Prayer, alongside meditation, is an integral part of religious traditions. God can be prayed to but also saints and angels. 

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert and Mark ask whether and why prayer is not widely discussed, how prayer can be practiced, and what prayer might be. 

They share personal practices of prayer and explore the agency of angels and saints. They ask about the entities that people report encountering when using psychedelics, alongside other questions such as how to pray for people and what can be expected from prayer. 

The desire to pray seems to be an almost universal human impulse. Much more might be made of it.

For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks

Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon discuss these two dynamics of projection. Transference and countertransference have become core to psychoanalysis, though Freud and others were initially very wary of them. So what are the limits to using the feelings that fill a therapy room? 

How can the set-up of the room itself affect such things? How can transference and countertransference be unethically manipulated, not least when feelings of love are activated? 

And also, how do these experiences relate to the uncanny, even so-called paranormal types of awareness and perception?

AI can be understood by the many, not just the few. We don’t need to respond to technologist and media hype via fear and the call for another lockdown, this time on AI development.

I hope ten points are illuminating.

1. The Turing test has been passed, but it never was a very good test to start with.
2. The AI industry thrives on the promise of tomorrow and is often led by those confusing themselves with gods.
3. Our psychology, as well as theirs, needs considering more fully, too.
4. AI models reality, as much science does. So don’t confuse AI models with reality.
5. Human intelligence doesn’t much involve calculation but presence, not much patterning but more participation.
6. We’re adaptive. Technology is surprisingly unadaptive.
7. Attention is a moral act and how we attend deeply shapes what shows up.
8. A cybernetic future might be the one coming, with AI recognised as tool not master.
9. Our intelligence is deeply linked to striving and longing, desiring and loving.
10. Our intelligence thrives with patience and experiencing, learning from now.

For more on Mark, particularly his work on spiritual intelligence, see www.markvernon.com.

What exactly is narcissism? Why is it so debilitating and troubling? Must everyone face narcissistic impulses and needs? 
 
In this discussion, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon explore the origins of narcissism in ancient myth and contemporary psychoanalysis. They explore the variety of pathological narcissisms, how it can be treated and whether a society increasingly online is at risk of becoming more narcissistic.

For more on Robert - https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com
For more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com

Owen Barfield was the friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. He championed the importance of imagination and poetry. But what can be missed is the transformative depth of his ideas. They can revolutionise our perception of everything. 
Landon Loftin and Max Leyf are the authors of What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield. In this conversation with Mark Vernon they ask how Barfield invites us to reconsider the meaning of everything from the human face to ancient history, from music to the person of Jesus. They ask about Barfield’s relationship with Lewis and other figures, such as Rudolf Steiner. 
Barfield had an answer to the alienation many experience in today’s world. His remedy was born of his own escape from depression. He realised modernity need not be rejected but itself contains the portals of participation that lead back to the divine.

For more on the book, What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield - https://wipfandstock.com/9781666736762/what-barfield-thought/
For more on Mark's book, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness - https://www.markvernon.com/consciousness

Terminal lucidity is the phenomenon of individuals who are dying receiving a surge of life, perhaps to say goodbye, as their death approaches. So what is the nature and meaning of such well-attested experiences? 
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon use Rupert's recent paper examining terminal lucidity in animals, to open up a discussion of phenomena from post-mortem contacts to the resurrection of Jesus.
Rupert's paper can be found here - https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Experiences-of-Dying-Animals_Parallels-With-End-of-Life-Experiences-in-Humans.pdf
For Lesley Kean's book Surviving Death see - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246583/surviving-death-by-leslie-kean/
For Dale Allison's discussion the resurrection see - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/resurrection-of-jesus-9780567697561/

Safety, confidentiality and trust are key parts of psychotherapy. That almost goes without needing to be said. But what is enabled by these qualities of the frame? How do they open up less conscious thoughts and feelings? 

In this second conversation about psychotherapy, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon explore this space of real encounter, which is paradoxically safe so as to allow the less safe to emerge. They ask how the frame feels sacred, how it can be spoiled or abused, and how it might enable the rebirth of souls.

For more on Robert - https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com
For more on Mark - https://www.markvernon.com
For more on the Philosophy Slam - https://www.philosophyslam.net

The anxiety about AI has reached hysterical proportions. Luminaries are declaring that every last human being is at risk. Which suggests a panic not about the future, whatever it may bring, but about the present, and what has already been lost.

What has vanished, for some, is a living sense of what it is to be human. As William Blake knew, when machine ways dominate, human beings flip from hope to despair, from elation to desperation.

The question that seems to hard to answer is just what it means to be human. Drawing on a recent book, I Judge No One by David Lloyd Dusenbury, as well as my latest, Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps, this talk looks to the life of Jesus for inspiration. 

Figures from Dostoevsky to William Blake have recognised he lived at an existential edge, in this world whilst simultaneously making present another world, not of control and moral anxiety but of gift and eternal expansion.

The vision is practical and, in an era in which the sense of being human is clearly at risk, fundamental and pressing.

For more on I Judge No One by David Lloyd Dusenbury - https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/i-judge-no-one/
For more on Spiritual Intelligence In Seven Steps - https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps

William Blake was against the monarchy. But might his Georgian loathing of the homogenising, conforming tendency of tyrannical rule have been utterly transformed by the coronation that opens the Carolean era?

My piece at The Idler, "The Marvellous Oddity of the Coronation" is here - https://www.idler.co.uk/article/the-marvellous-oddity-of-the-coronation/
For more on Idler Drinks - https://www.idler.co.uk
For more on Mark Vernon - https://www.markvernon.com

Therapies of various kinds are routinely in the news. And there is much to be said for the ease with which people talk about mental ill-health. 

But psychotherapy, in particular, can also received critique. What works on the couch? How do different traditions and techniques foster change? And is all that can happen to us well viewed through the lens of trauma?

Clearly, there is trauma in the world and too much of it. But there are other ways of approaching suffering. Maybe we are at a moment when they might be brought into the conversation, too?

For more on the Philosophy Slam, which Mark and Robert offer, see https://www.philosophyslam.net

For more on Robert see https://www.robertrowlandsmith.com

For more on Mark see https://www.markvernon.com