are explored en route.
And we ask what kind of Christianity might be evolving in our times.
To find out more about Martin Shaw - https://drmartinshaw.com
To find out more about Mark Vernon - https://www.markvernon.com
To find out more about Malcolm Guite - https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com
To find out more about Owen Barfield - https://www.markvernon.com/consciousness
To find out more about The Temenos Academy - https://www.temenosacademy.org
It is often noted that the ancient Greeks had an advantage in possessing several words for love. Eros, philia, agape and others allowed them to be nuanced about love and navigate its differences. So is there benefit in considering how love has been understood in different wisdom traditions, too?
This conversation, hosted by the Pari Center, explores how love has been understood in various faith contexts and across time, looking at Christian, Sufi, Platonic and other insights. The aim will be to tease out similarities and differences so as to deepen and refresh the felt presence of love in our lives.
Jane Clark is a teacher and independent researcher who has been studying the Islamic mystical tradition for more than forty years. She is a Senior Research Fellow of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, and also the editor of Beshara Magazine.
For more on Mark Vernon - www.markvernon.com
00:03:29 Four kinds of ancient Greek love
00:09:13 Four kinds of love within Islam
00:15:34 Love and spiritual paths in Neoplatonism
00:25:34 Love and the Sufi path
00:32:48 Love and suffering within Christianity
00:38:20 The fire of love in Ibn ‘Arabi and Dante
00:40:56 Is creation God’s act of love in Plato and Christianity
00:46:57 God making a hidden treasure known in Sufism
00:52:20 Is God love? Is God beauty?
00:57:13 The unconditional love of God
00:58:30 Charity, pastoralia and hospitality
01:03:58 The imperative for sacrificial love after the Reformation
01:10:30 Devotion, love of saints and idolatry
01:13:43 Attitudes to sex and sin across traditions
01:19:07 Attitudes to friendship across traditions
01:26:23 What about love and suffering?
01:32:38 Is there hope in collective movements of love?
A quick thought on the deep, inner, even esoteric history and significance of the Platinum Jubilee in the UK.
The full story of monarchs and the birth of individual consciousness is part of the story told in A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness - https://www.markvernon.com/books/a-secret-history-of-christianity
There is a kind of love which brings consolation in crises. But there is also another kind of love which appears in times of crisis; indeed, can only be known through crises.
This is worth considering because love is often use in nebulous or ill-defined ways, which means that its nuanced perceptions and mature forms can be hard to grasp. The need for a deeper awareness of love because particularly acute in times of crisis, though times of crisis also offer moments to understand love move fully.
This talk was given at the Pari Centre. I explore the links between love and personal, spiritual and civilisational development; different types of power, and its relationship with freedom and mind; as well as erotic yearning, suffering and loss; and so also to the knowledge of the ways in which reality itself is shaped by transcendent love.
William Blake is famous for his phrase "cleansing the doors of perception". But he has much, much more to offer the renewed interest in psychedelics underway in our times.
He responds to the need for a social and spiritual setting, widely recognised by those investigating psychedelics now, so that personal experiences can be not only beneficial for individuals but transformative in cultural.
Here, I discuss facets of his insight that suggest seven elements in which the psychedelic experience overlaps with cultural need.
1. Learning that imagination is truth-bearing
2. Realising that inner freedom is crucial
3. Perceiving that consciousness is basic
4. Recognising that healing is collective
5. Experiencing death as a portal
6. Understanding that vision matters more than morality
7. Awakening to the malleability of time.
"**More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man," wrote William Blake.
How we might participate in the All, without consuming more and more, can serve as a summary of Blake's vision and vocation. All he did was, in a way, an increasingly extended, expansive reflection on how to live in the presence of infinity.
The mistakes we make, when confusing this eternity with mere accumulation, offer an analysis of the modern predicament. Blake realised that there is no point telling people to want less, or even to moderate their desires. Rather, we need to learn how to discern our desires so they lead towards that which they really seek: the all.
It's an education of attention, an awakening of the divine. He provides powerful pointers in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a series of provocations not to live modestly but, rather, transformatively.
Perceiving the infinite tracks a path of liberty and vision, love and fearlessness, which I explore in this discussion of the proverbs that he tells us he heard in the energetic, exuberant fires of hell.**
The reality TV star, Tyler Henry, became famous with his celebrity readings. His new Netflix series, Life After Death, is a chance to consider what he does in a different light.
My sense is he is one of the relatively rare highly gifted clairvoyants, who have impressed investigators like William James.
I'm also struck by how his way of working resonates with psychotherapeutic phenomena like countertransference, as well as the testimony of Dante in the Divine Comedy.
Tyler Henry challenges worldviews. But if not simply dismissed, and also approached in a less starry more discerning light, he offers a chance to understand more of life, its relationship to death, and what our times may be rediscovering.
The land commons are the shared material resources that nobody in particular might own, and everyone might have, though they are routinely taken from us. Land and forests, water and minerals.
The spiritual commons are the being of life itself that nobody owns and everyone has. And arguably, they are being taken from us even more carelessly and callously....
