Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

Mark Vernon

200 episodes

2 weeks ago

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 mov...

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Religion & Spirituality

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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 mov...

Show more...

Religion & Spirituality

Episodes (20/200)

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

New Born Wonder. Jesus, Owen Barfield, William Blake

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 mov...

2 weeks ago

1 hour

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 hu...

1 month ago

32 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

Tantric Blake. The magic and the mysticism of William Blake

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.

1 month ago

46 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 o...

1 month ago

46 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 imagin...

2 months ago

36 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 t...

2 months ago

1 hour 14 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

“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 s...

3 months ago

1 hour 1 minute

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

The Wisdom of the Imagination. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

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 ...

3 months ago

34 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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

4 months ago

35 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 - w...

4 months ago

44 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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. I...

4 months ago

17 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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.

5 months ago

1 hour 29 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 ...

5 months ago

47 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 dail...

5 months ago

42 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 o...

6 months ago

54 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 o...

6 months ago

1 hour

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

How to Live like William Blake!

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 sho...

6 months ago

55 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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”.

6 months ago

3 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

Top 10 William Blake quotes! The full countdown

A taste of Blake’s genius and what he might mean for us. Celebrating the release of "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination" by Mark Vernon. The full countdown: 10. I’ll sing to you to this soft lute, and shew you all alive The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy. 9. I give you the end of a golden string; Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall. 8. Monos ho Jesus 7....

6 months ago

3 minutes

Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

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

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 ...

7 months ago

26 minutes