Robert Falconer, a psychotherapist who co-wrote Many Minds, One Self with Internal Family Systems founder Richard Schwartz and wrote The Others Within Us, describes how three decades of work on childhood sexual trauma led to cases he could not explain in trauma terms. One client carried something he judged was not part of her own history; after it left, she wrote that her earlier attempts to describe a nonhuman presence inside her had brought electroshock and forced drugging. Falconer argues that the IFS premise that mind is plural — closer to an orchestra than a soloist — extends to material arriving from outside a person's own lifetime, and that spirit possession is the metaphor most cultures have used for a real dynamic. Pinchbeck adds that the medicalized psychedelic movement has been weakened by refusing to take this seriously.
Guest: Robert Falconer
In brief
- Falconer says many therapists encounter apparently non-personal presences in clients but avoid the subject because it fits nowhere in the modern Western worldview.
- Falconer argues that the plural model of mind underlying IFS turns healing from internal civil war into cooperation, and that it has precedents in Plato and Socrates.
- Falconer says the dynamic usually named spirit possession appears in every culture and era with records and deserves study regardless of which metaphor is used.
- Falconer says hatred and anger directed at an unattached burden act like a spear keeping the person hooked to it, so setting the hostility down is part of the work.
- Pinchbeck argues the psychedelic movement's focus on scientific validation and medicalization has cost it the ability to address entity contact.
- Falconer says he deliberately keeps blinders on politically and confines his work to relieving suffering one-on-one and in small trainings.
Full text
One of the things I like to say is that there is a basic biocsychological dynamic that occurs in pretty much every culture we have records of every era of history. It can have huge impacts on people positively or negatively. The metaphor most often used to describe this is spirit possession. But whatever metaphor we use, it's worthy of study. It's it's everywhere. It's been here as long as we have records. And it's powerful. We need to be studying this stuff. Uh hey everybody. I am here today uh with Robert Falconer uh psychologist, author of many amazing books. Um and uh yeah, I wanted to talk to you about um what insights you might have from your work um kind of on the current American situation such as it is.
Where where are you based by the way? California. Ah, cool. And yeah, maybe just uh you know for the audience if you want to give us your own brief introduction um that'd be great. Okay. Um I started focusing on childhood sexual trauma because that's my own background and especially men who were raped and beaten in their childhood and uh I focus on that for 30ome years. And I thought I sort of understood the basic trauma oriented view of uh psychology. And then I had this case where there was something in this woman that was not part of her, not part of her personal history. It came from somewhere outside of her.
And after I helped her get it out, I just had the most primitive tools, but it left fairly easily. and she sent me these emails saying, "I never I didn't tell you this, but when I was young, I tried to kill myself many times and was locked up in mental institutions many times. And back then, when I tried to tell people about the nonhuman inside of me, they gave me a lecture shock and injected me with horrible drugs. You're the first human being to ever believe me, and you've changed my life." And I wanted to ignore this stuff, but uh after she sent me that email, I couldn't. And a lot of other therapists run into stuff like this, but they all hate it because it's so weird.
You know, it does not it does not fit in modern western worldview at all. So for the past 15 years or so, I've been getting a whole lot of referrals and wrote a book about this kind of stuff and the other phenomena that are like it that demonstrate that our minds are porous. We receive all sorts of stuff from outside of our own personal lifetimes and history and that these things have huge effects on us negatively and positively. Yeah. And the book was the uh others within us, right? Uh there was a previous book also. What was the name of that one? Yeah, that was uh many minds oneself that I co-authored with Richard Schwarz, the founder of IFS.
And that basic IFS is based on the understanding that mind is multiple. We're much more like a uh a sports team than a tennis player. We're much more like an orchestra than a soloist. And healing involves turning an internal civil war into a cooperative thing like a choir or a team or something like that. So it's a very different model of mind. And as you explore the implications of this model, it it totally revolutionizes most of psychotherapy. And it's not a new idea. Plato thought we were multiple. Socrates thought we're it's all over the place. But it's one of these ideas that comes up, gets buried, comes up, gets buried.
