The Foreign Entities Within Our Minds - Robert Falconer

Who are the others within us? Okay. Um, I'm, you know, my background is psychotherapy and as we go into the inner world, usually what we first discover is wounded children parts and protector parts and all these different experiences from our own personal lifetime. And then we start going in a little further and we meet legacy burdens. Things that happened to our parents and ancestors that are still alive in us and there is hard science evidence for this now. And then as we go in even further, sort of more towards the antipodes of the mind, um, we meet really strange things and, um, they often have very powerful influences on who we are. Probably, uh, let's see, if you, if you think about this in Jung's terms, you know, he said as you, as you start exploring your inner world, the first thing you meet are complexes, which are fragments of yourself that have an emotional energy and power attached to them. We need to treat those as people. And then you go and you start meeting archetypes. The first round of the archetypes are pretty human in form, you know, the great mother and stuff like that. And you go farther and farther, these archetypes get weirder and weirder. You start seeing gods and demons and, you know, vast weird entities. So I think it's the same kind of, uh, same kind of journey as you explore this inner world, our subjective realm. There are things in there that are not part of you in your personal life history.

Tell me a bit more about how you're thinking about the psyche. You mentioned there, Jung's complexes. So, you're just taking a step back. Imagine we, we, you try and do psychotherapy, as you say. Uh, why should we find parts of ourselves? Are you saying we find parts of ourselves we might not really know or understand?

And interesting. Yeah, definitely, definitely. We, we are astoundingly ignorant as a species. I mean, I think the brightest of us are, uh, still wearing diapers. Um, you know, uh, Eagleman, David Eagleman, I think the famous neuroscientist said, uh, we're sort of like a stowaway in a lifeboat who's hiding on a cruise ship thinking he runs the ship. Our conscious mind is so ignorant of who we are. And in the West, we're trained to ignore the depths of our mind, pretend all that stuff doesn't matter. And it really does matter. It determines, you know, whether or not our life has meaning, what we love, what we're interested in. It, it really is very, very important. And great energies are stored in there. I also think that many of the people we consider great geniuses have actually learned to navigate this inner realm so that, so that they can access some of the innate powers and dimensions of who we really are.

And you say that there, it kind of reminds me of a philosopher like Heidegger, who would say we're thrown into the world. And so it's not obvious, you know, you, it, in some ways, it kind of feels, oh yeah, me, you know, and, and the world makes sense to you. But on the other hand, there's just realms of even what would seem a simple experience, whether outside, other people, or in you, it actually is, maybe because I, then it makes me want to think about even our own impulses, like we get really angry at someone, or we, some sort of emotions that come up that we're like, yeah, I mean, I have to say that was me that I just did that, but then it's also like, I don't know. Yeah. I wanted to control that and I couldn't. Mhm. Yeah.

Then this is, you know, some people claim that Freud discovered the unconscious. That's not true at all. I mean, people have been talking about this forever. St. Paul said, "I don't do what I want to do, and I do all the things I think are bad." It's the same idea. We don't really know the depths of who we are. And the tragedy in the West, I think, is we are trained to ignore this whole inner world. And there's, there's a lot of evidence now in, in psychology, we talk about interoception, which originally meant the ability to sense the state of your body, uh, just by paying attention. So, a, a good like rule of thumb test of this, and you might try it now, or the listeners might try it. Just sit there without putting your hands on a pulse point and see if you can notice your own heartbeat. That's interoception, and it's a trainable, learnable skill. And they've now done all these studies. Poor interoception correlates really, really, really strongly with all the eating disorders. It correlates really strongly with major depression, with psychotic features. It correlates really strongly with borderline personality disorder. It, I think it correlates very strongly with most forms of mental distress. When we have lost the ability to pay attention to who we are inside, we tend to start getting really anxious and feel pretty miserable in general. And this is a trainable skill. And it's sort of, it's beaten out of us as kids, you know, "Stop daydreaming, focus on me," you know, all that kind of garbage.

Yeah. I mean, you, you bring up our experience as children. Then makes me want to ask, do you think that it's something one naturally has an intra-intraceptive ability and then it gets worse, or so is it a case of maintaining it over time? And, and so you, you mentioned even bodily, more bodily things, almost like your heart heartbeat or eating disorders, but does that translate into the whole remit of who we are as a person?

Yes. Why is it, yet? Definitely. There is no definitely on this, but I'm just going to say it baldly like that. Um, also creativity comes from in here. Um, and there's, there's vast intelligence inside of us that we don't access most of the time. Now, I want to tell a little story because the, the importance of this inner realm. Thomas Alva Edison, you know, the great inventor, one of the most practical-minded people who ever lived, the opposite of woowoo, right? He had this thing he would do to help him come up with ideas. He'd sit in his chair and he'd get a handful of ball bearings, metal balls, and he'd put his hand on the edge of the chair, hanging over the chair, and he'd have a metal plate on the floor underneath that, and he'd go into this half-asleep, dreamy state, which is called the hypnagogic state. And then when he fell all the way asleep, his hand would open and the balls would fall and wake him up so that he could stay in the, and the hypnagogic state is an interoceptive state. You are learning about your inner world. So he developed a way to spend long periods of time in this hypnagogic state to help him with his very, very practical concerns. So this state has a lot, it offers great, uh, practical help.

