My Internal Family System: Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris & The Weeknd
Four mental models I channelize in my life: yogic calmness, intellectual maximalism, clownish absurdity & embodied magnetism.
Note to readers: welcome to another Meta Mystic day — Tuesday this week! Yesterday we did a late Mother’s Day celebration so this got a bit delayed. I hope you enjoy this piece with some self-reflection prompts at the end.
Introduction: The Minds We Borrow
Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic framework that suggests the mind is not singular, but composed of multiple “parts”—each with its own voice, motivations, and wounds. However, in this article I’m going to apply this term in a new way: as mental models shaped by the people I’ve spent years listening to, watching, and admiring.
Neuroscience gives us a useful lens here. The human brain is, in many ways, a prediction machine—constantly building internal models of the world to guide behavior. Through processes like observational learning and neural mirroring, we don’t just understand other people—we simulate them. We internalize their patterns of speech, their ways of reasoning, even their emotional responses. Over time, repeated exposure strengthens these circuits. What begins as admiration becomes imitation. And eventually, imitation becomes identity.
We don’t just consume voices.
We become them—or at least, parts of us do.
So what I’ve realized is that my psyche isn’t just populated by “parts” in the therapeutic sense. It’s populated by internalized avatars of influential figures—voices I can channel in different contexts: intellectual, social, relational, and spiritual.
I’ll go through each one and share a video or podcast that illustrates their archetypal avatars well.
1. The Peterson Archetype: Truth, Theater, and Intellectual Grandiosity
Check out this conversation where Dr. Peterson and Dr. Mckenna brilliantly thread together Jung, psychedelic shamanism, and ancient mythologies.
I first felt pulled to Jordan Peterson’s work around 2019, initially drawn to his sharp and unapologetic critiques of far-left ideologies—Marxism, identity politics, and the broader cultural shifts happening in the West. What stood out immediately was his moral assertiveness and ability to boldly confront trendy but pathological ideas.
However, over time, as I became more interested in psychotherapy and self-transformation around 2023, my appreciation for Peterson deepened. I began to appreciate Peterson more as an oratorically brilliant synthesizer of ideas across radically different domains—evolutionary biology, biblical narratives, literature, neuroscience—rather than just a sharp political commentator exposing the far Left. In that sense, he’s almost a modern-day Alan Watts.
He doesn’t treat ideas as isolated or purely material—he approaches them symbolically, as expressions of deeper patterns that point toward universal truths about human psychology and existence. He also dramatizes ideas in not just lectures, but podcasts too. Few others have this ability.
That’s what I’ve internalized.
Peterson instills in me a kind of grandiose intellectual spirit—a drive to think broadly, open new books, to connect disparate ideas, and to pursue truth across disciplines, including even more esoteric sources. He pushes me to see knowledge as interconnected, and to approach the world not just analytically, but interpretively.
I’ve noticed this showing up directly in my podcasting. I’ll often lay out a multi-layered idea, pulling from different fields, and offer it to a guest as a prompt rather than a plain question. They respond, I respond, and the conversation becomes less about extracting mathematical answers and more about jointly exploring the spectrum of meaning. Peterson has been criticized for this interview approach as being very non-interview-ey — but I actually enjoy this way of conversing with leading neuroscientists and psychologists on my podcast (consider my 4-hour marathon with psychedelic neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris: part one and two).
Anyway, this Petersonian instinct—to synthesize across domains and to chase a deeper understanding of the human condition—animates much of my intellectual life which I am very grateful for. This is also an expression of openness and creativity that is core to my personality — not everyone enjoys playing and experimenting with ideas the way people like Peterson do. For those of us who have the bug due to whatever complex nature/nurture forces, we will keep searching for the truth in all places.
Peterson shows us how.
Watch my watch my podcast with Jordan from a few years ago here:
2. The Harris Archetype: Rationality, Equanimity, & Yogic Calmness
Enjoy a 26-minute meditation from Sam based on teachings from nondual traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism.
