Mark Vernon
Blake says, you know, more. More is the cry of a mistaken soul. So just wanting to accumulate, have this, have that, that’s the mistaken soul. But he doesn’t say, therefore want less. He says, no, nothing less than all will satisfy man. We do have a desire for the divine within us, for the infinite, for the eternal. And so again, any path that feels like it has this constricting effect upon you, it’s leading you astray, I’d say.
Elizabeth Rovere
What if our modern crisis isn’t a lack of meaning, but an overload of it? Too many interpretations, stories, fragments, and not enough depth. In today’s episode of Wonderstruck, I speak with philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon about absence of the sacred dimension, that once oriented human life. Mark proposes that true meaning isn’t found in the endless horizontal scroll of information, but in a reawakening to the vertical axis, to soul, spirit, and the mystery that transcends us. Mark’s work invites us back into the territory of wonder, not as a luxury, but as a necessity for the soul. I’m Elizabeth Rovere, a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a pilgrim in the realms of wonder and awe. This is Wonderstruck, a podcast about awe in all its forms, including the beautiful, the humbling, and even the uncanny. Together with thinkers and seekers, we explore the moments that undo us and awaken us to the very mystery of being. So, Mark, I’m just absolutely thrilled to be talking to you. It’s my pleasure. And I’ve enjoyed reading Spiritual Intelligent Life of Christianity or Secret, Secret History of Christianity. It is a kind of a secret life in a way. The evolution of consciousness aspect of that. I mean, you’re a prolific writer and a wonderful speaker. I’m so happy to be sitting here with you. Thank you so much for coming.
Mark Vernon
Well, thank you. It’s a joy to speak because I think a lot of these things, you’re right, it is a kind of life. There’s something living. And so speaking about these things is very much part of how we can sense the presence of them.
Elizabeth Rovere
So I know that some of your work, if not all of it, arguably is in a way, feels like it happened organically, but it’s addressing this meaning crisis or the fact that people feel more divided and more depressed and more anxious than usual, or perhaps I don’t know if it’s more than usual, but it seems like there’s an intensity to it today. How do you see your work as a response to this? You know, how does something like ancient wisdom, early Christianity address this modern existential and spiritual crisis.
Mark Vernon
I think the meaning crisis is right. But strangely enough, I increasingly feel, actually it’s not that there’s a lack of meaning around, but there’s just this welter of different meanings. And what the crisis is about, therefore, is not maybe 20th century style, nihilism and emptiness, but increasingly in the 21st century, I feel, is an excess of opposing meanings. Broadly speaking, everything seems to get increasingly collapsed onto a kind of horizontal flatland where there’s lots of individual features. Because of the horizontal nature of the world in which we live, it’s very hard to get a sense of how all this adds together or how to discern one path from another. And so I feel what’s being lost is the vertical dimension. And this is what spiritual intelligence can give us. And we need it because, partly because we need to find ways of navigating this kind of meaning tsunami, but also because it’s who we are as individuals as well.
Elizabeth Rovere
Do you feel that we’re in the meaning crisis in that way, neglected it? Is that part of the reasons why we’re here that we’ve neglected this vertical? And I think when you describe it as we’re in a horizontal or thin way in which we see the world and experience ourselves in the world, let’s help people understand that a little bit better by what you mean horizontal versus vertical.
Mark Vernon
I mean, maybe I could talk about being a psychotherapist a bit, because I think it really does have very practical and tangible impact upon people’s lives. People come to a psychotherapist, clinical psychologist, other kinds of help like that, because they’re suffering. I don’t doubt the suffering, the extent of suffering that’s around and about. But what they’re often met with is a whole range of methodologies, a whole range of either techniques or even approaches that are presented as a kind of wisdom about what it is to be human. And. But again, this kind of proliferates. And so you very often find that after a period of time, if people’s suffering doesn’t just lessen for reasons of the life course, they’ve tried this, they’ve tried that, they’ve had this technique, they’ve had long periods of psychotherapy. They’ve tried this kind of clinical psychology technique. And a lot of it’s been useful, but it’s like never ending. It’s interminable. There’s always another stone to overturn and have a look underneath. There’s always another residue of trauma to consider. There’s always an emptiness of space that somehow, particularly in the Modern world, we feel, needs to be filled. And so I feel that this proliferation of techniques in psychology, which is sometimes known as the replication crisis, I think there’s this phenomenon in psychology that one group come up with one set results, and they’ve pursued a perfectly good methodology. They’ve got the evidence and so on. But then sometime later, another group pursue more or less the same question, but with a different methodology. And they come up with very different results. And if they’re at all in the business of selling their psychology, each gets trademarked. And so you and I, as sort of punters of this, we get confusion. And I increasingly feel that what has got lost is it’s to do with who we are as human beings, that we have, you might say, this kind of soul level, which is our inner vitality that we know more or less directly as individual people. And it has color from the past, it has yearnings in the present, it has hopes for the future. It’s that which we meet when we meet, you know, the living presence of someone. But it’s not all we are as human beings. We also have this connection to what you might call spirit. You might call the divine. It’s the part of us, ourselves, which actually is not only more than who we are at the soulful level, but is more intimately who we are than at the soulful level. And psychology, and even psychotherapy, in large part, doesn’t know how to deal with that transcendent, vertical, spirit, divine dimension. And without it, we get lost. Yeah, because there’s no orientation, there’s no axis upon which all this other stuff can kind of turn.
Elizabeth Rovere
We find a place, no rudder, no orientation. And I love that you’ve said that. And so the vertical is more of this transcendental aspect. So there’s two things. First of all, I love what you said about where it can be sort of this repetitive analysis that just keeps going and going and going, and you’re sort of spiraling, and where are you? You know, there’s like that kind of witty comment, like, analysis paralysis. Come on, get to the point. And you talk about it, and I think it’s so beautiful that it’s like going inside, not to just analyze over and over, but going inside and looking inside and experiencing inside and awakening inside so that things start opening as opposed to repeating over and over. And you hit that sort of vertical or transcendental direction and experience. And I agree with you, we’re very much aligned with this. But how do you do that in your work with people? And what do you do when you hit against someone, that’s coming from a more kind of rationalist, materialist background that’s like, you can’t talk to me about the soul or the spirit. Like, what are you talking about? How do you get them to be open or wake up to that inner vibrancy?
