Wisdom, Depth and Meaning

    Discernment is in short supply these days - leaving too many of us drowning in negativity, cynicism, meaninglessness, anxiety & depression, externalizing our unresolved, unprocessed inner conflicts onto other people, living creatures and the Cosmos.

"Despair is only for those 

who see the end beyond doubt. 

We do not."

J.R.R. Tolkien

    A radically different, infinitely healthier, wiser perspective is that of the mystics as well as an increasing number of intelligent AND wise scholars like Jeremy Lent ("The Web of Meaning" 2022), Iain McGilchrist ("The Matter with Things" 2021), etc who masterfully integrate science and traditional wisdom to help us feel at home in our Universe. 

    A wonderful living example of a highly-evolved mystic is James Finley, author of the exceptional biography, “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation” 2023 - which I highly recommend! 
    An excerpt from an excellent recent James Finley interview: "A Momentary Mystic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQtvkwu2jA :

    "One of the Holy Cross brothers, teaching at the high school I went to, talked about monasteries in religion class. He spoke of monasteries as places where people go to seek and to find and give themselves to God, who’s fully poured out and given to us in each passing moment of our life. And they believe that their hidden life of fidelity to that search touches the whole world in ways we don’t understand.

    Thomas Merton in ‘The Sign of Jonas’ on the very first page wrote, ‘As for me, I have but one desire, the desire for solitude, to disappear into the secret of God’s face.’ At age 14, I didn’t know what it meant, but something in me said, ‘Me too.’ That is the depth from which he spoke of his own longing for God, awakened that depth in me. And for the next four years, I read that book over and over. And later, I lived in the cloistered monastery for almost six years - it had a profound effect on me. 
    And then Merton, as a novice master, guided me in the search. And he led me into the classical texts of the mystics – St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Meister Ekhart, Julian of Norwich, etc. I was so radicalized by this sense of communion, this deep experience of incarnate Infinity intimately realized, like the divinity of standing up & sitting down, and how reflective prayer becomes words of wordless silence and oneness, and so on. And Merton once said in one of his talks to the novices, that monastic life is carefully crafted to nurture and protect that oneness. But there are people in the world who are being led to it and they don’t understand what’s happening to them, and have no one to guide them. 
    So when I left the monastery, I found that that was true. I still wanted to live that way - my meditation practice and the mystics … So I started giving meditation retreats.

    I had a chance to study medieval philosophy under Daniel Walsh, who taught philosophy at Columbia, and was influential in Merton’s coming to the monastery. I was very affected by the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages. So when I was writing ‘Merton’s Palace of Nowhere’ on the true self, I said I don’t know how to communicate this to people out here, that we subsist in God like light subsists in flames – the Oneness. And Walsh wrote back. He said you can’t communicate it. But it will communicate itself through you if you’re convinced in what you say. And he said, if you are what you say. And you know it will communicate itself because there’ll be a response in the listener that knows, something very deep inside of them that matters very much is being awakened.

    I think that’s what I do. I try to speak from my heart about this oneness. I try to help people look for little moments where they had a glimpse of it, in the midst of nature, in the arms of the beloved, or reading a child a good night story, or lying in the dark listening to your breathing - how it washes over you like a taste of it, and how in that taste, you get the intuition that in these awakening moments, not that something more was given, but like a curtain opened and that you tasted momentarily the abyss-like divine nature of every moment of your life. 
    And so then ... What’s the way of life in which I can be liberated from what hinders me, from habitually abiding in the divinity of the immediacy of my life? And I get the feeling that people come to the retreat when they hear that it’s in silence and about the mystics, that they’re in some way been touched by that. Like how do I deepen that? Or how do I be faithful to that? How do I understand it? How do I live by it?
    For me where it started was because of the (childhood) trauma that was going on, a lot of the arguments with my father was about Catholicism (but) they fought about all kinds of things. So (my mother) would take us (6 children, I was the oldest) to mass on Sunday. And she would ask us to pray to God to give us the strength to get through the things that happen when daddy gets mad. 
    And so I was lying in my bed at night – I was maybe 4 – and I could hear my father screaming at my mother outside the door. And maybe earlier that day he had hit me. I knew tomorrow he wanted to do it again. And so I took my mother’s word and I prayed to God to give me the strength. I was lying there in the dark, and the experience I had was that God heard my prayer, came to me in the dark and in a moment I can’t remember merged with me. 
    So when I woke up the next morning, the trauma still went on. But when I came out into the living room, it was different, because if my father hit me, he thought he was hitting me, but he didn’t know he was hitting that other me, that other people could see. My father didn’t know that the real me was secretly carried by God into a secret place (my father) didn’t know about.

