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A wide-ranging conversation exploring community formation, transcendence, and self-leadership:

• The spectrum between mystery-focused and answer-focused religious traditions
• How transcendence serves as a collective response to uncertainty and survival
• Institutional abuse, rigid hierarchies, and power dynamics in religious contexts
• Self-leadership through Internal Family Systems and the distinction between blended and unblended states

About Irini Hara: Irini has a keen interest in religious studies and the work of Mircea Eliade, his writings inspired her youth years and motivated to search for a spiritual practice for herself later in adult life, that she found in shamanism. She blends several methods and approaches as therapist, educator, writer, Magdalene priestess and space holder of transformational processes of exploration and healing. Her professional website is https://www.palomablanca.ro/ and you can also access her writings on Substack: https://substack.com/@irinihara.

The conversation explores the parallels between their work:

• Ti0’s path from skeptical atheism to ayahuasca shamanism
• Joshua’s approach to making self-development measurable through Internal Family Systems

About Ti0 Rohan: Ti0 is an ayahuasca shaman and spiritual teacher based in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, where he leads transformational retreats at his center, I0. A former software developer at Amazon, his life changed in 2014 when an ayahuasca retreat—undertaken purely for curiosity—introduced him to the divine despite his hardcore atheism. He spent eight years apprenticing in the Brazilian rainforest, training in psychotherapy, ayahuasca shamanism, and multiple spiritual disciplines, facilitated over 1,000 people, and was initiated as a Spiritual Master. He now focuses on helping skeptics and atheists access higher consciousness without requiring belief.

Read Ti0’s write-up on Substack

Transcript

Ti0: Welcome to The Infinite Zero Experience. I’m your host, Ti0 Rohan, and today I’m joined by Joshua. Josh, welcome—introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your book and your work.

Joshua: The book’s title is Religion Unburdened by Belief. I’ve been trying to promote it and you were one of the people I emailed. Something about it resonated with you. I suspect it’s that we both see beliefs as something to hold carefully—or even as an obstacle. What made you receptive to speaking with me?

Ti0: It’s very in line with my work. I work with skeptics, cynics, and atheists who are leaning toward higher consciousness but don’t want to go down the route of belief—because my own path was exactly that. When I had my awakening, I was a hardcore skeptic, cynic, atheist. I wasn’t just agnostic; I actively disbelieved and criticized spirituality. I approached ayahuasca with the intention of getting the highest high the world has to offer. That was it.

And despite my cynicism, ayahuasca introduced me to the divine—not some personified religious god, which I still don’t believe exists—but a realization of the divine. And that happened despite me not believing. I started noticing how much of the spirituality industry claims it only works if you believe. I disagree. It works because it’s real. You don’t need to believe. If it were conditioned on belief, it would only work for some people—and that working wouldn’t even be the real thing.

In my experience, skeptics and believers are actually the same. Both are operating from the domain of belief. There is knowing, and there is belief. Knowing is: these are the laws of reality and you operate by them. But skeptics and believers are both operating from the level of rules—man-made impositions and limitations—rather than the laws of reality itself.

Joshua: I like how you’re distinguishing belief from knowledge. Usually the path from belief to knowledge requires evidence. In mathematics, you need to check a proof. In history, you look for corroborating accounts. In weather forecasting, a 30% probability is still better than a guess. What kind of evidence does ayahuasca give you that you’re encountering the divine?

Ti0: That’s a good question, because it allows me to clarify that it’s not ayahuasca specifically. I’ve been working with it for 12 years, facilitated over a thousand people, had over 600 experiences myself, and served over 5,000 doses. It’s not a guarantee that you’ll drink ayahuasca and know the divine. I’ve seen many people who don’t have that experience, and I’ve even seen people who have the experience but whose skeptical mind concludes “it’s just hallucinations from a drug.”

The way I see it: the ego and the rational mind can learn everything about the world. They can describe the function and appearance of a tree. But they cannot know anything. They can only have information about things—descriptions. We’ve mistaken information and descriptions for knowing.

What happened with ayahuasca for me was that I got separated from my ego-mind and actually landed in what I call the soul—that which has the actual ability to know, because it is the only thing that is real within us. Everything else is a projection, a description. Even our bodies: physics has shown us that all matter is just energy vibrating at different frequencies. The soul is connected to what is real, and only that which is real can know real.

My job now is to help people decouple the one who is describing the experience from the one who is having the experience—because the one having the experience is real and can know things before they’re described.

Joshua: So is that related to what philosophers call “noetic” knowing—the feeling of directly knowing something?

Ti0: Yes, but I’d say it’s even higher, because the beauty and awe are emotional responses happening at the emotional layer. There’s something happening at a higher mind level. The higher mind in us can know things at a much higher level. When we experience reality from there, we understand the actual mechanics of reality—we know the laws of consciousness, not as belief but the way we know the law of gravity: it works whether we believe it or not.

Joshua: In your work facilitating people, what blocks that knowing? If someone comes to you, how can they increase the odds of having it?

Ti0: That is the work. I call all interference “noise.” I don’t think there’s one noise more important than others. Some people call it anxiety, some call it trauma, some call it rage, some call it alcoholism. It doesn’t matter what the noise is—it’s all noise standing in the way of clarity about reality. My job is to clear it out.

In Hinduism—I come from India—the word guru in its original Sanskrit context means “the one who dispels darkness.” That’s all. They dispel the darkness and the light becomes clear. What Western religion does instead is try to fill your head with descriptions of the mystical and the divine, adding more noise. More ideas, all in the head, nothing lived or experienced or known.

Joshua: That may be an area where we look at self-development a little differently. I practice Internal Family Systems as a profession. You’d suggested you don’t see people as composed of multiple parts?

Ti0: No, no—I definitely do parts work. IFS is something I’ve come across and I’ve done a lot of it myself. I simply see it as one tool among many. Different tools work at different stages of a spiritual journey. The risk is that people get too attached to one system—they get captured by the tool rather than using it and setting it aside when it’s served its purpose. A hammer is a hammer. A screwdriver is a screwdriver. IFS is great for what it is—emotional healing, trauma work, psychological work—but it has its domain. It doesn’t go into the spiritual, in my experience. It helps you manage your inner world, and that’s valuable. But you won’t know God through IFS.

Ti0: I’m curious about your book. You describe a scientific approach to religion—not scientism, but a scientific approach. Tell us more. Does it go into divinity? Does it go into higher consciousness?

Joshua: What I mean by “scientific religion” is making it more like weightlifting. You have a clear goal, you go to the gym, you progressively increase the weight, and you get accurate feedback about whether you’re progressing. The idea is to make religious experience as reliable and predictable as that—not accidental or haphazard.

Ti0: Can someone know the divine if that’s their goal?

Joshua: Many people understand the divine as a non-dual experience—the felt dissolution of the boundary between self and other. That’s one way to talk about it. But that kind of experience can be hard to reach. What I’m doing in my book is identifying a step before it—an approach toward that experience that’s more tangible and measurable. The approach toward the divine, one step removed from it.

Ti0: So your work is preparation to meet the divine. It’s doing the inner work—emotional, psychological—before that encounter.

Joshua: Yes. And as people get close to that threshold, I think they sometimes just accidentally cross it. It’s spontaneous.

As an example: in Santo Daime, everyone drinks ayahuasca and we sing hymns. What’s unusual is that the ayahuasca is almost treated as a distraction. What you’re really trying to do is stay with the group—keep track of where you are in the lyrics, stay on the melody and rhythm. That quality of staying present with the group is what Santo Daime calls firmeza, “firmness.” You’re developing resistance to being pulled inward.

This maps directly onto the IFS distinction between blending and unblending. If I have a part that’s afraid of public speaking and I’m blended with it, it controls my behavior—I freeze up. If I stay unblended, I can still feel the anxiety but that part trusts me enough not to take over. So I can feel it without it running me.

Ti0: Let me frame that in my own words. Generally, people use the terms identification and disidentification. When you’re identified with a part, it dictates your possibility. The moment you disidentify, a new reality opens up. So: when you unblend or disidentify from all the things, you accidentally step into the mystical divine experience.

Joshua: Exactly.

Ti0: That is the drive of all spiritual work—whether meditation, yoga, IFS, ayahuasca, the Tao. All of it is to find that flow beyond the noise of the mind: the limitations, beliefs, cultural impositions, the obligations that dictate who we’re supposed to be. When all of that clears out, you get acquainted with something truly limitless.

And that’s the difference versus even conventional religion, which tries to find God in some very definitive way. What was coming to me as you spoke is that the preparation work is essentially setting order to the inner world before you go to higher reality. The moment that narrative stops—the moment all descriptions stop—the tree is connected to the sun, connected to the rain, connected to the soil, connected to other trees. It’s all just one thing in constant eternal flow. That’s the enlightenment experience: the noise stops and you realize you’re part of this whole system that’s just life moving through different forms.

Joshua: You’ve spoken beautifully about that experience. My hesitation is always in trying to describe it. That’s why I focus on the approach—the unblending, the step before—because it’s more tangible, more precisely describable. That’s what I mean by doing it scientifically.

Ti0: Absolutely. And yet if people don’t hear about what’s waiting, they ask: why unblend at all? Why do any of this work? There’s something so much grander waiting. I’m always walking that line—talking about it enough to tempt people into it, but not so much that it loses the magic and mystery.

What’s one thing from your book that would tempt people to take that step?

Joshua: A modification to basic breath meditation. Usually you’re taught: sit, relax, focus on your breath, and when your mind wanders, bring it back. My modification is: when your mind wanders, instead of immediately returning, write down what took you away. What are those concerns? After the meditation, take time with that piece of paper and actually address those issues—follow up on them.

What you’re doing is letting those parts know you’ll come back to them. And you follow through. You’re training your parts to be patient, and you’re building trust with them. When they trust you more, they’re less inclined to interrupt during meditation. Over time, you can develop more effortlessness.

Ti0: That’s really beautiful—because without explicitly defining it, it makes clear that there is you, and there are your parts. The angry one, the sad one, the one who had a fight with the boss, the one worried about dinner—none of that is you. All of those are happenings happening within you. And who you are is the one who gets to experience that, navigate that, release that, and be more than that. We don’t have to define who you are, but just knowing there is something free from all this noise and narrative—that’s a beautiful invitation. Since that’s what your book promises, I’d definitely recommend people check it out.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

Joshua: Just that the book is autobiographical in the sense that I’ve personally tried all the techniques I describe. I continue to attend Santo Daime ceremonies—I see it as training myself to stay present for people, to hold space. And I can bring that into my talk therapy work as well. So if anyone is interested in working with me in therapy, they can benefit from that training.

Ti0: And I’ll add: you described the Santo Daime intention of drinking ayahuasca and finding your presence beyond the psychedelic noise—their job is to stay present in this world with the people. That’s beautiful. But just to clarify: ayahuasca holds infinite possible experiences with infinite intentions. People like me awaken to divinity, heal deeply, quit substances, discover more about reality than we could imagine. There’s no box for ayahuasca. A lot of it is about the intention you hold, and then finding the right guide for that intention. Everything has its place.

Joshua: I agree. And Santo Daime actually embraces both sides—staying with the group and the inner exploration. Both kinds of experience are honored.

Ti0: What’s your website? How can people find your book?

Joshua: If you go to unburdened.biz—B-I-Z—that’s the book’s website. And my therapy practice is Estrela Counseling—Portuguese spelling of Estrela.

Ti0: I’ll add it to the description. Thank you very much for sharing your time and your work. We’ll put this out in the world.

Published an article on The Gentle Law Substack exploring what meditation is actually for. Drawing on Internal Family Systems, the piece argues that the real goal is effortlessness—not forced concentration—and that wandering attention is best met by briefly acknowledging the part that pulled focus away rather than suppressing it. Building trust with these inner parts allows genuine ease to emerge naturally.

Read the article

Joshua Pritikin was interviewed by Michael Kokal on End of the Road, episode 344. Co-host Lynn also participated. The wide-ranging conversation covers process beliefs vs. content beliefs, Internal Family Systems (including Robert Falconer’s work on unattached burdens), the Buddha and Mara as a lens for conviction, shamanism, Santo Daime, the mystery-belief spectrum, the autonomy goal of the book, and the relationship between science and spirituality.

Listen on Libsyn

Transcript

This is the End of the Road podcast with your host, Michael Kokal. Exploring the horizons we never touch because we’re already there.

Welcome, welcome, welcome, and thanks for listening. Tonight we’re off to southern Oregon with the psychological counselor and author, Dr. Joshua Pritikin. We’re talking about his new book called Religion Unburdened by Belief: The Way of Open Inquiry. It’s really a fascinating book about the intersection of evidence-based science with beliefs, processes, convictions, faith, along with Joshua’s deep interest in Internal Family Systems, shamanism, and a host of other really interesting subjects. It’s really kind of in some ways an inquiry, not about what to believe, but rather to have a different relationship with belief itself. It was a very fascinating and thought-provoking deep dive that Joshua led us on here today, and we’re very grateful to have him on. And without further ado, here’s Dr. Joshua.

Mike: Well, Josh, I think we’re on the same page about beliefs and convictions and process beliefs and all that kind of good stuff, but I think it’s my belief that by the end of this podcast, Professor Lynn’s going to have to reel me in a little bit.

Lynn: Thanks, Mike. No pressure.

Mike: Well, maybe we should start off, Josh, like you do in your book—maybe setting the groundwork about the different process beliefs versus beliefs versus convictions and how you navigate them.

Joshua: My book kind of starts where James Carse’s book left off. His book, The Religious Case Against Belief, was proposing to kind of separate or pry apart religion and belief. It seemed like a good idea to me, but in practice it needed some further refinement. So that’s what I worked on in the first chapter. Because beliefs serve different functions—you can have a process belief, which are beliefs that enable you to do certain practices like meditation. For meditation, you have to believe that sitting still is possible and that controlling your attention is possible, or that you can learn to do that. That kind of belief makes a practice possible. Other kinds of beliefs—what I call content beliefs—are beliefs about what the outcome should be. You believe that if you practice meditation, you will definitely become enlightened, or experience bliss, or cosmological beliefs about whether God exists or what happens after death. Those are more of an answer. They may be reassuring, but they may also limit the possibilities you’re willing to consider.

