Today, South Australians are heading to the polls. As I’ve watched this campaign unfold, something has been sitting with me — the degree to which our political conversations have become so polarised, so us-versus-them.
I’ll be upfront: I lean left. That’s not a secret to anyone who knows me. And like most things in life, I find myself looking at politics through a spiritual lens.
Dualism and Non-Duality
In meditation, we talk a lot about dualism — the tendency of the mind to split reality into opposites. Us and them. Winners and losers. Mine and yours. Non-dual awareness is the capacity to see beneath those divisions, to recognise our interconnectedness.
These two orientations map pretty neatly onto our political divide. The right tends to see the world as a contest — there are winners and losers, and the goal is to be a winner. Work hard, earn your place, don’t expect others to carry you. The left tends to believe we should lift everyone up together — that a world where we’re all winning is actually possible. The right sees this as naive. The left sees the winner/loser framing as the very thing that holds us back.
Both sides have a point. And both sides think the other is missing something fundamental.
What Waking Up Does to Your Politics
Here’s the part that I know is controversial, but I’ll say it anyway: in my experience, as people deepen their practice and begin to wake up — as the sense of separation softens and non-dual awareness grows — they tend to move in the direction of the left. Not because of ideology, but because they start to genuinely feel their interconnectedness with others. The “every man for himself” worldview becomes harder to sustain when you directly experience that there is no firm boundary between self and other.
What I find spiritually interesting is that the us-versus-them narrative — which populist leaders exploit so effectively — is a deeply dualistic one. It’s activating, it’s tribal, and it keeps people locked in division.
Whether you vote today or not, it seems like a good moment to ask: am I seeing clearly, or am I caught in a story about who the enemy is?