I mean, so I actually talked with a sleep neuroscientist who's doing work on how really any, there, there are many moments in the day where we have many sleeps almost. So that could be, you know, one can notice it, say, when you're driving or whatever. And so it's almost like there's a very deep relation between sleep and creativity. And now, in relation to your, I mean, maybe it's beside the point, so whatever, however we want to think about creativity and sleep, they're related. But it's like, whatever it's within you, there, there's, it's kind of very accessible. We know, we know it's in sleeping is very weird, you know, for hours in a day, we're going into a state. Most, even if you don't remember them, people have dreams. And they seem, and they give you insights into, at least, I guess I think they do. And I guess you, you haven't really, I haven't seen you speak about dreams specifically, but it's so, I mean, tell me more then about what is within us.

Um, you mentioned at the start, but yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go back there. I just want to say, uh, I think dreams are a major way people in the West contact the inner world. In, in anthropology, they have this exact, I think it's the exact same ideas in interoception, but they use completely different language. And the anthropologists don't talk to the psychotherapist. They're like in different silos. The anthropologists talk about inner sense cultivation. And you can see how that's the same idea. And there was a guy back in the, uh, the '80s who wrote this article basically saying that inner sense cultivation is the basis of all shamanic training. And a lot of people argued with him, but it's basically something like that. And spiritual practices seem to be about developing a way to navigate these internal spaces. The thing that most freaks out modern Westerners and most makes them want to pull their hair out and run screaming for the exits. We meet beings there who seem intelligent and agentic. That, that absolutely can't be. You know, that's, that really goes against materialism 100%.

I want to put it this way because I get such a hard time about this, ridicule and rejection. Uh, I'm old. It doesn't matter anymore. I want to put it this way. Maybe even the hardest-headed listener might be willing to accept this or at least entertain it briefly. There has been a basic bio-psychological dynamic that we can find in pretty much every culture we have records of and every era of history. And this bio-psychological dynamic can have huge effects on people, negatively or positively. The metaphor usually used to describe this is spirit possession. That's no longer an acceptable metaphor. Whatever we use to describe this, it's important and worthy of study. I mean, I come, do you think this? I come at it from a, a Christian perspective where you have these early church fathers or many people talking about almost in one's daily life, there are demons that are constantly pulling at you. There's interesting images of kind of funny ones too, of, you know, someone grabbing at at someone and kind. And so then it, and then I also come at it from a scientific perspective though, of, okay, you know, how, how should we think about this in terms of, um, parts of our self that are dynamic? And, and is there a way to almost naturalize these kinds of experiences? And so, do you think that you mentioned at the start that there are parts of ourself, that complexes that seem more related to us, but then there is a way in which further out, further in you go, there are parts of us that don't feel like us? So how do we, parts of us that do not come from us in our own personal lifetime?

I, this is another hard thing about the kind of work I do. And it's interesting, most therapists hate. A client will come in with this and most therapists go, "I don't want to talk to you at all. Go see Bob." So I get a lot of referrals. People just don't want to think about this. Yeah, some of it is, and we should. And this is the big contribution, I think, that modern psychotherapy can make to traditional spiritual techniques. We can help separate out all the stuff that's personal lifetime parts work from this stuff that's, it's not personal anymore. It's something bigger. And from the outside. And you mentioned as well, the term legacy burdens, of, uh, parts that are say from our culture, our race, our parents. And I remember, I remember, yeah. Well, I remember, I remember hearing a reading in a book that we sometimes can have dreams that are not necessarily just our problems, but they reflect actually broader societal problems, such that, yeah, you know, and then there, like the dreams that are actually not just for you, and not just, you know, and it's like you're a medium maybe through which that message is coming in, but it's not exactly pertinent to your life.

Okay. Only let me talk about legacy burdens for a little bit because there's hard science behind this now. It's been demonstrated in rat, in rats now. I think this, this is the new standard of reality. If we can do it in rats, it's real. If we can't do it in rats, it's woo woo. So there is this classic experiment, which I think was really brilliant, the Rassler experiment. And it's not w, it's R-A-S-S-L-E-R. If somebody wants to look it up. Diaz was an Emory. Rassler is an MD at Harvard. And Diaz came up in very poor neighborhoods and he noticed that insanity and addiction tended to run in families. And he thought, could there be something more in here than just, you know, just behavioral transmission? So he designed this, I think, brilliant experiment. He took male rats and exposed them to a smell, which is a chemical that's rather pleasant, sort of like almonds or cherry blossoms. Definitely not, you know, obnoxious. He paired that with an electrical shock until the rats had a conditioned startle response whenever they smelled this chemical. Then he took their sperm and gave it, impregnated female rats who had never smelled this chemical, never met the male rat. No possible behavioral transmission or genetic transmission at all. Put that sperm in there, and their pups, when they were old enough, had the startle response to that chemical. And so did the pups of those pups. And, and this, this shows that events that happened to an ancestor, maybe an ancestor you never even met, can affect your behavior in really dramatic ways. And this has been replicated with mice and all, all over the place. So there's hard science and statistics and numbers and all that kind of stuff for the skeptics out there.