I think it's very hard for most people to go, "Hey, I'm not the boss in here." You know, I'm just one of a whole bunch of conscious uh centers of consciousness. Yeah. And in that book, by the way, before we go any further, I should do my due diligence here and be like, "Hey, if you happen to be finding this on You Tube, you know, like it, subscribe to the channel. It really helps us, you know, grow the channel and reach more people. We appreciate that. Um, but um, yeah. So, um, in the book, I know you got very interested in like spirit possession and exorcism and, um, kind of, yeah, I guess you began to see these different like segregated aspects of the psyche as similar to what shamanic or, you know, different cultures would talk about as spirits or demons or or kind of entities or something.
Um h how did how did that evolve for you and um yeah that must have been kind of coming from a what was your original orientation as a psychologist? I started with uh hypnotherapy Ericsonian hypnotherapy then moved into Gestalt. I live quite near. Oh cool. I've been to Eselin over 150 times since 1971. Okay. Nice. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Really you're all on the west coast vibe. So, so um or the left coast as they call it. So, maybe this idea of like spirits and so on was a little bit more accessible, you know. Well, it it was I did not want to look at this stuff.
I re it was very unpleasant for me. But I when she said that thing about you've changed my life just by believing me and taking me seriously, I couldn't ignore it. Yeah. Mhm. Oh, go ahead. Um, this idea is so repugnant to so many people and I've tried to find ways to present it that people will at least crack their minds open a little bit. And one of the things I like to say is that there is a basic biocsychological dynamic that occurs in pretty much every culture we have records of every era of history. It can have huge impacts on people positively or negatively. The metaphor most often used to describe this is spirit possession.
But whatever metaphor we use, it's worthy of study. It's it's everywhere. It's been here as long as we have records and it's powerful. We need to be studying this stuff. Yeah, I completely agree with you. Um yeah, I mean I've done a lot of work with shamanism and visited a lot of indigenous cultures and so on and um yeah felt that uh this whole world of um spirit possession entity contact or whatever is um yeah kind of like a major threshold for for the modern west because we've been denying it for so long. uh like in the you know modern psychedelic movement which has grown really big the focus has been on the sort of scientific validation and medicalization of psychedelics um and uh the use of them for you know obsessivempulsive disorder or anxiety or depression.
But this whole idea you know still falls outside of a materialist or scientific worldview. And it feels to me that that movement has very much suffered from not really being able to take this idea seriously. I couldn't agree more. Well said. Super important. Yeah. I want to say one other thing. I think I I'm a deep admirer of shamanic stuff. I've studied it. My undergraduate and a little bit of graduate work were in anthropology. I think there's something that modern psychotherrapeutic techniques can add for the shamanic approach to these entities in IFS or Gestalt or many of these other parts work modalities. We realize a lot of these parts we meet are parts of ourselves.
They're wounded children or parts of our own psyche that have developed to protect the wounded children. So there's this whole internal system of us and then beyond that there's all this spirit entity uh larger beings divinities there's all that kind of stuff but we can sort what is part of our own psyche and this other stuff and we can treat those two things differently and I think modern psychotherapy can help by helping us heal the internal relationships before we start dealing with that faster realm. Mhm. Yeah. So, but it seemed in the book you were talking about different parts that were connected to personal trauma, personal history or ancestral, you know, trauma, but then you were also saying sometimes things turn up which just seem to be like walk-ins completely from a from another situation.
Yep. Exactly. Yep. How can you discern the difference between that? Okay. The first thing is the intention. The parts of us always ultimately have positive intention, including suicidal parts. Now, if you got if someone's hearing a voice or getting this idea in their head over and over, you got to kill yourself. You got to kill yourself. You got to kill yourself. So, you could ask it, well, what's good about having this person kill themselves? Well, then they wouldn't be around anymore. What's good about their not being around anymore? then they wouldn't be on the planet anymore. What's good about their not being on the planet anymore?
And often you have to drill down through half a dozen or more layers and eventually it will come to something like, "Oh, then they won't be suffering anymore." That's a part. There's a good intention. It's like this last line of defense against overwhelming pain. If you drill down and drill down and drill down and that suicidal voice says something like, "Oh, that means I win." Or, "Oh, that means I get to feed on their carcass." That's not a part of the person. It's something from somewhere else. That's I think of these things as parasites sort of uh you know, and this as psychic parasites and um yeah, I think they feed on human misery.
