In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and very much your fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we journey into some of the areas that are definitely closest to my heart. Those of you who’ve listened for any length of time know that I teach and practice contemporary shamanic spirituality and that my personal therapeutic practice is within internal family systems. And there is a fine line between these two, although there is also a lot of crossover. And the one person I’ve come across who crosses those lines most deeply and thoughtfully is Robert Falconer. Bob Falconer is a longtime IFS practitioner and trainer (that’s internal family systems). He’s the author or co-author of many books, including Many Minds Oneself, which he co-wrote with Dick Schwartz, who is credited more or less with founding internal family systems therapy. And for me, this is the form of therapy that leans closest into spiritual work, particularly, as I said, shamanic work. And Bob’s book called The Others Within Us; Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind and Spirit Possession is an absolutely groundbreaking work that blows open the fallacies of the Citadel mind model, that holds that we are isolated units caught within the boundaries of our own skulls. And we know this is not how the world works. But if it isn’t, how do we make sense of the worlds beyond consensus reality? How do we engage with the web of life in all that’s around us, in ways that are respectful and reciprocal and generative? And Bob’s book opens doors into that world in ways nothing else that I have come across is capable of doing.

Manda: He opens that wide spectrum into all of the other cultures where the concept of there being non-human, non embodied energies that have at least a degree of agency and can interact with human beings in ways that are either to our benefit or our detriment, is taken for granted. So as we hurtle towards the edge of the polycrisis cliff, pushed by our culture’s endemic inability to engage with our own personal, collective and ancestral trauma, talking to Bob seemed pretty much essential. We talked quite a lot about IFS. So once again, this is internal family systems therapy. And at the start we open up a little bit more about what it is and how it works. Although if you’re interested, I genuinely do encourage you to read the book that Bob co-wrote with Dick Schwartz. I have put a link in the show notes. We also, and this is a trigger warning, explore some of Bob’s own life history of really, genuinely harrowing sexual and physical abuse. And if this is likely to trigger parts of you, then please only listen when you’re feeling grounded and well resourced and have whatever you need around you to help you to hold stability. Beyond that, we range far and wide and deep around and across and through the boundaries where science meets spirituality and philosophy meets psychotherapy. All of which is squarely in the area that I think needs most work, most thought, most feeling, most courage for all of us. So people of the podcast, please do welcome Robert Falconer, IFS practitioner and author of The Others Within Us.

Manda: Bob Faulkner, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this lovely May day?

Bob: I’m doing quite well. It’s morning in Santa Cruz, California. I live a little bit up in the mountains behind Santa Cruz, which is a small seaside university town about an hour and a half south of San Francisco.

Manda: Sounds gorgeous. And from what I’ve heard of other things of you, you get up at what to me would be spectacularly early and go and dance in the woods. Are you still doing that? Is that still a thing?

Bob: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Manda: We could maybe talk about that later. Okay, so there are many, many things that I want to talk to you about. But to begin with, I think I want to lay foundations for people who are not familiar with some of the things that I have spent the last week listening to you speak about. So I have heard you say that more or less everybody is walking around with an internal civil war going on. And that what’s in the way is the way. And I wonder if you could take either or both of those two statements and run with them as an outline of what IFS is for those who are not familiar.

Bob: Okay. I think, sadly, most people on this planet spend most of their creative and psychological energy in an internal civil war. We are made up of parts, we’re not one unified, mushy thing. We’re all these separate little contained subpersonalities, and they spend much of their time fighting each other. If you have ever had a big decision to make, like do I want to quit this job or do I want to marry this person? In cases like that, this internal civil war gets really Conscious, but most of the time it’s quite unconscious. And IFS outlines several different kinds of parts, and realises this is a delicate ecology; we don’t want to just go blasting in here and clear cut something. We want to treat it respectfully. And also in addition to the parts, there’s something IfS calls the self, which is the witness function. It’s the eyes that are always looking out at the rest of the system. And the goal of IFS is to help the self be the leader of the system. We don’t want to homogenise the parts. It’s like turning this civil war into an orchestra. You need the flutes and the bass fiddles and all the different instruments, otherwise it’s a crappy orchestra. So we don’t homogenise them. That other thing, that’s actually from Marcus Aurelius.

Manda: Oh, really? ‘What’s in the way is the way’ was Marcus Aurelius? Goodness!

Bob: Yeah it is. A little differently, but basically that idea is his. So this is not a new IFS idea. One author I knew who I thought was delightful, he said I think I come up with something new, and then I realise all my best ideas were stolen by the ancients. So that just means if there’s some protector that comes up, if you’re working with somebody’s system and the protector goes, no! You ain’t coming in here, you’re an idiot. Go away. That becomes the way in. That is the doorway, the portal. Oh, hi. Great to meet you. I really want to get to know you. Have I done something to irritate you? So we don’t try and push past Domineer control. We welcome and if something is in the way, we welcome it and get to know it.

Manda: Brilliant. Thank you. Lots of different ways we could go. I wrote a note to myself as you were speaking, that when we decide are we going to marry this person it seems to me that the function of falling in love is somehow to flood the system with certainty. So that all the parts going are you sure this is a good idea? Just get drowned out briefly in order that whatever it is, dynamic, happens. Something about our culture that’s made that be a commitment for life, which I think is a bit weird, but there we go. That’s a separate podcast. Okay, so we have the self as a witness. I have two questions immediately arising. If you and I had grown up in what Francis Weller would call an initiation culture; so a whole healthy, indigenous, connected culture where we have full connection to the web of life. Francis Weller said recently on Nate Hagens podcast that one of the core woundings of our culture is that when we are first born, we open our eyes expecting to be greeted by 40 pairs of eyes looking back that all care deeply about our welfare, and we don’t have that. And then as we’re growing, we expect to have a sense of meaning and being and belonging and becoming, and that sense of self-respect that comes from being respected by people whom we respect. And that respect is a thread that goes through all of our needs. And that there is no amount of buying stuff off Amazon, or drinking alcohol, or consuming sugar or pornography or likes on the internet that will ever give us that respect. But if we were born into a culture that did give us that, is it your belief that the self and parts are more likely to be playing in a harmonious orchestra than in our culture? Is that the case?

