Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts

What is the role of love in public life? Can it have a place given the scrutiny faced by leaders and the processes of bureaucracies? Or is love what we need to face the huge challenges of today, from distrust of public institutions to the environmental crisis?Claire Gilbert is the author of several books, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, has served on several public and advisory bodies, and is the Director of the Westminster Abbey Institute. In this conversation, we talk about soulfulness as well as morality in public life, for which Claire is convinced there is a deep yearning. We cover questions from how to design safe and inspiring places that allow people to ask about love of their work, to the role character, contemplation and vision.We ask about how fear, despair and forgiveness might be part of a more loving approach to public life, as well as reconsidering the nature of power, which can be compassionate and stimulating as well as coercive.This is part of series of conversations Mark is conducting as part of a project investigating how design might help nurture more loving relationships at a personal and social level.For more on Claire see - https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-biographies/dr-claire-foster-gilbert

Constellations, also called family systems, is a way of visualising the dynamics of love that operate in any group that has to do with creativity or life. A constellation workshop brings people together to look at predicaments with which people are wrestling, be they personal or organisational. The goal is to find a design that releases and acknowledges the love that yearns to find a way forward, though can be thwarted or become stuck.In this conversation, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon, explore what in the constellations world is called the orders of love. They ask how love, because it manifests as a dynamic or spirit, is seen and fostered by rituals and gestures. The right distance between people may be as important as the right connection. The manner in which events and times are remembered or honoured can be crucial. The dialogue suggests that love won’t be pinned down and that becoming more conscious and aligned with the field of love, within which we all live, is crucial. Seeing how this is so is not only expansive for the individual but vitalising for the whole. Such collaboration is aided by principles akin to principles of design and which are discovered by testing and exploration, and proven by the beauty and truth released.For more about Robert, including Simple Truths, https://www.robertrowlandsmith.comFor more about Mark http://www.markvernon.com

Do our minds reside solely inside our heads, or perhaps bodies? Or do they extend into the wider world, perhaps even reaching to the stars? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the extended mind theory, taking a lead from recent work of Rupert’s on the sense of being stared at, and also the problems that contemporary science has with understanding vision. The discussion considers new research carried out by Rupert and others, as well as the theories of A.N. Whitehead. The way in which science since Maxwell has considered light as moving backwards as well as forwards in time is explored, alongside the way that William Blake described how we see, which itself fits the ancient understanding, that seeing is an active process of engagement, not a passive mode of reception.Rupert references two published papers. One is on the nature of visual perception, co-written with Alex Gomez-Marin, online here - https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/The-Nature-of-Visual-Perception.pdf. The other is on directional scopaesthesia, co-written with Pamela Smart, online here - https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Scopaestheia-and-Its-Implications-for-Theories-of-Vision.pdf.For more dialogues between Rupert and Mark see https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues and https://www.markvernon.com/talks

Guest Robin Dunbar, an Oxford evolutionary psychologist, discusses the dynamics of friendship, including Dunbar's Number and threshold group sizes. They explore the impact of social media on friendships, cultural variations in friendship perceptions, and the importance of rituals in maintaining relationships.

Bishop Barron is another figure I think worth listening to, who spoke at ARC in London, alongside Jordan Peterson. Like Peterson, he simultaneously leaves me as wary as enthused. I’ve explained where that took me with Peterson in another short talk. Here’s where I’ve ended up in response to Barron, which interesting is also, in my view, with a richer, fuller sense of Christianity untamed, unleashed.In short, you might say that Barron has his diagnosis right but his antidote wrong. And like Peterson, the misstep turns matters such as freedom and responsibility, and the side-lining of forgiveness and love.My thoughts in response to Jordan Peterson are in this podcast. A written version of this talk can be found at my website, www.markvernon.com

All in all, there is much to consider in Jordan Peterson’s latest passionate suggestions. I think he is right to present a vision of the human good coming from the future, thereby calling us and shaping a meaningful life now. The human self needs a sense of itself that exceeds an otherwise atomised, lonely individualism.However, in may view, Peterson celebrates faith and responsibility at the risk of losing love and response. In this talk, and in the spirit of dialogue, I try to show why the full Christian vision matters, and the inclination to secularise is risky. Distortions inevitably appear. Love and response is reduced to faith and responsibility. Judgment is replaced by an exertion of will. Forgiveness is sidelined. And grace becomes the assertion of moral order.A written version of the talk is online here - http://www.markvernon.com/faith-responsibility-or-love-response-thoughts-on-jordan-peterson-at-arc-in-london

Thinking carefully, not just apocalyptically, about AIs requires a combination of skills - technological, sociological, psychological, philosophical, organisational. So I was delighted to talk with Eve Poole, who is a rare individual capable of bringing all these elements into her work. Our central question was how to build AIs so as to design out risk and design in love. It turns out that the two elements are deeply connected.We began by thinking about the nature of the threat and opportunity. In her book, Robot Souls, Eve draws attention to the "junk code" that, ever since the Enlightenment, has been designed out of artificial thinking processes but which it is increasingly clear, needs to be designed back in. Quality decisions, let alone careful world-building, needs emotional, embodied and loving intelligence, alongside the purely transaction and rational.We consider how virtue ethics can inform the debate, and may do better than the purely utilitarian calculus that shapes things now. Similarly, we ask about the centrality of cooperation, too, as opposed to the competitive assumptions that tend to dominate. We think about how AIs are born in particular cultures and so reflect the cultures of technology companies and wider society.And we are never far from the deep question of the nature of intelligence, proposing that love and judgement are actually more central than reason and free will. For AIs to work in the real world, they will need those qualities. Therein lies hope.For more on Eve's book, Robot Souls, see https://www.routledge.com/Robot-Souls-Programming-in-Humanity/Poole/p/book/9781032426624For more on Mark's work see www.markvernon.com

Churches are in decline, certainly in the western world. People tend not to think to turn to a priest for spiritual insight or advice. But is a lived relationship with the sacred and wisdom traditions denuded as organised religion disappears? In this Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogue, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon talk about religious institutions for good and ill. Rupert picks up on a new book by Alison Milbank, Once and Future Parish, to ask how churches can maintain connection with the seasons, place and community, and speak to the whole of our humanity in its rituals and rites of passage. The conversation explores the wariness of organised religion, from its moralising and hierarchical manifestations, to its distorted message, inclined to treat religion more as a fearsome threat than a visionary promise. The perils of a privatised spiritual questing are set alongside the paucity of contemporary church life, though if it can be hard to live with organised religion, it seems also hard to live fully without it.For more conversations between Rupert and Mark see https://www.sheldrake.org/audios/sheldrake-vernon-dialogues and http://www.markvernon.com/talks

At the beginning of Idler Drinks (see www.idler.co.uk), I offer a thought. Here's the one from this week.

Owen Barfield talked of an evolution of consciousness towards final participation. But what is that state or quality awareness? How does it relate to the life of Christ? How was it described by Rudolf Steiner? Can we see and know intimations of it now?In this second discussion with Landon Loftin and Max Leyf, we explore the ideas of freedom and individuality, modernity and language, kenosis and romanticism come of age to press Barfield’s great insight and see whether we can help give it voice.For more on Landon and Max’s book see https://wipfandstock.com/9781666736762/what-barfield-thought/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLoftin%20and%20Leyf%20have%20provided,on%20his%20fellow%20Inklings%2C%20C.%20S.For more on Mark’s book see http://www.markvernon.com/consciousness