Mark Vernon
It’s a kind of active listening. And you’re absolutely right that there’s no point in presenting this kind of argument to someone in a therapeutic context in abstract, because it just becomes another idea to either reject or try and kind of keep spinning in your head and then just makes everything worse. But if you listen out for when people reach maybe a kind of pause or, I mean, the Platonic will be an aporia where they kind of run out of ideas about themselves or there’s a frustration even, and in that moment of pause, in that silence, to not just let it pass, to say, look, that might be the crucial moment now. And then, because of psychotherapy, when you work with people for a period of time, you get to know the kind of language that connects with their soul. That’s not just another idea, but actually has a resonance within them. Then, you know, part of the art, if you like, is to use that language to pay attention to that moment and to say that is something that’s within you, but also that you can maybe surrender to or give yourself to or understand to be a deeper part of yourself that’s also kind of beyond who you understand yourself to be. One phrase that I find very resonant myself at the moment is this notion of the Cloud of Unknowing. And the author of this famous medieval text says that you need a kind of contemplative practice where everything that you think you know about yourself or about God or about the world, you put into the Cloud of Forgetting for the purposes of the practice. And then you wait, as it were, on the edge of this Cloud of Forgetting with a dart of longing love, he calls it, this desire to know more. But because everything’s gone into the Cloud of Forgetting, knowing that you yourself can’t work it out anymore. And you stand then before this Cloud of Unknowing, and from that will come the insights, the presence, the that-ness, maybe more than the what-ness that you can increasingly know to be part of who you are and more than who you are as well. I mean, in some ways, I think that the genius of AA has got onto this in its own way. This is another way of putting it, which is when someone reaches a terrible rock bottom often, and yet they know then there’s nothing more they can do. But that’s also the moment, the pause, when a higher power might make itself present.
Elizabeth Rovere
Absolutely.
Mark Vernon
So this is. You know, this is a roundabout in our culture, too. Hooray. You don’t have to be explicitly religious.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. That’s beautiful.
Mark Vernon
You’re listening out for that. Yeah, yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And bringing in that metaphor of the cloud of forgetting in this way. I mean, when you bring it up to clients or patients, are they interested in the cloud of unknowing? Do they want to go read it, or are they just using the metaphor in the moment in that way?
Mark Vernon
Some will. I mean, because of my own past, which is connected with Christianity in the church, quite a lot of my people that I work with are aware of that in some way or other. And so, you know, they have some relationship to the church or Christianity, too. And then, you know, bringing in. Do you realize this is part of your tradition as well? Can be really a welcome thought. But, you know, not everyone’s like that, of course, in the modern world. And then you listen out for the resources, the traditions that people do relate to personally. And it may be another wisdom tradition, explicitly religious tradition even, but it may be through poetry or literature or the way these things get talked about, even in a secular context.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Mark Vernon
And so, yeah, the words at the end of the day are a bit like our soul. They’re. They’re just there to transmit something deeper than themselves.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Mark Vernon
So, yeah, being eclectic in the words you use, not being precious about the words you use, is really important.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. That’s fantastic. And I hear what you’re saying about how the AA tradition in this way and hitting a point where it’s a breakdown and you don’t have the answers, it allows for this kind of an opening. It is a beautiful spiritual tradition that. That you can participate in without having to be religious per se. And I like how you kind of. You bring in this way of looking at breakdown and breakthrough or these kind of polarizations, and you reference William Blake in the Spiritual Intelligence book. I’m fascinated by this as well, where right when you’re having the breakdown, it’s time for you to break through, like, there’s something hopeful about it and positive. So I wanted to just emphasize that and then ask you more about these polarities and Blake, because it brings us into this place of, you know, of course, the podcast is called Wonderstruck. And, you know, when I’m reading your book and it’s looking at these kinds of profound moments where you’re struck by you know, something that’s incomprehensible or you don’t know, and it’s like. You’re, like, terrified, and it’s bewildering, but magnificent. The polarization aspect of it is fascinating to me, and I was curious what.
Mark Vernon
You think about that, actually, as you’re talking, Dante has more immediately come to my mind, partly because it’s sort of personal with Dante for me, that I myself was in a long period of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis. Quite a traditional approach, really.
Elizabeth Rovere
Which one?