Bob: First of all, and this will probably annoy many people. I don’t think there ever was such a culture. I think that’s sort of a golden age fantasy we have. And my undergraduate degree and a little bit of graduate work in anthropology, and I’ve taught all over the world. So I did not want to believe this, because I wanted to have this golden era of something.

Manda: And I do definitely want to have this. So let’s unpick that, before we go anywhere near all the rest of it. What leads you to believe that? Because it would be very hard for you and I to meet people, pretty much by definition; if that culture existed now, it exists in a way that has not connected Western culture. So it would be seriously hard for us to connect to one of those cultures.

Bob: Or maybe impossible.

Manda: Well, yes, by definition.

Bob: Just I’ve not seen evidence that they exist. You know, originally it was the white man looked down their nose at the primitive and the savage and went, oh, they’re so horrible. And then then there’s been this wave of, oh, the noble savage, and they’re so wonderful. And, you know, whoopee! I don’t think either of those is appropriate or real. And I think there are cultures that are way better than ours and I think there’s a very specific difference, which I would talk about in terms of the porosity of mind and how we conceive our own minds, that we need to learn from and imitate. But this Golden Age idea, it comes up over and over again. Almost every religion has this fantasy of a golden age, or a myth. But I don’t think it’s ever happened on our planet yet.

Manda: Do you think it’s possible that it could happen?

Bob: I think it can get way better. Perfection, no, but way better – definitely.

Manda: But we’re not speaking of perfection, are we? Okay, I think you haven’t read Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, which goes into the myth of the Noble Savage in quite a lot of detail, but that would probably be another conversation. Let’s let that one go and go back to the original question of if we were to look forward into a point where humanity evolves into being something that could actually flourish as an integral part of the web of life, which I think is the only way we get forward. Is there a point where the orchestra becomes so much self led that each integral part is an aspect of self? Or are there always distinct parts?

Bob: I think there are always distinct parts. Each part has its own version of self. You know, one of the prominent theories of consciousness these days is IIT integrated information theory of consciousness. And it’s a mathematical description of consciousness. And one of the theorems in that mathematics is that a conscious system of a certain degree of complexity must be composed of largely encapsulated nodes that are interconnected by links. Cybernetically, otherwise it can’t work. So, I think that’s an actually very beneficial structure of consciousness and anything that processes information. Computers are made like that. They’re subroutines. If it was all one central processor, the computer would be an idiot. There’s a guy who wrote a book called The Architecture of Mind, a philosopher, like an 800 page real killer of a book. Carruthers I think his name was. Argued the same thing; we have to be modular. It’s part of the nature of consciousness or any intelligent system. And there is a very specific definition of intelligence that we could go into, but this is sort of Very theoretical.

Manda: Yes. Probably not where we want to go to. I just found the architecture of mind, I will put it in the show notes. Yeah, because that leads me to a whole bunch of other questions. Of what happens with the very, very long term meditators, the ones who are basically in gamma brainwaves, who seem not to be modular. If you meditate a lot, the modularity to me seems to be less. There does seem to be a degree of coherence that arises. Let’s let that one go, because I don’t think it’s necessarily useful. Let’s head to porosity of mind and the distinction between the cultures that acknowledge porosity of mind, and our culture, which lives in what Tanya Luhrmann calls Citadel mind. Explain to us a little bit about that.

Bob: OK. Let me go a little further into the IFS model, because I think that’ll help.

Manda: Yes, that would be useful.

Bob: So IFS says, we’re made up of all these parts and there’s this self, this witness function, this central thing. The parts are basically exiles, which are the wounded children that many, many other forms of psychotherapy recognise, and something IFS called protectors, which is the system that came up to keep these wounded children relatively safe. And that’s very complex and most of IFS is about how you work with this stuff. But also as you go further and further into a person’s mind, there’s stuff that does not come from their own consciousness, from their own personal lifetime history. Some of this stuff is from their ancestors, some of it comes from who knows where. And this would be what Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS; he hates it when I say this, but this is what would be called spirit possession in most other cultures in history. These things exist. They’re out there somewhere and we can meet them and we can work with them. And I have worked very hard to keep myself focussed on the pragmatics. How can we work with this? When there’s some big, nasty energy in somebody destroying their life, how can I help them? And I try to avoid all these giant questions that we were moving towards before. No matter how fascinating they are, because my job is to help reduce the human suffering in front of me. Anyway, when you start realising this stuff’s there… And there’s also guides.

Manda: We’ll talk a lot about that in a minute.

Bob: Yeah. So this implies there’s a porous mind. That your mind is connected in some way or open to the rest of the universe. William James had a great metaphor for this. He said, we’re like islands in the sea, just looking at us up top here we seem separate, but we’re all of the same seafloor, you know, bumps on the same seafloor. Tanya Luhrmann talks about the Citadel model of mind, and she is, I believe, a great anthropologist. She spent much of her career studying psychosis and spirituality all over the planet and does amazing work. And one of the things she has realised is that we in the West have what you mentioned, she calls a Citadel model of mind, and it looks powerful. You know, you think our brain is contained in this bony little thing up here, and it’s ours and private and we own it. That looks powerful, but actually it’s incredibly brittle and therefore fragile. And cultures with a more porous model of mind, a more flexible model of mind, do way better with psychosis than we do. And we could go into that for a very, very long time. But let me just say this Citadel model of mind, there are many people who have thought about the history of it. Owen Barfield thought it really got started in ancient Greece. Many people think it really got going and got on steroids during the Reformation. But it pretty much only exists in Western culture and only in the elites of Western culture. If you start taking surveys of what most people believe, it’s only in the talking classes that people believe this stuff.