Right. I mean, as you were saying that, it made me think of someone like P. Good, people doing epigenetic work, right? There are genetic mechanisms that have kind of, we could call it memory across generations. But then, but then as you say, there are sometimes no material factors. And then it makes you want to think of people like Robert Sheldrake, talking, thinking about fields of memory and mind. And then you say that, and it's like they're not, it's, we haven't exactly found or understood completely what these fields are that transmit information non-physically. But again, when searching for an explanation, I mean, I'm not, and one shouldn't be stuck to just a material explanation, but I do want an explanation though. As you say, I kind of approach this from a scientific perspective a lot. I want to understand what it is.

Yeah. Let me, let me say something. I think in this area, we have to be comfortable with not knowing for a long time ahead. We are so profoundly ignorant. And we have to just go with an open mind. Another area around the epigenetic stuff that's been very well researched and documented is the children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Their neurochemistry is different. This wonderful doctor, Rachel Yehuda, at a medical school in New York, has over 500 peer-reviewed papers showing that the cortisol chemistry is different. You know, this, according to traditional genetics, this shouldn't be possible, but it's happening. So we just need to be really interested in something, something very anomalous that does not fit our current theories. Happens that much we can say. I, I think it's too soon to have a theory as to what exactly this is.

Well, when you bring up the Holocaust survivors and their families, I mean, when you think about people's work like Ian McGill, Chris, and many others talking about how we are, how we're related to other people. That's kind of how we can define ourselves and should, um, not just some, there's some isolated identity that is us. Because in that case, I mean, obviously people that are very close to you being impacted, even if it's not felt directly one-to-one, you, your, because it's like down the generations, I mean, that your parents were affected, their parents' parents. And it's like that behavioral transmission. That's why I like the Das wrestler experiment so much. There's zero behavioral transmission. So it makes it really, really clear that something else. There's, there's that's true. That's a huge mechanism. And there must be something more. And then legacy burdens. So, and then when we get to something that's even beyond legacy burdens, and I think the word you have for it is unattached. Yeah. Burdens. So I don't like that name, but that's what they call them in IFS. Okay. Because with them, I mean, and I don't want to ontologically pin you down, but just when, when I read about it, these parts of ourselves that are intelligent, but then almost barely even human sometimes, not, it makes me think of demons. It makes me think of, you know, it's that they're intelligences, but they're just not even necessarily harmful, wanting to hurt you, but just foreign. Even. Some of them, a matter of fact, many of them, I think most of them are incredibly positive. It's all these people who experience guides, Christians who experience the presence of the Holy Spirit. Um, you know, there's, there's deity yoga. There are all these oracles and shamans throughout the world who have worked very, very hard to establish communication with these kind of beings because they feel they offer a portal or a doorway to a vaster intelligence. So I don't, you know, yes, there's also a lot of demons and nasty stuff. And because I come at this from a therapy perspective, I get a great deal of that. But I think worldwide, it's way more positive than negative. And I want to give one more piece of evidence about that. You know, with the psychedelic renaissance, um, in relatively high-dose DMT containing psychedelics, which includes Ayahuasca, psilocybin, and a bunch of other stuff. Major, major factor in psychedelics. Many, many people meet what they call DMT entities. And there have been several international conferences on this. Lots and lots of talk. It happens. And when Roland Griffith at John Hopkins did big surveys of this, 80 something, 80 plus percent of the people, they experience these as positive guides, wise ones, ancient beings. So, you know, people go, oh, demon possession, and this is all horrible. I want to say, no, that it's all, well, yes, but also there's guidance, there's inspiration, there's creativity. All these poets and, you know, um, musicians, and this is, they felt they got their, their creativity from contacting these kind of realms.

And you specifically bring up psychedelics, which maybe the most iconic and powerful ones and experiences, but it makes me then think about maybe more generally, what, what do you think about them? Because they feel like you're with dreams, let's say we brought those up. I guess they are something which everyone goes into. Whereas with psychedelics, you say, you know, well, you know, more likely than not, you'll have a good experience, but then not even that, you want to utilitarianly think about, oh, there's a risk as well though. It's more like, hm, you know, h, especially you mentioned we don't understand these things, so how can one have the wisdom and understanding to be able to go into them, navigate them?

