The ZDoggMD Show

True lies such as self-help is hopeless, "selfless leadership" is anything but, and spiritual bypass IS THE WHOLE POINT 🔥 The innocent, impersonal simplicity of THIS. Kat Van Oudheusden's books, free Zoom meetings, and more here.

• Why Kat’s personal story and “how I woke up” don’t make sense anymore, and the relief when story stops mattering
• Why seekers cling to the story of what Kat did, and what it’s like being a female voice in the male-dominated radical non-duality space
• The two extremes: “no one here, nothing to do” versus “we’re all love and a higher version of me,” and why they meet in a circle
• How self-inquiry can use the selfing mechanism to short-circuit itself
• Natural inquiry versus “artificial” inquiry from YouTube teachers, and life disillusioning beliefs one at a time
• Why everyone sees this in their own sequence, and how the mind turns whatever happened just before into the teaching
• Kat’s six aspects of no self and the essential inquiries in her book Seeing No Self
• Testing inquiries with more than 100 people over three years, mostly by WhatsApp
• Inquiry as a framework without a fixed path, process, or recipe
• Zubin’s early intellectual understanding, the energetic knot, and the belief that things always work out for the best
• If there is no doer, does “stop seeking” even make sense, and how radical non-duality and inquiry compare
• Zubin’s fossil record of contradictory expressions, from stages of enlightenment to “there is nothing to do”
• “We’re all liars”: no one can speak the truth about non-duality, and 8 billion versions are equally true or untrue
• Why judging another version of non-duality means you don’t understand it
• “I am no one” as another form of selfing, and freedom when it’s all seen as impersonal
• COVID, “alt-middle,” and how all positions were seen as impersonal
• Irreversible seeing versus the lived experience, which can still be contracted, egoic, and selfing
• A body that isn’t owned, being 50 and 53, parenting, and playing roles without believing in them
• The non-dual identity, and the relief when the camera turned off
• Why all of it is useful nonsense, and how Rupert Spira’s and Tony Parsons’s messages each landed
• Inquiry as breadcrumbs, direct recognition, and the seeking mechanism going into overdrive
• Why the spiritual world is full of ego, $10,000 retreats, and the myth of progress in being human
• Donald Hoffman’s nightly meditation, and Zubin’s spontaneous inquiry into materialism versus consciousness
• “We’re all end-stage seekers,” and the seahorse analogy for belief in a separate self
• The pretend game of separation, TED talks, and years working in university systems
• Why nobody wants what impersonal offers, and the non-duality police versus the personal religion crowd in the comments
• Morality, the separate soul that needs saving, and “sinners in the hands of an angry God”
• Zubin’s unworthiness reactor, and being grateful that nothing solved it
• Never having mystical experiences, and why that makes it doubtless
• Non-duality as the next lingo, and posting insight on social media
• AI-generated clips of soundbites, and doing meetings anyway
• The recursive loop of confusion, and “my thoughts are also just this”
• The end of hope, and impersonal hope
• The descriptive versus prescriptive fallacy, and practicing non-attachment
• Why it’s all innocent, and Kat’s book title joke “Isness”
• Romantic music, the hero’s journey, and not taking any of it seriously
• Servant leadership as selfless leadership, and why a self trying to be a servant leader is the worst kind
• Zubin’s wife as an example of effortless servant leadership
• Momentary glimpses, and “where did the moment go?”
• Shadow work and internal family systems, and why digging through the trash only finds more trash
• Looking where the self is not, rather than into more of it
• Spiritual bypass: “you have to bypass,” and why accusing others of bypassing is the least spiritual thing to do
• Kat’s name, growing up in Thailand, and plans for a part two

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Polish the turd of “me” long enough and it still won’t shine. A Thursday Zen rant for anyone who’s done everything "right" and is still seeking that enlightenment fix.

From our live YouTube conversation here.

Topics:

