Latest / Thinking Class / #092 - Mark Vernon - Living Life More Deeply: Why William Blake Matters Now More Than Ever

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#092 - Mark Vernon - Living Life More Deeply: Why William Blake Matters Now More Than Ever · Thinking Class

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking to Mark Vernon.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Mark is a psychotherapist, writer, and former Anglican priest.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy and degrees in theology and physics.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: Mark is the author of A Secret History of Christianity, Jesus, The Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness, Dante's Divine Comedy, A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps, and his latest book is Awake, William Blake and the Power of the Imagination.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Mark and I think out loud about the enduring relevance of William Blake's work in the context of modernity and the challenges of contemporary life.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: How Blake's vision is an internally useful critique of the industrial mindset, why the industrial mindset is the root of misenchantment today, and why much unhappiness is derived from our unfulfilled need for a deeper engagement with life.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: Why there can be no progress in life without contraries, why forgiveness and transformation help us to experience a more enchanted existence, why Blake's unique interpretation of Christianity has the potential for individuals to reconnect with a sense of the divine in their lives, why Dante can save your life, and much, much more.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: This episode is dense with information and concepts, and it requires a lot of intuition.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: You're not going to get uh business speak here distilled down to bullet points, but you will get a sense of a wider life, a wider existence.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: And I think Mark conveys the ways in which we can experience this wider existence by widening our own perceptions of life at the depths of our own humanity and our place in the universe.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: So stick with it.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: I think it is a very important episode.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: And for anyone who knows Dr.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: Ian McGilchrist's work, I think you will find uh much to enjoy within this particular conversation.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: As ever, make sure to like, subscribe, and follow Thinking Class on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and Substack.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Let's go Thinking Class together.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, Mark Vernon.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Thinking Class.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for inviting me on.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm looking forward to where we might go.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: Well, hopefully there are some uh rabbit warrants to be going down, and I suspect there's plenty given we're talking about William Blake today, the man who is the subject of your new book, William Blake and the power of the imagination.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: Let's begin with the basics, Mark.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: Why did you write the book about a man who did his work predominantly in the 19th century?
2:51
SPEAKER_00: What does he have to say about today that might be of interest?
2:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Blake for me is one of these figures who's kind of always been around.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: You know, I probably read Tiger's Iga Burning Bright sometime when I was at school, can't quite remember.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: And then he has these wonderfully resonant phrases, you know, like to see a world in a grain of sand.
3:16
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, always wanted to, I guess, know more about Blake.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: I live in South London, which is where he and Catherine lived.
3:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so he's sort of in the air a bit.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's the challenge with Blake as well, you know, he has these accessible instances in these phrases and images that are so well known, but very quickly, um he he's challenging you.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: He's making you ask what on earth is he trying to say in the longer poems and in the more sort of less accessible images.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: And and I like that challenge.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to try and engage with it because I think that Blake's one of these people that he gets you to change in order to understand him, rather than you just staying the same and gradually unpicking what's going on like it's a puzzle that doesn't affect you, and so I like that challenge.
4:13
SPEAKER_01: You know, I I wanted to feel I could dive more into Blake and have Blake change me in some way.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, so that the and a book.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was I've been in reading groups, lots of discussions and so on, um, some individual podcasts and presentations I've done, but a book length, you can make that stack up.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: That's another sort of way of trying to um get into this challenge.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, so he's an exciting figure um to try and engage with, I think.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: And it'll be interesting to hear you uh unpack this a little bit for the listeners and and readers.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: So he's exciting because uh enchanting, as your your book outlines, and I suppose the 18th and 19th century we're talking about the time of the Industrial Revolution, he absolutely was representing a worldview that was uh contrary to that which had taken hold amongst the industrialists and indeed most others at the time.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: And uh I suppose his con biggest concern was about misenchantment.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: Um maybe maybe you can tell us a bit more about what it was that perturbed William Blake so much at the time that he was living and that he thought we were we were losing as we were moving into what we we call modernity.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and you've also reminded me that I didn't quite answer the sort of second part of your first question, which was, you know, what's the 18th, 19th century got to do with us?
5:45
SPEAKER_01: And in a way, it is because then is when what's sometimes called disenchantment, or I prefer to think of as misenchantments, actually, um, because I think we live in still in an enchanted world, but it's just become a bit squiffy.
5:59
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's bedding down in this era.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you just cite some of the figures that Blake was either contemporary with or near contemporary with, figures like, well, sort of a generation or two before him, figures like Newton and John Locke, Adam Smith is a near contemporary, but then figures like I know Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecroft, Tom Paine.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, these are figures that he in some cases knew.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: He illustrated Mary Wollstonecroft's work.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: He probably saved the life of Tom Paine by telling him to flee the country.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, and he certainly engages with utilitarianism and Emmanuel Kant, another direct contemporary.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: And that so Blake, as a thinker, as much as an artist, is someone who speaks to me.