I first encountered Sam Harris in high school when I came across his now-infamous conversation with Charles Murray on race and IQ. The backlash was immediate and intense—accusations of racism, moral condemnation, reputational attacks. I struck by how he both calmly and boldly dealt with the situation without caving to progressive cancel culture.
There was no panic, no loss of composure, no primal descent into vitriol in his following battle with Ezra Klein on his podcast. He remained centred, precise, and focused on what he believed to be true. That posture—equanimity under pressure—left a deep imprint on me.
Over time, I watched him navigate similarly volatile terrain: debates about Islam, mass migration, and the cultural tensions within Western societies. What stood out again and again was not just the content of his arguments (which, for the record, Dave Smith made me question in our podcast - on jihadism, Western spurring of Islamic terrorism etc), but the way he carried himself while making them. I was amazed at his ability to not even elevate his tone of voice amidst being explicitly called racist or Islamophobic.
He has consistently emphasized the importance of being charitable to opposing views, of not misrepresenting your opponent, of resisting the temptation to score cheap rhetorical points.
That ethic became something I internalized. Ironically, I’ve found myself channeling this “Harris archetype” most clearly not in public debates, but in private ones—especially within my own family. Some of the most emotionally difficult moments of my life—filled with anger, anxiety, frustration, and trauma— have come from tense, deeply personal conflicts with parents, grandparents, and other relatives. And yet, in those moments, I’ve often been able to maintain a relatively steady tone, resisting the urge to escalate, trying instead to stay grounded and fair.
Even when others are lashing out, or operating from what seem to me like deeply irrational or delusional beliefs, I’ve made a conscious effort to extend charity—to acknowledge where they might be right, to avoid reducing them to caricatures, to resist black-and-white thinking. I’m not perfect at this, but it’s something I’m genuinely proud of. And I can trace a lot of that directly back to Harris.
But the Harris archetype isn’t just about rationality. In many ways, its deeper influence on me has been spiritual. After graduating high school, when I started seriously grappling with the question of human suffering—what it is, why it exists, and how to deal with it—it was Harris’s work that became my entry point. His book Waking Up and the accompanying meditation app introduced me to mindfulness in a way that felt stripped of dogma and grounded in direct experience.
Through that practice, I began to understand something simple but profound: that I don’t have to be completely identified with every thought that arises in my mind. That there is a difference between being lost in thought and being aware of thought. And that returning to the present moment—again and again—is not some abstract spiritual ideal, but a practical skill.
Harris has also effectively drilled in my mind that there is no future “show” to look forward to ultimately. This is it. There is only now. “This is the best opportunity you’ll ever have to enjoy the present moment” and “For every moment of true seeing, you can’t find evidence of your unenlightenment” are two of my favourite quotes by him which point to the universal reality that our true nature is ineffably peaceful and content, accessible right now.
Of all the figures in this internal system, Harris has probably shaped my inner life the most. He’s influenced how I think, how I regulate my emotions, and even how I speak. In fact, if I’m being honest, my tone of voice—calm, measured, analytical—is most directly modeled after him.
But this is also where I’ve started to see the limitations of this archetype. Because while that tone is incredibly effective in high-stakes debates or emotionally charged conflicts, it doesn’t translate as well to other domains of life. The same calm, controlled cadence that diffuses tension doesn’t necessarily create magnetic attraction. It’s not the energy that draws people in at a party or creates excitement in a romantic context.
In other words, Sam’s yogic calmness and objectivity has its place—but it’s not what makes women want to take off their clothes, exactly. Learning when to apply the Sam model and went to exit it and switch to a different mode, has been a crucial realization for me. Ironically, in part thanks to learning his meditation techniques, I’ve become self-aware of sometimes being too energetically monotone or even-keeled in environments that call for more expansive facial expression, high-octane energy, and magnetism. The last two members of my internal family system fill this hole left by the noble intellectual giants.
Read my interview with Sam Harris on Christmas Eve here:
3. The Rogan Archetype: Uproarious Laughter & the Healing Power of Not Taking Life Too Seriously
Here’s Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz talking about their first sexual experiences…lmao.
