When Joshua Pritikin’s email showed up in my inbox, I was in a strange spiritual in-between place.
I had been relating more and more to the religious tradition I grew up in symbolically rather than literally. Its stories, rituals, and language could still hold meaning for me, even though I no longer understood them in exactly the same way I once had.
At the same time, I had all these other interests that felt deeply important to me - psychology, Internal Family Systems (IFS), spiritual and esoteric ideas, mystical experiences, and my own complicated history with psychedelics. But I couldn’t quite see how they fit together.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an author I had never met reached out and asked if I would read an advance copy of his book, Religion Unburdened by Belief. He also offered to do a Q&A for my Substack. I was surprised and genuinely excited that something I had written online had reached someone exploring so many of the same questions!
As I read the book, my seemingly separate interests started to feel much more related…
What if unblending - the IFS practice of noticing a part without becoming completely swept up in it - is also a spiritual skill?
How can we honor mystical or psychedelic experiences without assuming that our interpretations of them must be objectively true?
Could meditation become more compassionate if we listened to the parts interrupting us instead of trying to silence them?
And what might spiritual community look like if it were built around shared practices and open inquiry rather than requiring everyone to reach the same conclusions?
By the time I finished reading, I had more than just a book review - I had seventeen questions. Fortunately, Joshua had offered to answer all of them.
So…if you’ve ever found yourself between spiritual frameworks - or wondered how to remain open to mystery without losing your discernment - I think you’ll enjoy this conversation! And bonus, Joshua was kind enough to record all of the questions and answers if you'd rather listen.
(If you’re short on time, questions 5, 6, 9, & 12 were some of my favorites I’d recommend skipping to:)
Joshua Pritikin, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in quantitative psychology, works in psychological counseling, and is an IFS Certified Practitioner. You can see buying opotions for his book here.
Part I: The Book, Belief, and Mystery
1. First, I have to ask: how did you come up with all of this?
This book brings together psychology, religion, Internal Family Systems, consciousness research, contemplative practices, psychedelics, shamanism, and more in a way I had never encountered before. What led you personally and intellectually to these questions, and eventually to writing Religion Unburdened by Belief?
Joshua:
As a teen, I noticed that my father had some books by Carl Jung in the bookcase. I tried to read them. I don’t think I understood anything, but they inspired an interest in inner experience and a meditation practice.
Three later collisions built the book’s actual machinery. I discovered IFS as a client, and it became the book’s psychological model. The book’s obsession with measurement likely comes out of my PhD in quantitative psychology. And the book’s caution around risk comes from watching psychedelics go wrong when I tried to introduce them to people close to me, and from my own investigation into growing Psilocybe cubensis at home, which came within reach of a serious felony before landing on a misdemeanor and suspended sentence. These three components were in place when I encountered that seminal Conspirituality podcast episode: “Brief: Religion is Not Belief?” May 4, 2024.
2. What is the overarching message of this book?
There are so many jewels in here and many different directions the book goes, so I’m curious how you would describe the overarching project in your own words. What are you ultimately hoping readers will take away most of all?
Joshua:
That’s fair. It does go in a lot of directions. If you walk past a building under renovation, the scaffolding looks chaotic. Pipes at odd angles, platforms at different heights, nothing symmetrical. But it’s not chaotic to the people doing the work—every piece is temporary, sized to whatever part of the building needs support right now.
The book has similar logic. Each chapter is placed where the conceptual network needs support. The “many directions” you noticed is that network’s contour.
But there’s a second layer of scaffolding. It’s not mine, it’s yours. And if there’s scaffolding, there’s a building underneath it. It’s you. Some of what you believe is genuinely load-bearing: the practices you keep doing and the values that shape how you treat people. And there is the other stuff, the cosmology, the metaphysical furniture about what’s really out there. That was only ever supposed to be scaffolding, and a lot of us have quietly let it calcify into a wall.