• A warning to the seeking energy that wants to polish itself until the self disappears
• Zubin’s story: the doctor and YouTuber who was miserable no matter what he achieved
• The core sense of brokenness, unworthiness, and separation behind the seeking
• The spiritual path as becoming an enlightened self, and the books and teachers that went with it
• Meditation, self inquiry, and resting as the I am, and why it felt like torture
• Glimpses and retreat insights as experiences for a “me”
• The spiritual industrial complex and why YouTube feeds it
• A slow, torturous disillusionment with every practice and guru
• A message for seekers: there is no future, no better, and no one
• Why wanting to lose the me is the me wanting the me gone
• Shadow work and trauma stories as more of the same story
• The nuclear reactor of unworthiness, and what happened when it collapsed
• What changed: spontaneous yes and no, no more people pleasing, and a nicer guy
• Whether you need spiritual practices (if they show up, they show up)
• Preferences remain, but nobody is left to own what people think
• Comment: panic attacks, the second arrow, and life showing up as panic
• Why it feels impossible to the one who wants it
• The mirage and the water, and how nothing is rejected
• Tony Parsons and Jim Newman, and how everyone points differently
• Disillusionment with teachers, and “I’m not a teacher”
• Free will, progress, and moving through the universe
• A Star Trek tangent (Kirk versus Picard)
• Zoroastrian roots, the Avesta, and why no belief stuck
• Is “no self” just another belief, and how daily life has changed
• Is non-duality another form of escapism, and what spiritual bypass looks like
• Money, wealth, and a message with no conditions
• Zen at war and why beliefs are useless
• The word “influencer,” and the loving character underneath the oppositional one
• Money fears, doubt, and Tim Cliss’s “doubtless uncertainty”
• Supporting your kids and the fear of ending up on the street
• Would mega wealth change anything, and billionaires as powerful seekers
• Studying Zen Buddhism, and why practice is an epiphenomenon
• Why awakening seems correlated with practice
• The descriptive versus prescriptive fallacy, and teachers who sell techniques

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I sent a kid off to college and a some sort of crazy adult came back 🫣😂 WARNING: contains spiritual ego collateral damage and one ANGRY cat named The Mitch! From our YouTube Live conversation.

• Nina (Z-Pupp) is home from Vassar for fall break, and the live is for Nai Nai to see her
• Why Nina left California for a school where she knew no one
• Double majoring in music and econ, and why she didn’t go to NYU for the music business
• Chamber music, her professor, and live-streamed orchestra concerts watched at home on the big TV
• Mendelssohn, and the screen photo texted to her mid-concert
• Making friends, her surprise roommate, and the case for a small liberal arts college
• Poughkeepsie versus New York City, and the train into the city
• A violin lesson in San Francisco, playing a Sarasate duet, and favorite composers
• The one dining hall, the bagel place, and the acai bowl shop where strangers pitched Vassar to her on the college visit
• Winning a concerto competition, and Nina’s opinion of Vivaldi
• The campus petting zoo and its ferret, chinchilla, and baby kangaroo
• The Mitch the cat: escape attempts, getting caught, and Nina the cat whisperer
• Professors’ outfits, music theory capes, and the jean jacket comeback
• The Cocteau Twins, and whether they count as emo
• Whether the Mitch is fat or just fluffy, and “you can’t win with women who know everything”
• What Nina misses most about home (her car), and feeling stuck in Poughkeepsie
• San Francisco tech bros, cappuccino art, and the vocal fry of Pacific Heights
• Dining hall slop, the freshman 15 in reverse, and joining a squash class and biking
• How Stanford benefits help pay for tuition
• Drop-off night, hotel bourbon, and a musician tip from the chat
• Professor Navega’s threat to “snap her neck” for being late
• Affluent classmates, generational wealth, and debutante parties
• Parties, Halloween weekend, and Zubin’s freshman 15 at Berkeley
• Nina’s take on the awakening stuff: “we just gotta live in the here and now, even though that doesn’t exist”
• Zubin agrees that awakening talk is nonsense, and why he keeps talking about it
• Vermont hippie colleges and the leg hair debate
• Crying (or laughing) at drop-off, and doom scrolling in the rental Volvo
• Halloween costumes: a chicken onesie and a Love Island robe with dollar store snakes
• Is college worth it in the age of AI: connections, Swiffers, and learning to be an adult
• Side hustles, and “what is a Zubin” showing up in Shorts feeds
• Donald Hoffman, conscious agents, and the homunculus
• Whether the kids had an awakening: telling Nina “nothing is real” during COVID and her existential crisis at 10
• Spiritual ego, and why a “me” with a new insight wants to inflict it on its kids
• Watching Nina grow up on the channel, the Big Pharma video, and Dr. House of Cards
• “Gaffes” and “C’s get degrees” versus “P equals MD”
• The stumbling block of teaching what you just learned
• Amenemope, the Bhagavad Gita, and Nina’s plan to take it next semester
• Using AI, just not for art or music
• Zubin’s Zoroastrian upbringing and chanting from the Avesta at 11
• Zubin’s “it’s all just this” take on oneness and consciousness
• Arjuna, Krishna, and killing your brother’s army
• AI flattery, and Zubin’s British lady Claude voice in the car
• Nina’s cognitive science class, “Chat with Pat,” and why the chatbot folds under pushback
• Whether Claude is conscious, and who is having the experience
• Saying please and thank you to AI, and older people finding company in chatbots
• Waymos, who is liable when AI goes wrong, and the doomer argument
• Dallas hospitality, a midnight hotel check-in, and an Uber ride into the MAHA conspiracy
• Chatty Ubers in Poughkeepsie and New York
• Whether Dallas counts as the South
• Wrap-up, solfege, and sending Nina back to school (she’ll be back in December)

