Philosophical Correspondent & Wandering Essayist
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
Man and His Symbols is an accessible gateway into Jungian depth work. This illustrated exploration of archetypes and symbols reveals how transformation happens in the imaginal realm, below conscious awareness.
Hillman's "acorn theory" illuminates the path to Authentic Purpose. His poetic yet rigorous approach gives language to the daimonic self and the ineffable aspects of personal mythology.
This book is James Hillman's main analysis of analysis. He asks he basic question," What does the soul want?" With insight and humor he answers: "It wants fiction to heal."
Vaihinger… shows that thought is primarily a biological function turned into a conscious art. It is an art of adjustment, whose chief instrument is the construction of fictions by which men may manage to live.
Mary K. Greer's seminal workbook transforms tarot from divination tool into technology for self-knowledge and narrative sovereignty. Packed with exercises that treat the cards as doorways to the imaginal realm, this is required reading for practitioners ready to use archetypal imagery as active imagination practice.
Johnson demystifies Jung's most powerful technique with step-by-step guidance for engaging the imaginal realm directly. This slim volume transforms abstract theory into actionable practice—essential for practitioners ready to move beyond conceptual understanding.
The clearest introduction to chaos magic as pragmatic practice. Strips away dogma to reveal the core mechanics of belief as a tool. Perfectly bridges the gap between depth psychology and results-orientated transformation work.
While the hero's journey has been overused, Campbell's original text remains vital for understanding narrative structure as psycho-spiritual map. Read it to learn the pattern, then transcend it.
This groundbreaking work bridges the mystical and scientific, revealing how tarot actually works through the lens of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Essential reading for practitioners who want to understand the neurological mechanisms behind symbol work, pattern recognition, and the imaginal realm's interface with the predictive brain.
This morning I am sitting in Bonnie, our caravan, with a cup of coffee and Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals open in front of me. We are in a field near Ashbourne on our first trip away in her. Dorothy is writing about walks, weather, meals, visitors, William,...
Reading Tools for Thought, I keep coming back to Alan Kay’s idea of the computer as a fantasy amplifier. It’s such a different way of answering the question: what are computers for? Not productivity machines. Not devices for writing more emails, managing calendars, filling in spreadsheets or shaving another twenty...
We talk about consuming books, as though reading were a kind of nutritional exercise: pages in, knowledge out. But the best reading has never felt like consumption to me. It feels more like entering into correspondence with another consciousness across space and time. A conversation where one voice has the...
The air has changed. I almost don’t want to say it out loud, as if naming it might hurry things along, but there was a trace of winter under the morning. It wasn’t cold. The air had acquired an edge, just enough to remind me that the year is already...
There is a will inside us that is older than thought. It moves beneath the surface of the personality, beneath preference, fear and habit, carrying an intention we may only dimly perceive. We feel it as a pull, a recurring image, a quiet insistence that returns even after we have...
There is no universal right way to live, but the platforms keep presenting life as if there were. Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram turn existence into a hall of mirrors. Someone is travelling more, earning more, healing faster, raising better children, building a cleaner morning routine, finding their purpose, buying the...
I picked up an old book this morning: Perceiving Ordinary Magic: Science and Intuitive Wisdom by Jeremy Hayward. The cover is a blue corridor of repeating geometry, the kind of image that used to promise either a difficult physics lecture or a trip through somebody else’s consciousness. Somewhere in its...
I keep seeing headlines about the new rules of attention, usually written by somebody who wants to sell a better way of getting hold of it. The old rules were blunt enough. Interrupt people. Startle them. Keep them scrolling. Learn which colours, fears, desires and half-conscious wounds make a thumb...
Yesterday, on a Wisdom Walk, I realised I had been spending my attention in three directions at once. Part of me had gone backwards, picking over old choices and wishing I had chosen differently. Part had gone forwards, trying to get ahead of outcomes I cannot know. The rest kept...
Rheingold’s Tools for Thought has me asking an old question again:: what are computers for? For a long time the answer seemed settled. Computers were calculators, then office machines, then portals into a giant shopping centre with a comment section. We learned to treat them as appliances that happened to...
I’ve got the new Masters of the Universe queued up on Prime for viewing tonight. I suspect I’ll be viewing it through two lenses. The kid, waiting to hear “I have the power!” and the storyteller who’s curious to know if they can make the mythology of Eternia something more...
This morning I picked up How to Practice Self-Inquiry by Ramana Maharshi. I expected a quick survey read, a reconnaissance mission into the territory of the question Who am I? Instead, before I had travelled very far into the book, another question appeared: Is this your game? Is this your...
“Same shit, different day” is one of those phrases I hate because it usually arrives wearing a smirk. It reduces a life to a conveyor belt: wake up, coffee, work, scroll, eat, sleep, repeat. A little verbal shrug before another day gets fed into the machine. And yet, some mornings,...
The forest does not offer answers in the way a book, a screen, or a clever conversation does. It gives you texture. Uneven ground. The sound of your own feet. Branches moving against one another. The minor negotiations of a body making its way through the world. In that setting,...
I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around with me: unfold a map, put a glass down anywhere, draw round its rim, then go out and walk the circle as closely as the streets allow. This is a low tech version of the deríve app I made last week. It’s...
Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You step onto one clause and find another small island appearing just beyond it: a memory, a road, an old map, a story someone told her, a political fact that refuses to stay merely political. The sentence does not hurry you to its...
It feels to me as though this is the only true choice we have. You did not ask to be born. You did not choose your parents. You did not choose the circumstances into which you arrived. The only real choice, I think, lies in deciding how we will play...
I’ve been thinking about the difference between critical thinking and the kind of intelligence that has to sit beside it. Critical thinking gets a lot of the limelight. Fair enough. It is the part of the mind that asks for evidence, spots the loose plank in an argument, and refuses...
Dusting off the old street photography and field note cameras this morning. The first one out of the drawer is my old Olympus Tough: compact, waterproof, shockproof, and made for being carried rather than protected. I’m about to head into Leamington Spa to give the Deríve app I made over...
The mistake is to build the gift shop first. A lot of independent people do this. We make the course, the membership, the coaching offer, the template pack, and the shop. Then we stand in the doorway wondering why nobody has come in. It’s the wrong end of the building....
