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

Mark Vernon provides a fresh route into Blake, taking him at his word. Exploring his writings, artwork and life, Vernon illuminates Blake’s vivid worldview and shows how his thinking is still relevant for us today.

Please note that the ideas expressed in this lecture do not necessarily represent the views of L’Abri Fellowship.

You may agree that the so-called hard problem of consciousness exposes the deep inadequacies of a materialist worldview. 

But the alternatives - various forms of panpsychism, panentheism and idealism - raise rich and fascinating questions, too. 

In this episode of The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore the leading edge of consciousness research, with Rupert just back from The Science of Consciousness Conference 2025 in Barcelona. 

They discuss the impact of Indian researchers of consciousness and the proposals of microchip inventor, Federico Faggin. They consider trainings in extra-ocular vision and questions thrown up by the hit podcast series, The Telepathy Tapes. 

One thing is clear: when the materialist paradigm passes, the science of consciousness will have only just begun.

For more on Rupert's work see - https://www.sheldrake.org/

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

In my book, I want to draw out two facets of William Blake, which I think get routinely sidelined now. My conversation with Jane Clark and Nikos Yiangou enabled us to explore these dimensions.

One is that Blake was a very sharp thinker. He had a very accurate and clear critique of the ideas that were beginning to bed down in his time and have really shaped our times in the modern Christian West. 

A second is that he is a religious figure, which gets sidelined in two ways. He lived daily with perceptions of angels and other entities: the divine, the dead. I don't explain that away by pathologising Blake. 

He is also a clear Christian mystic, a very important voice in Western Christianity since the Reformation - connecting us back to a mystical core, which again is very often sidelined.

For more about my book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination

For more about Beshara Magazine see - https://besharamagazine.org

A transcript is online here - https://besharamagazine.org/podcast/mark-vernon-awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-imagination/

0:00 Introductions
1:57 Blake as thinker and mystic
5:20 The power of the imagination
14:40 Blake and science
21:12 The interconnection of music and poetry
26:04 Innocence and wisdom
32:29 Blake's Christianity
39:57 Blake the philosopher