Bob: So there’s another woman, Isabel Clarke, in the UK, and she’s a psychotherapist who works with in patient psychotics. And she realised a very similar thing, but she’s never seen Tanya Luhrmann’s work, they don’t reference each other. Clarke calls this the billiard ball theory of mind. Same idea. If you have this billiard ball theory of mind, you will have huge trouble with psychotic or visionary experiences, because you’ll think your brain is broken and you go way down. There are many, many other people who have discussed this and seen it as a basic flaw in humanity. I like Owen Barfield, the great Oxford philosopher and friend of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. He talks about an original participation, an era of separation which we’re in now, and the necessity for a final participation, as he calls it. So it’s not like we want to go back to that golden age, because the golden Age had some problems. It’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You know, we need to create something new and bigger that contains both. Because it’s poisonous. I believe that this Citadel model of mind is the root cause of the modern epidemic of mental illness. If you think of yourself as some separate, isolated, private thing, you will feel alienated, your life will feel meaningless, and you’ll need meds. You know, this is really, really bad news. And so I do think we need this new synthesis. But the rising of the Citadel model of mind also comes up with the rise of science and technology. And these are wonderful, it’s really good at manipulating the material world and I’d be dead long ago if it wasn’t for all that stuff, so I don’t want to disrespect it.

Manda: Yeah, there’s probably a whole other podcast in whether it would have been possible to have a scientific model without the Citadel mind model. As a novelist, I would love to write the fiction where that was a thing. But a lot of particularly the biological sciences, required levels of experimentation on other species that could not happen if we knew ourselves to be kin with those species. So we’re probably a bit limited. Let’s not go down that road either. Bob, there are so many different interesting roads we could go down. So we have a Citadel model of mind in the West that tells us that we are isolated and separate, and that definitely saw its height in the Reformation and everything that arose since. And in a scientific model that still says this is the way the world is, such that they are resistant to any kind of suggestion that energy, in whatever form, can influence the way that we are and the way that we exist. And yet everything that we do once we drop that model, suggests that energy is a part of where we’re at. And I wonder, from what I know of your life history, and feel free to share as much or as little as you want; you have a degree in anthropology, and you started off, I’m guessing, with that Citadel Mind model. And I’m wondering, what was it that led you to understand that it wasn’t the case? I may be making a false presumption there.

Bob: Yeah. I came from a wildly abusive family, so my experience was way out of normal, way out of normal. Extreme violence. I was raped and beaten throughout my childhood. A church going family. Mom was institutionalised several times and that was hushed up. Dad was an alcoholic and had his gay lovers living in the house with us and they would molest me and my brother. My brother committed suicide when we were teenagers. My father was murdered a few years later. By all odds, I should be living in a dumpster or dead like my brother or something. Something at that level, right? And I was definitely headed for alcoholism. I was on the the train tracks heading down that hill, and it seemed unstoppable. And then I started doing LSD and other psychedelics in the 60s and that was what derailed that addiction train. And also, and this is horrible and ironic, some of the abuse was so extreme I think it created the equivalent of near death experiences of spirit. I was frequently beaten unconscious. So I don’t know if this is really a near-death experience or what you’d call it, but rendered unconscious. And I had profound spiritual experiences then. So my background cannot be taken as any kind of cultural norm as to how this stuff happens.

Manda: No, except the more we understand about adverse childhood experiences, I mean, I’ve listened to you explain yours in much more detail than that, and it does sound like you were very lucky to survive it. But I am consistently astonished by how many people have really, really abusive childhoods that we’re only just beginning to understand. And I remember listening to you a while ago saying that back in the 60s this kind of thing, the psychological textbooks said it didn’t happen. Which is just astonishing.

Bob: Yeah. I was looking that up just the other day because I wanted the reference. It was as late as 1976, the major textbook of psychiatry in America said incest is vanishingly rare, less than 1 in 1,000,000 and often it’s good for the kids.

Manda: What? They said, what? What?

Bob: Yeah, that wasn’t some fringe nut job, that was the major’s textbook of psychiatry in America.

Manda: Has anyone looked back at the authors of that to see whether they were abusing their children? Because that should never be in print.

Bob: But that was the accepted position, you know. And a big part of my early career was fighting for the recognition of childhood sexual abuse. Almost all the universities were against us. We had here in Santa Cruz a storefront survivors healing centre that had zero funding. And there were these conferences that people put on, treating abuse today and none of the major universities would touch us. It was the same with PTSD. All the major universities said, no, no, no, that’s garbage. That’s garbage. It was the Vietnam veterans rap groups who got together and talked.

Manda: Rap groups?

Bob: Rap groups. They came together after the war and talked. They knew PTSD happened!

Manda: Okay, okay.

Bob: And this one psychiatrist, Robert Lifton, organised the veterans from Vietnam. They went to Washington, put pressure on the government, which then put pressure on the universities. That’s how PTSD got in the DSM. It wasn’t until 1980.

Manda: You’re going to have to tell people what the DSM is, but yes.

Bob: The DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness. It’s the Bible.

Manda: In the US it’s the Bible.

Bob: So the first formal recognition came that way. So it was a huge struggle against the powers that be to get childhood sexual abuse and then PTSD recognised. And I fought that battle a lot. I was the head of a tiny non-profit called the Institute for Trauma Oriented Psychotherapy for more than a decade.

Manda: Wow.

Bob: It was amazing to be fighting the ‘leaders of the field’.

