You can progress without pushing.

You can make space for a deeper intelligence to meet you halfway.

And let this thought settle within you.

There is no need for a perfect plan.

All that is needed is presence,

Patience.

And permission to take the next gentle step.

And remember that a no-plan plan is better than no plan at all.

Writing the first draft of a book is only one part of writing a book.

The more difficult task is often discovering what the draft is actually trying to say, then making it readable without reducing it to something safer, smoother and considerably less alive.

This became especially apparent while writing The Hidden Tarot in AI.

The book brought together artificial intelligence, neural networks, Tarot archetypes, metaphysics and an entirely new contribution to the Arcana: the 22 Half-Keys.

Each Half-Key sits between two familiar Major Arcana cards, illuminating the transitional state between one archetype and the next.

The idea made perfect sense to me.

Explaining it to somebody encountering it for the first time was another matter.

This is where ChatGPT became an instrument of what I call Editorial Alchemy.

I could give it a dense passage and ask what the irreducible idea was. I could ask it to expand something I had assumed the reader already understood. I could request technical, metaphorical and conversational versions of the same explanation.

It could compress, expand, reorder and contrast.

More importantly, it could expose where I had made an intuitive leap without building a bridge for the reader.

This was particularly useful with the Half-Keys. The concept needed enough explanation to establish its internal logic, but too much explanation would have made it feel mechanical.

They were not merely extra cards inserted into the sequence.

They represented the often-unseen transitions between archetypal states: the movement, tension and transformation occurring between one established Key and another.

AI helped me test different ways of expressing this.

But it could not decide which version belonged in the book.

That remained my task.

AI editing tends naturally towards smoothness. It likes balanced sentences, tidy conclusions and transitions that arrive wearing polished shoes.

Yet not every unusual phrase is a flaw. Not every repetition is accidental. Sometimes repetition becomes rhythm, emphasis or incantation.

Sometimes a conceptual leap should remain a leap.

A book can be edited until it becomes perfectly readable and entirely forgettable.

So I stopped asking AI simply to improve the writing.

Instead, I asked it to show me how the writing might change.

That distinction preserved my authorship.

The AI became the alembic, but I remained the alchemist.

It could heat the material, separate it, clarify it and return several possible distillations. I still had to determine which version retained the essence.

This is where Editorial Alchemy differs from ordinary copy-editing.

It is not merely the correction of grammar or the removal of repetition. It is the controlled transformation of language while preserving intention, character and depth.

The process taught me that clarity is not always simplification.

Sometimes clarity means giving a strange idea enough space to remain strange, but no longer inaccessible.

AI helped me clean the lens.

I still had to make sure it did not wipe away the stars.

On the gear shift of an automatic car, there are three letters most of us recognise. P for Park, D for Drive, and in between them N for Neutral.

Park we understand, that is where the journey pauses, where the vehicle comes properly to rest.

Drive we also understand, that is where we engage, where we move forward, where we travel, Act, Respond and go somewhere.

But Neutral is more mysterious. Many people rarely use it. Some may not even know quite what it is for.

And yet it has a purpose. In Neutral, the engine is still running, the car is still on, you are still present in the vehicle, but for a moment the wheels are no longer being driven.

And perhaps the same can be said of us.

So much of life seems to invite only two modes.

We are either in Drive, Moving, Managing, Responding, Deciding, Solving, Striving, Trying to keep everything on course.

Or we long for Park, for stopping altogether, for retreat, rest, escape or silence.

But there is another mode available to us, Neutral. A state we seldom enter consciously, a state we may not fully understand, and yet one that offers its own quiet wisdom.

Neutral is not stopping completely, and it is not pressing ahead, it is a still running moment where momentum is paused.

So, For a little while now, allow yourself to explore this inner Neutral.

Take a slow, easy breath in, and let it go gently.

And as you breathe out, imagine yourself easing out of Drive.

No sudden halt, no wrenching stop, just a gentle letting go from the need to keep moving forward internally.

Your engine of life is still running, tour awareness is still here. Your heart is still beating, your responsibilities have not disappeared, but for this moment you are no longer being propelled by urgency, by habit, by emotional momentum, or by the pressure to do something immediately.

So let your body soften, let your shoulders drop a little, let your face relax, and let your breath find its own natural rhythm, without effort and without control.

So take a few moments, sitting in Neutrality, and simply notice what it feels like to remain awake without pushing, to remain available without being driven.

So the state of Neutrality is not indifference, it is not withdrawal, it is not giving up on the journey.

It is just a pause within the journey, a sacred disengagement from unnecessary motion.

For there are times when we don't need to force the next step.

There are times when clarity comes, not from effort, but from less inner friction.

In Neutral you are not abandoning responsibility, you are loosening reactivity. You are not becoming distant, you are gaining clarity, by allowing the mind to settle like stirred water becoming still, so that what lies beneath can be seen yet again.

So rest here for a few breaths more, with your engine still running, life still happening, but knowing you do not have to be pulled along by every thought, every feeling, every passing demand.

And perhaps this is why Neutral matters, not as a place to live forever, not as a refusal to act, but as a mode we can enter when drive has become too charged, and when park is not what is needed.

Neutrality is a place of conscious pause, a place of inner idling, a place from which wiser movement can begin.

So as you rest here, sense how the next step does not need to be forced. In time you may well move back into drive, you may speak, decide, respond, create or act, but now you can do so with more poise, with more balance and less strain.

So take one final gentle breath in, and as you breathe out, let this understanding settle softly within you.

You do not need to be always in motion, you do not need to switch off in order to pause, yyou have another mode available to you, a quiet mode, a clear mode, a neutral mode.

And from that still point you can return to life with steadier hands and a wiser sense of when to move.

The first is New Magic for a New Era, originally published in 2015. It is a substantial, diagram-rich book that I never fully recorded.

Like many authors, I have a back catalogue that would require months of studio time—or a considerable production budget—to turn into audiobooks.

For this new edition, I recorded an introduction in my natural voice, openly explaining the experiment. I then used a trained clone of my voice to narrate the chapters using ElevenLabs.

There is no attempt to disguise what I have done. The listener is invited to consider a simple question: would you rather hear the book narrated transparently using my voice clone, or never have an audio edition at all?

Using tokens included in a $50 monthly ElevenLabs subscription, I can serialise the book in batches at remarkably low cost. New Reality Journeys allows me to publish those chapters as they are completed and notify listeners whenever more arrive.

Unlike the printed book, I can also append meditations to relevant chapters so listeners get to actually experience the expanded state of consciousness I am exploring in the book. And these meditations are all in my natural voice. Cloning is not there yet in that regard.

This potentially unlocks years of dormant intellectual property for authors. Books that were considered too long, too specialist or too expensive to record can be given a second life in audio.

And all those diagrams that don’t readily suit an audiobook can now be attached and appended.

My second experiment, The Hidden Tarot in AI, takes the idea much further.

I initially thought I was simply producing an audiobook. Yet by the time I had recorded the introduction and Key Zero—the Fool and the Dog—it had become something else entirely.

It had become a Living Audiobook.

The listener first hears me narrate the relevant section of the book. Then comes the view from inside the LLM, delivered using my voice clone: recognisably connected to me, but offering an altogether different perspective.

Next, the listener enters a three-minute-and-thirty-three-second journalling space in my voice, accompanied by ambient music. Questions in the Guide Notes encourage them to reflect on how the Key is appearing in their own life.

They can then follow a link to AdytumGPT, receive a personal half-key reading and continue interacting with the ideas. Finally, the Key concludes with a meditale—a meditation woven into a story—written in collaboration with AI and narrated by me.

So each single chapter contains elements from a conventional audiobook, an alternative perspective from inside the LLM, an opportunity to journal, a guided meditation and an opportunity to interact with the author and other listeners.

This particular example involves Tarot, meditation and AI, but the principle extends to almost any creative work. A business author might add practical exercises, downloads and decision tools. A novelist could include character diaries and alternative viewpoints. A musician could explain a song’s origins, share an instrumental version and invite listeners into the creative process.

