Pinchbeck hosts Robert Falconer, the Internal Family Systems teacher and author of The Others Within Us, for a talk on parts work, the porous mind and spirit possession. Falconer opens with his own history of severe childhood abuse and decades of clinical work with men who survived similar violence, and uses that experience to argue two claims. The first, developed within IFS by Richard Schwartz, is that consciousness is multiple rather than unitary, organized as sparsely interconnected subroutines. The second, harder claim is that consciousness is porous. He draws on Tanya Luhrmann's anthropology of psychosis and spirituality, Isabel Clarke's clinical work in England, and Daniel Siegel's interpersonal neurobiology, treating their convergence on the same conclusion from separate evidence bases as consilience.
Guest: Robert Falconer
In brief
- Falconer argues that consciousness is multiple, more like a soccer team than a tennis player, and that this is a healthy structure to be worked with rather than a problem to be blended into a single mind.
- He credits Richard Schwartz and IFS with drawing out the implications of that idea, and says the end of what Schwartz calls the myth of the mono mind is a paradigm shift that has to happen.
- He argues that the belief in an impermeable mind is a profound error, citing Tanya Luhrmann's citadel model and Isabel Clarke's billiard ball theory, and notes the two researchers reached the same conclusion without citing each other.
- He presents spirit possession as a biopsychological dynamic documented in every culture and era on record, with effects for good and ill, framing it in terms a materialist can accept and noting the professional cost of raising it.
- Citing Daniel Siegel, he argues that emotional states are primarily regulated through connection with others rather than internally, and that the solo self is so embedded in language that clear thinking about it is difficult.
- Asked what gives him hope, Falconer points to the popularity of IFS and to convergent work by Siegel, Thich Nhat Hanh on interbeing, Luhrmann, Clarke and Charles Taylor, arguing that a person who genuinely experienced themselves as part of the world could not destroy the environment.
Full text
Okay. Well, next I think we'll just get started uh and I will hand the podium over to Robert Falconer uh who's going to talk about uh internal family systems and entities and uh egregor and all kinds of great stuff. Robert, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, having me. It's good to be here. Usually I'm in this little silo of therapy land talking to therapists about therapy issues and it's nice to breathe some other fresher air. Um I'm I sort of study consciousness from like the uh this a little gross. I have a 12year-old part who's very active. Perhaps I could be the proctologist of consciousness.
The background I come from is working with extreme trauma. Trauma. I was raped and beaten throughout my childhood sadistically uh by both of my parents. They were both alcoholic. My mother was institutionalized occasion several times. My brother were teenagers. A little bit later my father was murdered. This was all in a churchgoing family that maintained middle class. Uh sometimes I couldn't sit down in the church pew from having been raped all night and dads up I so and most of my career I've worked with men like me. There's there's a joke. It's not very funny in therapy land. Women go to therapy, men die or go to prison.
That that's uh largely true. So why am I not dead like my brother or in prison or living out of a dumpster? I feel now in my mid70s. I'm basically a man of joy. Um very books. I work with a lot of people. I teach about how to do this. Um I I love my life. But that wasn't the case for a long time. I was right on the verge of suicide. So what can of experience and working with hundreds of people with this kind of experience teach us about the nature and future of consciousness? First, consciousness is multiple. We are not thing. We're much more like a uh soccer team than we are like a tennis player in how we're organized, how our consciousness is organized.
To use more formal language, we our consciousness is encapsulated sub routines that are sparsely interconnected. And I believe there are arguments from uh nonlinear dynamics that can show this mathematically. This is incredibly significant. If you take this or the implications of this, it changes everything in therapy. It it revolutionizes the field. And Dick Schwarz and IFS have done a wonderful wonderful job of exploring the implications of this very basic idea. something we want to get beyond or fix or heal. This is good. It's a wonderful structure. We don't want to put all those parts into a blender and create a mush. That would create an idiot.
A band needs all the different. Um Dick refers to this as the myth of the mono mind. Um this is something that has to go I think in the near term future of consciousness the removal or end of the mono mind is one of the great big themes that has to happen. Um and there are many other traditions and uh philosophers and kinds of therapy that deal with a parts work structure. And I think this is a paradigm shift that absolutely has to happen for a whole lot of reasons. That's like the ground floor. I wrote a whole book about this. I've spent decades teaching this, but I'm going to go past that now.
