Mark Vernon - Talks and Thoughts
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
Episodes
158 episodes
All Things Are Full Of Gods by David Bentley Hart. A summary and discussion
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 pos...
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29:33
How does memory work? A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake
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 ...
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39:32
0:00 / 19:22 What did Socrates teach? Or why you only understand Plato if he is decolonised
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 tal...
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19:22
To see a world in a grain of sand. Poetry & philosophy for a civilisation in distress. A conversation with Valentin Gerlier
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...
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49:50
Hallam v the State, and free speech. The Just Stop Oil desecrations are calling to our humanity
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 misse...
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26:52
Chance and accidents, indeterminism and prayer. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake
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 Sheldra...
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38:19
Cultural Christianity kills. Taking Blake's Christianity seriously. William on Jesus
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 underst...
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51:06
Trans activism, transhumanising, economic transition. Proxies for vision & the lost soul of politics
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...
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17:40
Cut off in the literal age. Owen Barfield & Carl Jung on alienation and political disillusionment
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 B...
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18:47
To Generalise is to be an Idiot. William Blake on politics, disillusionment and 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 ...
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13:25
God, sexuality & the psyche. CS Lewis and Sigmund Freud tabletalk. Thoughts on Freud’s Last Session
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 re...
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22:49
Rendering to Caesar. Jesus on politics and the kingdom that is within
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 Aristo...
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13:31
The fullness of life. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake
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 t...
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34:29
Ethics and the failure of politics, or why ethics is part of the problem. A dispatch from Athens
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 fac...
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12:57
Beauty and the failure of politics. An election dispatch from ancient Athens
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 fac...
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11:40
Force Fields. Behind the fog of maths. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake
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 ...
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37:38
The enchanted vision. An invitation to read about love
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
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5:27
Matter is frozen light. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon
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 idea...
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40:07
Whose revival? Which Christianity? CS Lewis & Owen Barfield on the renewed interest of belief in God
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...
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41:05
Strangeness is the new real. Martin Shaw & Mark Vernon in conversation
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-Ih5xKlVWqSo it was great to talk again about what's bee...
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1:14:26
Christspiracy. The documentary's claims about Jesus & Christianity put to the test, w Kameron Waters
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 t...
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1:34:11
The Nature of Energy. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon
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...
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36:31
Participation renewed. Discussing The Riddle of the Sphinx, new essays from Owen Barfield
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 discu...
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1:20:51
Apocalypse? It's now! Good news & secular salvation, climate crisis & time. With Gunnar Gjermundsen
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 w...
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1:23:09
Practicing paradise, or refusing wretchedness in Lent
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...
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7:46