For more on Idler Drinks see - https://www.idler.co.uk
For more on Nick Hayes see - https://www.foghornhayes.com
For more on Mark Vernon see - https://www.markvernon.com
A conversation on wrestling with Christianity - or perhaps more accurately, the Christianities that swirl around the figure of Jesus - at the Medicine Path podcast, #87, with Brian James.
For more on Brian - http://medicinepathpodcast.com, http://brianjames.ca
For more on Owen Barfield and his take on Christianity - https://www.markvernon.com/consciousness
Modern Stoicism is more diverse than I knew, I learnt when I spoke with Simon Drew, Kai Whiting and Sharon Lebell. In particular, the divine element in ancient Stoicism, which was central, has not been discarded by everyone involved in the recent Stoic revival.
In this conversation, we talk about Stoicism, the Logos, the cosmos, Christianity, and the spiritual path of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I hope it's enjoyable.
For more on The Walled Garden - https://thewalledgarden.com
Politics and religion is a question of our times. The role of the church and Christianity is contested in both Russia and the liberal West.
William Blake was aware of the failure of politics in his time, recognising it wasn't ultimately a failure of leadership or practical solutions but of vision.
What politics is for? What role do religious institutions play in it? What has been lost in the Babylon materialism of today?
Blake applied his deepest perceptions and devised a dynamic fourfold schema that can guide us through the blindness and failure of our times.
It is radical and pressing.
The scientific study of religion has produced numerous accounts for the evolutionary origins of a sense of the numinous in Homo sapiens. Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford, is in the vanguard of plausible theories, not least as explored in his new book, How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures.
In this interview, for the Church Times podcast, we explore his ideas and their ramifications:
- how the religiosity of Homo sapiens exceeds others Homo species
- how mystical experience is the "motor" of religious forms
- the role of religion in the emergence of complex societies
- why cults exist and the links between religion and violence
- how religious diversity offers a shared sacred story for humanity.
An audio version of the conversation is online at https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/22-april/audio-video/podcast/robin-dunbar-in-conversation-with-mark-vernon.
My essay on trance states and the origins of religions is published by Aeon, at https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence
The two hemispheres hypothesis, championed by Iain McGilchrist, has become well-known. But what light does it cast on modern society and our direction of travel? The nature of overweening bureaucracy, technologies of control, and the narrowing of freedom are explored in this conversation between Iain and Mark Vernon.
They discuss issues from the legacy of the Covid pandemic to the story that modern humanity has come to tell itself about who we are. It turns out that now is a moment to be concerned and to ask again about fundamental matters, from the reality of evil to the meaning of death. To understand more is to find space to respond more imaginatively with a deeper, more expansive awareness of nature, the sacred, and life.
Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and philosopher, and author of The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and his new book, The Matter with Things. For more see https://www.channelmcgilchrist.com
Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist, whose most recent books are on Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Significance of Christianity. For more see https://www.markvernon.com
Each week, on Thursdays, we meet for Idler Drinks online, at which I give a short talk.
We're not meeting over Easter, so this is an extra, reflecting on the Isenheim Altarpiece and the extraordinarily moving experience of Marian Partington, to ask how pain might be born when so much of it surrounds us.
A written version of the reflection is online here - https://www.idler.co.uk/article/mark-vernons-thought-of-the-week/.
Is the resurrection a miracle? Are the events of Golgotha a mystery? And what of the resurrection of the body and attempts to prove what happened as an historical fact?
William Blake argued passionately that treating Easter as a miracle or a mystery entirely misses its significance, which is visionary - a moment when perceptions are cleansed and eternal life becomes manifest.
In this talk, I examine his images of the resurrection and crucifixion to see how he saw them as one moment of transformation, then and now.
I look particularly at his portrayal of Mary Magdalene and how he realised she participated in resurrection life through her encounter with Jesus.
Blake's communication of Easter joy is contagious. He presents us with the end of a golden string, never more needed than now. He desires that all might come to know that "God becomes as we are that we may become as he is."
This conversation is part of the Living Mirrors podcast, hosted by neuroscientist James Cooke, exploring topics like consciousness, science, spirituality, meditation and the renaissance in psychedelic research.
A discussion of two new books on human evolution by leading evolutionary biologists, Robin Dunbar and Simon Conway Morris.
Dunbar offers a revisionary account of the emergence of religion in Homo sapiens. Conway Morris considers widespread myths in Darwinian evolution, of which he is a leading researcher and advocate.
Put together, the books suggest a fascinating glimpse into not only the religious past of humans but the religious future. The trance and mystical states which so captivated our ancestors may transhumanise us again, offering new ways of navigating the cosmos.
I wrote an essay for Aeon drawing on Dunbar's ideas here - https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence
I wrote an essay for Aeon drawing on Conway Morris' ideas here - https://aeon.co/essays/words-have-soul-on-the-romantic-theory-of-language-origin
A YouTube on the evolution of Homo spiritualis is here - https://youtu.be/0XUWYn8SyT8
Details of Robin Dunbar's book are here - https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/316/316135/how-religion-evolved/9780241431788.html
Details of Simon Conway Morris' book are here - https://templetonpress.org/books/from-extraterrestrials-to-animal-minds/
I turned to William Blake seeking hope and found a remarkably accurate account of our times and his, lived during the Napoleonic Wars.
