"The Seat Of The Soul by Gary Zukav. It's basically about soul versus personality and multi-sensory personality versus the five-sensory personality - the people whose souls operate with spiritual guidance against people who can only see the earth, the beginning and the end. You really find out a lot about yourself when you read that book."

"“I’m lucky to have spent my childhood in the Middle Ages, or, as Huysmans described it, that ‘painful and exquisite’ epoch—painful in terms of its material aspects, perhaps, but exquisite in its spiritual life. What a contrast to the world of today!” Luis Buñuel always reminds us of what we’re constantly losing in this rotten society."

"Again, her whole catalogue is amazing. I love her music back to front. This is her hit record, as it were, not that it was a proper hit unfortunately. It's been with me for a while and I love it so much. We brought a few pieces of music to listen to while my wife was giving birth to our daughter and this was one of them. That gives an indication of how embedded in my life it is. The tone and mood it sets... She was deep into that sense of spiritual connectedness and universal love. I understand how people who aren't necessarily spiritual might see it as a foolish hippy diversion, but for me, this unlocks the potential of what music can do. At the time it was married to a political agenda, same for all these spiritual free jazz records, and I feel that it's a really unfortunate thing that people don't seem to be able to articulate that so well in the contemporary music world. This is an analysis and that's not why I love it, that's because when I put it on it's my favourite thing to be listening to. But it also stands up to analysis - there's so many reasons to love this music."

"If this list was only five albums long, this would definitely be on there. It's so incomparably good. I think spiritual jazz coming out of America in the late 60s and early 70s is my favourite music in the world. It has everything - big melodies, big production ideas, a heavy kind of rhythm, a really wide palette of sound, so you get that kaleidoscopic playground kind of feel because the texture is so dense and interesting… I guess it's funny how much it shouldn't connect with me because I'm an atheist, but so much of the music on this list is explicitly spiritual music. There was a Brian Eno Red Bull lecture, and Kieran was there and he asked him this very question: ""Why is it that so much of my favourite music is spiritual music?"" and Brian Eno's answer was pretty good. It's about that sense of release, disposing of your ego, and opening yourself up to be more receptive to different musical ideas. I don't mean that you're receiving some kind of spiritual energy - at least that's not my take on it - I just mean you push aside considerations of ego and being cool, maybe that's what it is. This record just seems elemental. It seems to have come from somewhere deep down and really says something about being human. Music means so much to me, it's so central to my life, and the music of Pharoah Sanders is so committed to the potential of music - what music can do, what it can say and how it can communicate with people. It's in no way cynical. It's inevitably going to resonate with me, because I believe in music so much."

"Viktor Frankl was a disciple of Freud. He was a psychoanalyst who, after surviving a death camp in the Holocaust, wrote this deeply spiritual book that is simultaneously psychoanalytic and autobiographical. This is a book about the power of the mind creating a reason to live in order to survive a dire situation. There is no more powerful a story than one about survival."

"A ghostly sea, a blurry horizon and a dusty sky all form a vaporous orange on the moving screen. Waves clash at midday. The mix of red and yellow is reminiscent of fire, sand, passion and memories of lost ones. The film immerses us in orange, possesses us through this color, and puts the viewer in a trance of longing for physical love and spiritual connection."

"The voyage is one of the soul in Roberto Rossellini’s unblinking and profound film. An unhappy couple in an unraveling marriage, perfectly captured in the petty bickering of Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, ultimately reunite. It has the feel of a miracle but is no happy ending. Death and spiritual mystery pervade the film, and love seems but a desperate, painful response to mortality."

"I love the South African jazz reissue label Matsuli Music. Everything they release is worth a listen, but this album is in a league of its own for me. ‘Anishilabi’ and ‘Lishonile’ are absolute masterpieces, if you ask me—very much in the vein of spiritual jazz that I love, but unique in so many ways. Both are club bangers too… at the right club."