Journey Through (& away from) Self-Negating Nonduality … — Transcript

Jeff Brown interviews Jessica Nathanson on the dangers of self-negating nonduality and the journey to embodied, heart-centered spirituality.

Key Takeaways

Self-negating nonduality can lead to emotional suppression and spiritual bypass.
Healing requires engaging deeply with pain and emotional wounds, not just witnessing.
Grounded spirituality values embodiment, heart-centeredness, and horizontal connection.
Instant enlightenment teachings often lack preparatory work and can be psychologically harmful.
A balanced spirituality honors both the absolute and the relative, embracing full humanity.

Summary

Jeff Brown discusses his critique of patriarchal spirituality, non-duality, and the new age movement.
Jessica Nathanson shares her experience with Neo-Advaita and self-negating spirituality.
They explore the emotional and psychological dangers of instant enlightenment teachings.
Jessica describes her journey from grief and emotional torment to healing and self-compassion.
The conversation critiques the denial of ego and emotional body in certain non-dual teachings.
They emphasize the importance of working through pain rather than merely witnessing it.
Jessica highlights the need for grounded, embodied, and heart-centered spirituality.
The discussion includes the pitfalls of dissociation and transcendence bypass.
They advocate for a spirituality that embraces the full human experience, including boundaries and emotions.
Jessica is building a support community for those recovering from harmful spiritual movements.

Chapters

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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Yeah, hey everybody, it's Jeff. I am so excited to bring this particular conversation to you today. For those of you who know my work around grounded spirituality and my deconstructing of the so-called non-duality movement, patriarchal spirituality, the new age movement,

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a journey that in many ways began for me around the time that I was hanging out with Bhagavad Das and Ram Dass and Sean Corn and making my felt Carmageddon. If you're familiar with that sort of trajectory, some part of my work then you

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know that it's been hard for me to find people who are out there in the teaching community in particular and those who have followed and believed in ungrounded frameworks and perspectives. It's been difficult for me to find people who really, really understand what

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I'm talking about and who are really preparing themselves to bring the new methodology: more embodied, fleshy, heart-centered, feeling-based, horizontal rather than vertical grounded spirituality. So not so long ago, I got some emails from somebody named Jessica Nathanson

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who had been part of some of these communities and who has now come to realize how deadly dangerous they really are. And we talk about that in this conversation. I bring her story to you, and it's a real delight. It really is to

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have had this opportunity. So let me just tell you quickly a bit about Jessica. After self-negating spirituality encouraged her to sacrifice too much of her precious humanity, Jessica Nathanson passionately is deconstructing the status quo of either-or non-duality and the tragically

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flawed no-self, no-suffering movement that is damaging so many hearts, minds, and souls in our world. She's building an online support community, Collective Soul Revival, for others who are recovering from movements like Neo and Veda, which I call the avoid

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movement, and journeying those who are ready to journey from self-abandonment to self-compassion and the glory is both-and of celebrating all dimensions of our sacred humanity. In my words, presence as a whole being experience. This, for me, is the real spirituality and the

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direction we must go. So just listen to a little bit of Trevor Hall, the song "Arrows," from the perfectly appropriately titled The Fruitful Darkness, and then have a listen to Jessica. Get into it and to really, really, I think, a really

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important conversation. And so, so delighted to bring your voice to them. Hey Jessica, good to be with you today.

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Hi, it's great to be with you also.

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Yeah, we have lots to talk about. Let me just read a quick, well, not so quick quote from grounded spirituality that might sort of contextualize some of the non-duality kind of monkey business we're going to talk about today. So here's the quote. This is part of a dialogue I have in the book with a character named,

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semi-fictitious character named Michael. So I say to him, it seems you bought into the ego bashing that is intrinsic to the transcendence bypass movement. It's ironic because what motivates the quest for non-duality is often the unresolved elements themselves.

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Denying the ego is egoic. This denial is often motivated by the unhealthy aspects of ego itself. That is, diminishment of the emotional body is motivated by the unhealed emotional body. The suggestion that everything is an illusion is motivated by a fear of reality, and the

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belief that simply witnessing the pain body nullifies it is motivated by the pain body run amok. Witnessing our pain doesn't dissipate it; it strengthens it. If you want to dissipate your pain, get inside it and work it through until it's

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thoroughly mended. And when it's truly healed, it will both create a richer, fuller life and reveal its essential nature as grist for the soul mill itself, the granules of glory that grow us closer to the god self. How can we evolve

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without this fodder for our expansion, the soil of our lived-in experience? You have bought into a kind of nihilistic worldview that desecrates everything that nourishes and grows us forward. How can you escape into a full life while leaving the self in your dust? Ironically,

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in your flight from those characteristics, you merely concretize their significance. Close quote. So you connected with me as someone who I'm now understanding to be, and I certainly relate to this, kind of an investigative journalist with respect to what I

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broadly call patriarchal spirituality, and what others call non-duality. And, you know, the Invader ultimate, I called the Abundant movement. It means all kinds of terms for this, but because you're getting out there now and you're telling your story

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of what you realized about that movement in the heart of kind of rejecting the notion of realization that they were trumpeting. So give us a sense of how you entered into that way of being and that exploration

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and then let's just talk about some of the things that you've realized.