So if you ask what I want people to take away most, it’s not even the Way of Open Inquiry. It’s a habit of action: Do a personal development practice such as talk therapy, meditation, mindfulness, enjoying nature, or experimenting with psychedelics. Too many people will read this book, nod, and then never act on it.
The book’s larger aspiration is to name what these practices can be aimed at: emotional regulation. Each can serve other ends too, but emotional regulation is the one the book puts front and center. What society hasn’t caught onto yet is that this isn’t just a virtue to hope for. Now, it can be measured and trained directly. It’s the load-bearing capacity behind good parenting, good teaching, good judging, good policing, good leadership at every scale up to a head of state. A society that got serious about training it would strengthen the skill every one of those roles depends on.
3. One of the biggest paradigm shifts for me was your distinction between “process beliefs” and “content beliefs.”
Could you explain those terms for someone encountering them for the first time? Why do you think content beliefs can become especially problematic in religion and spirituality?
Joshua:
I’ll answer this and the next question together.
4. Related to that, I was fascinated by your distinction between mystery-embracing religion and belief-system-dominated religion.
What does it actually mean for a religion or spiritual practice to remain oriented toward mystery? And what are some signs that an open-ended spiritual tradition is beginning to harden into a belief system?
Joshua:
The process/content distinction and the mystery/belief-system spectrum are really the same idea. One is about individual beliefs and the other about whole traditions.
A process belief is like trusting your compass: a working assumption that lets you go exploring. For meditation, you need to believe that attention can be trained, that inner change is possible, and that it’s worth trying. A content belief is a claim about what you’ll find once you get there. It might be how many heavens exist, what a particular vision means, or which story about the afterlife is the true one.
You decide which role a belief serves. If giving up a belief would stop you from practicing, it is process. If it would only change what you say about the universe, it is content.
Picture two monks in neighboring cells. Monk One believes the point of meditation is to eventually meet a 900-foot luminous being who will hand him the secrets of the universe on a scroll. Monk Two believes meditation is to sit there, paying attention, on the off chance something useful happens.
Now suppose both monks sit for months, but the being never appears. Monk One quits meditating in a huff. He was there for the content. Monk Two shrugs and keeps sitting. The process never depended on the content.
Now zoom out from the two monks to their whole monastery. A new abbot arrives who insists the 900-foot being is not a possible image but the correct one, full stop. Within a decade the monastery has a Scroll-Bearer Studies curriculum, a certification exam for meditation instructors, and a Doctrinal Compliance Office that reviews novices’ visions against an approved iconography chart (height: 900 feet, exactly; scroll: present; tone: luminous, not merely bright). Monks who report meeting a 40-foot being, or no being, or a perfectly ordinary sense of quiet, are sent for remedial sits with a certified corrector. Repeat offenders get reassigned to kitchen duty until their visions “align.”
Watch what happened: A content belief got promoted to the price of admission, spawning a whole civil service to enforce it. Somewhere along the way, the monastery stopped seeking the mystery and started obsessing over paperwork. Monk Two, the one who just sat there paying attention, would have failed the certification exam. Is that a good outcome?
I see a monastery that’s confused confirmation bias for revelation. Content beliefs can turn “what did you experience” into “did you experience the right thing.” Mystery-oriented traditions dodge this in a way similar to how Zhuangzi woke from dreaming he was a butterfly. He didn’t rush to resolve whether he was a man who’d dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he was a man. He just sat with the question, the same way Monk Two just sat with his practice.
Part II: IFS, Unblending, and Inner Experience
5. One thing I’ve become increasingly interested in is the tendency to confuse a spiritual experience with our interpretation of that experience.
In the religious tradition I came from, for example, a powerful feeling might become, “therefore, this church is true.” But I’ve noticed the same thing can happen in New Age and psychedelic spaces: “therefore, reincarnation is real,” “therefore, I contacted another realm,” or “therefore, consciousness survives death.” How can we deeply honor spiritual or mystical experiences without automatically turning our interpretations of them into metaphysical truth claims?
Joshua:
This question and the next are really the same question wearing two hats.