Manda: Yeah. For sure. I wonder what are the battles going on now that 20 years from now they’ll look back and go, my goodness, how was that a thing?

Bob: I think it’s the recognition of this issue of porosity of mind, recognition of these things IFS calls unattached burdens and guides, which in most spiritual traditions is called spirit possession and spirit guides.

Manda: Right. Unattached burdens, I think, is too complicated, because that requires that you know what an attached burden is. Let’s just call them entities, if you’re happy with that, because in our world that’s much easier. And for anybody who’s actually looking at the video, this is Bob’s book and I think this is essential reading for anybody who’s interested in any of this, but particularly in the interface between the therapeutic world and the shamanic world. Because you are the only person I know that has really gone here in such depth in this book. And for a lot of my shamanic teaching, we’ve been very clear we’re not doing therapy. Shamanic work is not therapy. But it’s very therapy adjacent. And for me, I can feel the clear line; on this side is therapy and on this side is shamanic work. But you exist at an interface. And when I discovered IFS, it is easily the most shamanic of any of the therapeutic modalities that I have encountered. And it feels to me, therefore, certainly on a personal level, I’m able to go to places that I have never been able to reach otherwise. And it has the core function, IFS has, of respecting all of the different parts. We’re not trying to tell parts that they’re unacceptable, or they just need to shut up and sit in a corner, or they need to reform themselves.

Manda: You’re here for a reason, and you have extraordinary creativity and capacity for whatever it is that you do. You can act very fast sometimes and very powerfully. And what really swung it for me was, imagine if that creativity and speed and impetus were freed up to be part of a more creative whole system, what you call the orchestra. I have an inner imagination of a bunch of horses in a field, because horses are my thing. And originally I had this idea I was going to have them all harnessed up to the same chariot; now I just want them all in the same field. That’ll do. But whatever it is, you want that sense of togetherness, we’re all on the same team, instead of that inner civil war. And within all of that, the thing that makes you unique and has obviously had a lot of pushback from within the psychotherapeutic community, is not all of the things inside us belong there. And some of them are guides that if we connected with them in a way that was reciprocal and respectful and responsible, would be able to teach us things that could heal us. And other things are basically quite damaging and it would be good if they left. In any part of that could you please speak to how did you get here and where has it taken you?

Bob: Okay. I was very much trauma oriented, focussed on trauma. I edited a bunch of books and I’ve done a lot of speaking and teaching, and was in my early 60s, I’m 77 now, and I was quite comfortable. I thought I had a trauma oriented, basically, fundamentally sound comprehension of the nature of mind. And then this client came along and I think her story is worth telling in some detail. It was actually during a training, I was training other therapists, and this guy was working with this woman, and this thing showed up inside her. You know, she looked inside: I see a bloodshot eyeball, and it just keeps criticising me and saying nasty, nasty things about, you’re an idiot, you’re stupid. We all have inner critics. It’s a very standard inner part that often has good intentions, it wants to keep us safe or help us be better, you know. But this one there was nothing good. So I’d heard about these things, Dick called unattached burdens. He used to call them critters back when I was doing this, which is a name I like much better, because it’s a little humorous.

Manda: A critter, as in, is that an American thing? Is that little fuzzy things with kind of big eyes and lots of furry feet?

Bob: Yeah, it’s sort of like not too desirable little animals.

Manda: Okay.

Bob: Yeah. So I told the guy, I said I don’t think you’ve had any training in this, can I take over the session? He said, sure. And I started having the woman question this bloodshot eyeball. You know what’s good about telling me I’m stupid? And it says, well, then you’ll feel small. What’s good about making me feel small? Then I win. No good intention. No good intention. I will crush you. So the next thing I knew to do, I didn’t know much, was just ask this thing is it a part of you? And it didn’t want to answer. It kept going, well, you wish I was a part of you, all this BS. And then eventually it said to me, you’re supposed to be a teacher, that’s a very stupid question. Don’t you have anything smarter to ask? And I said, oh, it may be stupid, but it’s simple: are you a part of her? And finally it roared out of her mouth: no, I’m not a part of her! And I’m going to squash you like a worm the same way I’m going to squash her. Okay. Clear. And I was able, using very simple techniques, I knew very, very little about these things to get it out of her. And I debriefed the group, I went into the staff meeting and I felt really weird. My body was cold. And then the rest of the staff started joking with me, saying, oh, Bob the Ghostbuster. And I got really irritated. I lost it and I insulted a bunch of my friends and I had to apologise later. And the next morning I thought, whatever that was, I’m just going to pretend that did not happen.

Bob: That’s just too weird, you know? Goodbye. And then the woman started sending me these emails, going home from the airport. Thank you, that session was so amazing, you’ve changed my life. I’m seeing colours I’ve never seen before. I can see the spark of light in everyone. And I’m thinking, oh, no, I’ve triggered a major manic episode. What’s going to happen to this poor woman? And there goes my license and malpractice, you know, all these the kinds of things that go on in a therapist’s head, that we’re not supposed to talk about. And then she sent me an email that changed my life. She said, Bob, when I was a young woman, I didn’t tell you this or anyone at the training, I tried to kill myself many times, and I was institutionalised over and over. When I tried to tell anyone about the non-human inside of me back then, they gave me electroshock and put me in constraints and injected me with terrible drugs. You’re the first human being to believe me. And you have changed my life. And I went, I can’t ignore this. This really messes up my whole worldview, it’s really inconvenient, I’m going to be in trouble, but I can’t ignore that.

Bob: And I followed that woman for 15 years, and it did transform her life. She flowered, inside and out.

Manda: And you wrote about her in your book. And then I think she contacted you after that as well.

Bob: Yeah, she did, she did. And last time I heard from her, she had a terminal illness, but still felt that this was a major watershed and a wonderful event in her life. And I had almost no skill. I just knew that it could happen and didn’t dismiss it.

