The Observing I Podcast

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 his life challenging those who claimed authority over him. The peculiar irony is that he eventually became precisely the sort of spiritual authority he’d spent his life rejecting.

In this episode of The Observing I, we explore Crowley’s extraordinary life, the philosophy of Thelema, and the troubling contradictions between personal freedom and the desire for control. From his religious upbringing and supposed divine revelation in Cairo to the ill-fated Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, we examine what happens when the pursuit of liberation becomes entangled with power, dependence and self-deception. And perhaps most importantly, we ask a rather uncomfortable question: how can we be certain we’ve discovered our true purpose, rather than simply becoming exceptionally good at justifying whatever we happen to want?

Much love, David x

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, we look at the radical pessimism of American writer Thomas Ligotti and Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, who argued that human consciousness was never an evolutionary triumph; it was a biological blunder. A pair of twelve-foot antlers we have to drag through the trees, saddling an over-tooled ape with an awareness of decay, silence, and mortality it was never built to carry.

From the clinical collapse in Ligotti’s "The Frolic" to the acoustic sanctuary that crumbles in "The Bungalow House", we pick apart Zapffe’s four walls of sanity—isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation—and why ordinary life feels like a mutual conspiracy of silence. We look at depressive realism, examine why art cannot save the organism from the abattoir, and ask the most uncomfortable question of all: what if the observing self isn't an enlightened witness, but a conscious marionette waking up to its own strings?

Much love, David x

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 welcome.

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Every time I schedule one of these monthly subscriber calls, I convince myself I’m going to run a tidy, disciplined session. I’ll read through a short essay, answer three sensible questions about the text, and be in bed by one thirty. AM. That plan never survives past the ten-minute mark.

We started off on the unexamined axiom. That greasy, low-level panic that hums behind your ribs on a quiet Sunday night when the rent is paid, nobody is knocking on your door, and your nervous system decides you’ve forgotten something that will inevitably ruin your life. It’s an ancient bit of survival kit that simply outlived the emergency. You learned the rule when you were twelve so an unpredictable parent wouldn't shout at you, and now you’re forty, pacing the kitchen floor in full plate armour while your tea goes cold.

Once the essay was done, the wheels came off in the best possible way. I had an empty pipe in my hand to look vaguely sophisticated/ The chat took us all over the place. We argued over whether people are inherently decent or entirely broken, which dragged in George Carlin’s line about an individual being great until three of them form a group. From there we drifted into Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes, Philip K. Dick convincing himself he was trapped in ancient Rome while hopped up on speed, the Roman cult of Mithras sitting under an office block in London, and a bizarre historical tangent about whether Victorian Britain actually burnt millions of cats to use as fertiliser (which, as it turns out, is true). At nearly two in the morning, for me at least, that all made total sense.

It all circled back to the same awkward theme: why we make ourselves so miserable. Having just recorded the episode on René Girard, we spent a fair bit of time on why big tech feels completely devoid of guilt, how people use Marcus Aurelius or The Art of War as corporate manuals to feel like suburban princes, and why trying to manipulate your peers is just cowardice masquerading as strategy. Even Machiavelli entered the picture at some point.

The full recording is above. Have a listen if you want to watch me lose my thread, talk through London jazz spots, and threaten to dress up as Rasputin for the Halloween call. And if you have an unexamined rule running your weekends, drop it in the comments. We might as well audit the ghosts together.

Much love, David x

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 gatherings to the glowing glass in our pockets, we trace how admiration curdles into competition and why modern crowds are so quick to find an enemy. It’s an unvarnished look at the mechanics of envy, the illusion of self-authored taste, and what it actually takes to catch the machinery running before you join the mob.

Much love, David x

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 unanswered messages and broken relationships to coercion, injustice and the limits of inner freedom. The question is not whether you can control your mind. It is whether the first story your mind tells deserves to become the truth.

Much love, David x

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 difficult to defend, particularly his account of the biological transformation he called the “calamity”. But the problem he kept pointing at is harder to shake off. A useful practice can become another way of grading yourself, and self-improvement can quietly turn into permanent self-surveillance. Can we change the things that genuinely need changing without turning ourselves into a permanent renovation project?

Much love, David x

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Join the conversation on our Discord server https://discord.gg/yUJGTCUmS5

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 real control over it, or simply gives us another layer of thought to get trapped inside.

Much love, David x

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 to David Benatar’s claim that coming into existence is always a harm. Benatar’s case is more difficult to dismiss than simply saying that most people are glad to be alive, because he draws a distinction between a life being worth continuing once it exists and that same life having been worth starting in the first place.

Taken seriously, that distinction leads somewhere fairly extreme. If suffering can be avoided by never creating the person who would experience it, while nobody is deprived of the pleasures they never exist to miss, then the safest ethical choice appears to be not to create anyone at all. But that argument also raises problems of its own. How much weight should we give to the judgement of people who actually live these lives? Does the impossibility of consent make procreation wrong, or simply something we should take far more seriously than we usually do? And what happens when the imagined baby becomes an adult with their own view of the decision somebody else made for them?

Much love, David x

PS: I've finally gotten around to setting the a Discord server for the podcast. If you want to join in some philosophical chats, recommend ideas for future episodes, or just hang out with a group of people who like to think, then the link is discord.gg/yUJGTCUmS5.

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 James and Jack Kornfield guide us through the difficult return to ordinary life. The real test is not how intense the breakthrough felt, but whether it changes how you listen, apologise and live once the laundry needs doing.

Much love, David x

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 Grit, Wilber’s account of his wife Treya’s cancer and death. Her story leaves us with a difficult question: can a map reveal what we have overlooked without giving us another way to explain somebody else’s experience away?

Much love, David x