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Sounds great. And that was a really poignant quote that you read. That was nice because I think it brought up a little bit of emotionality for

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me, which is good because it's been about five, almost six years now since I came out of my Neo Advaita kind of haze. And there was a very long period of intense grief and emotional torment, but the good thing is that over

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time I've kind of moved through that. So now I'm able to go back into it to really, like you said, investigate kind of what's going on there and help other people that are really trapped in it.

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It's been what I've been spending a lot of time on lately. And how might you define the Neo-Advaita movement? I mean, what is that just for people who don't know what we're talking about before we

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deconstruct it? We'll just do that. And I personally, I, for me, I equate Neo-Advaita with modern contemporary self-negating non-duality, and I think specifically the instantaneous enlightenment where, you know, you hear sort of like the direct

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path where, you know, there's no real long preparatory path. It's sort of, you know, these different direct paths within Eastern traditions that have been decontextualized and brought to the West as an instant enlightenment sort of packaging.

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Got you. And so what's, what is it that's, before we get into your actual experience, what is it within your psyche or your psycho-emotional roots do you feel drew you in that direction?

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Yeah, deserve, I love your questions. I would

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say that it's certainly my hereditarily—that's not a word—let's just say hereditary, what I inherited, which was a long lineage of an existential sort of angst or sort of melancholy and even at times depression. So,

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there's that. And I would also say just this real kind of curiosity and being sort of drawn towards deep exploration of the mystery of life. And so what was your first sort of stepping into this particular exploration?

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Well, it's funny because I had pulled this out recently, which was like, oh my, cool singer's ridiculous books, which has touched many lives in good and bad ways. I've been going back through it, and it's funny because I used to give this book to everyone, and I truly believed that it was

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incredible for everyone. But when I started reading it again a year ago, I couldn't get past the first 10 pages because I was appalled by what I was reading. Anyway, so I read that

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when I was, you know, I was 25. I was

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very lost. I was sort of in this existential conundrum, and even like I couldn't be present in life and, you know, neurotic ruminating thinking. And I picked up this book, and it seemed to, you know, to really have the

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answers. It was kind of that the beginning of feeling like I'd been let in on that big secret that, you know, it was kind of a whistleblower on personal reality and this sort of beginning of the beginning

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of the end of me, if you will. But it was the, you know, this idea that you're not your thoughts started kind of in a slow, slow way, but you're not your thoughts. And the, you know, the reason why you

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suffer is solely because of your, you're thinking and your desire for things to ever be different than what they are. And yo

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to form that he had me go with me to change his name to Eckhart and um The Power of Now and I was thinking the other day would anyone have picked it up if it was called The Power of

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self-annihilation which I highly doubt um it is very um smartly sort of packaged as just a way to be present in self-help so the I say the beginning of the industry of self-destruction to disguise the self-development uh right

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so we have ego death in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble um but back to the story so I read Eckert The Power of Now and I'm utterly blown away like a lot of people are when they read it

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um and it really was the entry of that what is the sort of the one problem one solution formula of no self no suffering right so your go to bed suicidal you have some kind of an experience in the night and you wake up

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in the morning in a state of what he calls Enlightenment said happily as he described on park benches for two years in a state of persistent and Perpetual Bliss psychologists call that dissociation patriarchal spirituality calls that Awakening yeah what how do

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you think he survived on that bench do you think people well I mean I believe I I may be mistaken but I think he was living in Canada uh I I don't know if he had a job or if he was on welfare I mean

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if you're on welfare and um it can cover your bills um that that'd be kind of blissful for a certain brief period of time for some of us I think um uh and I don't know I mean I think

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the way he describes it is I mean to me when I read the intro to the power of self-avoidance which I've called up for years I am I just didn't buy it I just I don't believe trauma is resolved overnight I I

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think he found a seam that allowed him to stay alive in a suicidal Consciousness and if there's nothing wrong with going out into the world and teaching that the same that you found is a way for people to stay alive until

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they're ready to drop back into their bodies and but for me the giveaway with toilet I used to call him that heart Tolle the giveaway for me was that I couldn't feel any aliveness coming off of him there was the EP I would fall

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asleep when he talked and I thought this is a very strange version of Awakening or aliveness when the body seems to be completely dead and all I hear is a really Powerhouse mind bashing the vine but yet living inside of the mind it's

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the great irony of patriarchal spirituality they blame the mind and then they go and it's literally into the mind in order to tame the mind they don't want to drop down into the feelings of their body because we know

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what happens then they become suicidal again so I don't know how it worked I mean I think that he became famous Oprah who I think has a bypassing tendency was drawn to this for her own reasons um it got sold all over the world and

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then now it's getting deconstructed because reality is forcing all of us to ground at our bodies and realizing that it just doesn't work that way and you don't call your tender wounded as a pain body like you're talking about a car

