The Meaning Code | Mark Vernon: Physicist, Philosopher, Poet, Psychotherapist Talks Power, Computation & Enchantment @TheMeaningCode | Uploaded February 2022 | Updated October 2024, 4 hours ago.
Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist and writer, interested in spirituality and the inner life. He has a PhD in ancient philosophy, as well as degrees in physics and in theology.

His newest book is Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey

Other books include A secret History of Christianity based on the ideas of Owen Barfield,
The Idler Guide to Ancient Philosophy and many others.

A little known fact about Mark is your background in science. Could you say a bit about how you moved from physics towards psychotherapy and philosophy and poetry?

You recently did an episode on Love and Power:
“In this talk, I consider two notions of power, as explored in the New Testament: dunamis, which might be thought of grace and space power or the power of love; and exousia, which is the power exercised by authorities and might be thought of as command and control power.
This sense of the dynamics of love and power can illuminate the communication of science, across five areas:
– reductive science and the bigger picture
– scientists as provocateurs and experts
– issues of cause and correlation
– science, impact and hidden agendas
– the status of science and conspiracy theories”

“You recently did an episode on Blake and the Metaverse in which you discussed the current crisis in science and you mentioned some interesting thoughts about computation. You said,

“There’s no life in machines. Computers don’t actually compute, because computation is a meaningful act. It has a sense of something that sorts. It has a telos, an end in mind. Rather what we call a computer depends upon the mind that made it and wants the computer to compute. It has an outside in relationship with the world around it.
The computer has no sense of prime numbers or even what the pixels on the screen that are a list of prime numbers to us are conveying to the mind that looks on them. In fact, there’s not even a single word in a word processor. Rather it’s a string of operations that we humans use to process words were the processor enabled by the tool we call the computer.”

Another of your quotes that I really like also correlates to the work of David Schindler and Esther Meek and I wonder if we could explore that a bit. You said,

“It’s secret in the sense of being hard to see even when plainly spelt out… It’s a perception that can be known like the quiet constancy of your breath. It’s that your life springs from God’s life and that this truth is yours to be discovered. It can be known directly, not on the basis of someone else’s report, someone else’s authority, someone else’s rhetoric, but inwardly and reliably – though it’s the work of a lifetime fully to align with it.”
Esther Meek: Contact w Reality is face to face with indeterminate future manifestations
David Schindler: Contact w Reality: when we are confronted by Beauty. If we lose Beauty, we lose Reality.

Mark Vernon: “The remarkable truth that Blake knew is that we don’t only long for what’s good, beautiful and true. When you think about it, as he assists us in doing, it becomes clear that can only be the case because the good, beautiful and true longs to be known by us too.”

Barfield says he experiences thinking differently. “It’s like Heidegger would say, thinking is thought thinking through me…. that our job is not to produce thought but our job is to put our mind into thought so that thought can actualise itself, or thought can be present in our mind. I want a word like open illumination.”

Using language, even in the everyday, draws on the spiritual wealth of language. This is what gives it meaning, what a computer doesn’t have, for example. That language “trails its clouds of glory” is present in Bohm’s idea that the explicit requires the implicit to give it movement and meaning; and in Barfield’s idea that words touch inner and outer realities from their origins, rather than outer meanings becoming metaphors for inner experiences.

The mind is to thought as the eye is to seeing.
Seeing gathers, it curates our world.

Mark's books are described on his website, markvernon.com
A Secret History of Christianity:
markvernon.com/books/a-secret-history-of-christianity
Dante's Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey: markvernon.com/books/dantes-divine-comedy-book
A list of all of Mark's books:
markvernon.com/books

Many of Mark's talks:
markvernon.com/posts

David Bohm and Owen Barfield transcript:
markvernon.com/david-bohm-and-owen-barfield-a-conversation

Other books or thinkers Mark mentioned:

Peter Harrison: The Territories of Science and Religion
Michael Atiyah, aka Sir Michael Attia: qualityandcertification.com/2020/the-famous-british-mathematician-michael-attia-passed-away-claiming-to-prove-the-riemann-conjecture/qualityandcertification.com/2020/the-famous-british-mathematician-michael-attia-passed-away-claiming-to-prove-the-riemann-conjecture