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Tobias Ricardo spent 15 years as a Hindu monk and had pretty much every spiritual experience on the menu: kundalini fireworks, blissed-out “I am” states, retreats, the works. The real freedom turned out to be seeing that all of it was happening to and for a “me” who was never actually there. If you’ve had glimpses that never seem to stick, and you keep thinking you just need one more retreat, maybe check this conversation out 😉

Click here for all my usual links, music, videos, podcast, Supporter Tribe and more.

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I sat down with Tim Cliss to talk about how nobody's home, how there's no prize at the end of the "spiritual" search, and how compassion works a lot better once there's no "you" left to get in its way. Also featured: psychedelics, ego death, and the surprisingly good news that hope is doomed 🥳

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I got an email this morning with the subject: "I died and you helped. Thanks." 😳

Here's the resulting YouTube LIVE discussion!

Topics covered:

• Reading an email from a longtime viewer describing two years of awakening, contraction, and finally the realization there was never anyone on the journey
• Why the end of seeking is surprising precisely because it's so ordinary, not some mystical attainment
• Why "unconditional love" and other spiritual language are imperfect pointers, and what they're actually gesturing at
• A follow-up phone call with email author, and what it's like when nothing lands or sticks between two people who've been through this
• Losing the impulse to fix or save other people once agency is seen through
• Compassion as natural, unforced acceptance of everything, including one's own conditioning
• The nuclear reactor analogy for how unworthiness gets walled off in childhood, and what happens when it melts down
• Processing anger and grief, including a viewer whose son is becoming homeless, and why there's no such thing as spiritual bypassing
• Revisiting the fury felt at the Hiroshima museum and how it naturally resolved
• Money, financial fear, and how the drive to "keep hustling" has changed
• Why the VPZD show and other seemingly contradictory activities still arise and make sense
• How the self attaches itself to actions after the fact to preserve the illusion of free will and agency
• The self described as a verb ("selfing") rather than a fixed thing
• Heaven, hell, and why eternity of any single experience, even pleasure, becomes hell
• Marriage, kids, and whether family changes how someone relates to death
• Closing reflections on watching a daughter start college, liberal arts education, and the peace out

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The sense of self may die, but these termites eating my house are still VERY much alive 😉

My recent livestream on TikTok. Some of the topics touched on:

Beliefs as an endless, dissolving process.

The VPZD show as a dance of conditioning between hosts and audience.

Fighting for a cause as really fighting for identity.

Communicating needs with a partner.

Book recommendations for exploring non-duality.

A partner's neediness as a mirror for one's own conditioning.

Doctor as just another fallen-away identity.

Finding meaning in a meaningless existence.

Why human consciousness defaults to negativity.

Letting go of the belief that you should be positive.

Getting contradictory antivax and pro-vax accusations back to back. Substituting one identity paradigm for another.

Reflecting on the 30s, 40s, and 50s as different flavors of seeking.

Flu shot risk tolerance and personal choice.

The shingles vaccine decision.

Nothing is happening, yet the characters keep playing their story out. Political yard signs causing friction with a spouse.

Sitting with the shock of losing a friend badly.

What is the point of any of this.

Termites, relative and ultimate reality.

Letting go of tribal fighting.

The Macklemore and Ed Sheeran controversy revisited.

Viewers sharing Macklemore songs and other political art.

Richard Wagner as beauty coexisting with bigotry.

Working with insects as a way to understand fear.

Closing thoughts on why this TikTok live feels accepting.

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A live YouTube conversation about dropping our oldest child off for college, ending with an overpriced bottle of hotel Jim Beam drunk out of plastic cups by a Homewood Suites firepit. Yeah, enlightenment ain't what the gurus have been selling us 😭😅

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Back from Japan to talk about being "alone together," why the "loneliness epidemic" is something engineered by the "me", and how bliss, grief, Fauci, and a three-dollar vintage shirt all fit into the same perfect unfolding.

Video show archive, audio podcasts, music parodies, Supporter Tribe membership options, merch, social media, and email contact form: ⁠https://lnk.bio/zdoggmd

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Alive Q+A wandering through our Sunday zoom meeting with the awakening group, to Jesus Christ Superstar, to the death of "ZDoggMD" as an identity, through moral injury, openness as the prerequisite for everything, why spirituality is a beautiful farce, and what it's like when worry about the future just stops sticking. Health 4.0 son!

