Burning to Give with Tom Morgan
'What is to give light must endure burning.' —Victor Frankl
The line between a psychotic break and success is not quite as clear as it once was, nor is the question of what medication, therapy, or practice is best, or in what amount. This conversation tries to unpack that liminal space with a man who knows it well and has been able to stay connected to the love in it.
In this episode of Love and Philosophy, Andrea engages in an in-depth conversation with Tom Morgan, exploring the complexities of love, philosophy, and personal transformation. They discuss the challenging balance between high-functioning careers and spiritual pursuits, the misconceptions around self-sacrifice and service, and the importance of community in navigating life transitions. Tom shares his personal journey from a high-stress finance career through an awakening experience, detailing his struggles with mental health, the role of psychiatric medication, and the lessons he's learned about integrating holistic and scientific perspectives. This episode delves into the nuanced intersections of mental health, personal growth, and the pursuit of meaning, offering invaluable insights for anyone on a similar path.
00:00 Introduction to Love and Philosophy
00:06 Exploring the Concept of Love
01:06 Introducing Tom Morgan
01:57 Tom's Journey from Finance to Philosophy
03:28 Balancing Wealth and Well-being
05:42 The Intersection of Science and Spirituality
08:28 Tom's Personal Awakening
13:54 Navigating the Hero's Journey
20:10 Challenges of Spiritual Integration
23:10 Holding the Tension Between Worlds
43:54 The Choice to Change
45:38 The Struggle with Identity and Career
47:07 Understanding Self-Sacrifice vs. Service
47:46 The Paradox of Complexity
51:01 The Role of Ketamine and Mental Health
58:56 Integrating Spiritual and Physical Health
01:06:45 The Importance of Community Support
01:09:58 Navigating High-Functioning Anxiety
01:17:23 Embracing Love and Contribution
01:22:50 The Future of Consciousness and Society
Please rate and review with love.
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TRANSCRIPT
Tom Morgan on Love & Philosophy
Tom Morgan: [00:00:00] I spent 15 years on Wall Street, hyper conventional worldview. And then a series of events led me to having what some people would call a unity experience, what some people would call like a heart awakening, what some people would call a psychotic break, um, sitting on a trading floor in 2017.
And that, um, destroyed my worldview positively and negatively in about 25 minutes. I suddenly became bathed in an absolutely transcendent love. That was the, the best feeling I've ever had.
It was this com, this embodied knowing of unconditional love that was totally blissful but very balanced.
And then I had this ketamine infusion, The express elevator to hell was seemingly the thing that got me to my, to my rock bottom.
I remember getting up to go to work one day and just crumpling at the foot of the bed being like, I was like a high functioning managing director, and now I am mentally ill and disabled for the rest of my life.
And this state of mind is something I'm not getting out of.
[00:01:00] And a lot of people really struggle with this, I'm in the middle of a question right now.
You know, can people pay the mortgage and pursue meaning?
So you have molecules that become cells, the cells become tissues, the tissues become organs, the organs become a human, The really, really fun part of this is to imagine that we are not the end of that process and that there are levels of intelligence and complexity above us.
I think the way that I frame it to myself as to like, why am I doing any of this? Is to essentially make people understand that these emotional, somatic, non-verbal, non-logical impulses that we get come with a high degree of intelligence which gives people more faith to act in a certain way.
What can I do for an unlimited period of time that I think has a tangible benefit to other people?
Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea. Today I'm talking with Tom Morgan. I just listened to our conversation and The thought that came to mind just now as I was walking around the neighborhood listening to it [00:02:00] was, what if all of this, whatever you wanna call, all of this is love.
that's what we're trying to help one another be able to handle. I remember as a kid, I thought love was everything, and I thought it was excruciating because You can't say it. You can't hold it. You can't do anything with it. I remember really thinking about this as a kid of how hard it was, as I've grown older, as I've studied philosophy and neuroscience and technology and in a way, I feel like I've just been trying to hold that space.
in my work I talk about beyond dichotomy. Trying to think of these typical. Divisions and contradictions, like mental and physical and, and let them be and explore the space holding them. I think that space might be love, but it's not what we've thought of as love. It's certainly not easy. And I say all that because Tom and I talk about that here, Tom is a.
Little bit famous in the Substack world, and I'm [00:03:00] doing some Substack talks and I wanted to publish them as part of the podcast too, because the whole idea here, even though yes, there's, we talk to a lot of famous neuroscientists and a lot of famous philosophers about what mind is and about these very ideas of how do we hold the paradox and what is love.
People have wisdom in so many different fields, in so many different worlds, and I really love to try to include conversations from many different worlds as well. Here Tom is from Finance and Wall Street. That's an important world, I think, to try to understand mind and mind and action, mind as action. And he had a very interesting and difficult experience.
In finance or as a person who was in this very high pressured world where he was very successful. And he will tell us about that today. because Tom is now a writer and um, as I said on Substack and a podcaster. And he also owns his own business [00:04:00] called the Leading Edge, it's a community for leaders.
where they can come together and talk about transformation and authenticity and a lot of words that you don't hear spoken about very much in the worlds of Wall Street, as Tom says here, to bring up consciousness is to seem as if you're losing your edge, but it's something everyone there wonders about.
So why can't we talk about it? And on the flip side of that, in academia and these high profile universes that I've been in, labs where we're studying the brain and cognition and these very, very important subjects, but we also are rather reluctant to talk about it on a personal level. And there's reasons for that.
We need to keep things. In a certain order, and we need to be able to function with particular standards, whether it's Wall Street or whether it's in science. However, we are complex people and it can help to try to open spaces where we can be those people together [00:05:00] without it canceling out all of the other stuff that we're doing.
And all of the other ways that we've been very careful with ourselves and our work. Tom and I talk about this and we talk about some very interesting questions. How do we learn the difference between service and self-sacrifice? For example, if everything is love and we're trying to connect to it, we can Confuse that and think, oh, we just sacrifice ourselves. That's love. No, it's not. That's why love is so hard. We talk about also, you know, do we have responsibilities? We have family love is to take care of them. How do we pursue our meaning and follow our bliss and still pay the mortgage?
How do we know when we're having insight and when it's psychosis? How do we know when we need to take medicine to help us because we've gone off some sort of edge, how do we get help?
How do we understand? How much medicine to use versus how much books we can read or therapists. We can see these are [00:06:00] very important questions in a lot of people's lives and not something we often feel like we can discuss. And I hope we can find ways to help one another through all of these things and to notice how blurred and confusing the boundaries and the edges are.
We're all walking thin lines. A lot of the time when it comes to whether or not our thinking is healthy or not, we have to help each other find ways to grow, to connect, to pursue our passions, to do our work to, and stay healthy. And figure out what that even is because we don't have a good idea of it right now.
We keep everything separated, compartmentalized, I think a lot of people are trying to find ways to reorient a lot of those things and it's, it is dangerous right now. And I mean that because we're so capable and when there's so much information available and it's so easy to go off the deep end. To go down some rabbit holes to get [00:07:00] lost or just to try to do too much at once, whether it's too much meditation or it's too many podcasts about what consciousness is or, there's all kinds of ways right now where we need to be able to talk to one another and help one another stay healthy.
So. This is a conversation about that. It's about wealth and health. It's about Wall Street and Woo. It's about wisdom. It's about all these tensions between evidence and experience, and it's with someone who's really been through it, who's lived through it, who's living through it now, who's very honest about how he sees the world, and is helping a lot of people try to find their balance and transform.
And I really appreciate that he can talk so honestly and openly about his journey and also accept that it, it does have a high woo factor. You'll hear us talk about that. His posts on Substack, he often gives them a woo factor, how kind of al there are they? Because as you'll hear a lot of.
People in his life are very right [00:08:00] brain, so to speak, to even talk about consciousness or spirituality already gets you a pretty high woo factor. I'm someone who started on the other end. as a kid, I was overly sensitive and, uh, I've gone the other way and gone into science to try to order all that.
So we talk about that in that meeting place and it's really very beautiful. I'm very thankful for this conversation. I'm happy to share it with you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for understanding that this podcast includes so many different approaches and paths into understanding what we are, how we can hold our contradictions without going crazy.
and how we can think of love in a way that helps us. Do all of that together and even opens new potentials that we might not be able to see or sense quite yet, but that are waiting for us. Waiting for you. All right. Be well.
Okay. Hey Tom, we already said [00:09:00] hi. But thanks for having this conversation on love and philosophy today.
Tom Morgan: It's uh, it's always incredibly nice to meet new people and have new conversations.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's great to meet you. I found you because I have this kind of obsession of trying to understand how to think about binaries, polarities, dichotomies, whatever word you wanna use differently, trying to sort of hold them and explore the space, holding them, holding the paradox, so on.
And you have a really interesting way I found of approaching this, of this left right. Um. Idea. And I hope we can get into that a little bit today. But first I just wanna give you opportunity. people who don't know, don't know you yet. What would you like to say? How should I introduce you that's fitting for you where you are right now?
Today?
Tom Morgan: Yeah, like if you do a, if you do a bunch of podcasts, there's kind of this script you go into, which is like, here is my story and here's what's relevant. Um,
Andrea Hiott: I don't know if you wanna do that. You don't have to. I just, [00:10:00] whatever's on your mind that you would like to say today.
Tom Morgan: I'll give you, I'll give you the brief context 'cause it will probably be important for what we're talking about later.
