working notes from the textual underground
Soulcruzer is a blog about walking, wondering, writing, and trying to stay human in the machinery.
I write from the crossroads of philosophy, myth, music, AI, learning, and ordinary life. This is my living archive: part field notebook, part essay chamber, part signal fire from the textual underground, part hypertext adventure.
Longer reflections from the Soulcruzer blog — essays, stories, mixtapes, and meaning-making from a mind in movement.
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.
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
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 other labels. 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 things. 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.
The Soulcruzer podcast…narrative alchemy in audio form. Call it an audioblog, call it threshold work, call it confessional mysticism.
One day I’m working through tarot as spiritual technology. The next, I’m exploring Nietzsche’s eternal return as lived practice, chaos magick techniques, or games as containers for transformation. Depth psychology meets the esoteric. Ancient wisdom meets the AI age. Theory becomes practice.
This is what narrative alchemy sounds like from the inside: raw, real, unpolished. Experiments in treating stories as code and consciousness as hackable.
If you’re here for the deep work and the edges, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode, I explore one of Jung’s most striking images: the unconscious as both dragon and treasure. What if the fear, resistance, and chaos you encounter when you turn inward aren’t signs that something is wrong but signs that you’re getting close to something valuable? Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, NLP, and the logic of myth, I unpack why the very thing guarding your buried gold is often indistinguishable from the thing you most want to avoid and what it actually means to face it.
Fragments, field notes, and half-lit thoughts from the textual underground
Here be dragon The old cartographers had a habit worth noticing. When they ran out of known world, when the coastline ended and the sea opened into pure conjecture, they did not leave the map blank. They filled it. Here be dragons. Not emptiness. Not absence. Something living, dangerous, and magnificent waiting at the edge of what they understood. Most people spend their entire lives inside the known territory. Not through cowardice, exactly. Through habit. Through the accumulated weight of everything that works well enough, hurts little enough, feels safe enough. The known world is not a bad place to
We now have AI tools that can mirror our own narratives back to us with terrifying efficiency. If you ask an LLM to validate your perspective, it will do so. It will help you polish your main character script until it shines. But if you use AI as an intellectual partner, as a way to find the holes in your thinking, to surface the perspectives you’ve missed, and to challenge your own “stories as code”, then it becomes a tool for expansion rather than isolation. The danger of romanticising your own life is that you eventually stop living it. You
Jung understood that the self is not a monolithic “I” that sits at the center of the universe. It is a constellation. When we identify too strongly with the Hero archetype, we inevitably cast everyone else into the role of the Shadow, the Herald, or the Threshold Guardian. We stop seeing the complexity of the other because our internal narrative requires them to be simple. We need them to fit the role we’ve assigned them so our story remains coherent. It’s a fragile coherence. The moment someone refuses to play their part—the moment a partner expresses a need that doesn’t
You take in raw experience, sensation, and uncertainty, and your mind reshapes all of that into ideas, concepts, interpretations, and conclusions that help you function. The purpose isn’t to give you a flawless copy of some objective reality. You don’t have direct access to that anyway. Your thoughts have done their job when they help you live more effectively. When they help you predict what might happen, weigh outcomes, make decisions, and respond well to real situations, then your thinking is doing what it’s meant to do. So the real question isn’t whether your thoughts perfectly match some absolute truth
Your self-story keeps updating in the direction of what it already believes. If the story says you have a problem with authority, then every exchange with a boss, a teacher, a system, or even a strong personality gets filtered through that frame. You don’t just experience the moment. You interpret it through the story. And that interpretation feeds the story right back to itself. The loop gets stronger. After enough repetition, it starts to feel unquestionable. This is just who I am. Look at the pattern. Look at the evidence. I’ve been living this for years. But a lot of
I was watching Hell’s Kitchen last night and something clicked. Watch how a head chef actually works. Gordon makes the menu, develops the recipes, and directs the kitchen. His sous chefs, his brigade, and his wait staff are the ones doing the physical work. But nobody questions who’s responsible for the experience. The vision, the standards, the taste, the judgment, that’s all Gordon. It made me think about how I work with AI, both in conversation and in agentic workflows. The “you just typed a prompt” crowd would look at that kitchen and say the cooks made the food. Which
People think I’m repeating myself when I say I’m all about Psyche and Soul. They see a linguistic loop, but I see an alchemical operation. To the dictionary, they are the same word. To the seeker, they are two different sides of the Great Work. The Alchemical Split Psyche is the Vas Hermeticum. It is the vessel. The architecture. The structural grid of the dungeon where the rules are written in cold, Apollonian ink. It is the vast, complex code of the collective unconscious. It is the “character sheet” of the universe: necessary, geometric, and static. Soul is the Mercurius.
There is a quietly subversive move hiding in plain sight here. This essay by Richard Beard looks like it’s arguing against AI, but the more interesting thing is that it is actually redefining what writing is. Richard Beard is not saying “humans are better writers.” He is saying that memoir is not a genre at all. It is a cognitive act. Writing memoir is thinking in public, remembering in real time, selecting meaning from lived experience rather than assembling language toward an outcome. That’s the pivot. Most debates about AI and writing stay trapped at the level of output. Can
