William Blake, Stoicism, and the Search for Enough - Mark Vernon

0:00Jack Frimston:I sort of had a slow motion breakdown really. It may be anxiety, it may be low energy, low mood. It may be the sense that something isn't quite flowing in the way that it might. When will enough be enough? When will you be content? More and more is the cry of a mistaken soul. Freedom is over time become a very different person. Notice it and to take it seriously. Not just try and build in more and more distractions to kind of anesthetise the dawning sense of dread. If you've reached that kind of that breaking point, where do I go now?

0:36Zac Thompson:Mark, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for inviting me on. I'm intrigued as to where our conversation might go. So am I. I'm excited to pick your brains. So we start off the same way. I'm going to hit you with a big open question. Who are you and what problem do you solve? so professionally I guess I my life is a mixture of working as a psychotherapist and writing so I write books but also journalism and then other things to do with writing non-fiction but that might be contributing I know thoughts and opinion online on the radio as well as in articles for newspapers and so on.

1:22And I think the problem that both those elements revolve around is the place of inner life in the modern world. How do we take what's going on inside, not just our individual psyche, you might say, but the collective psyche, how do we take that seriously in a world that's very, very driven by results, behaviour, metrics, the abstract um how can things like the imagination how can matters of spirit and soul how can feelings become i don't know modes of insight not just things that either help you or hinder you in life so yeah inner life in the modern world perhaps is the problem nice okay so

2:14Zac Thompson:So if I found myself, say I was a client of yours and I found myself working with you, what kind of symptoms do you think I might be facing in my day to day life for you to help me? It might be the kinds of things that do get talked about and spoken about quite a lot now. It may be anxiety. It may be low energy, low mood. it may be the sense that something isn't quite flowing in the way that it might that's shown up because of frustration at work because of difficulties in relationships one of the things about psychotherapy is that the presenting problem you try if this isn't too strange a way of putting it try not to solve it too quickly and because the sort of assumption is that problems are often disguising deeper issues and that if you can get a focus on that deeper issue then that's actually more releasing more freeing in the longer term you know so you don't get into sort of cycles of a problem recurring and a new technique and new insights a new sort of stone has been turned that may be interesting and may be practical and useful in some measure, but there's a sort of sense that you're not quite getting to the bottom of why you feel this distress in life or why you feel things aren't quite right or, you know, maybe quite dramatically not right as well.

3:55Jack Frimston:Are you able, Mark, to take us back? I think your journey is really fascinating. So just to take us back down the journey you've been on to end up where you are today. yeah well so I was um I sort of began my adult professional life as a priest in the Church of England I did what they call a curacy which is like a um a three-year um period where you work very closely with a vicar I'm a sort of fully fledged clergy person um like an apprentice but during that time I mean the one way of putting it is I realized it wasn't my thing another way of putting it was I sort of had a slow motion breakdown really and so I left and then I started working as a journalist I was it was back in the late 1990s and so I started working particularly in the area of business and technology because there was a lot of work that could be got there and I'd done a physics degree earlier so I didn't really know much about technology to be honest but at least I wasn't scared of it and yeah so I started writing because writing was really the thing that interested me and and then I was doing kind of academic work I did a PhD on Plato but never really got drawn to academic life I was always much more interested in the practical side I wanted things to change me really not just to learn more and more about less and less which is sometimes how academic life can be portrayed so but with the writing started writing books I wrote a book on friendship to start with and that just gradually nudged me you know from the business and technology area into the more philosophical spiritual religious kind of area and at the same time did the psychotherapy training partly to try and make some sense of what had happened before for me personally but also because ancient philosophy I think Plato in particular their stress is not kind of what you know abstractly what you can prove and what you can analyze and break down much more of interest to them was what can you harmonize what can you resonate with what can you feel into what can your imagination your inspiration your intuition reveal and that very much rests on who you are as a person you know your qualities your character and what blocks you and what frees you and so the psychotherapy funnily enough actually felt much closer to ancient greek philosophy than modern philosophy does um so there was a very personal side to psychotherapy like there always is because you kind of need that energy to make it work um but there was a sort of broader you might say inquiry into what is it to know something anyway um and um how the imagination particularly plays into that so it seems like um i'm thinking back to the pandemic, but when a lot of people are perhaps faced with the mirror of looking internally, they seem to end up at Stoicism or Socrates.

