working notes from the textual underground
Soulcruzer is a blog about walking, wondering, writing, and trying to stay human in the machinery.
I write from the crossroads of philosophy, myth, music, AI, learning, and ordinary life. This is my living archive: part field notebook, part essay chamber, part signal fire from the textual underground, part hypertext adventure.
Longer reflections from the Soulcruzer blog — essays, stories, mixtapes, and meaning-making from a mind in movement.
A working note on Ruth Netzer, tarot as active imagination, and the Jungian Quest for the Self as a spiral of symbolic integration rather than a simple heroic journey.
A short note on rereading Debbie Ford, noticing our reactions, and treating shadow work as an ongoing conversation with the self.
A rock mixtape for crawling out of the rut: Linkin Park, Papa Roach, System of a Down, Avenged Sevenfold, and the stubborn desire to live the thing instead of performing a brand.
The old questions have not changed much. How should I live? Who am I becoming? What is worth paying attention to? What is freedom? What is wisdom? What is the soul, if we dare still use that word? These questions predate Socrates. They predate writing. They are carved into the bones of the species, and they have kept philosophers, mystics, poets, and ordinary troubled humans occupied for as long as there have been fires to sit around and dark skies to stare into. Every generation meets them as if for the first time. Every life receives them fresh, intimate, inconvenient,
I finished Richard Cavendish’s The Black Arts this week. Not in the heroic readerly sense of having sat down and consumed it cleanly from first page to last, pencil in hand, scholar’s lamp burning into the night. I have been reading it on and off for a few months. Picking it up, putting it down, returning to it when the mood came back round. Some books ask for that kind of reading. They don’t want to be finished quickly. They want to become part of the weather for a while. My copy is the 50th anniversary edition. I bought it
I stole this idea from Justin Brooke on his LinkedIn profile. It’s a FUN PROMPT, and what came back from ChatGPT was pretty cool. I also asked Claude; the results were good, but they lacked an edge. Anyway, the prompt is: Write an unhinged BIO about me. Here’s mine: Clay Lowe is a walking footnote in the great unwritten manuscript of the universe. Part blogger, part philosopher, part myth-drenched field reporter from the edge of ordinary life, he spends his days following the rhizome wherever it wants to go: down muddy footpaths, through obscure books, into the textual underground, across
Maybe he made matter remember music. Clay, before breath, is just earth with potential. Dense. Damp. Waiting. It belongs to gravity, riverbed, field, grave, brick, and vessel. But breath is movement. Breath is an invisible rhythm. Breath is spirit entering form without ceasing to be invisible. So when God buried his breath in the clay, maybe he hid wind inside weight. He took what falls and placed inside it something that rises. That’s the human paradox right there: mud with a skyward ache. Not pure spirit. Not mere animal. Not just body, not just soul. A walking contradiction. Earth that
The ghosts in the American Ghosts have been dead for centuries. One of them for over a thousand years. They rattle around a house in the Hudson Valley: Revolutionary War soldiers, bootleggers, a Viking, a 1920s lounge singer. Most of their time goes to trying not to go mad from the sameness of it. Survival is over for them. That game is finished. The only game left is what you do with consciousness when there’s nothing pressing requiring it. Which is, if you sit with it for a minute, mostly the game we’re all playing too. Every living creature is
Hi, my name is Clay Lowe, aka Soulcruzer. This is the part where I have to reduce myself to a label so you can understand who I am and what I am about. But as Kierkegaard pointed out, labels have a way of negating the person. If I tell you I’m a blogger, I get reduced to whatever meaning you’ve assigned to the word ‘blogger’. I resist labels. And yet, here we are. So, in the context you find me in now, I am indeed a blogger.
I have worn many other labels. I’ve been a soldier, a learning and development consultant, a trainer, and a coach. I’ve also called myself a barefoot philosopher, a narrative alchemist, and a rogue learner, among others things. These were an attempt to orient me to myself. More recently, I’ve been working out what it means to operate as a text-based ontologist in a world where text is becoming the universal substrate.
A text-based ontologist sounds like someone who should live in a footnote.
They don’t.
They live in the browser window, the notebook, the prompt box, the blog editor, the Obsidian graph, the half-finished post, and the walking thought captured before it evaporates. Their material is language. Their subject is being. Their method is to hold attention long enough for a sentence to disclose what it is carrying.