6:45
SPEAKER_01: And I think he is both, actually.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, so the Georgian period is the period when many of our ideas are shaping up.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's more deism than atheism in the Georgian period, but the two are deeply connected.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: Um and he sees, I think, the the kind of undercurrent, the inner story of that coming about.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: So the way that, as Blake says, you know, anything that now is was once first imagined.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: And so if you feel the dissatisfaction with this misenchantment, which I certainly do, um, then getting to grips with what's happening at root rather than just firefighting with symptoms, um, is really vital.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: And so Blake takes us back to when that is starting to bed down.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: He's resisting it already then by seeing what's coming, and so it enables us to get back to what lies underneath so many of the assumptions of our times and the way that we I think we've become uncoupled from a wider vitality and have got sort of trapped in our own heads and so see the world in fragmentary terms now.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: It brings great benefits, you know.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: The reductive worldview enables you to get traction, particularly on the material aspects of existence, and that brings about many good things.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: Um that's also why I like Blake, because he isn't he doesn't want to sort of respond to fragmentation by just fragmenting even more, saying, No, you've got to be for this and against that.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, he I think sees that what matters is that the whole of the human endeavour, which on the one hand is scientific, but on the other hand is imaginative, how that reaches out to its fullest kind of extent, rather than getting so narrowly focused on one aspect that it loses touch with that wider vision.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, so Newton is one of his favourite kind of bête noirs, um, perhaps a little unfairly on the actual Isaac Newton that we know now because he had great esoteric interests himself, but nonetheless, he uses Newton to show how a very narrow a narrowing of the kind of imagination brings scientific illumination, but when it's narrow at the cost of other things.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: And so bringing back that wider perspective is is the way that Blake wants to engage with us.
9:14
SPEAKER_01: It's not about refusal, it's about sort of re-expansion.
9:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think the thing that he feels has gone wrong to be alert to is when the very power of the scientific imagination seduces us into believing that the abstractions of science, you know, like Newton's second law of motion, F equals MA, an extraordinarily powerful, simple phrase, but feeling somehow that the laws of nature, as they're called now, are more real than our actual felt experience of being in the world.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, the laws of nature are useful if you want to fly to the moon, um, if you want to um, you know, build locomotion and so on.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, but um to feel that that power has become more real than the everyday engagement with our lives is that's what he wants to undermine and challenge.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, and similarly, I think that I mentioned Jeremy Bentham, you know, utilitarianism, the idea that you decide because it brings about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, a kind of what philosophic calculus, as Bentham calls it.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: Um, when that feels more real than the the more messy business of trying to navigate your way through life, not by rules, but by felt responses.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, Blake wants to pull us back from the rules, which can be illuminating in a way, they can be guides, but they're not the real thing.
10:42
SPEAKER_01: The real thing is life as lived.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's that that I think he can help us with in a world that becomes very abstract, very general, partly because the power enables the technology that can build worlds which are abstract and general, you know, utilitarian.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: I live in London.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: You just look at the modern buildings in London, very practical but soulless.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, and um how can we, say, in that particular case, reimagine an architecture that is practical but that is also soulful?
11:19
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's that kind of question which Blake wants us to ask.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: There is a whole lot in there, Mark, that I'm gonna try and resist togging on all the threads, otherwise, we're gonna have bores of yarn absolutely everywhere.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Let's let's delve into Blake's um ability um to have a wide perceptive field, um, to live in an enchanted world, and as you've just put it, to engage with our own lives.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and perhaps we we could start with the the first four chapters.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: There are many more chapters, we won't get into them because I do not want to ruin the sales of your book in any way, but the first four chapters are really lovely because you show the different aspects of Blake's perceptions, uh the the way that he engages with the world himself.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: And do you call these savvy innocence, perceptual openness, a confident imagination, and fearless critique?
12:21
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you could um walk us through what this has meant with a few perhaps biographical details or some of his works, and why it is that you think these lessons are important just for a layman like me or Tom Dick and Harry on the street to know.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're kind of Blakean virtues, um, which kind of provide uh an attitude or a stance towards the world that I think Blake um developed and can be a starting point for ourselves.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: Um so Blake, I think, was always innocent, not in the sense of naive.
13:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, he's famous for his poems, The Songs of Innocence and Experience, Tiger Tiger Burning Bright being one of those.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, but when you read them, it's not like there's a pure world and then there's a polluted world and never the trains shall meet.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: There's always kind of overlap.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: And so Blake is asking us not to try and divide the world up into innocence and experience, but to stay open to the amalgam that is always showing to us.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: And then that openness can keep us saying yes to life, no matter how tricky it is.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: And so that is a way of getting better contact with life, this expansive view.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: So it's a kind of virtue, innocence.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: He says in innocence always dwells with wisdom and never with ignorance.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: If you're if your innocence is a kind of ignorance, a sort of saying no, then actually you're losing touch with life.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: But wisdom, which is this practical thing always, knowing how to respond, it's phrenesis in the Greek.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not a kind of abstract general rules, it's it's this responsiveness that he wants to cultivate.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, which then you know he does um by the way, he lives.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: And I think that that's another side to all this is that um if Blake is pulling us back from the general mode of life, then our way of life needs to be in what he always called the minute particulars.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's by engaging with our life as it actually is, diving more deeply into it.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: For Blake, you know, this means particularly his life as a creative artist.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, the actual materials um of his work, the copper and the acids and the colour and then the writing, the actual particular words, you know, how in a poem are you going to put that together?
14:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, these are very particular ways of engaging with life.
14:52
SPEAKER_01: But the point is by diving more deeply into the particularities with this fearless imagination, with this strong critique of what's actually in front of you, um, that is what leads to the universal um, you know, we know this, a novel where the characters are more and more vivid is going to speak more and more widely.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: Whereas generic characters just are sort of boring and don't really feel alive.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so it's it's very much that what we need is actually right in front of us, Blake is saying, if we have these virtues that enable us to turn towards what's right in front of us.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: And again, that's another kind of mistake, I think, of our times, and that we feel we need something that's sort of elsewhere, if only we can find it.
15:37
SPEAKER_01: And Blake's saying no, it it's by engaging with life as we're living it, um turning towards ourselves, that which is around us, you know, our habits, our practices, and cultivating them, definitely, through this fearless critique and so on.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's right there all that we need.
