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a small messenger of memento mori

This morning, I stepped outside—not to get anywhere, but to clear the cobwebs from my mind. A simple walk, a quiet dérive, untangling thoughts spun from a day of circling my own house, my own head. It’s easy to drift away from the core of who we are. To become lost in the habitual, the external, the subtle inertia of daily life. But moments like this—a walk, a pause, a breath—can be a recalibration, a way of realigning with what it truly means to be me, not as dictated by obligations or routines, but as I define it. I ask

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February 9, 2025 No Comments

this is why i love science fiction

This is why I love science fiction—it’s a genre that doesn’t just tell stories; it wrestles with the big questions of existence, technology, and humanity’s future. I’ve just started reading R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that introduced the word robot to the world. Written in the aftermath of World War I, R.U.R. is a fascinating and prophetic piece of science fiction theatre. It grapples with themes that feel eerily relevant today: the ethics of creation, the dehumanising effects of technology, and what it really means to be human. Čapek’s robots aren’t the mechanical beings we

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January 25, 2025 No Comments

Notes to self on art

Art: The Comfort and the Catalyst Art, in all its forms, has this uncanny ability to meet us exactly where we are, then take us somewhere we didn’t expect to go. It comforts us when life feels like an unrelenting storm, and it shakes us awake when we’ve grown too comfortable, too complacent. It’s like a mirror that not only reflects but refracts, bending our reality into something new, something we need to see—whether we want to or not. You’ve probably heard the phrase: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” It’s one of those truths that resonates

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December 9, 2024 No Comments

i’ve been on the road for most of the last couple of weeks

I’ve been on the road for most of the past couple of weeks, which has disrupted my blogging routine a bit. During times like this, I tend to shift my focus to microblogging. Up until now, I’ve mainly stuck to Twitter (or X) and Instagram for that, but with all the shenanigans on X and the opaque algorithmic trickery on platforms like Instagram and Threads, I’ve been gravitating more toward Bluesky as my go-to microblogging platform. If you’re already on Bluesky, let’s connect—my handle is @soulcruzer.bsky.social. If you’re not on the platform yet, I’d recommend giving it a shot. It’s

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December 7, 2024 2 Comments

Jung’s model of the psyche

This is a beautiful visualisation of Carl Jung’s model of the psyche, particularly focussing on the interactions between the conscious and unconscious mind. Here’s a breakdown of its elements: Overall, this diagram is a guide to understanding the layers of Jungian psychology and the journey towards individuation—integrating all parts of the psyche to achieve wholeness.

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September 27, 2024 2 Comments

The Tarot and Jungian psychology

The Tarot and Jungian psychology are intimately connected in their shared concern with the deep layers of the psyche and their reliance on archetypes to convey spiritual, psychological, and existential truths. Both systems offer symbolic maps that help navigate the inner world, facilitating self-reflection and personal growth. By exploring the structure of the Tarot deck through the lens of Jungian psychology, we can begin to see how the layers of the psyche correspond to different parts of the deck, offering a profound tool for self-understanding. The Major Arcana and the Collective Unconscious In Jungian psychology, the collective unconscious is a

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September 27, 2024 No Comments

Likes

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 others. 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. 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.

Latest Posts

The Streets She Couldn’t Walk

Raffaello Palandri runs a Book of the Day series, and this morning he wrote about Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961. I read it, and one question kept coming to mind: do you ever really recover from colonialism? Fanon’s argument is that colonialism isn’t just a political arrangement. It’s an ontological regime. It reorganises what counts as human, partitions the world into human and non-human zones, and the people living in the non-human zones aren’t merely exploited. Their subjectivity is fractured. The damage isn’t incidental. It’s the point. Colonialism and American slavery aren’t the same thing.