I wanna preface this section by saying that I think Joe Rogan might be the most integrated figure out of everyone in my internal system.
No disrespect to the aforementioned intellectual figures, but I mean Rogan has the remarkable ability to seamlessly move between completely different modes of being (Interestingly, Sam Harris once speculated in a conversation with Joseph Goldstein if spiritual enlightenment involves being able to move between different emotional channels at ease). On one hand, Rogan can sit down with intellectual heavyweights like Eric Weinstein and engage in deep, rigorous conversations about religion, astrophysics, neuroscience, and the nature of reality.
And that’s a big part of why I’ve always been drawn to him—his radical intellectual curiosity. There’s a real willingness to explore ideas without prematurely shutting them down. You see this in the sheer range of guests he brings on. Very few people can comfortably host both of those worlds.
But as important as that intellectual openness is, it’s actually not the main reason Rogan is part of my internal system.
The deeper reason is something much simpler—and, in a way, much more profound: His ability to be unabashedly jocular and even adolescent.
It’s genuinely astonishing. Here is someone who runs the biggest podcast in the world—someone world leaders like Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Volodymyr Zelensky have either gone on or actively tried to go on—and yet, on any given episode, he can sound like a 17-year-old kid joking about smashing the hot blonde chick in class.
And I mean that in the best possible way.
If you’ve listened to his podcasts with Joey Diaz, you know exactly what I’m talking about—those convulsively hilarious, smoke-filled clown shows where they’re telling outrageous stories, laughing uncontrollably, talking about absurd sexual escapades and, yes, ridiculous shitting stories (“he’s changing flavours”). More recently, take moments like him vividly delineating to Shane Gillis the wild fantasy of a teenage boy being orally pleasured by his hot English teacher after school (Shane complains, “stop dude! Are you trying to turn me on?”). Or most outrageously: Joe spent 30 minutes with Stavros Halkias on his #1 podcast hilariously debating the chemical composition of female ejaculation—taking the position that it’s basically glorified urine (after which Stavros shared his cardiac-arrest-inducing story of “tough squirt”).
All of this incongruously exists alongside the fact that he’s hosting presidents.
That contrast is what makes Rogan so compelling. He hasn’t sacrificed his sense of childlike humor, his irreverence, or his willingness to be ridiculous just because he occupies a position of enormous cultural influence.
That’s the archetype I’ve internalized.
This “class clown” energy—the ability to make outrageous, socially taboo jokes, to laugh at things you’re probably not supposed to laugh at, to just be stupid in a fun, liberating way—is something that comes out of me most naturally in social settings with people I’m comfortable around. Some of the most memorable moments of my life have come from exactly that: laughing with friends, telling absurd stories, pushing boundaries, and just enjoying the chaos of it all.
There’s something deeply therapeutic about it, especially for men. The act of “busting balls,” of saying things you wouldn’t say in polite company, of sharing wild, ridiculous stories—it creates a kind of bonding and emotional release that’s hard to replicate anywhere else.
Rogan has managed to take something that is usually confined to private friend groups and bring it onto the biggest platform in the world.
And in doing so, he demonstrates something really important:
You can’t take yourself too seriously.
Because the truth is, you can spend too much time in intellectual discourse. You can live too much in abstraction, in theory, in ideas. And if you do that without balance, something in you starts to rot. Life becomes overly conceptual, disconnected from the simple, visceral experience of being alive.
Life is not just good books and deep conversations.
It’s also good laughs.
And what Rogan embodies—better than almost anyone—is that balance. The ability to go deep, to engage seriously with big ideas, and then to completely flip the switch and descend into pure, unfiltered humor.
I honestly think that without this side of himself, Rogan would suffer. The position he occupies—being at the center of major cultural conversations, even influencing political discourse at the highest levels—comes with immense pressure. Without an outlet for levity, absurdity, and humor, that kind of life would become psychologically overwhelming.
And that lesson scales down to all of us.