7:02Jack Frimston:And that obviously had a big kind of mainstream revival, if you will, in the pandemic. Why do you think that is?

7:12I think that, I mean, Stoicism in a way has never quite died. It's reinvented itself. and um but there was a kind of appeal during the pandemic for returning to roots you know what's the origin what's the basic here what's the the kind of source wisdom not just the endless variations because in a way the heart of stoicism is this um dictum that it's not what happens to you that matters but how you respond to what happens to you that matters and the vast majority of self-help books are based on that dictum how can you work on that which you can control your response rather than trying to fix things in terms of what's happening to you the whole time so that's a very common notion but the idea that there was a sort of source to this the stoics um and uh how returning to the original often you know refreshes things um i think that that was part of the reason why stoicism took hold afresh um i guess also because it being an ancient philosophy it has a kind of aura of religion or even spirituality but without being religious which for many who got involved in stoicism uh was a big turn-off and in fact i got a little bit involved in the debates because one of the things which i knew about ancient stoicism was that it ultimately was about spiritual revelations it wasn't just about sort of developing yourself so that you could go with the flow a bit better another great stoic phrase going with the flow but was about how that revealed a deeper pulse or current of reality to you because you were less preoccupied with yourself and that enables you to see more deeply into things and the stoics particularly they they call that the logos and this kind of word or current or impulse and that was divine and so ancient stercism was really about connecting with the divine and it seemed to me that that's an important insight because in a very individualistic world you can sort of control certain things in your life if you're lucky if you have the means to and so on but if you see your life as primarily about being an autonomous individual there's going to be limits to that and so I felt that ancient stoicism could bring back the deeper sense of that which we share the collective sort of flow of life that we're part of and it seemed to me that that was sort of around a bit in the pandemic as well because whilst clearly you know there was a lot done to address the crisis the crisis itself threw up a kind of more deeper existential question which is you know what do we think we're doing in the modern world anyway and how much can we really control anyway and what happens when things catch us by surprise and and ancient stoicism has a kind of way of addressing that

10:22Zac Thompson:so mark we have a lot of call them high-flying businessmen on the podcast millionaires they've done some incredible things and and some of the questions that we sometimes ask is when will enough be enough when we be content and it feels like there's this like collective restlessness of like meaning and in terms of like will i ever be fully happy will i will i ever accept that that is enough how much of how much of this do you think is down to the modern world that we're living in now well one one way of answering that um is to draw a bit on william blake um in a rather clunky way i put my latest book just behind me on william blake there just came out so i'm uh sort of trying to drop that in whenever i can but blake i think is of interest because he has an answer to that question he knew that particularly the modern soul and he was born a couple of hundred years ago so So he's at the beginning of what we call the modern period.

11:25Jack Frimston:It's the beginning of mercantilism that became capitalism. And so many of the features of our lives now were very familiar to him. And he recognized that that new impulse has a kind of upside and a downside. And the upside is that more ordinary folk can contribute to life. you know in the say medieval world anyway where you were born more or less determines the kind of life that you lived social stratification and so on whereas what was happening particularly with the surveillance of the cash economy and the capacity to make money as cash not just say whole property and have your value in that way meant that it produces more social fluidity so people can have aspirations to leave where they were born and to make a success of their life materially and Blake definitely valued that he wanted to be commercially successful he developed new printing techniques that he thinks are going to be more commercially successful and he feels he's got a message to give to the world that should be heard you know like any writer or painter but he also realized that this new freedom had a kind of dark side which was it was focusing all that energy that it was releasing onto material gain and so what might be a kind of spiritual yearning to resonate with more and more of the flow of life was getting directed into a kind of possessiveness, a desire to accumulate more and more of material things in life.

