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.

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 often, it leads to reactionary nationalism, fundamentalism in religion, hedonism and sentimentality, and modes of inner healing that offer exaggerated experience as a proxy for transformation.

William Blake spotted this tendency. He realised that Romanticism must come of age, to borrow the expression of Owen Barfield, by understanding the imagination as a way of knowing of and growing into the fundamentals of existence. 

In this talk, delivered to the Centre for the Study of Platonism at the University of Cambridge, I explore how Blake conveyed the crucial awareness that might redeem the tragedy of Romanticism, so damaging alive in the modern world.

For more on Mark, and his book about Blake, "Awake!", see www.markvernon.com

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 imagination as seen through Owen Barfield — the Oxford Inkling and close companion of C.S. Lewis.

You can find out more about Paul via his website - www.paulwilkinson.co.uk

You can find out more about Mark via his website - www.markvernon.com

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’, and religion researcher, Esmé Partridge, talk in a masterclass, hosted by Unherd in London, on the meaning and mythos of Blake.

0:00 What world Blake was responding to
2:15 What did Blake mean by Newton’s sleep?
5:28 How did Blake see the natural world?
8:30 Why did Blake react against the Christianity of his day?
11:50 Understanding “The Garden of Love”
13:50 Understanding “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
16:50 Blake against the ills of today: sentimentality and unforgivingness
18:40 The road of excess and erotic desire
21:47 Navigating the contrary tensions of life
25:15 Blake’s mythological figures
29:30 What about Los and Jerusalem?
32:30 What about Blake’s view of politics and revolution?
36:50 How do you cleanse the doors of perception?
40:20 So in what way was Blake Christian?
43:46 How did William and Catherine support themselves?
46:52 How do we distinguish between imagination and fantasy?
49:51 How can Blake be helpful to modern psychology?
52:30 How can Blake help us reach for the eternal?
56:10 How can Blake bring meaning to life?
57:30 What would Blake make of Nietzsche?
1:00:00 What would Blake make of Spinoza?
1:01:30 Can we diagnose Blake and his visions?
1:03:20 What about Blake and cultural Christianity today?
1:05:30 What did Blake make about violence?
1:07:43 Can you say more about Catherine Blake?
1:09:30 Blake’s wit about his visions
1:10:54 Can you comment on Blake and Englishness?

“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 and objective, which Guite calls “epistemological apartheid”, is false and has terrible consequences for human beings, personally and politically. They argue that theology needs a revival of the imagination as the way we apprehend truths that put the fire into rational comprehension.

For more on Mark’s book, “Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination” see www.markvernon.com

For more on Malcolm Guite see https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com

0:00 Ways of knowing
01:46 Don't medicalise Blake!
3:30 The senses are inlets of soul
5:25 A fundamental, false division
12:07 Imagination makes real not makes up
16:35 Demystifying the imagination
20:48 Eternity in the present and particular
26:58 Reason the bound of energy: Geoffrey Hill on Blake
32:09 Blake's aphoristic philosophy
33:20 The renewal of Christianity
42:56 The generative teaching of Jesus 
44:46 Energy and the Holy Spirit: Barfield on Blake
48:17 Albion crucifies the imagination
54:21 Contraries that create not conflict
58:29 Selfless perception

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 understanding of the imagination has contracted in recent times, though also how modern science is a remarkable exercise in the imagination. They consider matters from how the Platonic notion of ideas relates to cosmic and evolutionary novelty, to whether angels can be said to be imaginative and creative. 

Mark’s new book is "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination". For more information see https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination.

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 understanding of the imagination has contracted in recent times, though also how modern science is a remarkable exercise in the imagination. They consider matters from how the Platonic notion of ideas relates to cosmic and evolutionary novelty, to whether angels can be said to be imaginative and creative. 

Mark’s new book is "Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination". For more information see https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination.

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

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.jasonwhittaker.co.uk
For more on Awake! and Mark’s work see - www.markvernon.com

0:00 Introductions
1:36 How Blake speaks to us
5:35 Mystic or visionary?
7:45 On not psychologising Blake
9:40 Reading Blake’s poetry
11:54 Blake as a prophet of now
15:40 Understanding Blake’s characters
19:20 The significance of the imagination in Blake
23:12 Blake and God
27:03 Why deism matters
32:55 Infinite perception
37:46 Against the church
43:05 Dialogues and the expansion of perception

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 Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too.”

We should care about what Blake called “single vision and Newton’s sleep”. The antidote is to reestablish a relationship with presence. Poetry and imagery evoke the lived moment of experiencing and the fluid dynamics of that perception. Regain contact with that, regain contact with life.
This is the promise of Blake and others.

For more on Mark’s book, Awake!, and more of his work see - www.markvernon.com