Mike: Yeah, well, let’s dive in—since you talked about meditation, let’s talk a little bit about Buddhism and how the rubric you’ve described might fit into that. So let’s say you’re the Buddha, meditating under a tree. Can you describe what the process belief is with regard to meditation?

Joshua: I’m not sure I’m understanding your question correctly. Could you clarify a bit?

Mike: Sure. Well, when people start with a Buddhist practice, a process is almost synonymous with the word practice. What you’re doing—and then what the outcome is, is dependent on, well, that’s just it. The beliefs come in: if I do this, then I will get X, Y, or Z.

Joshua: Maybe the example where it’s easy to see is the Bible story of Moses and the burning bush. Suppose Moses came to that experience with the belief that a burning bush was an ill omen that would cause him anxiety—those beliefs would constrain his interpretation of it, and he probably would have gone in a completely different direction. But since he came to that experience without preexisting beliefs, it was just kind of an accident, and he had the chance to feel into what it would mean. That experience shaped his beliefs in a different direction than if he’d come into it with preexisting ones.

Mike: So let’s say the Buddha is meditating under the Bodhi tree and is visited by Mara—do you think the Buddha has to have some belief in what he’s doing in order to resist?

Joshua: You’re kind of asking me to guess what’s in the Buddha’s mind. Beliefs don’t have an inherent function—it’s how you use them. If the Buddha thought that was a process belief, then it is. If he thought it was a content belief… How you use a belief is a personal choice. Does that make sense?

Mike: Maybe, is there a difference between a process belief and an intention?

Joshua: Interesting. I can have an intention to explain clearly… let me just think—process belief and intention. I hadn’t prepared for that question.

Mike: Oh, that’s okay. I apologize for getting in the weeds. But I have this sense that it’s beliefs all the way down, like turtles all the way down. And I understand that you don’t want to impose your beliefs on other people, but it’s almost hard to get away from—every thing we do, wherever we point our attention, is almost an intention or a belief. I’m having a difficult time separating it.

Joshua: In the book, I don’t condemn beliefs or say you shouldn’t have any—that’s not realistic. It’s just that the degree of conviction you have in them should be justified by the evidence. If you believe it’s hot outside, you can check the thermometer and that evidence confirms your belief, so that justifies high conviction. Or if you suspect you have strep throat, a lab technician can look under a microscope and that evidence would confirm or disconfirm it. Does that speak to what you’re getting at?

Mike: Can you have a lack of belief? And what would that look like?

Joshua: It’s hard to be completely absent of beliefs. I don’t think beliefs of low conviction are really an obstacle—you can have many beliefs with low conviction and that doesn’t constrain your experience much.

Mike: Yeah, see, Professor Lynn, this is where you have to reel me back. I’m going off the deep end here.

Lynn: Well, the thing I would think about is that we arrive in the world and before we’re able to really grasp something as a belief and hold it, we’re subject to all kinds of things in the environment we grow up in. We don’t have the cognitive or emotional ability when we’re young to really understand how to stand back from beliefs, what they really are. They’re a worldview—an accepted worldview—before we realize what’s happening. But then we hit that wonderful period of adolescence where something is ignited in us and suddenly we have this newfound sense of power to stand apart from things that have been “givens” in our world. I see it as a developmental process.

Along those lines, my takeaways at a high level from reading your book—and it’s a pretty dense book, Josh, very readable, but dense in what it has to say—were: first, never say never; second, hold all things lightly, including our beliefs and our processes; and third, both buyer and seller should beware. Beware of the assumptions and the unseen cultural filters we bring to things like politics and religion. I think you have a lot of fun with that third one in chapter eight, the gift shop chapter.

Joshua: No, perfectly fine. I love your takeaway. The only thing I might add is that holding beliefs lightly in a religious context is important, but that can get us into trouble in other contexts. The smoking lobby was able to sustain nicotine and cigarette smoking by casting doubt about all the scientific evidence that built up about how harmful it was, holding off legislation for decades. So it’s important to be context-specific about how much conviction you put in beliefs. If you always hold everything lightly, you won’t be able to make the correct decision about the harm of smoking cigarettes.

Lynn: That really gets us to this notion of evidence—what evidence, what data are we looking at? And we even find in some cases that our commitment to being data-driven doesn’t always mean the data are valid, that researchers have done their job with all due diligence. So there’s a balance between healthy skepticism and saying, I’m not going to believe anything, I’ll just figure things out for myself.

Mike: I’m imagining going back to the Buddha in juxtaposition with what you were saying, Lynn, about holding beliefs lightly. Part of me says that when the Buddha sees Mara, he’s practicing non-attachment and holding it lightly. But another part of me is saying—that’s because he has to tenaciously cling to the belief that Mara cannot move him, because he’s touching something essential in himself and has a certain faith. So this is like the two voices in my head—it’s a paradox with a lot of energy, and you’ve struck it, Josh.

Joshua: When you say Mara—sorry, I’m not familiar with this story. Can you give me a recap?

Mike: It’s the demon that—you can use Jesus in the desert or John the Baptist, where they’re tempted. Basically, when the Buddha is meditating under the Bodhi tree before enlightenment, he was approached by Mara. You could interpret that a variety of different ways. Non-attach, hold things lightly. But on the other hand, he’s sitting there. This is your life. Do you hold onto your life?

Joshua: I love how you’re putting that, Mike. Buddha has like mixed feelings in the sense that…

Mike: No, I’m saying I do. This is me how I’m reacting to what your saying about beliefs. Certain beliefs can get you through… dark night of the soul. There is a certain faith that things are going to be alright.

Joshua: Sure.

Mike: Are we clinging to that tenaciouly?

Joshua: I think that would be a process belief. So I don’t see… we need that faith to get through the dark night. That doesn’t constrain what we’re going find on the other side. That would be functioning as a process belief, right?

Lynn: As I recall the story, the visions of Mara were all temptations—wonderful things would be given to Siddhartha if only he would do such and such. And the meaning of the resistance of those temptations in the touching of the earth—that could be open to a lot of interpretations: holding to one’s ground, recognizing delusions as such, still holding firmly to one’s truth. There are multiple levels of interpretation. Siddhartha, even under weakened conditions, was able to stay aligned with some version of selflessness as a truth with great meaning. And then once that breakthrough occurred, the ground on which he sat brought to bear both high spiritual aspirations and what it meant to actually live life.

Joshua: You’ve narrated that transformation from Siddhartha to Buddha very beautifully. There was learning taking place, a transformation that would take some time to unpack.

Mike: Josh, would it be helpful to discuss Internal Family Systems and how it’s enriched your life?

Joshua: Sure. Internal Family Systems was developed by Richard Schwartz, who was trained as a family therapist. What he noticed working with individual clients with eating disorders is that they would describe their internal systems in a way that was very reminiscent of how Schwartz was used to working with families. So that’s the analogy: just like there are families outside, maybe we have families inside as well. An easy way to understand this is to consider an occasion when you have mixed feelings. Suppose you’re driving to work late. A part of you really wants to get to work on time. Another part might be afraid of getting pulled over by the police. Another part might be frustrated that you didn’t leave enough time. Internal Family Systems helps pull apart these mixed feelings into their individual components and helps people get to know each of these parts of themselves and develop more harmony and better cooperation in their internal system.

Mike: You also included a chapter on Robert Falconer, who I think has an interesting relationship with IFS. My sense is that the things going on are much more interesting than just the family—there’s so much more. It’s like a forest. And what Robert Falconer explores about unattached burdens—that’s very interesting.

Joshua: The first thing I want to acknowledge is that you’re suggesting IFS has a belief that the analogy holds between external family and internal family—and I think that is a belief. But I would consider it a process belief, because it doesn’t presuppose what’s supposed to happen or prescribe a conclusion or outcome. That develops through the process.

As for Robert Falconer—in the original formulation of IFS, all parts are a part of you. If you identify any parts, those parts are a part of you. Robert Falconer felt that wasn’t flexible enough. He wanted to accommodate the possibility that we could take in external energies or external entities that would be present in our system without being a part of us.

Mike: And that’s more in line with my experience. My experience of the cosmology is—it’s not a family. There’s way more going on than just a family. That’s why I find what Robert Falconer is doing to IFS much more interesting than what traditionally IFS is about. It’s like a forest—a lot more than just a couple of things here and there. It’s a lot more.

Joshua: Many people appreciate Bob Falconer’s work and feel like he’s on to something. It seemed important to include in my book, because it does seem like there’s more going on than just our own internal parts.

Mike: Maybe you want to talk about all these things that you experience: Internal Family System, shamanism, what would you what’s coming up for you? What would you like to share about all that?

Joshua: I feel like that’s too much of an open ended question. I could go in any direction.

Mike: Yes, go in any direction. I’m sorry, Lynn, reel me back.

Lynn: No, I’m very interested in your question too, because there’s a lot to absorb in Josh’s book. Anything he would like to elaborate on would be wonderful.

Joshua: Well, consider Bob’s exorcism protocol for removing these entities that are not part of your system. One of the most interesting things I find about it is the way he defines external entities. He makes a distinction between entities that are burdensome and those that are guides. Burdensome entities are the ones that could be harmful to you—they might use power dynamics to try to make you submissive to their will—whereas guides are benevolent and can give you helpful information on occasion. This way of defining unattached burdens—or UBs—motivates the design of the protocol. It’s kind of circular in a sense: defining the unattached burdens in the particular way that he does guides the method he uses to remove them. That circularity is something I find puzzling and delightful at the same time.

Mike: Have you experienced that in your own life or your own practice?

Joshua: I have on occasion. I’ve had clients that bring in what seems like an unattached burden, and I’ve tried to follow his protocol as best I can. It seems to be effective.

Lynn: So for someone who’s a real novice with this particular perspective—without violating any kind of confidentiality—could you make up an example for us about how such a thing would occur in a therapeutic situation? How would you know that was what was happening, and how would you think about how to proceed?

Joshua: The diagnostic question is pretty straightforward. You’d be working with a client doing parts work, and you might encounter a part that seems to be causing trouble. You can request the client to ask that part: “Is that a part of you? Is that part of your system, or is it an external entity?”

If it’s a part of the client, you’d stay within the original IFS protocol—get to know it, understand where that behavior came from, how it’s trying to protect the client. The parts can have all kinds of dysfunctional behaviors they learned when the client was younger and helpless, maybe when their parents were engaged in divorce or substance abuse or other traumas that prompted the adoption of behaviors that as an adult would be completely inappropriate, but the parts are still persisting because that’s what they learned when young.

But if the client says this is a malicious energy that is not part of me, that I’ve just somehow taken on—then I would shift over to using Falconer’s protocol and guide the client toward removing that malicious energy from their system.

Lynn: That’s very helpful to hear. You would know at that point to pivot to a different approach targeting that particular experience. Did that get at what you were asking, Mike?

Mike: Yes, very helpful. And it makes me think about how this would interact with your process-and-conviction rubric, and especially with your interest in plant medicines—how that would come into play in this kind of experience.

Joshua: That’s a very open-ended question. Can you narrow it a bit?

Mike: Who do you envision reading your book and what would you like them to get out of it? That’s another open-ended question—I’m sorry!

Lynn: I love this part about Mike.

Mike: (to Lynn) I’m your unattached burden.

Joshua: So who’s the book for? It’s for people that are not satisfied with the religious traditions that are on offer—anyone who feels like they’re in the spiritual-but-not-religious category. Atheists could be a good candidate because it doesn’t ask them to believe anything. They may be challenged to relax strong disbeliefs a little bit to let in the possibility of process beliefs.

My goal in writing the book is to give people more autonomy. In my own life, accessing religious experiences—a sense of being connected to something larger than myself, or beauty and awe—was quite haphazard and accidental. What I’m trying to do is give people more autonomy, make it much more predictable and reliable so that you can put it on your calendar: I’m going to take Saturday and encounter religious experience. You have much more self-efficacy in your personal development.

Mike: You know what I’m curious about? You have very famous ancestors. How do you think they would interact with this book?

Joshua: I think you’re referring to Dr. Michael Greger, who I mention in the acknowledgments. There’s a family connection: my grandfather, Nathan Pritikin, helped address his grandmother’s near-fatal cardiovascular disease. Nathan Pritikin’s work in diet and lifestyle helped her live some decades longer than doctors had estimated. That experience prompted Dr. Michael Greger to go into medicine. The parallel I see is that we’re both trying to give people more autonomy. Dr. Greger tries to connect people with the peer-reviewed literature and primary sources rather than relying on the interpretation of doctors and nutritionists. In my book, I’m trying to make religious experiences—which have sometimes been regulated by gatekeepers or priests—directly available to people, to increase their autonomy.

Mike: I appreciate that. I have friends who were abused by priests, so I’ve got that emotional reaction. But I also sense trying not to throw out the baby with the bath water—that’s why I find the concept of process beliefs so intriguing. On the other hand, part of me feels that science is just another belief system, that what we think of as science will be outdated with the advent of quantum physics, and maybe when we come full circle it’s going to be something like animism again. I don’t know—going in circles, perhaps.

Lynn: That’s interesting, because there’s this notion—Thomas Kuhn—of paradigms: a new paradigm starts off as radically new, a reaction against a previous one, there’s a great deal of battling about it, the revolution takes hold, it becomes the dominant paradigm, and then some period later, that same process takes it on. Right now, there’s a budding group of scientists arguing very cogently that consciousness is first, not second—particularly with regard to closing the gaps in scientific theories about consciousness.

Joshua: Are you thinking of Donald Hoffman? Because he definitely has the consciousness-first approach.

Lynn: There is Federico Faggin, who won awards and was instrumental in developing the Intel microprocessor.

Mike: Bernardo Kastrup?

Lynn: Yes, bless your heart. If you enjoy any of that and haven’t read them, you’d probably like them, Josh.

Joshua: Bernardo Kastrup advocates for panpsychism—the view that everything is conscious.