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part and it all starts to look ridiculous and dissociated but at that time it was like an opportunity to see ourselves through a different lens exactly it was very um it was very yeah a new a very new radical thing that

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helped a lot of people so it is I think we talked about that before that I don't think either of us are denying that there are you know some some good presence pointers in there and things like that but I I say with all these

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things that it's a little bit like and I didn't make this metaphor up but it's a bit of like a nectar laced with poison and that's kind of what you drink with a lot of these people yeah I mean I mean

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it's fine I agree with you I mean I think that when you call an Enlightenment we have a problem yes but when you say I'm a really [ __ ] up guy and I absolutely haven't resolved tons of stuff but I

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found some sort of meditative or witnessing oriented techniques that have helped me to get a bit of distance and perspective on my stuff then I don't have a problem with that but when you frame that dead energy as something

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enlightened I don't think at the end of the day you're actually helping anybody I think that for real serious trauma survivors you're leading the farther away from the field of self but where the healing has to occur and I've had

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many many people write me before killing themselves and people who knew people who had and quite often they read these kinds of books and it led in a horrific Direction because they became dissociated and were convinced that nothing was real nothing they felt none

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of their trauma none of their work does we'll talk about your experience with that and that's what got me going I thought well this isn't really helpful it's it's helpful for a relatively intact person to pull up and out of the

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neurotic Western mind or something and get perspective but hardcore trauma survivors should really not have anything to do with these kinds of teachings no they shouldn't and I also don't like you said I I don't I think it harms at

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this point I think it may harm more people than it helps to have these one problem one solution things that turn you against your yourself and your mind but um it helped me immensely with thinking I mean it the problem is that it took me

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from an overactive mind to a vacuous mind at a certain point where it wasn't none of these teachings are about bringing anything into balance I think that when you see it from perspective that it's radical and balance just

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swinging things from one extreme to the other to see how how unhealthy that is um it's just not necessary to do that um but yeah I mean the thing that his book started doing and I didn't really get super hardcore until I got into

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um like life without without a center with Jeff Foster and then yeah at the end of your world and um I yeah so it sort of begins that sort of orwellian Truth inversion right where it's the true self you're a false self so your

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problem is a case of a mistaken identity and there's an imposter inside of you and that's you essentially who thinks your name is Jessica Nathanson how dare you yeah that thinks that they're a person you think you exist as an individual and

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that's why you suffer and you're also pathological so one of the things I picked up from Eckhart Tolle's book that's really frightening is that it's this pathology pathologization is that a pathologically okay you know what I'm saying pathology making everyone

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into having a pathology merely because they think that they're a person so in a way it's pathologizing Humanity well and and that's and ironically calling it the new Earth but I used to call it the new bars because there's no honoring of The

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Human Experience and any of this or lineage or story or booby or ancestry or gefilte fish none of it any of it all of it it's it's a it's a it's a it's a good uh story for as long as it lasts but it doesn't

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last for very not even really a good one because it would be an unpopulated Earth at that point and I think it's actually quite ominous when you look at a title like the end of your world by adishanti

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to hear that it's really an apocalypse and it's not being said that it's anything other than that but anyway so um yeah so then you kind of get into these this false ultimatum which is like you can either suffer forever you know

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trapped in this me prison with ignorance and being asleep or you can commit ego psych and I say it in that way because a lot of the people that I was reading were talking about it in that way ego

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death destroy annihilate eradicate burn down you know it's they instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water these guys actually rip out the bathtub and burn the house down so um it's it's that idea of that kind of

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divine suicide of die before you die to realize there's you know no such thing as death and I've come back lately to this phrase and I think it's a good example of the really kind of mysterious and confusing weird inversions of

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language that is often used which is only the false can be destroyed you've probably heard something to that extent so the idea of being well don't worry because all you're going to be lose there's nothing to lose except for lies

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there's nothing to lose except for illusion and delusion and who doesn't want to rid themselves of delusion um but really that um yeah that that's you know if it's something that's temporary it's not real which at this point I realize that

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that's just a complete fallacy um but yeah so that uh Divine suicide and for me somebody who had a terror Terror of mortality this helped me incredibly this whole kind of you know um dissolve the one who is afraid to die

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dissolve the one who's suffering um self no suffering and it does it can work temporarily maybe for some long term but we know what the sacrifices are to to do such a thing um but yeah I mean from there on

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I went through sort of what I see as kind of like a funnel that people are kind of pushed through on this path and um you know thousands of people that you hear from are they end up in that

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addiction phase where they're addicted to these videos and you'll find it funny that a lot of people find Eckhart Tolle's voice very comforting and soothing I mean I thought he was hilarious I thought he was this hilarious spiritual comedian which he

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really is um you know he had some strange Mystique to him but anyways it was his voice it was Alan Watts it was Adia Shanti it was Rupert's Byron he's sort of hypnotizing voices that were helping me stay clean

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of my addiction to self um helping me you know when I astray back into thinking that I'm real or that problems are really a problem Etc so who knows how many hours I spent doing that in all the people that are

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um coming to uh to me now and who are part of uh well a growing support community are trying to kick that addiction you know um of listening and listening and listening um and just being sort of pummeled with