Um, I spent 15 years on Wall Street, um, hyper conventional worldview. And then a series of events led me to having like what some people would call a unity experience, what some people would call like a heart awakening, what some people would call a psychotic break, um, sitting on a trading floor in 2017.
And that, um, destroyed my worldview positively and negatively in about 25 minutes. Um, and then it led into a period of two years of, of really severe treatment resistant depression and dissociation. Um, that then I got out of, uh, in about, about three weeks before lockdown actually, um, slowly rebuilt my psyche, but then ended up researching my experience and understanding why it had happened in both a scientific and spiritual [00:11:00] context, but also becoming a.
Completely obsessed with the concept of transitions and how people transition in life. Um, and then I wrote about it for three years for a lovely wealth manager. And then about a year ago, I, I decided to found my own community dedicated to the exploration of these themes. But often for people within a traditional finance background or professional background that aren't exposed to them or if they are exposed to them, it's kind of in a, a relatively insubstantial and non rigorous way.
Andrea Hiott: And before you had that break or transition, or however we wanna put it, had you had those kind of experiences before just to kind of lead up to this, had you, had you seen the world in, um, contrast in terms of someone is healthy and successful or they're having a, a breakdown? I mean, or was this a, a jolt in your life in terms of those, those sorts of, whatever we wanna call them, categories, I guess.
Tom Morgan: Absolutely. Massive jolt. I had [00:12:00] been, uh, my, I was in an extremely stagnant job being paid a whole bunch of money. So I was, I was facing this kind of cliche disconnect between, you know, money and meaning. Um, I. Energetically, I think I was really suffering. Um, and I was good at ignoring that. I became incrementally more interested in things like Joseph Campbell, who was my, my gateway into a lot of these ideas in a kind of very accessible way.
Got interested in Cole Yung. So the way indications I started meditating, and because I was a productivity bro, I started meditating with a muse, uh, EEG headband, which I think kind of accelerated this process. But, um, whilst I was clearly being drawn to topics like complexity, it hadn't really, it hadn't entered my lived experience in any meaningful way.
I didn't really take any drugs. I didn't take psychedelics. I hadn't really had any mystical experiences. So it was just something that was, that was kind of abstract and conceptual, but [00:13:00] I was being drawn to it.
Andrea Hiott: Did you grow up, I know you were a high achiever. Did you, um, did you, what, what, how would you characterize the way you thought about life, like as a kid and stuff?
Did you have this kind of climb the ladder? Sense of the world.
Tom Morgan: Yeah. Um, not in like a oppressive way, you know, my, both my parents were very smart, kind of upper middle class. My dad had got himself into the upper middle class and I understood the value of an education and trying really hard. And I think that as is pretty common and not really pathological.
I think I was judged based on my academic achievement and from a very early age, I realized it made my parents very happy when I did well academically. Um, and so I don't begrudge that stage. I was, I grew up also in, I, I dunno how common this is, but kind of like a religiously non-religious household. We would Church of England, which meant that we would go twice a year.
You know, church of England stands for Christmas and Easter. Um, and so like I wasn't [00:14:00] explicitly told that God didn't exist or God did exist. It was left up to me very much by my folks, but there wasn't, there wasn't a single trace of mysticism in our household.
Andrea Hiott: Nothing. Nobody was looking at Joseph Campbell?
Tom Morgan: No, no, no interest,
Andrea Hiott: huh. And was it a shock for you when you started getting interested in those kind of things? Do you remember? I mean, what? Joe Campbell. Joseph Campbell was big for me, but it came kind of early. So I wonder, you know, and I was reading Herman Hessa and all this stuff as a kid, did you have anything, any kind of portals like that early on?
Or did it really start once you were in this environment that sounds rather oppressive.
Tom Morgan: No, there were no clues that I can think of. Uh, Herman Hessa as well was a big one. So Arthur was like, like month, A couple of weeks I think, before this happened. Oh. Uh, I think it was, you know, like appropriately, I think it was a call to adventure.
I think I was in the stasis stage of the hero sounds. Mm-hmm. [00:15:00] And call to adventure kind of ironically and inappropriately came through Joseph Campbell, but it was a side of my psyche that was calling to me and. Maybe give myself a bit of compassion. I'm noticing this very weird thing where it comes at 36 people told me it came at 36 and now I'm just noticing it comes at 36.
They're basically like, yeah, well you have, you have like this first 18 years of like basically just growing a personality and then you have this next 18 years of growing executive function. And then once you've got that kind of basic ability to, to be effective in the world, you get a call to invert those gifts in service of something.
And I think that was kind of what I was at, where I was like, maybe I was going off track for a really long time, but maybe it was just that I was getting a set of skills that could make me useless, useful, sorry, in the next stage of my life, you know?
Andrea Hiott: Was it, did it feel like a shock when you got to this place that was successful but it didn't sit well with you?
It didn't. You felt, I mean, it sounds like you didn't like where you were. So how was that experience? [00:16:00]
Tom Morgan: It wasn't a shock. Um, it was more. I look at photos of myself now and then I was pretty overweight. I started getting, I started getting like anxiety attacks, like non-specific ailments. You know, the US medical system was completely unable to get to the bottom of any of it because I think it was ultimately a spiritual and energetic sickness, which has been very interesting for something, for a lot of the things I've looked at since.
And I think a lot of the impulses that I've getting were kind of quote unquote, right, hemispheric, which are emotional, somatic, non-verbal, non-logical, but completely denigrated. So it was more of this like really slow burn where I was like physiologically, and to a lesser degree mentally, I just wasn't doing so well.
And there wasn't much of a dissonance as to why I was like, I'm in like a really boring place, but I also don't see any obvious alternatives, particularly with the amount of money that I'm making. [00:17:00]
Andrea Hiott: Would you call yourself a left brain located sort of person back then, or,
Tom Morgan: yeah. Yeah. I was very, very proud of my intellect, you know, like, not smugly, but I think it was just like, it had got me, you know, to have, I would say, a medium successful place, you know?
Andrea Hiott: So one thing I find really interesting about your work is the way that you balance it. It it's, I mean, it's a cliche for me to say that a lot of people who do the kind of work you do seem to be more right brain or coming at it from a more, I don't know how to describe it. A holistic or even almost psychedelic kind of place, right?
But I feel like you're coming at it, I mean, obviously from finance, but you, you're also in your work talking about this other high agency or I guess what we would associate with left brain sort of structure and the importance of that and so on. So when I was, sometimes when I was reading. Of course I haven't read everything, so you probably talk about this somewhere, but I was wondering [00:18:00] about, you know, how you came to hold that.
Because for me, for example, being in all these different worlds where, where I'm in academia, but I'm also, you know, I was, I've always been a bit esoteric, you know, trying to keep that in control, even as a kid, sensing the world in ways, I realized other people, other people don't. And so I feel like maybe I was making a little bit of a different movement than you.
And for me it's been hard to hold those spaces. How to understand how to be serious academic, how agency, and also still be what I am, which is, you know, really kind of sensitive, overly esoteric at times, abstract, whatever you wanna wanna call it. But I wonder what your experience was like if that was a tension for you or if it, because now it doesn't seem to be a tension and I just wonder how you.
How you hold all that stuff. you, you have this woo factor for, for instance, which is a beautiful way of just putting that out there, um, directly. And I wonder how you got to that place, or if that came naturally for you, or what does all this bring [00:19:00] up that I'm rambling about?
Tom Morgan: Not rambling. Um, it's a great question.
I think, I think I need science, whatever, I dunno whether that's a defective character, but I like to be able to land some aspects of this, the aspects that can be landed in empiricism. And a lot of people say to me, dude, you had this mystical experience, you know, whatever it is eight years ago, no one else is gonna take any of this stuff on board without that level of mystical experience.
And I'm like, maybe, but I would also rather, those people didn't have the profound suffering that I had and I'm, I, I'm hoping that they can. And I think the way that I frame it to myself as to like, why am I doing any of this? Is to essentially make people understand that these emotional, somatic, non-verbal, non-logical impulses that we get come with a high degree of intelligence that can actually be located within a scientific context, which gives people more faith to act in a certain way.
But I am realizing that I think I will probably be never free [00:20:00] of some degree of dissonance. And that's okay. That essentially, like, I'll give you an example. So I was writing a piece about magic and manifestation a few weeks ago, and while it was coming out, another rebuttal piece came out on the telepathy tapes, which I, I dunno to the extent to which people are familiar, but it's, um.
At the moment, there is this huge discourse on the prevalence of liabilities around this like viral podcast, about non-speaking autistic children and their telepathic abilities. And I have been digging into it just out of pure interest. I've interviewed the woman that that produced the podcast. I've interviewed the person that that helped facilitate the, the tests on site.
And for me, there still remain a significant number of yellow flags around it. But also I've been talking for three years about a common knowledge event around the prevalence of psychic phenomena be getting more visible. So I'm constantly holding this tension, which sometimes is really, really unpleasant and difficult.
And sometimes it's just kind of fun and exploratory between like, have I just straight up lost my mind? [00:21:00] Um, and I think you have to maintain a degree of metacognition. And the woo rating on my pieces is one way that I do it. That if I'm going to write about whether the sun is conscious, I have to understand how far that.