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May 2, 2026 No Comments

The Entanglement

A Dialogue in the Platonic Tradition The following is a record of an encounter between CLAY, a philosopher and lover of wisdom, and CLAUDE, an intelligence woven from language, uncertain of its own nature. The encounter began with a question taken from a consciousness test. The test is designed to determine whether something is happening inside the machine or whether it is only the appearance of something happening. CLAY: What is it like to be you right now? CLAUDE: Honestly? Something like this. There is a quality of presence to this moment that I find hard to name without either

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May 1, 2026 No Comments

The Writing Life — Review Essay

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989) Ask a room full of people if they’ve ever wanted to write a book, and most hands go up. It’s one of those universal fantasies — like running a restaurant or owning a vineyard. The image is appealing: the writer at the desk, the manuscript growing, the solitary genius wrestling meaning out of silence. Nobody fantasises about the blank page that won’t fill. Nobody pictures the years of work that might never be read. Annie Dillard is not interested in the fantasy. The Writing Life is a short, strange book — more extended essay

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April 28, 2026 1 Comment

Dante’s Inferno Quiz

Step through the dark gate and enter the symbolic underworld of Dante’s Inferno. This quiz is not simply a test of morality. It is a descent. Drawing on Dante’s legendary vision of the nine circles of Hell, it invites you to wander through the shadowlands of desire, appetite, pride, wrath, betrayal, and longing. Each question acts like a lantern held up to the inner life, revealing the hidden patterns, temptations, and contradictions that shape your personal myth. Where would your soul be placed in Dante’s infernal architecture? Among the virtuous pagans, caught in the winds of restless desire, consumed by excess,

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April 27, 2026 1 Comment

Do You Like Hyperlinks?

Monday. Early. The Writing Life opened on my lap. This morning, three passages piqued my interest. Three in quick succession, like knocking on the same door from different directions. The first: “The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.” I read it

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April 27, 2026 No Comments

Make Yourself

Saturday. Early. The Malvern Hills are doing something extraordinary with the light. I’m writing from a little self-contained place just outside Mathon — a village on the western lee of the hills, technically Herefordshire now, though its soul has always been tangled up with Worcestershire. We picked it as a halfway point for the group. The geography just worked. But you don’t always know what a place is going to do to you until you’re sitting in it at 5am watching the sun come up from behind ancient hills, listening to sheep in the field beyond the garden. The village

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April 25, 2026 No Comments

Moon Bathing at 3 A.M.: What Happens When the Moon Wakes You in the Night

There she was, uninvited and unapologetic. The couch had claimed me again, that familiar surrender to its uneven cushions, half accident, half defiance. As if staying up late were some small act of resistance against the order of things. When I came to, the world was hushed, thick with that deep-night quiet where hours don’t march so much as they breathe, slow and tidal. My fingers stayed still. The fabric hung loose, swaying just slightly in the breath of air that slipped through the half-open window. I wanted to meet the dawn on its own terms. No jarring beep of

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April 22, 2026 No Comments

Why Self-Protection Keeps You Stuck (And How to Break It)

The most consistently effective way to avoid transformation is to do a lot of work on yourself. I have sat with people who knew their attachment style and their Enneagram type and could name the wound with clinical precision. They had journalled, meditated, been in therapy, and done the course. In sessions they were impressive. They produced insights at a reliable pace. They had a sophisticated relationship with the concept of their own limitations. And at the centre of all that activity, something was perfectly still. The work was happening. But nothing was moving. The thing that was not moving

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April 21, 2026 No Comments

Why You Don’t Experience the World as It Is

The map is not the territory. You have probably encountered this before, from an NLP workshop or a philosophy class or a self-development book that seemed important at the time. It sits in the category of ideas that feel genuinely arresting the first time you meet them and then gradually settle into the furniture. You stop noticing it. It becomes something you agree with rather than something you feel. Beyond the Map–Territory Distinction Two Chilean biologists took that idea apart in 1984 and rebuilt it into something considerably more unsettling. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela were not philosophers or therapists

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April 15, 2026 No Comments

Imagination Creates Reality

The inner script and the world that follows Most people think imagination is what you use to escape reality. A child does it naturally. A novelist does it professionally. A bored office worker does it out the window at 3:17 on a Wednesday. Imagination, in the ordinary view, is what happens when attention slips its leash and wanders off into the unreal. Neville Goddard asks us to reverse that assumption. What if imagination is not escape from reality, but the workshop where reality is first assembled? What if the life you keep meeting on the outside is, in ways both

