William Blake Can Change Your Life | with Dr. Mark Vernon

You're about to hear a really great conversation that we had with Dr. Mark Vernon, who is the author among many other books of this very recent book, Awake, William Blake and the power of the imagination. We just finished studying William Blake over the course of January on verse community. And so we were reading a lot of Blake and a lot of our students were reading this book alongside our readings of Blake to get an understanding of of his context and why his work is so important.

This is a really great book. One of the reasons why I chose it for this course is because it's so accessible. It brings all the rigor of an academic and scholarly monograph, but the writing is so clear, so lucid, so so free of jargon and very accessible. So it made a really excellent companion to a study on Blake.

And so uh we were honored to have Dr. Mark Vernon with us and join us for this last meeting of the Blake course in which the students were able to submit ahead of time some of the questions that they had for uh this scholar on Blake. And some of the things we cover in this talk is the difference between the visionary and the mystic. How Blake's spiritual vision is compatible with other kinds of religions and spiritualities.

Blake's relationship to past art, possible nondualism in his spiritual vision, and how to engage with Blake as a spiritual practice and as a creative practice as well, which is something that we um gave some attention to in the course, especially with the homework assignments. So, I hope you'll enjoy this conversation. Check out the link below for links to Dr. Mark Vernon's book where you can purchase it and his Substack where he's writing uh about about Blake among other other writers of great visionary literature.

Thanks for joining us here on YouTube. Let's get into it. >> So, Mark, we're honored to have you with us. Thanks for joining us.

>> Thank you for inviting me, Adam, for your engagement and everyone who's watching as well. I mean, it's delightful to hear that this has been really welcome by people because I think Blake can change your life. So, I'm hoping people are enjoying that. >> Absolutely.

We gathered some really excellent questions and curiosities from ...