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 corrective to the way Christianity and indeed Christmas is usually articulated today. Where does this birth take place? Not in Bethlehem, not in a stable, not around 4BC, not even from Mary, but primarily “in the very purest, loftiest, subtlest part that the soul is capable of”.
Only, is this itself not only too rarefied a form of Christianity, but one inadequate to our times, in denial of moral imperatives or simply a gospel of spiritual bypassing?
In fact, precisely the opposite is the case. Without that birth of the Word in the soul, Christianity’s moral meaning is lost, its injunctions become pathways to demoralisation, with the happiness promised transitory or elusive.
Eckhart, therefore, has crucial things to say to a church dedicated to filling people up with experiences and demands, as well as a time keen on practices that miss the stillness and silence he argues is fundamental.
Rather, alongside the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and Mother Julian, Eckhart preaches the direct and easy path, that depends not on our efforts but on a capacity to not know and stay before the ground from which the Word is born.
Unity with God is the purpose and promise of life - the secret that I feel is regularly absent in presentations of Christianity, though so much sought and needed.

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. But the case can be made that science needs to revisit the notion of forms. Rupert’s own work draws much from that imperative. 
The existence of forms also matters in terms of explaining our relationship to others and the world around us. If the cosmos is more mind-like than matter-like than that means our sense of participation and communion is real. 
Indeed, it might be said that when we study and contemplate, our minds meet the intelligence implicit in all things, which itself arises from the divine intelligence that shapes existence itself.

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 about Blake's view of God. And then read the article for why he thought non-theistic humanisms just won't do! 

You can download VALA here - https://blakesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/VALA-5.pdf
My piece is entitled, "Enemies of the Human Race".

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 other contexts as well.

That can conceal deviant behaviour but is also a failure to understanding the nature of gospel, in my view.

In these thoughts, I explore how in mystical Christian traditions, as well as those with an interest in inner life and the path to God, the erotic is understood as a key mode of awakening and energy. For if sex is about wanting to have and be had by another, that is but a reflection of the yearning to be one with God, the true promise of the gospel: “oneing” with the divine, as Mother Julian and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing put it.

I turn to the insights of Plato, Origen, Dante and William Blake to draw out these themes. And also consider the parables of Jesus and his encounters with various individuals in the gospels as expressions of this deeper yearning, which he seems to have released in them and which might be foster in us, too - with discernment, honesty and wisdom.

0:00 My experience of Christian evangelical camps
2:50 Sex as a symptom of erotic desire for God
6:05 Plato’s insights about the body and why that is discarded
11:09 Origen on God’s kisses
14:09 The mystics understanding of “Onening”
15:05 Dante’s transformation of his desire for Beatrice
17:05 Blake on the erotic discovery that all things are holy
21:05 The erotic in the gospels and the notion of philia
21:40 Jesus’s encounters and his parables as desire for God
29:26 The abuse crises call for a lost Christianity

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 people today and how the withdrawal of faith in contemporary culture may be a precursor to a rediscovery. They ask about the different styles of Christianity that are emerging amongst the so-called New Christians and how to discern the spirits.

Martin discusses the way in which his quest has not ceased but become more focused, transformed by unexpected depths. Mark asks about living in modern times and resisting the temptation to invoke a negative energy, but instead .

They explore the teaching of Jesus and being in the world whilst not wholly of it, as well as subversive acts of beauty that bring light and levity to the gravity of the moment.