Contact me, watch all the videos, and join the Supporter Tribe for future zoom meetings here.

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I tell ya, there's something about these ephemeral TikTok live conversations that just gets this Zubin character all lit up 🔥 Here's a recording just for y'all who listen to the podcast (these live shows normally go POOF immediately after airing on TikTok).

As always, you can hit me up hello at zdoggmd.com, and check out all the things here.

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A two-hour conversation with a fellow "Z" that's for no one and goes exactly nowhere. Perfect! 😅

https://www.youtube.com/@Zabi_Non-Duality

We talk about addiction as hole-filling, and the hole that can never be filled; the seeking energy and what it actually wants; the dying process of identity deconstructing in reverse order; why the sense of a separate self is not a thought but an embodied energetic misunderstanding; why there's no practice because the person can't get rid of itself; what's actually longed for (not what the mind thinks); hopelessness as freedom... the real kind; the solidity trap and why making things real is the suffering; the sense of separation as the literal root of all suffering; what happens when you die; compassion as simply this communication; the end of the comparing mind; all the struggle of me for nothing; patterns falling away spontaneously; grief and loss and awe; and liberation as the end of the need for liberation.

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No subject, no object, just phenomena arising. From my TikTok live on consciousness, hope, meaning, the freefall of no belief, and what it's like when the self-critical voice quietly stops showing up. Plus: row your boat.

Contact form, more videos, and membership options here. https://lnk.bio/zdoggmd

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One phone call with cardiologist and recovering alcoholic Rishi Menon and BOOM: we're instant Stepbrothers 😂 We dive into failing med school, 20 years of proving worthiness, recovery, suicidal ideation, burnout, the Enneagram as software, body changes after letting go, and why practice probably isn't causative but shows up anyway. Full video here.

⁠Click here for website, contact form, links to all the things, and more!

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There's really only two questions. Exploring the first can lead to a more comfy prison cell, and REALIZING the second shows there never was a prison cell at all. Both are ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.

Live conversation from the Z-Shed!

Click here for website, contact form, links to all the things, and more!

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"You" can never really trust this moment. And yet THIS, here, now, IS pure trust itself. A Friday Zen Live on the unconditional acceptance of what is, why the separate self can never surrender into this, the second arrow that never landed, and an old biker dude who took the longest dump in trail bathroom history 💩

⁠⁠Contact form, videos, links, and all the things here.

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What goes up must come down, and for the spiritual seeker, that pendulation is one of the most specific and painful flavors of suffering there is. This Friday Zen LIVE from YouTube explores why the ups and downs are the same no-thing, what natural compassion looks like when you never practiced or play-acted it, Douglas Harding's headless way, and much more.

⁠Contact form, videos, links, and all the things here.

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My baby is now at senior prom, I got a splitting headache, and somehow this is the perfect moment to talk about no-thing-ness. A Friday Zen YouTube live (4/24/26) on retreats, the seeking apparatus burning out, no-thingness appearing as everything, and why the mind is a real a-hole 🕳️

Contact form, videos, links, and all the things here.

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Nina chose Vassar — and that news kicks off a wide-ranging Monday Zen live that covers a lot of ground. We start with the "spiritual journey" in full: from burning out as a doctor, to a spontaneous awakening in Las Vegas, to years of meditation, retreats, shadow work, and psychedelics, all of it eventually collapsing into the simple recognition that it was always just this.

Along the way: why lying becomes nearly impossible when there's nothing left to protect, what every psychedelic from 5-MeO-DMT to Salvia Divinorum pointed at (spoiler: this), the honest question of whether awakening is liberation or just a very specific kind of dissociation, monogamy and marriage as story, why spiritual authority dissolves completely at some point, and how the whole journey lands you right back where you started ...except the circle never quite closes.

• Video show archive, audio podcasts, music parodies, Supporter Tribe membership options, merch, social media, and email contact form: ⁠https://lnk.bio/zdoggmd⁠

• Support us with a 1-time donation and get a personal email response from me: ⁠https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/zdoggmd⁠

• More about Dr. Z: ⁠https://zdoggmd.com/about-z/

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Just got back from spring break touring colleges with my oldest ZPupp (yeah, wasn't she just a frickin' BABY yesterday?). Rochester, Vassar, and NYU. This episode is the full debrief...the steel cut oats, the Hogwarts campus, the NYU dean who told an auditorium full of accepted students and families that it's depressing to be poor, and what all of it reveals about ambition, projection, and just letting life life itself since the script is already written, bruh. Full video, originally LIVE on YouTube, here.

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