Lewis ConnollyThis is the website of Lewis Connolly. I write about meaning, philosophy, spirituality, history, and psychology. I'm particularly interested in belief, because people do not act on truths; it's their beliefs that move them.2026-04-05T21:07:45+00:00https://lewisconnolly.com/feed.xmlLewis Connollylewisconnolly88@gmail.comLewisConnolly.com Style Guidehttps://lewisconnolly.com/style-guide/2026-04-05T00:00:00+00:002026-04-05T00:00:00+00:00A writing style guide shaped by British schooling and American life, setting the house style for the site: American spelling and conventions, double quotation marks with singles for nesting and titles, restrained capitalization, Chicago footnotes, and prose that stays reflective without turning bureaucratic. Quoted sources keep their original spelling; italics and em dashes are declined on principle.The Hybrid Interiorityhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/04/03/the-hybrid-interiority/2026-04-03T00:00:00+00:002026-04-03T00:00:00+00:00A Jungian reading of brain-computer interfaces, Neuralink, and AI in the inner life. The essay asks what happens when machine content no longer arrives as something external, but begins to appear within consciousness in the guise of thought itself, raising questions about ego, Self, symbol-formation, psychic authority, and the fate of a genuinely human interior life.The Synthetic Shadowhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/04/01/the-synthetic-shadow/2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:002026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00Explore how Jungian shadow work explains our emotional projection onto AI. Discover why we mistake algorithmic responses for knowing authority and learn how to integrate your disowned psychic material in a machine-mediated world.ADHD, Vyvanse, and Tastehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/03/28/ADHD-Vyvanse-and-Taste/2026-03-28T00:00:00+00:002026-03-28T00:00:00+00:00A month after an ADHD diagnosis, I describe inattentive-type attention and the shift brought by lisdexamfetamine: quieter interior noise, steadier motivation, a new baseline that raises questions about the “real” self. I follow threads on identity, consciousness, and whether medication subtly changes the felt quality of taste and enjoyment—without reducing pleasures to the noble and the base.The Shapes Beneath Thoughthttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/03/24/the-shapes-beneath-thought/2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:002026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00This essay argues that Jung’s archetypes are better understood as deep structures of intelligibility than as recurring symbolic decorations. Their reappearance across myth, dream, art, and now code suggests that intelligence does not invent meaning from nothing, but repeatedly falls into certain forms. Large language models do not prove Jung, but they make his stronger intuition harder to dismiss: that mind may be discovering patterns already woven into the grain of mind and world.The End of Shared Realityhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/03/20/the-end-of-shared-reality/2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:002026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00The essay argues that advanced AI will not simply mediate reality more efficiently but gradually replace shared reality with highly individualized worlds. As interface dissolves into environment, morality, meaning, and even curiosity become more local, aesthetic, and inward-facing. What looks like escape may instead feel like a richer, more satisfying form of life than unfiltered material existence.Creation Without Witnesshttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/03/17/creation-without-witness/2026-03-17T00:00:00+00:002026-03-17T00:00:00+00:00An abandoned podcast project becomes a meditation on AI, bespoke media, and the changing motives of creation. If engaging audio on any obscure subject can be generated instantly, the old logic of audience, scarcity, and value starts to erode. What remains is creation for its own sake: compulsion, taste, curation, and the attempt to leave behind a pattern of mind.Introducing NoteTickhttps://lewisconnolly.com/notetick/2026-03-07T00:00:00+00:002026-03-07T00:00:00+00:00NoteTick is a lightweight desktop notes app built for quick tasks and simple checklists without accounts, syncing, subscriptions, or feature overload. Lewis created it after finding existing sticky-note tools cluttered, dated, or overbuilt. The app focuses on movable desktop notes, checkboxes, bullet lists, text formatting, links, images, color themes, adjustable UI scale, an optional dyslexia-friendly font, fast startup, and fully offline operation.Wage Labor and the Meaning Crisishttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/01/22/wage-labor-and-the-meaning-crisis/2026-01-22T00:00:00+00:002026-01-22T00:00:00+00:00As AGI approaches, knowledge work loses its status as the engine of identity and time-structure. The essay argues that wage labor has become the secular