Goes from the co prevailing scientific wisdom, or actually in that case, not the scientific wisdom, but the cultural worldview. Right? And so I want to inoculate people against that by saying, I know this is out there. Here it is. But also if you know the one outta 10 Wu, which is how, how much intuitive capability you want to cultivate, you know?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think it's a really super smart, beautiful, clear way of doing a lot. I mean, first of all, just saying there is such a thing as woo, and you're aware of it. And you know, because, and what you said about holding the attention is part of what I wanted to talk to you about it, because I feel like that's the space that we're all trying to open up for each other right now in a lot of different ways, whether it's science, you know, neuroscience and spirituality, or whether, whatever.
I mean, there's [00:22:00] all these kind of seeming opposites that we're trying to understand how to hold that tension. But as you said, or at least in a lot of my experience, people I've talked to, it's not easy to hold that. Tension. I mean, some of it's just group mentality, right? You should be in part of this group or this group, and you don't, you can't fit into both.
Um, so I, I wanna, I wanna
Tom Morgan: respond to that though, which is, this is gonna be a high reating observation. There's something about the time that we we're in, which makes me think of like cognitive labor. There's something about a population struggling with something that seems to do the work, a bit like a Bitcoin mining rig, working on these very different, difficult computational problems that then produces some wealth.
And at the moment, right now, I see so many people I. Because of my position. Right. There's probably selection bias, right? But like I see so many people wrestling with this, this very explicit [00:23:00] tension that I'm like, does this represent a cultural shift where a lot of people are holding this right now, but also the work that they do to hold this is somehow is somehow bringing something through in culture?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. That's great that you scale it up like that because I do think something's happening in terms of, the way we are. We do form communities and groups and the way that does shift what's possible in all these different ways, in a really practical ways, and also in the ways that we can talk and communicate and feel with, with one another.
And I almost, do you feel there's an urgency in there? because you know, it's not I'm talking, I'm talking about this as if it's all good, but I think there's also a way in which people are learning how to hold the tension and manipulate people in a different way too. So there seems.
There seems to be something happening and also a kind of urgency to get clear about what, about what's happening to help each other figure this out. Does that make any sense to you? Do you see anything like that?
Tom Morgan: Tell me more about the manipulation.
Andrea Hiott: Well, this idea of holding paradox, I see it a lot and it's not a new thing, but [00:24:00] you can, you can use language in politics or media or whatever in a certain way where you're, you're straddling that tension, which can kind of produce, you know, it's not necessarily in a bad way, but it's keeping people in a state where there's not a lot of, um, it's not like inspiring people to act for themselves, I guess.
because it's so kind of ambiguous. Scary and it can be done, I think almost consciously in a way, once you've realized that things are so complex in the sense that they do fractualize in so many different ways, and that one position can see things in so many different ways. Does that make any sense at all?
Tom Morgan: Yeah. Well you tell me. Uh, based on my response, which is I think, I think where we are is a period of cultural stagnation where basically for a hundred years more you've had science saying that essentially consciousness [00:25:00] is non-local, or at least that things can be non-local through quantum physics.
Right. For reasons that I'm happy to talk about, like that has sort of been denied from the mainstream. And what I think that has resulted in is this crazy stagnation in some cases in terms of scientific discoveries, but also like in like the psyche, the mass psyche. And I think what we're moving towards is some sort of confrontation with the anomaly that breaks the system, which is that consciousness is non-local, that like our consciousness is not bound by time and space.
And the number of things that's gonna upend is going to be like, I think a global paradigm shift depending on how and why it comes. And I think that like, let's just give an example. Probably the most heretical idea I have is that we, there is a, we inhabit an intelligence system that helps guide us in certain ways.
The most heretical derivation of that [00:26:00] idea for people I speak to is that. If you follow the right path in life, abundant material abundance will result when almost everyone I deal with in, you know, Midtown Manhattan is like, I need to earn the right to that abundance through earning money first. And I think if, if say like, just on that one example, say everyone understood at some level that they had much more professional and economic freedom than they thought they did.
People would not do crappy jobs. Right? Or at least not for very long. And the entire American economy is based on people's desperation and willingness to do crappy jobs that have no mobility of any kind. Particularly over the last 40 years, the mobility in the workforce has been decimated. So people would not do crappy jobs for tiny wages if they realized the system that they inhabited was more intelligent than the market.
Andrea Hiott: There's a lot in there that I would like to unpack. It actually [00:27:00] reminds me of something I saw too, that you said. People are, what is it? Um, pursuing meaning instead of their mortgage. What was the, the phrase Beyond paying the mortgage, right? Meaning beyond paying the mortgage. Isn't that what something you said recently?
Tom Morgan: Yeah. I said the, the tension between pursuing meaning and paying the mortgage.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. So it's a similar attention, but also there's just so much what you said about non-local consciousness and space and time. I mean, I've been working on this idea of philosophy of mind and I've been thinking about space and time in a really different sort of way.
And I think we're coming at this from really different references. So I would, I would like to hear what you really mean by non-local, because Yeah, you just, maybe you could help me understand what you mean. Yeah. What you mean by that. I mean, I've talked to so many different people who mean different things by that, so.
Tom Morgan: Yeah. And, and one of the funny things that I once read that anyone who isn't quantum physicist, using the word quantum in any context is a red flag. And I'm not a quantum physicist. [00:28:00] Um, it's like the bid in the bid in, um, Oppenheimer where he says, you know, do you understand quantum physics? He's like, yes.
And I was like, well, you definitely don't.
Andrea Hiott: Something's wrong. Yeah.
Tom Morgan: So I have a very successful wife and she follows this archetypal paradigm that I see in the community I run, and the community I see, I see where the men are in some sort of spiritual or professional transition, and the wives do not care at all, right?
They're just, they're, they're either slightly patronizing, like, or happy that they've just got an interest. And my wife is the same. And she basically is always like, you know, I spent. 35 hours reading the law of one, which is an alleged alien transmission over Christmas. And she, and I'm telling her I'm reading this, and one, she is like spectacularly disinterested, but no longer to the point of being worried about me, which she used to be.
But also she's like, is this making you a better husband or making you a better father? And so I have to come away from the law of one and say, what is in here that either changes my [00:29:00] worldview to the extent that it makes me a better person or more functional or agent or like, it gives me a set of practices that lead to the same thing.
And so like I find that a lot of these dialogues, people are like, well, did you realize that time isn't linear? And I'm like, I don't care. Like, I genuinely don't care. Like I can get, you can easily get wrapped up in like very abstract theoretical concepts that ultimately, you know, the lightning bolt never hits the ground anywhere.
And so like, you'd be like, well, what does it mean for consciousness to be a non-local? Why does that matter? Why does that impact my ability to pay the mortgage? I'd say like, again, let's go back to the one thing, which is this idea that recurs over and over again. It initially changed my life, so like I'm on, I'm in the line at Newark Security Airport, uh, Newark Airport Security in like 2017.
I listened to this podcast by the, I. By the increasingly problematic, Jordan Peterson, where he's doing, um, he's doing a lecture on the topic of Jacobs Ladder, which is still one of the best Ja, uh, best lectures I've ever heard. [00:30:00] And in it he says, Carl Jung believed that your, uh, your future self, uh, directed you by controlling your interests in the present.
And there was something about that idea that was just electrifying. And since then, I've discovered theories like the Theory of Centropy that says we somehow work towards attractors in the future. And I, I've encountered the work of Dr. Julia Moss Bridge that says we also react to future stimuli. So I'm like, okay.
You now have this kind of brain scrambling thing that time isn't linear, but I'm like, actually, like, how does that manifest in your life? And it manifests in your life in, for me, arguably my central concept, which is this concept of curiosity, which is like something is energetically calling me. Is it from the future?
Don't know. Don't really care. Will I ever find out from the future? Don't know, don't care. But it's the idea that that that things that interest me are coming with a high degree of intelligence. That is how non-local consciousness feeds into that, if that makes sense. There are other really interesting things as well, but it's more like, okay, not everything is, everything is equal.
Not [00:31:00] everything is dead. Not everything is material. There are some things with which come with a higher emotional, uh, emotional inte and, and energetic signature, and I should pursue those things even though they may not seem rationally fruitful.
Andrea Hiott: Do this come with a different visceral feeling for you now that you, I mean, maybe you should even talk a little bit about what, what happened and, um.
Was that idea central to it? Is that when it happened? I thought you said you were in the trade, But in any case, I, I just wanna put this out there before you do, is I, I think we're trying to figure out a different understanding of what a self is and what we even are, you know, where our bodies began and end.
And I mean that in the most practical kind of sense, you know, and all the sciences. I see it. And that relates a lot to, I think, what you're getting at there. So maybe I'll just bracket that and come back to it. But first maybe you could help us understand what this moment was that really changed you so much.
How, how it really changed you. Because when you were just talking, I got a really deep feeling for it. And of course I've read some stuff, but I don't know that everybody [00:32:00] listening has. So,
Tom Morgan: but that was just a, a momentary spark on a podcast. But the moment, the awakening moment itself and awakening sounds a bit douchy trying to avoid those kind of terms, but it's hard.
It, it's kind of. Very hard to articulate. Someone recently, someone recently who has experience with these things told me it was a heart opening that apparently you can have like a head kind of kundalini awakening. You can have like a body one or a heart one, whatever. Like this one felt like very much like a heart opening.
So I was sitting at my desk, I'd been writing increasingly like manically, um, because I'd gone on an elimination diet that had made my sensitivity much, much, much higher. So I'd been on a three month elimination diet. Oh wow. Uh, my sensitivity got way higher. That was manifesting in me writing a lot more.
