About
Who We Are
Soulmaker Press, a full-service, privately held, international publisher, works the space where intellect, science, the arts and the mystical converge to create new perspectives with deep implications.
Schopenhauer wrote that the truth comes in three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed and finally, it becomes self-evident.
Soulmaker Press focuses on the first two, creating an avenue for genius, both in writers and readers, to explore ideas of every kind. Inside of every work is a safe house where imagination, wisdom and insight play without rules and constraint. We are not here to conform; we are here to breakthrough into a state of union and communion between ideas and consciousness.
Based in California, Soulmaker Press draws upon the writing and editorial talents of the world as well as ever-evolving technology to deliver the highest quality reading experience possible, wherever books are sold.
Our Mission
We love beautiful words. We believe they are the outgrowth of the eternal. Something to be honored as a sacred artifact. To be crafted and worked with. The beautiful words are the red thread of desire that can guide you both into and out of the labyrinth of the psyche.
We believe that the word is the vehicle that can transport us into the terrain of the sacred, the numinous and ineffable. It is for this reason that one of the guiding principles of our books is that we let the experience organize the process rather than applying the conventional writing formulas we are familiar with. We feel that the truth is perishable (as all beautiful things are) and thus need a new way to be expressed rather than the canned methods and easy 1, 2, 3 solutions.
Our work is rooted in discovery and art rather than transformation. We approach spirituality as an art rather than a duty.
And just as with art, our books include what is often taboo or verboten. We do not shy away from the difficult. We do not want to ban anything: a thought, a person, an idea. We do not want to censor art. We in fact want to use art in its highest order: to reveal what passes as truth that is in fact manufactured through high ideas that do not match the map of reality. And, to re-integrate what we would attempt to exile, banish or reject, that we may live a more robust, honest and accurate expression of nature.
For this reason, we focus in large part on the “other side” of reality, the unexamined, the discarded. We take special interest in the shadow, in the unconscious, in the creative process, in a feminine system of order, non-rational in nature, that is just as accurate if not more so than the common system of logical order of classifications and thou shalts. We do not intend to displace any expression, only offer a fuller, more whole perspective, an alternative and yet rigorous angle or lens through which to see life.
It is for this reason our work is rooted in the principles of Eros as a philosophical underpinning. In classical mythology, Eros was one of the fundamental causes of the formation of the world, inasmuch as he was the uniting power of love, which brought order and harmony among the conflicting elements of which Chaos consisted. Precisely because it includes the world of spirit, the world of soul, the body, the profound and the profane, it may be that Eros can offer a much- needed perspective of unity that we are solely lacking in the world.
We view books as food for the soul, and soul food is what we aim to deliver. We aim for the secret, the mystery, to underworld, to underbelly, and expose a vast and rich territory of ideas from Eros to psychedelics, from a gangbanger to a rogue Zen priest, from a set of sutras to steep in to a perspective on cult that pre-dates Christianity and each book invites us into a view of community, tending to earth, and a view of incarceration rooted in the words tikkun olam, the repair of the world through good deeds.
That moment of illumination that marks the soul, the meaning behind “ole!” or “abracadabra!”, the luminescence that shines through an Olympic athlete or what forms between jazz musicians, what nuns call unio mystica (being at one with the divine) and shaman spend a lifetime cultivating. This is what we aim to capture in each of our offerings that as a world community we may trade in magic rather than mere coin.