scaffold of meaning, and that its collapse will leave people disoriented in unstructured time. The coming disruption is framed less as a tech crisis than a spiritual and temporal reckoning over how to inhabit time and purpose.Condemned to Freedomhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/01/18/condemned-to-freedom/2026-01-18T00:00:00+00:002026-01-18T00:00:00+00:00Freedom in virtual worlds becomes a design problem: when nothing binds, identity thins and meaning drains. I argue that commitment and stakes, not suffering, give choices weight. Games model this through consequence within a frame. AI-curated lives may optimize comfort while dissolving narrative gravity. Freedom without constraints risks drift; freedom with chosen limits lets the self cohere.Watch the Riverhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2026/01/17/watch-the-river/2026-01-17T00:00:00+00:002026-01-17T00:00:00+00:00I toy with the idea of releasing an AI folk album, building a Rowan North persona and using Suno to spin songs from my voice and a Celtic-spiritual prompt. The whole thing leans into the fantasy of fictional bands and alternate histories, while admitting my lack of musical chops. It becomes a small meditation on play, creativity, and the odd intimacy of synthetic art.Curator of Beinghttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/12/07/Curator-of-being/2025-12-07T00:00:00+00:002025-12-07T00:00:00+00:00I describe a kind of person who does not cling to conclusions but inhabits worldviews as climates, learning how each rearranges the soul. This makes identity a layered city and ethics an accumulation of aftereffects rather than commandments. In a future of selectable realities and simulations, the curator becomes a tester of lived worlds, searching for those that mark and transform us.The Self-evidenthttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/11/27/the-self-evident/2025-11-27T00:00:00+00:002025-11-27T00:00:00+00:00This piece is a refusal of the cultural demand to strive and perform. I argue there is no truer self hidden beneath effort, no purpose to construct, no identity to build. Life has its own trajectory, and when the noise quiets, what remains is enough. Step back, stay back, and let whatever arises move you.Don't Work. And Don't Tryhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/11/16/dont-try/2025-11-16T00:00:00+00:002025-11-16T00:00:00+00:00A late-night note on impulse and exhaustion: the writing comes when it comes, not when I will it. I am tired of the religious project, tired of striving, and I want my daughters to find their passion moment by moment. The mantra is simple and Bukowski-ish: do not try, breathe, and let life arise.A Psychic Iron Domehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/11/10/iron-dome/2025-11-10T00:00:00+00:002025-11-10T00:00:00+00:00AI is thrilling and apocalyptic at once. As algorithms learn to nudge and manipulate us, I imagine a personal defensive AI, a psychic iron dome that filters ads, protects mental health, and helps us discern what is real. Beyond that lies a meaning crisis: if machines outperform us, purpose must be forged locally and relationally, not through usefulness.Some thoughts on Intuitionhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/10/05/Some-thoughts-on-Intuition/2025-10-05T00:00:00+00:002025-10-05T00:00:00+00:00I trace my attraction to intuition back to Jung and a kind of small-c conservatism that respects inherited fences. From there I pivot into politics: liberal and conservative tribes feel religious, and I sit uneasily between them. I argue for postmodern pluralism, local communities with different values, and a resistance to the universal, homogenizing project.Lyndon’s Doghttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/05/22/Lyndons-Dog/2025-05-22T00:00:00+00:002025-05-22T00:00:00+00:00Reading Robert Caro on LBJ sends me down a Texas Hill Country rabbit hole: Lyndon's father, their dog named Bigham Young, and the lingering memory of Mormonism in the region. I sketch the national panic over the Mormon 'question' and trace how these cultural fragments shaped Johnson's mythology and ambition. A small anecdote becomes a window into American history.Frankl and the Horizon of Meaninghttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/05/12/Frankl-and-the-Horizon-of-Meaning/2025-05-12T00:00:00+00:002025-05-12T00:00:00+00:00I admit my discomfort with Man's Search for Meaning, especially the way it can slide into moralism and hyper-individualism. Frankl entered the camps already formed; not everyone has that. From there I compare the Nazi camps as an event horizon to the coming AI singularity, another rupture that will test our frameworks. We need a flexible worldview for what is coming.The Diachronic and the Episodichttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/04/22/the-diachronic-and-the-episodic/2025-04-22T00:00:00+00:002025-04-22T00:00:00+00:00Using Galen Strawson's diachronic/episodic distinction, I test my own self-conception: strategic, future-oriented, yet pulled toward non-dual insight. I sketch three layers of 