Great question. First, I want to say meeting a negative being is not necessarily a negative experience. Very, very often those are incredibly powerful positive experiences because, um, for a lot of reasons. Um, I think psychedelics are a very, very powerful tool that can be used in very good ways. Uh, and they also can be misused horribly. So it's not, I don't want to encourage everybody out there, go out and get high. That's, that's not what I'm here to say. I want to say something about, you know, you've asked about ontology a lot, which is a question most people ask, you know, what are these things? What are these things? And I realized quite early when I started working with this a lot, that's that question. We could sit here and talk and debate and argue for decades and not get anywhere. But there's this different question that we can reasonably expect to get some usable answers very quickly. And that's, how best can we work with this? When someone is experiencing something like they're hearing voices inside their head that seem to come from a giant insect telling them to kill themselves, and that I've had people like that. How best can we help them? That's a very pragmatic. You know, William James talked about radical pragmatism. And there are answers that we can get to in a re, you know, not in decades or centuries ahead, but fairly soon as to what tends to help people like this more, and what, um, what doesn't work so well. So, I've tried to stay focused on that radically pragmatic question. How can we help people who are having these kind of experiences? And I'll tell you one thing, telling them that they're psychotic and that these experiences have no meaning whatsoever, it's just a broken brain. That's not so helpful most of the time.

I would also, It's that makes me think that even a question of what something is, you say we could it for years and then still not get an answer. I mean, that might also tell one something like it's they're not a thing that you could locate or they're not even if we're not a materialist, but they're not even a static percept isolate. And and therefore, the only way to interact with them would be in a personal fashion. And therefore, a pragmatic, practical approach in people's lives is the right domain by which to think about these.

Yeah. You know, McGill says, uh, it's, it's all relationship. And I think that's, it points in the same direction I'm trying to move towards. We can work with these best by forming relationships with them. And, and that's what helps people. I want to say one other thing because this is such, for so many people, they get so weirded out by this whole idea. Things like this only have power in people when the people are scared of them. And when you're not scared of these phenomena anymore, they lose all power. And I know that's hard. And the other, the, sort of second thing about this, if you, parts of you are scared of this, which is true for almost everybody, the thing to do is not bulldoze over them and go, "I'm going to fight this thing." It's to find those scared parts of you and love them until they feel secure and well connected to you. And I, this is really simple, but it really, really helps people.

Tell me more about what you, maybe even in a practical specific way. So if we find within us there are parts of us that don't even feel like us, or or even we don't even characterize it that, but we have experiences that we can't understand and deal with. Um, you said you said maybe naturally there would be parts of us that, uh, fear and scare that. And so as we, so in trying to find good in the situation, or okay, I'll give you a case example. And this was the case that made me focus on this subject. I did not want to focus on this. It seems so weird, you know, I wanted to ignore the whole thing. I was working with a woman. I was actually supervising another therapist as a trainer. And, uh, this woman was there, he was working with, and it seemed that something was coming up in her that was not part of her. And I, I asked the trainee, could I deal with it? And he said, yeah, please. Cuz, and what she saw in her inner world was a bloodshot eyeball. And the message it kept giving her was, "You're garbage, you're garbage, you don't deserve to live, you're horrible, you're, you're worthless." On and on and on and on, in a very loud, screaming voice coming out of a bloodshot eyeball when she looked into her dream world. And she had other parts who were, you know, like, not that. So, we work with those parts, got them calmed down a little. And then the, the way you can tell whether what something like this is a part of a person from their own lifetime or something else. The parts of a person always have a good intention for the person. Even like a suicidal part, if it's a part of the person, if you ask it enough, well, what's good about killing her? Well, she won't be on the planet. What's good about her not being on the planet anymore? Then her suffering will be over. You know, there's the good intention. That's a part of the person. We don't want to try and get rid of it. We can join with that good intention. We can say, "Oh, we want her suffering to be over, too." And there's ways we can do it that won't involve you having to kill the body. Are you interested?" Almost always the suicidal parts say, "Oh, I'd love it if you could do that, but you can't. There's no way you could do that." And we just say to it, "Would you pause enough and give us a chance to prove to you that we could?" So that's if it's a part, it has a good intention. You can join the good intention. If it's one of, if it's some external energy, it doesn't have a good intention. So we worked with this bloodshot eyeball. Almost everybody has a critic. And we, "What's your intention? What's your intention?" It just wanted to destroy her. It just, you know, you know, make her, you know, make her suffer. No good intention. So then ask it, "Are you a part of me?" For some reason, these things don't seem to be able to lie in response to that question, but only that question. And it didn't want to answer the question. It said stuff like, "Ah, you know, that's a foolish question," or "You wish I was a part of you," all this BS. And then at one point it said, through her to me, "You're supposed to be a teacher. That's a really stupid question." And I said, "Well, it may be stupid, but it's simple. Are you a part of her?" And then it finally sort of roared out inside her head, "No, I'm not a part of her. She's a miserable little worm like you, and I'm going to crush you both." That's some kind of external energy with no good intention whatsoever. And we were able to get that out of her system and gone. And I thought, you know, and she left and left the training and I thought, "God, this was weird. You know, I'm just going to ignore that." And then she started sending me all these emails from the airport when she got home saying, "Um, I'm seeing light like I, so like I haven't seen before and colors and I can see the, I can see the sacredness in each human in the airport." And I'm thinking, "Oh no, I triggered a manic episode." And then she sent me an email that changed my life. She said, "Bob, I didn't tell you this, but when I was young, I tried to kill myself many times and was locked up many times. And back then, when I tried to tell people about the nonhuman inside of me, they gave me electroshock and injected me full of horrible drugs. You're the first human to believe me, and you have changed my life." And I went, "I can't ignore this. It's really inconvenient, unpleasant, shatters my worldview, you know, it doesn't fit, but hey, if I could help this woman change her life with it, you know, yeah, I need to, I need to be open to this being real." And I followed her for, oh, 15 years since then. And she continues to say, "Yeah, it changed my life. I feel a lot better." And reports of her external life also confirm that. Yeah. It really, really made a huge difference in her life.