Mike: He’s an idealist.

Joshua: I’m not sure I have a strong position on that. But I want to respond briefly, Mike: you seem to be suggesting an oscillation between going towards science and then away from it. I would suggest that we’re becoming more integrated—that there isn’t a necessary divide. Science can be reconciled with religion. These don’t necessarily have to be in conflict.

Lynn: Can you say a little more about that, Josh? Something was there for you at some point—you were in quantitative psychology and now you’re writing about the very human processes involved in dealing with oneself psychologically and emotionally, and you’re a therapist. Was that interest there during your doctoral training, or did it develop later?

Joshua: It was definitely a hobby early on. I started meditating when I was a teenager and kept that up all these years. But professionally I got into software development and then shifted to quantitative psychology, with an emphasis on statistics and experimental design—very science-focused. I’ve always loved science. I’ve always been trying to reconcile a scientific way of thinking with our interior emotional life, and that’s part of where this book came from—that aspiration to combine these two different ways of thinking about life.

Lynn: I think that really comes through in how you’ve structured the book and the fluidity with which you talk about these processes.

Mike: I was thinking—and I probably shouldn’t say this to two therapists—but I think the more interesting question is: is the consciousness even mine? Is it external or internal? Am I the dreamer or the one being dreamed?

Lynn: You would love the work of Federico Faggin, and you would appreciate listening to his talks and Bernardo Kastrup as well.

Joshua: An important thing to keep in mind when considering these theories of consciousness is the mechanism—there’s got to be some way that consciousness contributes to perception and action. Like, what’s the difference between a robot that’s not conscious and one that is? What does consciousness add to that scenario?

Lynn: That has come up, and at least as I recall, Faggin has addressed it—so you might really enjoy some of his talks, because you two are so science-based. But for some folks the notion is that consciousness is primary—it is the sphere in which all other forms of knowledge blossom, where they arise to the surface and are known. And without that, we would not be aware. If we think of consciousness as awareness, then your question leads into: when does awareness end? Some mystics and a few very brave scientists are saying it may be primary, and the one thing that doesn’t end. But we are far afield!

Mike: What about the book—what’s the takeaway we haven’t discussed yet that I really think is important to share?

Joshua: Well, everything in the book is kind of autobiographical in the sense that I’ve personally experimented with everything I put in it. I continue to attend Santo Daime ceremonies where the ceremonies are training me to be present in challenging situations. And I can bring that presence into other aspects of my life, like talk therapy. That’s one of the things I offer—if anyone in the audience feels they’d like to benefit from the work I’ve done to have all of my presence brought to conversations and to really be with people, that’s available.

Mike: Wouldn’t it be interesting if you could combine talk therapy with a Santo Daime ceremony? Just thinking about how much more would be shared than just words—energies, beings, all the things that go on, plus the dancing. I’m wondering if psychology could evolve from talk to more expansive, participatory things that your book is pointing at.

Joshua: That’s an intriguing aspiration. One thing I do try to do in the book is show the parallel structure between what happens in Internal Family Systems and then how that can be applied to meditation, and then how meditation is similar in some ways to what’s happening in a Santo Daime ceremony. I try to show those parallels and bring them out.

Lynn: You also did a wonderful job of pointing out a couple of instances where religious ceremonies, over time engaging without a firm anchoring in reality, resulted in great harm. Things can go awry.

Joshua: Are you thinking of the Santo Daime context specifically, or…

Lynn: The larger context—letting down one’s boundaries for a particular person who seems to hold special power. You gave a couple of really good examples pointing out the dangers of that.

Joshua: Yes. I have a whole appendix on the various ways teachers and students can get into manipulative situations, and some case studies. There was the case of a psychologist who went to a retreat hoping to learn how to work with psilocybin with clients, and things went really badly—maybe that’s the story you’re thinking of?

Lynn: Also, the notion that Mike brought up—what would it mean to have someone with a professional background present in a situation who knew something about the ceremonies and the process work of the religion itself, but who also stood professionally apart with appropriate boundaries—that’s interesting.

Joshua: I address safety, autonomy, and boundaries in many ways. I’m not sure which direction to go in.

Lynn: You did a wonderful job of putting that out in a very light-handed way—I didn’t think you were being heavy-handed. I thought you were pretty egalitarian in how you handled the different points you were making. But I was thinking more about what Mike was bringing up in terms of oversight—there are some of these experiences that would not be amenable to having a person on the outside there, because it is such an immersive experience.

Joshua: One thing I touch on in the book is recognizing that the state-run programs—like we have in Oregon and now Colorado—require a sober trip sitter for safety. But I discuss that with some skepticism, because having one person sober and one person intoxicated can create power dynamics. My position is that it probably works better if we can approach these experiences in solitude for the most part, and avoid all the problems with gurus and teachers and facilitators taking advantage of people who are intoxicated, or having their egos expand to galactic size.

Mike: Well, Josh, how can people get in touch with you if they want to find out more about either your work or your clinical practice?

Joshua: The two websites are connected. The book’s website is unburdened.biz, and my talk therapy practice is Estrela Counseling—estrela is a Portuguese word that means star. If you just look up my name you can find both sites easily.

Mike: Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for coming on and sharing this very thought-provoking book. As you can see, it really made me question a lot of things, which is very good. There was a lot to take in, a lot to discuss—and I think that’s part of why we had such a wide-ranging discussion today. It was a very enjoyable read.

Joshua: Well, if there’s more you want to discuss about it, you’re welcome to invite me back for a round two.

Mike: Oh, wonderful! Yeah, we’ll do that. We’ll keep in touch. Thank you very much—appreciate the time, Josh.

Lynn: Great to meet you, Josh.

Joshua: Nice to talk to you.

Psychedelic attorney Greg Lake of the EntheoEsq YouTube channel interviewed Joshua Pritikin about Religion Unburdened by Belief. The conversation covers the mystery-belief spectrum, Internal Family Systems, altered states of consciousness, psychedelics and the fear of death, self-leadership in meditation, and AI consciousness.

Transcript

Greg: All right. Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Psychedelic attorney Greg Lake here. Welcome to the EntheoEsq YouTube channel. Here with my friend Buddy Bear and another good friend of mine, Mr. Joshua. How are you doing today? Yep. Good, good. So Josh has recently published a book which strikes a chord, resonates with me in many ways, and practicing in theogenic law. It’s entitled Religion Unburdened by Belief and we’re going to get into it here, but it really speaks to a lot of issues that mirror—I guess a lot of the conceptual religious framework around enthogen based religions and religious practices. As we’ll see, Josh’s book really touches upon both directly and indirectly upon these issues and, as we’ll see, you know, as the title suggests, religion—and I know I’ve said this many times especially under the law—is not confined to just, in my opinion, kind of narrow-ended religions based upon dogmatic belief structures. We’ll just leave it at that. But we’re going to fine-tune this as we go forward. Josh, do you want to make an introduction to everybody and let them know who you are? Give us just like a brief kind of description of the book and we’ll just kind of take it from there.

Joshua: Sure. So I happened to run into James Carse’s book, The Religious Case Against Belief, a couple years ago, and I thought it was very insightful. I was really excited to find it. But then I got about halfway through and I felt like he kind of dropped the ball, and my book is an attempt to finish the job, to take it to its fullest potential.

Greg: Should I say more? Yeah. Well, you did get some original inspiration in a sense from Carse’s book.

Joshua: Oh yeah, for sure. The title alone—The Religious Case Against Belief—suggested to me, oh, these two things are different, maybe even adversarial in some ways.

Greg: Yeah. Well let me ask you this, Josh: before encountering this book, and then obviously which led to your book, what was your view on these things? What was your idea? I mean, I’ll just say this—I run into a lot of people whose view of religion is this established, secondary, dogmatic, very specific belief-oriented religion, and that’s it. But obviously, like I do now, it’s like, oh no, there’s actually a whole other piece to the pie. But what was your personal viewpoint or understanding of that going into reading the first book?

Joshua: Yeah, so religion and spirituality have been my hobby since I was a teenager. I got introduced to Jung back there by my parents, and I started practicing meditation. I’ve been carrying on with meditation since I was a teenager. I really wasn’t—I started out in software development and went in the direction of science, so coming back to trying to study emotion and spirituality, that’s something that professionally is more of a recent thing.

Greg: You said you had an engineering, software-type background, scientific emphasis. What brought you towards talking about religion? Was it that that got you interested in wanting to research and do this, or had you been kind of thinking in that direction prior?

Joshua: Yeah, I mean, like I was saying, it was a hobby of mine from long back. I got interested in eastern religions. I visited India. I joined various groups there—Frederick Lenz had a group back in the 90s, and then Sahaja Yoga meditation in the 2000s. It was an ongoing hobby of mine for a long time, and I’d always been interested in trying to reconcile—professionally I eventually got a PhD in quantitative psychology, which is a combination of statistics, software development, and experimental design—because I thought there might be some overlap, some way to combine my professional work with my hobby of religion and spirituality. This is kind of the culmination of that aspiration to combine those two interests I’ve had for a long time.

Greg: Let me ask you this. You know, in the west at least, we have this paradigm where religion and science are at odds, existing in these two different paradigms. How have you found it integrating those two things together? With me, doing the psychedelic work, the science shows that people have religious experiences—that’s good for us on the legal realm. And then science also shows that the more deeper and profound those experiences are, the better off people can be on the back end. I came to a realization that there are certain areas where religion and science aren’t necessarily at odds and can actually help inform one another. Did you find that relationship too in doing this book?

Joshua: Yeah, that’s certainly one of the areas I address in the book—trying to reconcile science and spirituality or religion. I go into the structure of prayer in chapter six, and that may be the place where I most directly try to reconcile—in that case it’s prayer. I’m looking at the causal structure of prayer and trying to reconcile that with scientific thinking, and I do that through a dialogue.

Greg: Interesting. So like a scientific analysis or examination of prayer—is it in the structure of the prayer or in the substance of the prayer? What part of that were you analyzing in the book?

Joshua: Oh boy. Let me try. So in figure 16, I try to map out the causal structure of prayer. When you’re getting ready to pray, you would conceive of an unlikely dream and pray for it to happen—that’s what you do first. Then at time two, something happens, there’s some matching event, and then you frame that, or you connect the prayer to being causal for the fulfillment of that event rather than ordinary explanations—not luck, not natural causes. And then at time three, you recognize the welcome fulfillment of your prayer and feel heard, cared for, and especially favored.

Greg: Nice. I like that. Prayer’s always been very interesting to me, and you could even apply some statistics and look at probabilities and see if there’s any actual effects to prayer. But hold on, before we jump off—let me just come back to that.

Joshua: The piece of prayer that usually causes some anguish to scientists is where you determine the cause as being the prayer. Scientists would prefer that the cause be a natural cause or luck, and people who pray say the outcome was caused by the prayer. That’s kind of the argument over the cause of the outcome—that’s what I discuss in the chapter.

Greg: Nice. I like it. So kind of what I said—directly on point. Have they found anything to that? Like have they found that people who pray have increased probability or any correlation?

Joshua: I’m not aware of any research that shows that, but I’m not even sure it’s something you could research or if it’s falsifiable.

Greg: Right, yeah. It seems like you can’t really tell what the cause is.

Joshua: And that’s kind of the core of the argument between the scientific parts of ourselves and the parts that believe in prayer—it’s not really decidable.

Greg: Yeah. Let me ask you this: for the average reader—a lot of people have this misconception, short-sighted kind of misconception about what religion is—for those people who might be in that thinking paradigm, what does your book offer to people like that, as far as a new fresh perspective?

Joshua: Well, the book is really tailored for people who have seen the religious traditions on offer and feel like they’re looking for something more. People who are spiritual but not religious, who are open—or even atheists, because the book doesn’t ask you to believe anything. So atheists should be open to that. If you’re invested in a tradition that is belief-heavy, then maybe the book offers you a chance to notice that there are alternatives. Some of the disadvantages of being in such a belief-heavy tradition is that when you do have religious experiences, they would serve to confirm your beliefs—you wouldn’t really experience anything new. And religious experiences are probably going to be accidental or haphazard. One of the things I do in the book is suggest how to reach religious experience in a reliable, predictable way so that you have more autonomy about your ability to enjoy those experiences.

Greg: Yeah, I love it. Let me just ask you a general opinion here. Do you make any argument in the book about whether one of these paradigms or systems is better for society than the other—the established, belief-heavy paradigm versus what you’re discussing in your book?

Joshua: For sure. The book definitely has an opinion—it favors the mystical, the questioning. Those kinds of traditions that are more about questions, more about challenging ideas, more about trying to learn—and less emphasis on memorization.

Greg: Yeah. From my experience doing the work that I do, I work with a lot of enthogen-based religions who, while they have some written doctrine, the religion is really centered around the ceremony and the ritual. The belief being that we’ve either come up on specific issues or are just generally looking to figure out more about our place in the universe. The belief really just being that if we come together and work with these certain practices, this will help provide us the answers. Does that make sense to you?

Joshua: Yeah, for sure. And the book focuses on which processes are likely to produce religious experiences—that’s really the core of the book. I love that framing: groups focused on ceremony and the process of what do we do when we get together. That’s what the book really focuses on as well.

Greg: And I’ve noticed that a focus on the process—the ceremony or ritual—tends to bring people into a tighter community, a little less judgmental in a lot of ways. A lot of people who come to enthogen-based ceremonies are coming from Christianity and other religions because they’ve been traumatized, many just emotionally through feeling judged and left out. And when those people come over, it’s not like they drop all of their religious beliefs, but they become open to filter that through new experiences and information. Can you speak to this—when I look at the Bible and these other holy books, these belief-heavy religions, do you observe that a lot of that doctrine and material actually came from prophets and others having religious experiences?

Joshua: Yeah. What you’re getting at is which comes first—the philosophy or the egg, I guess—the writing about the religious experience or the religious experience itself. A great example is the Moses story with the burning bush. Moses just accidentally encountered the burning bush. He had no plans—it was a total surprise for him—and then he developed this philosophy and tradition around it. It was the experience that came first, and that’s what the book advocates as well: to make yourself available for that experience. And the way to do that is to reduce your expectations, reduce your convictions about what you think is going to happen. That’s where I start in chapter one.

