The Mystic's Journey

In recent days, I’ve seen a number of high-profile thinkers — from Joe Rogan to Christian Angermayer — talk about the potential end of needing to work out of economic necessity. Elon Musk, for example, has talked about how AI will take over most low-skilled labour jobs, requiring new forms of government policy like “universal high income” where everyone gets paid by the state to have their basic needs (food, shelter etc) met.

Over the past two decades, Western society has seen a dramatic erosion of centralized authorities and shared cultural institutions. Religion, music, television, journalism, politics, and entertainment have all become more fragmented, more personalized, and more tribal. We increasingly inhabit personalized media diets, algorithmic subcultures, and ideological echo chambers. The old cultural gatekeepers have lost much of their power.

Welcome back to Meta Mystic Mondays! Today’s newsletter is focused on sleep. As always, I’m going to begin with personal, lived experience — the foundation of this newsletter — rather than jumping straight into studies, abstract analysis, or interpretations of other people’s experiences. Then I’ll get into some neuroscience, and end with an actionable initiative you can take to start improving your sleep, guided by a world-leading sleep expert.

In last week’s piece, I wrote about my internal family system of mental models: My Internal Family System: Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris & The Weeknd Rav Arora · May 1 Read full story As I did with the inaugural Meta Mystic essay on the “Old Self vs New Self” duality, I’m going to share with you my journal in response to the self-reflection prompts I provided at the end of the last piece. Note: this is not literally my journal.

Earlier this week, I published my my inaugural Meta Mystic essay: Epochs Of Inner Growth: Transitioning From The Old Self Into The New Self The piece ended with a couple of journal prompts for you to dig deeper into your own life and start to break free from autopilot mode which many of us unconsciously live in. I’ve decided to fill out these prompts myself to show you, the readers, what this looks like in practice, in case anyone is confused or uncertain how to do this or what the point is.

Link (Essay responding to Megyn’s Christian fans and critics in the comments to her post excoriating me as some awful New-Age pseudo-spiritualist coming soon) Clip of Megyn praising my first psychedelic essay: Please support this Substack by becoming a paid member now: Catch up on my inaugural Meta Mystic essay + email me your reflection if you’d like to be featured on this site:

I’m glad to finally be doing this properly. Last year, I did a soft launch of The Meta Mystic, which was really a rebrand of my original Substack, Noble Truths with Rav Arora. I launched Noble Truths in 2021, at a time when my reporting on COVID vaccine side effects, public health mandates, and institutional failures was increasingly deemed too far outside the Overton window for major media outlets.

My Internal Family System: Sam Harris (stone-cold equanimity), Jordan Peterson (intellectual grandiosity), Joe Rogan (absurd jocularity), The Weeknd (‘After Hours’ sensuality) Note to readers: welcome to another Meta Mystic day — Tuesday this week! Yesterday we did a late Mother’s Day celebration so this got a bit delayed. I hope you enjoy this piece with some self-reflection prompts at the end.

The Meta Mystic is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: Over the past year, I’ve been absorbing Joe Dispenza’s work on self-transformation. A good way to briefly distill it: your thoughts create your personality, and your personality creates your personal reality. At its best, his work instills a powerful sense of agency — a sense of ownership over the architecture of our thought space.

The Meta Mystic is a reader-supported publication.