Albion despairs, but Blake does not. He sees a pathway, denying nothing, towards renewed inspiration.
The second part of my conversation with Jonas Atlas, host of Revisioning Religion about spiritual development.
Mark Vernon's latest book takes a deep dive into Dante's Divine Comedy, a classic masterpiece, which, after many centuries, still provides many helpful insights for those who find themselves on a spiritual journey. We place Dante's work in a longer lineage that can be traced to the philosophers of Ancient Greece.
Often, those philosophers are presented as purely 'rational' thinkers who's thinking was repressed by early Christianity because it would conflict with a religious outlook on life. Yet, the historical facts paint a different picture. The ideas of the Greek philosophers were not merely precursors of modern science, but were fully embedded in a general search for spiritual development.
Even more so, according to Mark, their personal spiritual journeys were connected to larger spiritual developments of human consciousness, in which the emergence of Christianity also played an important role.
This leads us to discuss whether or not the spiritual journey of humankind can truly be seen as a form of 'progression', and how Mark assesses contemporary "New Age" ideas about the spiritual growth of humanity.
A conversation with Jonas Atlas, host of Revisioning Religion about spiritual development.
Mark Vernon's latest book takes a deep dive into Dante's Divine Comedy, a classic masterpiece, which, after many centuries, still provides many helpful insights for those who find themselves on a spiritual journey. We place Dante's work in a longer lineage that can be traced to the philosophers of Ancient Greece.
Often, those philosophers are presented as purely 'rational' thinkers who's thinking was repressed by early Christianity because it would conflict with a religious outlook on life. Yet, the historical facts paint a different picture. The ideas of the Greek philosophers were not merely precursors of modern science, but were fully embedded in a general search for spiritual development.
Even more so, according to Mark, their personal spiritual journeys were connected to larger spiritual developments of human consciousness, in which the emergence of Christianity also played an important role.
This leads us to discuss whether or not the spiritual journey of humankind can truly be seen as a form of 'progression', and how Mark assesses contemporary "New Age" ideas about the spiritual growth of humanity.
Witnessing so many Ukrainians responding courageously to the Russian invasion is moving and impressive. There is violence and suffering and death.
And yet, in the midst of the undoubted tragedy, there can be detected the distinct presence of hope. Points of light outshine the darkness. What is the source of this faith and powerful resilience?
I think it must be the deepest type of liberty, to align yourself with what is good, beautiful and true - a freedom that cannot be taken away from you. It is the freedom of Jesus before the Grand Inquisitor, the freedom of Socrates drinking the hemlock. It is the gateway to the divine within us.
It's a fearsome freedom, frightening and awesome. It's the source of the light that can be detected in the darkness descended on Ukraine.
The recent work of the psychiatrist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, allows us to bring the role of dualities in spiritual perception right up to date. He has shown how brain lateralisation facilitates two types of perception. They are asymmetric, both required in right relation for the fullest awareness of the world, which is so often lacking in our times.
In this session we will weave in insights on relationally and suffering, limits and embodiment, panentheism and trinitarianism, as well as from Nicholas of Cusa and process theology too.
This event is part of a series looking at dualities. See https://paricenter.com/event/dualities/2022-02-05/
Perception is cleansed in the struggles of life, William Blake realised, as his own life was lived between heaven and hell, innocence and experience, vision and labour. Opposites are the energy that bring the power to see through surfaces to Eternity. Blake offers maps that chart the transformation from the narrow sight of Ulro to the full embrace of divine vision.
In this talk I consider Blake's use of verse and imagery to awaken our consciousness; the critique he developed of the mechanical philosophy and the dynamics of the human psyche; erotic love and the androgenous mind; and the way he linked forgiveness, imagination and transformation - witnessed by the presence of Jesus.
This event is part of a series looking at dualities running through February 2022. More info here - https://paricenter.com/event/dualities/2022-02-05/
Much is now known about Stonehenge. Wonderful artefacts have been recovered, a welter on display at the British Museum's gobsmacking 2022 show.
But much mystery remains. How to interpret the past? Why do stone circles still draw us? What did our ancestors know?
They participated in life differently. They weren't waiting to be us, though we yearn to hear from them, via the sciences of archeology and the brilliance of exhibitions. And the insights of the rites, rituals, trances and treasures that shine with the light of the sun and knowledge of the gods.
As the great friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien put it, we long to participate once more with the inside of the whole world. It is no surprise that ancient riches draw us.
For more about Owen Barfield and the evolution of consciousness - https://www.markvernon.com/consciousness
For more about the exhibition - https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/world-stonehenge
A talk as part of the Dualities series with the Pari Centre, running through February 2022. For more information see - https://paricenter.com/event/dualities/2022-02-06/
In this talk, I discuss dualities in Plato. The ancient Greek is often accused of dualism, though the word itself didn’t exist at the time, which points to a subtler and crucial reassessment of what the philosopher was driving at.
He recognised that experience is often shaped by seeming dualities, through which we can become more open to life itself. This deeper realisation is gained by fostering the capacities of discernment and love.