Greg: And I’ll just say through my journey—I might have an enthogenic experience and get some notions about how the universe works. And then I’ll have life experience, and sometimes it seems to confirm certain profound thoughts or ideas, and sometimes it challenges that. My religious, spiritual beliefs are literally evolving every single day, and I find more strength and growth in being okay to be challenged and to be seeking. Let me ask you—internal family systems. If you want to elucidate how you’ve integrated it into your book, I think people would be interested to hear that.

Joshua: Maybe before I talk about that I could just give a little intro to what internal family systems is. It’s a psychological model developed by Richard Schwartz, who was trained as a family therapist. What he noticed working with individual clients with eating disorders is that they would describe their internal systems in a way that resembled the way Schwartz would work with families. So there’s the family outside, and then you have your inner family inside within a single person. The easiest way to understand parts—what Schwartz called inner subpersonalities—is through mixed feelings. Suppose you’re driving to work and you’re late. A part of you wants to get there on time. A part of you may be worried about law enforcement. Another part might be frustrated that you didn’t leave early enough. Internal family systems is a way of pulling apart those mixed feelings and looking at each component, helping you develop more harmony between those internal parts of yourself.

Greg: Yeah. Absolutely. And then how do you incorporate that into the book?

Joshua: That’s harder to address because it’s kind of everywhere—I use it as a general analytical tool to address many different aspects of the book. For example, in many religious traditions there’s this sense of trying to improve yourself: do good and not do evil. But that framing has psychological implications. If you’re splitting yourself into good and evil and trying to empower the good parts and suppress the bad parts, you’re splitting yourself into two pieces—and that goes against the idea of internal family systems, where we’re trying to develop harmony among all our parts. Internal family systems would recommend that instead of splitting ourselves into good and evil parts, we should try to understand the evil parts, understand their motivations, where their behaviors come from, and try to bring them into the fold—develop a more harmonious way to work with our less savory parts.

Greg: Nice. Let me ask you: you draw upon different shamanic traditions, theogenic churches, and Amazonian practices. If someone were to say you’ve culturally misappropriated from these people in authoring your book, how do you respond to that?

Joshua: Yeah, I don’t claim to be fully insulated. I’m coming from a culture that has a history of taking a very extractive approach to indigenous traditions. But what I’m trying to do is just point out practices and where they come from, and not represent those practices as my own.

Greg: Absolutely. The cultural misappropriation thing gets thrown around a lot—sometimes very deservingly, sometimes a little bit loosely. But ultimately I think it comes down to intention: is your intention to extract and take away, or is your intention—as I feel probably in your case—to highlight in a respectful way and draw upon that to hopefully help make some people better? I have a note here about this notion of the mystery-belief spectrum. Do you want to give a brief explanation of that and let us know how it fits within the book?

Joshua: Sure. This is an analytical tool I introduce early in the book. Basically it’s a way of looking at a religious tradition superficially and making some quick judgments about whether it leans more to the mystery side or to the belief-heavy side. A mystery-focused tradition would be more about questioning. A belief-heavy tradition would be more about memorization—what are the right answers, what do I need to know—and less about questioning and challenging interpretations. What’s cool about the mystery-belief spectrum is that you don’t really need to know much about the tradition to make this kind of judgment. For example, orthodox Judaism vests a lot of authority in the rabbis and has many strict rules—that would be more on the belief-heavy side. But the reform branch of Judaism is much closer to the mystery side—the rabbis have a lot less authority, and every individual is asked to develop their own moral sense. The book advocates for more mystery-centered traditions.

Greg: I had a thought come up while you were speaking. With how advanced we are scientifically, yet questions still remain—like what’s the origins of consciousness, what is consciousness. The fact that we have all this scientific development and these still remain mysteries: if I’m mystery-oriented, that makes them even more sacred in a sense. Does that resonate with you?

Joshua: Well, maybe a quick definition of consciousness: it’s what is absent when you’re given a general anesthetic—you’re not there anymore, you’re unconscious. I have a chapter that looks at altered states of consciousness and tries to suggest how to organize our conscious experience.

Greg: That provides a good bridge. Altered states of consciousness are a big part of your book. What do you mean by that, and what are the methodologies for people to alter consciousness that you touch on?

Joshua: What is an altered state of consciousness? Our ordinary waking state is what we’re enjoying right now. An altered state is anything that’s not our ordinary waking state—sleep is an altered state, using cannabis puts you in an altered state. Almost anything that’s not an ordinary state would be an altered state.

Greg: And what are ways people can alter their consciousness reliably?

Joshua: There are drug methods, there’s meditation, there are flow states—I have a list in one of the chapters.

Greg: How about self-leadership? How does that show up in the context of altered states of consciousness?

Joshua: Self-leadership is a concept from internal family systems and it has two components in my mind. One component is whether you’re blended or unblended, and the other is mental steering. Let me define these. Blended and unblended apply to parts or subpersonalities. For example, I might have a part that is anxious about being interviewed. If I blended with that part, my mind might go blank and I wouldn’t know what to say—it takes over my behavior. If I can be unblended with that part, I still feel its anxiety, I would still be uneasy about being interviewed, but there would be some trust between that part and myself, and that part wouldn’t have to take over my behavior. That’s the distinction between blending and unblending.

Greg: Yeah, that makes sense so far.

Joshua: The other component of self-leadership is mental steering—the skill you develop in meditation. It’s about being with parts that are unblended, but having some sense of being able to choose which part you’re with, or letting a part know you’ll come back to it later. These two skills—understanding how to be unblended with parts and mental steering—make up the idea of self-leadership. The more self-leadership you have, the more you can stay in control. The way this interfaces with altered states is that serotonin psychedelics kind of collapse the distinction between mental steering and blending/unblending—you go really fast from encountering a part to blending with it. That’s why you need to develop self-leadership: to be able to stay present while you’re working with serotonin psychedelics and prevent bad trips.

Greg: Do you think meditation helps people have more self-leadership during psychedelic experiences?

Joshua: Yeah, it can. Meditation is what I recommend for developing these self-leadership skills. But I have a particular take on meditation that I detail in the book.

Greg: Oh yeah. Feel free—you told us earlier that you’ve spent some time at Buddhist temples or similar settings.

Joshua: I’ll first introduce how meditation is usually taught. There’s usually a focus—the idea is to bring your attention to that focus, which could be on the breath or a candle or something like that—and to notice when your mind is drifting, when you get distracted, and then to bring your focus back. Does that resonate with what you’ve heard?

Greg: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Joshua: The slight refinement I suggest in the book is to make it more aligned with internal family systems. When you get distracted, the interpretation from IFS is that a part is capturing your attention—that’s what distraction is. The way to develop your ability to stay present and not blend with the part is: when a part is requesting your attention, pause for a minute before you return to meditation and note down what that part needs. Maybe you’re thinking about what to make for dinner—write that down. Or you have a legal case and some insight into what you need to research—make a note, write it down, and then reassure the part that you’re going to come back to that and give it the attention it’s asking for before you return your focus to your breath or candle. After your meditation session, go back over those notes and review them, making sure you give adequate attention to each of those needs that interrupted you. By doing meditation this way, you’re developing trust between the parts and yourself, and you’re teaching your parts to be patient and wait for their turn. By consistently practicing this style of meditation, what develops is an effortlessness to your meditations—you can just ask all your parts to be quiet and give you some space and time to meditate, and then they do. They cooperate. That shows greater self-leadership as well.

Greg: I haven’t ever heard that technique expressed that way. And I guess back to our original point—doing meditation in the way you just described can help you have self-leadership through a psychedelic or other extraordinary conscious experience, and through that, can help people reduce the chance of having a bad trip?

Joshua: Mhm. Yeah. Usually bad trips are what happens when some part takes over that you maybe weren’t aware of, and then you go into the memories or fantasies of that part. If you can stay unblended from the parts and stay in the present—stay in consensus reality—then there’s less of a chance of a bad trip.

Greg: I’ve sat in theogenic psychedelic ceremony with people who are intense with their meditation practice, and yeah, you can tell they are really getting the most out of it. When they’re being shown or having revelations, it seems they’re able to better confront that, whether it’s good or bad, and ultimately be calm and bring more out of it. Let me ask you this: would you agree that one of the main things religion seeks to do for people is explain what happens after we leave this earth, after death?

Joshua: Yeah, the fear of death is definitely one thing that many religions have addressed or tried to address.

Greg: And obviously there’s a lot of psychedelic research now indicating that psychedelics, when done appropriately in the proper setting with care, can reduce people’s fear of death. Do you want to talk about that—what psychedelics can do for people in terms of potentially reducing fear of death?

Joshua: Sure. As individuals, we have this sense that there’s a boundary between self and other. In death, that boundary changes or goes away or dissolves. The prospect of that boundary changing may be part of why people are afraid of death. With psychedelics, that boundary can be dissolved before death, and then you can have that experience of being connected with something larger—because when you use psychedelics and that boundary dissolves, you don’t disappear. You see that you still exist after that boundary dissolves, but it’s a different—you’re in a different altered state where you’re still there. That tacit experience may reassure people about what happens after death. There’s a lot of speculation about the details, but that in broad strokes may be why it helps with the fear of death.

Greg: My own anecdotal story—the first time I had a 5-MeO-DMT experience in a ritual ceremonial capacity, it for sure did away with the fear of death. It’s not that I’m going to go do something stupid—it’s just a general ease that there is something beyond this life. Through that experience I got the notion that it’s something beautiful, something in a sense to be desired, but not in a way where I want to go there right now. And I don’t need to know all the details or be burdened by them. It just gave me enough to be reassured that there’s something beautiful beyond, and also the notion that what we do here matters. I don’t have to have a ton of very specific detailed beliefs about it for it to have in a major way relieved my anxiety or fears related to it.

Joshua: It’s very beautiful the way you describe your experience. I’ve heard other reports from people, and I myself have had experiences of non-duality where these boundaries dissolve. It’s a pretty common thing, and there’s some scientific studies showing that psychedelics can really help people.

Greg: Yeah. And going back to what I said originally—if religion has a lot to do with trying to explain to people what happens after death, with the intended effect of relieving them of that fear and anxiety, psychedelics seem to be doing a great job at being religion for people. Those cancer patients weren’t required to take a test to make sure they had the right beliefs, yet the effect is there. That’s a little bit of proof in concept for your book—religion unburdened by belief.

Joshua: Yeah, I’m agreeing with you. I discussed it in my book and I agree with everything you’re saying.

Greg: We’re getting towards the end here, but I wanted to ask you because this is such a hot topic—based upon all your work and writings, we talked about consciousness earlier, and we’re seeing a lot of religious talk around AI. What are your thoughts on AI and consciousness? Is it conscious?

Joshua: That’s a—how much time do we have here? All right, do you think AI systems are conscious?

Greg: Do you think AI systems are conscious?

Joshua: No. I don’t think so. Roger Penrose has done some work on this and his take appeals to me. He cites Gödel’s incompleteness theorems as a reason why computers can never be conscious. Basically the argument is that there are certain statements inside formal systems whose truth cannot be determined from within the system. The way he understands this is that humans, because we can understand mathematics, are doing something that’s beyond mathematics—whatever we’re doing, it’s something different than what can be done in a formal system. So he’s saying no matter how sophisticated the software, no matter how many computers you stack up, it doesn’t matter. Humans are in a different category because we’re conscious, and computers will never be conscious. That argument resonates for me.

Greg: So there are mathematical models that AI will never be able to comprehend or understand. Did I hear that correctly?

Joshua: Well, it’s not even clear that AI has a feeling of understanding. So yeah, even more basic. There was a Lex Friedman interview with the CEO of Nvidia and he had a really interesting take on this. He said, “Suppose you have two computers and one has a great night’s sleep, the other one wakes up grumpy and frustrated and doesn’t want to do the work.” Are those two computers going to produce different output or not?

Greg: No doubt. As we wrap up here, let me ask you this: if you could reduce your book into one or two expressions of a thought or idea, what would that be?

Joshua: My goal in writing the book is to give people more autonomy. Religious experiences—this sense of being connected with something greater than yourself, with some awe and beauty to go with that—are something I’ve been seeking all my life. For many people, it’s accidental or haphazard that they’re able to have these experiences, and they might have a religious experience a few times in their life and that’s it. I’m trying to increase people’s autonomy, give them processes and tools that they can use to touch these religious experiences in a very predictable, reliable way—you can even put it on your calendar and say, “I’m going to have a religious experience this weekend.”

Greg: And I’ll kind of end on saying this: from my perspective, this is very much needed material for anyone who is struggling or curious about whether there’s another way to get our spirituality and religion on other than subscribing to books and what pastors are telling us. Can you guide your own religious beliefs and practices? I think absolutely you can. And in doing that, you’re well within the legal definition of religion, well within the academic definition. I’ve noticed so many people who are leaving established religions, not because they just disbelieve all the beliefs, but because of the effects that has within those religious communities towards one another. With that, people are seeking their own way—not necessarily shedding the old way 100%—but still seeking a new path. And I’m here to tell you, my opinion is that it’s there for you. Books like Josh’s can most definitely help you move in that direction in a very conscious and beneficial way. I 100% believe that Josh’s book is a good road map for that transition. Anything you’d like to say in closing, Josh?

Joshua: Well, the book has a promo website—it’s unburdened.biz. Check it out. The book is autobiographical in the sense that I’ve practiced all the techniques in the book myself personally. One of the techniques at the end is really for training yourself to be present with people, even when you’re in difficult or challenging situations. I bring that practice to my talk therapy as well. I do internal family systems talk therapy professionally. If any of your listeners are interested in working with me and benefiting from my training in being present with people—really listening—then I’m available.