And, and it's interesting you say as well, it's there's so many accounts of that in your work and, and been reading lots of them, you can kind of take it for granted. Oh yeah, these happened. But as you say, it now, it's, wow, that you have to, you would confront it. And as you say, it's been inconvenient for you because how can one talk about parts of oneself that are not part of you if that's the assumption? It's like, yeah. And I was already like 60 when that happened, or close to it. And I had a pretty well-established career as a trauma-oriented psychotherapist. And I thought I understood stuff. And this comes along and it just blows everything up. And who wants to start all over again at 60, you know? It's like, but when she said that thing about, you know, what they did to her back then, and just by believing her changed her life, it was like, no, I got, I got to listen to what the people, what people say and pay attention and not, you know, I think what I was doing before, I had this pretty narrow, rigid worldview. And I would impose it on everyone who came towards me. And now I'm thinking, that was a horrible mistake.

M. It reminds me of, uh, some an interview I, I saw of an actual exorcist, or at least he did part work. And also a psychologist. And he, again, he would find there's also definitely mostly parts of oneself, but then there are also in the special cases, but one would have to acknowledge that there are parts of oneself that are not you. But I suppose with him, he would maybe have more, he had more of a framework to understand, maybe I see what's going on here. Whereas you're kind of having to ad hoc go, what is going on here? And, you know, how am I supposed to deal with this?

I think the one way that what I do, and I've discovered what I do by sort of trial and error and trying to stay pragmatic. It's not like an exorcism or a deliverance. It's not combative or confrontive. Uh, I don't think there's much need for that. I think most, most often, maybe always, these things are just lost suffering. And they cling on to people out of desperation and starvation. And we don't need to fight them. We just need to help them get free. And when a person is no longer afraid of them and no longer wants them around for any reason, they, they don't seem to be able to stay. And getting into these big exorcist battles with them, I think makes it harder and does a lot of damage to the person. And, you know, it's a lot of unnecessary violence.

I think you mentioned Carl Jung at the start and someone like him, but many people through history have thought about self-actualization and a kind of person we're supposed to be. Or I think of Corbin's divine double in relation to how many parts there are within us, also things from the outside that can attack us. I wonder what you think about one's life purpose or, uh, in, yeah, if there's a right, reasonable definition of someone we're supposed to be? Because if there are parts of ourselves that, as you say, they feel very hurt and they do things which, in the way they act, doesn't seem appropriate to help one, but then if you talk to them, they go, "Actually, I do want the best for this person." So it's not the actual route, the journey to navigate what is optimal for someone seems very difficult and complex. But, but yeah, okay.

I think I get what you're asking. Um, I view it this way, and I think IFS, you know, Internal Family Systems, founded by Richard Schwartz, is basically the model I come out of. But I think I go beyond what they do. So if there's anything that seems weird or goofy, it's me. IFS is pretty, you know, straight-laced, academically acceptable, evidence-based psychotherapy, all that stuff. So I just want to make that little disclaimer from the IFS world. A model of healing that many IFS people share with me is that most of us, when we're wandering around the world, we're in a state of internal civil war. There's a part of us who wants to eat two servings of dessert, and there's another part of us going, "You fat pig, don't you dare." Sound familiar? Or a part of us who wants to quit our job because it's so boring. And another part that says, "We got a mortgage. We got to buy food." I think most human energy goes into these internal civil wars. It's an incredible waste. And what we can do if we work with the parts of people, we don't mush all these parts together in a blender, but instead of an internal civil war, it can become like a great orchestra or band or sports team that cooperates in this really beautiful way where the, the music that comes out is greater than all the sum of all the parts. And that's a practical, doable kind of thing. You can stop the battles and start helping these parts cooperate, right? And that doesn't need to suppose a kind of complete end goal or some state. That would be ideal. But, and since we're always related to other people, and we must navigate our own unique goals in life with how we relate to other people, it would, it would be premature to say that there is some final state that we need to get to.

