Interview on End of the Road Podcast with Michael Kokal
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.
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.