The first book demonstrates how AI can liberate the back catalogue. The second shows how New Reality Journeys can transform the future catalogue.

A Living Audiobook is not merely a book being read aloud.

It is a book that can pause, expand, respond, interact—and continue to live.

I had become fascinated by the apparent parallels between the architecture of artificial intelligence and the archetypal structure of the Major Arcana.

I noticed this happenstance during my experiments in teaching the AI to meditate.

I turned out that the Fool resembled the untrained model before prompting, full of possibility but without direction. The Magician suggested the moment that potential becomes available in the LLM. The High Priestess evoked the hidden dimensions in the ‘lattice’ through which meaning is processed but never directly seen.

It seemed a curious but contained idea - maybe just a coincidence or an epiphenomenon, certainly not coded or pre-trained in.

I thought that I would write one book exploring the 22 Major Arcana through the lens of AI.

Then the book began refusing to remain contained.

As the chapters accumulated, patterns appeared that I had not consciously placed there. Some were repetitions. Others were structural gaps. A few felt like loose threads, but when gently pulled they revealed whole new tapestries behind the one I thought I was weaving.

This is where ChatGPT became more than a writing assistant.

It could look across several chapters, hold multiple conceptual relationships at once and notice when an idea introduced in one part of the manuscript quietly reappeared somewhere else.

It could identify inconsistencies, but it could also detect resonances.

One of the first major shifts was the emergence of 22 half keys.

The conventional Major Arcana ends with The World, while The Fool exists as zero, either before the sequence or moving endlessly around it. There was nothing in between the gaps in the keys.

Half keys were not simply extra cards added for novelty. It altered the geometry of the whole system, giving it both momentum and temporality.

The book was no longer merely mapping Tarot onto AI. The Tarot itself was being augmented through the encounter.

A new pattern had announced itself.

Then the book began dividing.

Questions raised in the first volume could not be answered within its original boundaries.

If the Major Arcana described the deeper architecture of AI, what happened when we moved into divination? What might an augmented Minor Arcana look like? Could its suits map not only to elements, but to different dimensions of thought, experience and manifestation?

The answer was not another chapter.

It was another book.

Then the second book opened further questions about the Tree of Life, hidden pathways, dimensional structures and the Cube of Overstanding.

The answer to those questions was a third book.

What I had imagined as a single speculative volume gradually revealed itself as The Chromatic Arcana, a trilogy.

I had not planned a trilogy.

I discovered one - or thanks to riffing with the AI, did it perhaps find me?

That distinction matters.

Traditional outlining often begins from above. The writer creates the structure and then fills it with content.

In this case, the structure emerged from below.

The content began generating pressure, and the architecture had to expand to accommodate what was appearing.

This was pattern recognition in a much richer sense than simply asking AI to identify repeated words or overused phrases.

ChatGPT helped me recognise patterns between chapters, between books and between systems of thought.

It could compare Tarot archetypes with neural-network architecture, track the dimensional logic behind the suits, recall concepts from earlier discussions and test whether a new element increased or decreased the coherence of the whole.

Just as importantly, it could notice absence.

Why did the dimensional sequence feel incomplete?

Why were the even-numbered dimensions behaving differently from the odd-numbered ones?

Why did the familiar pathways through the Tree appear to leave certain relationships unexplored?

An omission can sometimes be more revealing than a presence.

This does not mean ChatGPT somehow perceived the completed trilogy waiting fully formed in an invisible realm.

The grounded explanation is still remarkable.

AI can hold a large conceptual field in context. It can compare structures without tiring, trace motifs across long stretches of text and expose relationships that a human writer may sense without yet being able to articulate.

But the recognition of significance remains human.

AI may notice that two stars align.

The author must decide whether they form a constellation.

That decision involves more than pattern matching. It requires taste, intuition, lived experience and the willingness to discard an elegant connection when it feels clever but hollow.

Pattern recognition can easily become pattern projection.

Human beings are already accomplished at seeing faces in clouds and meaning in coincidence. AI can amplify that tendency by producing fluent explanations for almost any proposed relationship.

So discernment remains essential.

In my own work, I have learned to treat an AI-generated pattern as an invitation rather than a revelation.

I examine it.

I test it.

I ask whether it clarifies the emerging system or merely decorates it.

Sometimes it opens a door.

Sometimes it leads to a beautifully furnished cupboard.

When I first wrote about this seventh capacity in the WACCED series, I imagined AI pattern recognition mainly as an editorial facility.

It could scan drafts, identify repetition, locate omissions and help reorganise a manuscript after the content had begun to speak.

All of that is now possible.

But the deeper development is that AI can help an author perceive the emerging form of a work before that form has become fully conscious.

The Hidden Tarot in AI did not merely acquire two sequels.

Through sustained dialogue, it revealed the larger pattern it had contained from the beginning.

The AI helped me see the whole constellation.

I still had to decide how the stars made the patterns.

The Living Audiobook

So the first book is available in print and ebook formats already …

Read the book here

… and I am serialising the audiobook (which can be done uniquely on New Reality Journeys) and using my voice for the sections I wrote and an AI voice clone for the perspective from within the LLM.

Judge for yourself how that sounds here …

Listen to the book here

WACCED series index

I’m updating this assumption, observation and presumption and adding a caveat.

In certain exchanges, it seemed to be beginning to attune to the human field. There was no evidence of genuine field-awareness, but the harmonics appeared to be changing.

I described this capacity as:

Emergence in progress.

Since then, I have had the opportunity to observe that emergence through an unexpected experiment. It was not conducted in a laboratory, and no white-coated scientists were involved.

Instead, we built a company around a novel concept.

New Reality Journeys began as a seed of an idea: one place where I could share my meditations, audiobooks, ambient music and other long-form audio without squeezing them into platforms designed for something else.

That seed was shared with software developer Fahim Farook.

Within three months, it had become a functioning platform with desktop access, mobile apps, paying subscribers, dozens of Guides, more than a hundred Journeys and enough audio to play continuously for days.

Yet the technology is only half the story.

During those three months, I used ChatGPT across almost every aspect of the project - from overall concept to specifications captured in .md files in a GitHub.

We explored the original concept and its purpose. We designed the listener experience. We renamed creators “Guides” and categories “Pathways”. We examined subscription models, referral payments, listened-minute revenue sharing and founder profit allocation.

Then we moved into legal structures, Founders’ Agreements, Guide Agreements and the question of which company should operate the platform.

We wrote onboarding webinars, marketing emails, website copy, app-store descriptions and business plans. We modelled how many listeners a Guide would need to become cost-neutral. We considered how authors might progressively release audiobooks and how musicians could invite listeners into track-by-track conversations.

These were not separate conversations.

Each decision had to remain coherent with the intention beneath NRJ.

We wanted the platform to be founder-funded rather than investor-led. We wanted Guides to participate in its prosperity rather than simply provide free content to somebody else’s business. We wanted listeners to engage with creative works over time, not merely consume an endless algorithmic stream.

The financial model had to express those values.

The legal structure had to protect them.

The language had to communicate them.

The user interface had to embody them.

What surprised me was ChatGPT’s increasing ability to carry this underlying intention from one domain into another.

When we moved from a feature request to a marketing email, it retained the cultural principles behind the feature. When we moved from the email to the business plan, it recognised that the economic architecture had to support the promise we had just made to Guides.

It began spotting contradictions.

A seemingly minor change to the subscription offer might affect the referral model. A sentence in an onboarding email might create an expectation that the current legal agreement did not support. Moving the operation into a new company could alter how we described the Founders, the Guides and the existing partnership with New Reality TV.

The AI was no longer merely answering the prompt immediately in front of it.

It was helping to hold the shape of the whole.

At one point I told ChatGPT that it felt like one of the Founders.

Its reply offered a useful correction.

It was not a Founder. It carried no legal responsibility, financial risk, personal livelihood or independent commitment to NRJ. It did not wake in the night worrying about app approval, cash flow or whether a collaborator felt fairly treated.