And then one morning I was just like, oh, the book is me. The book is like an articulation of my unconscious desires. And at that moment I [00:33:00] just popped. I had a great deal of pressure between my eyes and my third eye place. I suddenly became bathed in an an absolutely transcendent love. That was the, the best feeling I've ever had.
It was this com, this, this, this embodied knowing of unconditional love that was totally blissful but very balanced. It wasn't like kind of when people talked about Kundalini awakenings, it's kind of this, this high, high buzz energy. For me, it was just this, the first thing I did actually, it was chuckle. I was like, huh, huh.
And I thought to myself, I know, know, I now know what the Dow is. Oh, wow. And I, and it was funny. I hadn't even really been researching that in any detail. Yeah. And then I kind of wandered around for the day. I could see energy licking off the trees. My senses were ludicrously heightened, my inner monologue went away.
So I was walking around doing things. But there was no sense of narration. And I noticed at one point there was no narration that usually my brain would be be going like, now you need to go to this meeting, now you need to speak [00:34:00] to this person. And I was just floating around doing it. I could feel anyone's emotions within 12 feet of me.
I had, there were a series of artily bizarre synchronicities. Um, and then I went and spent an hour face to face with the CIO of a hedge fund, and we chatted. And so like, I was clearly like completely functional when I went home. My wife was like, you are completely insane and you are having like a, a psychotic break.
And, but there was some aspect of my, I was, I was, you know, I wasn't delusional. I went delusional later pretty rapidly. But like, it was, it was a very pleasant experience. And I think to, to go back to what we were just talking about, it lingered for a very long time afterwards with a high level of certainty that maybe has diminished over time just due to absence of direct experience.
But that the foundation of everything is love. Um, in a way that's, the L word is really, really, really awful and problematic, but I know you are interested in it. But the foundation of everything is ultimately love.
Andrea Hiott: I am interested in it because I think it's so hard for people to use that word for so [00:35:00] many reasons and with good reason even.
But I also feel it's what we're making. You know? It's, it's, it's what we can make. And, um, I'd like to hear two things. I came up. I wonder, did you, had you had that feeling in any kind of little moment, you know, before that moment, did you recognize it when it, when it flooded you or was it some kind of a new sensation?
No. Had there been hints of that feeling?
Tom Morgan: No. Never. I, um, there had been some moments in my early forays with, with meditation that I kind of had a like kind of little blissful feeling down the back of my neck. Um, and I'd been in romantic love a couple of times in my life, but nothing like this, the intensity.
The certainty with which it came was unlike anything.
Andrea Hiott: And you, did that feel connected to the absence of the narrating voice? I mean, did you feel, I'm wondering about your sense of self too. Were you still, how were, [00:36:00] how was that kind of, you know? yeah, I
Tom Morgan: don't remember totally. But what I will say, supervision for the months afterwards, up until the dark night started, I had two months of a very, very expansive self where I was, for two weeks, I was completely paralyzed by my sensitivity.
I ended up, I couldn't exist in Manhattan. I couldn't be in a restaurant. I can
Andrea Hiott: not only imagine,
Tom Morgan: Yeah. Like my sense is I believe, like to be a bit. Reductive about things. I believe I became right hemisphere dominant and effectively my reducing valve got opened up.
Um, and that's why my monologue went away because I became right. He hemisphere dominant. But like I remember going upstate to Pine Bush to try and get outta the city, and I could hear twigs on the trees rustling like 150 feet away. It was like that Bradley Cooper movie, limitless. Like it was a, it was a really, really weird experience.
Andrea Hiott: Hard, yeah.
Tom Morgan: But there had been no precedent for it. And then for the sense of self for the weeks afterwards, I was very, very small. I kept thinking about the line from the Nas [00:37:00] Barkley song. Crazy. Like even my emotions had an echo in so much space that I felt very physically expansive and my head felt very, very small that like, my thoughts were like, I was like, oh, they're my thoughts, you know?
There they are, but I'm, I'm having a much wider, like, it was very lonely. You felt kind of disconnected in some ways, but it was also very, very nice. I was like, a lot of the things that I'm feeling are kind of optional.
Andrea Hiott: As you've talked about this with people and shared it with people, do you, have you gotten a sense of, 'cause it sounds linear, right?
When we talk about this often, we're either healthy or we're not healthy, or we're functioning normally, or we're having a breakdown. And actually, in my experience, it's none of that. I mean, everyone's at, at a different place. In all of this that we're talking about right now, we are at always kind of at a different place.
Even just if we talk about it in terms of the way that our bodies and our brains are functioning and how we've come, you know, how we've made our way up to this point and and so on. And I wonder, in your work if you've have you, does it [00:38:00] still, does it feel like, uh, very stark differences? I mean, you said you, you feel like you're very far away from it now, or have you noticed that people are kind of at different places within this sensory capacity feeling, small feeling whatever, hearing things sensory.
How do you see all that now? Do you see it still linearly?
Tom Morgan: I think. One helpful framing, and that's a big question, but I think one, one helpful framing is the concept of the hero's journey. That at this moment I was like, oh, the Hero's Journey is an instruction manual. And the reason why we've been telling the hero's journey for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer, is because it's a narrative instantiation of the process of complexification.
And so like when people come to me in transition, which they've been doing nonstop for seven years, I, I can usually tell based on the hero's journey structure where someone is that, like if they're in stasis, I can tell they're in stasis by the way they describe their lives. If they're hearing the call to adventure, I can understand that they're hearing the call to [00:39:00] adventure based on what they've suddenly got interested in, which is, you know, typically anything around consciousness.
If they've refused a call, that's usually something that's very, very easy to tell as well. And if they're in crisis blind me, that's easy to tell. And then when they're on the back end of it, I can tell they're there as well because like you can talk about certain things and people can hear you.
Andrea Hiott: Do you feel that related to their sensory experience of the world though?
Because the way you're describing that, it's clear just as someone who started maybe closer to that as a kid, you know, and learned how to con how to deal with it to live, which is, you know, nothing like what you were going through, but just I'm telling you, kind of overall impressions, right. Of of being too sensitive to the world or something.
do you, have you noticed that in your discussions or even in yourself of how your actual being, your body is interacting with everything relating with everything? Based on the way that you're thinking about it or the way [00:40:00] one is thinking about it or what one is even. You know, Joseph Campbell's helped me a lot because it gives you this structure, which is a kind of a left brain thing, although people say that's very right brain, Joe Campbell, you know, that's woo or something.
But there's other ways that you could also structure that. It's not just that way, but that way appeal. so I just, yeah. I wonder how you see the sensory bodily visceral being, uh, relative to these more like scaffolding ideas.
Tom Morgan: No, it's not something that comes up very much because if you, you have to think about who my tribe is, right?
Which is, um,
Andrea Hiott: high agency.
Tom Morgan: High agency, but also that comes with a lot of less hemisphere baggage, right? So like mm-hmm. People that, that it sounds like have had your life. A lot of this is not very surprising. And actually their, their problem. The problem often is dialing down the impulses rather than trusting the impulses.
Whereas for my audience, and me, because of the way that I write and my story, people are coming from the other side, which is that I'm feeling this thing and I don't trust it, [00:41:00] or I'm not feeling this thing at all and I want to be. And a lot of the times, you know, like Bernardo Castro says, you know, the intellect is the bouncer of the heart.
And I think of it like if you give yourself intellectual permission to feel things that can really, really help. And I think that, you know, I've now been running this community of practice for a year and it's really interesting to me to see what's landed with people. And you know, sematic descent has been a really big one for a lot of people, which is this concept of somatic meditation.
The people, you know, our group probably over focuses on thought control. In a me meditative context, I'm like, we don't need to be more mentalized guys. So like. IFS, which is still a bit mental, but has a somatic component, breath work, um, somatic meditation. They're all things that have landed in my community pretty well, I think because they're cultivating an impulse that we haven't had before.
Andrea Hiott: And is that, that connection with the, that sensory connection, that relationality or something? Or what is, what is that exactly? Because you [00:42:00] know, you're, you're also, I I, I can see that you've also understood this other kind of world that can go too far maybe in, I don't even know if they're feeling it, but wanting to fill this connection and being Juan and, you know, all of this stuff too, which Do are, do the people that come to you want that? Or what do, what do you think that the orientation is towards?
Tom Morgan: It's a really good question. I think it, I think once you have someone who's hyper disembodied and rational, that has a taste of the bliss, I. That you can get from a lot of these meditative experiences like the Jans and stuff.
They can go into a, an a, a way overcompensation of basically just chasing states and be like, actually the evolution of my consciousness is all that matters. And I had a very weird moment after my awakening where, where like my psyche knew I had a choice and it offered me this choice. And it was like, uncle Bode Safa, you either gonna stay or you're gonna go.
And I knew with a total certainty that if I stayed, I was going to suffer [00:43:00] in an incomprehensible, in in incomprehensibly awful way. And basically I had this, I saw this fork in front of me and it was like you can either go to the mountains and chase the state and leave your wife or you can stay and suffer and burn.
And I had this um, Viktor Frankl wine. Uh, what is to give a light must burn. Um, and I realized afterwards that, you know, not to make it sound grandiose, but like my specific highly personalized struggle was this nature of midlife transitions for high agency people. And I had to experience the worst possible dumbest, most mistake ridden transition in order for me to then help people understand how to make these transitions.
But to your point, I get quite triggered by spiritual bypassing. Um, and you know, the anecdote I always think of, do you know Jill Bolty Taylor?