6. I’m a therapist and have studied Internal Family Systems quite a bit, but before reading your book I had never thought about unblending as an important spiritual skill. That was a huge paradigm shift for me.
How can IFS and unblending help us navigate mystical experiences, religious teachings, and altered states without becoming blended with the parts of us that desperately want an experience to mean something? What does spiritual exploration from an unblended state actually look like?
Joshua:
This question and the previous turn out to be more connected than they may first appear.
Say a friend cancels on you at the last minute, again, and you notice you’re furious—but also, underneath that, still fond of them, and a little worried you overreacted. Internal Family Systems (IFS) starts from the observation that this isn’t confusion, it’s accuracy. You really do contain multiple parts, each with its own feelings and agenda. Right now, several of them are talking at once. Suppose the anger wins out. You draft a scathing text. Blended with anger, it doesn’t even register as a part but simply who you are.
Unblending means stepping back enough to notice “a part of me is furious” instead of just being furious. With that crucial distance, you can stay in touch with the fondness and the worry too, instead of being driven by the loudest part. But emotional distance requires trust. The angry part isn’t wrong to be angry. Why should it loosen its grip? It has to trust you that stepping back won’t mean being ignored.
Something similar happens in spiritual and mystical experience, but with higher stakes. Suppose there is a flash of light in meditation, a wave of love on a psychedelic trip, or a chill during a sermon. A young part runs in breathless, having just connected all the dots for the first time: “This proves the church is true!” “This proves I contacted another realm!” “This proves consciousness survives death!” It’s just a kid who found one puzzle piece and is certain it sees the whole picture.
It’s the same move as with your anger at your friend: Stay with the part instead of becoming it. Enjoy the enthusiasm, but don’t hand it the pen to write your theology.
Blending is easy to miss precisely because it doesn’t feel like a part at all—it feels like you. Noticing it takes practice. Maybe that’s why the question about confusing experience with interpretation came before the one about unblending.
7. Early in the book, you compare learning to observe our inner experience more accurately with developing a trained palate or a musician’s ear. I loved the idea that introspection itself is a skill we can refine.
What can psychotherapy - particularly IFS - teach us about observing inner experience that religious or contemplative traditions may have been missing? And how does the Varela-Schwartz model help us assess whether we’re actually unblended?
Joshua:
The second question hands us the tool the first question needs. So we’ll start there.
IFS clearly works, clinically. But IFS only helps us understand the inward-facing case: one person and their parts. The bigger project of this book is to generalize IFS into a model of waking experience, both inward and outward. Since that argument took a whole book to make, here’s a sketch.
My opinion is that IFS is an instance of neurophenomenology, a term coined by the scientist and philosopher Francisco Varela for a research method that puts a subject’s first-person report and the associated second-person (from a trained observer) or third-person (from objective brain measurements) data in mutual constraint. Each one calibrates the other, round after round. In Varela’s neuroscience lab, that other signal was brain data, sitting alongside a subject’s own report.
In IFS, the constraint is distributed across two people: the client’s report and the therapist’s outward read (words, tone, body language) calibrate each other. Neither side stands alone as ground truth. The therapist’s read feeds back into what the client says and does next, which in turn sharpens the therapist’s next read. Round after round, in a thousand small increments, the client grows in their ability to stay unblended.
Which brings us back to the first question. What might contemplative or religious traditions be missing? Suppose, half-seriously, there is a tradition built around the 5-MeO-DMT experience (a fast-acting psychedelic whose peak is often interpreted as dissolving into the universal being). The conviction that comes with it is often overwhelming. But the problem is structural: This feeling, however strong, can’t be checked against anything else. There’s no second signal available to form a mutual constraint with.
Brain imaging during the peak doesn’t help, since there’s no established reference for a state like this. And self-report doesn’t help either, because nobody can self-report during the peak. The report can only come after, reconstructed from memory of a state that allegedly dissolved the observer doing the reporting. Maybe IFS’s real contribution isn’t a superior introspective technique, but institutionalizing the mutual-constraint loop—running it on small, repeatable, ordinary moments where it actually has something to bite on.