    Later, when I became a psychologist, I learned that I was dissociating, that I had borrowed the religious imagery of my mother to give meaning to dissociating. But that doesn’t mean that God didn’t merge with me in the dark. And so I had a lot of moments like that. I had a lot of these unitive moments. 
    So when I read Merton, I saw monasteries as places where you can actually go and live all the time, because I was like a flame flickering in the wind, it was very much in the heart of me. But I thought the monasteries were built so people can surrender themselves over to that.
    If we think of the word trauma, the root of the word means a wound or a source of suffering. So we might say that all of us are subject to traumas great & small that can and sometimes do occur in our life together. Small traumas are the slights and the insults, the abandonments, the accidents, the hurts. But the point is, the center holds. 
    Big trauma gets so intense you kind of disappear into the trauma – kind of a psychic death really. If you survive the incest or the beating, whatever, you’re so glad you survived, but not quite, because it got inside of you. And then a triggering event is anything in the present that resembles the original trauma, your autonomic nervous system, you’ll re-experience the trauma – post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And so then as a clinician, that needs to be dealt with in its own right. That’s the therapy.  

    Sometimes we get this feeling that we’re skimming over the surface of the depths of our own life, and our own woundedness is carrying us along, as part of that. And we realize somewhere that we’re suffering from depth deprivation. 
    And we know of depth deprivation because we can single out certain moments when we tasted depth: in the midst of nature, in the middle of the dark, or in the arms of the beloved, telling a child a good night story, a pause between two lines of a poem that shimmered & shined. So you know it’s there.

    So then the question is, what are the ways where that depth dimension starts shining out of the therapy itself?
    Let’s say you call me for therapy, and I really don’t know what you want to talk about other than the little bit you told me on the phone. But I’ve done it so much, I already know what’s going to have to happen between us, if the healing you’re looking for is going to occur. And here’s what happens. 
    It’s like a liturgy or a ritual. We’ll both sit down. You’ll talk and I’ll listen. At a certain point, I’ll ask you a question and it’s a real question. I want to understand you better. And the question is such that you can’t respond without pausing for a moment to listen to yourself. And in that moment, you’re becoming more present to yourself in my presence. And it’s already started. 
    You don’t say it. You’re not ready yet, but it’s already begun. So little by little, this way of growth forms an alliance. 
    And in that trusting alliance, the person goes through their work. So one of my theses is that, when we risk sharing what hurts the most, in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can be re-parented in love. Sometimes you get the feeling you’re in the presence of someone who is more present to you than you are. And they see a value in you you’re not yet able to see. And you have faith in their faith in you. And little by little by little, it arcs over and becomes internalized and so on.

    But there’s another level to this. In that process, there is the opening up of what Jesus called ‘the pearl of great price.’ And what opens up within the person is a depth of presence that’s abyss-like. They might start laughing or they might tear-up. It’s deeper than simply freedom from symptoms. 
    And so sometimes at the end of therapy, people are grateful that they have less anxiety with panic or self-cutting, whatever it is. But often they’ll say something like this: ‘Something was given to me and I’m so grateful for it. I matter. I didn’t know that I mattered. I have a value that cannot be calculated. There’s a preciousness about me that came shining out through my woundedness, and no one can take that away from me.’ 
    And that’s the spiritual dimension. I think that starts to put words to that dimension.

    'Sometimes, when having to endure the worst, yet finding God in the darkest place, you are liberated from the tyranny of shame over your heart. Where anguish and ecstasy intersect, it becomes incandescent — it becomes oneness.' James Finley  

    Being a therapist was a good fit for me. I felt so grateful for it - to experience the unrelenting courage of the human spirit. Sometimes people would say something to me like, ‘I feel so safe in here.’ I’d say, but notice I’m not doing anything to you. And I think what it is, when you’re in my presence, you’re more present to yourself. And if you can be more present to yourself in my presence, you can literally be more present to yourself (also) when you’re not in my presence. And you keep sifting it out and sifting it out. I felt so honored by that process."

    “A mystical experience is experiencing God’s presence in your life.” James Finley

    "The question is, ‘what does that mean?’ I’ll give some examples from Thomas Merton and all the mystics. 
    This is from the last chapter of Merton’s ‘New Seeds of Contemplation’: ‘The world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.’ So there he’s bearing witness to the already perfectly holy nature of what is – this dance. 
    And then Merton said a stunning thing. He said, ‘We don’t need to go very far to catch echoes of that game and of that dancing.’ And he gives very simple examples. He said, ‘You’re out walking alone in the midst of nature, and you turn to see a flock of birds descending, and as if out of the corner of your eye, you catch something in their descent that’s primordial, vast and true.’ 
    And then, to use faith language, although the person might not explicitly say it in faith language, you know that the presence of God is the infinity of their descent. And their descent is the incarnate immediacy of God. ((Self realizing that it's looking in the mirror)) And God is the infinity of your awareness of their descent. And your awareness of their descent is the concrete immediacy of God. And that’s the experience of God.’ ((Perhaps it's just a matter of remembering - remembering our True Nature, our Self, our ‘Original Face before our grandparents were born’ as we co-create the Cosmos))

