Aleister Crowley was a magician, occultist, self-proclaimed Great Beast 666, and a man the British press famously dubbed “The Wickedest Man in the World”. But behind the scandalous reputation was a…
Most horror stories try to convince us that the monster is out in the woods or lurking behind a cellar door. It’s a comforting setup, because it means you can turn the porch light on, bolt the…
On the last Tuesday of the month, I do a live session with whomever wants to drop in. There’s a short essay to start, and then a casual Q&A. It’s more of a hang out with the listeners than anything…
Why do we never seem to want anything until someone else tries to pick it up first? In this episode, we look at the work of French thinker René Girard and his unsettling theory of mimetic desire—the…
Epictetus is usually reduced to one clean Stoic idea: focus on what you can control and let go of the rest. But his actual philosophy is stranger than that, especially once you start asking what is…
U.G. Krishnamurti spent most of his life chasing enlightenment, then decided the entire search had been a mistake. He rejected gurus, methods and the promise that enough spiritual work would…
What happens when the mind catches itself in the act? This episode explores self-awareness, metacognition and the strange moment where a thought, reaction or impulse becomes visible before it turns…
What if having a child is a moral decision we rarely treat like one? Anti-natalism begins with an awkward fact: nobody consents to being born, every life contains some degree of suffering, and the…
In this episode, I’m talking about how we can be more focused on the process of “doing” rather than on the outcome, the things that are in our locus of control, and what causes us to be so focused on…
In this episode, I go on about purpose and meaning, what it is that we need as human beings to be able to understand where we sit in the context of our existence, and some things to think about if…