Mark Vernon
So it was broadly a psychodynamic psychoanalysis. I went several times a week lying on a couch and so on. It was really, really good for opening up my troubles, and I needed that. But it offered a way down which in, you know, Dante’s Divine Comedy is. Would be analogous in some way to the descent into. Into the darkness, into hell. I then got rather stuck and didn’t know quite what to do next. I sort of knew more and more about my past or about, you know, what was kicking off, and yet it didn’t seem to be transformative. And then I was involved in a group, and we read the Divine Comedy very slowly with a great, great teacher. And I realized that when Virgil and Dante get to the bottom of Hell, this sort of frozen, icy lake, and they’re climbing right on the body of Lucifer, you know, it’s. It’s. You keep going, it’s through, not saying, I understand. Now I turn my back and everything goes back to normal. But there was a. There was an about turn, what Jung might call an Enantiodromia. And that leads them to purgatory, to Mount Purgatory. Now, the point about Mount Purgatory is that there’s still plenty of suffering, but there’s light, there’s hope. The struggle now begins to make some sense. You trust at least that it’s going somewhere. And I think at its best, psychotherapy is more purgatorial than hellish, because the therapist holds out the hope, even if you, as someone who are in therapy, can’t have it at that moment, that this suffering. Partly it’s good to have techniques to deal with suffering because we also have to live normal lives and maybe work or look after others or whatever it might be. So I don’t want just to say techniques can’t be useful. And even just knowing that someone else understands can be immensely a relief, actually. But there’s something through the suffering as well that these wisdom traditions, the spiritual intelligence teaches us. And the suffering becomes very different when we realize that there is hope. And that this is part of the transformation and that we can reach out to others in the suffering, not just in happiness. And gradually what this is doing, I think, is creating the space around all that might be troubling us to see this higher dimension, to see, you know, in Dante’s scheme, the divine light more and more and realize that’s our kind of true self, that’s more than just ourselves and that we discover by giving ourselves to it. So this element of sacrifice and, you know, in the Christian tradition, it’s the discussions about losing your life to find it and so on, but you kind of have to know enough about what you’re losing before you can lose it. You know, you have to. Jack Kornfield, the famous Buddhist.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Mark Vernon
Writer, he often. He said things like, you have to be someone before you. You have to be a somebody before you can be a nobody. You know, there is. There’s a kind of self awareness that is necessary. It is part of the path, but it’s not the end point. It’s just really the preparation. I suppose that’s the way of putting it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. No, that’s beautifully said. That makes a lot of sense to me. The Dante analogy is fascinating. And it makes me think of having somebody that you’re talking to, whether it’s a therapist or a mentor that can sort of hold that space. And when you’re saying, I’m going through a breakthrough, like, yeah, I know, and guess what, that’s really good news. Or that’s hopeful, or, you know, for them to be able to see it as you’re. As a person is going through it, like having someone else really pay attention and hear those, as you were saying, those moments or those kind of the pauses or those gaps where something gets stirred up and you’re like, okay, there’s one of those moments. Is that a kairos time? Would that be a kairos time?
Mark Vernon
Yeah, yeah. No.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay.
Mark Vernon
Absolutely.
Elizabeth Rovere
And what is kairos time for people that might don’t know what it is?
Mark Vernon
Well, this is a little. Where a little bit of Greek comes in handy. There’s more than two words actually, but the two words for time in Greek, and one is chronos, from which we get, you know, chronology. And so it’s clock time, essentially, and it ticks second by second and is steady and regular and is useful for organizing things and all the rest of it. But when it becomes too dominant, it tends to squeeze out this other kind of time, kairos time. And kairos actually is a Greek word that comes originally from contexts like Weaving. And the great weaver of the cloth knows exactly the right moment to throw the shuttle through and throw the shuttle through. And so it’s that kind of sense of rhythm and pulse. But then that’s, you know, that becomes a kind of spiritual knack as well. So. And so kairos, it can be a big moment, but often actually it’s good to learn to live with it as something that might be happening in every moment. A bit like the rhythm of the weaving. Beautiful as well.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, when you said that about the weaving, that’s fascinating to me because my association was to Indra’s web and the pulsation of the cosmos from like the Vedic tradition, or perhaps it’s the spiritual commons that you talk about. You see these profound ideas, or I want to call them more than ideas, meanings throughout the different traditions.
Mark Vernon
I mean, I have in some substantial part become alerted to the way this is held in the Christian tradition because of engagement with Vedic traditions, with Indian philosophy.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, wow.
Mark Vernon
And particularly what’s often called non dualism, which focuses a bit like the cloud of unknowing, actually on the moment of stepping apart in order to become more aware of the presence of the unity that’s within all things. But I very much get drawn to those teachers who say that’s just the first step. Because then there’s the return to the many. But to be able to see the one thing in the many. So sometimes it’s called. That’s the Tantric move back where Maya, that which had confused you before, now becomes the revelation of the divine presence in all things. So there’s this first step to become aware of the presence. But then most of life really is going to be the step back. So that becomes more and more the everyday rather than the exception of experience.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, it’s beautiful. I can sort of feel that. I love that as you speak, which is that way in which suddenly you see right after going to. Kind of stepping into the. Being aware of the one and then coming back to the many and seeing in everything the one and the many, and just seeing that kind of unity, even though you’re experiencing it somewhat separately.
Mark Vernon
Yeah, I mean, I think Blake. You’ve been mentioning Blake, which has been wonderful. So let me return the Blake thought as well now. Cause he’s another hugely important figure to me. And he famously talks about the minute particulars and it’s captured in one of his best known phrases. To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. Hold infinity the palm of your hand in Eternity for an hour. So this is very much a kind of poetic invocation of how the universal is not discovered in some sort of abstract space, but is discovered at the heart of everything that is, you know, the world’s in a grain of sand. And he has a very lovely phrase that I think is precisely about becoming more and more aware of this, where he says, there is a moment in every day that Satan cannot find, nor can his watch fiends find it, but the industrious find this moment and it multiply. For when it once is found, it renovates every moment of the day if rightly placed. He actually, I think, learned a huge amount from Indian philosophy himself. He lived in this period where the East India Company was actually bringing back a lot of texts and wisdoms, like the Bhagavad Gita was translated into English for the first time in the late 1780s. And he read this. He’s one of the first readers, and I think it revived for him his sense of being a Christian mystic.
Elizabeth Rovere
Fascinating. Yeah. I felt like I learned more about William Blake and reading your books. And the quote about joy. Will you just say it?
Mark Vernon
Yeah. Again, so this is very much about this difference between the kind of chronological step by step through life, or the chirological, which is this moment which you give yourself to, where he says, he who binds to himself the joy does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise. So that’s this very different attentive sort of stance, kissing the joy as it flies. It’s participating wholly in the joy as it flies, but not so as to possess it, but so as to sort of release into it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right. Releasing into it, yeah.
Mark Vernon
Gosh.
Elizabeth Rovere
So this is fun having this conversation with you, because as you’re talking, I mean, I’m associating much more than I’m, like, thinking or thinking about what to do next. The sense of joy and, like, trying to hold onto it. Right. And the problem of that and kind of kissing as it. As it flies and participating in it, my association went to. That’s life. Like, we don’t possess our life, we participate in it. Right. I mean, there’s a way that you’ve. That you’ve talked about that, like, it’s just. It’s not yours to own, it’s yours to participate in.
