"Some things in life are beyond explanation. Kieślowski reminds us that film is a spiritual and transcendent experience that taps into the metaphysical realms of our existence. Irène Jacob is absolutely mesmerizing in her portrayal of two women who are doppelgängers and share a mysterious and unspeakable bond. The experience of watching The Double Life of Véronique is ever-healing, like soaking in a warm bath surrounded by candles at night."

"The existential side of inner seeking, which appealed to another part of me as an adolescent. The war-traumatized pilot Larry Darrell was my first encounter with a character who walks away from conventional social life to find inner meaning. I suppose you could say that Maugham waves a sparkler at the start of the spiritual journey. Materialism and money-grubbing get a bashing, which is worth thinking about today."

"How do we open ourselves up to life’s joy and the heart’s peace? Elizabeth Lesser has been helping me answer this question since I first encountered her book. Her message is simple and profound: “When we slow down, quiet the mind, and allow ourselves to feel hungry for something that we do not understand, we are dipping into the abundant well of spiritual longing.” That’s the starting point for growth."

"Again, Jesse turned me onto that record, years ago. We revisited that when we were in the desert at Rancho De La Luna, we were playing lots of good stuff on YouTube through the mixing board. The house was so cool. David Catching, who lives there, he was out on tour - great guy, but we had the whole house to ourselves. Just that record - throw it on in the daytime and then the sun starts coming and you're in this chill house and you're just cranking this record and then eventually when the sun starts going down, that's just super psychedelic. It was a good companion piece. That record has Leon Thomas singing ""the creator has a master plan"" over and over again. Never thought about this at the time, but repeating lines in a spiritual way - there's a title track to b'lieve i'm goin down…, which isn't on the album, which is just the same line over and over again - something about that spiritual vibe. Eventually Leon Thomas just does this spiritual yodelling! The record's so melodic. Pharoah Sanders does this cool thing - it's like pop, but it's like spiritual pop, mixed with jazz, where it's a relatively simple line, just a couple of chords, usually. It just puts you in this zone, it's so beautiful. It's simple, but not at all; nobody could touch it. Pharoah Sanders comes in eventually and plays the sweetest emotional sax and eventually it turns into insanity, noise, skronking and screeching. Honestly, he's known for that, but it's my least favourite part of him. I understand why he does it, because it reaches this climax and then all of a sudden, you come out and go back to this thing and it just goes all the way to the limit; it's just like life, it goes from zero to 60 and then you come back out of it. That's the beauty of him."

"Breaking the Waves was a big influence on me when I was studying cinema. It gave me the feeling that it was possible to make a film with just energy, with just a chair and a window. The roughness of the style—it’s like listening to a punk song. And I really loved the way that the female character is portrayed. There is something very disturbing and strong about the tension between sexual energy and spiritual searching."

"Before the Rain is one of my favorite movies of recent years. I think, in a very interesting way, there is a lot of spiritual thought hidden in the movie. When I saw it, the structure of the movie was very new, how it works with time. In my opinion, “time” will be one of the big topics in the future of telling stories, and how we approach it narratively will change in the next twenty to thirty years."

"I love all of his stuff from A Love Supreme onwards. I love the whole spiritual nature of those tunes. Love Supreme was his hymn to god and it sounds like it. Whenever I hear that first track it makes me think of opening a window and all this fresh, clean spring air coming in. It's uplifting, in the tradition of gospel, but abstracted. All of his stuff from that point onwards was a hymn. It's constantly influential and inspiring."