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
Hey, friends! If you’ve been enjoying my posts, I’ve got something new to share with you. I’ve added a dedicated Support page to the blog, offering a few easy ways to show your appreciation. Whether you want to buy me a virtual coffee via Ko-Fi, send a Bitcoin tip, or use PayPal, you can now choose the option that works best for you. Your support, whether through kind words, sharing the blog with others, or even a small donation, means the world to me. It helps keep this space ad-free and allows me to focus on bringing you more content
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.
A jagged, unfiltered interview that treats AI less like a tool and more like a cultural rupture that is reshaping how we think, feel, and
The Sicily setting is the right place to encounter this story. There’s something about participating in ritual rather than simply reading about it that changes
What struck me most reading this is how success keeps shedding its skin as we grow. Early on, it often looks like accumulation…status, security, recognition.
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.
There’s a practice older than psychology, older than most of the traditions we have names for: the practice of turning attention inward and looking honestly at what’s there. Not to fix it. Not to optimise it. But to see it. This is what the alchemists called the Great Work. Not the turning of lead into gold, but the turning of an unconscious life into a conscious one. A slow, patient, sometimes uncomfortable awakening inside your own story. If you’ve found yourself drawn to Jung, Campbell, Rumi, or the contemplative traditions, if there’s a quiet sense that the person you present
The ancient problem Heraclitus posed wasn’t really about rivers. That’s what gets lost in twenty-five centuries of footnotes. When he said you can’t step into the same river twice, he wasn’t offering a meditation on water. He was pointing at something about time, change, and the peculiar human resistance to accepting either one. The river is always different water. You know this. What the footnotes tend to leave out is the other half of the observation, which Heraclitus also made: you are different too. The person stepping in this morning is not quite the same as the one who stepped
There’s a particular kind of illusion that doesn’t announce itself as an illusion. It arrives quietly, disguised as a choice. Not something obviously false or fantastical, but a reasonable option sitting alongside the others. Coherent. Plausible. Even reassuring. And that’s precisely what makes it dangerous. Because not every option we perceive is real. Some are constructed in the moment—stories the mind generates when reality presents a cost we would rather not face. This micro-lesson explores that moment. The moment where a genuine choice appears, carrying with it something difficult: a loss, a boundary, a risk, a necessary change. And just
Maybe becoming the seeker and the sage isn’t about choosing between movement and stillness. Maybe it’s about learning how to live inside both at once. I think that’s where a lot of people get caught. They imagine the seeker as the unfinished one, the one still wandering, still questioning, still unsatisfied. Then they imagine the sage as the one who’s arrived, the one who knows, the one who doesn’t need to search anymore. But the more I sit with it, the less convincing that split feels. Because what’s a sage without wonder? And what’s a seeker without any capacity for
Main Character Syndrome Is a Narrative Problem Most people encounter the idea of “Main Character Syndrome” and immediately ask the wrong question. They treat it as a social media quirk, a harmless bit of TikTok narcissism where teenagers romanticise their commute with a cinematic filter. It’s understandable. It’s also a dead end. What we are actually looking at is a form of narrative entropy. It is the moment where the story you tell yourself stops being a map of the territory and starts being a wall. When you become the undisputed protagonist of your own life, everyone else in the
I was reading Jung the other day, and this phrase caught my attention: The unconscious as dragon and treasure. Five words that contain, if you sit with them long enough, the entire architecture of inner transformation. Not a theory. Not a clinical framework, but a map drawn in mythic language that tells you something essential about the terrain you will cross if you ever decide to do the real work on yourself. Podcast version: To think of the unconscious as both dragon and treasure is to recognise that the very thing that frightens you, disrupts you, and destabilises you is
You have never met yourself. Not directly. What you have met is a story about yourself, told so many times and with such conviction that it started to feel like the ground you stand on rather than the narrative you constructed to explain where you are standing. This is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is a metaphor, but it is also the most literal description of what is happening inside you at any given moment. The self you experience as solid, as continuous, as obviously you, is a curated selection of memories, interpretations, emotional habits, and inherited scripts, assembled
The Soulcruzer Mixtape Series is back, because some things are worth coming back to! If you’ve been here a while, you’ll know what this is. If you’re new, here’s the short version: it’s a curated set of songs, talked through, with a little context around why they matter and why they sit next to each other in this particular order. Take a break from the algorithm and enjoy some intentional listening with a bit of conversation around it. The series is back now as a companion to the live sessions over on Mixcloud. The live sessions are their own thing,
a meditation how’s your life right now? not the version you present online. not the edited highlight reel. the actual texture of it. the way your days feel when you wake up in the morning. the tone of your conversations. the direction your energy naturally flows. because whether you notice it or not, your inner life is shaping all of that. the thing worth remembering, the thing that quietly governs more of your experience than you might realize, is that what’s happening inside you doesn’t stay inside you. your thoughts, your emotional patterns, your expectations about yourself and the world,
The conversation is long today. If you prefer to listen, here you go: It started with a book. It usually does. I pulled Dario Nardi‘s The Magic Diamond off the shelf this morning more or less at random, the way you do when your hand knows something your mind hasn’t caught up to yet. I’ve been in this long enough to trust that impulse. The books find me as much as I find them. And this one, it turns out, had something specific to say. Not just about Jungian typology, though it has plenty of that. It had something to
On staying visible while going deep. The temptation to disappear into the work, the gold rush noise, and why the explorer who transmits is more valuable than the one who goes silent in the jungle.