I consider four dualities in Plato’s way of life: i. Light and darkness, ii. Love and lack, iii. Knowing and not knowing, iv. Life and death – and also look at four dialogues: Republic, Symposium, Timaeus and Phaedo.
If you listen in time, do consider joining us for future talks in February 2022 on dualities in Dante, William Blake and Iain McGilchrist. More information here - https://paricenter.com/event/dualities/2022-02-06/
What might Christianity have for us today? How might it stories still speak? Where to find what’s right in the tradition?
I was delighted to speak with Paul Kingsnorth, whose substack and other writings since his conversion to Christianity, are helping to galvanise a new debate about religion in our society.
We explore the need for more than cultural Christianity and its moral imperatives, to ask about its almost lost mystical side, and where and how that might be found.
That matters not only for us as individuals but for our culture. It might transformation our sense of being individuals, fear of death and desire for more.
Christianity might be good news once again, especially for a time of wandering in the wilderness.
For more on Paul Kingsnorth - https://www.paulkingsnorth.net
For more on Mark Vernon – https://www.markvernon.com
he hard problem of consciousness. Imagination as an "overheated brain". A future in the Cloud or Metaverse.
William Blake was a thinker as well as poet and artist. His prophetic punch comes from seeing through the mode of living he saw developing in his times, that so powerfully shape our own.
In this talk, I use five of his great sayings, as well as the insights of contemporary philosopher, David Bentley Hart, to reflect on the mental fight increasingly required to stay in touch with our personhood and resist the spectre of virtuality.
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“How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?” insists we are manifestations of the divine vision
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If that is denied we live amongst "dark satanic mills".
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So we must keep reflecting on what it means to be a person: “If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things. & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again Dull round.”
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And not live in a closed up mentality, because “There is no natural religion”. All must be in the service of more.
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When that more is the orientation of our lives, we discover that “He who binds to himself the joy, does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity’s sunrise”.
The remarkable truth that Blake knew is that we don't only long for what’s good, beautiful and true. When you think about it, as he assists us in doing, it becomes clear that can only be the case because the good, beautiful and true longs to be known by us too.
For more see my YouTube channel or www.markvernon.com.
How can we find a way through conflicts in and around science? What about experts and simplifications, uncertainties and advice, control and its consequences? Tensions are only going to get worse as the fallout and impact of Covid becomes clearer.
In this talk, I consider two notions of power, as explored in the New Testament: dunamis, which might be thought of grace and space power or the power of love; and exousia, which is the power exercised by authorities and might be thought of as command and control power.
This sense of the dynamics of love and power can illuminate the communication of science, across five areas:
- reductive science and the bigger picture
- scientists as provocateurs and experts
- issues of cause and correlation
- science, impact and hidden agendas
- the status of science and conspiracy theories
For an academic article on some of the issues raised, have a look at my piece in Rethinking Biology (Eds Michael Reiss, Fraser Watts & Harris Wiseman), "The Public Understanding of Biology: a journalist’s perspective", online here - https://www.markvernon.com/rethinking-biology
William Blake died in the apartment he shared with Catherine Blake on Sunday 12 August 1827.
A contemporary letter reports: "He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven."
3 Fountain Court is now part of the Savoy complex, which I visited to contemplate how Blake can help us see death through the eyes of Ulro, Generation, Beulah and Eternity.
For more about the work of Mark Vernon see www.markvernon.com
Rupert Spira and I met for a second conversation, beginning with one of William Blake's great exclamations of nondual awareness:
“Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One”
We discussed the meanings of suffering and death that feel so needed and neglected in our times; different possibilities for the experience of time and the value of disagreement, similarly overlooked; the role of the erotic, play and the imagination on this path; and the reality of angels and the guidance of myths.
1:39 The presence of nondualism today
3:30 The meaning of suffering
16:59 The true nature of death
23:39 A different experience of time: Chronos, Kairos, Eternity
36:06 The drivers of consumption and desiring heaven on earth
42:29 The value of disagreement
45:59 The erotic, play and standing in love
53:43 The expansive value of the imagination
1:02:54 Messages, angels and hierarchies
1:14:36 Myths and crafts as guides
For more about Rupert Spira see - https://rupertspira.com
For more about Mark Vernon see - https://www.markvernon.com
Our first conversation is online here - https://youtu.be/x0SfOFPCPgk
William Blake used his infernal methods subtly to critique Christmas via his illustrations to Milton's ode, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. He sought to reveal how its message of eternity is distorted by worldly vision.
Blake objected to the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, of the stable. He pushed against the humble child, pointing out that Jesus disobeyed and dismayed his parents, not in rebellion, but because his vision was divine.
Blake writes in The Everlasting Gospel:
"If Moral Virtue was Christianity
Christs Pretensions were all Vanity
The Moral Christian is the Cause
Of the Unbeliever & his Laws
For what is Antichrist but those
Who against Sinners Heaven close."
This meditation ponders what Blake objected to, how it applies now, and the nature of his inspired sense of Jesus the divine imagination.
In Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, he implores:
"“Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One."
