Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

By Mark Vernon

Reflections from Mark Vernon on soulful matters including spirituality and psychotherapy, science and religion, consciousness and the divine. For more on see www.markvernon.com

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· Religion & Spirituality

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The podcast currently has 212 episodes available.

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Number 1: Falling in love with your therapist. On transference & countertransference
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?
July 18, 202344min
Number 2: 10 ways to understand AI
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.
July 10, 202319min
Number 3: Narcissism. Good and Bad Therapy. A series of conversations with Robert Rowland Smith & Mark Vernon
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
June 15, 202334min
Number 4: Where is heaven? A response to Sam Harris & Jonathan Pageau
Sam Harris raised the question of the location of heaven, not least in the space age, when "up there" is not straightforwardly a good answer. Jonathan Pageau responded eloquently, noting that up is, of course, an analogy that might guide us towards the way in which earth and heaven are different dimensions of participation in divine reality. The ancients knew earth and heaven phenomenologically rather than just physically. Here, I offer a different conception again, that I think is useful now - taking a lead from Jesus's remarks that the kingdom is within, that praying is best done in secret, and that withdrawal and reflection are key to discerning the divine, heavenly presence. I consider how the Platonic notion of ascent, from The Symposium, is actually an mistaken gloss on what Diotima actually explains to Socrates. Love's path to Beauty is, in fact, one of subtly, awakening and understanding. And then I consider Dante's journey through the planetary spheres in Paradiso. Again, whilst metaphors of movement are present, the dynamic that Dante tracks is one of perception: the more he understands of the divine light within himself, the more he understands and knows how he is closer to heaven than he ever suspected.
August 25, 202226min
Number 5: Nature, politics, humanity. Three hard sayings of William Blake
William Blake saw himself as a prophet, which means that his writings challenge, even repulse, on occasion. However, Blake's harding sayings are the moments when his greatest vision stands before us. They are worth wrestling with, if he is to become more than a poet with a compelling line that we might grab as a proof quote. In this talk, I consider how Blake's vision of nature, politics and humanity sits uncomfortably alongside the received wisdom of today, in both secular and Christian domains. “Without man, nature is barren,” he writes in the Proverbs of Hell. Golgonooza “continually building & continually decaying desolate,” he writes in Jerusalem. “They were as Adam before me, united as One Man,” he also sees in Jerusalem. In the light of the infinite, that Blake longs to awaken in us, they speak of the higher dimensions of the cosmos that are to be discovered; of a politics of expectancy not utopia that awaits; and how the divine might be an imaginative intimation within us. We will also need the freedom of forgiveness, Blake insists, as well as a new science, built on the capacity to see how how all is animate, intelligent, alive. But that can stir the perception of God's activity as the true nature of our act activities, and so lead to an overcoming of the threatened self, to yield to the one life which is the truth of all life.
August 21, 202239min