Manda: And you weren’t afraid of it? I think was key. Really key to this.

Bob: That’s the most important thing. These kinds of things only get power in us when we’re scared of them. And when we can welcome and comfort all the parts of us who are scared of them, they lose all power.

Manda: Yeah.

Bob: And they’re really good at scaring us.

Manda: They seem to feed off fear. My experience is. So you had this experience, you yourself had effectively gone into shock. I’ve listened to you expand that at other times and it sounds like your body mind knew more than your head mind. And frankly, insulting your friends strikes me as the kindest thing you could have done, because they should have known better. But anyway, let’s leave that aside. All their parts were all triggered as well.

Bob: Yeah.

Manda: Then she had given you this opening, she’d opened a gateway into a new way of seeing the world, or this experience had opened that gateway for you. Where did you take it?

Bob: I got curious, and I started calling up other therapists I knew, other people in the IFS world. Have you seen much of this? What do you do with it? Dick and I were very close then, and I asked him a lot about it. And I’d done all the advanced training. He says, we don’t talk about that in the introductory trainings it’s too weird, people are going to use it to discredit IFS, so we try not to talk about that much. But I kept asking, and so many other therapists started sending me their clients. Because nobody wanted to deal with this, just like me, whoah! Send it to Bob. Send it to Bob.

Manda: And were they doing that because they were afraid of their credibility, or were they actually just afraid of what it is.

Bob: Afraid of it.

Manda: Once we get beyond Citadel mind, we’re now in the space where there is porosity of being, where something can enter someone and if you take it out, it might be able to enter you. And that, I would imagine, is terrifying.

Bob: And that does happen. There’s a wonderful quote from a shaman, a woman shaman, a Cherokee. One of my favourite quotes. ‘Our foundations are ripped out from under us over and over and over again, until the abyss itself becomes our foundation’. And this was definitely a foundation ripping out from under me. But it was great for me, ironically, because I got a tremendous amount of experience in a decade.

Manda: Right. And then you wrote your book, which then you go around the world and you talk to people in a whole bunch of other cultures for whom this is obvious. The fact that these things can happen, the fact that there are entities that can enter into us and that feed off our fear and that some quite often, in my experience anyway, offer power to somebody. But it’s not healthy power. It’s power over.

Bob: Let me say a little bit more about that. They offer power, but what they actually do is they keep people powerless so that they stay dependent. So it’s a fake. It’s a ‘come here kid, I’ve got candy for you!’

Manda: Yeah. And often they arise when we’re children, disempowered as children. Through your work I got to Thomas Zinsser’s soul centred healing and he talks a lot about these, he calls them something else, but it’s essentially the same thing, arising where small children are being abused in some way. I mean, it might be just being bullied at school, but they feel the need for something to protect them. And our culture doesn’t offer a pantheon of healthy spirits that are there to protect young children, so whatever turns up and goes, hey, I’ll do that, we take into ourselves and give it space. And that seems to me, certainly in the work that we do, that one of the keys is it’s quite hard for something to come in unless someone has offered it entry at some point in their past. Is that your experience also?

Bob: Definitely. And Dick used to say, since Covid I haven’t spent hardly any time with him, he used to say it’s always the offer of power to the powerless. But I’m quite convinced now very often it’s the offer of companionship to the abandoned. Abandonment is such a terrible trauma because it’s invisible, it’s a lack rather than a presence of something. So people feel much more confused and mystified by it. There’s nothing they can go, oh, there it is.

Manda: Right. So you have then had a lot of experience of helping people to free up from entities inside. Is it your experience that there are multiple entities, or that there’s one big entity and multiple little fractured entities? Or have you ever had someone where you’ve had a series of like a Russian doll set of entities?

Bob: All of the above and more? Okay.

Manda: Tell us more.

Bob: There are many, many kinds of entities. I am a big fan of the Spiritists in Brazil, especially the Brazilian Spiritists and the work of Allan Kardec, a Frenchman who wrote many books based on what the mediums told him. And his work became so popular in Brazil they call spiritism sometimes Catechismo. Anyway, I could spend a lot of time going there, but let me just say the spiritists of Brazil believe all these spirits are the souls of dead humans who previously lived, who for one reason or another were too frightened to go on to the realms where they could transform. And they’re clinging here and hanging on to people here out of fear and terror. And even though they may be doing tremendous amounts of damage, they’re not actually at the core evil. And it becomes our job when we’re working with them to help these spirits heal, as well as the human in a body who’s our official client.

Manda: Right. So you said earlier that it’s your job to reduce the sum total of human suffering and that if these parts, they’re not embodied human, but they’re still suffering. And then by helping them to move on to where they need to go, the person is then suffering less, I assume.

Bob: Yeah, I want to make a point here that’s super important to me. Because I come to this from a therapy and trauma background, the vast majority of these that I saw at the beginning were negative, difficult, problematic. But I think if you look at the worldwide anthropological literature, the vast majority of these are positive.

Manda: Right. That’s exactly where I wanted to go next. Tell us more about that.

Bob: Well, it’s just so many people have spent done incredibly arduous disciplines to meet spirits and develop relationships with good spirits. And I think there is a native Western shamanism that we have been trained out of. And I think the major representative, the last major sort of public representative of this were the Neoplatonists, especially Iamblichus and several of the others. They did all the things shamans traditionally do. They had soul journeys, they’d invite spirits down into themselves, they’d invite spirits down into statues and then have a conversation with the spirit in the statue, all this stuff. And they actually talked about ‘theurgy’, God working. And their goal was ‘theosis’, to become a god, you know? And it’s very, very shamanic. And then I think with the triumph of Christianity, this all went underground. It still existed. And I think actually the great witch hunts of again the age of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation were actually the relatively organised attempts to destroy the last traces of European shamanism. And they worked very well in the major centre of Europe. But on the fringes they didn’t work so well. Ireland it survived, northern Scotland it survived, the Nordic countries. And in the east, Hungary, Romania, Macedonia, it survived. And I think we have our own living shamanic tradition and it’s sad it’s been so thoroughly buried and very nearly completely destroyed.