    Another one is, there are moments between two people, in moments of loving union with each other, when they sense something within their love that’s beyond what words can say. It is a boundaryless quality. And in faith, you say, ‘God’s the infinity.' The infinite love of God is the infinity of their love. And the infinity of their love is incarnate in the midst of God. 
    You’re reading a child a good night story. You sense that in the presence of the child you’re in the presence of God. That’s why they’re so disarming. 
    And then what I’m saying also then, in love lost, as painful as it is, if you just sit with it very quietly, you can sense something of God’s sustaining presence guiding you through the loss. And when you come out the other side, you’re grateful to get your balance back, but you know, it’s so important to never forget what was learned in the dark – about fragility, the delicacy of life, grace."
    James Finley interview: "A Momentary Mystic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQtvkwu2jA :

    "Although we all have a fundamentally pure nature, it is not easy to get in touch with it. The gross way our mind ordinarily functions drowns out this deeper, more subtle vibration to such an extent that we generally remain unaware of its existence. 
    If we truly want to connect with this subtle essence, we need to quiet all distractions and loosen the hold our ordinary appearances & conceptions have on us. In other words, we need to create space, space in which our essentially pure nature can function uninterruptedly. Then. . . we will be bringing to the surface the inner, divine qualities that have always existed within the depths of our being.” Lama Thubten Yeshe

“Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, 
vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, 
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.  
Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; 
only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure & silent merge with formless truth.  
As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself; 
you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace.  
Whole, you enter the Whole.  
Your personal self returns to its radiant,  
intimate, deathless source.” 
Mundaka Upanishad

    "To have the radiant calm and unswayed balance of mind that we call equanimity is to be like the earth. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold onto, but it is the perfect size for letting go." Sharon Salzberg

 

        "The clouds are thin, the wind is light, 
         the sun is nearly overhead. Past the flowers, 
         through the willows, down along the stream. 
         People don't see the joy in my heart. 
         They think I'm wasting time or acting like a child." Cheng Hong, Chinese poet

 

Beyond Time - photograph by David A. Lovas

 

Diamonds and Rust

    To have a better understanding of, and thus derive meaningful benefit from this blog, it helps if we at least aspire to a more spacious self-concept & worldview - specifically, that of a 'holy rascal' or 'spiritually independent,' as explained by Rami Shapiro:
    “A holy rascal [a spiritually independent] is someone who thinks religion is much too important to leave in the hands of the professionals. There is such wisdom, brilliance & genius in religious stories, myth, practices, contemplative practices. But what happens when you put them into an institution, is they become very dry, very cold, & self-focused – not ‘Self’ as in some contemplative way of the capital S Self, but self-focused in the sense of the purpose of Christianity, even though they’ll say it’s salvation, it’s really to make you a better Christian, according to the denomination. The purpose of Judaism is to make you a better Jew, according to the denomination.
    So a holy rascal [a spiritually independent] is curious about the deeper meaning of religion, not at all interested in the self-focused nature of religious institutions, but is convinced that these myths and symbols and rituals are gateways to something that cannot be articulated in any other way. And so a rascal is someone who breaks the rules & tries to get to the heart of something.”
    Rami Shapiro “CHALLENGING BELIEFS: Are You a VICTIM of Spiritual Misguidance?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rZLlvXFQ7k

    The small, separate self or personality is, from the perspective of mystics, the ego, be it individual or group eg one’s religious denomination, political party or nationality. The Self on the other hand, is the mystical direct experience of Oneness or Unitive Consciousness or Source or Divinity or God etc. This is very much like the meaningle$$ parti$an$hip in US politics (Democrats vs Republicans) instead of Democracy; and competition between brand$ in the food industry (Frosted Flakes vs Captain Crunch) instead of Nutrition.
    Even secular wisdom research tells us that the more self-centred (personal or group) we are instead of allo- & ecocentric (focused on the welfare of others & the environment), the more unnecessary suffering we create for ourself & others. Mystics further realize that self-centredness (again, individual or group) is THE barrier to experiencing & living from Self.
    We ARE evolving from small, narrow mind to Spacious Mind. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Martin Luther King Jr.
    The wonderful movies by Daniel Schmidt attempt to convey the one perennial teaching inherent within all spiritual traditions : https://awakentheworld.com/series/awakening-mind-film-series/

    Joan Baez wrote the song, "Diamonds and Rust," then Neil Young wrote, "Rust Never Sleeps." Indeed rust, chaos, heartbreak - whatever name we use, suffering is part of life, and too often we get stuck wallowing in past suffering, worrying that suffering will return again, so we blindfold ourselves from seeing all the Diamonds right here & now.