13:12And he says, in one point, he has this phrase, he says, more and more is the cry of a mistaken soul. So accumulation, which he saw, you know, this was the age when London was opening its first arcades. When Adam Smith, you know, in The Wealth of Nations, he talks about seeing that people were wearing bigger and bigger coats and he says why are people wearing bigger and bigger coats it's not like the weather has suddenly got colder and then he realizes that a bigger coat has more pockets into which you can put the things that display your status you know your your lovely snuff box um your beautiful pocket watch um and so smith too he felt that this was going to be very ambivalent it was going to make sort of happiness in a way because stuff does bring happiness to a degree but it was also going to lead to a new kind of suffering that the pure accumulation of things brings as well the yearning for ever more material goods when you've kind of got enough to live by already um so Blake sees this more more as the cry of the mistaken soul but what I really like about Blake is he doesn't say therefore okay you must stop your desire you must take up an ascetic life um the desire for material goods is somehow bad he says no it's the first though awakening of the desire for not just more and more that he thinks we human beings have but for what he calls the all or the infinite or the eternal and Blake felt that at the heart of what it is to be human is the divine is a kind of infinite capacity is a sense and taste for the eternal and unless you recognize that the very desire that leads you to want more and more stuff will constantly be frustrated as well at the same time and so you get people who get onto these spirals particularly if they're good at making more money but they also then might say to people like you you know but somehow I can't get off that hedonic treadmill and Blake would say that's because it's fine to want more and more but what you've got to release into is actually not just the accumulation of this and that but an appreciation that in all things can be sensed the infinite can be seen the eternal and so some of Blake's best known phrases resonate with this so he you know he says these things like to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower in a very ordinary things a grain of sand and a wild flower and yet the appreciation of the heaven that's in the wildflower and the whole cosmos if you like that's in the sand and that is going to lead to a much more satisfactory life for we human beings and so you know the artist that devotes their life to doing that the scientist that devotes their life to doing that and the poet you know that does so that's why I think you know this there's this constant sort of struggle in the modern world and we're a bit in one moment rather down on the arts but somehow then get reminded that we sort of need them somehow too and we're not quite sure why you know people say well it adds a bit of color a bit of entertainment to life but Blake would say no the reason why we need the arts is because they satisfy the deepest yearnings of the human soul and if you push that to one side even if you're doing well in life materially you're also committing yourself to a way of life that's going to constantly frustrate you frustrate you as well

16:43Zac Thompson:I like that. And when you when you were talking about the coat analogy, it made me think like in the modern world, that is very much so. How many followers do I have on TikTok and Twitter and all of these lovely things? So we think about the hedonic treadmill and people are listening to the podcast and they're thinking, I might be walking towards a spiritual awakening. What do you typically find is the first step that people take towards that? It's normally some kind of breakdown. It's normally some, it might be gentle, a gradual realisation that the path that you're on isn't you. I mean, people often talk these days about being the best version of myself.

17:27And they realise that when they go to work, they have to kind of hang that aspiration up at the door because their work environment is demanding something else of them. and they put up with that for a while and you know we all have to do that to a degree we all wear roles in some measure but when that role that what you might call false self becomes too uncoupled from your true self from who you really feel you might be then it becomes on you know gradually or maybe quite suddenly becomes untenable people might have literally a breakdown or they might just kind of sense dissatisfaction rising gently or you know more positively they might have a child or they might fall in love or they might discover that they love music and they love the outdoors and so I don't know having been an accountant they want to become a lumberjack this happened to a friend of mine so he went and started volunteering for the National Trust and eventually got into land management, where actually rather beautifully, the old accountancy came together with the land management.