1:16 Why is Blake wary of Christmas
3:35 Nativity traps: Jesus is born and instantly forgotten
10:05 Shepherds see: the place for divine vision
12:32 How the infinite is enclosed
15:10 How the passions are lost
17:02 How the overthrow of darkness is missed
19:28 The illusory peace of repressed Christianity
21:41 Blake’s Christmas: Was Jesus gentle?
23:35 Blake’s Christianity: overcoming sin or opening paradise?
25:30 Blake’s imperative: rejecting the distant God, separated by sin
26:05 Blake’s Antichrist: Christianity and the wastes of moral law
27:00 “I am not a God afar off. Within your bosoms I reside”
28:50 Knowing Eden/Eternity, transcending Beulah
32:45 Knowing fourfold vision: “realities of intellect, passions emanate, eternal glory”
Our times are marked by divides that will remain, possibly deepen. Has the Divine Comedy anything meaningful to offer a riven state?
For more thoughts on Dante, and a guide to the Divine Comedy, have a dig around my YouTube channel or website - https://www.markvernon.com
Some talk about God too much. Others are said to be too embarrassed ever to do so. I think much of the pickle around God-talk arises from a fundamental, modern mistake. God is not an object to be proven, evidenced or possessed. God is the subjectivity of existence itself - beyond talk, though talk we must do, because talk too is already in God.
I muse on what that might mean, not least when it comes to talking about God.
01:11 Why the religiously wary seem religiously alive
02:40 The mistake of trying to prove God’s existence
05:00 The mistake of going by religious success
06:12 The mistake of presuming a gap between God and humanity
07:11 The mistake of treating religions as complete
08:36 The mistake of separating grace and nature
11:17 Beyond peak experiences to the existence itself
13:15 Beyond praying to God and God as an object in religious settings
16:11 Beyond human and divine relationality
17:59 On the lovely limits of talking about God
23:00 On reason as a guide, reflection as discernment
24:34 On divine union and the fundamentals of existence
28:30 On the meaning of love
30:06 How to talk of God in God and the greatest question
33:49 Why we don’t need anything though there’s everything to know
35:35 The nature of true apologetics
36:36 The nature of “religio”
39:25 Teacherly authority and sages
42:20 Direct presence and the spiritual senses
44:15 Spotting when God becomes an object again
46:54 There are many revelations not one true product
49:17 Christianity beyond Christianity and sensing a future
55:12 The good news and the question not of if but how
I'm talking about an essay that can be found online at the Perspectiva website - https://systems-souls-society.com/spiritual-intelligence-what-it-is-why-its-needed-how-it-might-return/
I much enjoyed the conversation with Hetta Howes, Matthew Sweet and Francesca Stavrakopoulou on God: An Anatomy. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00114py).
We had a good conversation over profound differences, which I develop further here. I think they matter, not just as an academic spat, in this case about God, embodiment and Plato. But because understanding the Athenian right offers a path back to a participative, life-giving relationship with the cosmos.
Put it like this. “The cosmic body is the most beautiful and perfect,” Plato wrote at the end of the Timaeus. So why is it that so many academics presume he despised physicality, in favour of a dry world of abstractions, and what did he actually say?
01:05: Challenging the atheist agenda
01:53 How projections reveal reality and deities
04:33 Critiquing academic assumptions Plato
05:40 Why there are no such things as "Platonic abstractions”
09:34 Why Plato didn’t think the spiritual was immaterial
15:16 Why Plato didn't separate divine and mortal life
17:13 Christianity’s problem with erotic energy
23:38 Who’s to blame for distorting Plato
Few have explored the nature of being human more directly than Charles Foster. He writes about his experiences in the wild in his books, Being A Beast and, most recently, Being A Human, raising profound questions about our awareness of the natural world in the past, present and future.
The evolving nature of our perceptions of ourselves and the cosmos is also close to the work of Mark Vernon, both as a psychotherapist and writer. Are we Homo sapiens, narrans, scientificus, ignorans, noeticus - or simply loquens, never sure what we are talking about?
In this conversation, Mark and Charles explore what the Palaeolithic might inspire in us today, how big histories of humanity get so much wrong, and the consciousness that could be needed for the future.
For more on Charles' work see - https://www.charlesfoster.co.uk
For more on Mark's work see - https://www.markvernon.com
The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, is currently out of fashion. The British poet and artist, William Blake, is not, though he is rarely well understood. So what might they have to say to our times?
Toynbee strove to understand the inner as well as outer processes of history, developing a theory he called etherialisation. Blake appreciated the destructive power of the dark, Satanic mills, with their loss of divine imagination.
Bring them together, and the two perspectives are remarkably illuminating in terms of both understanding and responding to now.
0:32 Toynbee and the inner life of history
1:52 Roman roads and the emergence of Christianity
4:35 Dante as an example of the exile who renews
6:28 The axial figures and civilisational change
8:24 Today and the allure of technological fixes
9:50 Beyond western Christianity and materialist philosophy
12:27 The guidance of Dante and William Blake
14:41 Golgonooza, Los and facing the Furnaces of affliction
17:01 Destruction and the renewal of inner vision
18:57 History, virtue and relating again to nature
20:47 Mistakes and forgiveness: rebuilding inner wisdom
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow does a great job at debunking the big histories of figures like Noah Yuval Harari and Stephen Pinker, but at a cost that ultimately undermines their argument.