For more on Martin Shaw see - http://drmartinshaw.com/
For more on Mark Vernon see - https://www.markvernon.com/

00:00 The unfolding of Martin's experience
02:32 The Skin-Boat gathering
06:44 Why Christianity puts people off
10:50 Understanding participation
15:07 Beauty and pinpricks of eternity
20:57 Being in the world and not of if
26:51 Political and spiritual power
32:04 What are you going to stand for
36:50 Finite life and infinite desire
40:40 Deepening the quest not ending it
41:39 The paths that lead to God
44:41 The centrality of devotion
49:01 Losing life to find it
55:47 Theosis in the western tradition
01:00:01 Mysticism and the Christianity of tomorrow
01:05:25 Injecting joy into the machine
01:10:10 The love that sees over horizons
01:15:17 Why Jesus stunned people
01:20:21 Dialogue and yearning for God

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, and the reality we know most immediately and best, namely our own lives and consciousness. 
The discussion ranges over a range of matters, from the growth of embryos to the attractive nature of gravity and the tendency towards order and beauty. An implication of the presence of purpose in nature and minds is a need to rethink phenomena such as matter and power. And there is an obvious reason that purpose keeps reappearing in scientific accounts, namely that purposes are present in all things. 
Mark's discussion of David Bentley Hart’s book, All Things Are Full Of Gods, mentioned in the discussion can be found as an early post on this podcast.

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?

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 illusion, or that consciousness doesn’t really exist at all; it is a careful examination of everything from eliminativism to integrated information theory, from the ideas of Daniel Dennett to those of Philip Goff.

Personally, I also hugely valued the book because it is, in a way, therapeutic. A nihilist cosmos has become default and it is not only intolerable to live in, it is gaslighting. A thought or experience is only possible because we have capacities for attention and intention, desire and perception, communication and participation - and following those qualities through, leads to the realisation that consciousness is not born in us, but that we are born in consciousness.

As on of his characters, Psyche, puts it: the mind’s “transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God.”

David Bentley Hart’s repeated point, as his interlocutors propose and take apart the materialist explanations, is that everything we might experience explodes with meanings. That is what mind does, in response to the life within which it is immersed.

That said, the book ends on a downbeat note. Psyche hopes the we humans “might yet learn to know themselves in a new way as spiritual beings immersed in a world of spirit, rather than machines of consumption inhabiting a machine of production, and remember that which lies deepest within themselves: living mind, the divine ground of consciousness and life, participating in an infinite act of thought and communication, dwelling in a universe full of gods and full of God.” The book is, of course, an invitation and nudge to do so.

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 fields, within which all self-organising systems dwell. They also ask about Indian ideas of memory and how that is related to ideas about reincarnation and the possibility that everything that exists lives, in some way, in the memory of God.

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 development - the early ones being close to the historical Socrates, the middle ones being the mature Plato, the late ones being the disillusioned Plato. Similarly, Socrates did not seek definitions.

The irony, given the sensitivity to this charge often from philosophers who misread Plato, is that this is a colonial reading of Plato. Scholars like Julia Annas have shown that reading Plato changed during the period of the British empire, when texts like Plato’s Republic came to be treated as a manifesto for young minds in public schools being preparing to rule the world. 

Before that, Plato Plato was understood not to have a message but instead a path. Roughly speaking, the aporetic dialogues - the ones that end in radical uncertainty - offer a preparation in the form of an undoing. Then, next, into that space, the visionary dialogues speak. I'm indebted to the scholar Sara Ahbel-Rappe for so clearly stating that Socrates stands for a mode of being, thereby imparting a taste for it, stirring a love of it. 

Socrates can't give that presence, because it is already within you. This awareness actually already belongs to us, and we sense a distant yearning for it because of feeling separate from it, through ignorance or forgetting. The way back is to clear the space that makes us more ready to know it once more.

This is the meaning of the message Socrates received from the Delphic oracle: knowing yourself means knowing yourself, at base, to know nothing because all your theories or assumptions or certainties will turn out to be limited or straightforwardly wrong. Take that on board and then, regarding yourself as poor, come to know the richness of life, which is not eudaimonistic but rather theotic: a participation by contemplation, or theoria, in God.

That divine end, stressing the inadequacy of an isolated sense of our humanity, must be the fundamental reason why Plato is so widely dissed. He ready does offend, though in Socrates saw why that disquiet is so wonderfully worth undergoing.