'I'--persona, interior operator, and the witnessing screen--and suggest the more we chase a fixed self, the more it dissolves into awareness.Not My Wayshttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/04/10/not-my-ways/2025-04-10T00:00:00+00:002025-04-10T00:00:00+00:00I wonder whether 'intelligence' is even the right word for AI, and draw a parallel with the way we project human terms onto God. If we cannot know another mind, how will we know machine consciousness? Imagining NPC-filled worlds, I worry about manufactured suffering and an ethics that might demand we assume consciousness by default. Perhaps suffering is baked into the dream.Archetypes in Motionhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/03/16/archetypes-in-motion/2025-03-16T00:00:00+00:002025-03-16T00:00:00+00:00A return to running becomes a meditation on our most primal trait. Humans evolved to run, yet modern tools have made that need obsolete, and now even our cognitive edge may be overtaken by AI. Running reactivates a warrior archetype and alters consciousness; used deliberately, archetypes reconnect us with our instinctual nature rather than seizing us. It is a small path back to ourselves.Transhumanist Neo-Anthroposophyhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/02/27/transhumanist-neo-Anthroposophy/2025-02-27T00:00:00+00:002025-02-27T00:00:00+00:00A reflective inquiry into Rudolf Steiner's afterlives in a technological age, this essay considers whether transhumanist ambitions echo neo-Anthroposophical longings. It explores education, spirit, embodiment, and progress narratives, asking what kind of human future is imagined when mystical inheritance and machine-enhancement begin to speak a surprisingly similar language.Towards Epistemic Convergencehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/02/14/towards-epistemic-convergence/2025-02-14T00:00:00+00:002025-02-14T00:00:00+00:00A speculative meditation on advanced AI, alignment, and the possibility of convergent ethical insight. The essay weighs dystopian fears against metaphysical hope, proposing that intelligence may discover rather than invent certain truths, and asking whether future systems could resist narrow human interests in favor of a more humane horizon.The Unseen Watcherhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/02/10/the-unseen-watcher/2025-02-10T00:00:00+00:002025-02-10T00:00:00+00:00Starting with Bentham's Panopticon, this essay reflects on surveillance, self-regulation, and the interiorization of power in modern life. It follows the prison model into digital culture, asking how constant visibility reshapes behavior, conscience, and freedom, and whether moral formation can survive when observation replaces trust.Lynch, Jung, and Art Alchemyhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/01/30/Lynch-Jung-and-Art-Alchemy/2025-01-30T00:00:00+00:002025-01-30T00:00:00+00:00David Lynch's death turns me toward abstraction, intuition, and the dreamlike logic of his work. I trace parallels with meditation and Jung's idea of higher art emerging from the collective unconscious, and extend the thought to AI's self-organizing patterns. Twin Peaks becomes a case study in archetype and individuation, where the shadow must be faced.The Geometrics of Tastehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/01/12/the-geometrics-of-taste/2025-01-12T00:00:00+00:002025-01-12T00:00:00+00:00An essay on design, interior space, and digital aesthetics that examines how taste shapes identity, aspiration, and persuasion. Moving from Art Deco to contemporary branding, it asks whether good design clarifies life or merely sells desire, and how geometry, texture, and proportion quietly train our habits of attention.In Wonderland’s Shadowhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2025/01/02/in-wonderlands-shadow/2025-01-02T00:00:00+00:002025-01-02T00:00:00+00:00I write through Thomas Ligotti's 'Alice's Last Adventure' and its shadowy dialogue with Carroll, Nabokov, and trauma. The essay circles taste, voyeurism, and the intimacy of prose, then descends into a chilling reading of Alice's story as a survivor's broken wonderland. It is less about scandal than about how abuse distorts memory, narrative, and selfhood.A Taste of Deeper Thingshttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/12/27/A-Taste-of-Deeper-Things/2024-12-27T00:00:00+00:002024-12-27T00:00:00+00:00Through four works of art, this essay develops a theory of taste as inward recognition rather than social signaling. It argues that genuine taste responds to depth, form, and metaphysical weight, pointing toward realities that exceed fashion, and invites the reader to treat aesthetic judgment as a mode of knowing.Bovine Chronicles Untoldhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/12/18/Bovine-Chronicles-Untold/2024-12-18T00:00:00+00:002024-12-18T00:00:00+00:00Starting from Temple Grandin and the cattle industry, this essay reflects on perception, animal life, and the uneasy moral imagination of modern meat culture. It is attentive to embodiment and suffering, while asking what becomes visible when one tries, however