Dr. Neil's Spiritual Awakening to Non-Duality
NEW EPISODES THE 1st OF EVERY MONTH
You may have heard about spiritual awakening. Do you know someone who is living it? Join us as Dr. Neil Schuitevoerder describes the lived experience of an advanced stage of human consciousness and shares insight for seekers of all traditions. Dr. Neil will speak from the direct experience of Being, Brahman, Sunyata, or Pure Consciousness as he transmits Non-dual Reality to you -- non-dual space/time, non-dual thinking, non-dual love, the non-dual body, and his yogic abilities to travel the cosmos, move through the bardos and, at the same time, live as a psychologist, husband, father, and grandfather. His experience dispels many myths about awakening. He will be interviewed by his partner, Dr. Connie Zweig, author of Meeting the Shadow, Romancing the Shadow, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, and the award-winning book The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul.
Dr. Neil's Spiritual Awakening to Non-Duality
Dr. Neil's Spiritual Origins
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Dr. Neil was first aware of being awake during a past lifetime in India. He recalls his physical birth, and then forgot his awakening to experience the human journey. He learned mystical practices early, but he grew sick and was told by a healer, his first teacher, that he was on the wrong path.
We're going to speak today about a little bit of history of Dr. Neil's awakening to non-duality. So when were you first aware that you were awake?
SPEAKER_01In my previous lifetime, the one before this one, I was a Hindu priest in a temple, um Shiva temple, and uh I was a Brahmin. I had two wives and five children, and I spent my 60 years in that lifetime meditating, practicing, spiritual awakening, and doing uh ceremonies for different people for their spiritual um practices.
SPEAKER_00So, as a Brahmin priest, you became rooted in what Vedanta?
SPEAKER_01Correct, yes, Vedanta, and um my daily practice was to focus and concentrate on the third eye for hours uh and opening it up. Uh, and as it open as it progressed, uh I became aware that I was not an ego, I was timeless, I was not in space and or time. I was being, I was aware. I was aware of myself and aware of the universe. And at around six, just before my 60th birthday, I passed on, I died, and uh found myself going through the different layers of um post-life experience until I arrived at a place called Brahma Loka, which is pure bliss consciousness, in which there are other beings who've attained a non-duality. I merged and melted into this state and found myself totally um, I would call it almost addicted to the state of pure bliss awareness. Uh how long I was there, I have no idea because there's no time there, there's no space there. Uh could have been moments, it could have been hundreds of years. Uh, but it's the goal of most Hindus if they can accomplish it. At some point I became aware that this bliss consciousness, while it was very enticing, was very boring, was very um, what's the right word?
SPEAKER_00Was it seducing you?
SPEAKER_01It was seductive, but it was also um there was no growth in it. There was no more knowledge in it, there was no more change in it, there was no life in it. It was uh it was like taking morphine. So and uh very enticing but boring. And so I began to look around in my own consciousness for what would take me out of this state, and I found my mother from this lifetime, uh, and she was quite neurotic, anxious, driven, competitive, pushy. And uh that was an energy that felt like it would move me and I would grow and change. Of course, I didn't particularly like it once I got into it, but uh but it was very inviting because it was the opposite of Brahmaloka. It was about never resting, never being at peace with where you are, about growing. And so I found myself starting to leave Brahmaloka and go through the various layers of reality when one is in a bodha, through a psychic reality. I guess uh the best way to describe it would be to go down the chakras, go down the different layers of consciousness until I arrived at my own conception in this lifetime. And uh that was uh beginning of becoming aware that I was um in in my mother's body, uh, and I was experiencing a fairly pleasant state, not the same as Brahma Loka Bliss consciousness, but uh warm, caring, nurturing state, uh, and which would help me grow and change and become. And I was attached to my present body and uh began to uh grow as uh as physically grow.
SPEAKER_00So I have a question. So you're using I mine, and yet you're not incarnated yet, you know, you're post-death on another plane, choosing incarnation again, beginning to descend. So who is this I in these experiences? What are you identified with? Without a body mind.
SPEAKER_01Well, as uh someone in Brahmaloka, I was identified with being, bliss, and consciousness. That was my identification. As I left Brahmaloka, I became aware of different aspects of my own consciousness that were not that, uh, that were um universal in the sense of being uh with everyone and everything, and then eventually as I entered my mother's body, being more identified with being a personal body.
SPEAKER_00And so you're in utero in your mother's body, right? And then what happens next?
SPEAKER_01Well, I grow and uh and expand my physical awareness, uh, and uh at some point the the uterus, my mother's uterus becomes too small for my physical body and somewhat toxic because it couldn't eliminate the um the byproducts of uh birth. So the um the uterus was not functioning well enough. And so then I became um aware that the environment that I was in was starting to close down, was squeezing and uh pushing and was becoming more and more uncomfortable. I guess that was my birth. At some point I felt my head being squeezed, and even to this day, uh physically there's aches and pains on the left-hand side of my body from entering the birth canal uh and uh being squeezed and pushed out into the world. Next thing I remember it was a lot of bright lights, some voices, loud voices, and um breathing, beginning to breathe.
SPEAKER_00So you consciously chose to descend into an incarnation. Yes. And what happened to the level of awareness in which you were awake in the last lifetime?
