Read A Book! #003

What I’ve been reading — and the thread that runs through it

One theme has been pulling my attention more than anything else over the past year.

It sits at the intersection of history, religion, and altered states of consciousness.

Books like The Immortality Key, The Road to Eleusis, and The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross all circle the same idea: that psychotropic plants may have played a central role in ancient religious practice — across cultures, and over long stretches of time.

If that’s even partially true, it raises a deeper question.

Why was something so widespread, and seemingly embedded in human culture, so thoroughly suppressed?

That question hasn’t gone away.

From August 2024:

• The Immortality Key — Brian C. Muraresku

• The Road to Eleusis — R. Gordon Wasson & Albert Hofmann

• The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross — John M. Allegro

• Maps of Meaning — Jordan B. Peterson

• We Who Wrestle with God — Jordan B. Peterson

• The Consolation of Philosophy — Boethius

• America Before — Graham Hancock

• Why Materialism Is Baloney — Bernardo Kastrup

• Son of Hamas — Mosab Hassan Yousef

• From Hamas to America — Mosab Hassan Yousef

• Among the Mosques — Ed Husain

• Israel and Civilization — Josh Hammer

• On Democracies and Death Cults — Douglas Murray

• Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari

• The Wuhan Cover-Up — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• Walden — Henry David Thoreau

• Civil Disobedience — Henry David Thoreau

• Sonny Boy — Al Pacino

• Good Stress — Jeff Krasno & Schuyler Grant

• The Path to Awakening — Shamar Rinpoche

• The Way of the Superior Man — David Deida

• Becoming Supernatural — Joe Dispenza

• The Trial — Franz Kafka

• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting — Milan Kundera

There’s no single theme across all of these — but there are clear threads.

History. Power. Belief. Consciousness. Meaning.

Some of these books I agreed with. Some I didn’t. Some I’m still thinking about.

That’s part of the point.

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What have you been reading?

What’s stayed with you — and why?

Recommendations welcome.

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I work with creatives in both music and writing.

Are you at a point with a song or a musical project where moving forward means making an important decision, yet one you cannot quite pinpoint?

If you’re in that position — where the issue isn’t lack of ideas, but knowing what actually matters — that’s exactly the kind of work I do in my Musical Crossroads Sessions.

If you have a piece of written work where something feels off in your writing, and you can’t quite see what’s not working, that’s precisely what Clarity Pass is for.