Uh there's a lot of um I mean I guess this idea that because you said your focus had been sexual trauma and childhood um that you know that type of experience really kind of opens up people to um these kind of outside forces. Absolutely. Definitely any kind of trauma, any kind of big trauma, anytime we're not in our bodies, childhood anesthesia really opens people up. So if people had to have a lot of operations when they were very young, psychedelics open people up both to positive meaning like mother ayasa and negative entity experiences. I think of it now IFS has explored the implications of the this understanding that mind is multiple.
There's also this whole other dimension. Our mind is porous. It's open and we there's actually ways we can measure how porous very various people's minds are. And well that's a whole I could go into that if you want. There are all these scales and ways to study that certain things open up this porocity. Psychedelics big time, right? Is the um another way to say porocity or porousness would sort of be like relational like sort of an maybe there isn't really this sort of like you know I mean the western construct has been this very like a centralized self and identity and actually maybe it isn't like that.
Maybe it's more of a continually evolving process that that's hyper relational. Exa Exactly. Exactly. Daniel, I mean, Gregory Bateson wrote a book more than 50 years ago called Mind and Nature. And he said these two things evolve together. The attempt to try and understand one without the other is ridiculous and bound to failure. And that's what we've been doing. You know we try and understand psyche mind over here as though it's this isolated thing that will never work. Yeah. Structurally that is not going to work. Um so now when you work with somebody and they have these different uh aspects I mean when do you call in you know when do you move from therapeutic techniques to more like shamanic techniques like like you know saging them you know going into I mean is uh is altered states kind of like a part of your practice because obviously it is for many shamans and kind of like exorcists and so on.
I've been involved with the psychedelic world since 1967 and I've had a couple hundred experiences of my own. Probably sat with that many people. I don't sit with people anymore. Uh uh you know um I do train people to sit with people. Uh I think there's a lot that we've learned through IFS and other newer stuff that really facilitates psychedelic experience. So I think that's a wonderful important uh mode. Um I don't I do use sage because I like it but basically how to put this I stay with the sort of psychotherrapeutic this is parts of a person approach until it's proven or demonstrated overwhelmingly that that's not the case.
Because if we try and amputate a part of the person, it causes all sorts of damage. So we want to heir on the side of trying to form good relationships with everything we can and only help something leave a system when we're really really clear it's not part of that person's system. And it happens all the time. Like alcoholics often they will have one part over here going how could you go get drunk again last night and then there's this other part who goes out and gets drunk again that night and these two parts hate each other hate and they both typically will point at the other one say that doesn't belong in the system cut that one get rid of that one you know so you have to be you have to really take your time and patiently listen and um do you still use hypnotism when you're trying to contact these different parts parts of the psyche. No.
No. Uh I think when people go in and contact deep realities within themselves, they alter their states of consciousness on their own and usually attempts to direct or manipulate that from outside, slow down the healing process. I think each person has within them an ancient healing wisdom and it's my job to help open that so that they can live from that more and more. And that's what does the healing. I don't do the healing. You know, 50, 60 years I've been doing this stuff. No, it's not me. I'd like to believe it's me. Uh-uh. There's an anc in people's bones, in their tissues, in their breath.
There's this ancient ancient healing wisdom. And when they can access that, they heal and then they can go on. It's like planting a tree. I don't have to keep working with them, you know? Right. So, what's your role then? as to cultivate the good soil for the tree or or I mean well sometimes it's a lot more active than that if there's a big if there's a big one of these things that entities Dick Schwarz has called them unattached burdens. Yeah. And the Can you explain Can you explain that idea a little bit more um in depth? Well, it's it's basically what I'm talking about, but he hated the word entities and he really didn't want to talk about this stuff.
They used to only train about it in the level three trainings because he said this will this will be used to destroy IFS and we were doing so much good stuff over here if we show them the weird stuff they're going to throw us out. So he sort of invented this term unattached burden so that he didn't have to say entity. Yeah. And he talks about unattached burdens, the negative external influences and guides, the positive external influences. Beautiful. Um, what kind of experiences do you have when people come into contact with the positive external internal influences like the guides? Oh, I've seen all uh the most beautiful one.
