Inferno 1

Dante's imagery, particularly in the Paradiso, offers powerful prompts to developing the sense of what it is to be intelligent. He wrote for modern times, he said. And now, as AI becomes more pervasive, he can help us understand how machine learning and human intuitions are very different capacities.

This was part of a talk given at the Scientific and Medical Network - https://scientificandmedical.net/webinars/

For more on Mark's work, particularly on Dante, see www.markvernon.com

Reason fails before the greatest spiritual truths. That much is not news. But part of the genius of Dante is his conjuring of images that reach beyond the impasses of paradox and seeming contradiction.

I consider 8 such moments when Dante sees the unsayable and offers images of the ineffable.
- how darkness leads to light
- how appearances can be the opposite of the truth
- how the immediate eclipses wider perspectives
- how all faces are the divine face
- how “I” and “we” coincide
- how divine and creature are one
- how consciousness expands
- how relationship is unity, many is one, movement is the unchangable.

For more on my book Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey see http://www.markvernon.com/dantes-divine-comedy

What is the meaning of Easter? How might Holy Week be more than an occasion for its retelling? Can death and resurrection live today, as they once did, 2000 years ago?

Dante’s journey, in the Divine Comedy, begins on Maundy Thursday, 1300. It continues through the inferno, on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, before he enters purgatory on Easter Sunday morning, at dawn. 

The climb up Mount Purgatory, then, takes until Easter Wednesday when, finally, Dante reaches paradise. Though that is really another beginning, as he becomes more capable of knowing the light of Christ in him, and so knowing that light in all that surrounds him.

In other words, the Divine Comedy invites us to consider the story of Easter not as an historical event but as a pattern and path which makes sense of our lives, if we dare to live them deeply.

Augustine once remarked that the joy of being Christian is being a Christ. Easter, then, is not primarily a remembrance of things that happened, but a recollection of who we are called to be. That is the meaning of Easter, needed if Christianity is to live in people’s lives now.

Dante would seem to be a key candidate for infernalism, the doctrine of endless punishment in hell for sinners who failed to turn to Christ.

He’s said to be medieval and isn't that what they believed then? And doesn’t his Divine Comedy clearly, indisputably say as much?

But Dante’s whole point is that nothing is as it seems to the unawakened eye.

I think what Dante is doing is taking evil completely seriously and showing why eternal damnation not only isn't, but can’t be the final result. And yet, this can only be seen when the darkness itself is fearlessly, fully seen.

The Divine Comedy is all about guides - finding guides, following guides, conversing with guides. Virgil and Beatrice are the best known, but there are other modes of guidance that Dante seeks and explores.

Angels, dreams and myths accompanying Dante, even in the darkest moments. He learns to be present to them and trust that whilst in one encounter they can bring fear or shame, in another they inspire wrestling and struggle, and then in another again bring divine light and insight.

For more on Mark's book, Dante's Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey see - https://www.markvernon.com/dantes-divine-comedy

For more on Mark see - https://www.markvernon.com

Dante coined the word "transhumanise" in the Divine Comedy, 700 years ago. "Trasumanar" is the transformation he will undergo in order to share in the life of paradise.

Today, the word has associations that are strikingly related to Dante's; partly quite similar, though changed in subtle but crucial ways. Understanding those differences illuminates the dangers of transhumanism today and how it might limit, not expand, our humanity.

I consider this constriction across half a dozen areas on the transhumanism agenda: telepathy, happiness, intelligence, stellar living, the superman, and death.

Transhumanising is a religious promise. It becomes a modern threat when that transcendent perspective is eclipsed and lost.

A joy to speak again with Brian, this time on Dante's Divine Comedy.

We talked about what happened to Dante, what happened to Mark that opened up the Divine Comedy, how the poem works as an initiation, what it reveals about Christianity, what happens to Virgil, the nature of paradise, amongst other things.

For more on Brian see http://brianjames.ca

For more on Mark see https://www.markvernon.com

Bernard Carr is a leading cosmologist who worked with Stephen Hawking and now investigates time, multidimensionality and consciousness, amongst other things. 

Bernardo Kastrup cites him as at the vanguard of the great task to integrate matter and mind.

So I was delighted to get the chance to ask Bernard about images from Dante. 

We talked about relational cosmologies as advocated by Carlo Rovelli, who has talked about being  inspired by Dante, and whether alternative images from the Divine Comedy might illuminate his own approaches, as well as our understanding.

This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues continues Rupert and Mark's exploration of Dante’s Divine Comedy, taking a lead from Mark’s book, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey. 

Dante is now guided by Beatrice through the heavenly spheres and into the Empyrean. It is a journey into the abundance of infinity and eternity, which immediately struck Rupert as akin to a DMT trip. 

Mark and Rupert explore how that is an apt analogy with Dante enabling us to incorporate the visionary into everyday life and understand how deeper perceptions of being can inform different times and cultures. 

The conversation moves over the relationship between the one and the many, the universal message of Christianity, the ways in which love and intellect work in tandem, and how Dante can aid various quests for knowledge today.

Various human experiences are deepened and resolved as Dante travels through hell, purgatory and paradise. The Divine Comedy can be read as an examination of this transfiguring of perception.

From the alienation of hell, through the transforming time of purgatory, to the ever-expanding awareness of paradise: Dante show us how time & love, seeking & suffering, telepathy & transhumanising can change to reveal divine life without limit.

For more on Mark's book on the Divine Comedy - https://www.markvernon.com/books/dantes-divine-comedy-book