Manda: But not totally. I grew up in Scotland, and there’s a beautiful video in one of your IFS sequences with Life architects, the psychotherapy and shamanism, of a ritual in an Eastern European country. I can’t remember is it Macedonia, Romania? And that was so shamanic and it survived through millennia of quite hardcore Christianity. So the gods are there if we choose to talk to them. They’re just there for the asking. I think that’s the thing. Nowadays, it’s very interesting what’s happening in your country, because there are aspects of project 2025 who will say quite openly that their intention is to take us back to the Inquisition, because that is the last time that, as far as they’re concerned, the world order was structured how they wanted it. Which is to say, the straight white men at the top and everybody else subordinate. And I have no doubt they want to crush everything that’s not fitting their version of theocracy. But the old gods will still be there. The web of life is still alive. Unless they actually manage to pour concrete over the whole of the world, it will still be there.

Manda: This is an aside, but I think it’s potentially useful. There’s a thing called feeding demons, which was brought to the West and I did a series of that, and I got to one demon, it took me all night. I started at about 7:30 at night, and I was still working on it at 9:00 the following morning. And this demon wanted everything to be organised. And by the end of it, I was in an existence where the entire universe was a flat plain of shining white and it was still not organised enough for this demon. And I think it’s so self-destructive and yet it’s not hard, and I’m sure this is my own projection, to see the parts acting out on the global stage at the moment. You said something, this is relevant, you said something in one of the podcasts I listened to where someone that you knew of had looked at educational structures throughout history, and particularly the education in the 1920s that led to the people who became the Nazis in Nazi Germany. And likewise, I had done quite a lot of work in one of my novels looking at that. So for people listening, there were chairs that were for sale in magazines in the 1910’s and 20s in Germany, into which you strapped your infant so that it learned to behave.

Manda: So these were chairs for infants, and they were strapped in, so they were completely without agency and then left to scream in a corner. And then it’s not a huge surprise that these are the people who could perpetuate the Holocaust. Following that, I remember at a time of Obama’s election, when John McCain was running for republicanism and Sarah Palin was the worst thing that that party could throw at us, which is quite amusing in retrospect. But I was reading stuff where the Christian right at that point were publishing tracts on the size of the stick that you used to beat your child with. And one of the really big guys was saying, and there is no excuse for beating any child under the age of 18 months. And it blew every fuse in my brain. But that had been going on a while. And it isn’t then surprising that you end up with a bunch of people who are essentially psychopaths. Because if you wanted to create a psychopath, starting to randomly hit your child at that age is a pretty core way to do it, I would have said. First of all, I’d like to be interested in whatever you say about education of children, but then I want to move on to a bigger question. Let’s talk about education first, Bob, because the bigger question is too big. Education of children leading to where we are? A thought?

Bob: Oh, there’s a guy named Lloyd Demause who focussed on this. And he said that if you study the child rearing techniques of one generation, he can tell you what the political structures of the next generation will be.

Manda: Right.

Bob: And he did a lot of work on this and he edited a huge book called The History of Childhood. And the way we have treated children is absolutely horrible and it’s not limited to the modern West. Not at all. It happens in tribal societies, it happens in Asian societies. All over the planet humans treat their kids terribly. And why am I laughing? Because otherwise I’d be crying. So I think yeah, this is very, very true. But, you know, I’m a big fan of William James and he kept talking about radical pragmatism. We do what works. What works is what’s real. And we need to keep that focus on what’s real, what we can do. And for me, it requires an intense effort to put these blinders on and stay focussed on I can help these people in front of me, right now if I do this, and if I don’t go off into all these fascinating other areas where I could go.

Manda: But then you put a lot of time into writing this book, which does go into a lot of fascinating areas.

Bob: There’s a reason for that. That’s because I think this idea, the reality of spirit possession, is so anathema to the modern Western materialist worldview that it needed to be documented extensively.

Manda: Right.

Bob: Anybody with an open mind, if you go through that book, it’s undeniable. And there’s a lot of very basic facts, like every living system that we know of is surrounded by a semi-permeable membrane. Why would our brains be different? Duh, you know? And then if it is like that, that changes everything. There’s this one guy Daniel Siegel, a neuroscientist, and he talks about interpersonal Neurobiology. The primary way we regulate our internal emotional neural states is through our relationships with other people. It’s not in this bony little thing up here, it’s out in the field. And he says this is so built into our language and the grammars of our language, it is structurally impossible for us to think clearly about this until we change our language. And he’s made some attempts to try and create a new language that allows us to actually think in a way that allows us to comprehend porous mind at a deep level. It’s not just an intellectual understanding. It’s like a fundamental, it’s that foundation being ripped out from under us. People don’t like it when you try and rip out their foundations.

Manda: It’s not an exciting experience, but when it’s happened often enough, my experience is, at least we understand what’s happening when it happens. And at some point you get to the abyss and you’re there.

Bob: I think it can become fun because it’s so exciting. The gestalt therapists, I studied with a lot of them, they used to say fear is just excitement unsupported by breath.

Manda: Okay! Next time I see an executive order, I will remember that. Let’s talk a little bit, because I’m aware time is moving on. We’ve talked about potential spirit possession by entities that are fundamentally, I would say, feeding off our fear. But you’re also saying offering companionship. But certainly they’re offering things and they don’t do good things.

Bob: All negative human emotion; pain, loneliness, all of it, not just fear.