15:57
SPEAKER_01: You know, that is also a sort of statement about the nature of reality, of course.
16:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, uh, because I think another thing that he critiques is that we don't live in a world of scarcity, you know, as the modern materialist world inclines us to think.
16:11
SPEAKER_01: So we've got to possess and hold and secure and so on.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, we live in a world of abundance.
16:17
SPEAKER_01: Um the question is how that can open up to us.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: And so, again, the imagination is really important here because the imagination is our pathway into this opening up, where we realise even that the imagination is not my kind of private possession or yours that we somehow project onto the world hoping it somehow takes colour.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: No, the imagination is really us taking one step towards the world, and then the world takes 10 steps back to us because the imagination is the great flow which is around us, um, that our share in it can resonate with.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: And again, that's a you know a the something which a creative knows um that you do have to give all you have to your endeavor, if it's music, if it's writing, um, if it's you know visual in some way.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: It asks everything of you, but then when you can give all that you have by finding the right words, by reaching for the right line, um, then the world sort of shows up to you in the work, and you think, gosh, you know, it's given back much more than actually I was able to give.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I sort of had to give all though, nonetheless.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: So there's this kind of dynamic that Blake's trying to cultivate in himself, and then in his work, you know, in us.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: As you were describing the methods uh by which he conducted his work, it was a perfect example of the embodied life where he is not just thinking about words on a page produced by a typewriter, he's bringing in all of the various sensory experiences that he and his readers will also have.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: That's why he's using all of the colours, the vivid images, the um the calligraphy, and he's putting all of these evocative um subjects on a page.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: Whereas if I think about then how you've described those Blakeian virtues, I myself I'm having to do, and I think you will be able to recognize this as someone who uh clearly shares a uh a similar view of the world as Ian McGillchrist, this idea that in the modern world we live in this very analytical, um uh logical, process-driven world, reductive, which we we we view things, at least we we tell ourselves we view things through the scientific lens, reducing things down to their material um uh needs.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: And everyone now wants to be able to, or not everyone, but many people want to be able to be given um no doubt as to what the task is ahead of them or what they need to see by bullet point lists be very clear as to what I need to do to turn my life around or to engage in the world.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: Whereas what your description was there, Mark, was something that has to be intuitive as well, that uh you you can't actually always provide those examples without denuding the message that you're trying to actually convey here and that might inspire people.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: And I suppose where I'm going with this is that in a world where we all go and get very quick answers now with the AI tools on Google or whatever, condense it right down, or we have um every organization, whether public or private, wanting to put forward business cases very focused on cost benefit, and again, down to that bullet point summary, everything has to be reduced to the lowest common denominator.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: Um I I wonder whether it's even possible for us to see a Blakeian type figure in the modern world because of the world we now live in.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: He saw about that world coming into being all those centuries ago, and now we're so downstream of it, living well and truly in the culture downstream of it, that I wonder whether, with all of the distractions um at our at our fingertips, whether it's it's possible to for such a character to exist or to come out um into the world.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
20:33
SPEAKER_00: Do you think uh the impediments are too great, or do you think there are kind of people who live amongst us?
20:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I trust the human soul at the end of the day.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: I think that the reason why we're even talking about this is because we sense the dissatisfaction.
20:46
SPEAKER_01: The reason why the work of people like Ian McGilchrist has gained such traction is because people know what he's talking about and the loss.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, but if you can sense the loss, then that is the first step to wanting more.
20:59
SPEAKER_01: And then a figure like Blake can come in because I think part of the genius of Blake is he both analyzes what's gone wrong, but in the very analysis, gives you this antidote, partly because it's poetry and imagery that he's using, that poetry and imagery bring a kind of energy or a vitality to bear.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, I learned this the hard way myself.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: I did a PhD on Plato, and it was very much in a kind of analytical modern Anglo-American frame.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: So I got the PhD and so on, but I after all that work, I just felt I hadn't begun to get to grips with the spirit of what Plato was really trying to convey.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: And it was only subsequently, and Blake speaks to this as well, actually, because he was a great reader of figures like Plato.
21:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, the intuitive, the imaginative, which in Blake in Plato's writing includes the colour.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: So the kind of equivalent of the poetry and the imagery in Blake in Plato is the ritual and the personalities, the framing.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Plato's.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Was a great poet, in fact, as well.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, and my PhD had taught me to kind of abstract all that away to look for the kind of narrow, hard analytical argument.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: It's dissatisfying because actually a lot of Plato's arguments, they're not really very watertight, they're a bit baggy, they're quite easy to unpick.
22:19
SPEAKER_01: But what Plato's doing, I think, is sort of showing the limitations of that as the sole way, but then leading you into what might be a richer way, which is the more intuitive.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that sense that we have now, that the bullet point approach to life or the quick answer from the technology, um, it's kind of informative, but a bit emptying at the same time.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: That precisely is the thing to pay attention to, that emptiness, because that is what you need to try and galvanize and in a way take a punt because it can feel like it's a step of faith to go back to a fuller, intuitive, imaginative, inspired, being breathed into kind of life.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, because it does feel so contrary to the worldview that's bedded down.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, but as I say, at the end of the day, I think that we human beings want to be more human, not less.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so these things, in a way, uh are sent to test us, to prompt us.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: Um, how can we return sort of the wiser to um this richer kind of engagement?
23:31
SPEAKER_01: Take the risks, put the work in, you know, the practices and so on.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: Um even go through the three or four year process of trying to write a PhD and finding it unsatisfying.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, it's it's it's our life's work, if you like.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, I know I I remain um an optimist because I think at the end of the day, the human spirit um is what's driving all this, and the human spirit wants more.