Um, I wonder what you think of something like, you mentioned that we're constantly then maybe in battles with parts of ourselves in tension. And I wonder what technology, especially the internet and having access to distractions, does in that they allow parts of ourselves that you wouldn't even need to restrain them, you know, but now I have to even if I don't do it, but I have to even maybe unconsciously restrain that part of myself that does want to watch loads of YouTube videos or what have you. And so, and even if that doesn't, because again, it's interesting. I wonder how parts of ourselves and other intelligences can exist within us that maybe we don't even notice.

Right. Oh yeah, definitely. Most of the time, we, we are totally unaware of parts of ourselves. Most of the time, they hijack the system and we don't notice it. One that I've struggled with for many years is if someone drives badly on the freeway, like cuts me off. A raging three-year-old is all of a sudden driving that car. The adult Bob is gone. Who knows where? And there's a tantruming three-year-old. This is not good news at 70 miles an hour. You know, this is not a good thing. But I'm getting more and more aware of the three-year-old. So I'm able to deal with him in a loving way and, and not act out on the road and give someone the finger or, you know, drive more crazy stuff like that. So yeah, we're not aware of this most of the time.

I want to say one more thing, and this is even a more radical idea than everything we've been talking about so far. I don't mind is multiple. That's what we've been talking about with this part model. We are not one unified thing. We are a system of interrelated beings. We're more like an ecology than a single organism. I think there's overwhelming evidence for that. Even a weirder or more radical proposition is that not only that, but our minds are porous. We take in things from our environment and give things out. Every living system is encapsulated by a semi-permeable membrane. Every single one. Why would our minds be different? You start thinking about it and it's sort of obvious. But our whole Western civilization in the past 4 or 500 years has been built on this, uh, model of, um, Daniel Siegel calls it the solo self, that we are these encapsulated beings like billiard balls bumping into each other. And it's garbage, and it's very, very poisonous. I think this idea that we are, that our minds are citadels or fortresses underlies most of the epidemic of mental illness that's been plaguing the Western world for 50, 100 years. And I could go into that at great detail.

Oh yeah, it would be interesting to talk more about that because it reminds me of more generally perhaps individualism and that the appropriate level of analysis is a single human biological individual. Um, it's something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of economics because it explicitly notices that you have these massive higher level systems, organizations, whole economies, but then in all its analysis, it will go, oh, but obviously there's individuals and they make and often selfish decisions. Rationally. But then it's again, with with porosity, okay.

I mean, I think that's in some ways a reasonable heuristic. I mean, I think treating humans as kind of sovereign natural entities. But then also, as you say, I mean, if we can't be influenced by intelligence that intelligences that are not ours, but again, just even more practically, like we're obviously influenced by emotional things within family, within the people around us. And yeah, you can try and ignore it, but it's not even. Let me give you a couple of examples. Distributed cognition. And I picked this one because it's not emotions. It's not woowoo. This is hard science we're talking about. Again, distributed cognition. They, they use this to analyze air traffic control, which you want, you want reliable here, right? There's no room for fuzzy thinking. Think about the problem for a minute. Where is the intelligence as a pilot is landing a plane? Is it in the pilot's brain? Well, is it in the instruments in his plane on his dashboard? Well, is it in the air traffic controller's brain? Uh, well, is it, is his instruments? Is it in the remote radar station? It's obviously distributed. It's that whole system. And to improve that system, you have to take the intelligence itself as being distributed. If you try and analyze it in just one of those areas, your analysis is going to suck. They use this in analyzing military chains of command, which is another place where there's no room for foolishness. So here is one example where a very cut and dried function of mind, cognition, is distributed. Now I want to give another example because I think it's super important. This amazing woman, Tanya Luhrmann, I think is one of the great anthropologists alive today. She says we in the West have developed what she calls the citadel model of mind. It's what, uh, Daniel Siegel called the, the solo self model of mind. And she says, you know, we have this belief that our mind is contained in this little bony thing up here. It's private. Everything inside it is our property and it constitutes our identity. Now, that looks really strong, but it's actually not. It's incredibly fragile. It's brittle, very brittle, and that's what makes it fragile. And if, if you start thinking about the implications of this citadel model of mind, which is the model of mind that underlies modern Western culture, it's built into the grammar of our language. You can't just think this away easily. If you have this model of mind, you will feel alienated from the world and all of those around you. This model of mind is alienation. And many, many philosophers have discussed alienation as the core of the modern anguish. I want to give a very specific example here. Luhrmann studied psychosis and spirituality in all these different cultures all over the planet. In one of her very earliest ones, she studied people with acute psychotic episodes in San Mateo, California, Accra, Ghana, and Chennai, India. Now, we spend over a thousand times as much money as those other two places, and we get worse results. This is, this is like, you know, why am I laughing? And, and the really bad news is we're spreading our methods. I mean, this is insanity. Her theory about why this is so is because of this citadel model of mind. If you have this brittle theory of mind and you start hearing a voice inside your head going, "You're an idiot. You should die. You're an idiot. You should die." Or whatever it's saying. Or, "You're God. You can walk on water." You know, whatever the voice is saying, you're going to think, "Oh my god, my brain is broken. I'm a mess. It's horrible." In Accra, she had, they have what she called a cosmoscentric model of the self. They expect the self to be interrelated with the environment around it, including the natural world, including the sky above, and including the beings who live there. So when they hear a voice or have other experiences of something that's not part of themselves, it's not so bad. It's okay. In India, they have what she called a sociocentric model of mind. They think of the mind as like a family or a society. And it's not so weird for them to be hearing other voices or voices of the gods. And there's a lot in Hindu religion about calling in the voices of the gods. So our brittle citadel model of mind damages us and makes us very, very vulnerable to severe mental illness.