It’s not really a job title. It’s more of a way of being caught by the world.
In the end, though, I am just a man walking a path.
The Soulcruzer podcast…narrative alchemy in audio form. Call it an audioblog, call it threshold work, call it confessional mysticism.
One day I’m working through tarot as spiritual technology. The next, I’m exploring Nietzsche’s eternal return as lived practice, chaos magick techniques, or games as containers for transformation. Depth psychology meets the esoteric. Ancient wisdom meets the AI age. Theory becomes practice.
This is what narrative alchemy sounds like from the inside: raw, real, unpolished. Experiments in treating stories as code and consciousness as hackable.
If you’re here for the deep work and the edges, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode, I explore one of Jung’s most striking images: the unconscious as both dragon and treasure. What if the fear, resistance, and chaos you encounter when you turn inward aren’t signs that something is wrong but signs that you’re getting close to something valuable? Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, NLP, and the logic of myth, I unpack why the very thing guarding your buried gold is often indistinguishable from the thing you most want to avoid and what it actually means to face it.
Fragments, field notes, and half-lit thoughts from the textual undergroundÂ
You will have the whole spectrum of experience at your fingertips, not as some tidy menu of moods, but as a roaring carnival of sensation, memory, dream, dread, hunger, laughter, grief, lust, silence, and starlight. You will be able to wander from the first spark of desire to the last breath of surrender, from the mud of the body to the outer rings of imagination, from the old gods whispering in the basement to the unborn versions of yourself knocking on the roof. Every door will open. Behind one, childhood.Behind another, apocalypse.Behind another, a jazz band made of ghosts playing
I finished Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie. The first part was a nostalgic trip through the 80s. I enjoyed that; however, I bought the book for the second part, Sean Manseau’s Phonomancy work. a bit disappointed. Read like a drug-fuelled psychodelusional trip through his own ego consciousness. Maybe my discomfort stems from me seeing more of myself in Manseau than I care to admit. Shadow gold.
I asked this question a couple of years ago. I would rephrase the question now. The world definitely doesn’t owe you a meaning. You have to make it for yourself. It’s built slowly from the choices you make that compound over time. You can be free without direction. You can have direction without freedom. What really matters, though, is whether you can wake up and choose the same life again.
I’m wondering if invoking the ends justify the means argument to support why it’s ok to use AI in creative endeavours is a little extreme. I was reading Moody Warlock‘s blog post last night about using AI for DND worldbuilding. His main argument against the use of AI is that there is no blood, sweat, and tears involved in the process. That using AI is a shortcut to the end result. For him the journey to the end is the main point. For him, if there is no struggle, then the end is hollow. This is what conjured up the
Existential Consent Consent is the move most people miss when they talk about uncertainty. We have better words, or at least more familiar ones. Acceptance. Surrender. Choice. Courage. Faith. We reach for them because they’re already waiting on the shelf, already worn smooth by use. But each one bends the thing slightly out of shape. Acceptance feels too passive, as if life hands you the terms and all that remains is to stop arguing with them. Surrender carries too much defeat in its mouth, too much collapse, too much kneeling before an indifferent force. Choice sounds cleaner, but it often
I’ve been testing the Kospet Tank M4 special edition smartwatch. It’s a fraction of the cost of something like the Apple Ultra smartwatch. Performance so far has been top-notch.
I’m not asking what happens to productivity or output. I’m asking what happens to meaning. When thinking is distributed across human-AI systems, something genuinely new appears. Not better thinking or faster thinking. A different category. Meaning that emerges from the interchange itself, that no single node, human or machine, can claim to have authored. You can’t point to the moment you had the idea. You can’t separate what you thought from what the system returned. The origin dissolves. What remains is only the pattern that emerged between you. This isn’t collaboration in the old sense. Collaboration assumed distinct agents contributing
This short clip from Ted Nelson in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World is less about technology and more about a philosophy of connection. Nelson reflects on the core insight that has guided his life’s work: reality is not made of isolated things but of relationships, connections, and ever-changing patterns. The central idea As a child, Nelson recalls trailing his hand through the water while sitting in a rowboat. Watching the water flow around his fingers gave him a profound realisation: The universe is a system of ever-changing relationships. That experience became the foundation of his thinking. Everything