I typed a sentence into a machine, and a video came out. Not a description of a video. Not a storyboard. Not a request routed to some human editor working a night shift in another time zone. A video. Movement, colour, light, duration. Born from a line of text, the way a spell is supposed to work in the old stories: you speak the word, and the world rearranges itself. I’ve been sitting with this for months now, turning it over, because something fundamental has shifted, and most of the commentary I’ve seen about it is missing the deeper signal.
Caution: This post contains spoilers. The show tells you who the hero is before the first episode ends. Carol Sturka, a curmudgeonly novelist living in Albuquerque, wakes up to find that nearly every human being on Earth has been absorbed into a peaceful, cooperative hive mind following the arrival of an extraterrestrial virus. She is one of only thirteen people whose biology is immune to the transformation. The rest of humanity, now called the Others, are content, collaborative, and disturbingly helpful. No war. No crime. No hunger. Just seven billion people who want to know what you need and when
I have been rewatching Game of Thrones, and something unexpected happened. The first time through, I watched it the way most of us did. Tracking plot. Waiting for payoff. Asking the surface question: who wins? The second time through, that question dissolved entirely, and I found myself watching something else. I was watching archetypes move. Watching wounds ripen across eight seasons. Watching destiny shift from spectacle into symbol. The series did not change. I did. And that is precisely what the mythic imagination does. It asks us to look again, not at the story, but through it. This is what
Most people encounter a new technology and immediately ask the wrong question: How do I use this to do what I already do, but faster? It’s understandable. It’s also a dead end. I call it the retrofit trap. You take an entirely new category of capability and bolt it onto your existing workflow like a spoiler on a minivan. You get the same thing you had before, slightly cheaper, marginally quicker. Nothing actually changes. You automate the assembly line and call it innovation. This is how most people are approaching AI right now. Write my emails faster. Summarise this document.
There is a model hiding inside every moment you have ever course-corrected, changed your mind, or walked out of a room sensing something had shifted. It is not a philosophy. It is not a metaphor. It is a working system, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The model is cybernetic. It is the same logic that keeps a thermostat maintaining temperature, that guides a missile to a target, that allows a living body to heal itself. It runs on a continuous loop of sensing, comparing, and adjusting. And it turns out that the four pillars at the
I spent twenty years in corporate learning and development watching people master outcome frameworks while their actual lives drifted sideways. They could build project plans with military precision, cascade objectives down organisational charts, and define KPIs that would make a statistician weep with joy. Then they’d leave the office and scroll through their phones on autopilot, accepting whatever the algorithm fed them next, living lives that were happening to them rather than through them. The paradox gnawed at me: infinite choice had somehow produced a culture of drift. We live in an age where you can customise your coffee order
This one started with me sitting down in the studio and noticing a pattern that’s been floating around the last couple of days. Everywhere I turn, people are talking about where we’re going as human beings, what we’re becoming, and how all this change is messing with our sense of place. AI is in the background of that conversation, obviously, but this episode isn’t me doing an “AI episode” as such. It’s more me circling the deeper question behind the noise. Over the past 48 hours I’ve been listening to and watching a bunch of stuff, and it’s all orbiting
Today’s episode was one of those “running to catch up with myself” kind of days. Busy. On the move. Meaning to sit down and record… and then something else pops up. But I don’t mind that rhythm. There’s something alive about feeling like you don’t quite know whether you’re coming or going. So this one turned into a proper ramble. A stream-of-consciousness audio blog. No tight structure. Just what was on my mind. And what was on my mind? Social audio. Whatever Happened to Short-Form Social Audio? I’ve been having a conversation over on BlueSky with my long-time audio friend
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