In this discussion and critique of a wonderfully disruptive book, I outline their case and some of the evidence, argue that they are implicitly advocating a state of nature myth, based on reason not Eden or violence, and suggest that this, unwittingly, recolonises the past with modern secular reason.
But it’s a book very much worth engaging with!
0:44 Why they are right about retelling our back story.
4:50 Why they are right about emerging evidence for its endless complexity.
10:44 Tasters of the alternative Homo sapiens prehistory they tell.
18:20 And yet, what is crucially missing in their retelling.
28:22 How it recolonises the past with notions of secular reason, freedom and will.
33:19 The first cities as ritual sites and what that says about consciousness.
37:33 Why a demythologised past isn’t enough for our future.
Our carbon consuming culture has completely internalised the belief "that the world is made up of dead stuff plus active minds and acquisitive wills,” wrote Rowan Williams in This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook.
We have forgotten the spiritual intelligence that knows how to align with the natural intelligence embodied in the living world.
To escape the toxicity of this mindset, Williams continues, will require radical change at the level of lifestyle and industry, yes. But more profoundly, it will demand that we ask again what is it to be human.
In this reflection, I consider 5 principles that can be practices and which might, in time, rediscover an older consciousness made new.
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How comedy embraces tragedy, in the sense that there is a good that will not let us go, discovered through love.
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How simplicity embraces complexity, not by being simplistic, but by seeing sub specie aeternitatis.
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How ecology is wider than the machine, bringing back awareness of the all that's beyond us all.
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How life is fundamentally abundant and generous, not scarce and priced.
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How sacred myths can see beyond scientific explanations, rebalancing the celestial and terrestrial.
The label “gnostic” is used to recommend and condemn. So what is, and what was, Gnosticism?
This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, takes a lead from a series of fascinating essays exploring the ancient movement and its modern forms by the philosopher, David Bentley Hart.
Gnosticism was originally a set of cosmologies which shared the sense that the created order was blocked from the celestial spheres by angelic and demonic powers.
It was remarkably widespread amongst early Christians of all kinds. They turned to Christ, in the hope of redemption or escape. Nowadays, it is used in different ways, often to express a sense of yearning or hope.
As Rupert and Mark discuss, gnosticism may offer the promise of a re-enchanted cosmos, freed from the Archons of the machine and mammon. Properly understood, it might offer a key for our times.
Two of the essays written by David Bentley Hart are available without subscribing to Substack.
https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/the-gnostic-turn
https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/imprisoned
For more dialogues see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks
What is the direct path of Advaita Vedanta and why is it significant for so many now? How is it found across traditions, including within Christianity? Why might it matter to us today, collectively as well as individually? What are its links to psychotherapy, individuality, freedom, God?
Mark Vernon talks with Rupert Spira about these questions and more.
0:34 What is the direct path and why is it of significance now?
13:59 If awareness of awareness is the start, what happens next?
17:20 Why might this matter socially as well as individually?
23:27 What is the relationship between the direct path and psychotherapy?
30:35 How does nondual show up in Christianty? What does the death and resurrection of Jesus mean?
41:55 How might the Trinity express nondual life?
50:47 How does this renew our experience of individuality?
53:45 Nondualism and a positive engagement with creation and the world.
1:10:38 Lessons from Dante’s journey into Paradise as a model of nondual expansion.
1:20:34 Growth after the recognition of our true being.
1:22:30 Goals after the recognition of true being.
1:25:08 The spontaneity of teaching.
1:27:47 Wrapping and further information.
For more about Rupert - https://rupertspira.com
For more about Mark - https://rupertspira.com
Meditation, yoga, vegetarianism. Eastern practices have become a feature of western life. But what do we learn from them?
This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, is prompted by a sense that the western way of life is being challenged, if not facing a full-on crisis.
As Rowan Williams puts it in his new book, Looking East In Winter, climate change and environmental degradation are leading to a sense of needing not a programme or an ideology but an epiphany, which might renew our perception of reality.
They discuss how eastern Christianity, as well as traditions in India, are based on participating with life and emphasise the cultivation of consciousness. They ask how this relates to insights such as the Christian Trinity and movements such as romanticism, as well as the effects of mechanistic science, which itself grew out of western religious perceptions.
For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.markvernon.com/talks
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
Rowan Williams has written another hugely significant book, one ripe with meaning for now.
In this talk, I unpack its themes of non-dualism and Trinitarian life, eros and kenosis, politics and justice, seeing truthfully and destroying the world.
0:39 Addressing the Anthropocene
1:28 The need for an epiphany
2:52 What is our key problem?
4:32 Nondual non-identity
7:12 Trinitarian life
9:05 The erotic life of the divine
13:30 True kenosis and ecstasy
17:42 The truth of ourselves
20:49 Watchfulness, angelic awareness, mindfulness
23:39 Apatheia and anger
25:19 Being in the world, not of the world
28:20 The artist and philosopher
29:43 The gift of wisdom and remedying ignorance
30:27 Rationality and relating
31:55 Being natural
33:11 A new solidarity and Maria Skobtsova
34:32 A new apologetics
35:25 A new politics and sense of justice
38:48 Hospitality as a way of life
39:10 Freedom and fulfilment
40:39 Divinization and the future
For more on Mark Vernon, see www.markvernon.com
The standard big history of human evolution, exemplified in Yuval Noah Harari's bestseller Sapiens, sees religion and spirituality as a byproduct of survival, at best a necessary fiction.