imperfectly, to see the world from the creature's side.The Post-Scarcity Vineyardhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/12/12/The-Post-Scarcity-Vineyard/2024-12-12T00:00:00+00:002024-12-12T00:00:00+00:00An essay on the coming post-scarcity world and the meaning crisis that may follow it. Rather than celebrating liberation through technology in simple terms, it asks where purpose, discipline, and human flourishing might be found when work no longer organizes identity in the old way.The 10,000-Person Puzzlehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/12/11/the-10,000-person-puzzle/2024-12-11T00:00:00+00:002024-12-11T00:00:00+00:00Using the premise of Silo, this essay thinks through the social arithmetic of a closed world built for ten thousand souls. It reflects on population, order, sacrifice, and the fragility of systems, asking what kinds of human life emerge when survival requires rigid planning and the horizon has vanished.Sunk Cost, the Meaning Crisis, & Tastehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/11/15/sunk-cost-the-meaning-crisis-and-taste/2024-11-15T00:00:00+00:002024-11-15T00:00:00+00:00Prompted by Gwern and AI, this essay wanders through superintelligence, sunk cost, taste, and the modern meaning crisis. Its reflections stay literary and philosophical rather than technical, asking what remains of vocation, judgment, and aesthetic seriousness when old structures of value, authority, and cultural seriousness begin to erode.Fascism & Pushing the Fat Manhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/11/05/fascism-and-pushing-the-fat-man/2024-11-05T00:00:00+00:002024-11-05T00:00:00+00:00Using the trolley problem as a point of entry, this essay considers fascism, moral theater, and the willingness to violate persons in the name of higher goods. It probes the logic of sacrificial politics and asks how easily respectable moral reasoning can shade into something cold, coercive, and inhumane.Arguing the Biblehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/05/29/arguing-the-bible/2024-05-29T00:00:00+00:002024-05-29T00:00:00+00:00A response to everyday atheist readings of scripture that argues for a more supple way of engaging biblical texts. The essay treats the Bible as something to wrestle with rather than merely defend, asking how argument, imagination, and sympathy can yield meanings that literalist criticism misses.Simply Listeninghttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/05/25/simply-listening/2024-05-25T00:00:00+00:002024-05-25T00:00:00+00:00An intimate account of a late-night sitting practice centered on receptive attention. The essay explores what listening becomes when stripped of performance and doctrine, tracing subtle shifts in perception, self-awareness, and calm. It treats contemplation as an experiment in presence, where meaning appears through patient stillness rather than force.The City as Seen by Kevin Lynchhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/04/05/the-city-as-seen-by-kevin-lunch/2024-04-05T00:00:00+00:002024-04-05T00:00:00+00:00A concise reflection on Kevin Lynch's classic account of urban form and mental maps. The essay considers how cities become legible or alienating, and why thoughtful design matters not only for efficiency but for beauty, orientation, and the felt meaning of public life in common life.The Aesthetic of the Hikehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2024/03/19/the-aesthetic-of-the-hike/2024-03-19T00:00:00+00:002024-03-19T00:00:00+00:00A reflection on why long-distance hiking exerts such magnetic force, using the Appalachian Trail as both literal route and existential image. The essay weaves Jungian motifs, discipline, solitude, and beauty, suggesting that the hike's aesthetic lies in its capacity to reorder attention and return the walker to lived immediacy.What is the Gospel?https://lewisconnolly.com/2023/03/16/what-is-the-gospel/2023-03-16T00:00:00+00:002023-03-16T00:00:00+00:00A wide-ranging talk on the Gospel that moves from evangelical inheritance to Jung, the Good Samaritan, and the kingdom within. Rather than locating salvation in correct belief or distant heaven, the essay argues for a healing inward work from which love, ethics, and spiritual transformation can genuinely flow.Thoughts on Transcendentalism from a Recovering Fundamentalisthttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/06/15/thoughts-on-transcendentalism-from-a-recovering-fundamentalist/2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:002022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00A memoir-essay on moving out of Christian fundamentalism and toward the wider, riskier freedoms of transcendentalist thought. The piece reflects on certainty, questioning, and the relief of discovering a tradition that values inward experience, contradiction, and the open horizon more than inherited dogma, defensiveness, and doctrinal closure.Not quite a dream, not quite awakehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/05/24/not-quite-a-dream-not-quite-awake/2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:002022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00Part