December 22-28, 2025
This was one of those weeks where a single concept suddenly reorganizes everything you thought you knew. The kind of week where you discover a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t just fit – it reveals the entire picture was different than you imagined.
Let me walk you through what emerged.
The Soul Fiction Revelation
The biggest shift happened when I encountered James Hillman’s concept of “soul fiction” while reading through his work more deeply.
I’ve been building narrative alchemy around the idea that stories are code, that we can debug and rewrite the narratives running our lives. But Hillman’s framing adds something crucial I’d been circling around without quite naming: psyche doesn’t just use stories. Stories ARE psyche’s native programming language.
Jung gave us active imagination as a method for accessing unconscious contents. Hillman took that framework and revealed something more fundamental: psyche is already continuously generating fictions. The question isn’t whether to engage with fictional narratives. The question is whether to do it consciously or unconsciously.
The shift from “Is it true?” to “Does it have soul?” changes everything.
I’ve been treating narrative work as debugging broken code. But what if it’s not about fixing what’s broken? What if it’s about learning to read, write, and deploy the soul fictions that structure consciousness itself?
This could be the linchpin of my body of work. The thing I can devote my Act III to.
Building the Theoretical Foundation
I spent significant time this week developing a comprehensive essay outline exploring soul fiction as psyche’s native language. Not a how-to piece. A theoretical foundation that establishes the conceptual territory.
The essay positions soul fiction alongside my existing “stories as code” framework. They’re not competing frameworks. They’re complementary angles on the same core insight: consciousness operates through functional fictions.
Here’s the key synthesis:
Jung maps the archetypal territory. Hillman shows us soul-making as psyche’s natural activity. Vaihinger gives us epistemological grounding for treating fictions as operational rather than representational. And chaos magick demonstrates the practical application: belief as tool, narrative as deployable technology.
Soul fiction is where all these threads converge.
I drafted the first three sections, establishing the foundation. Jung’s contribution. Hillman’s revolution. The shift from healing broken code to learning the programming language psyche already speaks.
The work here is making explicit what practitioners have intuited: you’re not fixing yourself. You’re learning the language you’ve been speaking all along.
The Gnostic Texts as Functional Technology
Mid-week I finished The Way of Wyrd and worked through The Apocryphon of John, a 2nd-century Gnostic text that inverts Genesis mythology.
But I’m not reading these as historical artifacts or religious texts. I’m reading them as functional technology.
The Apocryphon presents a radical cosmology: the material world created not by the supreme God but by an ignorant demiurge named Yaldabaoth. Salvation comes through gnosis – secret knowledge – rather than faith.
Translated into operational terms: you’re running someone else’s operating system. The consensus reality you inhabit was built by forces that don’t have your best interests at heart. Liberation comes through recognizing the architecture and reclaiming root access.
I created content around this for the blog and for my new codex system, treating the mythology as applied technology for consciousness work rather than literal cosmology. Using tech metaphors: operating systems, debugging, root access.
The Way of Wyrd works similarly. Brian Bates uses narrative to transmit Anglo-Saxon spiritual practices. You don’t study the material. You experience it through story. The mysteries work through planted seeds that reveal understanding over time.
Both texts demonstrate the same principle soul fiction is built on: psyche learns through narrative participation, not intellectual analysis.
Contemplative Practices and Consciousness Technology
Throughout the week I worked on several contemplative pieces that function as consciousness technology.
Created a daily prompt around the concept that imagination doesn’t create possibilities – it claims what already exists in infinite potential. You’re not manifesting future reality. You’re tuning into present reality that exists on a different frequency.
The practice: spend three minutes experiencing desired outcomes as present realities to be claimed rather than future goals to be created.
This shifts the entire energy. From striving to selecting. From creating to claiming.
I also explored shamanic meditation practices that maintain shamanic consciousness between formal journeying sessions. Core shamanic breathing. Nature gazing meditation. Middle world walking. Not journeying itself, but ways to stay connected to shamanic states in daily life.
And researched Transcendental Meditation when the question came up. The standardized mantra practice introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Interesting as contrast to chaos magick’s pragmatic flexibility.
Each practice operates on the same principle: consciousness is mutable. State can be shifted through systematic engagement with proven techniques
Hypertext and Knowledge Architecture
I also spent time exploring hypertext this week, specifically how it relates to my earlier blog post We Live in a World of Text.
The web promised true hypertext – networked, non-linear, rhizomatic structures. But what we got was mostly chronological blogs with occasional links. WordPress excels at time-based publishing but struggles with the interconnected, multidimensional structures that true hypertext enables.
This connects directly to the soul fiction work. Psyche doesn’t think in linear arguments. It thinks in networks of association, layered meanings, simultaneous contradictions.
I’ve been considering a hybrid approach: WordPress for chronological blogging and community features, Obsidian Publish for building a public Codex using Zettelkasten principles. The blog captures the journey. The Codex maps the territory.
We analyzed my vault structure and created frameworks for a hybrid public/private system. Central MOC (Map of Content), organizational templates, migration checklists. The goal: make private knowledge creation visible without exposing everything.
I’m not implementing this immediately. I’ll let it percolate for a bit. However, the architecture is there when I’m ready to go public.
Thought as Formative Technology
One thread that ran through multiple conversations: thought plays a decisive, formative role in constructing lived experience.
Not just describing reality. Actively shaping it.
This isn’t new to me theoretically. But this week it showed up in practical application. Perceptual filtering. Meaning-making. Identity construction. Reality tunneling.
Thoughts function as formative technology that creates self-reinforcing loops of experience.
I created an X thread around this.
This is what soul fiction means in practice. Not believing different things. Consciously deploying different narrative frameworks and watching how experience reorganizes around them.
The Connecting Thread
What unified this week was recognizing psyche’s native language.
Soul fiction isn’t a technique to learn. It’s the medium consciousness already operates through.
The Gnostic texts, the Anglo-Saxon mysteries, the contemplative practices, the hypertext architecture, the thought-as-technology framework – they’re all different expressions of the same core insight.
Psyche thinks in stories. Consciousness programs itself through narrative. Reality responds to the fictions we consciously or unconsciously deploy.
The work isn’t fixing what’s broken. The work is learning to read, write, and debug in the language psyche already speaks.
This shifts everything from my therapeutic healing model to a programming literacy model. From wound work to code work. From integration to conscious deployment.
What’s Next
The soul fiction essay needs completion. The theoretical foundation is solid. Now it’s about articulating the practical distinctions and implications.
The Codex architecture is designed but not implemented. When the time comes to build in public, the framework is ready.
The contemplative practices continue. Each one a different angle on the same central practice: conscious participation in psyche’s self-programming.
And the content production systems keep evolving. Blog posts. X threads. Daily prompts. Visual concepts. Each piece serving multiple functions across different platforms.
Soul fiction is psyche’s native tongue. Time to become fluent.
What’s your psyche’s native language? Hit reply and let me know. I read everything.
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