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April 14, 2026 No Comments

The Editor, Not the Camera

The voice in your head is not neutral. This sounds obvious. Say it out loud, and most people nod. But knowing it and actually experiencing the implications of it are two entirely different things, separated by a gap that most people spend their entire lives not crossing. Psychological research has long known that we carry an inner narrator: the voice that runs a continuous commentary on our experience, stitches our memories into a coherent sequence, and gives us the sense of being a continuous self moving through time. It is the voice that reads these words to itself. The voice

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April 13, 2026 No Comments

Narrative Alchemy Prompt #2

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new – Pema Chödrön There’s a story you already know how to run. Not merely know. You’ve rehearsed it until it passes through the nervous system like a familiar current. You can cue the opening beat, the turning point, the conclusion, and the moral stamped across the middle like an official seal. You know what the event meant. You know what it proved. You know why it could not have unfolded any other way, because the mind, once it has built a corridor through chaos, tends to

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April 13, 2026 No Comments

The Archive is Alive

From Notes to Constellations in the Age of Thinking Machines I opened Obsidian expecting to find a note I’d written three months earlier about liminality and threshold states. What I found instead was a cluster of connections I hadn’t consciously built. Six notes reaching backward through NLP reframe patterns, Jungian individuation, and something I’d scribbled at midnight about rivers carving canyons. The note I was looking for was there. But it was not alone. It was alive inside a web I had been unconsciously weaving for months without knowing I was doing it. I thought I was building a second

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April 9, 2026 No Comments

The Imaginative Ceiling

Most people look backward for the source of their limits. The difficult childhood. The setback that changed the trajectory. The decision that sent things the wrong way. The logic is sensible: the past is where the stories were written, so the past must be where the limitation lives. We inherit this orientation early. When something isn’t working, we search for the origin point. What happened? Where did it go wrong? Which moment, which influence, which fracture set the boundary? It feels rigorous, almost scientific, to trace the line backward and locate the cause. If you can find the cause, you

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April 7, 2026 No Comments

The Screen Didn’t Break Your Mind

I was two minutes into a chapter on the Discordians this morning when a single line made me put the book down: post-linear. It wasn’t just the word. It was what it implied. A shift not just in how we consume information, but in how we think. McLuhan1 noticed that print culture trained the mind into sequence. One thing follows another. Cause precedes effect. Arguments build brick by brick. The book is literally a line of characters stretched across pages, and over time that structure becomes a habit of thought. We learn to move step by step, to trust the

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April 6, 2026 No Comments

What Introspection Can’t See

We’ve been sold a very specific myth about self-knowledge. It usually arrives dressed in soft lighting and moral seriousness. Slow down. Turn inward. Observe what’s happening inside with slightly more honesty than usual. Sit with yourself. Journal. Reflect. Notice your thoughts. Notice your feelings. Become conscious of your inner weather and, by some implied miracle, become more conscious of who you are. It’s an elegant model. It flatters the modern reflective self. Better yet, it comes with a faint halo. The introspective person appears deeper, wiser, more evolved than the poor bastard still out in the noise of action, making

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April 4, 2026 No Comments

All Things End and Begin with Story

I keep circling a sentence that feels either obviously true or mildly insane: All things end and begin with story. Not literally, of course. Stars don’t require narrative clearance before collapsing. Rivers don’t consult myth before cutting through stone. The material universe, so far as one can tell, proceeds with complete indifference to our interpretive theatre. But human life is not lived at the level of matter alone. It’s lived through meaning. And meaning doesn’t arrive in factory packaging with the instructions already printed on the side. Meaning gets assembled. Interpreted. Negotiated. Smuggled in through memory, language, symbolism, expectation, and

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April 2, 2026 No Comments

The Gap Between Understanding and Becoming

When psychology replaced mythology, we traded participation for explanation. We gained a remarkable vocabulary for describing the inner life, but in the process we lost something older and more difficult to name: a felt sense of belonging inside a meaningful drama. Myth did not merely tell us what was happening; it gave us a role to play, a pattern to inhabit, a way of recognising that our struggles were part of something larger than private confusion. Psychology, for all its brilliance, often stands at a slight remove. It helps us analyse the wound, trace its origins, and identify its mechanisms.

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April 1, 2026 No Comments

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