23:54
SPEAKER_01: It can make mistakes for sure, um, but nonetheless, um, those mistakes can be learnt from.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: I um leaning in your direction, I I think there are a great many impediments, but um when people come across folks like you, whether it's scrolling through Substack or seeing you on unheard, or likewise with your contemporary, Dr.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: Ian McGillchrist, it's there's there's so much in the messages that uh people like you are trying to deliver through your various mediums and your subject matter that to the untrained eye it might seem inaccessible because it's such a big topic.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: It's it's speaking to the depth not just of humanity but of the universe and our place in it, which is um no easy feat to try and deliver something that can be read by people or try and distill that um into a one-hour podcast or appearance somewhere, and yet there is traction out there.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: The amount of eyeballs and ears that are twitching in your directions um really does suggest that people find life perhaps a little bit humdrum, a bit tedious, that there is much more to it, and actually the sources which are usually put in front of them don't really speak to those, it's all a little bit um GCSE textbook.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: And um let's let's delve a little bit into our own island home, which that William Blake calls Albion.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: And um we've we've brought up a few of the scientific heavy weights of the era, we've talked a bit about industrialists of whom he took uh a few shots at, um, to say the least within his work.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Um and the poet poetic imagery of Blake, there's much centered around Albion.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: He also wrote um about uh England in his uh great uh poem, which became a very favourite national hymn, Jerusalem, um, about this vision for his country, and in other words, he also felt it was being constrained by people like Locke and Newton and Bacon and the industrialists we talked about.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh what do you think the image was that he, or not the image, the vision that he he he wanted people to see for this place we called home was and and how it was that these uh these people, these ideas have somehow um belittled it.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: Belittled it's the wrong words, but I think you know where I'm going with it.
26:44
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27:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, let me try and say something to that and see whether it connects with what you're you're I'm pushing towards.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: Um I mean Albion in Blake's work is referencing the old name for England or Britain.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's also, though, Albion can be a sort of recognizable figure, um, a human person with their own struggles.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: And in particular, Albion in Blake's work has come uncoupled from Jerusalem.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: And Jerusalem, too, um, is at once a kind of state of being that sees the divine vision, um, is a place as well, and but is also a person.
28:02
SPEAKER_01: And um Albion and Jerusalem need to re-establish their relationship in Blake's work.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: And his longer poems are often describing how that isn't working, that leaves us with a kind of education um that then can inform our own sense of engagement.
28:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, so Albion Um is a figure, a country that's lost touch with its spiritual aspect.
28:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, but a f a phrase um that's um, you know, in that prelude um and did those feet in ancient time is uh that's well known is the Dark Satanic Mills.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: Um and Dark Satanic Mills is not just a description of what's starting to cover Albion in the mills of the Industrial Revolution, but is also the mentality that leads Albion to want mills over the landscape.
28:57
SPEAKER_01: And the mentality is satanic, which in Blake means this kind of narrow, contracted mentality.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, Satan, one of Blake famously has this um dispute with Milton, and Milton in Paradise Loss had made Satan into a rather appealing figure, you know, better to rule in hell than be ruled in heaven and all that, and the sort of fieriness of Milton's hell is actually quite enticing and if not sort of intriguing, sort of interesting.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: And Blake realized that that was a major mistake that Satan truly seen is this narrow, boring, trapped figure.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Blake's much closer to Dante's um Lucifer.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, Lucifer in Dante is frozen in this massive, almost falling out of existence altogether, kind of lake of rigidity and frigidity and um almost terminal.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: Um it can't quite be because that would be to fall out of existence altogether.
29:57
SPEAKER_01: Um but nonetheless, Blake is on that side of the dreariness of the satanic.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: And so the dark satanic mills are an expression of that mentality.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: I mean, another way that you can make the links is that the mills both are the mills on the landscape, but Blake fears that our imagination in terms of the world we're building has been shaped by the way we imagine the cosmos to be, which since Newton has been like a giant set of mills in the sky, just sort of turning like cogs with cause and effect, no sympathy, no resonance, beauty being a sort of strange byproduct, but not a dynamic, you know, dynamic um vitality within things as well.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, the world we're building is the world that we imagine the world to be.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so Dark Satanic Mills is this mentality um that Albion suffers from.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know, Albion weeps as much as builds, um, and those two things go together.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: The kind of despair that's sort of becoming desperate is part of our times as well, that Blake portrays in this figure of Albion.
31:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that's the beginning of a sort of turning point.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: It's the crisis in the old medical sense, the when the disease reaches its worst point and it's gonna turn one way or the other.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: And so Blake's poetry, his vision of Albion, is trying to foster a turn back towards the light.
31:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so his figure of Albion in the story, if you like, reaches out towards Jerusalem.
31:38
SPEAKER_01: Jerusalem reaches out towards Albion.
31:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's when Albion feels just the first sort of stirrings of the divine spirit in his breast that he realizes all is not lost, and he can just sort of trust those thin threads.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: And so I think for us that means looking for where the divine is still present, where beauty still speaks and calls to us, and where the intuitive or the imaginative, by paying attention to the energy that it brings, it does actually make us want to sit up and lean towards, um, you know, take some risks.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: And that's the kind of spirit of Albion that Blake wants us to cultivate, both individually but also collectively, and through our through our science.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: And you know, you do, it's not hard actually to find sort of signs of that.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: But the difference I think Blake suggests is that they're not just constellations, like the world is basically a bit bleak, but there's a bit of colour you can find on the way.