The next step, this is even harder to accept and more fundamental. Consciousness is porous. I think this is one of the the belief that our consciousness is not porous is a fundamental error tradition that is a profound poison. There is a great anthropologist named Tanya Lurman who's active today who studied psychosis and spirituality worldwide. And she talks she said we have what she calls the citadel model of mind. We think everything in here is our private property. It's ours alone. Nobody gets in here. It doesn't go out and it constitutes our identity. Strong. This looks like a great big fortress, but actually it's incredibly brittle and the slightest little bit of information coming in that contradicts that theory and people shatter.
We in the west spend over a what most other cultures spend on uh acute psychosis. We get worse results. Worse results, a thousand times the money and worse results. And the worst thing is we're spreading our technology and techniques of mental health and the native ones are being obliterated in the path of modernization. Okay. Um there's another woman uh Ispel Clark who's a psychologist who works inatient with psychosis in England who says who developed a very similar theory. She calls it the billiard ball theory. And she says this idea that our minds are this impervious thing like this is what makes psychosis so difficult and so destructive in the west.
She and Lurman don't seem to know each other's work. There's no references back and forth, very different bases. This is an example of consilience where two different sets of data lead to the same conclusion. Here's this theory we have in the west that our minds are, you know, this citadel or billiard ball. It totally poisons us. Um Daniel uh what was his name? Daniel Seagull, the guy who invented interpersonal neurobiology also understands this very deeply. And even though he's an MD, he's got every credential you could imagine. When he started talking about this, he was exiled from the academic community and he had to go it alone.
But now there's like many people who do this. There's over 50 books published things all around the of books sold all around the world. Um he says that this belief that our mind is this you know uh solo self he calls it is so ingrained in our language that it makes it impossible for us to even think clearly. And he says he calls for a complete because we're not going to be able to evolve or move forward. And he's made some suggestions in that direction, but they seem very clunky and very difficult so far. We need something basic has to change here. This is really deeply deeply in our another thing he says which I he just points out the number one way we regulate our internal emotional states is through connection with others.
It's not inside inside those we do it through this interreationship. We are that we are that interreational field. Okay, all of these subjects I've mentioned I could talk about for many hours each, but I'm just going to rush ahead. Guys will get excited and go do the homework. If you start thinking that the mind is really porous, it opens us up to understand all sorts of things. Spirit possession for instance. Now, I know, boy, have I gotten in a lot of trouble for talking about spirit possession. I mean, Dick said, "Bob, I really wish you wouldn't use those words. It's really bad. You can't talk about this." So, um, let me just put it this way so that the most hardcore rationalist materialist of you might.
There is a basic biocsychological dynamic that happens in every culture we have records of. It's one of the most widely spread cultural traits and in every era of history we have records of. biocsychological dynamic can have profound effects for good and for ill. The metaphor used to describe this most often is spirit possession. Whatever we call this stuff, it's it's important. People's lives can change overnight when they have this kind of experience of spirit presence. Um Tanya Lurman calls these spiritual spirit presence experiences or spirit presence events nonjudgmental way to talk about it. There are two more points that I think my uh underbelly view of consciousness find are very important.
personalism. These parts of ourselves, spirit beings, whatever they are, when we meet them, we can work with them much more effectively if we treat them as persons, conscious agentic beings. Uh, you know, Martin Buber understand understood this. He's not really popular in academia anymore either. Um, and I'm I'm a radical pragmatist, a follower of William James. Whatever works is real and all that fancy stuff. I sort of go, "Oh, okay. If it works, it's real." To relieve human suffering. What works is what's real in that field. And what works is treating these parts of people as fully formed people. Having dialogues with them, a dialogical relationship, relational, interactive, treating them with respect, I think is a word that um most psychotherapy is fundamentally disrespectful of the client.