    Back in 1995, Kenneth R. Pelletier MD, published the results of his pioneering research in the book, "Sound Mind, Sound Body. A New Model for Lifelong Health" showing how the most well-rounded, successful people, instead of being born into wealthy, successful families, actually had had to surmount serious adversities.
    Sharon Danloz Parks, in her powerful 2000 book, “Big Questions, Worthy Dreams. Mentoring Young Adults in their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith.” introduces a powerful, useful term, 'shipwreck' : “To undergo shipwreck is to be threatened in a total & primary way. … what has dependably served as shelter & protection and held and carried one where one wanted to go comes apart. What once promised trustworthiness vanishes.”
    Then Elizabeth Lesser, in her inspiring 2005 book, “Broken Open. How Difficult Times Can Help us Grow.” recounts many inspiring examples of people instead of being destroyed by 'shipwrecks' becoming better & stronger as a result.
    Gradually, research is being published on this phenomenon that has become known as "Post-traumatic growth (PTG) - "enduring positive psychological changes experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances."
    Eranda Jayawickreme et al. “Post‐traumatic Growth as Positive Personality Change: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations.” Personality 89; 1: 145-165, 2021. 

    Please NOTE: All of the 3 individuals below endured major trauma, and suicide, drug & alcohol use is discussed - this *** may be triggering ***.

    HOWEVER, we will see how suffering can bring out the very best in us. 

    Exceptionally VALUABLE, INSPIRING examples of post-traumatic growth:
        • James Finley. “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023.
        • Isira. "Buddha on the Dance Floor." ‎ Living Awareness, 2014.
                and
        • Robert Falconer "An Open-Ended Conversation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQyf0ew0XCU There are so many exceptionally valuable gems in this 53-minute interview that I had to transcribe most of it:

    Throughout his childhood, Robert Falconer suffered severe sexual, physical & psychological abuse at the hands of his alcoholic & drug-addicted father.
    Robert Falconer (RF) : “So by all odds, I should be dead like my brother (who died by suicide in his teens), or in prison. You know the old, it’s not really a joke, but people call it a joke because otherwise you have to start crying, ‘Men go to prison, women go to therapy.’ So I should be living in a dumpster, dead, or in prison, and I’m not.

    More and more, I don’t think people can heal without connection to spirit. Especially from major trauma like this, people need to find a way to connect to something much larger than themselves and much larger than the pain they endured.

    And if it’s okay with you, I’m going to talk about a couple of graphic incidents where I met spirit early on. There’s a phenomenon well known among therapists who work with severely abused children. Some kids can become, what they call, anesthetic. Pain doesn’t hurt them anymore. They just go numb. And these kids are really hard to control. You can try to control them. They’ll break an arm and they don’t care. They just keep fighting. I wasn’t totally anesthetic, but I could numb out almost any pain, including cigarettes being put out on me - all kinds of stuff like that. The one thing I could never numb out was being suffocated. I think there’s a hardwired biological response to being suffocated. The body just goes wild in that struggle for a bit of breath. So when my father discovered that, of course, that’s what he did all the time. And I just want to say the waterboarding our government does to those people in Guantanamo and other places overseas, that’s a very sophisticated, very severe form of torture, even though it doesn’t leave any marks. This is torture. There are no two ways around that. So what happened? He would often suffocate me while he was raping me. What happened? I don’t know if these are near-death experiences or what. Often, when I was suffocated & unconscious, I would meet a merciful female presence. And it was the only compassion I’d ever experienced in my life, and it was so wonderful. It gave me a taste of something worth living for.
    But she kept sending me back. And I did not want to go back into that little boy’s body being raped & beaten at all. So I got angry at her and I cursed her with all the force of my young heart. And then I couldn’t get in touch with her again for years and years and years. The image I had of myself was like a soldier on the front lines with a radio trying to call back to headquarters, and I couldn’t hear anything but static. I felt very, very lost.

    But I’d had that taste. In the depths of hell, I had that taste of spirit. I think that’s actually what kept me alive and kept a core of sanity going in me. And it’s so ironic that the most severe torture he found was what opened this gateway for me.

    There were other times when spirit came in my life when I was a child that I didn’t recognize as spirit at the time and I don’t think anybody else would have either. I was a fighter & a bully and was thrown out of schools and was in all this trouble and was heading on a bad downhill path. And I got into this little religious school, and this kid threw a spitball and hit me in the face. After class, I got him by the lapels in the coat room, and I was holding him up and I was going to start hitting him. And somehow, if I’d done that, I probably would have gone to juvie hall, jails and all that.
    But somehow, I put him down, I brushed the lapels of his coat off, and I’ve never hit anyone in anger since then. Now you could think that’s some trivial event, in freshman high school, but it changed my whole life. It was a parting of the ways there.

    Another one a little later on was I dated this Chinese girl, and she treated me with kindness & affection. And we never had intercourse. Most Chinese, at least at that time, did not have sex before marriage. But there was real affection & real connection. I kept thinking, ‘When is she going to stick the knife in my back? When is the betrayal coming?’ It never came. And somehow her kindness, her basic human kindness, cracked something open.
    There was this shell of concrete that was forming around me & my heart. And just that kindness broke me open and let some light in and opened something that was able to grow later.
    Now you could dismiss this as puppy love – two teenagers necking – but it changed my life. And I think spirit was in there in a very profound way.