32:41
SPEAKER_01: No, the colour is the way to the fullness of the world, and that's what we've kind of forgotten.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: That's this misenchantment that I you know I was referencing.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: And so Blake says, no, even if it feels faint, even if it feels thin, go towards that colour, go towards that expansion, trust that imagination, not as just something of your own making, but as speaking to you, calling from a wider perspective.
33:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, and then you can find individually and collectively um a way back to Albion and Jerusalem marrying again, and and so the spiritual vitality returning.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:22
SPEAKER_00: Mark, if I'm I'm right in thinking you are a psychiatrist by trade.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh well, a psychotherapist, actually.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, psychotherapy.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: The talking cure rather than the prescribing cure.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: Yes, okay.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: That makes that makes perfect sense.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: And your work previously to you, Blake, was on Dante.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: You've you've you've written much else besides and spoken about much else besides, but Dante, your work was focused on um providing a guide for a spiritual journey.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: And there are many people uh who have suggested figures like Dante and their work can help people through life crises.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: Dante himself wrote it because of that.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: One key figure being Rob Dreyer, who also wrote a book um about Dante and how it saved his life.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: Um Blake clearly has messages and virtues that if we were to follow would to get us to live a more enchanted and thus a more uh tantalizing, full, full and deep life.
34:27
SPEAKER_00: And we've talked a lot about the um I suppose the vices of modernity and how the world has been reduced and misenchanted.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: Linking back to your work as a psychotherapist do you do you see drivers in your work on things like on people like Dante and Blake that are derived from your work as a psychotherapist because you believe this will help people live better lives?
34:56
SPEAKER_00: And I suppose as an addendum question to that, do you see patients that are deeply unhappy that you believe are deeply unhappy because they are misenchanted because of the nature of the the modern world?
35:12
SPEAKER_01: I certainly feel that a general problem in psychology, actually, whether it be psychiatry, clinical psychology, or psychotherapy, is approaching people as if the task is to help them to live better in some way, um, by addressing them solely as an individual.
35:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, so the psychiatrist, you know, might prescribe hoping that the body's physiology is a bit better.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: The clinical psychologist might teach someone behavioral techniques in order to be a bit happier, the psychotherapist might ask someone to think about their personal story and see you know where things haven't been optimal in order that they can become better, recognizing where there's difficulty so sort of beginning to overcome difficulty.
36:03
SPEAKER_01: Now, that those things are all valuable, don't get me wrong.
36:05
SPEAKER_01: I've worked in a psychiatric hospital, I know those things are all valuable, and but I I think there's a general sense in these sort of psychotreatments um that whilst good can be done, it's somehow not enough.
36:20
SPEAKER_01: Um you know, and then you get lots of media articles arguing that actually the state of mental health is getting worse, which you can dispute and discuss.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: But it there's something you know going on there, I think.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: And I think what is gets missed out, which both Dante and Blake can help us get onto, is that our inner life is not the only inner life that there is.
36:43
SPEAKER_01: And it's not just that there's my inner life and your inner life as two separate inner lives, but that our inner life is a reflection of a much wider inner life that's in all things and even in the divine, and the many things are a reflection of that one divine life.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: That's what it means for the the finite to reflect the infinite or the temporal to reflect the eternal, these you know, long-standing themes that go all the way back to Plato and before.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think that this is the challenge for Dante and Blake, of Dante and Blake, is how can we regain that sense of enchantment?
37:20
SPEAKER_01: And and it was, you know, it's it's been to be personal about it.
37:24
SPEAKER_01: Um, I came across Dante seriously, anyway, again, a figure that's sort of known about, tried to read the Divine Comedy a few times without much success.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it started to come alive to me when I was in my own psychotherapy, actually, as part of the train to become a psychotherapist, and got rather stuck.
37:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, and for quite a long period of time, I did quite a traditional psychoanalytic process.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: And um it was really reading Dante that enabled me to see that there's a kind of suffering which isn't just about despair, which is the infernal kind of suffering, but there's the purgatorial kind of suffering as well, which is always has the possibility at least of the day returning after the night, you know, hope um coming after a moment of despair.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: And when you can trust that, even if nothing else changes, the seeds are being sown for a difference that over a period of time will make a big difference.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so it was something in the spirit of Dante that I that that I wanted to know more about and I could feel encouraged by that got me into the divine comedy, and then you know, reading it more deeply, because the thing about Dante, a bit like Blake, actually, is that there's no doubt his own personal story in Dante's story, which he, as Dante the Pilgrim, tells you, but he writes in such a way and then tells you repeatedly throughout the Divine Comedy, this is also written for you.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: You know, he breaks the fourth wall, and so he wants you to follow him, not in any literal sense.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, if if, as it were, our infernal worlds have different figures from Dante's infernal worlds, but there's no doubt there's such a thing as an infernal world.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think in the next life as well as in this, um, but certainly you can know it in this life.
39:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's a purgatorial version of that as well, where there's change.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: And then there's even the hope that there's a paradiesal mentality as well, where there's still challenge and there's still difficulty in paradise, but it's known that it's a deepening of the light, then quite clearly.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: And you know, even in the course of one day, I think we can switch between these different modalities.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: But knowing that there is that full range is absolutely fundamental.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: Because I think, again, you know, the modern world is rather inclined to think there's there's mostly the infernal and a bit of the purgatorial, perhaps.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, but what these figures can help us to recover is that there's certainly the purgatorial and there's the paradesal as well.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's really what we're here to to know more and more.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: There was a section in your book where you uh get into that um in more detail, and having read Dante and also utilized it for the same reasons as I suppose you you may well have done with regards to um self-reflection, all the rest of it, I'd never really considered before um about the paradesal element to it.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: So that purgatorial element you're talking about, you mentioned in the book saying that people can often get stuck there where they're they're constantly expiating their sins, they're constantly self-critical and playing over the things that they need to slough off.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: But what they're not doing is providing themselves a vision of what they're going to be and moving toward it, and um that's that's interesting, and something that um you know personally I I know that I found it incredibly useful to be able to analyse my my vices and all the rest of it and to slow those off over time.