Most of us won’t ever host presidents or influence elections, but we all carry stress, responsibility, and pressure in our own lives. And without some form of release—without laughter, without play, without moments where we allow ourselves to be ridiculous—we risk becoming overly serious, overly burdened, and ultimately less alive.
That’s what the Rogan archetype gives me.
4. The Weeknd Archetype: Sensuality, Confidence, and the Dionysian Life
Enjoy one of my all-time favourite Weeknd jams: “Often”
The final member of my internal system is The Weeknd—he’s the most recent and, for my personal life, one of the most transformative additions.
For a long time, I didn’t have a well-developed mental model for masculine sensuality. I had frameworks for intellectual debate, for emotional regulation, for spiritual awareness—but not for attraction, presence, or the kind of grounded confidence that creates romantic and sexual polarity. That simply wasn’t a channel I had built out in my psyche.
That started to change around the summer of 2024, when I began taking my dating life more seriously and intentionally. Around that same time, I discovered The Weeknd’s early work—especially House of Balloons—and it completely stunned me. I had known him mostly through a few radio hits, but this was different. The atmosphere, the rawness, the nocturnal energy, the unapologetic sensuality—it felt like an entirely new emotional and psychological landscape.
And more importantly, it gave me a model.
Not a moral guide, but a romantic one.
The Weeknd’s music—especially albums like House of Balloons, Kiss Land, After Hours, Starboy, and Beauty Behind the Madness—helped me access a part of myself that had been largely dormant. A more confident, grounded, and yes, sensual dimension of being. A mode that isn’t primarily analytical or spiritual, but embodied, present, and attuned to attraction and chemistry.
Because the reality is, intellectual depth and emotional awareness—while valuable—are not the same thing as magnetism. They don’t automatically translate into attraction. And I had to confront that gap in myself.
Listening to The Weeknd helped me begin to fill it.
It aligned with something that was already true about me, but underdeveloped: that I do value the Dionysian side of life. The side that embraces pleasure, spontaneity, and experience. Nights out with friends, dancing, music, exploring new bars and clubs, celebrating, letting loose—these aren’t distractions from life. They’re part of it.
And I think a lot of young men, especially those who are thoughtful, “nice,” or intellectually oriented, lack this dimension. They’ve been conditioned to be agreeable, restrained, and overly cautious—qualities that may make them respectable, but not necessarily attractive or exciting.
Developing this archetype has meant allowing myself to be more bold, more expressive, more comfortable with desire and attraction—not in a way that overrides my values, but in a way that complements them.
It’s also important to be clear: The Weeknd’s music has been criticized as explicit, excessive, and morally questionable. I don’t look to him for ethical guidance (though I do on his recent spiritual odyssey of an album Hurry Up Tomorrow), and I don’t treat all his lyrics as a blueprint for how to live. But like every figure in this internal system, I extract what’s useful and leave the rest.
What I take from him is the energy.
The confidence. The presence. The sense of self-worth. The willingness to occupy space and create an atmosphere.
Over the past year and a half, this archetype has become closely associated with a very specific mode of being in my life. When the weekend hits—Friday night into Saturday—I consciously shift out of my default intellectual mode. I step out of the Peterson-like philosopher, the Harris-like analyst, and into something more embodied and immediate.
More playful. More social. More alive.
It’s in those moments—late nights, music, movement, new connections—that this part of me comes online most fully. And it’s been a necessary counterbalance to a life that is otherwise deeply cerebral, analytical, and often intense.
If Peterson represents meaning, Harris represents clarity, and Rogan represents humor, then The Weeknd represents experience.
He represents the part of life that isn’t meant to be analyzed, but lived.
And integrating that has made everything else feel more complete.
The Integration: What Are Your Mental Models?
As promised, this Substack offers an integration component — in the form of therapeutic journalling (which has manifold scientifically proven benefits) — to help turn these ideas into something real, embodied, and practical.
That’s kind of what we’re all after here: not just insight, but transformation. Not just reading about the psyche, but actually working with it. Not just admiring the idea of becoming new, but participating in the process.
