working notes from the textual underground
as it seems…adding the ActivityPub plugin to the site was supposed to take a few minutes. the videos make it look as easy as clicking a few links…well I can’t say the experience of a few minutes has been reality.
surrender is such an evocative word. it conjures up images of white flags and final breaths and giving up. but what i’m beginning to realise is that in the space of spirituality, surrendering isn’t about giving up, it’s about giving in. it’s about leaning into the flow and allowing life to unfold instead of exhausting yourself trying to force life to happen. something i still need to deal with though is my lingering belief that surrendering is a passive act, and as an action man, this goes against the grain of who i believe myself to be.
what does the orange tree have to do to grow oranges? what does the sky have to do to be blue? what do you have to do to be?
my digital garden is more of a jungle right now, wild and untamed. i’m going to have to hack through the overgrowth and do some much needed pruning to get it to where i want it to be…work in progress
I’m having trouble with IndieBlocks. The Elementor widget won’t display notes, so I’ll try using a regular post category instead.
Ben: “Let go of your conscious self and act on instinct.” Luke: “How am I supposed to fight? I can’t see!” Ben: “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” Inner space If we spend time only working with our rational mind, then we are only ever likely to get half of the story. If we want to truly nurture our own personal growth, then we need to connect to our inner self, our subconscious mind, to get what Paul Harvey used to say, The rest of the story.? Connecting with our subconscious mind requires us to use our imagination—like
There’s something quietly warm and fuzzy about sea otters holding hands while they sleep. Not for romance. Not for display. For physics. The ocean drifts.
There is a quietly subversive move hiding in plain sight here. The essay looks like it’s arguing against AI, but the more interesting thing is
Like Carl Richards I’ve never been a big fan of setting goals either for many of the reasons that he lists in the beginning of
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.
I just read Michael Rock’s essay “If You Don’t See the Fnord it Can’t Eat You” and it clarified something I’ve been circling around for months. Rock traces the paranoid history of subliminal messaging from Robert Anton Wilson’s Discordian chaos to Madison Avenue’s mind control fantasies. The fnord1 is typography that triggers dread without semantic content. You don’t read it consciously, but it programs anxiety directly into your nervous system. Here’s what matters: the conspiracy theorists are right about the mechanism even when they’re wrong about the specifics. Stories do operate below conscious awareness. They do shape emotional states and
Reading Soundtrack: The Prodigy — Firestarter Smoke in the Silicon Close your eyes and feel the laptop on your thighs. It isn’t just warm: it is radiating. That heat is the friction of a billion data points rubbing together in a space too small to hold them. Outside, the world might be cold, but inside the black mirror, the temperature is rising. You can smell it if you look closely enough at the pixels: the sharp, ozone tang of a circuit board pushed to the brink, the scorched-sugar scent of a thousand “hot takes” melting into a single, screaming hiss.
The Uncomfortable Core of Self-Transformation The Seductive Misreading Someone commented on one of my posts the other day, drawing a parallel between the Left Hand Path and Nietzsche’s philosophy. They talked about the Übermensch, about self-deification, about becoming superior. They weren’t wrong about the surface similarities. Both traditions do emphasize the individual over the collective. Both do challenge inherited moral frameworks. Both do talk about becoming rather than being. But the comment revealed something I see constantly in spiritual and philosophical circles: people read these systems as offering power, specialness, transcendence over ordinary existence. They see an escape hatch from
You want to change your life. You’ve read the books, watched the videos, and learnt the techniques. You know about assumption, revision, living in the end, and the I AM formula. You’ve tried them all. And they work. Sometimes. Briefly. Then you slide back to the same patterns, the same reactions, and the same life you were trying to escape. NOTE: If you want to chat with the host, click here and listen to the podcast inside the Notebook. Here’s what nobody told you: there’s a practice that comes before all the techniques. A practice so simple it sounds useless.