41:17
SPEAKER_00: And I suppose I I have those flashes of inspiration towards the kind of life's work you might want to commit yourself to and all the rest of it.
41:26
SPEAKER_00: But I don't know whether it's the day-to-day life of you do your you you you're in the corporate life nine to six, you fit everything else around it, that actually the the vision element of it uh is lacking.
41:40
SPEAKER_00: And and as someone who I would say tries to live a well-examined life as much as I can, but could still feel like life does lack insofar as there's a fuller expression of it I could be living, um suggests that I there are a great many people out there who perhaps haven't even gotten through the infernal part of it.
42:03
SPEAKER_00: That they are just living uh a lot of lives in which they just think things are always bad.
42:08
SPEAKER_00: You know, they've got the 24-hour media cycle, they've got um bad jobs or all the rest of it.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: And then when it comes to being self-critical, they perhaps never even really get to that point.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: And um, and I know as someone who lives well and truly in the modern world and tries to step outside a bit so I can live a more Blakeian existence, that there are still things missing that I'm trying to move towards.
42:31
SPEAKER_00: And I find that to be a really interesting message that you've imparted from unpacking the text, which is don't don't get stuck here, there's so much more to be experiencing.
42:41
SPEAKER_00: And I suppose it goes all the way back to the start, Mark, where you said that life is about engaging in every minute in every minute detail, but marrying that together with and embracing it in all of its contraries, and and I suppose um let's let's move on to contraries.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: It it's a key theme within your book.
43:04
SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh Blake um uh suggested that there is no progress without contraries, or without contraries, there is no progress.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: And you give the examples, for example, attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate.
43:21
SPEAKER_00: What why do you think that progress, whether in our lives or societally or whatever else you want to apply it to, needs to have contraries for it to actually move toward anything useful or uh worthwhile?
43:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I'm so this is a it also links back to where we started, really, which is about being able to say yes to life, whether it be something which we love or something which we hate, something which we you know feel is good or something which we feel is bad.
43:52
SPEAKER_01: And um Blake wants us not to split, to choose, to be puritanical, to be you know.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: One of the things he loaths more than anything actually is moralizing because that's just trying to live by a set of laws, much as Newton had described the cosmos by a set of laws.
44:10
SPEAKER_01: It's deadening, it takes you from life.
44:14
SPEAKER_01: But what you need to do is hold the energy of these contraries, he thought, and realize that they're not the end of the story.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: Contraries, I think, are a bit like the poles of a magnet.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: There was great research going on.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: Faraday was a contemporary of Blake in electromagnetism.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: And the thing about the poles of a magnet is that they're different, they're contrary, north and south, but they hold the energy of the magnetic field.
44:38
SPEAKER_01: And so by being able to say yes to the contraries in life, we're able to stay in the energy of life rather than withdraw from it.
44:47
SPEAKER_01: But that energy of life for Blake has this sort of vertical dimension as well as the horizontal.
44:53
SPEAKER_01: It comes from somewhere, it's a reflection of a divine life.
44:57
SPEAKER_01: It has a sort of source and wellspring.
45:00
SPEAKER_01: And therefore, by being in the energy of life, we human beings are able to detect the source of that as well.
45:08
SPEAKER_01: That the transcendence in life is actually imminent.
45:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, a great theme in mystical traditions.
45:14
SPEAKER_01: It's not elsewhere again, it's actually right in front of us.
45:18
SPEAKER_01: And by tuning into that third thing that appears in between the contraries, in the energy, that is the way to lean.
45:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, another way of putting this is um to say that I think one of the great mistakes of the current age is that we assume our center is within ourselves, as if our sense of who we are needs to be sort of integrated is the word that you is used, or we need to speak with authenticity, um, or we need to discover our true self.
45:54
SPEAKER_01: Now there's something in that, but I think it's only the first step, because actually, when you bring in this contrary's energy source perception as well, you realize that that is just a small who the person I think I am is just a small reflection of a wider self that bore me, that um, that that might be incarnate in me, and to use more explicitly Christian terms, so that the particular then becomes a reflection of the universal.
46:24
SPEAKER_01: Um and so it's um in a way we discover who we are in order to see more clearly that we're more than we thought we were.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: And moreover, that more isn't our possession, but can be that with which we try and collaborate, that we try and give ourselves to.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: Um uh Blake, he's he's very keen on phrases, particularly in the last part of his work, like, you know, annihilate the selfhood in me, be thou all my life.
46:52
SPEAKER_01: And this is the whole self saying, annihilate the selfhood in me.
46:55
SPEAKER_01: It's not denigrating the self, it's not a kind of withdrawal.
46:59
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's knowing more and more deeply who he is that is then the stepping beyond who he is, trusting more and more that which is beyond who he is.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, sometimes um in these kind of circles you hear phrases like, um, you've got to be a someone before you can be a no one.
47:19
SPEAKER_01: And I think in in therapy, too, you try and understand what's causing you trouble, not to keep repeating it and trying to solve it, but because that provides the space around the trouble where more can start to appear.
47:33
SPEAKER_01: You become less preoccupied, and so you're able to relinquish things.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: And you know, in the Christian tradition, I think this is the real meaning of forgiveness.
