Dr. Neil's Spiritual Awakening to Non-Duality
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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
Non-Dual Love
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Dr. Neil describes the evolution of human love through the stages (or chakras) of self/other in family love, romantic love, and spiritual devotion. He explores how it opens into non-dual love, where subject/object and space/time disappear into boundless love, a quality of the divine. And he describes his experience of our 30-year relationship as it evolved, for him, into non-dual love.
Greetings. Welcome back to our podcast. Today we're going to explore non-dual love. We tend to think of love in subject-object terms. I love my husband, my son, my wife, my daughter, my dog, my house, right? Even the earth. All subject-object relationship. And today we're going to talk about Neil's experience of love in the state of non-duality or the level of consciousness of non-duality. Okay, Dr. Neil.
SPEAKER_01Well, let me summarize human love briefly because I think that's how most people see it. You've opened the subject. Human love exists on a number of levels. Firstly, physical love, love making. Um, and often is both. Uh so next the next level up, the astral level or the emotional level, where you love your spouse, you love your child, you love your parents, you love a dog, a pet. Uh, and the next step up from that is the mental aspect of love, which is you love your community, you love your family, you love your children, and then uh we take one more step up. Uh, love is love of humanity, um love all human beings. All of these are in a non-dual state, in other words, uh in a dual state, sorry, a dual state. That means that there's a person loving and a person receiving love, or they may not receive it, but if they're aware it's there. Uh, and there are some more subtle levels of human love, like loving uh the planet, loving mountains, trees, flowers, loving the planet as a whole, um, the human journey through the planet, um, also subject-object, also duality. But when one starts to go past this, one discovers that love seems to be returning. What you give out seems to come back to you. So love is not um just a one-way thing, it's a two-way thing. So it's good to love because you get love, but it's also on the subtle level of duality, because there's a process there where there's a giver and a receiver, even if you're the same one. Uh, and then we sort of can move on to more subtle planes. So let's move on now to more non-dual states. Non-dual states is um is where love pours out to itself, and there's no differentiation between self and other.
SPEAKER_00So, what I'm hearing you say is love is different in different states or stages of consciousness. So the baby's love for the mother is different than the teenager's crush or the adult's um transromantic love or transactional love. I do this for you, so you'd give that to me. Um and so when you become more spiritually advanced and you experience non-duality, what is it like? What is it like for you to love me now as distinct from when we met almost 30 years ago?
SPEAKER_01Well, firstly, it's spontaneous, so it's not something that I do consciously, it's something that is there. Uh, it's something that comes out of a part of me that is empty, part of me that is filling itself up, the emptiness up. So it's love that is without beginning or end. It's love that is no source and no object. So it's not so personal as romantic love, uh, but it's pure in the sense that it has no differentiation between people that you feel close to and people you feel distant from. So there's a love of everything, and everything loves me.
SPEAKER_00And so that level of unbounded love is present along with personal love, and I suppose all the shadows and reactivity that go with the personal love. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and you know, a lot of gurus and teachers and priests trying to try to separate uh love into um non-personal state. But in some ways, you have to have it all. Yeah, and in other words, there has to be physical love, romantic love, community love, family love, love for the humanity, love for the planet, love for the solar system, love for all beings, because that is who you are. That is who I am. I am at all those levels and more.
SPEAKER_00Are those connected to the chakras the way you described it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you can do it, you can say the first chakra is the physical love, and the second chakra is the romantic love, sexual love. Um, but not just sexual love, it's love making, it's uh romantic. The third chakra is community family. Uh and the fourth one is the humanity, and the fifth one is the planet, and and the sixth one is self and other merging. I love my mother, and she loves me, and there's a process of loving that's going on, that's a system. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00So, so in a way, so that goes back to what I said about love being different at different stages. Yes. Okay. So at your stage, we rarely hear about. I mean, the people who are on the bhakti path or devotional path in mystical traditions um are all about loving the teacher or the saint or the beloved, but that is still a separation.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00That is still dual until the mystical union is attained.
SPEAKER_01Yes, that is kind of somewhat primitive in a way, because it's it would be the second chakra. It's loving an object, loving a person. It's kind of like romantic love, but it's spiritualized. So uh can one have union with your guru, priest, teacher, Christ? Uh, can one join with them? Yes, but when you join with them, you you're past loving them. Your subject and object disappear. There's no subject loving, and there's no object perceiving love.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so that's the goal of that of those paths.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but it doesn't it the problem with those paths, the loving uh leaving love of a person as a or a figure or a spiritual enlightened being. The that form of love doesn't open up the community, the humanity, the planet, the solar system, the uh these it skips these stages and and has a lot of dangers to it.
SPEAKER_00It's very so it may it may spiritual bypass, it may bat bypass certain chakras on the way to the sixth chakra and the union. Right. Okay, but I don't want to put down people's paths because there is a beauty and as well as a you know long lineages of mystical love in Sufism and Christianity and Hinduism and even in Tibetan Buddhism, you know, you you know, when you meditate on an object that's a god or goddess, whether incarnate or not, I mean that exists in every tradition. So what I'm hearing you say is there's a risk in those practices to skip or bypass certain stages.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and some stages try to include them in directly. For example, uh transcendental meditation, uh Rishi Maya's yogi's path. Um he tells people, or he did tell people, to meditate for humanity, to actually save save humanity, to help humanity grow. So there's there's traditions that attempt to not bypass fully. Most of them are not very successful, and my experience is that I had to come, I I followed that path, and I had to come back to this lifetime in order to actually catch up those steps that I'd missed. Okay, but we would you like me to explain that?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think we spoke about that in your Indian lifetime.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00But we don't want to generalize and say that those paths are bad for everyone because they're not bad, they're spiritual paths and they're blissful and joyful, and and they they take people through into community sometimes.