18:36So that was a really wonderful resolution of what was quite a crisis at one point. So I think that, you know, breakdowns and not trying to resolve it too quickly are often the way that people find the path into a deeper or richer, a more expansive life.

18:56Jack Frimston:So I've become increasingly more fascinated with what makes religion stick. So obviously there's been thousands of religions in human lifetimes, but it seems like the thing that makes them stick is the story, right? So the ones that have kind of the best stories that are accepted in different communities tend to do the best. What do you think is the role of story in meaning i think what a good story can do and incidentally just in parenthesis sometimes there's a difference maybe between a story and a myth and a myth in the sense that i'm using it is a story that wasn't written by one person but somehow emerged from a community from a society, from some kind of shared engagement with life, and particularly life and death, say.

19:56And a great myth is a story that can hold you in the particular place you find yourself, but give it a wider context. And so deliver the confidence that you can tolerate what might be a difficult moment because this is the moment when you're walking through the forest and you're waiting for the clearing you know these kind of motifs that appear in myths they speak to us very profoundly psychologically or spiritually and because they're ways of talking about experiences that people have in life and so I think the great religions have these great myths might be focused on a figure might be focused on a saint it may be more cosmological you know they have a kind of story the unfolding of all things um and the point is their truth it's not is the story literally true or not um it's more does this story transmit something to me that in a way is beyond straightforward articulation and so it's truth is in that depth um it's something that my brain as it were can't wholly get around but by the actions that I perform maybe going on pilgrimages or performing rituals um singing music um the poetry literature of scriptures and so on it's all that is communicating something which I know to be true um even if one particular formula couldn't quite summarize it up um it's it's radiating this story is radiating with what's good beautiful and true you might say and also is able to hold darkness and difficulty but put it into a wider frame so I think the great religions have that as part of their core yeah and we test religions therefore by the truth of their story in that wider sense not historically I mean it's got to have some sort of resonance with history I think but that's not going to decide it actually what's going to decide it is whether it saves people and by that it's meant provides a frame within which people can live their lives and those religions that survive are the ones that do that so so what is it then about human nature that can take those stories

22:24Jack Frimston:and suddenly they go from an understanding of meaning to a tribal maybe problematic identity instead? Well I think that they the the great stories always emerge in a kind of collective context. There may well be a kind of originating charismatic figure. I mean let's take one that's relatively uncontroversial from the ancient philosophical world which would be the figure of Socrates so Socrates was definitely a historical figure and no one doubts that he was quite a significant player in a strange way in ancient Athens particularly in its period where it was moving from war with the Spartans the Peloponnesian war into this kind of proto-democracy and then he was found guilty by the Athenian jury and died by drinking hemlock you know all those there are certain facts about Socrates but quite well maybe what he taught is fairly clear that it what he taught was based something on asking questions for yourself trying to work out who you were as an individual in relation to the wider context but the way that that was developed then takes on a life of its own and so even one writer like Plato who nearly in all his works references or has Socrates even as the main figure.

23:57It's different kinds of Socrates that show up in different works and so this aboriginal figure if you like has already become more to his followers than he might have even been in life or at least the perspective you might say that a different person would take to the figure of Socrates when they were alive would be a bit like a mirror and would show up something more to them than they saw so that the kind of meaning of Socrates if you like was emerging from in between Socrates's followers and Socrates himself it was drawing out a kind of third thing if you like and I think that most great this is I'm partly making this a theory now be interested to see whether you find it plausible I think that the great founders of the great religious traditions um it's something like that that's happened and so if you go sort of squirreling down and trying to discover the historical socrates or the historical jesus or the historical mohammed you you'll never quite get there but also you'll you'll sort of be eroding what matters really about socrates and jesus and mohammed in the process as well which is about how they you know if you're the follower of say Socrates how that figure can speak to you now and that's going to be from a broader context they're absolutely crucial but it's something that they catalyze as much as maybe spoke directly so again there's a it's something about the resonance you might say of a particular tradition and how that carries more and more with it and so becomes diverse you know there's not one christianity there's many different christianities um uh but that i think is it needs testing it needs discerning and it can be very troubling particularly to the kind of modern mindset um that somehow thinks everything should be a bit like physics you should be able to sort of pin it down um incidentally i was talking to a physicist just yesterday as it happened and we were talking about what counts as proof in physics and of course there's a huge discussion amongst physicists about what counts as proof that's particularly coming to the fore now with the increasing involvement of computers but now AI in science because a more you might say mathematically inclined physicist will say no we don't we haven't really got a new bit of physics until we've got a formula until we've got an equation because that's like a real insight into reality whereas There's another kind of physicist that says, no, it doesn't matter what equation we have.

