Greg Lake interviews me about my new book

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.