Welcome to Wisdom NOTES, a short reflection capturing insights from my conversations on In Search of Wisdom. This edition comes from my interview with Dr. Mark Vernon, the author of Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey. Mark has a diverse background with a Ph.D. in ancient philosophy and degrees in physics and theology. He is also a psychotherapist and writer interested in spirituality and inner life.
Psychotherapy and the Spiritual Path
How does one navigate the spiritual path? Do we need a guide for our spiritual journey? These are just a couple of the questions we explore in the conversation. The classic spiritual text The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is widely considered one of the greatest works of world literature.
Mark’s book offers a vivid introduction and interpretation of a book that, 700 years on, continues to open minds and change lives. Dante’s masterpiece presents a cosmic vision of reality, which he invites his readers to traverse with him on the journey.
The Groundwork
In a previous conversation, Dr. Vernon mentioned that psychotherapy could be considered prep work for the spiritual journey. I asked Dr. Vernon if he could narrow it down, what are the prerequisites to embark on the spiritual path?
Dr. Vernon responded,
If you have personal issues, that can block a broader spiritual perception because there are no-go areas in your most immediate interiority. That means you're either consciously or less consciously preoccupied with those blocks, and so you might try and use spirituality to bypass them or overcome them. Or alternatively, it may just be there, like blind spots. And so you can't engage with what the spiritual adepts tell us of wider reality. And so it's almost like psychotherapy can be the kind of groundwork for the beginnings of the spiritual journey.
The Way Down is the Way Up
In part one of Inferno, there's this concept that you hear of the way down is the way up. Could you share how you think about that in modern life today?
According to Dr. Vernon,
Due to the extremity of Dante’s crisis, he needs to know it in a whole other way. And a crucial part of knowing it in a whole other way, which is this mystical journey, is realizing how you're cut off from God first. And that means encountering yourself, which I think Dante does in the inferno, when he encounters others, it's quite clear that he can only journey to these dark places when he recognizes how the darkness resonates with him.
You can only really know the strength of love, explained Dr. Vernon, when you have faced the power of hate and realized that love is stronger.
Navigating Uncertainty
“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost,” wrote Dante at the beginning of his Divine Comedy. Learning to navigate uncertainty is a perennial challenge. To the question, “How should we think about navigating uncertainty in modern life?”
Dr. Vernon responded,
The therapist in me responds by saying that uncertainty is much more tolerable when it's shared. And when someone who knows what's going on for you in some significant way, so you feel understood, but at the same time isn't actually going on the same journey. And so I think that psychotherapy is one response to that, that the therapists would have undergone their own journey.
Dr. Vernon painted this picture in his book Dante’s Divine Comedy: “There is a forest around him, and it looks strange and uncanny. It is dark and full of twisted roots. The place feels slippery. It renders any direction of travel unclear. Maybe this is the first real step: to wake up to where he actually is. Lost.”
Thank you for reading the Wisdom Notes from my conversation with Dr. Mark Mark Vernon. If you’re interested in learning more, you can listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
JW