I think this is a story worth telling. I was working with this woman who's very highly functional in the world, uh, international trainer, you know, doing all this stuff. And we were working and she said, "Oh, you know, I go inside and I see my parts and then I see these two things in there. They look like spiders that somebody had stepped on and they're just barely alive and they're like crawling around." And she said, "Oh, I feel so sorry for them. Those poor things. And you know, are they parts of you? What's your intention? All that stuff. No, no, no. They're not parts. They don't belong here.
And so we say I get her to let them go. I say it's beautiful and sweet. You want to take care of them that there's a better place for them where they can really heal. And she gets those out of her. And they seemed innocuous, right? Just like these little dependent. She gets those out, helps them move along to a healing realm. And then she's this light starts flooding her face and she turns her head down a little like this. Her eyes close and tears start slowly rolling down her face and light radiates out of her and she said, "Oh, oh, it's Mary. It's the Virgin Mary." And she was radiating light into the room and it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.
And it was a nasty little room. Cinder block and fluorescent lights, you know, it's not not a spiritual place at all. Very cool. Very cool. Uh, one reason I wanted to reach out to you now and I really enjoyed your presentation in our future of consciousness class. Uh, I think this is like great work you're doing, but I was kind of kind of like thinking about what's happening to the United States as a kind of whole, let's say, collective mindscape or something. It feels like, yeah, we're having this sort of we're fragmenting. we're sort of like having like you know internal conflict, civil war even. Uh I'm curious if you guys apply this whole line of inquiry into sort of social social psychology and social phenomena.
Okay. I want to sort of distance myself from the IFS world or they have sort of distance themselves from me. I speak for me. I think a lot of the IFS people think I' I've gone round the band and that's fine. Um, so what I think is the planet overwhelmingly is ruled by these negative energies and they fill the airways. One of the absolute characteristics of these things is contempt. Contempt, hatred, sneering. That's the typical tone of voice of these negative energies and hatred. So if you listen to the media today from both sides, what do you hear? Contempt, sneering, hatred, judgment, self-righteousness. All of these things I believe are uh psychic poison.
So, the sort of visual image I have of this is there's two tornadoes of of hatred and self-righteousness that are trying to suck everybody in. You got to be on one side of the other. And when I refuse to join the hatreds, a lot of people get really angry at me, you know, like, oh, what do you mean you don't hate them? You know, we're not we're never going to talk to you again. And I think that's all all sort of misguided. I mean, you know, um Einstein said a long time ago, uh a problem's never going to a deep problem will never be solved from the kind of consciousness that created the problem.
You need a a fundamental change. People don't want to hear that. They want to look at somebody and point their bony finger and blame and f them fill themselves with rage and self-righteousness. And I think that's very very sad. I think there's I'm fundamentally an optimist even though what I said probably just sounds really pessimistic, but I think there's a way out, but it's not joining that battle, not jumping into one of those tornadoes of hatred. Uh so what would be more like the way out that you that you that you would see? Okay. Well, Saltzen said it a long time ago. You know that famous quote, the the line between good and evil does not run between political parties, does not run between nations.
It runs down the center of each human's heart. And who wants to look for evil there? So that would be the answer. I think we have to look for the evil, the hatred, the contempt, the meanness in our own hearts and heal that. You know, people think I'm nuts. That's okay. Uh, it seems sort of idealistic to think that by transforming one human consciousness at a time, you could change the world, but I actually think that's the only thing that will. And something that gives me profound optimism is something Ian Mc Gill said, who I think is one of the towering intellects alive today. He said that he thinks it would only take about 3% maybe less of the people on the planet to change their consciousness and that would carry the whole world into a whole new phase.
So I think just by doing the one-on-one work each of us doing our own work uh evolving into a place where where we are not acting out that evil and self-righteousness and contempt and hatred and one down and power o all that nasty stuff. Uh that would probably be enough 3%. And even though the airways are dominated by hatred and fear-mongering, I just keep I keep my try and keep my nose down, work with the people who come and sit in front of me and help them make these transformations. And now because I'm so old, mainly I'm training other therapists to do this kind of work. Yeah.