SPEAKER_01I forgot about it. You know, in uh in Judaism, there's a saying that when you're born, an angel comes and strikes your head, and you forget about everything from the past. That's more or less what happens, except there's no angel doing it, it's you doing it to yourself. Because one would become too confused and disoriented if you could hold all of the consciousness from between lifetimes and uh before this life. So the sort of goal is to become human and experience the human journey, and to do that one needs to forget the past.
SPEAKER_00So you were born into a family in South Africa.
SPEAKER_01Yes, in South Africa.
SPEAKER_00And during apartheid, yes, and you began to grow up, and you had a kind of ordinary human experience, although you had several siblings who were also quite evolved.
SPEAKER_01Yes, my sister was very much into um psychic phenomena. She was a medium uh and uh would sit on the stage and uh have transmissions. My parents were shocked and very dis very distraught. Uh, they didn't like the fact that a Jewish girl would be doing such things and went and pulled her out. But what was more important to me was the books that she left lying around uh about spiritual evolution. Um I remember one on White Eagle, who was an American native, who uh had a meditation practice, and uh around about 15 or 16 I started to practice meditation in the style of White Eagle, which was uh very uh grounded, and uh of course White Eagle was uh not incarnated and passed on, but somehow communicated in writing to the author. So that was the sort of beginning of my meditation practice.
SPEAKER_00And what appeared next?
SPEAKER_01Well, um, let's see, 16, 17. Um what appeared next was my father passing on. He died when I was 18, and I became far more intoxicated and interested in the spiritual realms.
SPEAKER_00Umtoxicated what way?
SPEAKER_01Um, I needed to find out about my father's death, what it meant. Because my family was very um quiet and silent about what was going on. I never knew he was dying until a week before he died, and yet he was seriously ill for more than a year, and I spent three months of my university um vacation just before he died taking care of him. Um, but nobody spoke about it. And so there was a deep thirst to find out about what life was about, why he died, how he died, what was it about in terms of uh where he was going and what it meant.
SPEAKER_00So the mystery of life and death came to you through your father's death.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and the fact that my sister was a medium and spoke to the dead. Oh, yeah, allowed them to speak to her. So there was some kind of awareness there. My parents were agnostic. My father believed that the holiest Jewish day was meant to be taken off work and lie in the sun and uh get a good taste. And my mother was uh a very good person, um, and her belief was that the most spiritual uh state is one of humankindness, uh, not one of attainment, spiritual attainment.
SPEAKER_00So your early life and your family life would not have led people to believe you would reach this high level of non-dual awakening. I mean, there is nothing there that would really tell us it would lead here. So, what did you find some teachers in this early time?
SPEAKER_01Awareness of my early life has grown with my awareness of more consciousness. So it's not that I remembered all of this initially. I remembered it because of various things that I went through. So, for example, I spent 10 uh sessions of hypnotherapy on the birth process and discovered myself in the womb and discovered myself um uh exiting the womb and going through excruciating pain and finally breathing and becoming alive through that process.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Ten sessions of hypnotherapy. Anything else?
SPEAKER_01Well, that was the beginning. Uh of course, um, who were my teachers at that stage? Um probably uh being Jewish, I um my parents while they were secular humanists. They were secular humanists, nevertheless had a belief that I needed a Jewish education. So they sent me to Hebrew school and I learned how to understand Hebrew, and I um had a bar mitzvah, which is the uh consecration ceremony at 13 years old for a male Jew. And I continued to be interested in Judaism. After that, I would go to temple, uh synagogue, and pray and develop a belief that there was a god, despite my mother's and father's lack of belief.
SPEAKER_00Were you doing Jewish mystical practices?
SPEAKER_01Not initially. Initially, I was just doing secular um Orthodox Judaism. A lot of prayers, a lot of singing, and there was a sense of attaining some spiritual bliss and some ecstatic state. My brother and I would go on a Friday night to temple, which is the holy day, beginning of the holy day, and we would sing the um songs that were part of the ceremony very loudly. People would look at us and say, quiet, not so loud. Uh, we were uh ecstatic.
SPEAKER_00You found joy in the singing.
SPEAKER_01There was joy, there was a connection with something deeper than just the personal. Um I think when I became uh when my father died when I was 18, I became more interested. Initially in uh Judaism, there was a a mystical teacher called Hassan, Rabbi Hassan, who taught me uh Jewish mysticism. And so I I sort of uh grew. He he thought that I had a special mind, and uh and we would study in Hebrew or Aramaic together. At the same time, I started to meditate uh more seriously. Um I TM was becoming big uh in my uh university here, and I was initiated into uh mantra and began meditating seriously at that.
SPEAKER_00So, how old were you when you started transcendental meditation?
SPEAKER_01I'd like to say 17 or 18.
SPEAKER_00Um and you stayed with it for a while?
SPEAKER_01I stayed with it for a number of years, and in fact, I became quite focused on meditating to the point that I was meditating four or five hours a day, which was not the TM practice, and I found myself becoming sicker and sicker, losing energy, losing awareness. And now when I look back at it, um I I think I I was on the wrong path. It was not meant for me to be spiritual so early, but I became seriously ill, and uh a friend of mine invited me to go and uh see a healer, who she thought was quite remarkable. His name was Neat. That's his last name. To be continued.
SPEAKER_00So this was the first spiritual teacher that Neil really met, and we're going to pick up on this next time because there was a breakthrough in his consciousness with this encounter with this teacher.