working notes from the textual underground
I’m restarting the community pages here using BuddyPress and BBPress. If you’re not already a member of the site, you can register and create your own profile here on soulcruzer. I’ll get a group and a forum started shortly.
I’ve been dipping in and out of Stephen Larsen’s book, The Mythic Imagination: The Quest for Meaning Through Personal Mythology for a while now. It’s become an ongoing companion that keeps nudging me to explore how I exercise my own mythic imagination. I find myself tapping into this deeper way of seeing whenever I’m walking in the woods or doing one of my shamanic journeys. There’s something about being in those spaces, surrounded by nature or in the stillness of inner exploration, where myth and symbol come alive for me. It’s as if they rise up from the earth or
Metamodernism seems like an interesting space to play in. I came across the term a while back when I was exploring postmodernism, and I asked the question what comes after postmodernism. I didn’t go any further than asking the question. But now metamodernism has resurfaced and has my attention. What it is: Metamodernism is an intriguing concept that seeks to describe the cultural landscape we’re living in—a world that’s not quite postmodern but something beyond it. It’s a reaction to the jaded scepticism and irony of postmodernism, while also recognising that modernist idealism, with its rigid structures and belief in
Something that struck me as interesting is the fact that the Christian church used to wield so much power. I’m looking at this 12th century church and thinking that once upon a time, tomorrow, Sunday, this church would have been packed. Everyone in this village would have attended the service and people would have noticed if you weren’t at the there. Fast forward to tomorrow and I suspect if I were to step into this same church, there would be hardly anyone here. This contrast made me reflect on the immense influence Christianity once had—not just on the people, but
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I think it’s a compelling question… At first glance, according to Juniper, the answer seems like an obvious “yes.” Our world feels like it’s been plucked from the pages of Neuromancer, with its omnipresent technology, fractured power structures, and a pervasive sense of surveillance. Yet, I don’t think it’s a direct mapping of the dystopia they projected. It feels like the vision has evolved, subtly blending cyberpunk’s dark edges with the mainstream. In classic cyberpunk, technology is often portrayed as a double-edged sword—liberating in some ways but soul-crushing in others. Think of Blade Runner’s dark cityscapes, where towering corporations loom
“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.” This quote has been attributed to several different sources, so I’ll leave it to the internet to sort out. For me, it has been the Golden Barge I’ve been chasing
judgement is a kind of cheap currency. it’s easy to spend, requires little thought, and rarely offers much value in return. and who better to deal in such currency than the fool because they neither recognise its worthlessness nor perceive its true cost… the fool is quick to judge because they see only the surface of things. they like putting things into neat little boxes like “good” and “bad,” “right and “wrong.” this binary thinking is comforting in its simplicity because it relieves them of the burden of understanding and dealing with the complexity and ambiguity of the human experience.
This essay reminded me of the famous quote often attributed to Churchill: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But
This resonates with something I catch myself doing as a blogger. Whenever I notice myself slipping out of blogging to express and into blogging to
I love Maria Popova’s journey from contempt to curiosity around divination. Once you stop clinging to logical analytic mind, you’ll find that the cards become
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.
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Bonus 1. Begin again. Always, and without drama. Bonus 2. The stone the builder rejected becomes the cornerstone. Nothing is wasted.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
