Interview with Psychedelic Attorney Greg Lake

Greg Lake—trial and appellate attorney specializing in entheogen-based religious freedom law and author of The Law of Entheogenic Churches—sat down with Joshua Pritikin on the Entho SK YouTube channel for a wide-ranging conversation about Religion Unburdened by Belief.

Lake, who has helped establish over 120 entheogenic religious organizations and litigated related claims in state and federal courts, contributed a blurb to the book: “Shifting focus to the individual experience of the Divine, through entheogenic and experiential practices, is ultimately a movement towards world peace and reconciliation.”

The conversation covered:

• IFS in action — Joshua walked Lake through a live Internal Family Systems session exploring Lake’s mixed feelings about politics and divisiveness, demonstrating how “parts” language unpacks contradictory impulses without forcing resolution.
• Neurophenomenology — How Francisco Varela’s framework for studying subjective experience alongside brain imaging informs the book’s approach to ineffable mystical states.
• Primary vs. secondary religious phenomena — Lake drew on his legal work to explain why courts struggle to recognize religions built around direct experience rather than written doctrine, and why that matters for entheogenic churches.
• Cave paintings and prehistoric religion — The evidence that altered-state experiences predate written belief by tens of thousands of years, and what that implies about humanity’s shared spiritual heritage.
• Which beliefs to keep — Joshua’s distinction between process beliefs (necessary for practice) and cosmological beliefs (candidates for minimization), and why different entheogens challenge different assumptions.
• Ego dissolution and death anxiety — Lake described how his 5-MeO-DMT experience dissolved his fear of death by demonstrating that the boundary between self and other can dissolve without annihilation.
• Access and equity — The cost barriers created by Oregon’s psilocybin program and the case for communal, peer-supported experiences as a more accessible model.

Lake closed by committing to finish the book and return for a deeper follow-up conversation.