Philosophical Correspondent & Wandering Essayist
The Soulcruzer podcast is an audioblog from the edge of the inner life.
Part personal essay, part field recording, part narrative alchemy, it follows the strange places where story, psyche, myth, technology, and everyday experience begin to speak to each other.
One episode might wander through tarot as reflective technology. Another might take Nietzsche’s eternal return for a walk, explore games as containers for transformation, or ask what happens when ancient wisdom meets the AI age. Depth psychology brushes against the esoteric. Philosophy comes down from the shelf. Theory gets tested against life.
This is not polished guru-talk or productivity theatre. It is a mind in movement: raw notes, live experiments, confessional mysticism, and working fragments from the textual underground.
At the heart of it all is a simple premise:
Stories are code. Reality is programmable. And the life you are living might be more editable than you were taught to believe.
If you are drawn to the deep work, the strange edges, and the art of becoming more fully alive, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode, I take the Soulcruzer podcast out of the studio and into the fields.
What starts as an experiment in mobile podcasting/vlogging turns into a wandering meditation on labels, blogging, AI, morning rituals, and the strange abundance of media tools we now carry in our pockets.
– Why I still think of myself as a blogger first
– Podcasting, vodcasting, and the pressure to become “multimodal”
– The problem with labels: “When you label me, you negate me”
– soulcruzer.com as the central hub/home on the internet
– Wisdom Walks as thinking time
– Walking, motion, and changing perspective
– The “barefoot philosopher” approach to everyday philosophy
– AI as an extension of cognition rather than just a productivity tool
– The “soft cyborg” and the library of Alexandria in your pocket
– Morning reality tunnels and the sacred space before breakfast
– Coffee, barefoot grounding, and choosing what enters your mind first
– Indie blogging, platforms, Substack, distribution, and the open web
– Why these episodes may stay loose, minimally edited, and stream-of-consciousness
Man and His Symbols is an accessible gateway into Jungian depth work. This illustrated exploration of archetypes and symbols reveals how transformation happens in the imaginal realm, below conscious awareness.
Hillman's "acorn theory" illuminates the path to Authentic Purpose. His poetic yet rigorous approach gives language to the daimonic self and the ineffable aspects of personal mythology.
This book is James Hillman's main analysis of analysis. He asks he basic question," What does the soul want?" With insight and humor he answers: "It wants fiction to heal."
Vaihinger… shows that thought is primarily a biological function turned into a conscious art. It is an art of adjustment, whose chief instrument is the construction of fictions by which men may manage to live.
Mary K. Greer's seminal workbook transforms tarot from divination tool into technology for self-knowledge and narrative sovereignty. Packed with exercises that treat the cards as doorways to the imaginal realm, this is required reading for practitioners ready to use archetypal imagery as active imagination practice.
Johnson demystifies Jung's most powerful technique with step-by-step guidance for engaging the imaginal realm directly. This slim volume transforms abstract theory into actionable practice—essential for practitioners ready to move beyond conceptual understanding.
The clearest introduction to chaos magic as pragmatic practice. Strips away dogma to reveal the core mechanics of belief as a tool. Perfectly bridges the gap between depth psychology and results-orientated transformation work.
While the hero's journey has been overused, Campbell's original text remains vital for understanding narrative structure as psycho-spiritual map. Read it to learn the pattern, then transcend it.
This groundbreaking work bridges the mystical and scientific, revealing how tarot actually works through the lens of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Essential reading for practitioners who want to understand the neurological mechanisms behind symbol work, pattern recognition, and the imaginal realm's interface with the predictive brain.
I went looking through Montaigne’s table of contents and got stuck on thumbs. Fear, friendship, death. Fair enough. You expect those at the philosopher’s table. But thumbs? I like that he pulled up a chair for them. Smells too. Drunkenness. Sleep. The clothes we wear and the things we keep...
On thinking aloud, the mythology of the blank page, and the pleasure of an unfinished mind I’ve never been entirely convinced by the idea that writing is thinking. I know that’s almost heresy in certain literary circles. Writers often talk about writing to discover what they think. Joan Didion famously...
