The Porous Mind

Robert Falconer on Trauma, Spirits & the Multiplicity of Consciousness

Dear friends,

What if your mind isn’t a fortress, but a relational field?

What if the self you cling to—the “I” you think you are—is just a diplomat negotiating between multitudes?

In this week’s YouTube release from the Future of Consciousness lecture series, we present a true explorer of the psychic underworld: Robert Falconer—trauma survivor, psychotherapist, and maverick guide to the inner multiverse. His books include The Others Within Us, where he explores spirit possession and internal family systems (IFS) in depth.

Falconer shares his harrowing childhood experiences of abuse and near-death—and how, out of that darkness, he encountered something luminous: a female spirit presence that sustained him. Over the decades, he’s come to see consciousness not as singular or sealed, but as multiple, porous, and relational. He draws on Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS), anthropology, psychedelics, and shamanic experience to argue for a new paradigm—one where healing is not about integration into a “normal” self, but about dialogue between selves, and compassion for the spirits and parts within.

“If everybody was a bass player, you’d have a lousy band. You want all the instruments in your psyche to play together.”
— Robert Falconer

We talk spirit possession, the failure of Western psychiatry, psychedelic entities, schizotypy as spiritual gift, and why the myth of the solo mind may be the root of our ecological and existential collapse.