The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow does a great job at debunking the big histories of figures like Noah Yuval Harari and Stephen Pinker, but at a cost that ultimately undermines their argument.

In this discussion and critique of a wonderfully disruptive book, I outline their case and some of the evidence, argue that they are implicitly advocating a state of nature myth, based on reason not Eden or violence, and suggest that this, unwittingly, recolonises the past with modern secular reason.

But it’s a book very much worth engaging with!

0:44 Why they are right about retelling our back story.
4:50 Why they are right about emerging evidence for its endless complexity.
10:44 Tasters of the alternative Homo sapiens prehistory they tell.
18:20 And yet, what is crucially missing in their retelling.
28:22 How it recolonises the past with notions of secular reason, freedom and will.
33:19 The first cities as ritual sites and what that says about consciousness.
37:33 Why a demythologised past isn’t enough for our future.

Our carbon consuming culture has completely internalised the belief "that the world is made up of dead stuff plus active minds and acquisitive wills,” wrote Rowan Williams in This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. 

We have forgotten the spiritual intelligence that knows how to align with the natural intelligence embodied in the living world. 

To escape the toxicity of this mindset, Williams continues, will require radical change at the level of lifestyle and industry, yes. But more profoundly, it will demand that we ask again what is it to be human.

In this reflection, I consider 5 principles that can be practices and which might, in time, rediscover an older consciousness made new.

1. How comedy embraces tragedy, in the sense that there is a good that will not let us go, discovered through love.

2. How simplicity embraces complexity, not by being simplistic, but by seeing sub specie aeternitatis.

3. How ecology is wider than the machine, bringing back awareness of the all that's beyond us all.

4. How life is fundamentally abundant and generous, not scarce and priced.

5. How sacred myths can see beyond scientific explanations, rebalancing the celestial and terrestrial.

The label “gnostic” is used to recommend and condemn. So what is, and what was, Gnosticism? 

This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, takes a lead from a series of fascinating essays exploring the ancient movement and its modern forms by the philosopher, David Bentley Hart. 

Gnosticism was originally a set of cosmologies which shared the sense that the created order was blocked from the celestial spheres by angelic and demonic powers. 

It was remarkably widespread amongst early Christians of all kinds. They turned to Christ, in the hope of redemption or escape. Nowadays, it is used in different ways, often to express a sense of yearning or hope. 

As Rupert and Mark discuss, gnosticism may offer the promise of a re-enchanted cosmos, freed from the Archons of the machine and mammon. Properly understood, it might offer a key for our times.

Two of the essays written by David Bentley Hart are available without subscribing to Substack.
https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/the-gnostic-turn
https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/imprisoned

For more dialogues see:
https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues
https://www.markvernon.com/talks

What is the direct path of Advaita Vedanta and why is it significant for so many now? How is it found across traditions, including within Christianity? Why might it matter to us today, collectively as well as individually? What are its links to psychotherapy, individuality, freedom, God?

Mark Vernon talks with Rupert Spira about these questions and more.

0:34 What is the direct path and why is it of significance now?
13:59 If awareness of awareness is the start, what happens next?
17:20 Why might this matter socially as well as individually?
23:27 What is the relationship between the direct path and psychotherapy?
30:35 How does nondual show up in Christianty? What does the death and resurrection of Jesus mean?
41:55 How might the Trinity express nondual life?
50:47 How does this renew our experience of individuality?
53:45 Nondualism and a positive engagement with creation and the world.
1:10:38 Lessons from Dante’s journey into Paradise as a model of nondual expansion.
1:20:34 Growth after the recognition of our true being.
1:22:30 Goals after the recognition of true being.
1:25:08 The spontaneity of teaching.
1:27:47 Wrapping and further information.

For more about Rupert - https://rupertspira.com

For more about Mark - https://rupertspira.com

Meditation, yoga, vegetarianism. Eastern practices have become a feature of western life. But what do we learn from them? 

This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, is prompted by a sense that the western way of life is being challenged, if not facing a full-on crisis. 

As Rowan Williams puts it in his new book, Looking East In Winter, climate change and environmental degradation are leading to a sense of needing not a programme or an ideology but an epiphany, which might renew our perception of reality. 

They discuss how eastern Christianity, as well as traditions in India, are based on participating with life and emphasise the cultivation of consciousness. They ask how this relates to insights such as the Christian Trinity and movements such as romanticism, as well as the effects of mechanistic science, which itself grew out of western religious perceptions.

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

Rowan Williams has written another hugely significant book, one ripe with meaning for now. 

In this talk, I unpack its themes of non-dualism and Trinitarian life, eros and kenosis, politics and justice, seeing truthfully and destroying the world.