It labels them, puts them in categories. Diagnosis is an act of disrespect. Uh psychotic people are disrespected all over the place. People have the most powerful emotion visionary experience of their lives. And some psychiatrist said, "Ah, your brain's broken. Don't pay any attention. That stuff's meaningless. Don't listen." That's terrible. I shouldn't talk like this, but I'm old and I don't need to work anymore, so I get away with it. Now other people don't have this ability because they still have to operate within the system. The fourth major point. So we got consciousness is multiple consciousness is porous personalism. It has to be treated as persons respectful relational.
The fourth point is spirit. We need for healing from the kind of trauma I went through or the kind of trauma I worked with all my life. You have to have something connection, some kind of connection to something much bigger than you. Much bigger than called spirit. I don't care what people call it. I'll go with whatever name they want to call it. The big woo wooza. I am fine with that. But I've worked a lot in Pakistan and China and a bunch of other places. I'm not arrogant enough to think I have any answers about what it is they want to use is is fine with me.
So, I'm going to go back into the personalism a little bit. The poor. No, I'm going to go to the porocity because I think this is super important and this is a hard change and it's one that could really make a huge huge difference. One and this is this is Clarkient psychologist in uh in England. Once we accept that we are porous and that this has dangers as well as potential, we can begin to deal with it. Until we do that, we're not we're not even at the starting line. You know, porocity is is good and bad. It leaves people wide open to schizophrenia, but also all the most creative people, the visionaries, the people who have extrensory perception, the people profound religious experiences, the visionaries who give us the images that can draw us forth forth into the future.
These are all highly porous minds. There are actually at least half a dozen ways to measure porocity of mind. There's the scale, uh the psych psychoticism scale, the schizotype scale developed by Gordon Clarage in England. Now, this one's especially important, I think, uh not much time here. I'm rushing. the schizotype scale because he started to develop this as purely a measure of pathology. You know who's going to go psychotic and how psychotic are they? We can but as he worked with it for a decade or more he realized that the people high on his schizotype scale were vastly more creative things. Now, what I've come to there's some other scales.
The sensory delight scale. I love that one. The Stanford hypnotizability scale seems to relate to these other um the Telingan absorption scale that uses um Okay. So, we can measure all this stuff. The higher the higher you are, it's good and bad, dangerous and wonderful. It's a dangerous blessing. The way we receive people who are high is very destructive to them. We don't we don't supply any kind of supportive net to receive that kind of experience in our culture at all. We label it pathology. We give them drugs and electroshock. If you wanted to destroy the highly poorest people, this is a system you would set up.
It's incredibly poisonous. Most other cultures do a lot better. Um, I'm going to give one quick example of this. A stud treatment of acute psychosis in California and Thailand. A young man in California and a young woman in Thailand had an acute psychotic fluid psychotic episode, out of contact with reality, out of their gourds, needed to be locked up, needed to be. The guy in California is told, "Take it in to the shaman, the psychiatrist in the white coat, the stethoscope, told, "Your brain is broken. Take these meds. Unfortunately, they'll turn your brain to a jellyfish in about 10 years. Uh, sorry. All these experiences you had are totally meaningless." And is told, "Oh, I'm so sorry.
You've been put on the front lines of the cosmic battle between good and evil. you will have a very very difficult life. But if you fight well, you can help many others and you can you can do great in society. Both of these people had repeated psychotic episodes later. Both needed to be medicated and rehospized, but one had a life and the other felt like a piece of garbage. What are we doing? I mean I what what the hell are we doing? And you you start saying stuff like this, you will be exiled from the therapy world. Personal experience, you you will be in trouble. Um, Gregory Bateson, you know, the great cyberneticist and anthropologist, he he in one of his books he said, "Mind and nature evolve together and one without the other is ridiculous.
It will never work. They are interrelated. Mind is porous. It's part of a bigger system. We have to come back to thinking about this." Owen Barfield, I'm gonna have to stop really soon, but just I'll get in a couple more of these. Owen Barfield, the great Oxford philosopher, he said participation, which is like the animism or, you know, people believing and experiencing themselves as part of nature. And then he said, we've had this division and now a final participation. um his work is brilliant, deep, difficult. It's almost a disrespect to mention him in passing like this. Barbara Erin Reich uh wrote a book called Dancing in the Streets, a history of collective joy.