But I mean I guess from my perspective I still see significant differences between the two main factions whereas one of them has really embraced cruelty and bigotry and uh you know violence. Uh and the other one, yeah, may maybe it's all there, but it's it's way more hidden and you know, at least primarily their goal is to sort of uh you know, maintain society and um you know, like um yeah, it see it seems like you know, it seem it seems like one one project is much more destructive uh than the other to me. Yeah. Um you know, I'm thinking of Tiknad Han. I, you know, during the Vietnam War, he wanted peace and both sides hated him.
The communists hated him and the Americans hated him. And he just stayed with his, you know, we need peace. That's what we need. And after the communists won, he they he had to leave the country. He couldn't go back for like I don't know if ever he could go back. But I think he stayed with the same kind of course and approach. And I know it's unpopular and difficult and it's much more fun to blame and point out all the demons that live in whatever side you don't like. And that's what most people want when they invite me to this kind of conversation. and they want me to recruit and uh diagnose and point out the particular demons that are living in each side.
And I'm I'm not I'm going to it's a the power of those spinning tornadoes is so intense. I feel the suction. I want to go to hatred, contempt, sneering. How could those people be so stupid that and hate half of the people in this country? And I think it's incredibly damaging to me and to other people if I allow myself to be sucked down that drain. You know, I've I've studi studied Emanuel Swedenborg a fair amount and he said one thing I really liked. He said um truth expressed without love is not after all true at all. Who's speaking truth with love these days? Anybody in the major media?
And yet sometimes it it does seem as if certain figures in the polit political world or the celebrity or elite worlds do seem like they're a little bit more possessed or influenced by these unseen burdens than others. And you know I'm thinking particularly as one reason I wanted to reach out to you was uh Elon Musk who we now know is a heavy duty user of ketamine and um you know psilocybin and LSD and so carries a whole kit with him everywhere he goes and you watch some of the videos of him at inauguration or at other events and sometimes he seems like he goes into a kind of like dissociative trans state. Um, I'm just curious if um, yeah, if you have any thoughts about that. You think it's possible that, you know, figures like that that have, you know, so much cultural focus on them and so much power and wealth and yet maybe internally they're very unresolved and maybe they're actually they have, you know, also because somebody like Elon Musk is a hypermaterialist who, you know, would never believe something like a spirit or or or something that could, you know, kind of attach itself to him from outside. Uh but maybe that also, you know, makes makes somebody like that easier prey, you know, for for beings from the super sensible realms.
Mhm. Yeah, I think that definitely does. The you know, there's all these quotes about uh especially in a a lot of African traditions, the most powerful demons are always the hidden ones, the ones we know are not the big shots. Yeah. Which I think is a very sobering idea. or from the Christian tradition. Uh recently several people have said the greatest triumph of evil is to make us believe it does not exist. Yeah. So I think all that's true. I'm not I'm not going to try and diagnose or analyze Elon Musk. Yeah. You know, I just I wish him all the best. I hope he finds healing.
And I wish more politicians on both sides would do psychedelics, but then they wouldn't be politicians very long, I don't think. Yeah. Well, there's also a big question about that now because um kind of like the, you know, technocratic uh right is seems to be kind of embracing psychedelics and um you know, because we know that psychedelics function as non-specific psychic amplifiers. Mhm. So if you're kind of focused on war and and and greed and cruelty and so on, you know, I mean, they could actually, you know, exacerbate all of that, you know. Yeah. Yeah. They could I'm I'm much more fundamentally optimistic about human nature, I think.
Yeah. I think you know in the map studies uh which uh I really admire Michael Mhoffer the guy who was the head of the the head administrator and trainer for their MDMA studies. He's he they talk about an inner healing intelligence that when the psychedelic takes effect the therapist the sitter needs to step back and trust the inner healing intelligence in each person. I think that's there. I think that's there in even the most depraved serial murderer, rapist on death row. I don't think that can be extinguished. I think when that goes out, people people's physical bodies die. Um, so maybe I don't know. You know, I've been dealing with some very disturbed people for a long time.