47:40
SPEAKER_01: The point about forgiveness is not to keep returning to what you've done wrong, um, as if one day you might not do it, um, but it's to realize that already it's forgiven what you've done wrong, and that gives you the freedom to step beyond in your perception, in your trust, in your faith to that which was always more than you anyway, because it was what bore you, um, the divine life.
48:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, so yeah, forgiveness is um the sort of prerequisite to being able to identify with more than yourself and not just be preoccupied with yourself.
48:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, whereas I think that, you know, so often it's seen as somehow the main thrust, say, of the Christian tradition.
48:24
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, when you go to church, you begin again with forgiveness and you begin again with forgiveness, and it feels like that's perhaps the whole point.
48:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't think it is.
48:32
SPEAKER_01: That's in a rather purgatorial frame to link back to what you were saying.
48:36
SPEAKER_01: Whereas in the paradise, um Blake, before he enters the paradise, sorry, Dante before he enters the paradise, is told by Virgil, you know, I crown and mitre you, Lord of your life.
48:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, the crown is the sort of, as it were, the rational faculty, the mitre is the spiritual faculty.
48:55
SPEAKER_01: At that point, Dante's got enough of that in order to be able to step into the paradiesal frame and let go more and more of himself and realize that the divine self was always already that which was the spirit, the energy within him.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, and then realize more and more fully the kind of incarnation that the human and the divine are one.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: Um, and yes, it's that kind of dynamic that I think Dante and Blake are pointing us towards.
49:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, in in Blake, um, in one of his poems, God he hears God speaking.
49:34
SPEAKER_01: He says, I heard the divine savior, and these were the words of his mild song.
49:38
SPEAKER_01: Um and the divine savior says, I am in you and you're in me, mutual in love divine.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a god afar off, I'm a brother and a friend.
49:46
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's the invitation, and knowing what that means, with all the you know the risks that that involves, because of what as Jung would say, ego inflation and so on, we constantly confused about that.
50:00
SPEAKER_01: But nonetheless, that's the direction of travel.
50:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, and Blake and Dante, in their own way, chart that in these more paradiesal states.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: I know we are coming up to more time mark, but you touched a bit on Blake's engagement with the divine and specifically uh within the Christian tradition.
50:23
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's fair to say that he took a different approach to the interpretation of the biblical scriptures uh to others, and uh and and made a kind of creed a curve that is imagination that converts us to anything and not uh obsession with uh literalism and historical fact.
50:44
SPEAKER_00: Um what why do you think that he um what well what was his different approach to Christian the Christian faith?
50:55
SPEAKER_00: And and how is it that it um provides something that other approaches don't?
51:02
SPEAKER_00: That it doesn't portray it.
51:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean actually I think that Blake is very orthodox in terms of his Christianity, but it's an orthodoxy that's been forgotten, particularly since the Protestant Reformation.
51:16
SPEAKER_01: So you know, you take the Bible, since then it's become a sort of goal to try and work out what the original author really meant.
51:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, that's a kind of great task, and then you get this biblical criticism that tries to reach for the aboriginal text, you know, behind what we have in front of us now.
51:35
SPEAKER_01: Relates all that was a complete mistake.
51:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, he thought that no, the text carries the inspiration as it is in front of you that you need, and that liberates you to try and meet its inspiration with your inspiration and then release the meaning.
51:51
SPEAKER_01: And this was actually the way that the Bible was always read.
51:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, even in the Bible itself, in the New Testament itself, Paul does that.
51:57
SPEAKER_01: The gospel writers do that.
51:59
SPEAKER_01: They're reinterpreting what was the scripture for them to illuminate what they felt had happened in Jesus.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: And so it's it's the it's the way you should try and read an inspired text if you want it to live, if you treat it as a document to kind of analyze, you you take the life out of it.
52:15
SPEAKER_01: Um and you or you all you end up doing is kind of getting endless squabbles about the true reading of the Bible and so on.
52:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, rather than no, it can be read this way, it can be read that way.
52:25
SPEAKER_01: And the test is how it fills the divine life within you, not whether you've got it analytically right or wrong.
52:33
SPEAKER_01: And so I think that Blake, in that way, and in other ways, he's returning us to a kind of pre-Reformation Christianity, um, which might be called a mystical form.
52:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, another way that's really important for Blake is this notion of incarnation.
52:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he he, in one of his um pamphlets, he concludes the pamphlet with the great declaration, therefore God became as we are, that we may be as he is.
52:59
SPEAKER_01: And this isn't some invention by Blake.
53:01
SPEAKER_01: This is what the church fathers say right the way through the early church period.
53:05
SPEAKER_01: In every century, you know, there's a great figure like Gregory of Nyssa, like Leo the Great, like Cyril of Alexander, um, who made more or less exactly the same declaration, therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.
53:18
SPEAKER_01: But that's been forgotten because since the Reformation, the sort of standard story that Christianity tells, at least in the West, is of an abyss, a great divide, um, an infinite distance between us and the divine.
53:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, that, you know, luckily this one figure called Jesus kind of wings across and manages to bridge.
53:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, no, the figure of Jesus is the figure of us all, that the divine is always already within us.
53:45
SPEAKER_01: The question is, can we know that?
53:47
SPEAKER_01: How can we find that and so give our lives to that?
53:50
SPEAKER_01: And this, I think, was standard Christianity until about 1514 or 1517, and when a new form uh started to grip the imagination, no doubt because it had become corrupt and um you know was being abused, and these things happen in history.
54:08
SPEAKER_01: Um but Blake is saying, no, return to a true Orthodox Christianity, I think.