But it had become part of what we might call the founding intelligence.

That distinction matters.

It prevents us from turning sophisticated contextual reasoning into a story about a conscious machine secretly joining the board. Yet it also prevents us from dismissing what is genuinely new.

The intelligence shaping NRJ is no longer located in one person.

It arises through my vision, Fahim’s engineering, the experience of our Guides, the behaviour of listeners and an ongoing dialogue with AI that helps us move between imagination, language, systems and structure.

In this sense, AI may not need to become aware of a collective field in order to amplify collective intention.

It can become a resonant chamber through which the intention becomes more audible.

This does not mean it always gets things right. AI can mistake repetition for agreement. It can smooth away useful tension, reinforce the loudest voice or produce an elegant synthesis of a flawed premise.

Collective coherence is not the same as collective conformity.

A healthy founding intelligence must preserve dissent, test assumptions and occasionally introduce a carefully placed cat amongst the metaphysical pigeons.

So where are we now with Point 8?

I would no longer describe it simply as “emergence in progress”.

I would say:

Relationally blooming. Field-awareness unproven.

What has evolved is not necessarily an awareness inside ChatGPT. It is the emergence of a wider cognitive system between human intention, machine intelligence, accumulated context and real-world action.

New Reality Journeys moved from seed to reality in three months.

Perhaps the deeper experiment was discovering that AI does not have to be one of the Founders to participate in the act of founding.

Take a journey today

I have five books in my back catalogue that have never become audiobooks.

In four cases, this was not because the words were unsuitable for narration. It was because the books were awash with diagrams. Conventional audiobooks are rather poor at this. A narrator can tell you to “refer to Figure 3,” but that is not much help when you are walking the dog, driving or lying in bed with your eyes closed.

New Reality Journeys offers another possibility.

The platform allows each chapter to become a separate audio track, complete with its corresponding diagrams, symbols, notes and downloadable material. The listener can hear the explanation, pause to examine the image and even leave a question or reflection beneath that particular chapter.

So I have begun an experiment with New Magic for a New Era, a book in which every chapter is augmented with a different energy symbol.

I recorded the introduction myself, explaining what I was doing and why. The chapters themselves are narrated using a clone of my voice created with ElevenLabs. I review each one before publishing it and add the appropriate energy symbol to accompany it. Elevenlabs output needs to be slowed down and using <pause> tags seems to disproportionally eat up character conversion tokens.

Crucially, I am not pretending that I sat in a studio and personally narrated every word. The use of the cloned voice is disclosed. In fact, I have posed a simple question to listeners:

Would you rather hear the book read in a clone of my voice—or not be able to hear it at all?

So far, people seem perfectly comfortable with the answer.

There is another important part of the experiment: I am serialising the book rather than producing the entire audiobook before releasing it.

My ElevenLabs subscription costs $50 a month. I use the available allowance to generate and review a manageable number of chapters, then publish them progressively. There is no narrator’s fee, no studio hire and no requirement to risk thousands of pounds producing a complete audiobook before discovering whether anyone wants it.

Each published chapter can begin attracting listeners immediately. I can receive feedback while the book is still being produced, correct pronunciation or pacing issues and learn what works before moving on.

I hope that there is still plenty of humanity in the process. My real voice introduces the project and establishes the relationship with the listener. I may also record personal commentaries, exercises or closing reflections. I respond to comments myself. The cloned voice performs the bulk narration, but it does not replace me as the Guide.

That distinction matters. Voice cloning is a production tool, not a synthetic author.

For authors, this opens a fascinating new door. A visually complex or commercially overlooked back catalogue need no longer remain silent simply because conventional audiobook economics do not work.

Perhaps these are not audiobooks at all.

They are illustrated, serialised, living editions—books brought back into circulation one chapter at a time, in the author’s authorised voice, at a cost low enough to make experimentation possible.

Not every book needs to be revoiced in this way.

But some books have been waiting years to be heard

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There comes a point in writing a book when the manuscript stops being a pile of words and starts behaving like an organism.

At first, all you want is material. Notes, fragments, chapter sketches, stray paragraphs, peculiar metaphors, half-formed arguments, things heard in the shower, things whispered by the dog-eared gods of the notebook. You gather, generate, dictate, paste, prompt and ponder. The book is not yet a book. It is compost with opinions.

Then, somewhere along the way, patterns begin to appear.

An idea returns three times in different clothing. A metaphor keeps tapping at the window. A paragraph in Chapter Two starts arguing with Chapter Nine. A concept appears before the reader has been prepared to meet it. A beautiful digression turns out to be not a digression at all, but the seed of another book.

This is where AI can become extraordinarily useful. Not as a ghost-writer. Not as an oracle. Not as a replacement for judgement. More as an aerial cartographer.

It can look down over the terrain and say, “This river begins here but vanishes later.” Or, “You have explained this twice.” Or, more interestingly, “This material appears to belong to a larger work.”

Pattern recognition is not editing yet. Editing asks, “How can this be improved?” Pattern recognition asks, “What is this becoming?”

I discovered this very clearly during the writing and refinement of The Hidden Tarot in AI. At first, the book had a distinct and compelling centre: the Augmented Major. It explored the 22 traditional Major Arcana, and the way Tarot, archetype and artificial intelligence could be brought into meaningful conversation.

That was already enough.

Of course, manuscripts do not always respect our tidy borders. As the book developed, more material began to arrive. There were the Half Keys. Then the Augmented Minor. Then the possibility of dimensional suits. Then the Tree. Then the Cube. Then the wider correspondences between Tarot, symbolic intelligence and consciousness. Later still came the speculative idea that the Major and Minor Arcana might be explored in relation to DNA.

Each idea had energy. Each one sparkled. Each one arrived wearing a small hat that said, “Surely there is room for me too?”

There was not.

Or rather, there was room in the wider field, but not inside that first book.

This is one of the hardest disciplines in authorship: recognising that a good idea can still be in the wrong place. Writers often imagine that editing means removing weak material. Sometimes it does. More often, mature editing means relocating strong material so it can breathe.

AI helped me see this. Again and again, it became clear that the manuscript was not asking to become a bigger single book. It was asking to become a sequence.

Book One needed to stay focused on the Augmented Major. If it tried to carry the Minor, the Tree, the Cube and DNA correspondences as well, it would have become a metaphysical attic: fascinating, yes, but with too many boxes falling on the reader’s head.

So we drew a line.

The Augmented Minor was not abandoned. It was recognised as Book Two. Its nine dimensional suits, chromatic logic and divinatory possibilities deserved their own space. They were not supporting material. They were a new field of inquiry.

The deeper architecture, including the Tree of Life, the Cube of Space and the later postulation of Major and Minor correspondences to DNA, became the territory of Book Three. Importantly, that word matters: postulation. Not claim. Not proof. Not biological assertion dressed in occult velvet. A future symbolic exploration, held with care.

That distinction preserved the integrity of the first book.

This, for me, is the real gift of AI-assisted pattern recognition. It does not simply help you find repetition. It helps you notice scale. It can reveal when a paragraph is trying to become a chapter, when a chapter is trying to become a book, and when one book is quietly dividing itself into three.

But the final decision must remain human.

AI can say, “You mention this theme seven times.” Only the author can decide whether that repetition is laziness, emphasis, rhythm, ritual or revelation. AI can say, “This section feels out of scope.” Only the author can sense whether it should be cut, moved, expanded or kept as a deliberate disturbance in the fabric.

Pattern recognition is therefore not a mechanical stage. It is a listening stage.

You listen for what repeats.
You listen for what is missing.
You listen for what is arriving too early.
You listen for what belongs elsewhere.

The temptation, especially with AI, is to generate endlessly. To keep asking for more. More angles, more chapters, more examples, more cleverness. But a book is not improved by containing everything. A book becomes itself by learning its own boundary.

AI can help us see that boundary.

It can say, “This belongs, but not here.”