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these derealization and depersonalization messages um that really does start to indoctrinate you in a way um and brainwash you but um the next thing that I got to was the life without a center and I mean for me at the time it was like

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this was such a holy grail for me and I I really for a long time felt really nothing but happy and liberated and even you know feeling more mature because I felt like I didn't need anything outside of me I now realize and I think that you

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probably will appreciate this is the idea that you know people who were neglected growing up or experienced um like psychological Trauma from caregivers that really what they're telling you is self self-soothing that you don't need um you know you don't need anyone else

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to soothe you when you know you're you could be somebody who was not soothed as a baby or a child you know starving for the Attunement and affection of another person and they're telling you that you don't need that so yes a double-edged

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sword again it's great to not be overly dependent on external situations but you know radical isolationism is not the solution either um so yeah so this next thing that happens is this idea that the reason why you're depressed is because you're

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trying to hold up a sense of being somebody and really kind of goading you just just drop that you know just unburden yourself of a self and that also really spoke to me but but really when you look back to it I think

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people are more depressed in terms of holding up a self I think it's more that a lot of times you're holding up a sense of self that is based on what other people want you to be and you haven't

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really created or discovered what feels like an authentic sense of Jessica or Jeff yeah yeah so let me speak to that for a second I I think this is this is the trick of it all so so they show up and really the way I see

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almost all of them is that they're all hardcore trauma survivors who don't understand that you can be in the self and have a joyous experience because they haven't had one so they all they know is suffering themselves so it

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makes sense they would want to find some sense of sort of placid in Equanimity or something of the neutralization of the self in order to just have a break from their suffering there's no ecstasy there really because they're they call it

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Bliss but there's no Bliss because there's no self to be blessed but you know I think and I think Byron Katie is a good example of this she tells a very similar silly story at the beginning of her main book about being a mess and

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then waking up and she's not a mess anymore um and what I find interesting is that what what they're appealing to often in even just day-to-day people who are not hardcore sufferers is the fact that they haven't found out who they really are

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say on a sacred purpose level in a conditioned world that uh overwhelming survivalistic world where you become what you have to become to put food on the table most people have never thought about who they are on an

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authentic level and that's true the problem is the trick is they're not leading you there they're leading you further away from that because the further you get away from the self and the experience of embodiments the further you get away from identifying

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the true self and the authentic experience of the body so that's the game we're going to turn around your story and sometimes it's good you go yeah I could look at it a different way through a non-conditioned lens but if

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the real goal of that is to take you so far away into this buddhistic land of nothingness you've actually not served a higher purpose for anybody on this planet and now they are miles and miles and far far far away from being able to

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come back down into their bodies and figure out and make distinctions between false self true self false path true path survivalistic identifications authentic identifications you will not find it in no self land go there for a while if you need to clear some

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patterning but you've got to come back into this beautiful glorious human story in order to find the story that's right for you right and that's of course you know the story is such a massive yeah they love that they love to bash the

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story as though every single part of my my booby and the soup and the building me and the loving me all of that is annihilated she's annihilated it's all because she was missing thinking she loved her grandson Jeffrey was a complete

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misidentification she had no idea who she was she had no idea who I was so there couldn't possibly be anything genuine about that experience it's such a disparaging and discrediting of the beautiful elements of the human story in

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a quest for the annihilation of every part of it that you end up well tell us where you ended up yeah and I'll just say quickly about the story part is that the sad thing is that they're they

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they've reduced a human to a story or a person to a story when a story is a part of a human it's not the whole thing and they're saying that so um right so and is also you were saying

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that's part of the the kind of pull for the game whatever you're going to call it is that um what really gets programmed into you is that the authentic self is nobody so any type of personal sense of self is immediately

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inauthentic yeah the absolute self is the only self there is there can't be a uniquely Jessica Nathanson path or purpose encoded in you with the bones of your being that you're born to live out and bring to the world all of that is

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preposterous all there is is this amorphous non-individuated apps absolute self-hood state or something heartbreaking because you get the capital S self the lowercase s self and the fact that they give that amorphous awareness or whatever you call it the

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name self really I think really um [ __ ] with people's heads and I mean it makes sense um so yeah so of course you know along this path there's the dissolution where I experienced uh you know a massive you

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know what I would have called sort of like an ego blowout you know Suddenly It's just boundless kind of open awareness with no sense of self or even being encased within a physical body and it's radically radically Serene

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and there's no perceiver Etc and you know I kept wanting to deepen into that and so these are kind of the days of boundlessness and you hear that word over and over the boundless pristine you know Immaculate perfect uh

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you know infinite awareness and there's a lot of insights here that were helpful but boundlessness became my sort of started to become more of a a default and what I later realized and this comes back to trauma is that you know what so

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many people need is not boundlessness our problem for so many is not that we have strong two strong boundaries so we do often have over defensiveness but especially trauma survivors it's you know that you need to strengthen a

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healthy set of boundaries so that was only being further eroded um and so there was this very slow kind of erosion of personality and personhood this so I wanted to just get to this point where um looking back there was a real for