And she points out that this colleance that happens in group ecstatic experiences was a healing experience of this porocity of mind. This collective joy ended about the time of the reformation and counterreformation. Taylor, a great philosopher at the uh Mc Gill University in Canada, talked about the buffered mind, same idea as the citadel mind. He said it really got going at this same time. Something happened there that I think is the origin of our currentness. It's all about this conceiving of ourselves as a citadel. And it's poison. It's absolute poison. This is what I think we need to change. I think this is the future the the immediate future.
Um of all the spiritual teachers I think Tiknad Han is the clearest about this. He talks about interbeing. We inter are and a lot of brilliant wonderful stuff. I just I'm going to just go on just a minute here. Go to spirit. I'm going to talk about connection to spirit in two minutes. This is outrageous. Excuse my arrogance. Um Tanya Lurman has a great articity is the heart of religion because porocity is about how you can have direct experience of spirit. It's your openness to spirit. And there's now ways we know with the studies of interosception, they call it interosception and psycher sense cultivation in anthropology where they're realizing this is what shamanic training is all about really.
So there are these techniques to develop these ab abilities. Um, one of couple other things I'll just say, I think what spirituality is really about for me and what sustains you through hell, what what can you lean on and be with through the absolute worst goddamn hell experiences of your life? What is solid even there? I also want to say the thing culture has exiled completely is high energy spirituality. We sort of got this idea that spirituality is sitting absolutely still and being silent and not moving. Most spirituality throughout the history of humanity has been high energy dance and and meeting the spirit in those kind of states.
Okay. I've tried to cram as much as I could into 30 minutes. Thank you all for listening. Thank you so much, Bob. Yeah, I can see you had a lot a lot on your plate there. Uh is there anything that you felt really truncated in that time that you want to just take another couple minutes to kind of like um express? Okay. Okay. I'll go back to this spirit thing because that'sing now. Most of the work I've done in the past 15 years has been about meeting entities or spirit possession work because other therapists wouldn't touch it and when they heard I would deal with it.
I got all these referrals. So, one of the most recent books I did is all about this and how to deal with it in a good way. Um, can you can you can you can can you tell us a little bit more about how you see spirits? I mean, do you see it more from a yungian sense or more just like are they like whatever whatever metaphor system appeals to the person. When I worked in Pakistan, I talked about jin that's fine. I don't focused on pragmatic techniques. How can I relate to this thing in a way that helps relieve that person's suffering? And I've been a by focusing on that question instead of this when I start trying to go down the path of what are these things I'm gone for days, weeks.
But if this person right in front of me, I can come with some things that are actually valuable. First one is these things only have power in a person when the person's afraid of them, but they're really good at sc. So you find all the parts who are scared of these things and welcome them in. Make them feel safe. You don't try and you don't try and bulldoze over those parts. You welcome in welcome them in with love. So that's the most important thing I found. The second thing I fight these things. It's not like exorcisms and rage and all out out demon out. Most of them are lost, desperate, suffering beings themselves who just attach to a person out of their own need.
A birding man festival every year uh where people take a lot of psychedelics and a very unprotect unprotected kind of you know space without you know I mean the whole space is its own kind of container. Uh after going to the Burning Man after I went to a Shapibo Shaman and older wellrespected shaman when people came to had been to Burning Man a lot of these festivals people like oh no because apparently they would have just tons of on them and you have to spend the first ceremonies kind of peeling away these these beings. I I hear what you're saying about, oh, you can just like let the um you know, according to this tradition, you can actually have a lot of different attachments that are not necessarily something you're even aware of. They're kind of like these little autonomous complexes that does that does that resonate with you? Do you feel that are there?
Totally. Totally. Yeah. And they prefer to they don't like being discovered. I didn't mean to imply that you let them be. It's just that they are also suffering. And if I go to them with compassion and help them move on, that's much better than fighting with them. One thing I did forget to mention complete completely forget entities. That's another reason why this is so front and forward now. You know, in most of the major studies like Roland Griffith and um some some of the people at the Imperial College in London, 50 or more percent of the people doing highdosese DMT containing psychedelics meet conscious agentic beings.