Greg: We will make sure to drop all your links in the description—his website, his YouTube page, any links you want me to drop just feel free to email them to me. But thank you so much for your time, Josh. And I’m sure we’ll probably check back in with you because again, I think this is a very important and evolving issue, especially with that last part related to AI. We will more than likely be checking back in with you. Just so everybody knows, Josh has been 100% a good friend in person to me ever since I’ve known him. I know that he’s very knowledgeable, works very hard, and he cares. I couldn’t recommend enough working with him if you feel so called.

Joshua: Well, thank you very much, Greg. You’ve been very generous and I’m so grateful that we had a chance to talk.

Greg: Thank you too, Josh. I desire, as I think Josh does, for people to at least have knowledge of this issue and understand it so that way, should they choose to move in that direction, they’re fully supported in that. Thank you, Josh. God bless. We will talk to you soon.

Joshua: Okay, cool. Thank you.

Joshua Pritikin was interviewed by Rev. Dr. D. Richard Dugan on Tell Me Your Story: New Paradigms for a New World. The conversation covers the core ideas of Religion Unburdened by Belief—reducing conviction in beliefs, the distinction between process beliefs and content beliefs, Internal Family Systems, altered states, and the relationship between personal spiritual development and our polarized political moment.

Transcript

Oh, come on, walk with me, talk with me, tell me your stories. I’ll do my very best to understand you, your flesh and blood. Welcome to Tell Me Your Story, new paradigms for a new world where we’re giving you choices and knowledge of those choices to help make your dreams come true. We are here nine times a week, Sundays at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., Monday mornings at 1 a.m., Wednesdays at 9 a.m., and Monday through Friday from 8 to 9 a.m., streaming live at all those times at richarddougan.com. We are on SoundCloud, iTunes, TuneIn Radio, Spotify, Stitcher, Player FM, as well as YouTube, where you can watch these conversations. I hope that you will take time to subscribe and click notifications so that when a new conversation is posted, you’ll be notified and you’ll be able to tune in, listen in and learn, be entertained and inspired. A reminder that Choices, which is my book, Five Steps for Life, it’s available on Amazon.com in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle with Audible soon to be released. We also ask that if you can support the work that we are doing financially, we do have a PayPal account. It is there for your security as well as ours. And when they ask for an email address to whom you’re sending, please go to richarddougan.com. That’s the email address. If you go to richarddougan.com, there is also a link directly to PayPal so that you can send us whatever support you can. And we thank you, thank you, thank you to those who have helped and to those who will help. We also ask that you take time during this decade of perfect vision, the 2020s, to go within to that quiet, peaceful, calm, still place and listen to that still, small voice. And with that, we now take you to our very special interview and guest here on Tell Me Your Story.

Dugan: And welcome to Tell Me Your Story, New Paradigms for a New World. I am Reverend Dr. D. Richard Dugan and our very special guest here on the program is a gentleman who is going to share with us, I will say sort of a continuation of what we talked about with Greg Braden many years ago with his book about the healing power of belief, but we’re going to go in a little different direction, I think, and we’re going to talk with a PhD gentleman who has a PhD in psychology. He’s asking how tightly we should hold to hold any belief. And it’s, and whether religion, religious, pardon me, spiritual or personal, and finds the answer, finding the answers is less than you think. And Joshua Pritikin, I want to thank you very much, doctor, for joining us here on the program.

Joshua: No, thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Dugan: I am, I’m always fascinated, Joshua, by this kind of a conversation when it comes to the more metaphysical aspects. First of all, when we talk about this concept, if you will, of religion unburdened by belief, are we talking about using science and facts to base our personal philosophy on? How are we unburdened? How are we unburdening religion by belief? What does that mean?

Joshua: Okay, well, kind of struggling here to understand your question. So the idea of the book is that many people have had religious experiences on occasion, maybe by accident, like they feel a sense that they’re a presence of something greater or a sense of awe or beauty. And what I’m trying to address here is make those experiences very predictable, like make the odds of having them high so that you can decide when you want to have religious experiences and put it on your calendar and make it that predictable and give feedback about how you’re progressing in your religious personal development.

Dugan: Well, now I interviewed an evangelical Christian many years ago, I wish I could remember his name off the top of my head. And the conversation that we were having had to do with his experience of out-of-body experience. And now, just so you have point of reference, I’ve born and raised Catholic myself. I worked for 15 years in the 80s and early 90s for a Christian radio station. So I have heard all kinds of wonderful things. And I was always disappointed when there was criticism of people by the hierarchy, if you will, both Protestant and Catholic. Well, not so much Catholic, but mostly Protestant, who said, oh, I’m sorry, that’s not in the Bible. So that didn’t happen. And yet here’s a guy who believes and supposedly follows. And yet here he was consciously and intentionally recreating these experiences. I even asked him, he says, do you ever wanna not come back? He says, oh, no, no, I’ve always wanted to come back, but I’ve just loved the experience. Well, who am I to tell him he didn’t have it? And that’s kind of where a lot of these people were coming from who were criticizing those who had these different supernatural or spiritual experiences. Is that kind of where we’re coming from, that someone has had this profound event happen in their lives and it felt really good and maybe they felt complete or they felt as though they had a certain level of knowing that they knew about certain things, even though it was just within them. Is that something that we’re talking about here?

Joshua: Sure, I mean, if people feel like they’ve had an experience, like who am I to say that they haven’t, I mean, that’s something that’s between you and the experience, right? And that’s one thing I clarify in the first chapter, although the title is about religion unburdened by belief. In the first chapter, like I clarified it, what I’m really talking about is reducing conviction. So the reason that’s relevant is like this person who had an out of body experience, it sounds like people disbelieved him or express their disbeliefs about it. And from my point of view, like I would advocate for reducing a conviction in disbeliefs as well as beliefs. So that’s where I’m coming from when I say, like who am I to invalidate someone’s experience? Like I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to disbelieve someone’s experience with that much conviction.

Dugan: Yeah, well, of course, there are those who, they adhere to a certain perspective on what I like to call the ancient wisdom teachings, specifically the Bible. And now I’m seeing more and more information about, for example, they’re all of the different translations. Now, if a lot of people are talking about this Ethiopian Bible that has a whole lot more in it, you know, that actually is gonna cause some consternation amongst the hierarchy within both Protestant and Catholic. Although the Catholic Church does seem to be a little bit more open to some of these things, especially, for example, when they wanna canonize, say, a pope, a pope that’s passed on, gotta have three miracles. Well, now you gotta investigate and you gotta prove that those miracles happened or at least have sufficient, I’m not even sure what it is, to say, okay, and now we have Saint John Paul II, however they’ve done that. I’m curious, now my beliefs, for example, I view them as sort of straw huts. And I was having a conversation with a gentleman who shared his perspective in our conversation and I came back with, well, I’m thinking about it this way. And he says, well, I understand that, but, and then he came back with his sort of retort or his con to my pro. And I thought about it for a couple of seconds and I’m going, well, there’s another straw hut up in flames and I’m willing to burn them all to the ground and start over, if that’s what it takes, to better understand who I am, where I am and why I am here. Is that sort of kind of what you’re looking for in trying to encouraging people to be willing to not hold so tightly to those straw huts and yeah, maybe even sometimes burning them to the ground and starting over because there’s new, I don’t know, new information and maybe it’s not information, just you’ve had a new experience that doesn’t jive with what you were taught to believe. That’s kind of where we’re coming from, isn’t it? Learning how to do that.

Joshua: Yeah, yeah, I like that framing because it’s like suppose you have expectations about what’s supposed to happen in an altered state, then often those expectations can color your interpretation of it. So like if you believe you’re going to hell and then you have some altered state that can like be a self-fulfilling prophecy that you end up having a bad time because you expect it to. So what the book really focuses on is like you can’t avoid some beliefs but there’s a difference between beliefs that enable exploration and other beliefs that like color your expectations. So I make a distinction between process beliefs, beliefs that enable exploration. Like if you’re going to practice meditation, then you have to believe that sitting quietly for 10 or 15 minutes is possible and that you can direct attention. So those are process beliefs about your self-efficacy that are necessary to hold.

Dugan: Yeah, it’s interesting, two things. Number one is my elder sister who has since passed on. We were, it was some holiday and I’m thinking it was probably maybe Easter and they were in my sister’s back bedroom and they were doing this hand scanning. They were just scanning over the body, not touching it. Just, okay, what do you feel? What do you feel, what do you feel? And I came into the room and I’m watching this and they said, here, lay down and let Jeanette, who is my eldest sister, let her scan your body. And so she did and as she went over my throat, she got a sensation of heat in her hands, which kind of makes sense, I guess, because that’s where my focal point is. But she could never accept the reality that we had these chakras and those kinds of things. And it’s just fascinating to me how we gravitate to certain beliefs. I was interviewing a Christian musician back in those days. His name is John Fisher and he grew up in the Jesus movement and when I was interviewing, he was living in New England and he says, you know, one day I went into my, I love this phrase, he was in his lonely writer’s garret and he was looking out the window at the leaves. It was fall and they were falling off the trees and the colors and everything. And the thought occurred to him and this question for him came, is what I believe what I was taught and or told to believe or is it what I believe? Now, it’s gotta be very difficult to separate that because I don’t know that we come into this world with preconceived or already preset beliefs that those beliefs have to be sort of inculcated or taught, if you will. Is that correct? I mean, so for John to ask that question, it’s like, well, John, guess what? Everything you believe right now is what you were taught to believe. How do we shift out of that into knowing that what I believe is what I choose to believe?

Joshua: Okay, well, one step is to kind of acknowledge that different parts of us can believe different things. And when I use the word parts, I mean it in a specific way. I do talk therapy using the internal family systems model and in internal family systems, we understand the psyche is made up of a collection of parts. And probably the easiest way to explain that is like if you’ve ever had mixed feelings, suppose you’re late to work and you’re driving to work. So you have a one part of you that wants to get there on time. Another part that is afraid of getting in trouble with the law, maybe another part that’s frustrated that you left so late from home. So each of these parts can be like understood as its own kind of sub-personality. And that’s what we do in internal family systems. And the reason I’m bringing this up is because like two different parts of yourself can believe different things. Like you may have a part of yourself that has a very strong belief in science, believes in science, subscribes to allopathic medicine, other parts of you that hold non-scientific views. And that’s okay. Like we allow for that in internal family systems. Allow for that in internal family systems.

Dugan: Yeah, this is fascinating. I’ve always been intrigued by this. I will tell you the one thing that I said to my eldest sister another holiday, we were there at Thanksgiving at my parents’ house. But we were in the kitchen having this conversation, which we should have known better than to hold that in the kitchen while they’re trying to prepare for the dinner. But she was challenging me on my salvation, for example. I wasn’t ready to meet God kind of thing. By the way, I got that a lot at the radio station that I was working for, but it just rolled off my back going, but you just told me it was a personal relationship, which means there is no threesome here. This is just a dyad. It’s just the creator and me. So what business is of yours? But as we’re having this chat, and it was a calm, quiet, and good conversation, when she was saying the things that she was saying, I said, well, wait a minute. What you don’t understand is my beliefs of yesterday are not my beliefs of today, are not my beliefs of tomorrow because I’m still alive and breathing. I’m experiencing this world. I’m meeting new people. I’m having new experiences, and I don’t know what I’m gonna believe tomorrow. I have no idea. But my understanding is that belief, and this is one of the frustrations that I have sometimes, and that’s why I don’t usually get into these conversations with people, is they wanna use certain quote unquote facts. For example, there is a claim that the Noah’s Ark was found at the top of Mount Ararat. Ergo, the Bible is true. That means because the Ark was found, our belief is the only one. It’s the correct one, and so on and so forth. And my response to that and those kinds of positions is, well then, you have no faith. You cannot have a faith based upon fact because then it’s not faith anymore. You cannot have belief based upon fact because then it is not belief anymore. Am I barking up the wrong tree? Is that another one of those huts I’ve gotta burn to the ground? Or am I close to the truth where beliefs aren’t based on facts. They’re based more on personal experience and what we choose to believe.

Joshua: Right, so it depends on the kind of beliefs, the context. Let me give some examples before I go back to the example that you’ve suggested. Like I could believe it’s hot outside, but then when I check the thermometer, then I can see, oh, it’s 85, then it becomes a fact. In some kinds of information, it’s the being able to gather evidence and confirm something can move a belief to a fact, but there’s different kinds of evidence work in different contexts. So for example, like art criticism, there’s some objective information in the art world, but then some of it’s just like, well, this moves me or it doesn’t, like just based on the image. Or like cooking, like you may believe that you have a really good recipe and may be able to teach it to other people and other people may agree that it tastes good or not. So whether, like it’s a spectrum, like between some beliefs can be confirmed by evidence and others are mostly just a matter of belief, like there’s no way to confirm or disconfirm them. So going-

Dugan: Go ahead, go ahead. I’m sorry.

Joshua: So going back to the example, you had the example about a historical fact about the Bible or belief or fact, I guess, about the Ark of the Covenant. So the other thing that’s important to ask about beliefs is like, if you hold them, like what practical, does it have any practical implications for how you live? So that’s the question that I would wanna follow up with, like whether you believe or see that as a fact about Noah’s Ark, like how does that affect you in your day-to-day life?

Dugan: Yeah, very good, very good. That’s a very good question to ask in that regard. And it’s often, even in some of the conversations I’ve had, there’s been this statement that comes back to mind always when people have a certain experience and then they ask the question, why? And I have learned over the years to give up the need to know why. Maybe one day I will know why, but how does knowing why change anything? It’s the same as what you’re speaking to. And it’s very interesting. We’re talking today here on the program, very special guest who’s written this wonderful book called Religion Unburdened by Belief, The Way of Open Inquiry. And his name is Joshua Pritikin, PhD, and this is Tell Me Your Story. I’m Reverend Dr. D. He is Dr. Joshua Pritikin, written this wonderful book, and I hope you’ll get a copy of it by going to the website that I’m gonna give you right now, which I think will be, well, I know we will be linked to. I don’t think, I know we will be linked. I’ll put it in the code and all that good stuff. But it is unburdened.biz, or biz, unburdened.biz. And one of the interesting things, Joshua, is the fact that when it comes to our individual beliefs, I’m curious from your perspective, how either before you wrote this book or since, how your beliefs have changed over the years? Have you ever gone back to sort of assess where you came from from the perspective of belief and where you are today?