26:36What we need is inputs that produce outputs. And AIs are great at doing that. They can spot the pattern. We don't have to know why the pattern or what the pattern is. We just need to know that there's things we can test. Now, they're very different standards of proof. One's a kind of insight. One's just something very pragmatic. So the funny thing is that even in the so-called hard sciences, these things are much developed. And I suppose what I'm arguing for is a kind of pragmatic approach in the sense that someone like William James might have meant it, which is that truth itself might always kind of elude us, but it's in the fruits of what we have that we know that we're onto the truth.

27:18And I think this is very much the case in religious traditions.

27:23Zac Thompson:so it feels like whether it be religion or philosophy that that fills that gap that some people are looking to fill and make them feel more content to move forward in life where does spiritual intelligence come into the conversation with that spiritual intelligence um it's you know it's a phrase people will define it in in different ways if they use it at all some will say it's just kind of an extension of emotional intelligence so emotional intelligence is the capacity to work with your feelings not be overwhelmed by them but to use them as a kind of guide or be able to navigate feelings in a group or in a room and the spiritual just be an extension of the emotional in some way or other you know perhaps where meaning and purpose is felt for example I think actually spiritual intelligence can be defined in a different way which is about the kind of ground of our being it's about not just that we're aware of certain things but that that capacity to be aware itself can be developed the kind of intuition can be turned up if you like and so I think spiritual intelligence is about the capacity to not just process things, but to foster

28:51who we are before, in a way, we've even started processing things. You know, it's presence, if you like. That maybe is a good word. You know, so someone who has great spiritual intelligence, they may well utter words of wisdom, but really, when you encounter them, you feel their presence you think goodness me they've kind of got something and I don't know quite what it is but I just know it and you know there's there's some figures that become very well known for this you know many will meet the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama will say something probably something quite simple actually but that's not the point the point is that they felt this person is transmitting something much more than just you know who they are as an individual and I think that's because they've got a great spiritual intelligence they're able to resonate and harmonize with a kind of side of life and that's bigger than just them and you feel that when you meet these people so is it so so we take the Dalai Lama into like an example is it something

29:52Zac Thompson:that you're born with or is it a is it innate to nurture is it a skill set and if it falls into that skill set bracket how do we how would one say right okay my spiritual intelligence is a one i'm now going to go and spend the next six months and get that to a 10 where do i start yeah i mean the thing funny one of the things about spiritual intelligence is that i think you have to put yourself in a kind of receptive mode but ultimately it's probably something that that comes to you um and maybe that's not so surprising um you know I think a lot of the things that we learn you have to kind of do the work but then you need that extra sort of grace or je ne sais quoi or um inspiration you know so the great author that writes a novel has to do all the work of actually sitting down day by day putting words on a screen or a page but they'll sort of say that in the best moments the characters started speaking to me um that they started um that they revealed what should happen next in the story for example um and i think a lot of people that have moments of inspiration would think of it like that you you have to do the work but then you have to kind of keep at least a part of you that that's patient enough to wait for the breakthrough um and so i think that spiritual intelligence is like that completely that you need to be able to as it were do the work that enables you to get out of your own way so understanding how you are working now you know your assumptions that you bring that maybe serve you quite well in life but also might block off you know so if you were a very rational person that can be very good in many contexts but perhaps it leaves you less imaginative or if you're a very intuitive person um that serves you very well in many contexts but perhaps you find it quite hard to decide things so you need a more kind of rational capacity as well um so it's about knowing yourself a great socratic phrase of course know thyself um but um then being in a receptive place to receive this more um you know the psychotherapist would talk about something coming from the unconscious the spiritual person might talk more about something coming from god or from the divine um you know that the artist might leave it a little bit in a kind of uncertain space they might talk about the imagination or um that kind of thing and so spiritual intelligence requires i think this capacity for receptivity so the preparation isn't going to let you go from like naught to 10 in a six-month program but what it might do in a six-month program is leave you more receptive and that might be quite painful and difficult because it is about letting go of that which you sort of trust more and you feel but this is really me um so often again you know breakdowns and difficulty the shadow these kind of elements people would talk about as being part of the development of spiritual intelligence one of the interesting things about having ai at our