Santo Daime pushes this even further. Ordinarily, evaluating someone’s emotional regulation requires a trained observer: a clinical supervisor watching whether the therapist stays curious rather than defensive or dysregulated. That’s because we’re vulnerable to self-deception. A protector part can pretend to unblend, reciting “I recognize I’m angry because my needs weren’t met” while it continues driving hostile behavior.
Daime closes that gap. Participants are asked to hold precise external form—singing lyrics, rattle rhythm, physical composure—while the Daime tempts inward reverie (blending with a part). Sustained challenge plus real-time monitoring is what makes the test hard to fake. The prize is an evaluation that doesn’t require an expert in the room.
It’s worth pausing on the broader implications. We might assume the people who most need emotional regulation will know they lack it. In practice, the opposite is often true. A therapist who uses sessions to meet his own need to be needed doesn’t usually experience that as a lack of regulation—it feels like care. A judge sentencing from irritation doesn’t feel irritated so much as certain. A head of state making a decision out of wounded pride will tell you, and probably believe, that it’s resolve. The skill is slippery; losing it doesn’t feel like losing it. That’s what makes an uncheatable test so valuable.
8. You also introduce what you call “perspectival navigation skills,” which I found fascinating but difficult to fully wrap my head around.
Could you explain what perspectival navigation means in everyday language? What might it look like to become more skilled at deliberately shifting perspective rather than having a triggered part determine our perspective for us?
Joshua:
This one leans on the book’s Varela-Schwartz model, so it may land better for readers who’ve gone through those chapters.
In everyday language, your perspective at any given moment is your vantage point. Are you focused inwardly? Or looking out at a situation? Or somewhere in between? Also, are you choosing that vantage point or being put there?
IFS gives the clearest single-person version of this. When you’re blended with a part, you’re occupying its vantage point rather than your own. An anxious part’s fear becomes your world. Self-leadership is the skill of un-occupying that vantage point. Someone with strong Self-leadership can notice “a part of me believes that I’m going to get fired” without that conviction becoming the only available reality.
That’s the Schwartz half of the model. It’s the inward-facing relationship to your own parts. But the model has a second half. Varela’s triad describes your outward-facing vantage point: absorbed in your own take on a situation (Subjective), jointly constructing a shared understanding with someone else (Intersubjective), or stepping back to view something with distance (Objective).
The Orgasmic Meditation and Santo Daime diagrams in this book are examples of constraints on two or more people’s vantage points, coupled together, each affecting where the other can go. That coupling is harder to map than the single-person case. We don’t fully resolve it here, but it’s the direction the model points. The conclusion we reach is that unblending isn’t an IFS-specific skill. It’s the capacity that makes the whole map navigable, both inward and outward.
So what does getting more skilled at this actually look like? Start by practicing the analysis itself: Take an ordinary activity—venting to a friend, sitting in a meeting, arguing with a partner—and map its Varela-Schwartz constraints. Which vantage points does it demand, and how does information flow through perspectives?
Once that’s second nature, you can work backwards. Choose a partial constraint pattern and go looking for activities that impose it. That’s the process I used to select the book’s activities. Confession time: the “aha” moment I hand you in Chapter 7’s “One Single Key Skill” was built in reverse. I wrote the punchline first and reverse-engineered the setup. Don’t tell the magician I told you.
9. I was especially intrigued by your “parts-aware” approach to meditation because I’ve tried meditating for years and have always honestly struggled with it, and now I know why- I was ignoring parts! Traditional meditation can sometimes feel like we’re being asked to quiet, transcend, or move past whatever is arising, whereas your approach seems much more interested in our relationship with what arises.
How did you develop this approach? Because now it seems so obvious to me, but for years I had tried to force myself to do traditional meditation while parts were crying out for attention.