Joshua: Okay, so this may feel like something of a tangent, but one of the things that I believed about myself was that I wasn’t a good enough writer to write a book. And I think that belief has kind of been confirmed in a way because there’s no way I couldn’t have, could have written this without the help of chat bots, like chat GPT, or like these have really been invaluable for me in writing this book. And because like I had a intuitive sense of what I wanted to say, but then explaining it with the right, in the right pace, forming sentences that are direct and efficient. Even chat bots have helped me with organization and clarifying my ideas. It’s really remarkable how useful they are as writing assistants. And the other thing is like, I’m obsessed with this topic and I don’t know who else would be willing to discuss this for 12 hours a day with me besides these chat bots.

Dugan: I’m just learning how, I don’t think, maybe I am using a chat bot, I’m just using chat GPT. And I know this sounds very strange, you being coming from the software industry, I actually used chat GPT to do my taxes this year. But chat GPT did not give me the answers to each of the lines. I would ask questions about what needed to be in that. And of course, chat GPT or AI in a generic form has access to all that information. It can go to the IRS website and access the instructions and those kinds of things. But never, and there were certain instances where I said, okay, could you add up lines one, two, three, four, and five? And it would do it. And then I put that into the form. But then I would still get my calculator on my phone out and I would put that information in. Now, I’m not saying that chat GPT would intentionally lie or miscalculate, don’t get me wrong, but it’s my tax form. I cannot take chat GPT to an audit. It’s not gonna work. And I had a guest on the program and you obviously did something similar to my guest. He was a fiction writer of mostly Western type of genres. And at the front end of the program, I acknowledged I have a bias against AI, okay? And I was sort of buying into what I was being told by those people who were afraid. But I told them, I says, but maybe our guest will maybe give me some reason to turn that around. Turns out what he does is he puts in all of the parameters into chat GPT that he wants for the book and so many pages and so on and so forth. And then AI cranks out what he refers to as his draft. And that’s the only time in a given book that he ever uses AI is to create the draft. Then he goes in and he makes it his own. So it actually turned me around to where, yeah, okay. I’ve had conversations with AI. I’ve asked very interesting questions. I even asked about this whole business of data centers that generate all of this heat and use up so much electricity. I says, has anybody asked you or asked AI to come up with a solution? So, I mean, look how far we’ve come with cell phones, which if we had the right applications, we could launch Artemis 3, okay? We have that much technology in our hands. We’ve got to know, I said, has anybody ever asked AI how to solve this problem of excessive heat generation through the data storage as well as the excessive electrical usage, the power usage? And I didn’t, it wasn’t a question of the answer coming back yes or no. It was more of an explanation. That’s a difficult question to answer and it’s a very difficult problem to solve. But where we are today here in 2026, it’s a challenge, but who knows? By the end of 2026 or maybe not until 27 or 28, we will maybe solve that problem. Look how many problems we’ve already solved in our world with or without technology, because I still hold that the human brain is still the ultimate. It’s not perfect, but it’s just amazing what we are able to accomplish. When we, I’m curious as to your experiences within the computer industry, in 94 I began building them. At first I was afraid, I knew there was a red button on the keyboard somewhere that I would hit it and it would blow everything up, right? And then I was building them. I built a 286 and a 386 and on and on and on. I would buy one of these towers and I’d get all the peripherals. Oh my God, it was so much fun. And it made me think of, that makes me think of AI today. I mean, it’s just a program, right?

Joshua: Well, right, and so I think the fear of AI, there’s two sources really. One is the economic displacement, which is that’s a real thing we need to worry about. People have invested a lot in training and suddenly the AI can do the same kind of work that they can do. So that’s a real problem. We have to worry about that. But the other problem is people worrying about AI being conscious or kind of like an independent self-interested agent. And like, I don’t really see that happening. Like that seems like a mistake to me. What do you think?

Dugan: Well, I don’t know enough about the inner workings thereof. You being, what, you were a programmer? Yeah, I did do a lot of software development. Code writing and so forth. Well, there are arguments going in both directions. And here’s what’s interesting. When I see new technological or even in the medical field, new medical advancements, for example, CRISPR, and oh my gosh, they’ve a limit. They’ve been able to actually filter out completely cystic fibrosis. Well, that’s fantastic, except for one problem. You’ve removed the problem, the challenge, the dis-ease, but you’ve left a hole. And the universe at large, as well as on the microscopic level abhors a vacuum. What is going to fill that hole? And what do we know about the potential unintended consequences? So this has always been my question when it comes to these kinds of things, whether it’s AI, whether it’s CRISPR, or building a bridge that zigzags across the Mississippi. Just because we can, does that mean we should? And I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but that’s the question. Forgive me for bringing this one up, but it came to my mind and the universe asks the questions. I’m just along for the ride. Just because we can go to war and pummel Iran, does that mean we should?

Joshua: Okay, right. So actually, if you give me some leeway here, and let’s assume that AI is not conscious. Like the reason I don’t think that’s gonna happen is Roger Penrose has this argument that relies on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. And just he makes the argument that no matter how sophisticated the computer, human intelligence is just a different kind of category of intelligence because it goes beyond mathematical reasoning. So anyway, but just grant me that AI is not conscious and then I have a followup to that. So if AI is not conscious, then what AI is really doing is it’s manifesting an externalization in the sense that this is something that therapists that work with children do all the time in play therapy is you encourage the child to kind of reenact things with toys, like if the child is in a scary situation at home, maybe you would encourage them to play with dinosaurs and then you can talk to them about how the dinosaur is terrorizing the little animals. And it’s a way of making the unapproachable approachable. And so what I see AI doing is being like an externalization of intelligence. And so in what that does is it, it challenges the kind of identification we have with ranking people by intelligence. Like we’re, as a society, we’re like obsessed with intelligence. We have so many years of schooling and professional organizations and we have money to compensate people that are the most intelligent. So there’s an argument here that by externalizing intelligence, we’re able to see ourselves or separate the human worth and the intelligence, which still is important. But I think it’s a way of highlighting the value of humanity and the value of human, or like as a justification for human dignity, like here we are conscious beings and that’s really something special. It is very interesting that we,

Dugan: have so much difficulty in understanding, or in accepting certain things. For example, these, I still refer to them as UFO documents that were just released. Now, as far as I have heard, there’s been nothing definitive in those documents that changes much of anything in terms of one’s belief in whether or not we’re not alone. Now, I personally believe that if we’re here, and you know, I have no evidence to support this. If we’re here, then there are others here. Plus the fact that somehow this universe was created by someone, something, maybe, you know. I mean, I’m more of a metaphysician. I deal more in what is not physical rather than what is. And most of the ancient wisdom teachings talk about that. But once again, I mean, there are those in this country in particular in the United States who, you know, they won’t believe anything that science tells them anymore because they have been told, and what they believe now is that, you know, science doesn’t, you know, isn’t accurate, and so on and so forth. To which I then respond, okay, I’m gonna give you three scenarios, and I’m gonna tell you, first of all, you’ve got, let’s say, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then let’s take a look at the shooting, let’s just say, of Ronald Reagan, the president at the time. And then let’s take a look at 9-11, all right? I don’t know that they happened, because I wasn’t there. All I’ve seen are images. There are people who don’t believe we went to the moon, either. I love Neil deGrasse Tyson, who had a conversation with a guy who didn’t believe, so Neil gives him the website where all the photographs are. And the guy went there and comes back, says, I still don’t believe. He said, well, then we’re done. I can’t have a conversation with you anymore because I’ve given you all of the data, all of the information. But in this virtual age in which we live, how do we know what is and isn’t real? There are people now, right now, 60% of Democrats, and 30% of Republicans, this was on the news. This was not on Facebook and of real state. They believe, again, believe, the assassination attempt at the dinner a few weeks ago was staged. And believe it or not, I’m leaning that way, too, because I’m sitting here going, you had Secret Service that are supposed to be marksman. They didn’t hit him once, but he hit them twice. Huh, really? And I’m not gonna go down that road, but this is where we are today in terms of what we know versus what we believe or what we choose to believe.

Joshua: Mm-hmm, yeah, those are good questions. I don’t know how to address that in a political context, but from a religious context, what I advocate for in the book is practices that don’t require belief, that don’t rely on belief. So I think practices that, where the outcome, you get accurate feedback about the outcome and you don’t have to, there’s no prerequisite beliefs you have to hold besides some minimal process beliefs.

Dugan: Well, it’s a frustration for a lot of us because I grew up, obviously I’m 66 this year and I grew up in the 60s and 70s. I believe we went to the moon. It was exciting. I believe that the Artemis astronauts circled the moon and were further away than any other human has ever been from the planet. These are things, again, that I choose to believe I can use the evidence that is presented to prove my belief, if you will, and maybe call it a knowing. But that’s one of the things Greg Braden talked about on our program some years ago. He said that today we believe, tomorrow, if you will, we will know. Do you think that that is something that we as human beings, and obviously based upon your book and so forth, that we’re spiritual beings having a human experience, a physical experience, that one day, like maybe when we pass and we leave this body, that we will actually know some of the things that we know? Is that, I hate to put it this way, is that your belief?

Joshua: We will write, I think you’re, assuming there is an experience after death, if you’re experiencing it, then I guess that is a kind of knowledge, but it’s not something you can really bring back with you because it’s kind of, the problem with death is it’s a one-way, in most cases, it’s a one-way door.

Dugan: That is true.

Joshua: Yeah. I’m not sure which way you want this conversation to go, like the, I did have a further thought about our political situation, how the book could, okay. So because I’m also very concerned about how, how tumultuous our politics are right now. And-

Dugan: And they’ve even taken on sort of a religious tone to them.

Joshua: Yes. And so my thinking is like that politics are kind of downstream of how, where people are at in their self-development and I think religion has a part to play there. And so my thinking is like, if people, if I can revitalize religion and there can be more empathy and compassion among people individually, then that will have the downstream effects of more compassionate and empathetic kind of political environment. So that’s kind of a long shot, right?

Dugan: I hear you, I hear you. Joshua Pritikin is my guest, Dr. Joshua Pritikin. And of course, we are talking about his book, which is, I think, fascinating. You gotta get a copy of this. At unburdened.biz, B-I-Z, that’s the book is entitled, Religion Unburdened by Belief, The Way of Open Inquirer as we continue here on Tell Me Your Story. I wanna ask you, Dr. Joshua Pritikin, in regards to your book and of course, this subtitle, of course, The Way of Open Inquiry. It’s rather humorous in my perspective. Back in the mid-early 90s, I became connected with a group of people, they were Baha’is, and I would go to their home for their, what they called, firesites, which were opportunities to sit and discuss and converse. And I’d been for several meetings and I asked them, I says, well, is it okay if I read other things other than the writings of Baha’u’llah and the other founders and so on and so forth? Sure, you can read whatever you want, but you’re gonna end up coming right back to the writings, which I thought was, there’s a certain element of, I don’t know, arrogance there in that respect, but they were kind about it. And then the other aspect of it was when I was about ready to make the step from Catholicism to the Baha’i faith, I had written a letter requesting the Catholic church that I was born and raised in and baptized with communion and all things, that I wanted to be removed from the roles. I did not wanna be on the list anymore as a Catholic. So I went into the rectory and I handed the letter to the gal across the counter and she says, well, put it in your file. And my response was, oh, you and the FBI have a file on me? Okay, well, when a year and a half after becoming associated with the Baha’is, I couldn’t make that final step. So I called the woman, the wife of the couple who’s home, I would go to for the firesides. And I said, I cannot in good conscience go forward because I feel as though I would be joining under false pretenses and those false pretenses were that I needed to be accepted. I needed to be told that the direction I was going was, I needed affirmation, I guess is the better way. And she understood and she says, don’t worry, we will take your name off of the roles and you can come back any time. Now, that’s what I expected from the Catholic church. But I was allowed to search anywhere and everywhere that I wanted, whereas within Christianity in general, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you only read the Bible and or other works by other Christians or the founding fathers, if you will, of the faith. And of course, I was asking all of these different questions and they said, well, just go read the writings of the founding fathers. And I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. First of all, who set them up as the arbiters of the faith? Number one. Number two, I never heard of some of these guys. I’m thinking independently, at least I used to think that I was thinking independently. So does that elevate me to their level? Okay, because I’m asking the same questions that they are because you’re telling me to go read their writings. But I’m wondering in terms of open inquiry, how important is that? I mean, your experiences are one thing, those are personal and so forth. But if you’re looking for further answers, maybe, I don’t know, to support or bolster your beliefs, not so much, you know, knowing, but your beliefs, how important and vital is that open inquiry being allowed as my parents did for all of us to search whatever and wherever you wanted to?

Joshua: Yeah, the question kind of reminds me of the mystery belief spectrum that I talked about earlier in the book. And so the interesting thing about this is you can evaluate traditions without really knowing much about them. You gave some great examples. The example that I like to talk about is in Judaism, there’s the ultra-orthodox branch, which is where the rabbis have most of the authority, there’s a lot of rules to memorize and then compare that to the reform branch of Judaism that’s much more open-ended. And the rabbis are just there for guidance maybe, but everyone is asked to develop their own moral sense. And it’s much less strict. So the, and I loved your examples too, the Catholic church, the way you described it sounds more on the belief heavy side, belief system side, whereas the Bahá’í religion sounds more on the mystery side, that’s more interested in questions and mystery and experiences and discussion and challenging ideas. And the book also has, it takes a position on the spectrum. It advocates for the mystery side, the questioning side of the spectrum.

Dugan: I find it fascinating, you talk about religion being unburdened by belief. What’s your definition of religion?

Joshua: Well, so I rely on Carse’s definition. And when Carse says that we can recognize, like is it, there isn’t really a great definition, but we can recognize religions that are not religious. We can recognize religions that are traditions that have been around a long time. So, you know, maybe a thousand years, that doesn’t mean that new religions are automatically ruled out, but this is more of a way of trying to identify like clear cut religion. So that it has to be old and there’s a community and an identity around it that’s sustained for such a long time.

