Category: Blog

On the eve of the U.S. release of AWAKE! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, a conversation with author, Mark Vernon. What inspired you to write Awake! and focus on William Blake’s imagination as a central theme? ​Blake is widely loved but not so widely understood and, in my view, also regularly misunderstood… Continue reading Energy is the Only Life! QnA with Mark Vernon

An audio version of this talk is at my podcast, Inner Life, available via podcast feeds. 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… Continue reading William Blake’s spiritual analysis of our times. A conversation with Jason Whittaker and Mark Vernon

Why is the mechanical view of reality so strong? Why does billiard-ball atomism remain the default popular metaphysics? Similarly, why the pervasive hold of the equally reductive and scientifically passé idea that genes encode organisms? After all, philosophers and scientists have been stressing the error for decades and more. New essay at my Substack, A… Continue reading Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race. William Blake and the remarkable persistence of reductive materialism

How does poetry work? What does the poetic release in us? My favourite theory comes from Owen Barfield, the great friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. He has a proposal about the magic of poesy and it has to do with the energy of words. A new essay at my Substack, A Golden String.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Thus wrote William Blake, making the doors of perception one his best known metaphors. Jim Morrison named a band after it, Aldous Huxley a book, and nowadays it is cited in contexts ranging from game theory to psychedelics.… Continue reading Cleanse the Doors of Perception! But what did William Blake mean?

Thinking about the way that AI dazzles and misenchants us is crucial, given the runaway fears about the presumed superintelligence of tomorrow. For intelligence is not about calculation but comprehension, not about silicon power but the capacities we have for being present to imagination, intuition, inspiration. Become alert to the way the material imagination forges… Continue reading Misenchantment and the dazzle of AI. Intelligence remembered, with the help of William Blake

The talk can be downloaded here. 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… Continue reading William Blake and the Power of the Imagination. A talk at L’Abri

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,… Continue reading What is really known about consciousness? A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

An audio version of this talk is at my podcast, Inner Life, available via podcast feeds. 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… Continue reading Awake! William Blake and the Power of Imagination. A conversation with Jane Clark and Nikos Yiangou

A new essay at my Substack, A Golden String.