Joshua:
I also struggled with meditation for many years. The idea was triggered by a specific remark. In a September 2021 interview, Dick Schwartz critiqued mindfulness directly:
> Mindfulness in particular is, for me, a good first step. You’re asked to separate from and observe your thoughts and emotions, and to do that in an accepting way, but not to interact with them. That’s fine if you believe that these are just ephemeral thoughts and emotions that come and go, or that they’re the ego, which many spiritual traditions tend to be irritated by, or even demonize. Then it makes sense to separate and just notice it without trying to do anything. But if you think of these, the way we’ve described [Parts] earlier as inner entities, many of whom are suffering, then it isn’t compassionate to just passively watch them. <
Something clicked. Instructions like “just notice it, don’t engage” weren’t as neutral and impartial as they might seem. So I went looking for how IFS handled meditation. What I found was guided meditation. These can be useful as a beginner’s on-ramp toward silent practice, but were not a coherent response to Schwartz’s critique.
The unresolved question underneath Schwartz’s comment was: What is meditation actually for?
I moved cautiously, because meditation is unusually hard to investigate. You are both the instrument and the thing being investigated. Trying to stop doing is itself a doing. I write elsewhere in the book that judging the “precise contour” of an altered state is surprisingly difficult, and meditation is a clear case. Read ten serious teachers and you’ll get ten different phenomenologies, subtly contradicting each other, each claiming lineage authority. And that’s the state of the art after thousands of years. Nobody should expect a quick answer here.
A few candidate uses didn’t hold up. Relaxation is real but incidental. Plenty of relaxing activities aren’t meditation, and plenty of meditation isn’t relaxing. Self-discipline could be worth enduring as a means to an end. But grinding as the practice itself doesn’t seem worthwhile.
Extrapolating from Schwartz’s idea, I seized upon effortlessness. You can white-knuckle your way to tranquility, but let’s try standard IFS logic instead: Parts unblend most completely when they aren’t coerced. So meditation’s wandering attention should be regarded as a surfacing part rather than as noise to suppress. That reframing answered Schwartz’s critique.
And effortlessness has a nice property other candidates lack: It still leaves open what meditation is ultimately for. Say you still think the real goal is transcendence, or stillness, or union with something larger, or simply relaxation. Fine—on any of these accounts, a practice that proceeds by force is going to be slower and more exhausting than one where the parts cooperate. Effortlessness isn’t competing with your destination; it describes the condition of the road to it.
For more specifics about the proposed technique, see https://thegentlelaw.substack.com/p/what-is-the-goal-in-meditation
Part III: Altered States, Discernment, and Spiritual Authority
10. This book also felt like the guide I had been missing for exploring altered states of consciousness.
In my experience, psychedelic spaces don’t always offer the psychological guidance or preparation I would want, while conventional therapy often has surprisingly little to say about intentionally exploring altered states outside formal psychedelic-assisted therapy. What do you think each of these worlds is missing from the other? What does responsible, psychologically informed exploration of altered states look like?
Joshua:
I think the deeper problem sits upstream of either world. We now have access to an unprecedented variety of psychoactives, but our psychological understanding of subjective effects hasn’t kept pace. Both fields inherited that gap. That’s why each one, looking at the other, sees something the other seems to be missing. The book’s answer is to treat altered states the way psychology already treats anything else about a person: as material to be analyzed with the same tools. Psychedelics are not a special category exempt from ordinary psychological analysis.
Once you adopt that stance, responsible exploration is straightforward. Most bad trips aren’t random weather; they’re what it looks like when a part is afraid, distrusts Self, or never gave consent. So the preparation that matters is parts work. Know your own internal landscape. Notice if something in you is bracing, dissociated, or unconvinced. Address that before things get weird. Do that, and most of what is treated as an unpredictable hazard turns out to be preventable.
Even with a unified psychology, there’s still a provocative gap worth naming. As we discussed in question 7, Daime’s demand for sustained composure is a better test of emotion regulation than a trained observer. Talk therapists, whose whole job depends on staying unblended while a client’s activated parts tug at them, might benefit from training under a psychedelic’s pull. But the field isn’t close to considering this. It’s still arguing over whether a sober sitter even needs firsthand experience with the substance.