But new science is telling a different story. Research done by Robin Dunbar, Agustin Fuentes, Robert Bellah and others is showing how engaging with invisible worlds and supernatural vitalities is an ancient and central aspect of Homo culture, which took off with the emergence of Homo sapiens.
Considering matters from Neanderthal art to altered states of mind, this vlog tells that story and asks why it matters today.
You might also enjoy my essay - https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence
For more about Mark - https://www.markvernon.com
I've notice a tendency to downplay the divine element in accounts of William Blake, and to reduce his understanding of the imagination to a human artefact, from its true status as a supernatural capacity that he knew.
In this talk I consider 5 ways in which this can be resisted:
- Blake's insistence that "there is no natural religion".
- Blake's affirmation that “God becomes as we are that we may become as he is”.
- His understanding that, “The desire of man is infinite”, and without it, we consume the natural world.
- His realisation that even Eternal Death is transformed by Eternal Life.
- And his engagement with The Bhagavad Gita, which arguably not only inspired some of his own mythology but his clear absolute idealism and philosophy.
Covid has brought the reality of death into the centre of our lives, but what can we learn about death in response?
This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, is prompted by a sense that part of the anxiety arising from the pandemic is living in a culture that has forgotten how to know death in life.
Rupert outlines some recent work on the role of death in plant life, and how that is not only of biological interest but can be spiritually resourcing. They discuss how wisdom traditions don’t dissolve death but understand it as a process that leads to more life, and therefore to be embraced and undergone.
Both reflect on personal experiences of death and dying as well, in what they hope is a helpful as well as interesting conversation.
For more conversations see - https://www.markvernon.com/talks
An extended conversation that begins with thoughts on Owen Barfield, participation and the meaning crisis, Schopenhauer and Jung, moving through the state of modern physics, to the nature of evolution, the nature of mind at large, the role of dissociation and projections, and freedom.
For more on Bernardo's work see - https://www.bernardokastrup.com
For more on Mark's work see - https://www.markvernon.com
Running order:
3:18 Introducing Owen Barfield and representations
8:22 The modern mistaken and the meaning crisis
13:38 The paradox of increased knowledge and decreased meaning
17:25 Questioning uniformitarianism in physics and the laws of nature
26:11 Physics in the first person and fine tuning
28:42 Carlo Rovelli and relational quantum mechanics
36:07 Dante's vision, consciousness and modern cosmology
39:42 Panpsychism and stretching materialism
44:16 Is evolution driven only by survival and random mutations?
52:05 Science, intuition, evolution and participation
56:31 Aesthetics in nature
1:00:26 About mind at large and classical theism
1:06:21 Entering the medieval worldview
1:09:30 The becoming of creation and potentials are not nothing
1:13:31 Divine activity and different kinds of change
1:17:51 Polarities of being and becoming in God and nature
1:22:36 Respecting the polarities in us
1:24:10 Jung on the God of the Old Testament and New
1:26:13 A critique of Jung and the evolution of monotheism
1:29:30 Discussion of "The Origins and History of Consciousness" by Erich Neumann
1:31:26 On not discussing privatio boni (the pushback at Jung would be that the relationship between good and evil is asymmetrical, much like the relationship between hot and cold, say)
1:31:39 Introducing the role of dissociation
1:31:50 Other psychological phenomena in mind at large, in particular, projection
1:40:49 Projections connect with reality and the enriching role of alienation
1:46:20 Bewilderment as the pathway of return
1:49:25 Meaning in suffering
1:49:56 Freedom, physicalism and conscious inner life
1:58:50 Participation and co-creativity
2:01:20 The freedom of service
2:04:03 The Essentia Foundation
Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713) may be the greatest English philosopher you have never heard of. In the 18th century, he was said to be the most famous philosopher in Europe.
His ideas suffered in England, as those of his empiricist tutor, John Locke, took hold. But they inspired figures from William Blake to Adam Smith, and are, in my view, much needed now.
For more on St Giles House - https://www.stgileshouse.com
A short discussion of psychodynamic psychotherapy, talking about the experience of suffering, the ego, the past and present, and the future change as people move through three zones - which might be described as hell, purgatory and paradise.
For more see - www.markvernon.com.
Why do matters as seemingly unconnected as children’s stories and shamanic encounters feature talking animals?
This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, is prompted the book, Roland In Moonlight by David Bentley Hart. It relates long conversations between the Eastern Orthodox philosopher and his pet dog, generating fascinating thoughts on all sorts of liminal experiences, from telepathy to panpsychism.
How might a re-enchanted world appear to us in the future? What does that have to do with ancient perceptions and modern science? Rupert and Mark discuss matters from pets to symbiosis, and the way that the living world participates in divine life.
For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks
Modern Christianity, at least as expressed by the church, has become very confused about the afterlife.