Mark Vernon
I think this is Right. And, you know, the link to death is both at the heart of the wisdom and is certainly, for me, the great challenge of the wisdom as well, because this is a letting go that is Ultimately a preparation for dying itself to make it a bit more bite sized. There’s another very nice phase of Blake which helps me where he says every kindness is a little death. And so that’s the idea that when we offer a kindness to someone, we do give of ourselves. We act not in for our concern or out of our anxiety, but in order for the benefit of someone else. And it’s a little death, therefore, of our sort of small self, if you like. But it’s also a stepping into a wider life, because in that moment you feel the connection with someone else.
Elizabeth Rovere
Exactly.
Mark Vernon
So in giving, you receive and all these ways that this is talked about and held in the wisdom traditions, but I think particularly maybe it’s more of a second half of life task is to live more and more in that mode. Because as Jung puts it, the thing about the second half of life is you realize that the sun is no longer climbing higher and higher into the sky and blazing beautifully above you. But actually it’s begun to come down in the sky and it’s afternoon and you know at some point there’s gonna be a sunset and you hope that will be beautiful. But now is the moment to practice that. And hence, as you’re saying, the question of death and dying isn’t a kind of marginal concern in this approach, but is really the central concern, as the philosophers put it, as well. You know, Socrates, one of the famous sayings of his is philosophy is learning how to die. And it’s captured in one of the best known of Plato’s dialogues, which is the one in which Socrates actually dies when he drinks the hemlock. This creates a kind of huge tension right through the dialogue because you know, this is going to happen. But at what point, not just is Socrates going to be at, but are those he’s talking with going to be at for this inevitability? There’s a moment in life and sometimes there’s a moment in the day where, you know, working out who you are, asserting yourself, finding your place in this world is absolutely fundamental because that’s about being real and being grounded. But there comes a moment, you know, if we’re lucky. I think that’s why the old prayer, save us from sudden death is so powerful. To have preparation for that is very much part of stepping into a wider life.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, it’s interesting, as you say that there’s a couple of things that come to my mind. So this idea of kindness being a small death. First I was like, what? I didn’t quite grasp it. Then I was like, okay, now I’m seeing it. The idea of when you’re kind to someone and how it fulfills you and it fulfills. Like there’s something you’re giving, but it’s uplifting. You feel that connection with the other person or something larger and you feel uplifted in that process. And then going into like a sunrise. And I can’t remember if William Blake said this about sunrise or sunset, but not just seeing, oh, it’s a beautiful sunset, but seeing more in it, seeing more in the sun. Sort of like this transcendent aspect that we intuitively and hopefully. Right. Feel about, as you said in Socrates or with Jesus, that that’s the. That is what death is in that way, this transcendent moment. It’s a really difficult. Death is really difficult. And I know you write about it.
Mark Vernon
Yeah. I mean, I feel that any wisdom tradition worth its salt, if you want to sort of check it out, see what they say about death. Cause that’s really where the rubber hits the road.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Mark Vernon
But I mean, you know, going back to Blake and what you’re saying there about how his reflections on seeing the sun rise, is this another quite well known set of remarks that he makes. He actually imagines having a conversation with someone and this person says, you know, when you see the sun rise, do you see a disc of gold about the size of a guinea popping up over the horizon? And Blake says, oh, no, no, no. I see the heavenly host crying, holy, holy, holy. You know, and I think it is supposed to be witty, actually. There’s a kind of lightness that is all part of this as well. You know, lightness is about letting go, isn’t it? And levity, which we, you know, normally means kind of laughter now, was actually the. In the medieval period was the opposite of gravity. And if gravity roots us to the soil, levity rises. It helps us rise to the stars. Yeah. So I think that this, this capacity that Blake promises, he says that his work is a kind of education in this capacity to see. He’s not. And he’s not saying this is some sort of ecstatic moment that I had one day. He says, no, this can be an invitation to a way of perceiving life that can become part of your everyday. I just might say in parenthesis that my next book is all about this in Blake.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, it is.
Mark Vernon
And it’s called Awake William Blake and the Power of the Imagination. But Blake says that this expansion of the imagination, this awakening of perception is deeply linked to kissing the joy as it flies. I Mean, I’m trusting this as much as knowing it directly myself, I should say. But I think that part of orientating and feeling into this wider life is knowing at once there’s a kind of letting go of self. But that at the same time is an opening onto more. Life grows as a result. It’s like the dart of longing, love before the cloud of unknowing. We can’t know it in the sense of being in control ahead of time. And, you know, here’s the program, as it were. This is a space which is growing even as you’re growing into it. But we can, through trust, through these traditions, through great teachers like Blake and others, sort of follow this path.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting. It’s like through trust and that kind of surrender and the way in which of not knowing, things open up. Things open up that you didn’t expect. And it’s like, awesome. It’s fantastic. And so I wonder. I’d like to trust that that’s a way that you take into death. It’s like, I don’t have control. I don’t know, can I open up to trust? The process in a way that I’ve seen in these different traditions, within those different traditions and philosophies. I mean, it makes sense intuitively, perceptually, imaginatively go into dying in this way. I mean, I think it’s a profound thing.
Mark Vernon
And how this is presented in the Christian tradition, I think, is particularly challenging because the death that’s at the heart of Christianity, in terms of the narrative of Christianity, is, of course, the death of Jesus. And that clearly was a troubling experience. You know, there’s the story of Jesus before. On the night before, he died in the Garden of Gethsemane and beaten deeply troubled, so much so that he sweated blood. And yet it’s through the depth of that suffering that the moment arrives where he can also say, but not my will, but thy will be done. And then the angels come and minister unto him. So this is not as if the suffering goes away, but something more than just the suffering comes to be known. I think, you know, and then Christ on the cross utters this line from the psalm, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But in that darkness is where the light then comes in the story that’s through death, that there’s the resurrection, there’s more life. And it’s like Dante again, you know, that the way out of hell is not to turn your back having seen the worst, but is to go on Right through the heart of darkness on Lucifer’s body. And so trusting this in these stories. But also, I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s so valuable to have been with someone when they’ve died, when they’re dying, when they’ve died, as they die, because a kind of felt familiarity with what’s possible is really the best guide. You know, I can come up with phrases. Someone like William Blake comes up with very beautiful phrases, but at the end of the day, knowing directly what might be possible. And so being able to call on that spirit yourself is part of the task of learning to live.