    And I was also drinking really, really heavily in high school, and I was on the railway line to severe alcoholism. But I ran into LSD – or LSD ran into me. In 1967 I consummated by love affair with LSD. Somehow the exposure, just the exposure … I went towards LSD with a spiritual attitude. I needed to find spirit. But because of that exposure to psychedelics, somehow I became repelled by alcohol. And there was no professional therapy involved. It was us freshmen at college doing acid. But that also was another huge changing point.

    And then I went on. I was often suicidal. But I’m very stubborn. I’m as stubborn as a mule. And sometimes that saved my life. And I just thought, well, I’d like to kill myself. But if I’m really going to do that, I ought to do this, this, & this first. And a lot of those things were pretty hard to do, like get a master’s degree in psychology, and have a nice place to live. So I did all these things and I tried every kind of therapy you can think of. And a lot of them were very damaging.
    But I came up through all these, and found these parts-work models. … Only about 15, 20 years ago, I found Internal Family Systems (IFS), which I think is the most respectful & potent form of therapy available now. I just want to say, I didn’t used to put respect and potency in the same basket. But I think IFS is potent because it’s so respectful of the person and all their different parts and welcomes all the parts. IFS was founded by Dick Schwartz about 40 years ago. … IFS has this concept of self. We’re made up of parts, and we’re multiple. We’re much more like a basketball team than a tennis player in our internal psychic structure. But there’s also this thing Dick calls ‘Self,’ which he says is always Curious, Compassionate, Calm, Clear, Courageous, Confident, Creative & Connected (the 8Cs of IFS). And I think what Self does, it sort of sneaks spirit almost like through a back door because spirit is not really acceptable in modern academia. You know you have to sort of slide in sideways.
    So I don’t think people really heal at a profound level unless they can connect with something larger than themselves.”

    Host Jeffrey Mishlove (JM) : “Well, I guess it’s fair to say, that at some level, at the level of the persona, the personality, you were extremely damaged by your childhood. And now I think many, many decades later, it’s fair to say that you are a well-balanced, happy person.”

    (RF) : “Yeah, I think I’m a man of joy.”

    RF goes on to say that he’s noticed that the interviewer, Jeffrey Mishlove himself, over the past 50 years, appears to be getting more & more joyful.

    (JM) : “I think it’s true. … It’s something about getting older that does get you in touch with something very fundamental. When you know that you’re closer to the end of life, you get to appreciate it all the more.”

    (RF) : “I think every trauma, every difficult thing presents us with a fork in the road. We can either let that break our heart open, which is difficult, and then we go forward into compassion, joy, vastness, - OR - we can contract and get bitter, hard, small, & resentful. So I think, in my experience, I’ve been presented with that choice over, over, over again. And hopefully, at least there’s a predominance of going toward the opening, which is why I think I’m happier and more & more joy-filled."

    RF goes on to discuss how his hard-earned life experiences influence his psychotherapy work with his clients.

    (JM) : “… and the paradox is that what is meant by ‘scientific’ is that you have to explain yourself in terms of materialistic reductionistic language, and that’s not what you’re doing. You’re doing the opposite. You’re doing something that is holistic.”

    (RF) : “Yeah, yeah, and I think, I hope that’s changing. There are so many wonderful people like Bernardo Kastrup, and many others who are … That materialist paradigm is dead, I think. It’s not really tenable anymore."

    (JM) : “I’m pretty sure that you understand that, and I understand that, and probably most of our viewers understand that, but we’re still kind of a subculture. The mainstream culture is, you know, for all of the lip service we pay in the United States to religion, we live in a very, very materialistic culture."

    (RF) : “Yeah, yeah, totally. I agree. I think that’s one reason why we’re experiencing an epidemic of mental illness. People don’t have anything larger than themselves they can connect to, and I think that’s necessary. I think the work of psychotherapy is really spiritual. It has to have a sacred basis or it falls apart.
    Now if I cared about academia, I couldn’t say that. And don’t attribute this to IFS or Dick Schwartz or anybody else – this is just me. I want to read a short poem, because I think it makes this point in a really beautiful way:

‘The Healing Time’ by Persha Gertler

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say
holy holy

    I think we have to have that kind of depth."

    (JM) : “That’s beautifully put, and there are some things, I think, that can only be expressed through poetry. The logical language just doesn’t get to the heart of some things.
    But now, going back to the question of spirit possession and your very, very traumatic childhood, did you personally ever experience that idea of an ‘unattached burden,’ and ‘external entity’?”

    (RF) : “I have experienced that, and I think they were in me all along, but I was not directly aware of them as such, as an external energy in me. I think rape almost literally injects them into people. They’re very often called ‘parental interjects’ or other things like that, and as I got more & more healing, I experienced some of them quite directly.
    One I could talk about. I have wet macular degeneration, and I was told about 10 years ago, ‘Bob, you’re going blind. You better get ready. With wet macular degeneration there are these blisters on the retina that come and then start bleeding into the eye, and it slowly blinds you.’
    And I did IFS work with Richard Schwartz himself, and we looked for any psychological dimension to this illness, and saw this image that looked like a spider with a scorpion’s tail, and it was in there poking at my retina, which fits pretty well with the blisters, and it was trying to blind me. It was a lot of my mother’s and my father’s spirit, and there seemed to be some other bigger energies that had gotten into them that weren’t their personality.
    I don’t know what this thing was, but we were able to get it out of my eye and move it away, and I’m doing way better than the doctors ever thought was possible. I can still read, I can drive, you know. I get the regular medical treatments, but I’m doing way better than ever, than anybody thought was possible. So that’s really very convincing to me."