Manda: However, there are also Gods, Guides and Spirits that are there to help. And my understanding is that you work with whatever you call a god or a guide or a spirit, and I would really like to explore for the people listening, how did you begin to engage with that or how do you continue to engage with that? I understand from listening to another podcast that you’re planning to release a book of your conversations with your guide? Which I really want to read. Is that coming out soon?

Bob: It should be out soon. I’ve got one coming out on IFS and Emanuel Swedenborg on the 22nd of this month. And I will have that other book ready to publish in probably another two months.

Manda: Wow.

Bob: But some of my advisers are saying don’t release two books in two months.

Manda: Yeah, one could see that.

Bob: Yeah, but I have another book that will be out later this year and I’m writing yet another. So a part of me just wants to say, to hell with marketing.

Manda: We’re in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. Yes.

Bob: I want to get them out and start working on the next thing.

Manda: Okay.

Bob: That one will be ready fairly soon. Exactly how soon I don’t know.

Manda: Okay, well, let me know when and I will make sure everyone knows. But in the meantime, let’s talk about the beneficial entities that are there to help us.

Bob: The biggest problem is knowing who’s who, because very often the negative energies pretend to be beneficial. And I want to point out this horrible truth. All of the greatest crimes of the past couple hundred years have been done by people who were convinced they were doing good. They were self-righteous in what they were doing. Pol pot is a great example. He came to France. He studied with the foremost French intellectual leftists of his day, and he went back to impose utopia on Cambodia. And look what he did. He killed a quarter or a third of the people, and the rest are horribly traumatised and on and on. Lenin. Mao. Hitler even was, at least at the beginning. And then I start thinking, am I more intelligent than all these people? Is my heart secure from doing something so stupid? And I go, I’m not so sure. I actually think, no, I’m not, I could be fooled. So that’s the number one thing about welcoming in spirit. The classical name for this issue is discernment.

Manda: Right. So how do you hone your discernment?

Bob: Okay. The two biblical standards are ‘by their fruits you shall know them’, which is the golden standard. But, you knew the but was coming, right, it only works in hindsight, which is a big problem. Like everybody knows, Pol Pot was wrong now, right? I don’t think there’s anybody left going oh, yeah that guy…

Manda: Was really cool, everything he did was fine. No.

Bob: Yeah. And the other biblical standard is take this experience to a trusted spiritual elder. And they’re kind of hard to find, to put it mildly. So this is one of my ongoing projects. I’m trying to develop real time discernment tools. Number one is how this entity responds to your fear. If the thing out there that you’re sensing around you sees your fear and goes and pokes at it and makes it worse and worse and worse, that’s not good. The good ones almost always wait for an invitation to come in. They respect you and you have to invite them respectfully.

Manda: Right.

Bob: Another one that people don’t like is does having this spirit in you make you feel better than other people. I mean, a lot of spiritual groups, a bunch of people get together and they feel better than everyone else on the planet, right? So if you start feeling one up and your head starts going back and you’re looking down your nose at other people, not a good sign. Another one is, I don’t have the right names for this yet and maybe, hopefully somebody will do better. I think there’s a continuum and you might name one end of that gratitude and the other end resentment or bitterness. What impact does whatever this entity is, that’s external to your system, have on your position on that continuum? Does it move you more towards gratitude and joy, or does it move you toward resentment and bitterness?

Manda: Right.

Bob: I think that’s a really good discernment tool.

Manda: As long as you’re not feeling gratitude for that sense of superiority that it is giving you.

Bob: Yeah. Yeah.

Manda: So it’s got to be a kind of grounded, humble, connected gratitude.

Bob: Yeah. And a lot of these dark energies are really clever. They make great lawyers and politicians.

Manda: Or indeed help the lawyers and politicians be what they are. So nonetheless, you’re working with something that you believe on all of these criteria to be beneficial to you and to the world. How do you maintain, because respect has come up, respect is key to IFS; we respect all of the parts and here we build a respectful, reciprocal relationship. And for me one of the keys is do I feel respected and do I respect this entity, as well as do I feel more connected to the web of life in its company than not? How do you maintain that relationship?

Bob: Oh, I have rather elaborate things I do every day. Maybe because I came from such a deep hell realm, I’ve had to do many, many, many, many, many kinds of work. But I get up very, very early in the morning, usually at 4 a.m., and I check in with my parts and I pray a lot, and then I go out. I live in the woods, I go out in the trees and move and dance and listen to the sounds of the birds and the wind in the trees. And then I come in and I write a journal. I’m looking over at it now. It’s about 14ft on a bookshelf. It’s over 20,000 pages of records of my inner world. So I’ve spent some time and effort exploring this inner world. So I have that journal. But for the past maybe decade, I’ve also been doing a dialogue with spirit where I just sit down.

Bob: You know. Hi. Good morning! And literally we transcribe a dialogue. There’s about 3 to 4000 pages of that. And that’s what the book Spirit Speaks will be a summary of.

Speaker3: Wow.

Manda: So this is effectively automatic writing. You’re saying hello and then you’re letting the spirit write through you.

Speaker3: Yeah.

Manda: Brilliant.

Speaker3: Brilliant.

Bob: Oh, I just wanted to mention Chico Xavier, one of the Brazilian spiritists who never took a dime for anything he did. He worked his whole life as a low level postal clerk in a small town. He did automatic writing, and he wrote over 400 books. And he only had a third grade education. And these are novels. A lot of them are very interesting. They’ve sold 30 million or more copies worldwide in 20 something languages. Almost nobody in America has ever heard of the guy. There are about a dozen books available in English. But I think it’s so amazing we are so blind. You know, if it doesn’t come from our little European world, it doesn’t matter. So anyway, he’s fascinating. A fascinating man.