I've never seen anybody who doesn't have this core down in them. Even people diagnosed as uh psychopath or we used to call them sociopaths, they still have this in them. The trouble with them is when you deal with them and if they finally do open up to realizing, you know, to admitting their own vulnerability and a little bit of compassion, they're they become intense suicide risks because they realize how much pain they've inflicted on the world and they feel so horrible about what they've done. Very often when they break break through to the connection to this deep inner wisdom, they kill themselves. So if you're, you know, for any therapists out there, yeah, psychopaths, sociopaths are treatable, but there's a really intense and dangerous transition phase.
Do you think because it's become popular in a lot of the medical establishment to think that a lot of psychological illnesses are actually have a genetic component. Um, nope. Nope. I yeah everybody wants to reduce it to physical causes. I think consciousness is primary and somebody like Bernardo Castrip can make this absolutely consciousness is primary. Consciousness causes this stuff. The cure is working through consciousness. Yeah. No, I'm I'm a Castropian. I'm an animistic idealist. I'm totally on board with that. Yeah, he is. Oh, I love his work. which I'd actually already explored that before I knew of his work in my in my 2012 book with Amika Swami who you probably know.
Um so okay but let's uh just like you know as a thought experiment it feels like the country as a whole and I know you say that it's both sides um you know my my my sense personally is that there's some kind of like possession trance that has overtaken you know a significant subset of the population uh which has now unleashed their kind of like lower instincts. So for instance, there's a kind of exuberance around cruelty and around like these, you know, people being picked off the streets who've been here for 30 years and working a job by people wearing masks without identification while they're kind of like dissem disassembling the constitutional republic and taking away people's rights and kind of mocking people, you know. so on, you know, and yeah, I mean, it feels like a kind of collective, you know, possession trance or kind of like attachment situation and and it does feel to me that, you know, it's more on one side than the other that a lot of the, you know, more like, you know, Democrats, progressives are, you know, they're procedural, you know, they they want to kind of like maintain the sort of uh, you know, rudiments of of a constitutional system and, you know, have things decide ed through democratic process and so on and this other thing has now sort of started to take hold you know as we sort of saw with like let's say Nazism you know in Germany in the 30s where um you know ultimately if you wanted to survive that you know you had to either join it or kind of like escape from it you know get out of the way and you know I think Jung you know probably saw you know Nazism as a kind of you know archetypal possession trance you know I he talked about wan you know I think as as this figure that kind of um you know inspired this um this ambiance you know this kind of this kind of circumstance. So I'm just kind of curious cuz um yeah that's kind of how I feel the situation right now and see it. So, I wanted to check in with you about that and also then think about, you know, are there tools that can be applied outside of individual one-on-one um you know, that are almost like um I don't know if they're social psychological tools or collective therapies or, you know, pattern breakers, you know, kind of like, you know, how do how do we facing this intensifying shift towards authoritarian or totalitarian systems?
uh that involve, you know, mass cruelty, concentration camps, really a, you know, incredible intensification of stuff that was maybe always present in the American, you know, reality, the American psyche, but now it's really been, you know, put in the in the front. So, I'm kind of curious what from your work and IS and and the sort of parts model um could be helpful for us in kind of like facing what's what's happening. Okay. First thing I want to say is the IFS world is totally in the democratic, you know, as you would expect from therapists. It's totally in that world. And I think that's sort of unfortunate because it means that a whole powerful therapeutic modality is not available to a lot of the people who need it the most because it's identified with an ideology they despise.
And this, you know, a message I hear a lot in my head is sometimes it might be necessary for you to go to war and even kill. It is never necessary for you to hate. Hatred always damages you. Hatred, judgment, self-righteousness, they always damine that damage the hater profoundly. So I you know it and it's it's such a struggle. It's so tempting. It's like it's it's uh it's more of an addiction than cocaine or methadine. Hatred, judgment, all of that stuff. I and I think it is a sort of archetype of an addictive process. There's a guy do you know the work of Matias Desmet? Uh I have looked at his work and um yeah I have to admit I have a little bit of mixed feelings around it.