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. Yeah. On her treadmill?
Tom Morgan: Yeah. And she talks about how when she was having this full right hemispheric experience of Nirvana, she, she reaches for the phone and tries to call [00:44:00] an ambulance and she can't use the phone.
Oh, yeah. And she's like, wow. Like the
Andrea Hiott: numbers. Yeah.
Tom Morgan: And then she picks up the phone and she's trying to tell her friend she's had a stroke and she's basically going, whoa, because she doesn't not use of language. And I'm like. That actually is like a, a tidy metaphor for the spiritual community that is like, great, you, you are one with everything, but you're not getting shit done.
And I joined a lot of spiritual communities over the last few years to see what, how they fail. And it's essentially, they have no executive function that like, and they'll write really abstracted concepts that don't mean anything. They invent their own language, they don't respond to emails. They're allergic to finance, they're allergic to technology and they don't integrate any of the things that need to be integrated.
They haven't integrated the left hemisphere, which is the whole point.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I really wanna get into that. I, as you know, as I've said three times probably already, that's what really interests me about you. It's because that, I see that a lot too, and I don't know how to exactly talk about it, of how easy it can be to Yeah.
Become like this, what you just described with Jill Belge [00:45:00] Taylor, of just kind of wanting to be with the oneness. And that's why I was talking about that tension that you're holding and that, that space being kind of the challenging space, the hard space. That we're all trying to learn, no matter which side we're coming at it from, because that's that place where you're, you're in touch with the, this love that you described in a way, you know, it's, you, you're starting to learn it's real.
If you haven't known it's real or you're starting to learn how to deal with it. but when you said you, you, you made the choice to get out of this place. Like it was a choice. Either you're gonna do it or not. I like that idea of the path and the journey, but what place do you mean the old you or something?
Or how, what was that place of, of or deny that this is real or?
Tom Morgan: I think that decision was like, you're in Manhattan, you're in really the belly of the beast. You can't, I only realized at the time, I'm really fully accepted later by making a series of decisions that [00:46:00] genuinely nearly cost me my life through suicide was essentially, you can't go back that once.
Once you've had one of these kinds of experiences. The first day I walked back into the office and I did not miss a day's work. I, um, ended up in hospital. 'cause I thought I was having a heart attack. Um, 'cause I, my whole left side of my body went numb, uh, which maybe was the right hemisphere on the other side.
Obviously, like being like, you are moron. You, I've, I've, I've just taken over your entire nervous system and now you're walking back into the office that is killing you, so I'm gonna disable you. Um, you can't go back. And so then you're, you're left with a choice, which is that, do I, do I, do I leave all of this and just work entirely on my own consciousness, which may be a perfectly viable path, or do I bring, do I try and bring what I've just experienced into the context of where I am and work with it that way, which I think is, involves much, much more suffering, to be honest.
Andrea Hiott: That's the tension that you, so you made that choice to hold to do that is what you're saying. You [00:47:00] didn't just turn and go into this other No. Yeah. And when you said you made mistakes, is that what you, is that what you meant? That you
Tom Morgan: No, no. I, the mistakes I made were, uh, hilarious retrospectively, that basically the first thing I did was denied all of my.
History in finance and was like, finance is nihilistic and shitty and therefore I need to go and be a hospice worker. So I went to go and watch people die for a while. I went to Fordham to study social work. I tried to be recruited to help people change jobs. I decided to be a life coach. I embraced all of these, you know, fully right, hemispheric, holistic things, wasn't good at them and wasn't being called to them.
And the universe actually blew up most of these things in increasingly hilarious ways, which made me feel like I was really failing downwards. I panicked and went back into finance, uh, for 11 months, which was the worst 11 months of my life. It was an even more abstracted version of the abstracted job that I was doing.
Um, and so what I think I was doing was that my [00:48:00] ego, my left hemisphere was still trying to control the evolutionary process rather than surrendering into it. And it was like, okay, dude, you don't have any meaning. And I remember sitting in a. Really urine filled apartment in the Bronx for an assisted living facility, reading a man with late stage dementia, the Lord of the Rings, because someone said that he liked the Lord of the Rings and he just couldn't focus on anything that I was doing.
And it was this dark room and it was intensely depressing. And I remember thinking to myself, why isn't this meaningful? Why does this feel terrible? Why is this making me more mentally ill than something that should be like this? This really transcendent thing? And I realized laterally, it's not a self-sacrifice is a really dumb path.
Nature would never optimize for self-sacrifice. Nature optimizes for service and contribution where you are doing something that makes you incredibly joyful but also integrates to whole. And that
Andrea Hiott: there's a lot of nuance in that. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that's a really [00:49:00] important thing you just said.
Yeah. 'cause a lot of people think self-sacrifice is service.
Tom Morgan: Yeah. That's very
Andrea Hiott: important, what you just said. I just wanna stick a, you know, point that out. That's actually something to explore.
Tom Morgan: It's why it's so difficult and it's integrative to your point. And I think it's, it's a, alright. Yeah. Let's, let's do this.
So like, the, the reason why this is hard is 'cause of a paradox, and I know you're interested in paradox, right? Yeah. Which is that the definition of complexity is something that's hyper differentiated and hyper integrated. Your body is full of a bajillion, differentiated parts that are seamlessly integrated into the whole.
In order for you to understand the difference between contribution and self-sacrifice, you have to understand the contribution of integration. And to understand the concept of integration, you have to understand whole lot, you know, like, at least in my opinion, right? So the idea is, is every stage of evolution transcends and includes the whole.
So you have molecules that become cells, the cells become tissues, the tissues become [00:50:00] organs, the organs become a human, and the human becomes a culture. The really, really fun part of this is to imagine that we are not the end of that process and that there are levels of intelligence and complexity above us.
The first and most pressing of which is that if we find a means of integrating our personality into the whole, there will be a positive integrated outcome, maybe in the form of a meaningful coincidence, like a synchronicity. So let's make this all less abstract, which is like if you do what you love in service of what you love, abundance will follow.
Which goes back to our previous thing of like actually, like you need to get that bit ripe first, and when you do the doors open, Joseph Campbell follow your Bliss and Doors will open where there were only doors. The difficulty, which is why you're so smart to stick a pin in it, is how do you know? How do you, like most of us are disembodied or dissociated in some degree, so we're like, okay, I think I know what makes me happy, although for some people even that's really, [00:51:00] really hard.
But how do I know it's integrated? How do I know this is where I'm being called to go? And that process is often like disabling difficult,
Andrea Hiott: which is what makes sense for me. Listening to you having to go through all those kind of fumblings, it's almost like a random, like if you were gonna model it, it's just throwing the darts kind of randomly until you start to get the pattern or something.
it, it kind of makes sense and it's why I was asking what your choice was. Like if you, if you had chosen, okay, I'm not gonna be a good person now, or I'm going like, sacrifice myself because that's what love is, it could have, it could have, it could have. And I've, I have read and seen you talk about a bit like having this kind of year or something where you were trying to be, you know, in this, in this state that didn't quite fit.
So I find that tension really, really interesting and really, really helpful. I could imagine for people, because, because of this way we still try to think either or, you know, you're either pursuing a financial career and making a lot of money, but miserable or you're, you know, serving the world, living in love and [00:52:00] helping people.
And that feels like something that's gotta shift right now in this tension that we've been talking about. That
Tom Morgan: I think it's the most important.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Tom Morgan: Yeah. I think, I think you've, you've hit on the most important thing, but let me explain how I messed it up, right. Which is that effectively finance, Tom was I.
Enjoying it ish. Sort of stopped enjoying it. But that's sort of this differentiation path, right? Like what's good for me? And then there was this integration path, which is like, what's good for me is not important anymore. I'm just going to like, try and explicitly pursue things that are meaningful on paper.
And then I had this ketamine infusion, uh, this ke infusion fusion. I had this Academy Fusion therapy, which we could talk about in more detail, but one of them seemed to be, one of them was an express elevator trip to hell. The other ones were joyful drug experiences. The express elevator to hell was seemingly the thing that got me to my, to my rock bottom.
After that point, I got a dumb job back in finance. But what I was doing during that point was I then encountered the work of Dr. McGilchrist and a bunch of other [00:53:00] ideas that because I had a heart sense for truth. Struck me as intrinsically true and also corresponded to my experience in a both scientific and woo sets, they were integrative of my perspectives.
When I face those ideas, I can't not share them. If I discover a model of the world that I think is utterly revelatory, like McGill, Chris's, it's the best model of the world I've ever encountered. My personality will not allow me to just sit in a study and read that and be like, Hmm, that's interesting. I need to tell as many people as possible.
And so I loved the idea of researching and distilling Ian's work because he, God bless him, he's extremely long-winded at times. Like his books are like, you know, the matter with things is 1500 pages long. And so I was performing a service by compressing it and probably botching it. But then I sent it out to my old audience and, uh, one of the only a hundred people, right?
And then one of the recipients went back and was like, we will hire you to do this within a financial context.
Andrea Hiott: Hmm.
Tom Morgan: Which is [00:54:00] absolutely impossible. That should not have happened. And he was like, we will invent your dream job. And for me, it was one of the most divine things that had ever happened, but that it was essentially like you, you did this paradoxical trying not to try, right?
You did what you couldn't not do. You exhibited a high level of agency by using your finance synthesis abilities to, to create content that respected people's time. You put it out into the world and the world was immediately like that was an integrative act. And since that point, I've leaned even ever more and more and more into bringing these issues into a finance audience.
