The Power of Weirdness: Embracing Your Unique Path

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Morgan discussed The Power of Weirdness: Embracing Your Unique Path, here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Tom: A tropism is a direction, I think, and holism just means holism. So, it’s a directional force towards holism. So, it’s like, evolution is always acting on you to draw you towards psychological wholeness, like personal evolution, but also the evolution of your own niche. Like, why does a shark look like a shark? Why does a dolphin look like a dolphin? Because it’s evolved to occupy a niche that it’s highly fitted for that niche. Is a great white shark adapted for its niche? Well, if you drop it in a Sahara Desert, it isn’t adapted.

So, you are adapting constantly towards a Jake shaped niche. If you’re a great white shark, there’s probably only one niche for you, and it’s the same for all great white sharks. But we are so complex and differentiated to each other that the Jake shaped niche is really very, very specific. There’s this constant attraction.

Jake: Very weird too, I’m going to guess.

[laughter]

Tom: Well, the beauty of this is you do get licensed to be mega weird, because you’re like, “Well, if I’m interested in something no one else is interested in,” you’re like, “Great.” If it’s working out in an integrated fashion, you’re saying the synchronicities, even better. Keep on keeping on, because that’s your niche and that’s the point of the holotropic attractor, which, again, is just like a slightly pretentious way of talking about following your bliss. But people like it when you can say things like holotropic attractor, because then you don’t need to use– [crosstalk]

Jake: speaking to your left brain, right?

Tom: Right. This is where I think the world is going in all of this place. This is what my new company is doing, which is like, you can’t have cringy spiritual videos about this stuff, because it’s no longer the domain of cringiness. One of the main problems of myth is that people think that they’re fake. People are like, “These don’t apply to real life, because they’re about orcs.” And you’re like, “No, these were just a way that we managed to communicate these patterns that apply to your life.” Let’s take the inverse.

The other most popular myth, apart from the hero’s journey, appears to be careful what you wish for, which is, when you screw this up, which is when your ego takes control of your direction because it wants what it wants. But the ego is the left hemisphere and it knows nothing. It knows absolutely nothing. So, what it does is King Midas, which is like, “I just want the gold. I want the gold and I’ll be happy.” And it turns everything else to gold. And that smash sparrows over again. It’s like, “I just want one abstract thing, and then everything alive in your life goes dead.” So, that’s when you can be at your absolute dumbest within this context, which is, you target an abstract variable.

Tobias: That’s– [crosstalk] Sorry.

Jake: Go ahead.

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