H. It makes me want to wonder what is the kind of where individualism, a citadel model of mine came from. And what is the proper place of, in particular, I bring this up because I think about Christianity and then what, um, one thing it reminds me of is in the past, dreams and visions were more, perhaps it's reasonable to say they were more accepted in Christianity. Um, then downplayed, and then to such an extent that they were kind of not accepted from really anyone as like the maybe the prophets had them. And now no more. And that's, that's enough, uh, interesting strange experiences for us.

And yeah, I think, well, there's many historians who've traced the development of this model of self. Uh, Charles Taylor, who was at McGill University, a secular age, he's the one I think who came up with this phrase, a porous mind. He tends to see it being developed in a really big and toxic form at the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. And Owen Barfield, the great philosopher at Oxford, uh, saw it, uh, really getting its roots in ancient Greece. Other people, I'm forgetting the guy's name, he sees it as even more ancient than that. And I think I think they're all sort of right. You know, this is, this is a toxic plant that has very deep roots that's really only flowered in the last 4, 500 years, and only in the Western culture, and only in the elites of the West, the, the self-proclaimed elites of the Western culture. And unfortunately, with the spread of Western materialist worldviews, it's being exported all over the planet now. I mean, I don't want to even make this political, but with even changing one's identity and gender, it makes me think that the end is not an individual, but like something supposed deeper than an individual that is a true self. That we can, even in the, even in a lot of American culture, there's the American dream. We have to be something, but what that end goal is, is a kind of also materialistic end state sometimes. And so it's, it's not the buck doesn't stop at the individualism. It kind of, there are things, why is it there? And you're going to have end goals and things you're striving towards. And it's so, it's sort of like, okay, you can have it as a hypothesis, maybe, you know, this is something one could, one could think about people and the world as like this, but then what does it give you? Where does it lead to?

Okay. Is good question. I have a, I have an answer. It's probably, it's probably at least 50%, but put it out there anyway. Um, I think when we're able to learn in interoception, when we're able to cultivate our inner senses, and when we're develop the courage to meet our parts and form a choir or orchestra with them, and when we're on better terms with all those other weird things we discover, we sort of put down roots and we're connected to the environment around us in a way that makes it almost impossible for domination structures to control us. And I think that's one reason why domination structures destroy this kind of inner contact. You know, some people have said that the main thing churches do is prevent spiritual experience. When people are having profound spiritual experiences inside themselves, they don't really need priests in a church in the same way they used to, or they can't be pushed around by a priest in a church. I think good priests, good churches do help people develop this. I don't, I don't want to be seen as, you know, denigrating them all. And I also think when people have connections to their own depths in this way, they can't be sold a bunch of garbage they don't need and go into debt and have to work their whole life. They get an independence and a spine. And, you know, domination structures don't really like this. You can't dominate people who have that kind of profound connection into their own inner worlds.

This reminds me of Jordan Peterson's emphasis on someone like, um, what's his name? But the, you know, in the Russian revolution, right? You can always, in any any situation, you can always blame. Is it the individuals or no? They had that, it was all the state was the only person who was culpable. But one, as an economist, I even find this a practical fascinating problem. How, how do they interplay? You know, is it possible to actually stop tyranny and corruption based on how individuals act? And are there ways to change the norms in the institutions? Because you can have, say, yeah, corrupt church and be like, well, what could we do? But then there's, yeah, m maybe in iteratively you get sold nonsense if you are not connected to deep parts of yourself.

I think when you are connected to the deep parts of yourself, it's much, much, much harder to sell you.

Garbage. Which I think I think that claim is modest enough so that it's verifiable. Even the way you frame it to sell you. I mean, why is one selling you anything? Not that we don't, we we need the economy, we need these, but just it's like someone's trying to get something. And then why do they even want, you know, what is the need for then something excess beyond? Not that wealth is bad, but it's like, yeah, from reading your work and people who are very connected to themselves. It makes me think you kind of know what you need. And so there's no need for excess of really anything to buy, to sell.