So can our experience of life now, illuminated by wisdom traditions and modern science, offer a way into this perennial question?
I've written more fully about these things in my book, A Secret History of Christianity. See here - https://www.markvernon.com/consciousness
Death always brings subterranean assumptions and stresses to the surface, and the pass of Prince Philip is no exception.
The moment carries the weight of millennia, which is why it’s hard to navigate, though it can be better understood as part of the evolution of human consciousness, as Owen Barfield and others understood it.
The key test is the vision held about the future humanity.
I talk in particular about the two images in the episode artwork.
Could bliss be transmitted by a Happy Helmet? Are the fantasies of the super-wealthy secretly shaping our lives?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss a new novel, Double Blind, by Edward St Aubyn. It is a story of ideas, including issues previously explored in these dialogues, from the nature of consciousness and the revelations of psychedelics, to the missing heritability problem and the replication crisis.
St Aubyn has richly addressed our moment with its environmental and existential concerns. His characters explore matters of paramount important as they effect real lives. His book invites us to ask ourselves about the worldviews we hold and the ways in which our imaginations reach out for tomorrow.
For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks
Some reflections on the fascinating conversation between Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau:
- Maybe it's not how to be a Christian but to realise how you already are
- Why symbology, developmental maps and archetypes become as many rabbit holes
- That the beginning and ground matters as much as the end and theosis
- CS Lewis and what he never quite got from his friend, Owen Barfield
- The way hierarchies collapse into the unity of all things
- How Dante and Meister Eckhart in the western Christian tradition help
- And more!
The original conversation is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rAqVmZwqZM
More on A Secret History of Christianity here - https://www.markvernon.com/consciousness
For more on Dante see here - https://www.markvernon.com/dantes-divine-comedy
Iain McGilchrist and Rowan Williams were in dialogue on Friday 19th February 2021, a beautiful exchange that was sadly not recorded.
Here I offer some thoughts on it, particularly in the light of reflections offered by Matt Segall.
It concerns transcendence and immanence, being and becoming, eternity and processes in space and time - or to put it another way, the similarities and differences between the ontologies of Plato and AN Whitehead.
Matt's reflections are online here - https://youtu.be/znoNfagDeUo
The discussion of alternative worldviews, from various forms of materialism to types of idealism, has exploded in recent years, and the notion of panpsychism is in the middle of the debate.
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore the different types of panpsychism being proposed, from more conservative forms that are linked to materialism, to older types that have been advocated by figures from AN Whitehead to Aristotle.
They ask about the place of time and space in different views of reality, and tease out the connections to consciousness and eternity. Models including emergence and information theory rise, as well as the role of the brain, as they wonder about the direction in which this rich conversation is heading.
For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks
A friendly chat about the movie Soul, with me Pippa Evans and Jonathan Rowson.
Does Pixar's latest movie have a message we should 'get', or is the most important thing to get about the movie that there is really nothing to get? In what way might it place our plans for our lives in perspective? Does it make it any clearer what 'the soul' is?
We are colleagues at Perspectiva, a group seeking perspectives on systems, souls and society. https://systems-souls-society.com/
For more on Pippa http://www.pippaevans.com/
For more on Jonathan https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Rowson.
We naturally talk about seeking the light at the end of the tunnel, or hoping to be enlightened. But are such phrases that reference light more than metaphors?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore how light is both physical and spiritual, and note the remarkable harmony between scientific and mythical ways of exploring light.
They ask about the links between light and intelligence, as discussed by figures from Plato to Dante, as well as how our inner lives, say when we dream, include light. Rupert reflects on his time in the ashram of Bede Griffiths, and Mark recalls remarks made by Roger Penrose.
It turns out that the way we talk about the experience of light is hugely suggestive of the nature of reality. There are good reasons light is so closely associated with the divine.
For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks
Artificial intelligence is rarely out of the news. But what is it?
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon take a lead from the breakthrough by Google in the prediction of protein folding, which Rupert has studied for decades.
Whether this success reveals any deeper understanding of nature leads to a discussion of different types of intelligence, such as emotional and spiritual. They consider what is lost when AI dominates the imagination, and obscures aspects of reality that are embodied, and those that reach beyond, such as pure consciousness.
For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks
I heard Rhonda Byrne talking with Rupert Spira and wondered what on earth they might have in common. The Law of Attraction is simply an error in nondualism, identifying with thoughts rather than awareness. But The Greatest Secret offers a very different philosophy to The Secret. In my view, Byrne confuses them to some degree in her new book, though that can in itself be illuminating. There is a written version of this talk, which develops this teasing out the differences, at www.markvernon.com.
Pixar’s animation genius brings us, Soul, a film about the quest for meaning and music. I think it wittily subverts many common nostrums about happiness and fulfilment, purpose and pleasure, by fearlessly tackling the metaphysical as well as the mundane. A written version of this talk can be found at www.markvernon.com.
Owen Barfield agreed with the other Inklings, like JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, that the life of Jesus marked a pivot point in history. But he had a particularly powerful way of capturing the truth…
Reading from History in English Words by Owen Barfield.
For more on his understanding of Christianity, the evolution of consciousness, and genius worldview, see www.markvernon.com.