I know he had a whole thing about what um group formation or reaction formation or something like that. He was yeah mass formation. Yeah. Well basically he says he says the first prerequisite of what's going on and I I think in our country he's right is that and he took this from Hannah Arent the I love Hannah. I've studied her work. Yeah. Yeah. She talked about the atomized subject. How the first prerequisite of this kind of social deterioration and warfare is that people feel they're disconnected. They are atomized. They're isolated. And then that creates this state of sort of generalized anxiety with no no clear imp.
And then if you're in that state of generalized anxiety a lot, it creates this hostility and you want somebody to hate. and having someone to hate feels so good you're ready to join these mass movements. Now I've just grossly oversimplified what I think is a brilliant and profound idea. So the root cause is the atomization of the individual this sense of separateness isolation and as we can that's the opposite of a porous mind right it's Tanya Lurman the great anthropologist calls it calls it the citadel model of mind like our mind is something private and invi inviable you know and we're this isolated thing I think that worldview and it's not just an intellectual idea. It's a way we live is the root cause of all this garbage.
And so I that's where I want to work. And I know if I get pulled into one side or the other, everybody on the other side will never listen to me again. You know, I'm the enemy then. I mean, I'm sort of the enemy of a lot of people now because I'm not I'm not going to join that war. A friend of mine said, uh, I'm a conscientious objector in the culture wars. Yeah. Um, yeah. Cool. Well, I mean, I guess, um, yeah, I mean, I I I I understand that perspective. Um, um, so for you, it's really just about, you know, the, you know, spreading the the work on an individual basis.
Yeah. I think these things of I'm a big fan of Martin Booers and I know he's not very fashionable anymore, you know, and he basically you either relate I thou person to person with this deep respect and most people have forgotten or don't know that Martin Booer and Martin Luther King were very good friends and collaborated on a lot of projects and this kind of booer-esque personalism was foundational to Martin Luther King's spirituality and the whole civil rights movement that that gets ignored. But anyway, you can either relate I thou or you can relate I it and treat other people as things. And when you start dividing people into camps and oh this group and that group, you're turning them from a thou into an it. And Booer also said early on I think he changed his opinion about this later all evil comes out of I it relationships with other people.
So it's when we start doing this group stuff, us and them very very dangerous, incredibly dangerous and toxic and so tempting even I would say addictive, right? I mean I I I get that but I I think I still have fundamental disagreements with you because I think there are sometimes uses and them. I mean there were Jews and Nazis, you know, and as much as much as the Jews, you know, might have, you know, wanted to have a different shared context or relational situation with those people, you know, at that point it was too late in in terms of them having, you know, gone into this type of pres possession trance. Yeah. you know, whereas where whereas if there had been an intervention maybe earlier, you know, in some sense, um um there might have been a way to kind of kind of interrupt or pull them out of that uh you know, the sequence of cause and effect that ultimately led to, you know, holocausts and so on.
Yeah. So, personally, I don't I just want to say I don't feel any judgment or hatred around people who are MAGA or, you know, in that camp. I'm just like trying to think through a way that we can use our tools and our knowledge and you know whatever you know reframings in a way to you know avert you know you know very negative consequential you know situations that that may come about and and it does seem to me that you know in this circumstance you know there do happen to be people who are a little bit more like the adults in the room and people who are kind of acting out in a in a more um you know immature way uh you know so um you know so and I hear that in for instance in the language of like Trump and his followers which is very othering and very us and them and so for me to for you to say that I can't make a distinction and say that like okay there you know I'm I'm you know using the tools that I've developed you know over a lifetime to sort of you know understand that um you know something has to be done here um doesn't really leave me much to you know, because because so so yeah, I just um um kind of struggling with that as as a framework because because I think that um you know, you do have a group I've read a book, you know, by one of these white Christian nationalists called Unhumans and he basically says that, you know, socialists, leftists, liberal democrats are not human. They're not fully human. They can be treated, you know, like, you know, animals or they they can be mistreated.