I think some people who are very, very well connected to themselves, profoundly well, are immensely wealthy. Many of the Sufis, which is interesting, you know, a lot of traditions think holy people have to be poor. Not the Sufis. A lot of them thought, well, a holy person could be a wonderful businessman. And a lot of them would go start up a business, make a wad of money, and then go do something else that they really wanted to do. I don't think that I don't think material success and deep self-connection are mutually exclusive at all. I I definitely see people who that at least for part of their life that feels very necessary. Maybe even younger people in general, that's younger males, maybe that is even necessary and and good.

Uh, but it reminds me even of of what do you call them, kind of philosophers or self-help people who kind of realize and notice and appreciate that throughout our life, the goals we need to attain and who we are kind of evolves and changes. So that the kind of person we're supposed to be at one time in our life, maybe might have worked really well, in fact, and we kind of achieved what we needed to. And then it kind of changes. And thank God, I'm glad I'm not the man I wanted to be when I was 12. I still have a very active 12-year-old part who I really enjoy, but I don't I don't let him choose, make the big decisions. You know, he's got a great sense of humor and he says really snarky things and he makes me laugh a lot and he's very playful, but I don't let him, you know, decide which house to buy or what book to write next or any of that stuff.

When you talk about you particularly mention specific parts of yourself, how does one should one cultivate those kind of relationships so that you kind of explicitly notice, oh, these are these are the parts of me? Definitely. Yeah. I devote a lot of time to that and checking in with them on a regular basis and asking their opinion about stuff. And if I don't do that, they tend to want to kick me in the butt. And that that sets those civil wars going again, you know. And I really I want I want my internal world to be a choir or an orchestra of vast power and thousands of beings cooperating and playing together joyfully. It's not some grim, oh my god, no, I'm not. That's not me.

What What wonder if it feels like you try and name a certain part, but then it feels strange? I guess I'm talking from my own experience. It's Is that a part or as it's just a temporary? Who am I talking to exactly? Because then it feels like the boundaries feel hard to delineate. Oh yeah, definitely. All the time. Standard experience. And my my rule of thumb for that is don't think, don't try and figure it out. Just ask, you know, instead of going, uh, gee, I think that part's maybe from my blah blah blah. Just say, hi, who are you? Why are you here? Do you need something? What kind of what what would you like to do? You know, it's like it's just like developing friendships in the outside world. Very much like that.

I want to say something else and I know we're just about out of time. They used talking about cultivating the inner world. They used to tell kids and parents with kids who had imaginary friends that's really bad. You're wasting your time with those imaginary friends. You know that's going to lead to insanity and ignore that. Ignore that. Don't do that. You're bad. You're bad. Literally indoctrinate and sometimes even punish that out of children. Now they actually started studying it. Kids with imaginary friends mature more quickly and precisely in the areas where everyone was saying they do the worst. Kids with imaginary friends do better in forming social relationships with other real kids or kids with bodies. So we were going in exactly the wrong way. Developing this internal world and the internal awareness and these internal relationships helps us in the external world. It's not the road to insanity. Especially as a young person, a child, you haven't had that that many experiences. And every time you say meet new friends, that's actually quite new novel experiences. And so to have practice. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, as well in our daily life, we also at least I am constantly having conversations with a friend and it's like obviously my friend's not there, it's just me, but then it it's helpful. And that conversation never happens. And even if I think, oh, this is how the argument is going to go down and I'm going to say the, then it doesn't happen. But I don't know if it's useless. Although sometimes we can daydream too much, maybe. But yeah, I'm very much a fan of William James and he talked a lot about radical pragmatism, what works is what's real. And so a lot of people come to me very distressed about something that's going on deep inside them, images they're seeing or voices they're hearing or emotions that are roaring up in them. So my question is, how can I help this particular individual right in front of me right now? And I try and put all those other questions, hey guys, you got to back off. Here's what I'm doing. And I just want to I want to stay really focused on that. And that's much more learnable than these vast questions about the nature of mind or the limits of human purpose or which are fascinating questions, but they're so much harder. And they they limit, they don't help. They actually limit my attempts to reduce human suffering, which is sort of like my north star. I want to try and reduce human suffering.

Thank you for this. It's been really fun. Anything else you're working on in the at the moment? And where can you point people that want to see your work? Uh, go to my website, robertfalconer. us, the big book about these things. Uh, the others within us. Um, I'll have a book out in May on uh, IFS and Emanuel Swedenborg. I'm working on two other books, spirituality and uh, psychological health and healing and u whole b there'll be a bunch of classes coming up that are on my website. So I'm 77. I should be retired, but I so love what I do and I'm so fascinated by this inner world that it keeps me alive and full of joy. I'm looking forward to it. Okay. Thank