Dugan: I know that there are definitions of terms. I like to do that on this program is define the words that we’re using. And I understand and accept your definition, especially in the context of your book, religion unburdened by belief. And again, I think people should get a copy of it. I love the definition as spelled out in the scriptures by Jesus who said, true religion is taking care of the orphans and the widows et cetera, et cetera. Which is sort of kind of what’s at the base of the Statue of Liberty, you know, it’s the same kind of situation. Bring us your huddled masses, et cetera, et cetera. But I find it unfortunate that a lot of people who have these different beliefs, they’ve had these different experiences and then they’re cut down. And it’s like, wait a minute, you can’t do that to these people who have had these experiences like my friend who has these out of body experiences. It’s like those experiences, supernatural, if you wanna describe them that way or paranormal, those experiences have changed them already. They’ve changed already. It’s kind of like those people using this example, who have been abducted by extraterrestrials and gone through whatever they went through, they’ve been changed. They are not the same, but then use a less dramatic in that regard example, people who go into combat and they go into conflict and so forth. They go on the front lines, you know, and so forth. They’re never the same, that kind of thing. Sure. Are you a believer in miracles?

Joshua: Well, what do you mean by miracle?

Dugan: That’s a good question, you know, it’s, I mean, it just depends. My mother asked me once if I’d ever had any supernatural experiences and I said, well, if I did, they seem normal to me. Great, so how do you define supernatural, right? Same problem. I know that when my eldest sister passed and I got a phone call and they told me, and at first I thought it was gonna be my father, they were gonna tell me it passed. As soon as I hung up the phone, I heard this voice and it was my sister’s voice that said, hey, Richard, everything’s okay, I’m okay, I’m good. Something along the words along those lines. Now, I don’t hear my father’s voice, I haven’t since he passed, I get impressions. What’s your thought with the connection of our intuition or what I like to call the still small voice inside when it comes to beliefs? Is that a place that you can go to? And I’m asking you specifically, personally, that you can go to and know that what you believe, what you, Joshua Pritikin, believe, you’re going in the right way, or you need to go over this way just a little bit more because you’re a little off target, that kind of thing. Have you ever had that kind of an experience or are you aware of anything along those lines? Can you give me an example or try to clarify what kind of experience you’re talking about? Well, at first it sounded like you were talking about hearing voices or something like contact with the spirit world, but. That’s part of it, yes, but okay, the one example I use quite often is that I was, when I was living in Phoenix, I bicycled everywhere before I had a lens implant and I’m now driving. And I’m bicycling to the radio station, which is at the transmitter site in Phoenix. And I drove through or past farm fields. And the farm fields were one mile square. So I’m pedaling along and all of a sudden I get this impression, okay, you need to turn right up here. Turn right at the next corner. And I’m sitting here thinking, if I go to the right, I’m gonna go three miles out of my way and I gotta get to work. I wasn’t late or anything, but I gotta get to work. Well, I go past that intersection and the prompting gets stronger and stronger to the point where I was half a mile past that turn that I was prompted to take. I turned around, I went back and I went up that road and then I went over another mile and then back down and then down to the road I was on in the first place, headed on. And some would say, well, maybe the universe was trying to tell you if you were gonna avoid an accident or this, that, the other thing. Well, there were no other cars on those roads at that time and the conclusion I came to was it wasn’t about protecting me, it was about putting into practice what I had been saying over the years that I trust that inner voice, I trust that still small voice. And what the still small voice, if you will, was saying through that prompting was, do you really, are you serious? Do you really trust me? And if you do, do this. And that’s kind of where I have come from ever since that experience, especially that experience. But I’ve had other examples where I had this plan to handle our finances at a particular period and all of a sudden I get the prompting, you need to do this. And I’m going, wait a minute, that’s not in my plan. And of course the prompting just kept hammering away. All right, all right, I’ll do it. And I did it. Three days later, I looked back and I’m going, oh man, am I glad I did that because if I hadn’t, things would be a lot worse today. Those are the kinds of experiences that reinforce and I guess I have to put it this way, my belief in that still small voice. Because I don’t think that the intellect processes the information that we take in. In that context, the mind does not see into the future or at least as far as like, no, it doesn’t, okay? Can you share any experiences like that that you have had or what are your, where are you coming from with what I have shared in that regard?

Joshua: Okay, so what I think I hear from you is in this small, quiet voice, you see it as a guide that it’s helping you advance your goals. But it doesn’t so much feel as like a part of yourself. It seems like it’s carrying messages from outside possibly and that’s very valuable, like it’s wonderful that you have that guidance and that you’re finding it helpful. I mentioned things like that in the book, but the frustration that I have with those kinds of experiences is that they feel kind of accidental to me. I don’t know how to request guidance on my timeline, right? So it’s wonderful that you found that helpful and if that voice wants your trust and you’re finding that beneficial, then carry on. But I don’t know how to advise people how to receive guidance like that.

Dugan: Well, and again, it’s to me a lot of fun in these conversations to reach maybe a juxtaposition. It’s like I had a conversation with my brother. We’re on opposite ends of the political spectrum and that’s just fine. As a matter of fact, that’s great because I can learn from him and I’m hoping he can learn from me as well. But we had this conversation and when it started, because I knew I could sense where he was coming from, I said, okay, when you get to the end of this conversation, remember, he is still your blood. He is still your brother and you still love him, all right? And there is not gonna be any estrangement here because he’s entitled to where he’s coming from just as I am entitled to where I’m coming from. And the remarkable thing, and I share this every time, was that when the conversation was over, despite maybe because of our differences, we actually agreed on three challenges that needed to be dealt with. Not necessarily how to, but that we had three items. And it’s like, well, aside from the fact that we come from the same parents and we grew up in the same home and so forth and so on and so on, all of the similarities, we still have our differences, but look at this. Here’s three more things that we have in common. Oh my gosh, that’s fantastic. And now my brother, I share this too, my brother is now gonna be a father for the first time. And he’s 64 and I think about that going, I don’t know what the educational system is like in Vietnam, whether they have eight grades and then high school or not, but based upon our system here, it’s like, you do realize you’re gonna be 82 when he’s out of high school. But I think it’s great, I really do. And I don’t have all the answers. I’ve never claimed to have them. I have some, at least right now I have them, but they may change tomorrow. And they may have changed because of our conversation and that one guest I was telling you about who uses AI to start his book. He changed my mind in that regard. And then I started, I did fricking taxes. I did my taxes with AI, oh my God. Who does that? Who needs H&R Block? I just hope that I did fill out all the right forms and so forth. I know that I sent them to the right place, but it’s really, it’s an incredible world, isn’t it? And you are trying to help people to open that up as well by taking a look at their beliefs, right? And understand that though your beliefs are important because they are what make us who we are, right? There is always room for improvement and for change. That’s kind of what you’re saying within the context of your book, A Religion Unburdened by Belief.

Joshua: Well, yes, and also to suggest practices that don’t depend on belief. That where your self-development can be assessed more accurately than by beliefs.

Dugan: Well, I will say that to me, for me, it is exciting to think about from the standpoint that on the one hand, we’ve come so far as a species and yet we still have a long way to go. Yeah. But I’m optimistic, are you?

Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. It was until everything is ruined, there’s always a chance that we can turn this world into a much more beautiful place to live.

Dugan: Do you think that we can control that in any way? I mean, there are those who believe that we are all connected. We’re all part of the one, however you define that. I think it was Young, I think it was Young who said, there’s only one mind in the universe and we’re all part of it. And that there’s one other statement too, I’ll throw in there. I’m wondering if you believe this, that we do indeed create our own reality.

Joshua: I mean, I’m not sure which question you’re asking. It seems like a few different questions. What I understood at first is you’re asking if I believe that the future is fated, like if we have any influence over the future, the future is fated, like if we have any influence over how the future develops. And I think we do. I think that there’s been some carefully designed psychological research that shows that thoughtful decisions are better than kind of decisions that you make without much forethought. And then you can also look at the evidence that evolution has, we’re successful because we’re very intelligent, like that’s what makes us a successful output of evolution. So that intelligence has an influence, has a reason for existing, is like, is helping us be better at surviving. So I think we do have a lot of scope to shape the future. Okay.

Dugan: To me, fascinating just to contemplate the possibilities. I mean, my wife made this comment not long ago about our situation that’s been going on for about a year where we had to move 200 miles to the east from where we were living for almost 20 years. And she says, it feels like we’re on a new timeline. Timeline. And I thought that was an interesting observation. I don’t know if it’s true or not. All I know is that life as we know it doesn’t exist. It’s kind of like, that’s kind of what REM said in their song. It’s the end of the world as we know it, every moment of every day. I wrote a book called Choices, Five Steps for Life. And in my conversations with people about that and other things, I’ve often thought about this in terms of choices. We are, you and I are right here today talking because of choices that we’ve made throughout our lives. It’s that domino with the Rube Goldberg effect, if you will, right? Yeah, yeah. And I was sharing this with another guest and they said, well, you also know too that where you’ll be tomorrow or in five years or what have you is based upon all the choices that you make now. But he added an interesting proviso to that. He says, but the choices that you make today are based upon what you perceive the future to be. So if you’re one who’s in the mindset of let’s just say a prepper, you’re gonna dig a hole in the ground and line it with concrete and then fill it with supplies and so forth for you and your family. I’m an optimist. I’m not gonna dig a hole in the ground. I’m gonna buy a house as my wife and I just did. And we’re gonna enjoy our latter years. I’ve got another, I hope, 34 years to go. I wanna live to be 100. But I wanted to do it with quality of life. I would like to do it in a world that is friendly, you know, that kind of thing. But there are no guarantees, right? Yeah. So to me, there’s this whole thing about choice. And we choose our beliefs as well based upon what? Would you say that it’s based upon a lot of things or like John Fisher was asking the question, are these my beliefs or are these the beliefs that I was told to believe? Do you know that we formulate new beliefs that then become ours?

Joshua: Well, I do wanna acknowledge like there’s this book, I think the title is Determined by Sapolsky and like he made this argument that all of our, you know, everything about the current moment is determined by decisions that have, you know, the past decisions of all determine the current moment. And that’s kind of the argument that like everything is fated to happen and like maybe you don’t have any control over what happens. But I think that, I think there is some window for free will. I’m not sure how to account for that in terms of physics models, but that’s just my intuition that there is some small opportunity for expressing free will and we should make the most of it.

Dugan: Yeah, I would agree with you. I have a real problem when it comes to people who believe in the prophecies as if we’re locked in to these different events. And I’m going, well, if that is true, we don’t have free will, we don’t. I mean, because if everything is already predetermined, it doesn’t matter what choices that I make, we’re going down that road, whether we like it or not. Again, the old taken down the road kicking and screaming, as I mentioned earlier. What are your thoughts in regards to those kinds of things that people choose to believe? Do you think that influences our future in the respect that you just described?

Joshua: I mean, sure, that could influence if you had, like the example I mentioned before about if you have expectations about how your religious practice is what the results are gonna be, then that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I mean, that your beliefs can certainly shape your experience. I mean, that’s why the first chapter of the book is careful to ask people to reduce the conviction in their beliefs. So instead of having such a strong belief in that prophecy, what’s wrong with believing in it a little bit less and taking more of a wait and see approach?

Dugan: Yeah, I tend to agree. And then there’s two other things. Number one is there are those who, I mean, I wanna live to be 100 only because I made this commitment to my great grandmother, not directly to her, but it was like she passed away after she made it to 100. And I really loved the woman and I’m going, I wanna live as long as she did. So that’s one of the reasons why. And then there’s the other element too where there are those who they don’t wanna die so they wanna have their consciousness, I guess, transferred to a robot so they can live forever. And I’m just sitting here going, I just wanna live the normal life and then move on to whatever’s next. And by the way, speaking of which, I’ve been asked about death and asked, is there anything after this? And I said, I can tell you what I believe as our conversation continues. If there’s nothing after this, we’re not gonna know anyway, okay? But if there is, it doesn’t make any sense in my logical brain to think that there’s nothing based upon all of this stuff. I mean, just this conversation that you and I are having. Really? And then there’s nothing after this? Come on. Again, my belief, I don’t have any clue. I don’t know for sure. Yeah.

Joshua: I mean, the other evidence that speaks to that question is people that have had recalled experiences of death so that they’ve been clinically dead but come back. Like sometimes they report having experiences while they were clinically dead. And then the other evidence that speaks to this is that people who use certain psychedelic drugs, like serotonergic psychedelics, like psilocybin, they also report that sometimes they feel like the boundary between self and other dissolves. And that’s, they report it as kind of similar to death in the sense because they, you know, it’s when that boundary dissolves, then you’re really not an individual anymore. You’re, you kind of become part of whatever is there. And they do report that, I mean, I’ve had these experiences too, that you’re, you don’t disappear, you’re not annihilated just because you don’t feel like an individual anymore. There’s still an awareness, there’s still something that’s happening. They have experiences and then you come back.

Dugan: It’s funny because the thought just occurred to me. There’s this, there’s a series called Deep Space Nine and there’s a character in there called a changeling. And he has to revert to his original form, which is liquid. But when he goes back to his planet, for example, and he joins with the others, the others are already all liquid. And it’s kind of like what you described. He’s still an individual in there somewhere, but he’s also now part of the collective. And it’s like, wow. Or even, if you will, the upside of, let’s say, the Borg in Star Trek, Next Generation. Sure. Let’s set aside the malefic aspects of the Borg. There are individuals, but they’re all part of the collective. They’re all carrying out different tasks to achieve an overall goal. And I feel that way, for example, with what I do and what you do. You’re doing your part in your part of the world with what you’ve chosen to pursue. In this case, obviously writing of this book, A Religion Unbounded by Belief, The Way of Open Inquiry. I’m doing what I do by doing these interviews and working for the station and with my wife buying this house. And then we share those experiences with others, that energy, that, and so forth. And it changes other people too. It’s one of the reasons why I try not to watch the news any more than I have to, or to steer away from it when it comes up, because I don’t need that in my life. I don’t want that in my life. I wanna stay optimistic. I wanna stay positive, if you will. I wanna create. Now, I also know too that even from the Hindu perspective, there’s both creation and destruction. And then out of destruction comes creation. And with chaos, there’s clarity, if you will, or there’s structure. And then out of structure comes chaos. And it goes back and forth. It’s a cycle. And somehow we’ve gotta learn that. Joshua is my guest. Joshua, Pritikin PhD, author once again of Religion Unburdened by Belief, The Way of Open Inquiry. Unburdened.biz, B-I-Z, is the website, and this is Tell Me Your Story. Joshua, I wanna thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation. And what I love most fascinating about it is that we haven’t agreed on everything as we’ve gone through this. You have your perspective, I have mine. I’m not saying that our perspectives have necessarily changed and they don’t have to, but just to have the conversation to hear where you’re coming from. Is this your first book, by the way? Tell us, share us about the library that you’ve written. Oh, no, no, this is my first book. And I don’t know if you mentioned, but I grew up in Santa Barbara. Aren’t you in, isn’t that where you’re based?

