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 transhumanis...
Feb 14, 2025•1 hr 19 min
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....
Jan 29, 2025•35 min
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 ...
Jan 23, 2025•1 hr 17 min
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 ...
Jan 17, 2025•1 hr 23 min
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 son...
Jan 11, 2025•30 min
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 correc...
Dec 14, 2024•33 min
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....
Dec 06, 2024•39 min
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 ...
Nov 29, 2024•12 min
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 ot...
Nov 21, 2024•32 min
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 pe...
Nov 01, 2024•1 hr 22 min
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, ...
Oct 25, 2024•30 min
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?
Oct 22, 2024•35 min
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 il...
Oct 06, 2024•30 min
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 fiel...
Sep 16, 2024•40 min
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 deve...
Aug 26, 2024•19 min
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 t...
Aug 09, 2024•50 min
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 archi...
Jul 21, 2024•27 min
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 Boe...
Jul 18, 2024•38 min
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 q...
Jul 04, 2024•51 min
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 dra...
Jul 03, 2024•18 min
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...
Jun 25, 2024•19 min
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. Acc...
Jun 21, 2024•13 min
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...
Jun 12, 2024•23 min
I've been thinking about politics and disillusionment that seems most characteristic of now, in the West at least, and thinking about the prepolitcal - what politics needs to work well. I've thought about Plato on beauty and Aristotle on ethics in previous posts. Now a third guide, Jesus on... which isn't immediately easy to say. And that's the point. Some would say that Jesus and politics is easy to define. - a preference for the poor - the prosperity gospel - or Christian exceptionalism and op...
Jun 07, 2024•14 min
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...
Jun 07, 2024•34 min
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 a...
May 31, 2024•13 min
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 highli...
May 31, 2024•12 min
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 Ar...
May 09, 2024•38 min
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
Apr 19, 2024•5 min
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. T...
Apr 09, 2024•40 min