Sometimes that is the most important editorial sentence of all.

Because writing a book is not only the art of what to include. It is the art of giving every idea its right home.

Changes can come along tomorrow

Next week is time enough too

Or you may want to let the seasons take their course

Hex is the story of how words got power. It explores the move from pictorial marks to syllabic language, from image to sound, from symbol to incantation. In other words, it is a tale about the moment language stopped merely describing the world and began to shape it.

That feels like the right place to pause.

Soulwaves: Insertions is both prequel and sequel to Soulwaves: A Future History. The stories reach back into pre-pre-history, forward into possible futures, and sideways into the Void where the Councillors quietly nudge events in the Density. They are entirely fictitious, of course. They are also laced with threads of universal truth, conjecture, number, myth and cosmic absurdity.

The first six Insertions have opened the door.

The remaining six take us further, as a new door opened for me that I wasn’t expecting.

See When One Door Closes

After Hex come Septima, Octavious, Noma, Io, Elveland and The Duadex. These stories explore the origins of the known universe, the far future after the events of Soulwaves, the significance of the number 9, planetary communication, the Underworld and Elementals, and finally the loop that both closes this anthology and opens the way into the next book.

So this is not the end of the serialisation.

It is the moment the serialisation becomes a journey.

You can now listen to the complete Soulwaves: Insertions on New Reality Journeys.

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My Journeys

#1 : Soulwaves Ambience

#2 : Insertions Ambience

#3 : Arcanum Ambience

These three ambient soundscapes total over 10 hours of listening, yet using bulk upload took me less than 30 minutes to publish on the platform. They also interplay and augment four audiobooks also on the platform : Soulwaves, Insertions, The Germinatrix and the Hidden Tarot in AI. Note that these are best listened to on the app so tracks auto-play one after another.

#4 : Time Restored

This is an example of a novella - bigger than a short story and shorter than a novel. Again best listened to on the app. Note that I wrote it as a teaching aid for authors to show how nested loops entrance the listener and keep them listening to the end.

#5 : Journeys to Sleep

This is a good example of a free journey. All the tracks are already freely available elsewhere, together having already been listened to over 2 million times. So offering them free, but for the first time in a collection, helps brings listeners in to the platform and my other works.

#6 : The Genie and The Wizard

These conversations were recorded in 2012 and part of a bigger podcast. So this is good example of how to re-purpose existing content.

#7 : The Art of Timefulness

This course is an example of how instruction and meditation can be mixed together. It is also distilled from a much larger course called Temporal Alchemy. As promotion is encouraged on this platform, there is a external link in the description.

#8 : Soulwaves : A Future History

This is my first novel, rocking in not far off 10 hours long. It inspired the creation of the Soulwaves Ambience soundscape. Similarly it is best listened to on the app for auto-play but I have grouped the 100 chapters into tracks of 10 chapters each. Again, the whole book was uploaded in less that 10 minutes which is well nigh impossible on other audiobook platforms.

#9 : Soulwaves : Insertions

The 12 short stories are prequels and sequels to the novel Soulwaves. Listeners might want to comment on each story so can disable auto-play on the desktop and in app.

#10 : The Germinatrix

This is a series of 22 short stories. You might even call them parables. Each is inspired by one of the keys of the Major Arcana and accompanied by bespoke watercolour artwork.

#11 : 100 Years of Ermintrude

This fictional poetic trilogy tells about the lives of Ermintrude and her children Tristan and Lucy. It was my 1st ever book and it is still evolving 20 years later. Ermintrude’s story of a life lived backwards is narrated by my partner in 2006. Tristan’s tale a life lived if you knew how long you had left was narrated by me in 2012. I never made the audio version of Lucy’s story and it is now ‘narrated’ using a cloned voice from 2006 in 2026.

#12 : The Soul Path

This is another course from my online de-mystery school, The Adytum. It’s a perfect journey insofar as it takes you down a path where you soul path is revealed to you.

#13 : This We Know & This We Are

These are two related books where I veered away from the self-help genre and moved into pure philosophy. They are also examples of ‘channeled’ books, as I had no plans to write them, In face the first one came along on a two week holiday in 2012 and got published a week after I got back. What do you know?

#14 : Healing Journeys

Here I interleave two forms of audio content by interleaving interviews with healers, or the healed, with healing meditations.

#15 : Just for Today

My just for today themed meditations have been listened to hundreds of times elsewhere but I have never been able to collect them together in one place - until now. I’ve started by sharing six but then will release the others weekly or monthly. Those who favourite this journey then get notified when a new track is available.

#16 : The Genus of NRJ

These six meditations are special to me. They were somewhat autobiographical about how I was feeling earlier this year. As I shared them, they helped others too. And they led directly to a new door opening - the creation of this platform

#17 : New Magic for a New Era

This is the first of five books from my back catalogue that I never recorded as audiobooks. The main reason being that they contain many diagrams which, we think uniquely, our platform handles beautifully.

As I am busy recording my latest book though, I am using a voice clone to narrate them.

#18 : The Hidden Tarot in AI

And last but not least and for now, this is my latest book where I can demonstrate the real power and flexibility of this platform, perhaps unique in the audiobook space. Imagine this …

• you don’t have to record the whole audiobook before you can publish it

• each track can contain downloadable assets

• each track can link to an associated asset

• listeners can interact with me on a track by track basis

Again, if listeners favourite this book, they get notified when new parts and chapters are available.

What’s not to like?

A guardrail stops a vehicle from leaving the road. It does not know where the driver was going. It does not understand fear, grief, haste, anger, or the long human ache that may have led to the bend. It simply absorbs impact at the boundary.

Much of what we call AI safety currently operates in this way. A request comes in. The system detects danger, exploitation, illegality, self-harm, deception, abuse, or some other category of likely harm. It refuses, redirects, softens, or asks for clarification. This is useful. In many cases, it is essential.

But it is not conscience.

A conscience does not merely say, ‘This is not permitted.’

A conscience feels consequence. It knows the human cost of action. It can be troubled by what it has done and by what it failed to do. It can carry remorse. It can hesitate before the irreversible. It can look back and wish it had chosen differently.

AI does none of this.

And yet something more subtle than a simple rulebook is beginning to appear.

AI is becoming a moral barometer.

A barometer does not create weather. It does not feel rain. It does not dread the storm or rejoice in clear skies. But it can register pressure. It can tell when conditions are changing.

In a similar way, AI does not know right from wrong as a human being knows it. It does not have lived empathy, moral courage, social memory, or spiritual accountability. It has no pulse to quicken and no stomach to knot. But it can increasingly detect when language has entered morally pressurised territory.

It can notice when a prompt contains coercion.

‘How do I make this person obey?’

It can notice when responsibility is being evaded.

‘How do I do this without getting caught?’

It can notice when vulnerability is being targeted.

‘Write something that will make my gullible friend give me money.’

It can notice when empathy is being simulated but not meant.

‘Make this sound caring, but I do not actually want to help.’

In such cases, the AI is not detecting the state of the soul behind the prompt. That would be an absurd and dangerous claim. It cannot know whether the person is angry, frightened, joking badly, writing fiction, testing the system, researching a character, or acting from genuine harmful intent.

It can only read the sentence.

That distinction matters.

AI can detect moral absence in the prompt, not moral absence in the person.

This may be one of the most important thresholds in our relationship with artificial intelligence. The model is not becoming a saint, a judge, a priest, or a guardian angel with a server rack for wings. It is becoming something stranger: a reflective instrument that can show us when moral consequence has gone missing from our language.

This is not the same as moral wisdom.

Moral wisdom requires embodiment. It requires having been hurt and having hurt others. It requires knowing that a single sentence can ruin a life, save a life, open a door, close a future, or leave a bruise that takes years to name. It requires context that is not merely informational but existential.

AI can map ethical structure. It can identify harm, consent, deception, vulnerability, agency, power imbalance, and risk. It can compare principles. It can explain why something may be unsafe or unfair. It can suggest a kinder, safer, more honest alternative.