    (JM) : “And in your work with Richard Schwartz, you were able to determine that this was not part of you, that it was somehow external to you?”

    (RF) : “Yep, yet, and there are 2 questions to do that. The first one is, ‘What’s your intention?’ And this thing just wanted to blind me. ‘Why do you want to blind me?’ To make me weak. We just kept asking, ‘Well, what’s good about that? Well, what’s good about that?’ And it just went down to destroy, destroy, destroy. There was nothing good in there.
    All (IFS) 'parts' have a good intention. Even suicidal parts, if you just keep asking, ‘Well, what’s good about killing them?’ Usually you get down to, ‘Well, I’m the last line of defense against overwhelming pain.’ If they’re in absolutely unbearable pain, ‘I can take them out, I can heal them.’ And then that’s a part that’s not some external energy we want to get rid of at all. We want to say stuff like, ‘Boy, you’ve had a very difficult, heroic kind of job being the last defense.’ And what we say is, ‘If we could show you a way that we can get them out of pain, without having to kill the body, would you be interested?’ And they almost always say, ‘Yeah, we’d love that, but you can’t do it.’ And then we just respond, ‘How about giving us enough room, so as an experiment, so that we can prove to you we can do that?’ And usually the parts will say, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So the parts of people aren’t bad. They have a good intention down inside them somewhere. Even the ones who are causing them to drink, or cutters who are anorexic. When I said about IFS being respectful, we respect those parts. We don’t go in there saying, ‘You’re bad, wrong, stupid, shut up and go away.’ We go, ‘Oh, what are you really trying to do? We want to help you, not weaken you.’"

    (JM) : “But with regard to this spider-like part with a scorpion tail that is causing blisters in your eye, that seemed to have no redeeming qualities."

    (RF) : “No, it didn’t want to do anything good. So the next thing we do is just ask it directly, ‘Are you a part of me?’ And these unattached burdens or spirits, whatever you want to call it, they lie all the time. They don’t call Satan 'the prince of lies' for nothing. But they don’t seem to be able to lie in response to this question, which is a really wonderful blessing. In the 10 years I’ve been focused on this particular aspect, there were only a couple of cases where it couldn’t directly lie, but it could weasel pretty good. And then, no, it’s not a part, and then we help it go.
    And the thing that’s changed in me in the 10 years I’ve been doing this (IFS work with external parts), is I’m kinder & kinder & kinder toward these things. I’ve come to believe that they’re suffering beings who are clinging here, and they’re desperate, lost, starving & suffering terribly. But they’re sort of like – trying to rescue a wild animal trapped in a fence or something. They’ll try and rip your arm off, even though you’re trying to help. So these things are like that. Or another image that occurs to me is a child who’s drowning. If you swim out to them and try and help them, they’ll take you down, because they’re so terrified. Dealing with these external energies, seems like that to me.”

    (JM) : “When you say you’ll ‘Help them to go away’ and they’re not intent on going away, how does that process work?"

    (RF) : “They don’t seem to get to stay unless they can get some part of that person scared of them. They love fear, they feed on fear, or there are some parts of the person who want that in them. Probably the most common way these things get in, Dick used to say, was the only way, but I think there are other ways - they offer power to the powerless.
    Imagine some young boy like me being raped and beaten all the time. The young kid’s going to reach out for anything that offers it power, even if it’s just some voice in their head. But then they don’t actually give power, they give an illusion of power, and then they keep the person weak so it stays dependent.
    So what we do is we just focus on all the parts of a person who are connected to it, who are going to miss it in any way when it’s gone, or who are scared of it. Work with them one after another. And then there’s nothing left for that kind of entity to connect to. It seems to have free will. I try and encourage them to go some place where they can heal. But some of them are just defiant, rage-filled, hard, contracted, and they go back to some dark realm, look for somebody else to attack. But I try and help them all go to some kind of healing."

    (JM) : “Now, I know many people who do this work, would work with what they would call their spiritual guides or helpers, that it’s not something that the therapist does at the ego level. It’s done at a completely different level of consciousness.”