Elizabeth Rovere
It is part of the task of learning to live. And I’m glad you said it like that. I think that’s profound. And I’m also glad you brought up Jesus, because I know in your work you’ve talked about Jesus’ death and Socrates; death, and there’s two aspects. And I’ll just. You know, I grew up in an Anglican, Episcopalian, you know, Christian tradition. And, you know, walking into church and seeing the crucifix, and I was just like, I just don’t get it. This isn’t making sense to me. And then a lot of times, even during sermons, it’s like, okay, but I’m still not getting it. I started getting it more, not 100%, but working on it, you know, when you were talking about. But that’s the deepest part of his humanity, is to be able to experience human suffering. I mean, okay, so it kind of sucks. Not great, but that profound moment of being utterly human and yet coming into that transitional moment of moving into light or seeing the light, but feeling forsaken, like a lot of us most. I mean, humans do we feel this way at some point in our life. That’s Jesus as profoundly human that all of us can relate to. And where you talk about, you know, God or Jesus or Logos becoming human so that we can become not just human. And I say it like that because it’s, you know, is it God? Is it light? Is it something transcendent that we don’t understand? So that’s really meaningful to me, and to bring it even to a more concrete analogy is you write about the death of Ivan Ilyich, a story by Tolstoy, which, when I read that, I was like, oh, my God, that’s one of my favorite stories ever that I reference a lot because I find it deeply meaningful and also hilarious. I guess my point of that is, here’s this guy, Ivan Ilyich, that’s cranky and he’s got like this family that’s like, oh, it’s inconvenient that this guy is dying. Cause I wanna have my party on Sunday and what’s gonna happen? And then he has that moment and I just. I’m reading it from your book, from Tolstoy, but it’s like he’s like all of a sudden in death, he’s like, where did the death go? There was light, but maybe you could talk a little bit more.
Mark Vernon
Yeah, but it’s only at the moment of death that the death goes, as it were. So that’s the paradox.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, the paradox, Yeah.
Mark Vernon
I mean, just my tradition is the Anglican tradition as well, in the Church of England, in Christianity generally, actually, the cross is talked about in lots of different ways. And I feel that most of the ways it’s talked about is not helpful. In fact, I don’t think, because it’s much. It’s the transactional reading of the cross. It’s like Jesus had to die to redeem us from our sins, and God, as it were, needed the sacrifice in order that we can be washed clean. And to my mind, it’s an absolutely horrific reading of the cross, actually.
Elizabeth Rovere
Thank you. Right.
Mark Vernon
Yeah. And I think what’s happened is that the mystical reading, understanding this as a pattern of life, has got lost. And this has become, I think, particularly intense since the Reformation. But actually, do you know, for the first time, millennium or so of Christianity, that transactional understanding of the cross wasn’t really very present either. So before about, you know, the 1100s, that transactional understanding of atonement, that’s the official word. So substitutionary atonement theory is so Christ died instead of us, you know.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right. And sacrifice.
Mark Vernon
Yeah. But we see the cross and the horror of it. And so that instills a sense of horror in ourselves, in our condition.
Elizabeth Rovere
Totally.
Mark Vernon
That’s not very present in the first Christian millennium, which is why if you go into an Orthodox church, Greek Orthodox say, you don’t actually see many crucifixes. There will be one, but it’ll be sort of not front, right in front of you. It’ll probably be towards the back. And it’s much more presented as part of the path, part of your theosis, that this dying to self is part of what it is to be a Christian. So that’s a very, very different perception of the cross from certainly many Protestant traditions. In Christianity, there’s never been any official theology of the cross. So these things.
Elizabeth Rovere
Fascinating.
Mark Vernon
You can coexist with these things actually in the tradition. But I feel now, very much for the reasons you’re saying, that this more mystical understanding of what the cross invites and brings makes present for us in our own path. It’s really important to try and talk about, because this transactional notion, I mean, what kind of God does it invoke? And any kind of sort of person just thinking as a human being, it’s gonna be repulsed by that. And I think that’s a lot of the trouble that Western Christianity’s got itself into, actually.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, that was my experience growing up. I was just like, I just don’t get this. I mean, this is not making any sense to me. I don’t feel good about. And, you know, then I’ve been reading just, you know, with your book, and then prior to that, too, which I know you like, the Divine Double, Charles Stang’s book. These early aspects of early Christianity, it’s like. It’s so much more resonant. It’s so much more powerful in a way, this secret history and, you know, these parables and these stories and what’s the deeper meaning that somehow I did not experience until, you know, I was reading about it now, but I didn’t experience it growing up. And it’s just like. It’s so much more appealing thinking about this more subversive, like, religious sect that’s going around doing these deeper mysteries and, like, awakening within. That’s exciting. I mean, that’s, people would love Christianity if it was really about that in the church, I think.