University of New Mexico discovered this and it freaked him out. But so they're also showing up in the psychedelic space. Um, oh, I had a question for you. Oh yeah, what about the relationship between people who suffered like you sort of that leads to sort of dissociative states in a weird way and then you know the ability later in life to be a channel or a medium or to be a shaman or work with spirits. It feels like sha trauma I guess it has to do with what you're talking about the ferocity of the psyche. It makes people more aware of that experience that that porousness so they're able maybe to access a wider range of psychic experience or or bring them into consciousness.
I think so. I think so. And it's a really odd and to me very disturbing phenomena that ex takes people to the same profound spiritual states that uh are achieved in other ways. But many spiritual traditions like the Sundance, they they use this explicitly. I'm going to tell one story and if you're easily offended, you should turn off your One of the things my father did to me repeatedly was he would suffocate me unconscious while he was beating and raping me because that was the one pain I could never distance from or numb out at all. So when he and then in those states of unconsciousness I met a merciful female presence and it was such oh what a blessing what a wonderful thing you know oh my god my god so wonderful but I came to hate her back you know I came to hate her and I cursed her damn you don't send me back there I did not want to be alive you know But how bizarre that my first profound meeting with spirit came while being raped and tortured.
Yeah. So there is a profound connection and it's Could you maybe give us uh what two questions for you I guess. What is um so what is kind of the goal then? I mean is the goal kind of like um to reach a more like integrated state? I'm thinking of like Gerf, right? He talked about how all these different eyes that are kind of like running them. They're like a machine. But ultimately, if you, you know, reach a higher state of being, you sort of integrate those eyes, you have them under your command in a way. And when there's more of an integration of of of identity is for you kind of what you see as more recognizing that we're that we have all these different like subprograms running all the time.
Great question. I don't think integrating them is right. I think, you know, you want all the different instruments in your band. If everybody was a bass player, you would have a lousy band. Want all the different instruments and we want them as distinct as possible. We want to encourage their individuality. We just want to help the band play well together. Now, I think most people are wandering around the planet in a state of internal civil war. And most of their psychic energy in internal civil war. So I want to help first stop shooting guys. Stop shooting. Please just put your guns down. And then get them to cooperate.
And when they so much more powerful and creative and there's so much more joy in their life, you know. So that that's my model of therapy. An orchestra. If you like classical music, a great orchestra or a great chorus. I'm curious uh uh Robert where you see kind of progress in the field you know kind of I mean do you see like you know one of the ideas is that as we discuss consciousness do you see despite you know we're seeing negative effects of technology and social fragmentation are you also seeing some some some positive um you know either anecdotally from what you what you what your colleagues say or what you read to think about Okay.
FS is ridiculously popular now. I mean, somebody said it's like the Beatles, you know, uh if if you're an IFS therapist, you got more clients than you know what to do with. And um the trainings are sold out and on and IFS is, I believe, the most respectful and powerful form of therapy available because it's based on parts. It also has this concept of self which we didn't really talk about. Uh but it actually sort of duality in in a way that's acceptable to modern materialist minds. So I think that's a very positive smaller smaller frame thing. The bigger frame thing I think is pos is very positive is the citadel model of mind are being w more more and more widely recognized and there are many people from many different directions working to change this.
Daniel seagull and interpersonal neurobiology, ticknot han and all his ideas of interbeing. Tanya Lurman and her anthropology Clark and her her work with psychosis and she's she's sponsored several conferences in the UK and um so there many oh yeah and Charles Taylor at Mc Gill a very prominent philosopher a lot of people and there there are others there there's several others who are working in this same direction if these people can come together and start talking to each other. I think a big big change could happen in this. And I think this idea that our minds are a citadel underly suffering and dysfunction. If you really knew and experienced the world as though you were part of it, you wouldn't be able to destroy the environment.
Wouldn't even occur to you. Yeah. That' be like Yeah. Anyway, so those are the two most hopeful things I see. Awesome. Been great talking with y'all. Thank you so much, Robert. Thanks for joining us. Fantastic to hear from you and
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.