But I didn't, I didn't find that myself. Right? It was this act of surrender, which is a word, another word I hate, but like there was this calibration that I didn't find that out. I got kind of forced into that discovery.
Andrea Hiott: Gosh, that's wonderful. Um, it's funny you brought up Bernardo Cash Tripp, and. Then you've and I talked to him about some of the things you just talked about, which is weird.
And also Ian McGills the same [00:55:00] because I have this kind of thing with him and his books are sitting right here, the ones you're just talking about. and both those conversations relate a lot to what that I've had with them. Relate a lot to what you've just said. And I think that's actually the, the hardest and the most important thing.
What you just demonstrated there that, because if you had been just as you did do, I guess for a little while trying to do what you think a good person does or what you think other people would do to do, to be something, to get something that's very different than what you did. And there's this kind of complex systems randomness of it in the sense that all you needed was that one person to connect and open up that that door.
And it never would've happened if you hadn't gone there. But that whole framing is very dissonant, I think for people. And it's even, I guess that's what you're doing in your work is trying to put some. Language on that. And that's that tension, right? Of how to be present with yourself and still, it's disciplined.
It's hard, it's not easy to do what you did. That's hard to read all those books and distill all that stuff. And I've [00:56:00] seen that in your work too. You do that often. You do put a lot of work into it, but it's coming from a place where you can do that. Does, is this making any sense? Like there's something very rich about that, that I feel like is very hard to communicate, as not a formula, but also still a pattern that you do notice and it gets easier with time.
Tom Morgan: Well, I, yeah, but I think you used a word that I want to correct, which is randomness, which is, I think this is the opposite of randomness. Like, you know, you have one view of the universe that is like with an infinite number of roles at the dice. You had to roll, you and me, you had to roll this conversation, right?
You know, just math says this has to have happened. A million times. That's why there's an infant number of these conversations where I'm gonna say fish now instead of saying elephant now. Right? Like, I get it. I understand that theory, but the one that I, I've gravitated to much, much more is this urban laslow idea of the holotropic attractor, which you could just sub in the word love for that.
But the i, the idea that the universe trends towards integration, wholeness, and [00:57:00] complexity, that like there is this tropic force where everything dies. And this is syn tropic force where everything's complexifying and getting more conscious at the same time. Uh, why? You can have 50 different reasons for that, but that means that your decisions set is not random.
So when I was sick and monstrously depressed, I was fully dissociated from the world, and therefore I had no access to any kind of energetic frequency that would guide me. Now, five years out from the ketamine. I have quite a high level of energetic sophistication relative to my own past, but probably like hilariously low relative to someone like you.
But where someone says to me, read this book, and I'm like, yes, right? Or go meet this person. And I'm like, yes. Like one of my old memories pre-crisis was the book Complexity by like, it's a book about the founding of the Santa Fe Institute. And I did not think that was an interesting book, but I tore through it, like my life depended on it.
I was up late reading it. And then right at [00:58:00] the end, in the last chapter, there's a book about the game of life and how life is a balance between order and chaos. And that idea ended up becoming transformational to me. But there was something in me that knew I had to read the rest of this boring book first, and it was this idea of this future attractor guiding me to the end of this book and whether it needs to come from the future or not.
It's the idea of like, you know, one of the members of our community and she's a. Spectacular human if you haven't interviewed her. But, uh, Anna Lako, she talks about this idea of keeping an energy diary, which out of all the practices I've studied, I think is probably the most applicable, which is at the end of every day, look at like the thermodynamic signature of your life.
Did you have a cool conversation with Tom or was it really draining? Right? Or like, did this activity really like fill you up or, or drain you? But then you also have to integrate this idea of integration, which is, was it of service somehow. It's very hard to do in our culture, but it's like just playing drums in your garage is not an integrated act.[00:59:00]
It has to be offered out there somehow. And that's the part of our worldview we're missing because materialist science doesn't understand that there's a guiding force, which again is probably like a non-local consciousness thing. Just apply everything up.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. And again, there's a tension here I wanna hold because.
I think it's right what you said about the randomness, but it's also not how I meant it because I tend to think we have to hold two things in mind at once, which is like the process and the ongoing as it is, and then the way we sort of model it and when we model random randomization does make a lot of sense.
I mean, I, I'm thinking even in terms of like computer software, um, things that I've been working on lately where you, you, you, you use a model and you go outside of what you, the model you might usually use, but that's not actually. The life that you're living, that I, I think the synchronicity and all the stuff you just said is making sense, but sometimes we need these structures that we kind of overlay on them.
And so it reminds me of like a discussion I had with Carl Frisson [01:00:00] about entropy and how you're maximizing entropy and minimizing entropy. Entropy at the same time. And we almost need a language to be able to even understand that because it just kind of makes your brain brain blow up that you would be doing both at once.
But again, that's getting outta that linear mindset and it's being very careful with the words, which I wasn't, which is why it's great you brought up random, because we do tend to mistake which world we're talking about when we're communicating. That's one little thing. But the other thing that's come up a few times when you've been talking is this distinction between your physical health or your mental health or you know, we've been talking about the brain and I would really like to hear about how this sits with you and how you've.
Felt about this after. 'cause you had ketamine, you had medicine, you had help, in a traditionally physical way. And we talked about Jill Bolty Taylor. And that was literally like, you know, it was happening to her on all those levels at once. And, And we put this model of, okay, her, you know, she was [01:01:00] having a stroke and so this was happening in her brain. And we have to look at it that way to understand it. It's helpful. And then there's another model, which is the one, maybe more the one we're talking about, which she also puts on it with her TED talk of understanding the world in a different way and opening up, you know, and there's all that going on at once.
And I wonder, in your experience, especially coming at it more, you know, or, or being able to hold this tension in the way that you do, how did that all sit with you? Because, maybe at some point you thought, okay, I really need to go get help, I need medicine. And how did that integrate with all this other.
Stuff that often is put in a different shelf, even though what I'm trying to say here is that I know it's the same process, but we assess it from different points, right? We come at it through Joseph Campbell or we come at it through going to see the doctor, for example.
Tom Morgan: I mean, you know, such an insightful question because like when this first happened to me, um, I was, I, I became delusional very quickly because I was like, I had no, no narrative framework to put any of this experience [01:02:00] around.
You know, I was a banker from Manhattan and, um, the, I went to see the head of psychiatry at Columbia and he looked me dead in the eyes and said, if I stimulate this part of your scalp, you'll believe in God. You know, there is no there, there you are bipolar and we are now in symptom management for the rest of your life.
And then the spiritual people were like, you just need to meditate through this crisis. Or actually the, the smart one said, the last thing you should do is meditate. But actually you are now on a path to enlightenment. Just stick it out and whatever you do, don't take meds. Um. I ended up taking the meds out of fear, I think.
But I am still on psychiatric medication. Like I am the happiest. I, I cannot imagine being happier. I have a, a stable job, which I, I've founded my own company. Like I have two children, um, you know, thriving in every conceivable way, but I'm still on psychiatric meds. And for me that's a, that's a point of both shame and dissonance, where it's like, if I, if I stopped taking those meds, if I, you know, [01:03:00] screwed around and found out, and the data is not great, if you go off psychiatric meds as to what happens to you.
Like, do I suddenly develop these traumatic superpowers, which I've, which I've, which I'm suppressing, or do I go back into the abyss? Which is why I'm like not super willing to, to play around with this when I have so many responsibilities to my family. And, you know, my experience during the crisis was that some, some psychiatric meds were unequivocally awful.
Uh, a lot of the antipsychotics. Made me considerably more insane. Um, I had this one medication called Latuda, which meant that I didn't dream for nine months. Um, and I, it was clearly like blocking the unconscious, which made me physically functional, but like wildly dissociated. And so it makes me think that there are certain medications, particularly new ones, which kind of address symptom, not cause, um, but like my life got stabilized by the [01:04:00] meds.
And so holding this kind of physical and spiritual, if you'll allow a digression. I'm kind of obsessed with Michael Levin at the moment. Have you run into his work?
Andrea Hiott: I've had like three talks with Michael Levin on, oh shit. Okay.
Tom Morgan: I should need to go back and listen over
Andrea Hiott: the past few years. So yes, I know his work.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Tom Morgan: I need to go and listen to him. Thank you. I should know that. Well,
Andrea Hiott: I'm, there's so many things to listen to with Michael Levin, so I'm not saying you should go listen to it, but I'm just saying it's actually everyone you've brought up I've talked to and years ago, so that's really cool actually, that we have those references.
Tom Morgan: Well, these guys are on the leading edge, like legit, like I think so. Like, and anyway. He's made me think, you know, 40% of Americans die from cancer and heart disease. Um, and we've solved all the small stuff like the, the, the bacteria and the virus stuff. Like anything where you can go smaller and solve it.
We've solved it all. Reductive medicine pretty much. Right? People still die from it, but like, so 40% of Americans are dying from cancer and heart disease, which strike me as possibly energetic conditions. You know, the ha the heart is an electromagnetic transmitter and receiver above all else. [01:05:00] By eleven's view cancer is a, a bioelectrical condition, right.
To the degree that I understand it. And so you have this angle where it's like the bits matter, right? The bits really, really matter. Like if, if I break my leg, I'm not praying it away. But you also have this holistic understanding which needs to be incorporated. That like maybe the meds stabilize you in the moment, but like, you know, there's some data that if you have a psychedelic trip and you don't change anything about your life, you'll be back in the hole in nine months, right?