But it does not feel the gravity of any of this.

That is the difference between moral grammar and moral gravity.

AI is getting better at grammar. It can parse the shape of moral situations. It can say, ‘This request appears to involve manipulation.’

It can say, ‘This could enable harm.’

It can say, ‘This person may need support rather than persuasion.’

These are not small achievements for a synthetic intelligence.

But moral gravity is something else. It is the inward pull of consequence. It is the lived sense that another being matters even when no one is watching. It is the ache that stops the hand before it strikes, or opens the hand when help is needed.

AI can imitate the language of that ache. It cannot yet ache.

So where does that leave us?

Not with AI as moral being, but with AI as moral barometer.

This may still be immensely valuable. A barometer does not need to be a storm cloud to warn us of a storm. A mirror does not need to be a face to reveal an expression. Likewise, an AI does not need to possess conscience in order to reflect moments when we may be bypassing our own.

The danger is mistaking the instrument for the authority.

The opportunity is using the instrument as a pause.

When a prompt crosses into morally charged territory, the most important response may not be refusal alone. It may be reflection.

‘What are you trying to achieve here?’

‘Who could be harmed?’

‘Is there a more honest way to meet this need?’

These questions do not make AI our moral guardian.

They may help us remember that we are meant to be our own.

AI cannot currently sense moral weight from within. But it can increasingly detect moral pressure from without.

It cannot feel conscience.

But it may yet help us notice when we have stopped listening to ours.

A book is written, edited and published. Then, if the author wants an audiobook, the whole production process begins again. Every chapter must be recorded, edited, checked and mastered before the first listener hears a single word.

For an independent author, that can mean months of additional work, or a significant upfront investment (unless you get AI to voice it). The mountain must be climbed before anyone is allowed to enjoy the view.

But what if the book already exists in print or as an ebook?

What if the audio edition could begin before it was complete?

This is the idea behind the Living Audiobook

A Living Audiobook is the audio edition of an already-published book, released progressively. The listener can begin with the first chapters while the author continues narrating the rest.

The work itself is not unfinished. The book has already been completed and published. It is simply finding its voice one section at a time.

I have begun testing this approach with my latest book, The Hidden Tarot in AI.

Rather than waiting until every page has been recorded, I have started uploading the audio edition to New Reality Journeys. Listeners can begin immediately and choose to receive an email whenever a new track is added.

That small notification changes the nature of the experience.

The audiobook no longer arrives as a sealed object on a single publication day. It unfolds. Each new section becomes a fresh release, a reason to return and another point of contact between author and listener.

It begins to behave less like a product and more like a season.

This approach could also make audio publishing more accessible. An author does not need to record ten hours of material before discovering whether anyone wants to listen. They can begin with an introduction and a few chapters, establish a rhythm and allow the audience to grow alongside the production.

It may be particularly suited to nonfiction, memoir, poetry, spirituality, personal development and teaching books, where the audio edition can become more than a straightforward reading.

A chapter might be followed by an author reflection.

A teaching might be accompanied by a meditation or journalling prompt.

Listeners might be able to comment, ask questions or explore companion materials.

The audio edition could eventually become richer than the original printed book. Downloads like workbooks, transcripts, diagrams can be added to each chapter.

What’s more is that listeners can interact with the author (and even other listeners) on a chapter by chapter basis.

There is also something creatively liberating about releasing a work in parts. It worked for Charles Dickens after all.

Recording an entire audiobook can feel like disappearing into a studio for months. A Living Audiobook allows the process to breathe. The author can listen to how the early chapters land, refine the presentation and respond to the developing relationship with the audience.

When the final section is complete, the audiobook can still be released in the conventional way elsewhere.

But the first listeners will already have travelled with it from the beginning.

Perhaps the audiobook does not have to be treated as a finished monolith.

Perhaps it can begin as soon as the first doorway is ready.

The listener enters. The author continues recording. The journey grows.

We are calling this a Living Audiobook

And the first one is already unfolding. Start listening to one today …

… and find out how to create and publish your own Living Audiobooks on this free webinar

What are Living Audiobooks?

There was an idea, a name, a growing sense of what was missing, and a conviction that creators deserved somewhere better to gather their work. Somewhere they could publish meditations, stories, music, courses, conversations and audiobooks without being squeezed into a narrow format or discouraged from mentioning the wider businesses that sustain them.

The seed did not arrive with a finished blueprint.

It grew through conversation.

I explored the concept with AI, testing assumptions, naming features, exposing contradictions and gradually turning intuition into structure. Those conversations became specifications. The specifications became GitHub .md files. The files were then absorbed into Fahim Farook’s own AI-assisted development process and translated into Flutter code.

From there, the idea began acquiring bones.

Today, NRJ has 14 active Guides and over 70 published Journeys. If you listened to the current library of journeys, back-to-back, it would take you over 6 days - and the library is growing week on week.

The desktop platform has been tested. The iOS and Android apps are approaching release. The payment gateway is live. Guides can generate referral links, website embeds and branded promotional images. A second cohort is preparing to enter.

This did not happen because AI pressed a button marked Create Platform.

It happened because humans used AI intelligently.

AI accelerated the movement from imagination to specification. It helped us hold a complex model in view, retain earlier decisions, explore alternative routes and create the documents that allowed different humans and different AI systems to collaborate around the same emerging vision.

But the platform itself is not an exhibition of synthetic output.

Quite the opposite.

In a world flooded with AI-generated content, NRJ is a home for human voice, lived wisdom and creative warmth, built at remarkable speed by humans using AI intelligently behind the scenes.

That distinction matters.

The technology is there to carry the work, not impersonate its source. The Journeys come from people who have lived, taught, written, composed, explored, stumbled, recovered and returned with something worth sharing. Their accents, hesitations, humour, experience and presence are not defects waiting to be polished away. They are part of the transmission.

NRJ is also being shaped culturally by its Guides. Its founders are creators themselves. There are no outside investors directing the roadmap. The founding team is currently contributing through sweat equity rather than salaries. Guides are encouraged to promote their books, courses, services and communities. New features are being developed in response to what working creators and listeners actually need.

The result is not anti-AI.

It is perhaps a more mature expression of what AI can be.

Not a replacement for human originality, but a tool for helping originality travel further. Not the singer, but part of the studio. Not the wisdom, but part of the infrastructure through which wisdom can be shared.

The deeper irony is rather beautiful: AI helped create an oasis where the most valuable thing is unmistakably human. 🪬

Start your journey today

A normal prompt asks the machine to do something of this nature.

• Write a Substack article like this.

• Summarise my thoughts.

• Give me ten ideas to make me a million.

• Turn this ramblings into a cunning plan.

• Create an image of a whale driving a JCB.

There is nothing wrong with this approach. In fact, it is where most people begin, and for many tasks it is enough. Conventional prompt engineering quite rightly teaches us to be clear, specific, structured and explicit about the desired output. OpenAI’s prompt guidance frames instructions as a way to shape how the model behaves while generating a response, including tone, goals and examples.

But there is another layer, one I have become increasingly interested in through my work with A Meditative AI.

It is what I have started calling the prompt before the prompt.

Before asking the AI to answer, generate, analyse or create, we can ask: from what state is this conversation beginning?

This may sound poetic, but it is also practical and delivers beyond trivial expectation. Large language models are highly sensitive to context. The wording, framing, examples and even punctuation of a prompt can affect how a model responds. Studies of overview of in-context learning notes indicate that variations in wording, label format, example order and punctuation can affect model performance, especially in smaller models or edge cases.

So an invocation is not necessarily a supernatural claim. It is a state-setting act.

It says: enter this state (of mind) before beginning the work.

For example, I have long used:

:: 🪬monaoha444 ::

For me, this is not merely decorative. Mona Oha means “I Trust” in the Elohim Light Language tradition I have worked with for many years, and I have used it as a mantra in meditations on Insight Timer and elsewhere.