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some of these people was a real like language of violence and a sense of violence in this whole sort of waking up thing and so you know I had and again when I named names of people I'm fully

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aware that there are good aspects of them but when I got to adiashanti in the end of your world there was a lot of talk of things like you know the maybe it wasn't that book specifically but there's one quote that I remember that

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was like every moment of transcendence is a mortal blow to the ego there was again all this talk of like burning down and you know eradicating and just it was just a stage of radical destruction or deconstruction and breaking everything

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down into its constituent parts and it like you said before sort of like evaporating into dust but I'm just gonna speed up a little bit to get so we can get more to the present day and I've told the story a lot and you'll hear it

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in other conversations but that kind of slow erosion of personality and that everyone experiences that goes down these paths and ends up finding you know uh the the kind of perils of it is this loss of motivation this but what it came

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with was also more access to these like states of radical contentment but that radical contentment is a demotivating type of contentment because it just feels like there is nothing to do there's nothing to say there's nowhere else I need to be why go to a concert

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you know why you know go hang out with friends and have conversations with illusory dream characters um that's what it felt like so yeah it just got to this point where more and more I became just an emptied

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out sort of um you know this is speeding up a bit but shell of a person and I'm gonna read another Shanti quote because I think it is important to to see some of these things that we often don't necessarily

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hear when talking about them is that without emotional investment in the ego's point of view what is left but what is left of ego but a hollow shell with a little bit of Personality mixed in and looking back I think wow you know

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it is so such a for foreboding or for foreshadowing of of what happened and what happens to so many people is getting to that point where they feel dehumanized they feel subhuman um I call some people subhuman superheroes or that's what they feel

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like to me or what I felt like to myself at some point but just realizing that you know we've gone from these outgoing enthusiastic people who thrived on connection and you know adventure and things like that in a healthy way are

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now sort of they're not interested in you know I get heartbreaking emails from people that are like you know I used to love art and I used to love reading and music and now all kind of just dead to me I've gotten

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several emails of people who said they dropped out of school because they were you know they were passionate about you know ex-subject and now it just feels meaningless or just that they are in such a state of you know radical

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derealization and dissociation that they can't keep up with it um so you know loss of a lot of your passions um and just feeling like you've become a zombie um and that did happen to me at one point

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um for as much as I had become you know awakened and ego dissolved it was just this sort of really scary feeling of like kind of made a strange deal with the devil um and really what got me in the end to

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starting to need to get out of it was realizing that I could barely have relationships anymore I couldn't hardly carry on conversations without being exhausted after the first sentence um and just really that kind of like I said that sort of I you know I had

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listened to Rupert Spira a lot in one of my big pointers was kind of like falling back into what is prior to all content and I really kind of I'd really kind of been sucked into this background awareness

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um where it felt like it was very hard for me to come forward into the the land of self um and interaction and to to gather myself in from that boundlessness was very hard um and yeah so relationships

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um I realized you know am I gonna am I gonna sacrifice Having You Know Rich Intimate Relationships for the rest of my life um you know I might be able to do that and just be in like Serene no self land

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but started to get to me that like that might not be what I really want um and then of course you know it did spin out into some like harrowing loss of agency and some real kind of dissociative episodes that were you know

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not healthy and very scary so um I I'm gonna speed through this part too but I have to thank Jeff Foster at the same time because while he was the one that led me into this life without a

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center he also had realized over time that he had been part of neoadvaita which he called a Loveless cult um and at a retreat of his I went and um his whole tune had changed to not self-abandonment but self-befriending

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and self-compassion and his the whole thing collapsed right there that I'd never heard such a concept and just like if I had been told that instead of just Transcendence wouldn't I had gone for that like this seems so much depends

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when it depends when hence when it depends when you're right but at this point it was like I just felt devastated that I had gone down this path of the self you know self-eradication when I could have been on this other more

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humanistic path um that's when it was just like rapid fire seeing all the kind of tragic elements of of um of the no self no suffering path and um you know feeling like I had really kind of died in a way and I was sort of

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in an afterlife that uh you know was a kind of period of like rebirthing and re-authoring a new sense of self um and yeah I mean it took years for me to get to get through a lot of grief and a lot

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of what happened was all my trauma started coming back I kind of had a you know some people call it Kundalini I don't relate to it fully as that but what happened at the moments that I started turning towards

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myself with self-compassion that everything I had been pushing away just rushed to the surface like Pandora's Box you know and realizing that I had really been I'd worked through some stuff in therapy during this time but there was a

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hell of a lot of it still there um and it was showing me that and that the path forward was self-compassion and you know things like inner child work a lot of the stuff that you talk about um and really opening my heart to

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suffering rather than trying to you know get rid of it Burning Down the one who Burning Down the one who suffers which is what a lot of these people say is the the sacred purpose of suffering is to

Speaker A

basically you know is self-immolation if you will um aren't they funny people you know um and this may just be my sort of male perspective or Intuition or something but absolutely um so this is coming from not Jeff Brown