33:02Jack Frimston:fingertips now mark is you can ask ai a lot of these big questions and obviously it can consult the information available to it and i asked a scary question the other day around how rational it believes human beings are in their lifetime the percentage of their life they spend being rational and it was below 20 it said below 20 of your life you will be a rational human being what it then depicted was this idea that you are actually being dragged around by an irrational version of yourself that sometimes milliseconds afterwards is being justified by the rational version the irrational version being a little bit faster than the rational version do you then think free will is possible if that's true i think what free will is about it's not the ability to do what the hell you like any moment of the day or night you know um i'm not free to suddenly decide that I want to live underwater permanently, for example.

34:01And if I base my freedom on the capacity to do that sort of thing, I would condemn myself to a very unhappy life. But what I think freedom is about is that we can reflect on who we are. We have not just consciousness, but self-consciousness, not just awareness, but self-awareness. And that brings a freedom to not in a moment change who we are but over time become a very different person um and that i think is where our freedom lies um so you know when people talk about free will and they debate you know is it just the capacity you know i decide to raise my hand or something and then someone puts you in a brain scanner and they see that there's a little impulse that happened a few milliseconds maybe that's what you're referring to you know before and they said well you weren't really deciding whether to raise your hand i mean those kind of arguments i think they're they're not very rational actually because the point about that kind of experiment is that where does it begin you know where where's the first moment um you need for example people to take part in the trials so you have to go out and ask people to take part in a trial you've already set up a whole chain of decision making you can't decide where the first moment for the raising of the hand begins so they're on the hiding to nothing and this is the critique of that kind of experiment the ai may pick it up because there's a hell of a lot talked about on the internet.

35:24And of course, the AI doesn't understand anything. It's just in a very elaborate way, reflecting back to you what is out there already. So I think that that, to come to your particular point, that we're not rational for much of the time is because life itself ultimately can't be pinned down to the purely rational. But what you can do is use a rational moment where you say okay this is how I've been in life and I know it's not serving me well I'm going to understand it a bit better and then try and lean into other possibilities and develop a kind of awareness of that now the deciding to do that is rational but it's guided really by feelings by intuitions by the knocks and blows of life as well as the sense that actually this feels expansive this feels better in some way um that's not strictly rational um but it's really where the heart of life lies so you know that we're not rational for most of the time i think is to say that we're actually living we're not in a algorithms um you know that do try to be rational um uh if that's what's going on aside in ai of course people just debate quite what's going on inside a neural network it may be completely irrational too but it just happens to produce