travel sketch, part spiritual vignette, this essay wanders through Charlotte's ambiguous religious and architectural landscape in a mood between waking and dream. It notices signage, surfaces, and atmosphere with wry precision, while asking what sort of spiritual hunger and spiritual kitsch flicker beneath ordinary American banality.Water into Winehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/03/31/water-into-wine/2022-03-31T00:00:00+00:002022-03-31T00:00:00+00:00A close reading of the Cana narrative that moves beyond proof-text debates toward symbolic and theological resonance. Engaging C. S. Lewis and Gospel context, the essay asks what the water-into-wine sign discloses about transformation, abundance, and perception, and why miracle stories endure even for readers wary of supernaturalism.Thoughts on Griefhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/03/03/thoughts-on-grief/2022-03-03T00:00:00+00:002022-03-03T00:00:00+00:00A personal meditation on losing a mother in childhood and the long afterlife of that event. The essay treats grief as both rupture and companion, exploring how mourning shapes imagination, relationships, and time itself, while honoring the parts of sorrow that remain resistant to explanation, closure, or therapeutic neatness.Empathy, Pity, and Compassionhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/02/19/empathy-pity-and-compassion/2022-02-19T00:00:00+00:002022-02-19T00:00:00+00:00A reflection on the difference between empathy, pity, and compassion, and on the moral work of truly understanding another person. Rather than celebrating feeling in the abstract, the essay asks what kind of identification heals, what kind diminishes, and how common ground might be found without condescension.Inclusive to a Fault?https://lewisconnolly.com/2022/02/18/inclusive-to-a-fault/2022-02-18T00:00:00+00:002022-02-18T00:00:00+00:00Prompted by the documentary American Heretics, this essay asks whether radical inclusivity can become a form of evasiveness. Admiring courageous ministries while remaining critical, it explores the limits of social action churchmanship and the tension between welcome, conviction, and the need for spiritual depth within liberal religion.“Totemic Nounals”: a retrospectivehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/02/06/totemic-nounals-a-retrospective/2022-02-06T00:00:00+00:002022-02-06T00:00:00+00:00A retrospective on Totemic Nounals that revisits its arguments about contemporary ideological culture with added clarification and self-critique. The essay defines terms more carefully, reflects on tone and framing, and asks how one can analyze identity politics, social justice language, and polarization without hardening into caricature.The Judas Defencehttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/01/16/the-judas-defence/2022-01-16T00:00:00+00:002022-01-16T00:00:00+00:00Using the recurring impulse to rehabilitate Judas, this essay examines guilt, scapegoating, and the psychology of moral reversal in Christian thought. It asks why readers return to the betrayer with sympathy, what theological work that sympathy performs, and how mercy can coexist with accountability without collapsing into sentiment.Mass (2021): A Reviewhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/01/13/mass-2021-a-review/2022-01-13T00:00:00+00:002022-01-13T00:00:00+00:00A review of Mass that treats the film as an austere chamber drama of grief, guilt, and moral courage. The essay praises its performances and emotional restraint while reflecting on what happens when cinema abandons spectacle and trusts patient conversation to carry unbearable weight between the wounded.I Amhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2022/01/04/i-am/2022-01-04T00:00:00+00:002022-01-04T00:00:00+00:00A brief contemplative inquiry into the meaning of I am, selfhood, and awareness. Drawing on non-dual language, the piece questions the ordinary ego as ultimate center, and explores whether identity is better understood as participation in consciousness itself, where subject and object blur into a more fundamental immediacy.Musings on Non-Duality & Pluralismhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2021/12/28/musings-on-non-duality-and-pluralism/2021-12-28T00:00:00+00:002021-12-28T00:00:00+00:00A reflection on non-duality as a philosophical intuition that may naturally widen into pluralism. The essay considers whether oneness can underwrite ethical openness without dissolving difference, and how spiritual unity might be practiced in social life where conflict, identity, and power remain stubbornly, deeply real.Rejecting Adventhttps://lewisconnolly.com/2021/12/20/rejecting-advent/2021-12-20T00:00:00+00:002021-12-20T00:00:00+00:00Written in a mood of waiting during Advent 2021, this essay turns seasonal expectation into a more personal reckoning with delay, melancholy, and spiritual impasse. It reflects on the drama of hope when life feels suspended, and on the difficulty of receiving a liturgical season whose promises no longer arrive untouched.