Speaker A

just a perspective um and not Jeff Brown says that um I would watch that card to Sean T and you know even Jack cornfield and certainly Jeff Foster all of them and all I saw apart from the desperately

Speaker A

egoic need to be seen as the one while completely bashing wanting to allegedly dissolve the ego was was anger they all just seem such like such Angry Angry Men angry at life angry itself angry at feelings angry at the feminine

Speaker A

angry at the body remember I can't remember it was Tooele was with maybe it was uh Tammy Simon um they were doing some kind of conversation about 9 11 it was just the way he was sort of mocking the people

Speaker A

and I thought you know I mean eckhart's just strikes me as just an absolutely a rich kid to being that's just my personal response to him and I just think all of them are just angry father muckers um masquerading as some kind of blissful

Speaker A

Captain Bliss characters none of them actually ever feel happy to me like it it never feels to me like they've achieved anything that feels good or buoyant or light or soft or surrendered or sweet it just feels like some some kind of a 18-hour a

Speaker A

day meditation clamoring for pseudo Equanimity until their partner shows up and they have an argument and realize how super [ __ ] up they really are any questions their ideology yeah right absolutely well or just or just what

Speaker A

comes up in the presence of The Human Experience when you haven't been able to convince everybody around you to go no self I mean then you've got a real problem you're married to a selfer and you're a no selfer and oh my God where

Speaker A

did we go from other divorce happens yeah yeah absolutely but of course on one half of it there's really nobody there to divorce so I don't even know how they go through a legal process they're not entity but that's a lot of

Speaker A

other questions so so now so in terms of anger um where do you sit with your anchor not only in relation to early life experiences stuff that you pushed away but do you feel angry and how are you experiencing anchor in

Speaker A

relation to what you've now realized about these very dangerous teachings yeah and this is a hard thing for me because I also realized like anger is something that I suppress my whole life because I had an angry and angry

Speaker A

caregiver who kind of you know stifled me on anger and I learned to see anger as just something just something awful because it wasn't healthy it wasn't expressed in a healthy way but so I've been through real real days of anger and

Speaker A

rage because there is a lot of people who are their lives are being completely devastated in unhealthy ways um and people are people are dying you know and that's that's at the extreme but you know when you get emails from

Speaker A

hundreds of people in varying states of dysfunction and down maddening rabbit holes of derealization and depersonalization and nihilism and you know isolation just horrible horrible things um and we're not talking about a handful of people here you know it's a I would

Speaker A

say there could be Millions who knows if you think of how many oh no I think there were Millions a large Facebook group and I'm imagining that you hear stories like this I've received thousands and thousands you know what this stuff is made of and it

Speaker A

is tragic it's really hardcore and you know I think apart from the suicidal ideation that often emerges for trauma survivors who are trapped in these places you know we are it's very obvious that our species is in trouble our capacity to live on

Speaker A

this planet is is questionable all the rest of that and you know for me with so many people dissociated not with their boots on the ground not with their hearts on their sleeves not finding something purposeful to bring to the world what are the

Speaker A

chances that we're going to be able to actually preserve the species um because and there are all many forms of dissociation in our world I mean this is where we're talking about one of them but I think it's one that because of the

Speaker A

way in which spirituality was set up where nobody was allowed to diss it I mean I I mean I I went through years of this in social media posting stuff where nobody was and and people would come on and you know

Speaker A

just bash the fact that I had critically reviewed spirituality they and these were people who were critically reviewing the political world they were activists they were all kinds of things but something somehow the guru had worked this so [ __ ] brilliantly

Speaker A

that spirituality became something that you never critically review and as a result people who walk down these roads don't have books to turn to as an example don't have other teachings to listen to that will remind them that what they're

Speaker A

doing may in fact be dangerous do they can still proceed and they'll make their own choice but it's important that they have all of these perspectives available to them before they walked out a road that might kill them that's right and um

Speaker A

yeah I mean in terms of anger also and just some insight into you know um how much work it's going to take and takes a lot of people to extricate themselves from this is that there really is something that you realize is that

Speaker A

you're radically deprogrammed you know that you're everything you think is true is not um and then you're reprogrammed with a new Rigid authoritarian ideology that you often don't see is there especially if you've you know really gone deep into

Speaker A

kind of dissolution of Concepts and not type of stuff that you come out of it and you know I did I just realized I am [ __ ] up on Concepts you know the absolute and the relative and the big

Speaker A

self and the little self and all of the stuff that you know I know a lot of people that are now calling um uh cult Recovery Specialists because they're I've been learning a lot about um Dynamics and spiritual abuse and

Speaker A

there is a real pattern of the criteria a lot of the criteria of that um of course absolutely these teachings are all cultist teachings um on every level the nature of patriarchal spirituality is cultists it's designed it's it there's always a

Speaker A

godjectified guru in these structures they're always denying the veracity of the ego while taking the one seed is the one who knows I mean it's all of this is called this um and particularly confusing and dangerous if the culture in is one that

Speaker A

has convinced you that the self isn't real so now you don't have a self to move from to Intuit from to react from to enrage from to claim this is [ __ ] once you start to realize you're being