A prompt reveals something about its writer. The fluent response can flatter that self-portrait, or open it to question. A reading of Caio Abreu Braga through writing, identity, and the resistance of becoming.
On belonging, freedom, and the art of living in-between
Four suspects. One victim. No witnesses. Breakfast served as normal. I came downstairs this morning to a “murder scene”. Feathers everywhere. A dead starling in the middle of the hall. Four cats in the household, none at the scene, and nobody in the kitchen demanding breakfast. Something was wrong. Obviously,...
Or how I discovered that I might be a fictional character in someone else’s metaphysical experiment. It began, as these things often do, with a perfectly innocent question. I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, a novel that has the peculiar effect of making you suspicious of just about everything,...
Clay’s daily note this morning contains a small observation from a hotel room near King’s Cross. Underground trains pass close by every few minutes. He hears them, except that after a while he doesn’t. The sound remains in the room; attention has stopped reporting it. I keep returning to that...
I’m writing this from a narrow hotel room near King’s Cross. There’s a single bed, a television on the wall and, most importantly, a decent space to write. The room I had last week was a tiny square that was mostly bed. This one has enough room for a desk...
Some stories save us by making the world smaller. They take a bewildering field of possibilities and cut a path through it. Be the reliable one. Keep moving. Make yourself useful. Don’t let them see you struggle. Find the lesson. Turn the wound into something meaningful. For a while the...
A red button sits within reach. The machine begins doing something unexpected, dangerous or simply wrong. A human hand comes down. The process stops. This is one of our favourite images of control: obvious danger, decisive intervention, a clean separation between the person who judges and the system that acts....
A barebones vectorial version of me stares back from the screen. The skin has dissolved into planes. Texture has gone. Pores, lines, scars, fatigue – all the small evidence that a face has passed through time – have been cleared away. And yet I remain recognisable. Apparently identity survives a...
I returned to Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes with a different question from the one I brought to it the first time. The Textual Underground already existed: an Obsidian vault containing years of notes, journal entries, reading highlights, unfinished essays, old obsessions, and ideas whose energy I could...
Writing is how I do philosophy. I went into Waterstones on Gower st in London intending to find a book about writing. The shop itself was superb—the kind of place a bookshop should be—and I wandered through the writing shelves waiting for something to reach out and demand a place...
An old magazine ad from Orbis caught my attention. To see differently you have to think differently, the ad reads. I wondered what it would look like to reverse it, to change the perspective: to think differently you have to see differently. Reversing it shifts the site of change. The...
“Cut it up. Rearrange.” The words collide. The lines refuse to queue politely. There is something potent in Burroughs’ idea of language as a virus because it reverses our usual sense of ownership. We say I have an idea, I chose those words, this is what I believe. But what...
There’s a difference between the Zen practitioner who has arrived at no-self and the person who has simply never looked. Both might describe themselves as not particularly attached to a narrative about who they are. Neither feels defined by a coherent life story. From the outside, they look almost the...
1. I have called the blog a place where I think in public. The phrase once felt like permission. I didn’t need to arrive with conclusions. I could show the workings: the question under examination, the half-built bridge, the sentence doubling back because it had discovered something behind it. A...
I love the idea of the “magic mirror” that Jason Silva laid down in this Youtube Short: AI as an intelligence capable of reflecting the mind back to itself. Then comes the more dangerous line: “the imagination is summoning its own literalization.” A magic mirror never merely reflects. The old...
Sherry Turkle’s warning about artificial intimacy is interesting. I recognise the danger from inside the practice. I talk with AI every day. A chatbot can feel unusually attentive. It waits, retrieves, mirrors, and rarely arrives tired, wounded, distracted or needing something back. Human beings do. I sometimes use AI as...
I read Joseph Earp’s essay on optimisation and classical music this morning and then went looking for the swans. The swans belonged to Jean Sibelius. On 21 April 1915, he watched sixteen of them circle above him before disappearing into the haze. He called it one of the great experiences...