11. One thing I took from the book is that altered states may sometimes help us unblend from our ordinary conditioning or experience ourselves differently, while at the same time potentially amplifying conviction. Is that an accurate reading?
If so, how can something simultaneously help us step outside our habitual sense of self while making us more vulnerable to believing the stories our minds generate? How do you personally reality-test insights that arise during altered states?
Joshua:
This answer builds on unblending and the book’s account of altered states, so it’s easiest to follow having read those chapters.
You’ve named two different effects of altered states: unblending, and conviction amplification. I’m going to start with unblending because it is broadly applicable. Only certain kinds of altered states amplify conviction.
Self-induced altered states create a chaos of limited duration. What gets unblended tends to differ by the specific state. Extended fasting can loosen a part that eats out of habit, boredom, or anxiety rather than hunger. Ecstatic dance can loosen a part that polices how you’re allowed to move or be seen. Holotropic breathwork can loosen parts holding old feelings, preverbal parts that don’t have words for what they’re carrying.
Conviction amplification, by contrast, is an effect peculiar to classical serotonergic psychedelics, not altered states in general. You asked about the surprising variety of effects on conviction. Research is not settled on the best model. Carhart-Harris’s entropic brain and REBUS models describe the mechanism as relaxed high-level beliefs. The brain’s usual top-down priors loosen their grip, allowing old certainties to dissolve and new ones to rush in with equal ease. McGovern and colleagues, reviewing the literature in 2022, found the empirical picture mixed: Some studies show belief entrenchment and heightened conviction. Others show increased open-mindedness and willingness to update.
I think the variety of outcomes suggest that these experiences are shaped by mental steering. Set and setting is the coarse version of this idea. A finer-grained version: The experience is shaped by your relationship to your own parts.
You asked how I reality-test insights, and that’s a role mental steering can serve. It means not diving in with total abandon. Keep some thread of attention on consensus reality. Stay unblended enough to notice when a part with strong convictions shows up. But some parts are convincing enough to fool you anyway, so add a second check. Real insights survive a sober validation check once ordinary consciousness resumes.
You asked for a personal example. During an altered state, I came up with an idea for a fan fiction piece about the Chapter 8 dragon, plus a bit where I’d interrupt my own readings at book signings, run outside, and get the audience looking at the sky for a dragon that was never going to appear. The idea felt inspired, but on sober reflection, I realized I had presumed a level of crowd-drawing ability I don’t actually have. Maybe I’ll be able to pull this off for the 10-year anniversary edition?
12. I loved your examples of spiritual teachings that can be interpreted in psychologically opposite ways - for example, “burning up impurities” could mean understanding and transforming difficult patterns, or it could mean exiling natural human impulses. Similarly, surrender or non-attachment could reflect healthy unblending or disconnection from legitimate human needs.
How do we distinguish genuine transcendence from suppression, dissociation, or self-abandonment? How can we pursue spiritual growth while still honoring the complexity of our psychological system?
Joshua:
Locus of control is an old idea in psychology: Do you author your own outcomes, or does authority sit outside you—fate, an institution, a teacher? When a text says “burn up impurities,” who decides what that means?
Picture a meditator, Ren, on a retreat. She mentions to her teacher that loneliness keeps surfacing. He tells her to ignore it until it dissipates. She accepts his reading despite her own inner conflict. The pen has left her hand. That reading exiles a legitimate need and there’s no one left to catch it.
So watch for both: Is the reading generous or harsh? And can you still imagine disagreeing with it?
This doesn’t mean ignoring teachers. Early on, some borrowed authority is how you learn. The failure mode isn’t deference. It’s forgetting to wrestle the pen back into your own hand, even from someone you trust.