Speaker A

[ __ ] with solid because with heartbreaking thing with so many people it's just that constant gaslighting of well that's just the ego talking you know and you can't you know you can't understand this from rationality so any

Speaker A

way that you're basically you know barred from being able to break it down rationally because you've been so kind of shamed and twisted into thinking that this is just beyond logic so anything that you say or anyone else says is

Speaker A

automatically can't touch it um so there's a total mind [ __ ] it's just a complete mind [ __ ] while they're busy crashing and blaming the mind for every single issue that we have and meanwhile they're working from within the mind to

Speaker A

control the mind while telling you that your mind is the problem it's so filled with irony all of this a long time to unravel the The Matrix The Matrix of it and it can be really shocking to see the

Speaker A

extent of it but you picked up on something important in terms of the survival of the species and everything that's happened you know in the last how many years with you know authoritarian powers that be in politics and globalism and you know I

Speaker A

would even say you know like the walk the woke culture um well we get back into sleeping we're gonna go and down another Rabbit Hole um but just this real sense lately of you know people are not independent

Speaker A

thinkers anymore and you know free thought and free speech is under attack everywhere you look and then I turn back to what I had been through and these um you know these uh anti-intellect type of spiritualities are really

Speaker A

are really not going to help us to you know resist being programmed by any authoritarian power because because that's not real well it's eroding your it's it's crippling it's crippling our thinking and I just one of the things that I've come to is

Speaker A

that yes a lot of us suffer a lot from overthinking and ruminating but it's not about getting rid of thinking it's about healing patterns of thinking and it's about thinking in healthier ways and thinking more critically I've come to

Speaker A

you know this real value of like wise critical discernment I'll even say that you know I'm become a healthy skeptic because it's like 99 of the stuff out there in spirituality to me is deceptive it's dangerous it's you know it's taking

Speaker A

people further into the dark than than into the light um and so yeah in terms of looking at Evolution we really have to turn towards uh you know turn towards thinking in more evolved ways rather than not thinking or deading

Speaker A

on them and living our life with a center um so that we can make clear distinctions between what's real and what isn't so we can spot that's real that's real spirituality so that we can make the distinction between

Speaker A

the Tyrant to masquerades as benevolent which is happening it has always happened it is certainly happening right now in Canada and you know justifies the clumpy data freedom of speech and expression and it masquerades it behinds all kinds of diversionary cliches that

Speaker A

will fool people into thinking that they're cared for when in fact all they want is be to be What globalist leader of all this leaders I mean it's it's becoming more and more obvious to me and and it's it's problematic because

Speaker A

technology allows them to overwhelm Consciousness more than it was already overwhelmed by marketing constructs and gives them powers and access and data and information to manipulate Consciousness and the real war between a freedom-oriented critical grounded centered Consciousness and whatever that

Speaker A

other thing is which is the annihilation of the self in a different way but really the same way I mean I realized at some point that for me Tolle and any politician who was really annihilating the self was the same guy

Speaker A

was the same guy yeah so so going forward for you now so you so your D you're beautifully and brilliantly and I I I'm so proud of you even though I you know I mean I've only just met you but I'm I'm I'm so

Speaker A

delighted that you know I've been doing this stuff for a long time and I've been calling out many of those people that you mentioned in fact every one of them I've called out different ways and I seldom fine and people resonate with

Speaker A

my work and they agree with parts of it and it's beautiful but it's hard to find people out there who are not only deconstructing it but interested in crafting and new methodology that is a more grounded reality based truly Consciousness

Speaker A

inclusive self-honoring distinction making critically thinking version of spirituality that really begins and maybe perhaps even ends within the body itself um rather than in the float away from it um so I'm just kudos to you for for doing this it gives me a hope for

Speaker A

Humanity people who like me who write these things and we have followings and it's wonderful to be supported but we always know that there are millions of other people that need to hear this message and we can't get it to them

Speaker A

because the drum beat of dissociation is so loud and so powerful um and so coercive on many different levels and so insincere and therefore more effective as a marketing construct so apart from deconstructing it in the deconstructing of it and we need Decades

Speaker A

of that don't let anyone ever tell you enough is enough of that um in terms of the building of something different um and soon um where are you with that yeah it's a great question because I am very much you know I go back and forth

Speaker A

between those two things the deconstruction and the Reconstruction reconstruction right but um I mean and I think what I what I have turned towards it's a harder sell than you know the dissociation or in a lot of ways but

Speaker A

it's really that you know suffering can serve the purpose of breaking our hearts open open to our suffering to our trauma open to other people to empathy to compassion and really a sense of um of real camaraderie and unity and

Speaker A

interconnection with the human race and with the human condition as you know um as you know really um being being a member of a you know Human family if you will and so I think that you know a big thing for me is you

Speaker A

know taking the Transcendent down into the um you know if you're going to call it the personal or the imminent or whatever but healing that split of spirit versus matter which is extremely dual in what's happening in you know what's being

Speaker A

considered non-dual um so healing not split and then rather than um you know going to this kind of Oneness only no separateness is really um is really uh widening our perspective which is you know taking in the hole but