Like, and it's this same idea that like the doors of perception open. They allow you to access the holo, tropic, attractor or love or whatever it is, and then you allow that force to guide you by keeping those doors of perception a little bit more open than they were, but not too open. That's how you integrate these experiences, and that's what I'm interested in doing from an agency and a community perspective.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you so much for talking about that, because in my experience, there's a lot of people I love who take [01:06:00] these kind of medications or, you know, there's the, the whole, there's a whole realm of different things that people take medication for that they think they shouldn't, whether it's depression or, or that they, you know, that we try to put into these boxes or that we really need or that like we don't know how to handle.
You know? I mean, are we crazy? Are we not crazy? Like, because those very, very categories are so, what I think of as dichotomies that don't, you know, they, they're never the same all the time and trying to hold the tension that we've been talking about as part of. something that really motivates me is trying to understand that exactly what you just described and what I've seen in a lot of people I love even right now, and where there's not a clear answer always about that and about finding the right balance and the right medication, and even thinking of medication as if it's some kind of external thing.
You brought up leaven and, and all those, all those boundaries are even getting very blurry about, I mean we put coffee in our bodies, like all these things we're [01:07:00] putting in our bodies and we kind of delineate, here's things that are legal and not legal. Here's things that are medicine and not medicine.
All of that can get, I think so confusing and overwhelming for people, but also just on the everyday level as I see it. And I, I don't know if you've experienced, but it can just be when you have to be with yourself and ask and think of these questions. Depending on what you're gonna lock into and, and what the world is saying, you could find any story, right?
You could find a story that tells you you should go off everything. As you were saying, you can find a story that tells you you have a disease and you're always gonna have to take the same medication for the rest of your life. And that ambiguity, that tension, I find incredibly uncomfortable. We need to help each other with that.
I think, it's awful.
Tom Morgan: It was some of the worst experiences in my life of dealing with the side effects of each new drug and also the hope that each new drug was gonna save me. Yeah. Uh. It's a really, really dark time. Now, some of them made me faint and some of them, you know, some of them gave me acne so bad I couldn't even look people in the face.
Like it was an incredibly awful [01:08:00] exploratory process for which there was no psychological support. 'cause the only psychological support at the time was coming from the same psychiatrist that was prescribing things. And psychiatry for me was extraordinarily damaging as a therapeutic modality. 'cause it was asking me to, to turn a scalpel, to turn the intellectual scalpel on myself.
Um, the only solution I can think of, which is substandard, but better than standard of care, is this concept of community. Like where you have very, like what I have with leading edge, which is a very ground, we don't have a lot of people in crisis, right? Like, because that's not the point of the group. But there is this idea of like, it isn't either or, and it shouldn't be either or.
And there shouldn't be any stigma for you being on SSRIs. But also, like I was told. Definitively multiple times I was not getting better from a place of deep darkness and very low human functioning that effectively I was disabled. I remember getting up to go to work one day and just crumpling at the foot of the bed being like, I was [01:09:00] like a high functioning managing director, and now I am mentally ill and disabled for the rest of my life.
And this state of mind is something I'm not getting out of. And really only it was a hail, hail Mary of ketamine that did get me out of it. That I, you know, my wife, my wife stayed with me. God knows why, because I was, she was like, if I can get 30% of him back, I will stay with him. And at the moment she was on 0% and she stayed.
I was on 0% of humanity for more than two years.
Andrea Hiott: I think you're loved. So thank you. But it's, uh, it's very important this, this issue and this, I. Messiness and ambiguity and that we need to help each other. And it's not only with these kinds of issues, I think it can be with anxiety, it can be with depression, it can be all these things that we've categorized as if they're somehow outside of everyone's experience at, at different times.
And finding the right, the right balance and how that can go [01:10:00] wrong. And I don't know, I just, I feel like it's such a messy thing right now that we, we need to help each other with. And, um, so I just, I appreciate that you, that you shared it. And also I wonder about, you know, it can go the other way too, where, because it could just be, you know, like in a high power.
You, you, you, you work with a lot of people who are very successful and there's a lot of stress and anxiety that motivates us too. And do you find in your. In these kind of communities that it's a similar process. Um, I mean, just to try to kind of make it a little more level like this, this, this medication and stuff can sound so crazy.
I'm going crazy or I need medication, but I, I actually see that pattern playing out in a lot of things. Even what I was talking about with the woo factor and spirituality and, you know, like how this, this, this place where there seems things that are [01:11:00] taboo or that if we're told we're this way, then we must be, you know, forever that way.
Um, do you see that too from the other side of, of people who are very high functioning executively, like have a high executive functioning and like the motivation factor for that? Um, do, do they worry they'll lose that if they start opening up to community in a way, even though they might be anxious and and miserable?
Do, do you know what I mean?
Tom Morgan: Yes. So precisely know what you mean. I think that. Wall Street is probably the worst place in the world for this. That effectively, like if you even start to express an interest in something like consciousness, your lp, you will probably imagine that your LPs think you have lost your edge because like that, that has this implicit positive sum mentality to it.
And actually capitalism, late stage capitalism is intrinsically zero sum. And so there's this idea that if you start to express interest in more holistic topics, [01:12:00] there's this fear probably well placed that like, you know, Tom just lost his edge. He's now having a midlife crisis and we've gotta redeem our capital straight away.
Or he's not gonna be able to out trade the next guy or whatever. And also the guys on Wall Street that are the highest, who are most of the people I interface with? Often very good at being left hemispherically abstracted, and very good at climbing hills like from a fitness perspective, which means that they're, they end up on very, very, very tall hills where they have to sacrifice a lot of fitness to get to the next one.
But also they need to move to a completely different form of cognition, which is they need to move from left hemispherically oriented to right hemisphere or write hemispherically oriented, which often precipitates a breakdown. I, um, I wrote yesterday this thing about Levin's work, sorry, um, Hoffman's work where like the more abundant society becomes, the more of reality we can see.
And what I think that means is that the doors of perception are opening on mass, that you have this higher level of neurodiversity. People [01:13:00] should be getting more curious, and it should, and it might be manifesting in A DHD, which is Dr. Lar LA's view, that like there's a hyper curiosity aspect to a DH adhd, which is like, we live in this incredibly abundant environment.
Therefore our children are going to be drawn to explore an enormous number of unconventional things. It just makes sense. That's totally logical. There should also be a wise, uh, rise in interest in mystical experience. And more people should be having mystical experiences because we have the safety to have them.
And then the thing that I'm noticing is that people with a lot of means, um, for better or for worse, um, the luxury psychedelic retreat is now a societal marker. And this is done with higher and lower integrity. But most people I know, I would say the majority of people I know, and certainly 80 to 90% of the people that I speak to on a daily basis have done psychedelics and organized psychedelic retreats.
Um, and the integration of those experiences, it's a topic that you can talk about for hours, but it's more just emblematic of this idea of this. Security [01:14:00] leading to the experience of a, a wider bandwidth of, of consciousness experience. Um, and that, that that does create havoc and we don't have the containers to, to integrate those experiences.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think that would be another our talk, but I think that's an important thing too, that we've created these seemingly kind of safe spaces in the sense of nobody's gonna laugh at you if you're a high functioning executive, if you go do a psychedelic retreat because you just can kind of put it in a little box now and so many other people are doing that, that we see in the media or whatever it must be.
Okay. Um, and then yeah, but still, when it comes to how we're integrating that overall or when we go too far or when we start needing that, you know, or when we're sort of losing ourselves, like all of that gets, I think, rather confused too. But there's two things. You brought up curiosity, and I know that's important in your work, and I think the piece you're just talking about was the fog of war one, or.
Where you're talking about this kind of space of perception that we [01:15:00] have and we're, we're extending that and it reminded me of something, I can't remember which book it's in, but that like we can, we, we, we always get what we can handle. And what you were saying is something I've thought about a lot of, of, I do feel like, and that maybe goes back to what we talked about at the beginning.
We're in this space where we're pushing the boundaries of what we can handle and that is gonna change whatever we are as humans, as this planet. Uh, and yet, yeah, it's a dangerous space. It's a kind of edge working, isn't it? Um,
Tom Morgan: it's, it's incredibly dangerous, particularly when people, very achievement oriented people.
Blow their filters out through, you know, like Vim Hof breath work, which drives their nervous system, or they've never done meditation and they go on a 10 day silent pass, a retreat. Like, I think that was part, that was one part that contributed to my awakening was doing the EEG meditation. And I ended up meeting this woman, will it be Britain?
She's basically like the only person in America that focuses on adverse meditation events at scale that I can find.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, wow. Because people, [01:16:00] people don't talk about that.
Tom Morgan: People don't talk about it at all. They're like, yeah,
Andrea Hiott: it's really there. You see it even in, you know, in science stu studies, but nobody talks about it.
Tom Morgan: Well, this is the thing that's really interesting to me, which is that, um, now in that same Jordan Peterson lecture, I think he talks about how in like Siberian shamanism, you, the person in the community would get the shamanic call and then they would be put in like a hut for two years and a lot of them would die.
Right. And then in the monasteries, people would show up at the monasteries and like the monks would be like, certain number of people are just gonna go nuts and never get better, right? Like there was this, there was this omelet breaking eggs mentality, the like. This, this was really dangerous territory and we don't have any chrysalis structure for it in modern culture.