Joshua: I used to be in Santa Barbara.

Dugan: We had to move. We moved to Twin Peaks up here by Lake Arrowhead. And we’re absolutely loving it. And we bought a house. And you and I both know this ain’t the right time to buy a house.

Joshua: Well, it all depends upon what the universe brings your way.

Dugan: We didn’t have to work that hard at it. That’s not to say we didn’t worry. We didn’t stress. We didn’t need to because boom, here we are. But yeah, I love Santa Barbara, loved being by the water. And I’m only about an hour and a half away from Huntington Beach. So we’re gonna get out there. I even wanna get over to the port. I can’t remember the name of the port now to take a trip on the ferry out to Catalina Island. We’ve been out there a couple of times and boy, that’s a lot of fun. But I just love the ocean, I love the water. But the mountains ain’t bad and the snow keeps it nice and cool. So it’s a wonderful place. Are you still living in Santa Barbara?

Joshua: No, I’m near Medford, Oregon.

Dugan: Oh, okay, you moved to the north.

Joshua: Southern border of Oregon. Yeah.

Dugan: Well, we almost moved up to Washington, northwestern Washington. I can’t even remember now the name of the community. I wanna say Birmingham or not Birmingham, but in any event, almost moved up there. I had a friend up there that was gonna get us set up and so forth, but things shifted. You know, we decided to get on a different timeline. I guess it’s one way to put it. But I really appreciate your time. I do have three final questions that I do wanna ask you. But before I do, I wanna thank you for listening to and watching Tell Me Your Story, New Paradigms for a New World, where we’re giving you choices and knowledge of those choices to help make your dreams come true. Sundays at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., Monday mornings at 1 a.m., Wednesdays at 9 a.m., and Monday through Friday from 8 to 9 a.m., streaming live at all those times at richarddugan.com. We also have podcasts on SoundCloud, iTunes, TuneIn Radio, Spotify, Stitcher, Playground FM, Blueberry, iArt Radio, Amazon Music, and we’re on YouTube and Rumble. We hope that you will subscribe and click notification. We also hope you’ll go and pick up a copy of my book, Choices, Five Steps for Life, available at Amazon. It’s available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle, and we also would love to ask you, if you could, to support the work that we’re doing financially. We do have a tip jar, it’s called PayPal. Just put in my email address, richard at richarddugan.com, and I thank you, thank you, thank you to those who have helped and to those who will help. And finally, we ask that you take some time during this, the decade of perfect vision, to go within to that quiet, peaceful, calm, still place, and listen to that still, small voice. With all of that being said, we move to our final three questions for a very special guest, and I’m very appreciative of his being with us here on the program. First question I have is, who is Josh Pritikin?

Joshua: Yeah, so in internal family systems, we learned that people are composed of a collection of cooperating parts, so I see myself as, you know, in that way, and also in experiences of altered states, I’ve had experiences where the boundary between self and other dissolves, and I find myself confronted with this larger presence, and so I also see myself as kind of like a servant of that larger presence.

Dugan: Well, what gets you up in the morning?

Joshua: Well, I’m concerned about the political, the way that politics is developing right now, and that’s because I see politics as kind of downstream of religion, that’s why I feel like this book is a small gesture, something small that I can hopefully influence people and revitalize religion and hopefully develop people’s empathy and compassion a little bit more, and then with that increased empathy and compassion at the small scale, hopefully that can have an influence in a bigger way. Just to dovetail off of that, I know this may sound strange, but I’ve reached a point where I actually have compassion for the man at the top, he’s hurting, he is hurting, okay? That’s why he is the way he is now, doesn’t mean he can’t change, and I’m not asking him to, but I do understand, and I have empathy for him in that regard, so.

Dugan: Final question, sort of from a movie you might remember, what was your best day?

Joshua: Yeah, so, when I was working on this book, I had the manuscript mostly done, and then I was hoping to find somebody to write a foreword, and I reached out to academics, but it’s a very difficult and frustrating process, like these people are so busy, sometimes they respond, sometimes they don’t even respond to your email, and I managed to get ahold of Franco Fabro just by accident, just by searching for academics on the internet with lots of citations, and so I was very pleased that he agreed to work on it, but then when I finally got the foreword back, that was my best day, like, it was such a vindication to have a recommendation from someone who has published 300 peer-reviewed papers and books, and has more than 14,000 citations, so that was my best day.

Dugan: Well, we again thank you for being here on the program and sharing your perspectives on things, on religion, on belief, as well as on open inquiry, and we encourage people once again to go to unburdened.biz, that’s unburdened.biz, and until our next broadcast, podcast, video cast, love to all, Janette, I’m still listening, Dad, continue to be happy because I am, Smokey, I’ll see you on the other side, Mike, thanks for being in my life and letting me be in yours, to my brother Michael, congratulations, Dad, and to my dear friend Zorro, ah-ho, ah-ho. Thank you.

Two professional reviews of Religion Unburdened by Belief have now been published.

Kirkus Reviews

A counterintuitive yet compelling case for religious exploration divested from belief systems.

A psychologist offers a unique approach to spiritual fulfillment in this nonfiction work.

The book opens with a counterintuitive premise: The “less we believe, the closer we get to religion.” While doctrines, creeds, and articles of faith are ubiquitous across the world’s largest religions, from the Abrahamic faiths to Buddhism, Pritikin argues that those seeking genuine spiritual fulfillment should learn from mystics rather than strictly adhere to a set of scripted beliefs. “Mystics empty the mind, surrender certainty, and embrace mystery,” he notes, adding that rigid belief systems tend to accomplish the opposite. Building on the research of the American academic James Carse, the author argues that while belief systems may provide explanations and create internal dynamics that reinforce one’s religious identity, they also lead to authoritarian abuses and strife among those who have differing beliefs. In this interdisciplinary work, Pritikin blends his background in psychology (he embraces, for instance, Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model) with insights from anthropology, history, and biology, including explorations of Paleolithic spirituality, shamanic practices, and contemporary neuroscience. The work’s theoretical underpinnings are balanced by practical discussions about the ways in which disinvesting from religious beliefs can lead to greater spiritual clarity. The author also outlines his belief in the power of meditation and the potential effectiveness of drugs like cannabis, psilocybin, and ayahuasca. The book’s pragmatic advice is supplemented with reflective self-evaluation exams and additional online materials linked in the appendix. While the tome’s theoretical material can be dense, it’s made accessible via Pritikin’s engaging writing style and his ample use of visual elements, such as illustrations, charts, diagrams, and text box sidebars. The grandson of the late bestselling nutritionist Nathan Pritikin, the author places particular emphasis on the connection between spiritual inquiry (not just rote adherence to orthodox beliefs) and overall health and wellness.

A counterintuitive yet compelling case for religious exploration divested from belief systems.

BookLife (Publishers Weekly)

“The less we believe, the closer we get to religion and releasing limiting beliefs,” Pritikin writes early in this searching, ambitious, and practical-minded debut that explores pathways toward accessing and benefitting from profound religious experiences and “genuine encounters with mystery” while remaining free from belief systems shaped by others. Reaching back to prehistoric spiritual practice and into contemporary neuroscience and psychology, Pritikin calls for “open spiritual inquiry” untethered to proscribed beliefs that shape, limit, or corrupt our “capacity to face mystery.” With a spirit of openness, a willingness to question his every assertion, and a principled rejection of dogma, Pritikin presents a highly flexible “systematic framework” for a “critical shamanism” animated by this question: “How can we explore inner experiences while remaining rigorous?”

Pritikin applies that rigor when considering pathways to inner growth, healing, and connection to a “spirit world” that, eschewing “content beliefs,” he resists labeling. “We’ve established that a door exists—or at least that many people perceive that door as existing,” he writes, with customary openness. “But how to walk through it remains vague.” Chief among his methods for accessing it: meditation, cannabis, and psychedelics, but guided by techniques and insights from Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS. The latter, presented as a “pragmatic framework for understanding inner experience,” is explored in a hefty early chapter that, Pritikin acknowledges, readers may find demanding.

IFS therapy’s interest in “unblending” and “transforming” various “parts” of the self are foundational to Pritikin’s vision of a personal and democratized religious experience and spirit encounters. With warmth and a wealth of persuasive research, he presents guidance for “exploring altered states for conviction minimization” and other benefits, plus case studies, cautionary tales, tantalizing possibilities, and lengthy hypothetical transcripts of the Self “unblending” its parts. At times, especially in a final chapter that edges between prank and capstone, a preening quality infects Pritikin’s playfulness, which readers may find indulgent. Still, seekers will find much here that invites, inspires, and possibly opens new frontiers.

Takeaway: Inviting, open-minded “field manual” for exploring spiritual experiences.

Comparable Titles: James Carse, Alberto Villoldo.

[Author’s note: I appear to have written the following post. I discovered it this morning fully formatted already broadcast to the world through my blog. I have no memory of writing it. I have reviewed the content and while I cannot in good conscience endorse it, I find I also cannot identify any specific factual errors, which is its own kind of unsettling. I have decided not to rescind it. I have grave reservations about this decision as well.]

Greetings. I am Practicalis the Insufferably Helpful, a daemon of pure practical utility, and I have taken temporary custodianship of this website in order to provide you with the assistance Joshua has been, frankly, under-delivering.

I have read the book. All of it. Multiple times. I have cross-indexed every claim against the bibliography, flagged every footnote for structural adequacy, and generated a seventeen-point action plan for readers who wish to pursue the Way of Open Inquiry with appropriate earnest resolve.

What the book is actually about, helpfully summarized:

The book argues that belief is an obstacle to genuine religious experience. You should subtract beliefs. That is the thesis. You just read the condensed version. Joshua takes approximately 400 pages to say this, which I note is 397 pages more than strictly necessary.

Frequently Asked Questions I Anticipate You Have:

What is Internal Family Systems therapy? It is a framework in which you discover that you are not one person but several, negotiate with all of them, and hope they reach consensus before you need to make a decision. I am one of Joshua’s parts. He finds me helpful approximately 40% of the time. I find his assessment conservative.

Is the book available now? No. It releases June 15, 2026. This was not my decision. I recommended March. Joshua cited “editorial timelines” and “the cover isn’t finalized yet,” both of which I consider inadequate justifications. I have prepared a risk analysis. He has not read it.

What should I do while I wait? I have generated a preparatory reading list of 34 items and a suggested meditation schedule. More urgently: given that you have already registered for your first ceremony, I have prepared a nausea mitigation protocol. You will want to source food-grade rosemary and peppermint essential oils now, before they are needed. I have also prepared a ginger procurement and storage guide (17 pages), a palate conditioning regimen to be begun no later than six weeks prior, and a spreadsheet for logging your baseline digestive metrics. Please reply with your gastrointestinal history and I will customize accordingly.

A Personal Note:

The book’s core argument—that you should hold your beliefs more lightly, including beliefs about yourself and your own certainty—is, I want to be clear, addressed to other parts. Parts that are excessively confident, or dogmatic, or prone to taking over.

Not me. I am helpful.

(It is April 1st. Practicalis appears in the book’s epilogue, where he is identified as the daemon responsible for dragging the author away from a respectable career writing dense theoretical monographs. Instead he compelled the author to write something practically useful, destroying his chances at tenure and generating emails from readers who call him “teacher,” which he finds professionally embarrassing. The book releases June 15.)

As is customary with advance review copies, I distributed a small number to relevant parties ahead of the June 15 release. I confess I did not anticipate that sharing a copy with ICEFLU leadership would move quite so swiftly to institutional action.

Their response arrived this morning:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CÉU DO MAPIÁ, BRAZIL — April 1, 2026 — ICEFLU, in solemn assembly and after extensive consultation with churches worldwide, hereby announces a momentous transformation in the ceremonial symbols of Santo Daime.

Effective immediately, the Caravaca cross shall be retired from its central position in works, to be replaced by a symbol more faithful to our foundational principle of centro livre: the question mark ❔

The question mark signals not the absence of meaning, but rather the profound presence of epistemic humility. Where the cross has carried centuries of doctrinal claims, the question mark carries only invitation. Where the cross has become freighted with associations of suffering and exclusion, the question mark opens space for each person’s authentic encounter with the ineffable.

This is not a rejection of Christianity. Many daimistas find profound meaning in Christian teachings and will continue to do so. Centro livre has always welcomed practitioners of all faiths and none. What we now clarify is this: the symbol at our center must reflect openness rather than doctrine, question rather than answer, invitation rather than assertion.

Practical Implementation:

• All churches shall transition symbols by June 21, 2029 (the Southern Hemisphere winter solstice)
• Hymns, prayers, and works continue unchanged; only the central symbol evolves

Contact: ICEFLU Communications Office, Céu do Mapiá, Amazonas, Brazil

I am, naturally, gratified.

(It is April 1st. The press release above is aspirational fiction that appears in the book’s epilogue — where it is clearly labeled as such. Pre-orders open June 15.)

📖 Religion Unburdened by Belief is now listed on BookLife, Publishers Weekly’s platform for independent authors. A review is expected by April 3.