Mark Vernon
Yeah. I mean, I agree. It became a very practical question for me when I was thinking about the title of this book, A Secret History of Christianity, because I knew that would put a lot of Christians off, actually, because for them, it has kind of gnostic resonances. You know, like there’s some sort of knowledge which a minority group within Christianity transmitted and gets a bit Dan Brownish. And so it puts people off. But actually, Jesus, it’s actually a gospel word. It’s a biblical word. Jesus talks about the secret of the kingdom. And probably the most common phrase that he cited saying in the Gospels are these words where he says, you know, they see but see not, they hear but hear not. This idea that a transformation has got to happen to you, got to be received in order to understand what he’s talking about. You know, the kingdom is near, he says, and yet most people don’t see it, don’t know about it. And I think parables, his gnomic phrases, his wit. Actually, his wit is great. There’s a lot of kind of very strange, bizarre phrases that Jesus utters, if you hear them kind of naively. But in that naivety is the energy that can make you think, wait a minute, what am I just not even seeing here at all? And so be ready in that moment for the secret. And, you know, even the word mystical, you know, comes from the Greek, which just means sort of obscure. You half know it’s there, but you’re not quite sure how to see and look at it. There’s a certain attitude, it’s good to cultivate. Ultimately, it is revealed to you. It is a kind of unveiling as well.
Elizabeth Rovere
So that’s pretty good. I like that. I think that’s an analogy too, for like, that half knowing it’s there. But that uncertainty, that sort of obscurity. I feel like that’s how we live our lives. And that’s why this horizontal doesn’t work so well. It’s like there’s something more going on. And that’s why when I read this or my producer reads this, we’re like, wait, this is an awakening. This is exciting. And it makes me laugh, too, because as I’m reading some of these things that you talk about with these parables, and you analyze, I’m going to say explore instead of analyze the parables in your book. And I’m like, oh, that’s what’s going on. Because where Jesus talks about the first shall be last and the last shall be first, I mean, nobody really likes to hear that. It’s like, I don’t want to be last. And yet it’s like, you have a guess what it really is about. But let’s talk about humility. Humility is expansive and opening and receiving. That’s pretty cool. So I wanted to ask you if you’d talk a little bit about that. And then the way in which, instead of morality in the church, but these virtues and like, humility is a virtue and how that’s. Virtues are cool. Can we bring them back?
Mark Vernon
Yeah. I mean, on humility, actually, it was a moment when I went to hear the Karmapa, one of the great Buddhist leaders, Tibetan Buddhist leaders speak. He was talking about humility and said, humility is like the sea. And the point about the sea is it’s at the lowest point, but that means that everything flows into it and it says yes to everything, and so becomes the ocean, this great water of being, if you like trying to push the metaphor a bit, but because it’s at the lowest place, because it’s humble. And then I remembered that when Dante and Virgil come out of the inferno, and they’re at the foothills of the purgatory. Their first guides that they encounter there tells them they need to go to the seashore, they need to go to the lowest point. And you can only begin the ascent when you’ve been to the lowest point and know what that feels like. And I think it is very much this kind of openness that it’s inviting. And then similarly, looping back to the parables, I think another disaster, really, that’s happened for Christianity is it’s presented as a kind of moral creed. And the parables are presented as if they’re teaching you how to behave. And then these notions, like the first shall be lasting, they become burdensome. For one thing, where’s the appeal? But also it leads people to feel guilty. And so the link between guilt and Christianity is so deep as well. But when they are presented as possibilities of transformation, then they take on a completely different feel. Because, you know, this is appealing to the part within us that wants to know the divine, not just to, you know, live a sort of good life in a moral sense. You know, that’s worthwhile in some ways, but it’s ultimately, it risks at least contracting our humanity. Blake, he talks about the wastes of moral law. And so when Christianity becomes a sort of set of moral laws or a kind of creed, it wastes life, actually, even if it, you know, the intention is that it makes more of life. But conversely, when these things become invitations to pursue our desire, but to discern it, to understand that ultimately, as Blake says, you know, more, more is the cry of a mistaken soul. So just wanting to accumulate, have this, have that, that’s the mistaken soul. But he doesn’t say, therefore want less. He says, no, nothing less than all will satisfy man. We do have a desire for the divine within us, for the infinite, for the eternal. And so, again, any path that feels like it has this constricting effect upon you, it’s leading you astray, I’d say. But the path, that can be difficult and looping back to what we were saying about suffering, but nonetheless, you intuit it’s the expansive path still that’s the.
Elizabeth Rovere
One to follow, this desire for the internal within us that can manifest itself as taking a lot of supplements and doing your exercise and whatever you might be doing and fear of death. Right. I’m wondering, does it maybe this is really more of an intuitive sense that life is eternal? I don’t know.
Mark Vernon
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that’s another part of the kind of crux that we’ve got ourselves to in the modern world is that the longing for eternity hasn’t gone anywhere, but the working out of that has got channeled into again, the flatland. Very kind of flatly material notions of what a longer life might be, a wider, more expansive life might be. You know, the material, I think, really matters, but when it’s seen, as Blake says, as portals to eternity. And there’s a nice little link with Dante here, actually, that what I think you’re talking about in terms of how we can extend our life is often now referred to as transhumanism.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Mark Vernon
And that was actually a word that Dante coined.
Elizabeth Rovere
You’re kidding.
Mark Vernon
So he talks about how when he. He’s on the cusp of paradise and he says now is the moment to transhumanize. But for Dante, what it means is discovering the divine element, this vertical element within which then the material and the horizontal, as it were, is in the service of, Becomes a transmission path for. And what we, of course, you know, looping back to where we started, we’ve forgotten this vertical or we don’t trust it anymore. And so transhumanism itself has become just this kind of increasingly desperate quest to extend material life. As if that’s going to satisfy us.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right. And it’s not quite. It needs this as well. There’s two ways in which I’m seeing this. It’s like you’re talking about spiritual intelligence as an expansion of perception and a waking up of perception so that you see more vertically or see experience, perceive more vertically. And, you know, when I was reading the book too, I felt like, is it also. Is spiritual intelligence also love? I love how you talk about love. I think it’s so beautiful. And so there’s that question. And then I know you wrote about it, about a book about it about 15, 10, 15 years ago.
Mark Vernon
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And I was curious why?