Here are today’s prompts based on the themes of this piece. I recommend writing 1-2 pages double-spaced on this.
Who lives inside your mind — and when do they take over?
Which thinkers, artists, friends, parents, teachers, or public figures have shaped the way you think, speak, feel, or move through the world?Which “mental models” do you unconsciously run in different situations — at work, in conflict, in relationships, in parenting, in creativity, in moments of stress or desire?
What archetype are you overusing?
Is there one mode you rely on too much — the hyper-intellectual, the discipliner, the perfectionist, the visionary, the caretaker, the overachiever? Where does this archetype serve you, and where does it limit you?What missing archetype do you need to develop?
What part of life feels underdeveloped in you right now — play, discipline, sensuality, courage, calmness, creativity, devotion, confidence? Who embodies those qualities for you, and how could you consciously practice channeling it?
Bonus:
Here are some archetypal mental models I’ve also developed but not nearly as the four I wrote about:
Chamath Palihapitiya - entrepreneur, multi-hyphenate, technologist. A successful man who has done a lot of inner work (watch his Tucker or Lex interviews) and embodies it as a family man with a beautiful Italian wife (he’s like IRL Dev from Aziz Ansari’s Master of None series on Netflix). Living every young brown guy’s dream! I think of Chamath a bit like Rogan: highly integrated, firing on all cylinders, making money, vacationing in Italy, living life to the fullest. That’s who I wanna be when I grow up :)
Kanye West - visionary, obstreperous creative. Creator of arguably the greatest musical composition of all time: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Also creator of arguably the most boundary-pushing, musically iconoclastic album of all time: Yeezus. His recent public debacles aside, Kanye is gifted with stratospheric creative instincts. Whenever I have some big idea, I will sometimes embody the grandiose Ye energy. No idea is too crazy enough to bring to life in this mental model. Never take no for an answer. Don’t shoot for the stars — shoot for whole new galaxy. (A piece for another time but this model has some massive strengths and fatal flaws.)
Kendrick Lamar - another rapper! I see Kendrick as someone who transcends the world but also creates worldly art that appeals to the zeitgeist. He goes deep into spiritual contemplation across his discography — from converting to Christianity in the storyline of his debut album Good Kid, Maad City, channelizing his religious worldview in DAMN. to then pursuing Eastern mysticism and inviting meditative master Eckhart Tolle as a feature on his radically distinct album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. When I’m pondering the deeper questions about life’s meaning and purpose, how to help people through my art (which is what The Meta Mystic is for!), I channelize my inner Kendrick.
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As I wrote in the last piece, I’d like to publish some reader reflections of these prompts. Email me any deeper reflections here: ravmetamystic@yahoo.com
You can state whether you’d like to stay anonymous or have your name published with the reflection.
Supercharge Healing Using AI
I’ve written about supercharging my healing process using AI here — I’m aware of some risks but I think the benefits are overwhelming. I encourage you to try it out if you haven’t already. Once you’ve written your journal, I recommend taking a photo of it (or copy and pasting if you’ve typed it) and sending it to Claude, ChatGPT, or another LLM and saying:
“I wrote this journal from a prompt on Rav Arora’s The Meta Mystic Substack and I’d like to reflect on this in therapeutic fashion. Please help me identify the old-self patterns, the new-self qualities I’m trying to build, and the practical ways I can begin rehearsing this new identity in daily life.”
You don’t need AI for this exercise, of course. A journal, a therapist, a trusted friend, or a quiet walk can all be enough.
But there is real value in having a reflective mirror that can help you see patterns you might otherwise miss.
I greatly appreciate how you write with such openness, humility, and wisdom (are you really as young as mentioned in the last piece?!), as well as this unique adaptation of IFS. Thank you.
My friend, I must implore you to seek the answers you are looking for not in success or sexuality, not in pursuit of wealth or happiness, but in God who is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. God bless you. I was once an atheist and believed a lot of the things you write about. I was successful, wealthy, living the dream. The only thing that matters is our relationship with God.