they could, you know, they're not they're not, you know, they're not in this great white Christian way of being, you know, and Vance and and oh, he also talked about, you know, fascist dictators in the past like Pinoch and he was like, "Okay, it's okay, you know, you can like it was good what Pinoce did when he took, you know, liberals and and and journalists up into helicopters and he threw them out of the helicopters." Uh, he was like, "That was a great idea." And you know on the back of the book JD Vance and Donald Trump you know both positively blurb the book and they basically say this is the right plan for America. This is what we want to do here you know so I I I so so you know they're so they're very much creating an us versus them scenario. I'm not trying to do that, but I'm saying there are people who are more like the adults in the room right now who you know can sort of see this process underway and uh so I feel a little bit resistant to you kind of saying that oh it's just the same and this side is othering and both sides are turning one side into the it because I'm actually not doing that but that's being done to you know other people including you know the the worlds that I'm part of and I'm very concerned because if you look at like you you know, systems that lead to genocides like Rwanda, you know, where there actually wasn't an ethnic or religious differentiation between Hudos and Totsis. That was like an a kind of um political identification that the the Belgian colonialists had forced onto these people, which over 20 years they then accepted. And then one group was more like a slightly poorer group and more rural.
The other group was a little bit more cosmopolitan, a little wealthier. and they ended up stirring up the hatred of the poorer group for the slightly more cosmopolitan group, you know, and that led to massacres, you know. So, um, yeah. So, you know, if there are signs that we're in a type of situation like that, you know, then then I think we have to go a little bit more into an emergency triage mode and say, yeah, if if there's one group that has kind of moved into kind of like a possession trance on a large scale, then if we're not in that trance, I'm not othering those people. I'm not judging them.
I'm not hating them. I'm trying to find like a way of dealing with an increasingly dangerous situation. So I I don't find that you know your your perspective is fulfilling much for me at the moment because it's like okay like we can go to the individual basis. We don't have time for that. There's like tens of millions of people who have uh become convinced that this is uh apocalyptic you know and have read the Turner diaries and are you know ready to go to war and have created like right-wing militias and all that stuff. So yeah I guess I'm hoping a little bit more for you to get you a little bit more engaged.
uh in that way, you know. Yeah. You know, a guy you might like a lot more than me is Paul Levy in the idea of what I I' I've talked with Paul Levy. I love Paul. Yeah. I I did a podcast with him. Yeah. Yeah. And he I think he would uh join much more. Yeah. In that in that way of thinking. And I'm thinking of another woman whose name I'm forgetting now. She was a big anti-war activist and she would march and she would do all that activist thing. But the thing she did that almost no other activist would do is when she would find the people in the crowd who were yelling the loudest and the most nasty stuff to her and to the other peace marchers and she would go over to them and she would talk to them in a kind way.
Right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean building those bridges obviously um you know if you can snap people out of this kind of possession trends that's kind of what I was kind of curious from you is um you know looking at it from a spirit possession dynamic and that happening on on a collective level involving these kind of large scale archetypes. Um, are there tools for intervention that you could sort of generalize from your work with individuals that we could then use for for this for this crisis as a whole, you know? Okay. The well, the number one thing in dealing with these individual unattached burdens. They do everything they can to get you to hate them and they do everything they can to get you to fight them because they love fighting in hatred.
So, and very often they've done really nasty stuff to people and people can feel totally justified in their hatred and resentment and all of that. And um they are justified, but if they allow themselves to hate, it keeps the it keeps the negative spirit around. It it's it's like the hatred and the anger becomes a spear that keeps the individual connected to whatever negative energy is in it. and they have to find a way to put the spear down so that that negative energy no longer has a way of hooking into the person. Yeah. So, I don't know what that would look like on a social scale.
Yeah. Like I said before, I sort of intentionally put blinders on. I think I can do useful and valuable work in a fairly small area of relieving human suffering one-on-one or with relatively training relatively small groups of people and then they spread out and do more of this and if I start joining one or the other I understand yeah um cool listen I I really appreciate the insights in your work and I definitely think that there's a lot there in terms of the yeah kind of like the uh the multiple dimensions of the human psyche and that were more like a uh um dissonant orchestra, you know, than a, you know, singular violinist or something. Um and um yeah, and I think it's great that you're that you've sort of helped to kind of bring back ideas from, you know, indigenous practices um kind of into a modern psychotherrapeutic uh um construct. Um so um yeah, thank thanks for spending some time with me today and and having this chat.
Okay, great talking to you. All the best, Daniel. Cha.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.