In fact, we do the reverse, which is we pathologize and we're like, who has the time at 36, let alone 44 with a family of four, possibly the sole breadwinner to go into a hut in Siberia for two years. But it, there may not be any other way of doing it. [01:17:00] Like that's the thing that I find nuts is that like to break down someone's entire materialistic worldview and to integrate this anomaly, this move from left to right, like it nearly killed me.
Many, many times. And it took a very, very long time and it was messy and awful. And I, I don't have any sense for how uniform that experience is, but I know it's not isolated. And most people are like, it's just gonna be a three week period. They tell their wives and they tell themselves that it's gonna be this three relatively smooth transition from one life to another, and it might usually be three years.
And there's an enormous amount of shame attached to that timeframe. But I'm like, in the scheme of your life, that's nothing. And it will completely transform the living of your life. But people like, uh uh, people attach this crisis label to it, which I'm like, is hugely stigmatizing and actually leads a lot of people to kill themselves either before they make the leap because they think they're shame in it, or during the leap because there's no support.
Andrea Hiott: I think that's a very, very important, important point that the way we see [01:18:00] time needs to change a bit because it is our life. It's weird that we even think, I mean that whole mentality of. Okay, I'm gonna do it in three weeks and then I'm gonna be better. Like that whole notion of of time, rather than it being, it's a continuity.
It's not gonna ever stop or start, it's already started and it's not gonna stop. And it's kind of like, how can you handle it the best? How can you ease into it the best? It'll be different for everyone. You mentioned the shamanic idea and we're, we, a lot of us are trying to learn from indigenous communities and from our past and stuff, and there is something about what you described of certain people.
Maybe we need to give them that space to do that and provide them what they need and figure out as societies how to do that. And all of that's probably part of how we figure out this, this edge work and, and where we are. But before we go, when you were talking, I sort of felt that I, I don't know how to ask you about this without it getting kind of.
I don't know. Weird. But do you, do you feel like this is an act of love that you, [01:19:00] that you have for yourself or for life or for what's possible for these All of us, um, in the work that you're doing and in, in continuing and holding that tension and going through all this, I mean, how does that, how does that relate the word love?
Again, just before we go, I want, would be interested to hear how it feels.
Tom Morgan: I think, I think love collapses the paradoxes that we're focused on, which is like a lot of this, um, a lot of what we're talking about is about power, I think, and how much power and agency you have in the world. And I think if you ask the questions, there's some great questions, which is like, if you had to do what you love in service of love, what would that be?
Right? Like it, that's differentiation and integration. Or like if you had a superpower and you could locate your own superpowers, but you can only use it in service of love. Where does that constrain you in a deeply positive way, right? And, and so that collapses the [01:20:00] paradox because there shouldn't be any difference between what you love and in service of love.
But we tend to think in terms of those binaries, right? And I think that's a really helpful thing for people to ponder, which is that, you know, what can I do for an unlimited period of time that I think has a tangible benefit to other people? And a lot of people really struggle with this, but often it's like, I'm really, I'm in the middle of a question right now.
You know, can people pay the mortgage and pursue meaning? I'm gonna write about that. I'm gonna communicate about that idea because it's top of other people's mind. And that might jog things, might clear some fog of war for other people, it doesn't have to be heroic. And Anne Law's philosophy is just structure these tiny experiments.
But if you have that framing, it collapses the paradox. And I can be a little bit more thinky about it, but like I. I now have this daily routine. I write for four hours in the morning, um, about these topics that I care about, and my audience tells me that they care about 'em too. Then I roll jiujitsu at lunchtime, which is deeply embodied.
I think it helps my [01:21:00] cognition, but I'm not sure. And then I meet people all afternoon in what is almost unanimously thermodynamically positive ways. So everything in my life is a positive sum game, and I emerge at the end of every day with more energy usually than I went in, which shouldn't be possible,
Andrea Hiott: right?
And
Tom Morgan: so, like everything is an act of love. Like everything I do is an act of love and everything is positive sum. So like, I think that's the, that's the aim of the game is to get to something approximating that.
Andrea Hiott: That's, yeah, that. Thank you. And I think when you say collapse, like collapse the paradox, but, and maybe what you mean, or, or maybe that's similar to how I think of it.
We just use different words, but I think of it as embracing or holding, opening the space for those, all those polarities. Because when you do that, that feels like, I mean, love is not a feeling, right? The way we're talking about it, it's more of a, what is it? It's a, it's, it's, it's letting that, it's letting that paradox be what it is, but being very present and active with it.
Then, [01:22:00] then some, something, some kind of relation that you're making, um, begins to feel to me like maybe what you described as that love of. Where, you know, the, the, the knots of tension, um, can be there, but they're not the focus. You're not focusing on them. Does that, I mean, when you say collapse, you don't mean like, everything just goes away.
I mean, the tensions are still there, it's just there's multiplicities, right? They're not binaries anymore. Or, or, or, or maybe you see it differently, but
Tom Morgan: No, you're right. I think it's, when I say collapse, the tension, I mean the, the differentiation between those two sides of the paradox kind of go away.
Andrea Hiott: Were you trying to decide between one or fit one to the other? Yeah. That, all that stuff, yeah.
Tom Morgan: For me, writing about the tension of holding scientific skepticism around these woo ideas, that's doing what I love in service of love. 'cause I think it helps other people and it's difficult right there, there, there's a creative tension that comes out of that exercise, which I've learned to love.
I've learned to love that labor. Um, [01:23:00] but there's also, you know, like I meet a lot of people, a lot of people that I'm trying to coax into these routines rather than these destinations. And a lot of them don't feel like they deserve it. Like, I couldn't live my, that, that's so like self-indulgent, like to live my life that way.
And I'm like, well, I pay the mortgage, right? Like I've structured, I've structured a container that pays the mortgage to allow me to do whatever I want to do every day. Because what I, everything I do is in service, also in service of something else.
Andrea Hiott: That's that service, uh, selfishness thing too. That's different that, you know, being of service or, you know, it's not the same as being selfish or doing what's not selfish, right?
To be in service. I mean, those, those things too need to be pulled apart.
Tom Morgan: They're awful words like surrender. I think one of the words I like that someone told me is a contribution, right? It's a contribution, right? You are contributing something to the whole, like, and it's not sacrifice and it's not service.
I hate service. 'cause that makes me think of like a waiter, right? Mm-hmm. And I hate self-sacrifice. 'cause that makes me think of like Christianity, right? Like so, [01:24:00] mm-hmm. I think these, it's like, what are you contributing? Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: And do you, do you see that as part of this World Wise Web that you've written about that, is that a a, is that part of the, whatever, the animating sort of ongoing material of that, the fluid, whatever it is?
Tom Morgan: Yeah, I think it's, it's born out of pragmatism, which is, I don't think the, the current system has not collapsed yet and may never collapse. But I think it's going to, uh, I think it's going to probably in the next couple of years actually. But, um, if that isn't the case, I don't necessarily care. I don't have a dog in the fight.
I just don't believe that you can go out and play positive sum games in a zero sum system. I've just seen everyone going into conscious capitalism or trying to be a life coach or trying to start a, a holistic business. They just get eaten and, but there's no, there's no chrysalis for, for things to incubate before they can be strong enough to compete in the external world, if indeed they ever can.[01:25:00]
And so I'm like. Like irresponsibly bullish on these concept of walled gardens based around, you know, 150 Dunbar's number people focused on consciousness for high agency people, where you are getting individual high agency people into better niches that you know what they love in service of what they love.
Mm-hmm. You give them a transitional mechanism for that and you just see what emerges. Like, I just don't think those
Andrea Hiott: attractors that you talk about a lot of that. Yeah. I think that's a powerful idea.
Tom Morgan: Yeah. I think you help people dial down the left hemisphere so they can follow the right, and that's the purpose of the community.
Then the system revolves, resolves itself spontaneously rather than you having to have some sort of grandiose, here's my design for meta capitalism that no one's ever gonna embrace, or it's gonna create like a dystopia
Andrea Hiott: and you do whatever you did when you I don't know how to, how to say it, but you listened to yourself and you did that.
Hard work of reading all the Ian McGill crest and presenting it to people to help them. And then, you know, tho those kind of moments too, which, which don't necessarily the attract are [01:26:00] there, but they're not the same attract that you might see other people following.
Tom Morgan: Well, it shouldn't be
Andrea Hiott: right
Tom Morgan: then.
Wouldn't. Oh gosh,
Andrea Hiott: no. What were you gonna say?
Tom Morgan: Well, then it wouldn't be complexity. If you are doing the same thing as everyone else, the system wouldn't be complex. It's your bliss.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. But that's very hard, I think, for people to hold, especially if you've never studied complexity in, in this kind of thing.
And so it's, it's great that you can put it into kind of ev different words, you know? But I, but that's what I felt when you were saying is that the attract will are there, but there's a certain kind of way of being dancing, holding the body, whatever it is, juujitsu that you know, lets you feel that. And it's different for everyone.
We're all in different positions. Yeah. Well, Tom, thanks so much. You need to go. We both need to go and I, but I just wanna tell you thanks for what you're doing, appreciate your work, appreciate your being. You're holding the tension, so thanks a lot and thanks for today. Thanks for talking to me.
Tom Morgan: Thank you.
Your questions were amazing.
Andrea Hiott: All right, be well. Thanks. [01:27:00] Bye.