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...
Dec 19, 2025•1 hr 1 min
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 sci...
Nov 23, 2025•33 min
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.
Nov 20, 2025•47 min
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 ofte...
Nov 14, 2025•46 min
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 imaginatio...
Oct 27, 2025•36 min
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’, ...
Oct 27, 2025•1 hr 14 min
“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 an...
Sep 27, 2025•1 hr 2 min
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 und...
Sep 24, 2025•35 min
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
Sep 01, 2025•35 min
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.ja...
Aug 24, 2025•44 min
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 Part...
Aug 23, 2025•17 min
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.
Aug 04, 2025•1 hr 29 min
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 ...
Jul 26, 2025•47 min
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 perc...
Jul 15, 2025•43 min
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 en...
Jul 06, 2025•54 min
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 Bla...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 1 min
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 emb...
Jun 13, 2025•55 min
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”.
Jun 12, 2025•4 min
A taste of Blake’s genius and what he might mean for us. Celebrating the release of "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination" by Mark Vernon. The full countdown: 10. I’ll sing to you to this soft lute, and shew you all alive The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy. 9. I give you the end of a golden string; Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall. 8. Monos ho Jesus 7. The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternit...
Jun 12, 2025•4 min
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...
Jun 08, 2025•27 min
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 La...
Jun 01, 2025•41 min
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 messi...
May 25, 2025•43 min
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...
May 20, 2025•42 min
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...
May 17, 2025•25 min
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 t...
May 09, 2025•43 min
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...
Apr 23, 2025•34 min
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.
Apr 20, 2025•19 min
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...
Apr 20, 2025•28 min
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...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 32 min
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...
Mar 05, 2025•57 min