    (RF) : “Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. And I ask Spirit to work through me, and I ask, ‘Please shut me up and you do the work,’ you know, stuff like that. Yeah, that’s very interesting. I have not worked inpatient, but there are several people who’ve worked with psychotic people diagnosed schizophrenic, and they say the voices talking to the schizophrenics are voices of demons. And psychiatrists say, ‘Don’t encourage the patient to talk to the voices, because that’s colluding with their hallucinations, and you don’t want to do that, it makes them worse.’ But actually, Jerry Marzinsky, and there are some others too, say that’s exactly what you need to do. What he’s discovered in working with schizophrenic patients in a much more blatant and florid way, these nasty voices giving all these poisonous, weakening messages, it’s very much like what I’ve discovered in working with a much, much less damage population. …
    I don’t think people heal from lives like mine unless they find something like (a voice of wisdom) they can connect to in their inner world. And it’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of experience. I think people have to somehow have an experience of that kind of reality. And that’s what makes the difference.
    People talk about faith. Faith is not about believing a doctrine. It’s about having a certain kind of experience and being true to it. There’s a wonderful line I like, “Theology is the corpse of revelation.” It’s that experience of revelation that’s alive and real and undeniable to the people who have it, that I think can really, really change lives.

    Roland Griffiths, who just died last year, was the head of psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins for a very long time. What he realized is that it was the mystical experience that healed people. Roland Griffiths was another hardcore scientist – all statistics, very controlled and careful. So what he tried to do and what he did was to operationalize the definition of mystical experience. So they got these 6 criteria, 3 major and 3 minor criteria, and they developed a way to rate these numerically.
    The 3 major ones are:
        1 Unitive experience – part of a whole
        2 Sacred experience – precious, the present moment is precious, often in psychedelic experiences, heartbreakingly precious
        3 Noetic experience – it’s true or real or realer than real, because very often these experiences feel more real than everyday reality.

    The 3 minor ones are:
        1 Positive affect – it basically feels good, even though even in his very carefully controlled environment, 35% of the people had moments of intense terror. So there’s positive affect, but it is not an easy trip.
        2 There’s no time or space – those disappear. They no longer apply.
        3 Ineffable – “too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words”

    He’s created this scale and a numeric way to quiz people on it and get a number, and he realized the higher the number they scored for a mystical experience predicted how much healing they got out of that event. So a very scientific way at showing that spiritual experience is healing, almost in and of itself.”

    (JM) : “Well I was personally very influenced by Abraham Maslow and his work on the peak experience, which was almost identical to this description, in which Maslow interviewed the most successful people he could find in his day – people like Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. And he discovered that they had these peak experiences and that the peak experiences for these highly successful people were central to who they had become."

    (RF) : “Yeah, I think so. I definitely think that’s true. And this is not popular among psychotherapists, this idea that this is what’s really needed for deep healing, some kind of experience of this step. I think the 12-step movement knows this. The first three steps of the 12-step: we couldn’t manage it, came to believe there’s a God or a higher power who could restore us to sanity and turned our lives over. That’s all about finding some kind of bigger reality and resting into it."

    (JM) : “That’s very important for self-healing. But the work that you’re doing with the, I would call it depossession, I don’t know if you use that word or not, that takes it to yet even another level, doesn’t it? Because now you’re healing another person or you’re serving as a catalyst to heal yet another person.”

    (RF) : “Yeah. I’ve studied the Spiritists, the Brazilian Spiritists. They’ve been doing this for 150 years or more. And they say that when you do this work and you encounter one of these spirits, they become your client too. And it’s even though very often when you meet these things, they’re cussing you out and they’re screaming at you and trying to scare you and doing all this stuff. That’s your client. That’s who you need to help.
    I just want to go a little bit more into ‘The Others Within Us.’ That book took me 10 years to write. It’s very well-reasoned, rational, calm, unemotional presentation of all the reasons why this makes sense.
    The first thing that I think is so important is our minds are porous. In the West, we seem to have developed this myth that our minds are like this citadel, some kind of fortress surrounded by this nice bony thing (skull) we have up here. Everything inside it is private. It’s our property, and nothing go out, and nothing comes in. That is a myth and it’s very, very wrong and it’s very, very damaging. I think that myth is almost a definition of alienation. If you’ve taken that in as your operational myth, you’re going to feel alienated from the world and alone. There are quite a few people who’ve traced the history of this myth. It’s only come up big time in the past four or five hundred years.
    If you think about it, every living system is surrounded by a semi-permeable membrane. Stuff comes in, stuff goes out. If it isn’t like that, it’s dead. Why would our minds be any different?
    Even Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most vehement, fundamentalist atheist alive on the planet today, and he’s a brilliant man, so he can really destroy people, he came up with this theory of memes & memeplexes. He actually came up with the theory to explain religion. He said religion is like a virus in the mind, and it can get from one mind into another, and then it can replicate in that mind and then go out to others. And then he talked about memeplexes, which would explain a whole complex combination of stuff, like a whole religion and all its mythos, and that going into minds, replicating and then going out. That also explains spirit possession. That’s a perfectly adequate theoretical explanation of spirit possession. And so here’s one of the most vehement atheists giving a perfectly rational, totally atheistic explanation of this event."

    (JM) : “I think there’s something fascinating and paradoxical about that, and I get that as well when I look at Buddhism, which is a very spiritual approach, which when you look deeply into Buddhist philosophy, they don’t believe in any kind of ultimate deity.”