36:45Jack Frimston:the right results so it feels like the kind of through line just to to echo it back is perhaps there are no fundamental truths that you arrive at perhaps there is no fundamental evidence of an authentic or inauthentic self you know all these big questions but actually in the pursuit of trying to answer the question you will arrive at lots of little things that perhaps make you see the bigger picture in a way that's a bit more palatable is that is that fair my interpreting what you're saying correctly yeah that the fruit it's in the fruit by their fruits you shall know them as jesus said um but i do think there's i do think there's truth though um and i do think that you know we human beings are creatures that have a sense and taste for what's good for what's beautiful what's true um and we dispute endlessly whether this thing is good or that thing is beautiful but the point is we have the conversation um the disaster would happen when we even stopped having the conversation or the disaster would happen when something terrible happens and no one cared terrible things undoubtedly happen but people care and that to me says that you might say the love is stronger than the jealousy or the hate that led to the terrible thing um so you know we creatures, we human beings are creatures in time.

38:08It's constantly unfolding, constantly changing for us. But I think that there is a kind of direction of travel that maybe, as Aristotle said, you only really see on your deathbed. And when you have a kind of flashback for your life and you think, oh, actually, I was trying to pursue what I thought was good, even for all the mistakes I made. And then Aristotle says you can die happy. The trick is to have that capacity to reflect on things you know as they're happening as well and then mark one of the things you've spoken about a

38:39Zac Thompson:lot is a lot of the symptoms are you probably hit that that breakdown that breaking point that rock bottom what where whatever you call it there'll be people probably listening to this now especially if they're in the the the rat race of nine to five they're in sales that they're just feeling like i mean me and zach have had this conversation many a times but we look back to our mid-20s and we think what are we doing with our lifestyle what is what is the point and then eventually you come out of that what was maybe some low stakes things that they can start what is the first rung on the ladder if you've reached that kind of that breaking point where where do I go next I think a good a good thing is to notice it and to take it seriously um I mean sometimes we don't notice these things until we reach some kind of mid point in life because as Carl Jung said it's then you realize that the sun doesn't continue rising in the morning sky indefinitely it reaches a kind of noon point overhead and then horror it starts to fall in the afternoon sky and so you reach I don't know if you count it as 35 or 45 but you realize anyway that the sun is not going to just keep rising in your life and so recognizing that trying to not just react to it by bringing in some more distractions or throwing yourself even more into the path that you've taken or you know feeling the fear and trying to do something that helps you feel around the fear and not just be frozen by that kind of realization and that might be you know talking to someone it maybe talking to friends of course it may be talking to someone like a therapist um it may be trying to bring in a new practice in your life um you know it might be experimenting with what you're reading or um going to live events not just consuming things online all these things that bring people into a kind of wider energy if you like um and then that can enable a process that begins you to sort of start stepping out um of of the life you've been living um but the first step i think would be to try and pay attention um and then the second step would be so what do i need to reflect upon what i'm uh noticing and that might be someone else it might be kind of how you're living your life what you're doing but i think i suppose not just not just try and build in more and more distractions to kind of anesthetize um the the dawning sense of dread it feels like the obvious thing to do is okay things aren't going my way i'm breaking down what can i do to kind of who who can i be around what can i do what can i put in my body what can i distract my mind with i think like there's so so many great takeaways there mark um i've absolutely loved this conversation i feel like we've only just scratched the surface with you like there's probably like loads more that we could pick your brain on if people want to work with you or read your work what how would you best suggest them to go about that yeah well thanks for you know inviting me on and i think that the conversations like this themselves are part of the work you know you asked me a question i try and reach for something that connects with what you're saying and you're thinking so what can i come back you know that is the kind of process of revelation i wonder whether people that's part of what's happening with this podcast medium actually is that when they're at their best they're kind of revelatory and that's because it's happening in the moment and that itself inspires people actually so look you know thanks for inviting me on and you know keep up the good work too um but you know always have something to sell and someone's told me and so i i have a website markvernon.com and um yeah so you can find my books and I do quite a lot of podcasting myself for the reasons I've just explained actually I think it is quite a particular kind of medium when it's done well so I use social media YouTube I have a sub stack those kind of things yeah but markvernon.com you should be able to find links amazing thank you so so much Mark thank you to you guys