Mark Vernon
Well, yeah, I mean, love is talked about in lots of different ways. Of course, at the end of the day, I think that the love, the desire called love, which is the sense of longing for more, is core to any spiritual path. It’s in Plato. But in that little book on love, I tried to link it with developmental psychology and again, partly for my own self, to work out what psychology might really reach for and maybe has forgotten. And partly, basically, the story of love that comes from developmental psychology is that we go through these phases of knowing a certain kind of love, but then that reaching a sort of limit that becomes a crisis and can feel existential. But if that can be tolerated and found a way through, then a new kind of love opens up as a result. So a prime example, and maybe it’s even the first example that we’ve all experienced, is when we’re first born. And developmental psychology on the whole, tends to teach us that the very young child, and maybe the child in the womb even more, doesn’t know the difference between itself and other. The universe is a kind of oneness, but it’s a primitive oceanic bliss, as Freud put it. And so to want to return to that kind of oneness is actually a sort of regressive step. But what happens is that the child is born and then realizes that, you know, warmth and food and being held isn’t always just at its beck and call, isn’t always present, isn’t omnipresent. And that creates a crisis. And, you know, if you’ve ever been with young babies, you’ll know that they have moments where they won’t be fed, they refuse to be comforted. There’s rage going on there, they’re kicking against it. And I think this is maybe the first crisis of love. But what happens is, if that can be born, then there’s the realization that love is two dimensional. There’s another person that you’re receiving love from, and that is expansive. Now there’s two dimensions in the world, not just one. And anyway, the point is you can sort of track through developmental psychology these thresholds which are constantly met, which are very disturbing often, and yet if they can be, the threshold can be transversed. A new dimension of love opens up. And the sort of divine bit just to complete the story is that what you gradually realize is that these wider and wider and wider notions of love were there all along. You just didn’t know because you were operating in a smaller version of love. And the complete love is the divine love that after these early developmental stages, we might discover as well.
Elizabeth Rovere
Beautiful. And you have to add to. Because you talk about it, the etymology of threshold, like separating the. What is it? The wheat from the chaff or chaff or.
Mark Vernon
How do you know? I’ve forgotten about this. I mean, you might well be right. You might be right. I mean, threshing. It’s like there must be a link.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You write about it where it’s like. It’s like. That’s why thresholds are so profound, because it’s like you’re separating what’s not needed to something that’s more potent and meaningful.
Mark Vernon
Yeah. And it’s, you know, it can Be a painful process.
Elizabeth Rovere
And it can be a painful process. Yeah. And I already have two questions I know that I need to ask you because your book on Christianity is also about the evolution of consciousness, and you also talk about Owen Barfield, but consciousness, the evolution of consciousness, Perhaps there is this profound shift in consciousness happening. Is that how you see it? Do you see us on the cusp of this shift now? Kind of like what we had in this axial age?
Mark Vernon
Barfield, who was great friends with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, just to sort of place him a bit, so he’s part of this Inklings group, he realized that words change meaning over time and that if you can recover the older meanings, then what you’ve got in the word is a fossil of consciousness, as he called, can help you remember how consciousness, by which he meant the way that people experience the world themselves, the gods, nature and so on, does shift very profoundly over time, over periods of, you know, maybe 500, that kind of cultural time. Barfield spoke to me because I did this PhD on Plato and so was. And I got the PhD, but I kind of came away thinking I didn’t really understand what Plato was talking about. And Barfield says that’s because people can read the whole of Plato and even write books, he says, on Plato, and not have understood that keywords in Plato carried very different resonances two and a half thousand years ago. And what he argues with this evidence, it is evidence, the evidence of words was happening in figures like Plato, but also in the Jewish tradition with the Hebrew prophets, is that a great shift was unfolding from people primarily finding themselves what we would call externally in the world around, to people increasingly finding themselves internally. And so Socrates gets people to ask questions, you know, what is this? How do you know that? How come something else? And this is a turn inwards to establish what you think you know, rather than staying in the wisdom tradition, in the rites and festivals of the religious system that would have sort of carried you through life previously. And then similarly with the Hebrew prophets, particularly with the trauma of the exile of the Israelites. And so they can’t now go to Mount Zion where they found Yahweh, they can’t now go to the temple where they could perform the rites and have the festivals that told them who they were externally, that gets carried into the exile and so must now live within them. And so this too cultivates a kind of interiority that didn’t really exist before. And so Barfield said that’s what Barfield means by the evolution of consciousness. And it’s linked to the Axial age notion as well. And for him as a Christian, this finds a complete expression in the figure of Jesus, who is at once both fully human and, and fully divine. And when Jesus says I am, he’s not just referring to I am Jesus of Nazareth living in a particular time and place, but it’s referring to the divine. I am, you know, the Hebrew word for God, name for God. And so within ourselves is this sort of infinite abyss. At first that’s also the empty space within which the divine is born. And so that’s the primary shift of consciousness that Barfield’s interested in. He thinks it has a history, it didn’t always exist and that we’re now in this dispensation which is, you know, and has all sorts of knock on effects, like we now value the individual in a way that older societies and other societies maybe don’t. So his notion of the evolution of consciousness is different from others that you can read about though, which are presented more as a kind of linear continuity, a kind of progressive notion that consciousness expands and expands and expands. Barfield himself, he preferred the shape was a U shape, that’s what he prefers. And he says that what he thinks happens is that both whole societies, cultures, civilizations, but also individuals, we go through this pattern of descent where we touch bottom and we realize that the notion of who we were, that we were working with is no longer working. But that is the turning point of the return to the divine presence. But that now can be held in our sense of self as well. That’s the again, this pattern we’ve been talking about of through losing ourselves, through this kind of different kinds of death in our life, more life is found. And so he prefers a U shape to a kind of steady incline when he talks about the evolution of consciousness, which I think is more intuitively resonant for me.
Elizabeth Rovere
Do you feel that we’re in this waking up to that space or reawakening to that place again?