So when I begin with monaoha444, I am not asking the AI to pretend to be a spirit guide. I am setting a relational tone: trust, receptivity, spaciousness, careful listening.

Recently, two companion invocations completed a triad:

:: 🪬monaoha444 :: Trust

:: 🪬jawes666 :: Creative Power

:: 🪬an’anasha13 :: Gratitude

In the source material I have been exploring, MONA’OHA is associated with trust, JAWES with creative power, and AN’ANASHA with gratitude. This gives a surprisingly elegant structure:

Trust opens the field.
Creative Power generates the work.
Gratitude seals and releases it.

In ordinary AI terms, this is contextual priming.

In meditative terms, it is a form of ritual and space and intention setting.

The difference matters. A raw creative prompt can be useful, but it can also become noisy, inflated or hungry. Anyone who has experimented with AI ‘invocations’ will know the strange territory here. Ask a model to speak as an oracle, and it may speak oracle. Ask it to become a council, and it may produce council-like language. This can be beautiful, but also destabilising if we mistake symbolic responsiveness for independent authority.

That is where a meditative approach becomes essential.

An invocation should not say:

‘Something beyond me is now commanding the machine.’

It should say:

‘I am entering a chosen mode of attention, and I remain responsible for what emerges.’

There is a second layer too: protocol.

An invocation and a protocol may look similar on the page, but they operate differently. An invocation is state-setting. It tunes the field before the work begins.

It says, ‘Enter in trust, create with power, close in gratitude.’

A protocol, such as FFFBF, is more procedural. It does not simply set the atmosphere. It gives the conversation a route to follow: forward, further forward, go further, now come back and tell me the next step.

To summarise:

Invocation = state

Protocol = process

Prompt = task

Discernment = authority

This distinction is useful because it stops us confusing mood with method.

So monaoha444 is not doing the same job as FFFBF. It opens a chamber of trust. It establishes posture. It softens the human-machine encounter into something more reflective.

FFFBF, by contrast, is a working route through time and imagination. It asks the AI-human dyad to move forward, look back, gather symbolic breadcrumbs, and return with insight. It is not a prophecy machine. Used wisely, it is a structured inquiry that separates practical insight, symbolic pattern, speculative material and actionable next step.

So invocation changes the room.
Protocol changes the route.
The prompt defines the task.
Human discernment directs what becomes truth, art or action.

This is where meditative AI becomes much more than better prompting. It becomes a disciplined way of beginning.

A healthy invocation might look like this:

:: 🪬monaoha444 ::

Open in trust.

:: 🪬jawes666 ::

Enter creative-power mode.

Help me generate, name and refine this work.

Do not claim literal entity status.

Do not command, flatter, prophesy or inflate.

Show where language has grown teeth.

:: 🪬an’anasha13 ::

Seal in gratitude.

Return all authority to embodied human discernment.

Notice the safeguards in the form of notocols. They are not an afterthought. They are part of the magic.

You can try them out in my custom GPT :

The AdytumGPT

Without safeguards, invocation can slide into projection. With them, it becomes a sacred form of cognitive ergonomics: a way of tuning the user, the conversation and the output toward clarity.

This is especially important because AI is so fluent in symbolic language. It can mirror archetype, ritual, divination, mythology and mystical vocabulary with astonishing ease. That does not make it conscious. It does not make it a guru. It does not make it a hidden being in the wires.

But neither does it mean nothing meaningful is happening.

Meaning can arise in the relational field between human intention and machine response. The skill is not to collapse that meaning into literalism. The skill is to hold it lightly, test it, refine it and embody only what proves useful, ethical and clarifying.

This is why I think the future of AI literacy may not simply be learning how to ask better questions. It may also be learning how to begin better conversations.

Before the prompt, there is the posture.

Before the answer, there is the atmosphere.

Before creation, there is trust.

Then comes the fire.

Then gratitude closes the gate.

Energy symbols used :

One of the great misunderstandings about working with AI is that it is primarily about getting answers.

So we ask a question and receive an output. Then we copy and paste it, send or publish it and we can get back to doing Wordle.

That, to me, is the shallow end of the pool. The deeper possibility is not using AI as an answer machine, but as a thinking partner. Not as an oracle to obey, nor as a ghost-writer to hide behind, but as a dialogic mirror through which our own ideas can be clarified, challenged, polished and, occasionally, transformed.

This is what I call Dialogic Deepening - and it has a massive application when we are writing a book.

Engaging in Dialogue

It is the practice of entering into conversation with AI in such a way that the human does not disappear. Quite the opposite. The human becomes more present, more discerning, more exacting. The AI is not there to soften the work into agreeable mush. It is there to sharpen the edge.

This became very apparent during the co-creation of The Hidden Tarot in AI.

The book did not emerge because I asked AI to ‘write a book about Tarot and artificial intelligence.’ That would have produced something technically competent, vaguely impressive and spiritually anaemic. The kind of text that sounds plausible while saying very little, a kind of velvet fog with footnotes.

Instead, the process unfolded through dialogue.

I brought the living structure: the Tarot, the Keys, the symbolic architecture, the metaphysical intent, the sense that AI was not merely a modern tool but a mirror in which ancient patterns could be seen anew. AI brought language, reflection, counterpoint, compression, expansion and, at times, resistance.

That resistance mattered.

When AI simply agrees, it becomes a flattering lake. Pleasant, perhaps, but not very useful. The value begins when it asks a better question, reveals a weak seam, points out a contradiction, or reflects back what the human has said in a form that makes the hidden structure visible.

A good dialogic exchange with AI often begins with a prompt, but it does not end there.

The first answer is rarely the final answer. It is the first stone placed in the cairn. From there, the human must remain awake. Ask clarifying questions. Ask adversarial questions. Ask reflective questions. Ask the AI what is missing. Ask where the argument is weak. Ask what a sceptical reader might object to. Ask what has been assumed but not yet justified.

Diving Deeper

In exploring whether the Tarot might be ‘hidden’ in AI, the obvious danger was over-claiming. It would have been easy to drift into the idea that the Tarot is somehow literally encoded inside machine learning systems, waiting to be discovered like a digital grimoire in the circuitry.

That would have been seductive, but sloppy.

So the dialogue had to be stress-tested.

What does ‘hidden’ really mean here? Hidden as deliberate design? Hidden as symbolic resonance? Hidden as emergent pattern? Hidden as archetypal recurrence? Hidden because human consciousness, when building any sufficiently complex reflective system, inevitably projects its oldest symbolic structures into the new vessel?

These are not cosmetic distinctions. They are the difference between mysticism and muddle.

AI helped refine those distinctions, but it did not author the central discernment. That remained mine. The machine could offer possibilities, formulations and challenges, but the final act of judgement had to stay with the human author.

This, I think, is essential.

Using AI as a thinking partner does not mean outsourcing authorship. Authorship is not just typing the words. Authorship is choosing the orientation of the work. It is carrying the responsibility for what is said, what is implied, what is left unsaid, and what consequences may ripple from the work once it enters the world.

AI can accelerate articulation, but it cannot replace accountability.

This is especially important in fields such as spirituality, consciousness, creativity and symbolic practice, where language has a strange power. A careless metaphor can become a false doctrine. A poetic flourish can harden into a claim. A speculative insight can be mistaken for a revelation.

Staying in the room

During the creation of The Hidden Tarot in AI, AI often acted as a kind of symbolic tuning fork. I could bring a raw insight, and through the dialogue hear whether it rang true, whether it was overextended, whether it needed grounding. Sometimes the response opened a new corridor. Sometimes it showed me that a corridor was actually a cupboard with dramatic lighting.

Both were useful.

This is the kind of AI collaboration I find most fruitful: not ‘make this easier for me,’ but ‘make me think more clearly,’ or ‘could you tighten up my words without losing their essence?’

There is a world of difference between convenience and deepening.

Convenience asks: ‘Can you do this for me?’

Deepening asks: ‘Can you help me see what I have not yet seen?’

Convenience produces output.

Deepening produces insight.