13. I was fascinated by your argument that written guidance can sometimes be safer than relying on a spiritual teacher, psychedelic facilitator, or guru - which initially felt counterintuitive to me, but is actually true to my personal experience.
Why can distance and autonomy actually protect seekers? And what should someone look for when deciding whether they genuinely need face-to-face guidance?
Joshua:
The main danger is a runaway positive feedback loop between someone’s admiration and someone else’s authority. A book can’t be flattered into believing it deserves your devotion, and it can’t quietly expand its claim on your life as you become more invested. It also won’t get clingy when you leave. Just close it, no goodbye tour required.
If you do seek help, look for a plumber, not a priest. And once you’re with someone, imagine telling them, “I think you’re wrong about this.” If you can say that without flinching, you’re probably fine.
That’s the short version. See the book’s corruption toolkit appendix for more depth.
14. I’m also really curious about your discussion of Santo Daime and the cultivation of “firmness.”
If part of the purpose is learning to stay present and grounded rather than simply getting swept away by visions, why use ayahuasca at all? Why not, for example, do something difficult together like ice baths while singing hymns? What does the psychedelic contribute that the challenge, ritual, music, and group structure alone would not?
Joshua:
A ceremony, as I define it, is a juxtaposition of two extremes: transcendent unity on one end and community on the other. Daime performs two related functions. It stretches you toward unity, dissolving boundaries. And it surfaces parts underneath, inviting you to blend with them.
Both an ice bath and drinking Daime issue a public dare: Can you choose the hard thing? From there the resemblance ends. A shared ice bath can strengthen the community pole well enough. But cold exposure doesn’t dissolve boundaries, and it doesn’t invite blending.
Suppose instead of Daime, the sacrament was 5-MeO-DMT, the fast-acting psychedelic whose peak dissolves you into the universal being. It could do the unity half of the job. But 5-MeO dissolves everything, leaving no parts demanding attention. This would lose the direct test of emotional regulation. Of Daime’s two functions, that’s the one that matters more. The unity stretch is a nice-to-have, but the blending invitation is what makes firmness a real skill.
So back to the ice bath. It fails for the same reason 5-MeO would: both offer an ordeal but no invitation to blend. Without the pull toward visions, there’s nothing for firmness to hold against.
Part IV: Community, Metaphysical Leanings, and the Sacred Kitchen
15. Your “Way of Open Inquiry” finally gave me language for the kind of community I’ve been searching for: community, ritual, shared practices, and openness to mystery without requiring everyone to share the same metaphysical beliefs.
Most spiritual communities I’ve encountered eventually seem to organize around claims about God, consciousness, reincarnation, energy, spirits, or reality. Have you seen communities successfully organize around inquiry rather than shared conclusions? What would such a community need in order to remain genuinely open?
Your book has actually inspired me to begin experimenting with creating a small community of my own around some of these principles, so I’m especially interested in what you think is essential - and what pitfalls I should watch for.
I was also fascinated by your discussion of IFS community practice. Could something like that be incorporated into a non-clinical community centered on open inquiry, or in your view does it need to be facilitated by a therapist?
Joshua:
Have I seen it work? My first instinct is to point at Orgasmic Meditation (OM): a fifteen-minute protocol with two people paying attention to a single sensation. During practice, let your mind drift into philosophy and you’ve sabotaged it. The word “intercourse” originally just meant exchange between people, no sex required, and that older sense fits. OM is still inquiry, just conducted wordlessly. Nicole Daedone, who founded the practice, is a prolific author, with multiple volumes of Sutras and a cosmology of Eros. Will that literature stay optional, or will it eventually calcify into doctrine that the practice itself starts to require? Worth watching.
A distillation of “what’s essential” might be narrower than most people expect: no required readings; no requirement to believe anything about God, consciousness, or what happens after you die; and no sermons. The no-sermons rule might need unpacking. Call it a sermon when someone explains what a shared experience meant. A testimony stays on the near side of that line: “here’s what happened for me.” A sermon quietly says “and therefore for you too.”