Speaker A

then to act and engage in the world with that wider angle view um that I I've thought of a little bit as kind of like a world-centric view and I think that we need that and I also think

Speaker A

um you know really that um really encouraging us to see ourselves in our small existence is actually extremely significant and each person you know that your individuality is not is you are special you know this whole thing of trying to be special or

Speaker A

thinking you're special is a problem and self-centered is that everyone's special because they exist and really um for me I think that um heart of spirituality is Wonder and awe and is being able to for me it's gone

Speaker A

and I would like to suggest for others like rather than seeking the sort of like spiritual Perfection or perfectionism is like preciousness it's like returning to having the eyes to see the immense Miracle of you and of me and

Speaker A

there's so much suffering but if we open our heart to it and help you know allow that to deepen our you know interwovenness um that that can really be what serves as a foundation and then of course you

Speaker A

know this this both and the this either or thinking in every sphere of the world really we have to we have to move to both and thinking um and yeah in terms of evolution I think it's much more about that um

Speaker A

you know I've said the uni duel which I get from from Tim freak is being individuals who are also unified with one another um and so yeah I can say it's been a little bit of a I could say a path from

Speaker A

self-abandonment to to self-compassion sorry I'm picking up my cat okay here we go and definitely lots of cats and animals um but yeah I think that that that's that's a big part of it and you know I I do

Speaker A

want to say to to people that are you know in these paths that say that you know in order to have Oneness you have to disappear is that no we get to be a part of that Oneness um and that we are yeah just that

Speaker A

everything is is so significant because because it's here and it's real and you've said in real men and and I had a like a kind of new understanding of that and he had said it and it's really you

Speaker A

had said something like being all that being all that you are or all that we are again being presence as a whole being experience that's really what we're talking about um right right every every aspect of this experience welcomed at the table

Speaker A

and the honoring the absolute honoring of the uniqueness of your particular path and purpose and orientation in this lifetime and and absolutely distinguishing all of that from the male conditioning and the survivalistic adaptations of disguises that have oriented our consciousness

Speaker A

but again not moving away from the self learning how to you know I mean I I think it would be an interesting question if we could get this Oneness right I mean Oneness like me one me you one if we could just get that right

Speaker A

and then ask the question how does this interface with the Oneness um I would be interested to see how all of this looks from that perspective but we keep jumping out of the healing and integrating and becoming present for the

Speaker A

Oneness the jeffness the jessicaness we get out we leave it so quickly because of the pain and the discomfort and the disorder the reasons to dissociate that I don't think we have any idea what we're talking about when

Speaker A

we're talking about its inclusivity or non-duality of Consciousness because we're not inclusive or even non-dual or unified within the self itself and my work really is to convey to people that that's where we're at as a species that's where we need to stay and then

Speaker A

when we get that right let's start talking about whether or not we even have any interest in or have a totally different perspective on this whole question of something called non-duality or Transcendence like where Birds may all just seem like the dumbest

Speaker A

and most ridiculous thing that was really birthed in the discomforts of The Human Experience and now that we're more comfortable than our bodies we don't even have anything yeah and you said inclusivity and that's another piece of it is wholeness and wholeness means

Speaker A

including everything you know there was in this novel world that wholeness could be achieved by rejecting something they call it non-duality it's Preposterous if they bash the body the ego personhood the selfhood the feelings the story everything everything human has been

Speaker A

removed from the non-dual field I think that's just called the celebration of automatism or the becoming of a robot and that's not really any kind of a duality that's going to serve us yeah but and wholeness means embracing a lot

Speaker A

of [ __ ] that we don't want to embrace but it's worth it it really is I don't think we have a choice extensions again so um so thank you for your courage for rebraving yourself um in this lifetime and I look forward

Speaker A

to reconnecting when you reach the next stage of whatever this is that's beautifully happening inside of you well I deeply appreciate having discovered you and being a part of this and I can if I can just say that for anyone who's

Speaker A

listening who um is seeking support with going through any of this that um we'll put hopefully somewhere and if there's a description somewhere yeah contact because I am um I am starting an online community soon for people who are recovering from

Speaker A

all of this um we'll have we'll have those looks that's perfect thank you Jessica bye foreign

Topics:nondualityNeo-Advaitaspiritual bypassgrounded spiritualityself-negationemotional healingpatriarchal spiritualityinstant enlightenmentembodimentheart-centered spirituality

What is self-negating nonduality as discussed in the video?

Self-negating nonduality refers to spiritual teachings that deny the ego and emotional body, often leading to suppression of feelings and spiritual bypass rather than true healing.

Why does Jessica Nathanson criticize the Neo-Advaita movement?

Jessica criticizes Neo-Advaita for promoting instantaneous enlightenment without preparatory work, which can cause emotional torment and prevent genuine healing and integration.

What alternative to self-negating spirituality do Jeff and Jessica propose?

They propose a grounded, embodied, heart-centered spirituality that embraces the full human experience, including emotions, boundaries, and the integration of both absolute and relative aspects of being.

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