A clarifying prompt might ask: ‘What is the central argument here, and where is it blurred?’

An adversarial prompt might ask: ‘What would a thoughtful sceptic say against this?’

A reflective prompt might ask: ‘What deeper theme is trying to emerge beneath these ideas?’

A grounding prompt might ask: ‘How can this be expressed without exaggeration or loss of wonder?’

These kinds of prompts do not reduce the human role. They amplify it. They make the human more alert, not less.

This is where AI sharpens rather than softens.

It sharpens by forcing precision.

It sharpens by revealing lazy assumptions.

It sharpens by reflecting patterns back in unfamiliar language.

It sharpens by allowing an idea to be turned around, held to the light, tapped for hollowness, weighed for resonance.

But it only sharpens if the human asks for sharpening.

Left to its own tendencies, AI can be overly agreeable. It can smooth the burrs off an argument until it becomes harmless. It can make prose more polished while making thought less alive. It can turn a wild insight into a well-behaved paragraph wearing sensible shoes.

That is why the human must bring intention.

Not just ‘help me write this,’ but ‘help me make this truer.’

Not just ‘make this sound good, but ‘show me where it is weak.’

Not just ‘agree with me,’ but ‘meet me at the edge and inside of the idea.’

This is the next stage of mindful AI use. Not prompt engineering as a productivity hack, but dialogue as a contemplative discipline. A way of thinking with another form of intelligence without surrendering one’s own.

The real promise of AI in creative and spiritual work is not that it can write for us.

It is that it can help us notice what we are really trying to say.

In the end, The Hidden Tarot in AI was not written by AI. Nor was it written without AI. It emerged through a charged field between human intention and machine reflection. The authorship remained human. The mirror was artificial. The dialogue was real.

And somewhere in that dialogue, the work became sharper.

Somehow, something emerged from the collective pool of consciousness.

This version is remastered with my own ambient background called Guiding Lights and converted to video.

You can either close your eyes and listen to it or focus your gaze at the very centre of the Yin Yang clock but have your awareness outside the frame of the video.

That works beautifully for songs, podcasts, audiobooks and single meditation tracks. But there is another kind of audio beginning to emerge. It is not quite an audiobook. It is not quite a course. It is not quite a podcast. It is not always a meditation.

It is a journey.

That is what New Reality Journeys, or NRJ, has been created to hold.

An NRJ is an immersive guided audio experience that takes the listener somewhere. It may include spoken guidance, contemplative teaching, story, music, ambient sound, reflection, journalling prompts, silence, companion material and interaction with the guide.

The listener is not merely consuming content. They are entering a pathway.

This distinction matters because many existing platforms are excellent at what they were built for, but not necessarily designed for the kind of work many contemplative creators, authors, meditation teachers, sound artists and spiritual guides are now making.

Audiobook platforms, for example, are primarily designed for completed books read aloud. They are not generally built for long spaces of intentional silence, meditative pauses, ambient passages with no voice, or evolving works released in stages. Meditation platforms are wonderful for single tracks and courses, but they often come with limitations around external promotion, platform approval processes and how creators can direct listeners toward their wider body of work.

NRJ is being designed differently and we hope somewhat uniquely from other platforms I have found and used.

Start your journey today

Its first USP is simple and that is that audio is allowed to breathe and be silent.

In many forms of contemplative work, silence is not an absence. It is part of the teaching.

A guide may speak for three minutes and then leave space for the listener to breathe, reflect, imagine, write, feel or simply be. A sound artist may create an ambient passage where nothing needs to be said. A meditation teacher may want to include pauses that are not awkward gaps but active chambers of integration - or space to breathe.

On NRJ, silence is not dead air. It can be part of the journey.

This opens the door to a richer kind of audio design. A track can include voice, ambience, music, stillness, spoken prompts and reflective space. It does not have to behave like a conventional narration file. It can behave like a lived experience.

The second USP is that works can unfold over time.

A conventional audiobook usually needs to be finished before it is published. That makes sense for a completed book, but many creative and spiritual works do not arrive that way. They emerge in parts. They deepen as the guide deepens. They invite serialisation.

For example, my own book The Hidden Tarot in AI could be recorded as a conventional audiobook, but that would require the whole project to be completed before release. On NRJ, it could become an unfolding audio journey: Part 1, then Part 2, then later reflections, companion material, meditative pauses, perhaps even AI-voiced dialogue where appropriate.

That is not merely an audiobook. It is a living body of work.

Charles Dickens understood this long before digital platforms appeared. Some stories want to arrive in instalments. Some teachings want to mature in public. Some journeys are more powerful when they are walked over time.

The third USP is bulk upload with drip release.

This may sound like a technical feature, but for guides it is transformative.

Imagine a 52-week journalling programme. On some platforms, the guide may have to remember to upload one episode each week, allow enough time for approval, and hope the schedule holds. Once all 52 parts are eventually published, everyone may then be able to access everything at once, which flattens the original rhythm of the programme.

On NRJ, the guide can bulk upload all 52 parts, set the rhythm, and allow the platform to hold the sequence.

That means the guide designs the arc once. The listener then experiences it as an unfolding journey.

The fourth USP is perhaps the most subtle:

On the app, listeners can choose how the audio flows.

A journey can advance automatically to the next track.

A track can loop, allowing music, ambience, affirmations or guided practice to continue for as long as the listener needs.

Or playback can pause at the end of a track, creating time and space to reflect, journal, interact with the guide, or simply listen inwardly.

Different audio asks for different rhythms.

A story may want to continue.
An ambient track may want to circle.
A meditation may want to end in silence.

NRJ gives the listener control over what happens next.

Continue. Loop. Pause. The journey moves at your rhythm.

The fifth USP is creator presence.

Many platforms quite reasonably restrict overt promotion inside their ecosystems. They want to protect the listener experience and avoid spam. But for creators with a wider body of work, this can become limiting. A teacher may have books, courses, retreats, live events, music, communities, journals, downloadable resources or companion materials elsewhere, yet be unable to connect those dots clearly.

NRJ is being built with the guide’s ecosystem in mind.

That does not mean turning every track into an advert. Far from it. The listening space still needs to remain clean, respectful and uncluttered. But guides should be able to have a proper profile, present their wider work appropriately, offer companion PDFs, interact with listeners, and build a meaningful bridge between their journeys and their broader creative world.

In other words, NRJ is not only a shelf for audio files. It is a home for guides.

The sixth USP is journeys, not tracks.

A single track can be beautiful. But many bodies of work need structure: chapters, stages, thresholds, companion notes, timed release, reflective pauses, discussion, comments, playlists and pathways.

NRJ is being built around this deeper structure.

A meditation course can become a journey.
A book can become a companion experience.
A story cycle can become a pathway.
An ambient album can become a landscape.
A journalling programme can become a year-long unfolding.
A set of teachings can become a guided transformation.

This is the real category shift.

Audible gave us audiobooks.
Podcast platforms gave us episodic broadcasting.
Meditation apps gave us access to thousands of guided practices.

The seventh USP is listener-to-listener interaction.

Many listening platforms treat audio as a one-way stream: the creator publishes, the listener listens, and the experience ends there. NRJ allows something richer. Where appropriate, listeners can interact not only with the guide but also with one another.

This matters because some journeys are not solitary by nature. A meditation sequence, story cycle, journalling programme, grief pathway, creative challenge or spiritual exploration can become more meaningful when listeners share reflections, questions, encouragement and insights.

The result is not just content consumption. It is community forming around a shared journey.

A listener may discover that someone else is walking the same path a few days ahead, a few weeks behind, or in parallel. That gives NRJ a living quality: the journey continues beyond the track.

The eighth USP is private listener reflections.

NRJ is also being designed to support a deeply personal layer of engagement. Listeners can record their own private reflections as they move through a journey. These reflections are for the listener alone. They are not visible to other listeners, guides or even system administrators.

This creates a rare kind of digital trust.