    (RF) : “Yeah, and yet there are all kinds of spirit possession stuff, especially in Tibetan Buddhism. They have that State Oracle, the Nechung Oracle, and the Dalai Lama relies on the spirit who possesses the man for state advice. And you can see interviews with the guy who’s the oracle, and he’s completely unconscious of what happens. And he does amazing things. They put this huge headdress on him that must weigh 50 pounds, and he dances in it. It would snap somebody’s neck. And he says after the trance, they carry him out because he usually passes out at the end of this. They carry him out, and he says when he comes back to consciousness, he’s just filled with joy. And these guys don’t live long. They almost all die young. But he says, 'I’m just filled with joy.' It’s such a pleasure for him to be the recipient of this spirit."

    (JM) : “Well our science has a lot to learn about mediumship, about channeling, about the idea of multiple personalities. It seems to me that we’re hampered by our adherence to a strictly materialistic metaphysics. It stifles our creativity when it comes to looking at consciousness."

    (RF) : “Definitely, totally. And maybe I’m just optimistic, but I think it’s on the way out. You know the physicists aren’t buying that anymore. And there are Rupert Sheldrake and Bernardo Kastrup and even Christof Koch, the great scientist of consciousness. These people are coming around."

    (JM) : “They are. And it’s important. You’re talking about the leading edge of culture, where you certainly stand. And I would like to think that I stand there as well. But when we look at the whole vastness of human culture, you have to appreciate that the leading edge is just one movement. There’s a huge society that is still coming along very, very slowly. But nevertheless, these slow movements are the ones that are lasting when it comes to consciousness and culture."

    (RF) : “I hope so. There’s a very sad story I want to mention about that. Many traditional cultures get better results with psychosis than we do. And India was one of those. Tanya Luhrmann, who I immensely admire, anthropologist. I’m pretty sure she’s still alive. She studied psychosis in different cultures, and she was comparing California to India and Ghana. And in both of those other places, they got better results than we did. And the really sad thing, we are exporting our methods that don’t work. We’re not studying what they do. We’re exporting our bad methods. And in India, the government, in the name of modernization, is actively working to destroy the traditional temples that treated psychosis and mental distress. And they treated it on a spirit possession model. And they got better results than we do. And that’s just such a tragedy to see this being attacked in this day and age. And this is one major temple where they’ve lost some of the rights because there are not enough people left to do them."

    (JM) : “You see the same thing with Native American cultures, where the young people decide they no longer want to follow the ancient rituals. And I know of at least one tribe in California where the elders decided, and took all of their ancient ritual implements, buried them and said, this is the end. The young people are no longer carrying out our tradition."

    (RF) : “Thinking about Tanya Luhrmann, she wrote a book called, ‘How God Becomes Real.’ She says, ‘prayer is a cultivation of inner senses.’ This is something I think maybe could make the bridge between this spiritual world and psychotherapy. Because lately in the psychotherapy world, there’s been a lot of study of interoception – our ability to sense our subjective realm and to sense what’s going on in our bodies. This concept’s been around at least 100 years, but only since around 2010 has there been much research. But now it’s getting really, really clear that people who have poor interoception skills are much more likely to have treatment-resistant depression, borderline personality disorder, all this nasty stuff. Your ability to be aware of your inner world is really important in terms of your health. And you can be trained, it’s trainable. And Tanya Luhrmann coming from studying religion all over the world has come to the same conclusion. It’s all about, she calls it, inner sense cultivation. So maybe these two can meet somewhere."

    (JM) : “Very interesting. And I tend to think that having a good inner sense also is a way to cultivate psi ability."

    (RF) : “Definitely, definitely. And I think for me, the more I go inward, first, I met all the trauma from my childhood, which I didn’t want to meet. Who does? But as I moved through that, things got bigger. It’s like with the night sky, we get better and better telescopes. The sky gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The same thing happens as you pay attention in the inner world, I think.
    So at first we meet our personal history. Then there are the sort of close-in archetypes that are still human-looking. Then there are these archetypes that aren’t even human anymore. It’s fascinating to me.
    Every question I get a little bit of an answer to, opens up ten new, more fascinating questions. So I find it really exciting. Sometimes it’s a little scary. There’s a great quote I like from a Cherokee woman shaman, ‘Our foundations are ripped out from under us, over & over & over again, until the abyss itself becomes our foundation.’ Yeah. And I think that’s what this movement inward is. It’s about learning to not only tolerate, but enjoy that.”
    An Open-Ended (53-minute) Conversation with Robert Falconer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQyf0ew0XCU *** AGAIN WARNING: Major trauma, suicide, drug & alcohol use are discussed, which for some may be triggering ***

“When you think that you've lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more …"
Bob Dylan “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”

    The small, divided, dualistic self or mind sees rigid adherence to must haves & must avoids as essential to (the fragile ego's) life. BUT Self sees the exact opposite, how we must eventually tear down ALL our protective walls, open up & accept BOTH sides of the One reality. When we think we've lost every thing, the "abyss itself" - unmanifest Divinity or Buddhism's "Emptiness" - finally becomes our home again.