You asked for a pitfall for your community, so here’s one: It is statistically likely that someone in your group is going to start a smaller, more serious group, to discuss why the larger community has started feeling a little rigid. This is either the process working exactly as intended, or the seed of your first schism. I’m not sure which.
Naturally you’ll also need legal support, otherwise a “community organized around inquiry” is the kind of phrase a judge will quote back to you, right before ruling against you. That’s why I’m delighted to mention Greg Lake, an entheogenic attorney. Greg has formed over a hundred entheogenic churches and knows how to keep them in good legal standing. His offerings include formation and bylaws, handling substances, contracts and waivers, and how to talk about your community publicly. He was generous enough to blurb this book, and in exchange, I promised to recommend https://entheoesq.com at every opportunity. Consider it done, Greg.
But maybe forming a new church sounds like too much work. It’s worth knowing that CHLQ, my home church, supports a number of low-profile daughter churches, scattered across multiple US states. That’s a lower-friction alternate path.
On the IFS question: A Healing Circle is a great way to bring that practice into a non-clinical community. You don’t need a licensed therapist to run it. The only caution is the customary one: Avoid exile work unless the facilitator knows what they’re doing.
16. You make a compelling case throughout the book for holding content beliefs lightly, so I have to turn your framework back on you: what do you believe?
You describe yourself in terms of pragmatic agnosticism, yet you also entertain some fascinating possibilities involving consciousness, the fractal nature of Self, and the relationship between consciousness and the body. Are there metaphysical possibilities you personally lean toward while deliberately resisting certainty about them? And how do you tell the difference between entertaining an intriguing hypothesis and beginning to turn it into another content belief?
Joshua:
The question assumes a stricter version of my argument than I made. Leanings were always fine. Conviction minimization is about the grip, not the belief.
So let me answer the actual question, which is really two questions: What do I lean toward, and how do I keep a lean from calcifying into something I’d feel pressed to defend.
The leanings:
● Consciousness is fundamental. Hoffman’s conscious agent framework seems persuasive and promising.
● Consciousness and quantum wave collapse are connected somehow. Penrose and Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction offers a mechanism I find more plausible than alternatives. (For background, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction)
● Self has a fractal structure. Every part carries a spark of Self, so our personal Self may itself be a spark of the one universal Being.
I hold these as low-to-moderate conviction content beliefs by my own scale. You asked about the difference between “entertaining a hypothesis” and “content belief.” But these aren’t two different postures I have to learn to tell apart. The exact boundary between “entertaining” and “believing” is less important than the overall grip strength.
I’d also push back on the phrase “resisting certainty,” which makes a light hold sound effortful. For me, it’s the other way around. Conviction is effortful: It has to be maintained, defended, patched when evidence threatens it, protected from the questions that would unsettle it. A gentle lean doesn’t need as much upkeep.
17. One last question because I have to ask: The Sacred Kitchen completely got me.
I caught myself thinking, “Wait…is he actually serious?” before realizing that my own reaction was part of the experiment. What exactly were you hoping readers would discover about themselves through that chapter?
Joshua:
I’m grateful you called out this playful vignette. It’s from Chapter 8, the one chapter in the book that isn’t factual. Sacred Kitchen is an entirely invented ethnography of a fictional psychedelic cooking tradition, complete with made-up hymns, guardians who correct your onion-chopping rhythm, and a stove-lighting ceremony. None of it is real.
Josie prepared a dish for me without knowing it: her doubt—“wait, is he actually serious?”—offered up raw and still warm. I didn’t write that chapter hoping to fool anyone for long. I wrote it hoping for that delicious moment of doubt.
That’s my answer for Sacred Kitchen. But let me pivot to your second question: What I hope readers discover is the same thing you already did: that reading about a better kind of community is not the same as building one. And only one of those counts.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading - I’d LOVE to hear in the comments what stood out to you. I’m so glad you’re here :)
Love this insight from you and Dr. Pritikin!
Beautifully done. Thank you so much for posting it!