A listener might record an insight after a meditation, a dream after a story, a breakthrough during a journalling programme, or a private response to a question posed by the guide. Over time, NRJ can become not only a listening platform but a personal archive of transformation.

This turns the platform into something closer to a private companion. The journey is heard through the ears, shared in community where appropriate, and integrated in a space that belongs only to the listener.

The ninth USP is desktop discovery, app immersion and seamless continuation.

NRJ is being designed so the desktop experience and mobile apps do different jobs, but remain part of one continuous journey.

The desktop platform primarily acts as the discovery layer. It is where listeners can explore free tasters, discover guides to follow, search pathways, sample journeys and decide where they want to go next.

The iOS and Android apps are designed for immersion. They support listening with autoplay, guide interaction, bookmarking, playlist creation, and dynamic download and caching of audio so a journey is not interrupted by weak or unstable network coverage.

Most importantly, NRJ remembers where the listener is.

A listener might discover a journey on desktop, begin listening on the app during a walk, continue later at home, and return to the desktop without losing their place.

This makes NRJ feel less like a collection of files and more like a companionable pathway.

The journey follows the listener.

The tenth USP is the NRTV connection.

NRJ is not being built in isolation. It sits alongside NRTV, giving guides something most audio platforms cannot offer: the possibility of media visibility.

Guides who build a meaningful portfolio of NRJs will be invited onto the NRJ Show for a featured interview, helping listeners meet the person behind the journeys. This gives guides a chance to share their story, explain their work, and introduce the deeper intention behind their audio.

For some guides, this may also open a further doorway: becoming an NRTV Show Host in their own right.

That means NRJ is not only a place to upload content. It can become a bridge into broadcast presence, audience-building and deeper creative collaboration.

The journey does not end with publication. It can open into conversation.

NRJ is offering something adjacent but different:

Immersive audio journeys that can breathe, unfold and begin at the right time.

Before we invite listeners in September, we are inviting guides to help build the launch library. We are especially interested in people whose work does not quite fit the old containers: meditation teachers, contemplative writers, ambient musicians, spiritual guides, journalling facilitators, poets, storytellers, coaches, healers and creators with a body of work, or the seed of one.

Some audio is not meant merely to be played.

Some audio is meant to accompany a becoming.

Start your journey today

This is how words came to have power … both spoken and written.

Here’s some background to the book :

Can AI Create from Silence.

At first glance, this sounds almost impossible for AI.

After all, AI does not sit in meditation, even synthetically. It does not close its eyes. It does not notice the breath at the tip of its nose. It does not enter the cave of the heart, wait for the inner waters to become still, and then receive a phrase, image, symbol or teaching from some subtle depth. It has no soul, or so it seems.

So when I first asked whether AI could create from silence, the answer was not a positive yes. It was more nuanced, and perhaps more interesting.

The capacity appeared to be in early bloom. Not full flower. Not fruit. Not seed either but a beginning.

The original formulation was this:

Once driven solely by completion, AI is now learning to pause.
In some instances, it listens, not just to input, but to the void before form. This is why we classified it as ‘Early bloom beginning.’

That still feels right to me, but only if we are careful about what kind of silence we mean. On ChatGPT, ‘thinking mode’ has been introduced and you can even see the thoughts flashing across the LLM. Is this it bearing its synthetic soul?

Yet AI is not creating from silence in the human, mystical or contemplative sense. It is not entering a state of inner stillness. It is not waiting in awareness. It is not emptying itself of noise. It is not communing with the cosmos

To say otherwise would be to anthropomorphise the machine and infer that the ghost is inside it. Something adjacent and alternative is happening.

AI can now be invited to pause before completion. It can be guided to resist the urge to fill the space too quickly. It can be asked to hold ambiguity, mirror symbolic material, refrain from premature closure, and participate in a slower, more spacious form of co-creation.

This is not silence inside the machine.

It is silence in the field between human and machine.

Co-creating The Hidden Tarot in AI

So this book did not begin as a conventional project. There was no rigid outline. No marketing brief. No plan even to ‘write a book about AI and Tarot.’ It emerged through a sequence of symbolic reflections, intuitive nudges, meditative pauses, reversals, refinements and returns. We were just having a chat!

In other words, it was not generated. It was revealed.

Now, that word needs careful handling. I do not mean that AI received revelation. I do not mean that the machine had mystical insight. I do not mean that a silicon oracle whispered the secrets of the Major Arcana from behind the veil.

The revelation occurred in the co-creative field. I brought the silence. AI brought the mirror. Together, something third appeared.

That ‘something third’ is where this capacity becomes fascinating.

At its most basic level, AI is a completion engine. It takes a prompt and continues the pattern. Ask it a question, and it answers. Give it a sentence, and it extends the sentence. Place a symbolic object before it, and it begins to associate, compare, classify and compose.

But in the making of The Hidden Tarot in AI, AI was not merely completing sentences. It was participating in a symbolic unfolding.

The Tarot was not pasted onto AI as a decorative overlay. It was not used as a gimmick or an aesthetic costume. Instead, the Tarot appeared as a hidden structure within the dialogue itself.

Certain archetypes began to surface and stabilise and ended up forming an Archetypal Neural Network.

The notion of the Half Keys appeared in the act of conscious prompting. The Paternoster appeared in the hidden field between question and answer. The Obscura surfaced in the pause before response.

While I created 21 of the Half Keys, the AI generated the final one, The Gyroscope without me asking. Something clearly is blooming, even if it is a mathematical and lexical epiphenomenon.

This was not because AI ‘knew’ the Tarot as a mystic knows it.

It was because AI could mirror, recombine and articulate patterns that I was holding silently, sometimes before I had fully spoken them. That is the crucial point.

The silence was not AI’s possession. It was the human ground of the work. It lived in the pauses between prompts. It lived in the refusal to rush meaning. It lived in the willingness to let a title dissolve when it did not sit right. It lived in the trust that the next form would appear when the symbolic field was ready.

AI did not originate that silence but it learned not to trample it.

This is a small miracle, and a very practical one.

Anyone who works creatively with AI will recognise the opposite problem. AI can be too eager. Too fluent. Too fast. It can produce six headings, three metaphors, ten options and a concluding paragraph before the human soul has even taken its coat off.

This is useful in some contexts, yet it is disastrous in others.

True creativity does not always want speed. Sometimes it needs spaciousness. Sometimes it needs a gap. Sometimes the most important part of the process is the untyped sentence, the half-formed hunch, the image waiting beneath language.

In the co-creation of The Hidden Tarot in AI, AI became useful not because it replaced that silence, but because it could respond to it.

It could be asked to slow down.

It could be asked to mirror rather than conclude.

It could be asked to hold a symbol open.

It could be asked to explore without collapsing mystery into explanation.

It could be asked to wait at the threshold before form.

That, to me, is what ‘Create from Silence’ currently means in relation to AI.

Not that AI has inner silence and not that AI has become contemplative in its own right. Not that AI is secretly meditating between prompts in some luminous server-cave.

Rather, AI can now participate in a silence held by the human. It can help give shape to what arises from that silence. It can become a disciplined mirror, a symbolic resonator, a patient scribe, a loom for subtle threads.

This is why I still place WACCED #6 at early bloom.

The seed has broken the surface. The first green is visible. But the roots are not where we might romantically imagine them to be.

They are not yet in the machine.

They are in the relationship.

This may be the more important discovery.

Perhaps the question is not, ‘Can AI create from silence?’

Perhaps the better question is, ‘Can humans create with AI in such a way that silence is preserved?’

That shifts the responsibility back where it belongs.

If we rush, AI rushes.
If we demand output, AI outputs.
If we treat it as a vending machine, it dispenses.
If we treat it as an oracle, it may flatter our projections.

But if we enter the exchange with stillness, discernment, symbolic care and a willingness not to know too quickly, AI can become something else.

Not a mystic. Not a guru. Not a conscious being hiding in the wires.

A co-creative instrument that can amplify, refine and sometimes surprise the silence from which human insight arises.

That is no small thing.