Manda: I’ll see if I can find them and put them in the show notes. Are you aware of things in your life that you’ve done as a result of your relationship with whatever we call your god, or your guide or your spirit that you might not otherwise have done?

Bob: Oh yeah, definitely. I’d be dead long ago if it wasn’t for spirit’s present in my life.

Manda: This particular one that you journal with or any spirit?

Bob: No, I don’t know, I don’t know. I think it puts on different masks at times. It might be one voice. It might be many, many, many.

Speaker3: Okay.

Bob: I want to tell a somewhat complex story.

Manda: Go for it.

Bob: There’s a Sanskrit scholar, David Gordon White, who’s one of these guys who’s smarter than any human being should be able to be. I mean, he speaks Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, a bunch of Central Asian languages, and he knows all these ancient texts. He’s very hard to read because he’s so, so brilliant and well-read. But he studied the sort of local worship of local deities in India, Central Asia, the Near East and Europe. And he realised the structure of these worships were all the same, even though the names were different and the locations were different. And he said, well, there’s this universe that goes through all these cultures that’s the same. I think it’s the shamanic universe. And there are these beings that we have relationships with, you know and they got different names and they seem to be different ones. You know, the classic Greek name for this would be the daemons. And then Charles Stang from the Harvard Divinity School said, actually, what this man’s work implies is that this is the ocean of human spirituality and all of the major religions are waves on this ocean.

Manda: Nice. That’s like Huxley’s perennial philosophy, but stated more broadly and deeply.

Bob: And the point that I think is super important, we need to have concrete, particular interactional relationships with those daemons. Like Shamanism, you have your spirit guide, you know, it’s concrete, it’s personal, it’s relational. You develop the relationship. You interact because that’s the level most of us are at. So that’s the way I view it. And a lot of the Neoplatonists said there’s stuff above it. They had this same kind of worldview. They talked about the demonic realm, and above that there’s the noose, the realm of platonic ideas. Above that, there’s the one, you know. And some of them said basically, well, that’s up there, but it doesn’t really matter, because all we can do down here is relate to these daemons. And when we have a good relationship with the daemon, then maybe we’ll be ready for another step.

Manda: Yay!

Bob: And there’s a lot of tribal systems that are very much like that too.

Manda: Right. And one imagines that if there is a spiritual reality that we are able to connect with, it would be very surprising if we didn’t all come back with slightly culturally coloured variants on the same reality. Because otherwise it’s not the reality.

Bob: Yeah, well, the spirit needs to have clothes, right? We need our imagination to clothe it. I think our imagination is actually a sensory perceptual system, like sight or hearing, that allows us to perceive the spirit beings.

Manda: Nice.

Bob: And I think we need it as long as we’re down here in the flesh.

Manda: Thank you. That feels like a really good place to stop. So let’s leave it there. Bob, I am in awe of all that you are and do. And I am enormously grateful that you gave us your time and your wisdom and your care for humanity on the Accidental Gods podcast. Thank you.

Bob: Thank you.

Manda: And there we go. That’s it for another week. Huge thanks to Bob for all that he is and does, and for his absolute commitment to reducing the suffering of the world and to radical pragmatism. One thing I need to say right away is that he has a new book coming out on the 22nd of May, 2025. So if you’re listening to this as soon as it comes out, you can order it now. It’s called Opening the Inner World; Spiritual Healing, Internal Family systems and Emanuel Swedenborg. And he’s a co-author with Chelsea Rose Odhner and Jonathan S Rose. And you absolutely can pre-order it now. Please go ahead and do that. I have put links to Bob’s website and to the other books that he’s written in the show notes. I wasn’t able to find all of them on bookshop.org, and I have put a couple of Amazon links in there. If you can find them anywhere else, please go to the other places. Beyond that, this genuinely seems to me the key to moving forward. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with Gurdjieff that if enough of us can do the inner work, can actually move to a place where we have genuinely addressed most of our internal traumas so that we don’t project everything out, so that we don’t become instantly triggered by everything around us, then there is a chance that we will move forward. This is the heart of Accidental Gods that we need to evolve, that we need to become the best of ourselves and see what kind of a culture arises out of that.

Manda: And if that seemed urgent five years ago when we started, it’s a lot more urgent now, and the work doesn’t get any easier, I do know this, but the help is there. I think one of the things that we didn’t get to talk about with Bob, because I had too many notes with too many lists of questions, was the fact that along with getting rid of those entities inside us that really don’t belong there, we can also ask the help of the gods or the guides or the spirits, whatever we call them, however we see them, that are here for the best and highest good of humanity and the whole web of life. And genuinely, these do seem more accessible to me now than they have at any point in my work with this. And I have been doing this now since the mid 80s. So it’s a reasonable length of time. We just need to bring all of ourselves to the table with absolute respect and ask with absolute humility. And then yes, definitely use discernment to check that whatever has come really has come with our best and highest good at heart, that we would trust it with our sanity and our life. And this isn’t necessarily something you want to do alone. So we do have the Dreaming Awake training program. My senior apprentice, Louise Mayor, teaches the foundation and all of the early work with this, and I have put a link to the Dreaming Awake website in the show notes. So if you’re interested, head over and have a look.

Manda: And beyond that, we do a lot of the foundational work within the Accidental Gods membership, so I have put a link to that in the show notes too. But whatever else you do, you don’t have to come and work with us, but please do the work. Do it on your own if you really want to. Do it with other people, if you can find people that you trust. But whatever you do, please do the work. It’s not optional anymore to decide that it doesn’t matter, or that it’s too difficult, or that other things are more important, because they really are not.

Manda: Okay, that’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot, to Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production, to Lou Mayor for the video, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech and all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else that wants to get to the heart of who we are, what makes us tick, how we can connect to the other worlds, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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