0:39 Addressing the Anthropocene
1:28 The need for an epiphany
2:52 What is our key problem?
4:32 Nondual non-identity
7:12 Trinitarian life
9:05 The erotic life of the divine
13:30 True kenosis and ecstasy
17:42 The truth of ourselves
20:49 Watchfulness, angelic awareness, mindfulness
23:39 Apatheia and anger
25:19 Being in the world, not of the world
28:20 The artist and philosopher
29:43 The gift of wisdom and remedying ignorance
30:27 Rationality and relating
31:55 Being natural
33:11 A new solidarity and Maria Skobtsova
34:32 A new apologetics
35:25 A new politics and sense of justice
38:48 Hospitality as a way of life
39:10 Freedom and fulfilment
40:39 Divinization and the future

For more on Mark Vernon, see www.markvernon.com

The standard big history of human evolution, exemplified in Yuval Noah Harari's bestseller Sapiens, sees religion and spirituality as a byproduct of survival, at best a necessary fiction.

But new science is telling a different story. Research done by Robin Dunbar, Agustin Fuentes, Robert Bellah and others is showing how engaging with invisible worlds and supernatural vitalities is an ancient and central aspect of Homo culture, which took off with the emergence of Homo sapiens.

Considering matters from Neanderthal art to altered states of mind, this vlog tells that story and asks why it matters today.

You might also enjoy my essay - https://aeon.co/essays/how-trance-states-forged-human-society-through-transcendence

For more about Mark - https://www.markvernon.com

I've notice a tendency to downplay the divine element in accounts of William Blake, and to reduce his understanding of the imagination to a human artefact, from its true status as a supernatural capacity that he knew.

In this talk I consider 5 ways in which this can be resisted:
- Blake's insistence that "there is no natural religion".
- Blake's affirmation that “God becomes as we are that we may become as he is”.
- His understanding that, “The desire of man is infinite”, and without it, we consume the natural world.
- His realisation that even Eternal Death is transformed by Eternal Life.
- And his engagement with The Bhagavad Gita, which arguably not only inspired some of his own mythology but his clear absolute idealism and philosophy.

Covid has brought the reality of death into the centre of our lives, but what can we learn about death in response?

This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, is prompted by a sense that part of the anxiety arising from the pandemic is living in a culture that has forgotten how to know death in life.

Rupert outlines some recent work on the role of death in plant life, and how that is not only of biological interest but can be spiritually resourcing. They discuss how wisdom traditions don’t dissolve death but understand it as a process that leads to more life, and therefore to be embraced and undergone.

Both reflect on personal experiences of death and dying as well, in what they hope is a helpful as well as interesting conversation.

For more conversations see - https://www.markvernon.com/talks

An extended conversation that begins with thoughts on Owen Barfield, participation and the meaning crisis, Schopenhauer and Jung, moving through the state of modern physics, to the nature of evolution, the nature of mind at large, the role of dissociation and projections, and freedom.

For more on Bernardo's work see - https://www.bernardokastrup.com
For more on Mark's work see - https://www.markvernon.com

Running order:
3:18 Introducing Owen Barfield and representations
8:22 The modern mistaken and the meaning crisis
13:38 The paradox of increased knowledge and decreased meaning
17:25 Questioning uniformitarianism in physics and the laws of nature
26:11 Physics in the first person and fine tuning
28:42 Carlo Rovelli and relational quantum mechanics
36:07 Dante's vision, consciousness and modern cosmology
39:42 Panpsychism and stretching materialism
44:16 Is evolution driven only by survival and random mutations?
52:05 Science, intuition, evolution and participation
56:31 Aesthetics in nature
1:00:26 About mind at large and classical theism
1:06:21 Entering the medieval worldview
1:09:30 The becoming of creation and potentials are not nothing
1:13:31 Divine activity and different kinds of change
1:17:51 Polarities of being and becoming in God and nature
1:22:36 Respecting the polarities in us
1:24:10 Jung on the God of the Old Testament and New
1:26:13 A critique of Jung and the evolution of monotheism
1:29:30 Discussion of "The Origins and History of Consciousness" by Erich Neumann
1:31:26 On not discussing privatio boni (the pushback at Jung would be that the relationship between good and evil is asymmetrical, much like the relationship between hot and cold, say)
1:31:39 Introducing the role of dissociation
1:31:50 Other psychological phenomena in mind at large, in particular, projection
1:40:49 Projections connect with reality and the enriching role of alienation
1:46:20 Bewilderment as the pathway of return
1:49:25 Meaning in suffering
1:49:56 Freedom, physicalism and conscious inner life
1:58:50 Participation and co-creativity
2:01:20 The freedom of service
2:04:03 The Essentia Foundation