Mark Vernon
Now I think perhaps what’s happening is that what we’ve been talking about, that would have been talked about, but perhaps in rather secret circles, you know, amongst the religious people, the monks and the nuns, or texts like the Cloud of Unknowing. Originally it was written by one probably Cistercian monk to another Cistercian monk as a guide. So it would have been a kind of marginal interest, but now it’s not so marginal and many of us are interested in this and wondering how to build it into a way of life. And so I think that the expansion of these mystical traditions is very much part of our now.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I was thinking about it because I was thinking about Barfield. I’m thinking about your work. I think about John Vervaeke’s work and others. And it’s like people are more and more asking these questions and interested in this. There’s a poet, John O’Donoghue, and he actually calls for a pedagogy of the interior, like bringing something back in this way that we can kind of work on cultivating it. And since it’s not been as much of our culture as we were perhaps yearning for. My other question that I wanted to ask you and kind of go back to again is this idea of wonderstruck, but this idea of really being struck. Because this idea of struckness came to me when I was having a conversation with Jeffrey Kripal. And Jeffrey Kripal talks about the extraordinary and to a certain extent, the paranormal. And he was telling me that wonderstruck wasn’t hard enough. It’s gotta be like the struck part, like an ontological shock. And I’m like, whoa. But as I was reading your work and I’m reading about Isaiah and his experience of seeing God that’s definitely an ontological shock that’s transforming all of a sudden who I think I am in my worldview. And I wanted to know what your sense of these kinds of phenomena would be of just seeing a sunset. And that’s profound to seeing God in a temple and, like, what your sense of that is. And even if you wouldn’t mind sharing even perhaps one of your own experiences.
Mark Vernon
I love Jeff Kripal’s work. I mean, he talks about the Flip as well, doesn’t he? Yes, his book, the Flip. One of his best books, I think, is the story which he tells with a woman called Elizabeth Crone called Changed in a Flash. And Elizabeth had this experience of being struck by lightning and going to some sort of heavenly realm and existing there for quite a few weeks and learning various things and so on before returning to Earth. And it had only been a period of minutes on Earth and she was kind of in the ambulance after the lightning strike. There’s many reasons why it’s a very fascinating book partly because of the extent of what Elizabeth Crone knows and then Jeff Kripol’s sort of unpacking of what she says. But two things particularly stood out for me, and I was in touch with Elizabeth as a result of this. One was that the heavens that she describes have very direct parallels to the paradise that Dante describes. And she’s Jewish. And I wanted to know, you know, have you ever read Dante? And it wasn’t just as in, you know, blazing light and happiness and beauty and so on, which you might expect. It was details, like she describes how she knew what someone else that she was with was thinking or feeling. Not in a kind of bilateral process of telecommunication, but because they were all sharing in the one divine light, one divine mind. And in that sharing of the wider mind, what’s going on around you becomes more transparent to you. And that’s precisely how Dante describes Beatrice’s understanding, what he was worried about or wanting to ask about, and so on. So this had the ring of authenticity to me. And I, you know, it was hardly a scientific test, but I needed to know, have you read Dante? And she said, no, you know, sorry for that. But the other thing is that whilst it kind of made her life, it also sort of ruins her life. She talks about her marriage breaking down. She has a whole series of premonitions which are deeply disturbing. And so it was a great challenge to her as well. What are you gonna make of this? And for me, that’s, in a way, the most important thing about these moments when we’re struck that because perhaps we live in this materialistic age, these things happen, and the first experience is a kind of jolt. It’s like, what does that mean? Everything I thought to be the case, I now can’t quite presume to be so. And so these various accounts of flips, ontological shocks that Jeff Kripol describes, I think they’re really important for our time because we need that kind of shake. But it’s only the first step, because what is next then asked of us is, okay, so how are we going to remake our life now that we’ve had this glimpse and that becomes the ordinary, everyday life that we live? The kairos, that’s not just the one moment, but might even become a steady experience of revelation. And the world becomes a kind of constant symbol to us. Or as the Sufis put it, every face becomes the face of God. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, personally, I’ve never had a real massive ontological shock in a kind of blinding flash sort of sense. My ontological shock was much more about the descent and, say, through the process of psychotherapy which I described, realizing that my suffering was deeply connected to assumptions I was making about essentially my omnipotence in the world, my ability to control it, which was very, very mistaken. So a kind of a negative Striking. That was.
Elizabeth Rovere
But a striking nonetheless.
Mark Vernon
Yeah, it was kind of striking. Yeah. But. But maybe these wonder strikes, you know, they are astonishing. But often if you. I wonder whether often if you talk to people, there’s something quite disturbing about it too. It’s a bit. Be careful what you pray for.
Elizabeth Rovere
No, absolutely. I think it is kind of double sided in that way. It’s like it’s the awesome and awful and you know, just. But it’s. And it’s on a continuum as well. Like a gradual kind of awakening versus like a striking awakening or just these phenomenon. But it’s part of our experience. Which takes me to that William James aspect which is like this religious experience as part of our experience. It could be grand and it can be subtle, but that. That needs to be part of our repertoire of life.
Mark Vernon
Yeah, I agree. And you know, one of the great things that William James did in the varatis of religious experience was take it seriously and start to look at it and ask, what does this mean?
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, absolutely. Which is a great place to just end right now. So thank you so much, Mark. I really appreciate speaking with you. It’s been a pleasure.
Mark Vernon
Yeah, well, look, thank you too for what I feel has been present as we’ve been talking, which you know, very much comes from this space that you’re holding. So thank you.
Elizabeth Rovere
What stayed with me after this conversation is Mark’s wisdom on healing. Not as something we solve or fix, but as a deepening in a world flooded with competing meetings. He reminds us that our relationship to the sacred, not necessarily religious, but indeed sacred, maybe what is most unifying and what we’re most longing for. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a comment and let us know what sparked your curiosity. You can follow us on Instagram @wonderstruckpod, subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform and visit wonderstruck.org to learn more about our guests and upcoming events. Wonderstruck is produced by Striking Wonder Productions and the teams at Baillie Newman. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelly, Eliana Eleftheriou, Travis Reece and Josh Wilcox. And remember, be open to the wonder in life.
