The Observing I Podcast

Can the stories we tell about the future actually help bring it into existence? In this episode of The Observing I , I explore the work of philosopher Nick Land, accelerationism and the strange idea of hyperstition , where fiction begins to shape reality. From self-fulfilling prophecies to artificial intelligence and technological change, we examine how our expectations influence what happens next...

As it’s Halloween in a few days, I decided to focus on Edgar Allen Poe and the Tell-Tale Heart for this months live session. There’s a reading of Poe’s magnificently unhinged narrator, some philosophical poking about in the darker corners of the human mind, and the somewhat question of whether we’d actually recognise our own self-deception if it slapped us in the face. Given that most of us can ba...

There's something rather strange about watching a horror film and complaining that it wasn't frightening enough. We spend much of our lives trying to avoid danger, discomfort and anything that might genuinely terrify us. Yet we'll happily pay to experience those very feelings, provided there's a screen between us and whatever's trying to kill us. Why do we deliberately seek out...

Warning: This episode includes discussion of intrusive thoughts around self-harm and suicide. So, if you’re struggling with that, or if you’re really not feeling it right now, please look after yourself and take a pass on this one. Otherwise, get yourself a nice cup of tea, and settle in. You are standing on a viewing platform or waiting on a draughty railway station when an uninvited thought flar...

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 philosophy built around a surprisingly compelling idea: that every individual possesses a True Will, a purpose that belongs to them rather than their parents, religion or society. Crowley spent much of...

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 deadbolts, and pretend the house is safe. But what if our deepest dread isn't something waiting in the dark, but the three pounds of wet tissue sitting behind our own eyes? To kick off our October series...

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 serious. If you’re interested in joining the next one, it’ll be on Tuesday 27th October. You don’t have to be a subscriber to join. They are hosted on Substack ( theobservingi.com ), and everyone is...

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 idea that our ambitions, envies, and rivalries are rarely our own, but borrowed directly from the people standing on our own patch of carpet. From the quiet friction of group chats and family gathering...

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 really “up to us” when even our thoughts, emotions and circumstances refuse to cooperate. In this episode, I look at Epictetus through the gap between what happens and what we decide it means, from unan...

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 eventually produce a better version of you. What interested him instead was the seeker itself: the part of us constantly comparing who we are with who we think we ought to become. Some of U.G.’s claims are dif...

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 into behaviour. But more self-awareness isn’t always better. We look at rumination, cognitive defusion, choice blindness and the limits of introspection, asking whether noticing the mind gives us any re...

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 person who will live with the consequences has no say in the decision that creates them. In this episode of The Observing I, I look at the philosophy behind that argument, from Schopenhauer’s pessimism t...

You can dissolve the self, touch the infinite and return convinced you have seen behind the curtain. Then the tea goes cold, someone still deserves an apology, and the ego quietly promotes itself to “the awakened one”. This season finale asks what altered states are worth once the visions fade, and where spiritual insight ends and psychological crisis begins. Stanislav and Christina Grof, William...

Wilber’s four quadrants begin with a persuasive idea. A human problem has an inside and an outside, and it belongs to an individual as well as the world around them. This episode explores Integral Theory, the difference between waking up and growing up, and the danger of mistaking a comprehensive explanation for the person it claims to understand. That danger becomes painfully real in Grace and Gr...

Bernardo Kastrup argues that consciousness may not be something the brain produces, but the reality within which brains, bodies and the physical world appear. In this episode, I follow his route from computer engineering into analytic idealism, and examine why he believes physicalism has mistaken a successful scientific model for a final account of what reality is. We look at the hard problem of c...

We like to believe that our eyes are honest, that the world we see is a reasonably accurate representation of what is actually there. But the math suggests a different story. We aren't observers of a physical world; we are users of a biological interface. From the green of an apple to the distance between two people, we are navigating a system of simplified icons designed to keep us alive by k...

Waking up is a slow return, a flicker of weight, a point of view, the sudden, jarring realisation that you're here again. It's the most basic fact of your existence, yet the one thing you can never hand to another person. For decades, neuroscientist Christof Koch has tried to break that lock, attempting to turn the most private experience in the universe into a public science. It is an exp...

There is a gap between the brain scanner and the experience it measures. David Chalmers calls it the Hard Problem, and it is the question that will not go away no matter how precise our maps become. Why does it feel like something to be you? We travel through the psychonaut's testimony, the philosophical zombie, and the possibility that consciousness is not something the brain produces but som...

In this episode of The Observing I , we enter the work of Pema Chödrön, exploring shenpa, groundlessness, tonglen, and the uncomfortable spiritual practice of staying present when everything in us wants to escape. Rather than treating awakening as a way to rise above pain, Pema points us back into the exact moment we get hooked: the tight chest, the old story, the message we want to send, and the...

In this episode of The Observing I , we enter the work of Stanislav Grof, the Czech-born psychiatrist whose psychedelic research led him to a stranger view of the unconscious: one shaped not only by childhood and memory, but by birth, death, the body, symbols, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. We explore what Grof’s maps of the psyche still offer, where they overreach, and why powerful exp...

Aldous Huxley sat in his study in 1953, watched a vase of flowers become the first thing he had truly seen, and wrote it down. Millions read it. The reducing valve, he called it. The brain filtering out vastness to keep us sane. A beautiful theory. And like most beautiful theories, it has a limit. Huxley could describe the territory. What he couldn't do was enter it. Laura Archera could. She h...

Against all odds, we have reached episode one hundred and fifty. To mark this milestone of collective survival, we are taking a brief, unannounced intermission from our Realm of the Psychonauts season to turn the lens completely inward and dissect the core philosophy behind this entire show. We spend the vast majority of our lives acting out scripts written by people we have never met, frantically...

In this episode, we explore the strange and troubling legacy of Carlos Castaneda, the anthropologist and author whose books about Don Juan Matus helped shape modern psychedelic spirituality and the New Age movement. Castaneda claimed to have been apprenticed to a Yaqui “man of knowledge,” learning a path of sorcery, discipline, altered perception, and spiritual transformation. But as his influence...

We often imagine tyranny as a heavy hand from the outside, but Aldous Huxley understood a more unsettling possibility. He saw that we can be persuaded to enjoy our own containment. In this episode, we follow Huxley’s journey from the clinical satire of Brave New World to the mystical search for a conscious culture in his final novel, Island. We explore the "reducing valve" of the brain,...

Human beings are often drawn to transformation because we aren't entirely comfortable being ourselves. We imagine that if we can just find the right door, we can shed our old personality like a heavy coat and step into a hidden room behind ordinary consciousness. This week, we explore the life of Richard Alpert, the man who became Ram Dass. His story is a map of the return journey from the hea...