This is part II of The Spreader, a psychological horror/speculative fiction story I started at the tail end of last year. If you haven’t read part one, here’s the link. I decided to use an interactive format for Part II. Spreader Part 2 – Interactive E-Book Spreader Part 2 An Infection of the Mind Narrative Alchemist ← Previous 1 / 0 Next → Use arrow keys to navigate • Left/Right or scroll to turn pages
Jordan Peterson on self-authorship: “Constructing the narrative of your life is a way to determine what to strive for and what to avoid…” There exists a peculiar condition in human consciousness where we experience ourselves as both the one living and the one observing what is lived. We are simultaneously inside the story and somehow outside of it, watching ourselves move through scenes we did not consciously script. This dual nature creates a tension that most people never examine. They simply live as characters, fully identified with the role, never questioning who wrote the lines they speak or designed the
Think about this: your reality isn’t happening TO you. It’s happening THROUGH you. Your state of awareness operates like a projector beam. The world you experience is whatever appears on the screen of perception. Most people assume the screen is the problem. They argue with the images, rearrange the furniture inside the scene, or try to force a better storyline. Very few notice the beam itself. But the beam is doing most of the work. When your awareness is contracted, tense, and defensive, the world doesn’t feel neutral. It feels hostile. An unread email becomes a threat. A delayed reply
Let me tell you something about anxiety that nobody seems to mention: it’s a terrible storyteller. I’ve watched anxiety operate in hundreds of minds, including my own. And here’s what I’ve learned: anxiety is fundamentally sterile. It produces nothing new. It’s a photocopier stuck on the darkest setting, churning out increasingly distorted copies of the same fearful image. But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? When you’re in the grip of anxiety, your mind feels incredibly active. Thoughts racing, scenarios spinning, mental energy burning at full throttle. Surely all that activity must be accomplishing something, right? Wrong. And understanding
A response to Joan Westenberg’s “The Case for Blogging in the Ruins“ Joan Westenberg opens her case for blogging by invoking Diderot’s Encyclopédie, that 28-volume monument to organized thinking that took two decades to complete, survived two government bans, and drove its creator to periodic breakdowns. Her point was that the infrastructure for thinking has always been hard, dangerous, thankless work. She’s right. But I want to push the argument further. Blogs aren’t just infrastructure for thinking. They’re infrastructure for becoming. They function as soul technology: consciousness-shaping code that runs quietly in the background of who we are and who
“Two fishes swim in your sea… but look closer: they cast only one shadow.” Welcome to a journey into the liminal space where philosophy turns poetic and science begins to sound like prayer. In this video, we explore the ancient mysteries of The Book of Lambspring, reimagined for the modern seeker through the lens of Narrative Alchemy. Alchemy was never just about lead and gold—it was a coded map of the human psyche. The “Two Fishes” represent the fundamental duality within us all: the tension between Spirit and Soul, thought and feeling, the reaching and the resting. In this audiobook
I’ve been reading Hans Vaihinger’s A Philosophy of As If: A System of the Theoretical, the Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. I came across this book through James Hillman‘s Healing Fiction, and it’s been illuminating his concept of “useful fictions.” The Nature of Useful Fictions Here’s the core idea: we see the world subjectively. We look at facts, but we create stories between those facts. When facts are absent, the mind fills in whatever it needs to make sense of things so we can get on with life. Hillman calls these “useful fictions.” They can be completely made up,
In this episode, I explore why we feel restless and incomplete even after achieving our goals or finding spiritual practices that seem to work. I argue that our perpetual longing isn’t a sign of failure or proof we’re on the wrong path but rather the fundamental nature of consciousness itself, constantly reaching and questioning. The real insight is recognising that seeking is the finding, that the journey itself is home, and learning to treat our restlessness as fuel rather than a problem to solve. There is a significant element of dysfunction in human consciousness. If you doubt that, read a
I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. They tend to smuggle in a quiet kind of pressure, turning the turning of the year into a performance review of your life. Suddenly you are measuring yourself against abstract ideals, borrowed goals, and the fantasy of a more disciplined future version of you. None of that has much to do with the real, breathing conditions of your days. Real change does not happen because you bully yourself with targets. It happens when you start paying attention to what is actually alive, strained, hopeful, or unfinished inside you right now. Instead,
Saturday afternoon, passing the polo grounds Out on today’s walk, I came across a field full of ravens (or rooks, I can never quite tell without a close-up). Hundreds of them, clustered around my favorite tree. These birds have always felt significant to me, in fact, at one point, they were my spirit animal. I love encountering them out in the wild at some random moment that insignificantly significant. I was out unpacking my reflections from my morning quiet time. A simple question: what to do with a Saturday? Odd that such a simple question spiraled into a philosophical reflection
This is a follow on post to the piece I wrote back in December. I’ve spent 25 years working with stories as technology, treating narratives like code that runs in the background of our lives. I’ve debugged corporate cultures, reprogrammed limiting beliefs, and helped people rewrite their personal mythologies. But reading The Apocryphon of John reminded me that some texts don’t just tell stories. They install entirely new operating systems. This isn’t a book review in the traditional sense. I’m not here to critique the prose or evaluate the scholarship. I’m here to tell you that if you’re serious about
Daydream Believer There’s a question Mitch Horowitz asks throughout Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind that lodged itself in my brain like a white hot poker: “What do you want?” Not as a therapeutic prompt. Not as spiritual navel-gazing. But as a foundational question, one that determines whether you’re truly living or merely existing. This is the question that sets the direction of your life, the point from which every deliberate act of creation begins. It is the launching pad for any practical metaphysical work you attempt, because without knowing what you actually want, no technique, belief,
It’s radical to say that self-expression is the most important thing in life. It’s not survival, even though we must continue to live. It’s not about happiness, even though we may experience it. Not even meaning or connection, though these often arise naturally when we express ourselves honestly. Self-expression is the fundamental imperative, the primary reason consciousness manifests in form. This is not an easy claim to make. It challenges the stories we’ve been taught about duty, service, and self-sacrifice. It cuts against the Protestant work ethic that tells us to be useful, the therapeutic culture that urges us to
Conspiracy, Psychedelia, and the Rituals We’re Already Inside I started reading Red Mass expecting to enter a strange story. What I didn’t expect was the sense that the book was quietly rearranging the furniture of my own thinking. Not in the way a good thriller pulls you along, but in the way certain ideas linger, unsettle, and refuse to stay on the page. This is not a novel that simply depicts conspiracy. It treats conspiracy as a living system. UFO lore, cryptids, secret orders, altered states, and underground movements are not aesthetic choices here. They are functional components. They organize
Note: I started working on this short story right before everything got absolutely bonkers during the holidays. It grew out of this idea of stories as code and the idea of “soul fiction”. The whole thing’s told from the point of view of language as a virus. It’s a concept I borrowed from William S. Burroughs. Words have their own life. They spread, they mutate, they get inside your head and change how you think. The story is in several parts. I am older than your oldest gods. Not in the way mountains are old, but in the way hunger
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