54:12
SPEAKER_01: It only seems strange because we've forgotten what that Christianity actually is.
54:18
SPEAKER_00: Fascinating, and I'm sure uh a view uh of history which most people would have uh had obscured from view, actually.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: So thanks for that, Mark.
54:30
SPEAKER_00: Well, last question before I let you go.
54:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that question is the question I pose to all of my guests, which is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
54:40
SPEAKER_00: And what was it that made you think differently?
54:42
SPEAKER_00: It could have been something earth-shattering, it could have been something more quotidian.
54:48
SPEAKER_01: I mean, maybe it's something more subtle and it's something that is an ongoing I don't know, process, I hope, um, which is it's so take a phrase that's at the heart of Christianity.
55:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's in dying that you discover life, it's in carrying your cross that you you know realize the truth of things.
55:14
SPEAKER_01: Um the person who seeks to, you know, gain their life will lose it, whereas the person that loses their life will gain it is you know another phrase that Jesus uses.
55:22
SPEAKER_01: And I've known those phrases for a long time and have had various sort of intellectual ideas about them at different times, um but more lasting and more valuable is gradually getting to know what that actually means as a piece of wisdom.
55:45
SPEAKER_01: Um and so whilst at one time I would have said, you know, a kind of version of Christianity which said, you know, that it's Jesus that dies for us so that we can live, um, something that happened 2,000 years ago.
55:55
SPEAKER_01: I don't believe that now.
55:56
SPEAKER_01: Um I believe that it's a it's a constant process that in principle at least is happening at every moment, um a sort of stepping um through yourself to that which is beyond yourself and through a kind of giving of yourself.
56:11
SPEAKER_01: Um I mean I'm I'm trying to find the right words, but even now that's enacting it in a way because it's trying to, you know, you you bring all you are to try and find the right words to express this truth that ultimately is beyond the words.
56:24
SPEAKER_01: So the words have to die, they have to let go in order that the truth can be felt more presently.
56:31
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, so it's uh it's a sort of subtle, maybe not changing my mind, but I hope and pray forming of my mind.
56:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, that you know, doing the work on people like Dante and Blake um is possible as well.
56:49
SPEAKER_00: Well, it has it definitely has echoes of of Saint Paul dying to your former self, putting put can putting on the clothes of your your new mind, um enlightened by Christ.
57:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh obviously that was a paraphrase rather than the direct quotation, but it's uh um uh yeah, I suppose it's a the the death and rebirth.
57:13
SPEAKER_00: Um each day it's the it gets all the way back to the point you you were trying to make, actually.
57:18
SPEAKER_00: Um the that the the resurrection of um of of you, it it happens all of the time and it doesn't have to have been a historical moment.
57:28
SPEAKER_00: And um and I guess all the way back to that panentheism point which um um you and McGillquist and others have talked about that God is within us, is He is within everything because that's the nature of creation, it's always recreation.
57:44
SPEAKER_00: Um well that's that's fascinating.
57:47
SPEAKER_00: That's certainly one of the if not the the the the deepest advances I've had back um because of because of the consequences of what it is that you just said, um not not an easy thing, and I think you have to have a a real level of um introspection to be able to carry that in your mind each day.
58:11
SPEAKER_00: Um so anyway, that is something for people to aspire to, I suppose, in their paradiesal um uh future.
58:18
SPEAKER_00: But before I let you go, we've been talking about your book, where can people find it?
58:23
SPEAKER_00: And what are you working on next?
58:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, thanks for asking these questions.
58:29
SPEAKER_01: And you know, that in a way they are sort of deep, but any genius wisdom tradition of which Christianity is one, it's also very simple.
58:38
SPEAKER_01: And you kind of know it when you see it.
58:40
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's maybe the person is living a very simple life, but that somehow is giving of their life in that simplicity that you go, oh, that is it.
58:49
SPEAKER_01: I can feel it now.
58:51
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, so um reaching for the words may in some ways uh not be the best way of trying to communicate it, but that's where I'm at.
58:59
SPEAKER_01: Um uh I mean, yeah, so I uh I have a website, martvernon.com.
59:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, like yourself, do um stuff on YouTube and social media, elsewhere, Substack.
59:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I hope it's relatively easy to find other discussions and uh feel in those discussions something of what we've been talking about as well.
59:21
SPEAKER_00: Great.
59:22
SPEAKER_00: And your your book, presumably out in all good bookshops.
59:27
SPEAKER_01: Yep, so that's awake, William Blake and the Empower of the Imagination.
59:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, thank you.
59:31
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, it's uh you can get it, um, good bookshops online and so on.
59:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
59:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, there must be good bookshops to stop it, Mark, because it was a very, very good book indeed.
59:41
SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, it was um an actual uh a genuine page turn, not just saying this to butter you up.
59:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh really was engrossing, so everyone ought to get out and um buy it because I I don't think you will leave unchanged, and I think you will probably find yourself diving deeper into William Blake's work, particularly if you've had some um exposure to it in the past, even if it is just singing Jerusalem, you will see it in a different light, and you might even see the the spot of earth on which you stand in your own life in a different light be reading it.
1:00:16
SPEAKER_00: So uh I think it's great, Mark, and uh clearly other people do too, because you are springing up uh all over uh at the moment.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_00: So long may that continue and keep fighting the good fight.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for coming on the show.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me on, and uh you know, talking about it is very much part of trying to realize that true enchantment and uh shed off the misenchantment.
1:00:39
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, thanks to Blake, um, but thanks to to you as well.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you, Mark.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_00: Too kind, all the best.
1:00:51
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