SPEAKER_01They take people into loving community and service, and uh so they do have good qualities to them, but the dangers are apparent when you look at what's happening around the world with priests abusing their abusing children and gurus abusing their cellas, their devotees. So there's dangers in it because there's a lack of consciousness of the the other, the human being.
SPEAKER_00So maybe they transcend without including the earlier stages. That's I think a way to say it. So to come back to non-dual love or loving in a non-dual stage of consciousness, what else do you want to say about that?
SPEAKER_01Well, a non-dual state means that you're in an awareness that there's no self and there's no other. Uh, you're in a state where time and space don't exist. Uh, and um that's a level of awareness, so that's on the road, but there's a higher state then than the non-dual state, which tends not to have any kind of feeling states in it. Um might have bliss or you know or some joy, but it doesn't seem to have love in it. Love comes after that, and love is higher than those states. Higher meaning pure love is higher than those states, and pure love is non-dual, pure love is being love, and that being has no source or direction, it's just is.
SPEAKER_00Would you say it's a quality of consciousness?
SPEAKER_01I'd say consciousness is a quality of it.
SPEAKER_00Ah, say more of that.
SPEAKER_01Well, one cannot define it in terms of level, because once one attains a sense of non-duality or subject and object, there's nobody home. There's no earth, there's no mother, there's no father, there's no there that those are all constructs of consciousness, and consciousness is a construct of love. So these are these are um very subtle states that go beyond non broad non-duality states, and one can also talk about other states that are similar, like well-being and bliss and joy and uh kindness. These are states that have no subject or object, or can have no subject or object, unless one goes down to the human level, and then we can say, Um I'm joyful because and have a reason.
SPEAKER_00So before we called those qualities of consciousness, and now what I'm hearing is love supersedes consciousness, it's not a quality of it, consciousness is a quality of love, right? So is love in some way divine?
SPEAKER_01Yes, divinity, love is divinity, it's the nature of the deity, the God nature, but we're also part of that God nature. So uh it's a level of consciousness where we become connected deeply with the nature of God or divine.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so let's go through sort of these levels of love in our relationship, so people get an example of how this is lived, the lived reality of non-dual love. Okay, so we met and there was a subject and object, yes, with the recognition, and we recognized a soul connection, it wasn't a persona relationship even from the beginning. Okay, and then we recognize the third body, we called it the weeness, yes, third body, the body that is exists between the two of us, it's it's another body, okay, and then so we move from the excitement of romantic love to include spiritual romantic love, what I was saying before that romantic love can be spiritual too, can have a spiritual element.
SPEAKER_01How do we move from there? How do we move from romantic spiritual love for each other to um just loving each other? How was it for you?
SPEAKER_00Well, I don't live in your level of consciousness, but I can say that love is more than a feeling, love is love is as a state between us, but see, there's still an us, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I, a you, and an us, that's duality, right? So yeah, so non-dual love would be uh love where there's no self, no other. It just is think called love, you know. It does not it exists in terms of each other, but it it transcends that. Transcends self and other. So right at this moment I'm experiencing a deep sense of love. And where would that come from? It doesn't come from the body, it doesn't come from the emotions, it doesn't come from the mind, it doesn't come from the ego, it doesn't come from the soul. It's bigger than that, it doesn't come from the divine as a separate being, as a separate existence, it has no beginning, it is there for everything and everybody without limit, and everything is for it without limit, without beginning, without end. So the sense of duality where I love you and you love me, and we have a we love each other, which is the and we have an us, the third body, is transcended in non-dual love.
SPEAKER_00And even the soul level, even our memories of past lives together, even the soul level is transcended.
SPEAKER_01Right. So when I look at you, I see God. So you are you are the divine being that recognizes the divine being in me, that divinity is manifesting itself without beginning, without end, without self or other. It's kind of like God loving God or self-loving self, but there's nobody home.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Anything else to add about this moment?
SPEAKER_01It's very difficult for most people to understand this form of love, this stage, let's call it of love, because we are so caught in the physical love, uh, or the romantic love, or the love of our children. Well the roles, or the roles for in our community, loving the or loving, you know, God or Jesus, as other, God as other. As other, Jesus. So we're so caught up in the notion of being saved or being enlightened that we don't recognize that there is nowhere to go. There's nowhere to go but to to have an experience of love without beginning or end. There's nowhere to go but to recognize that you are loved. You are loved without beginning or end. And you are part of this flow.
SPEAKER_00Well, even to say you are loved is receiving.
SPEAKER_01Well, you don't have to receive it, it's just it is, it is. Yeah, it is without beginning and it is without end, it is it's not even personal. Who are you? You are empty, you are full, you are everything. So when we say you are loved, it's not the same as personal love, where there's an identity and an ego or a soul. You're loved as everything without beginning or end. And you love without beginning and without a self or another.
SPEAKER_00And do you have any suggestions for how to open out into this for our listeners?
SPEAKER_01I think there's steps or stages in spiritual growth. So I think the the first big one is to be everywhere and to open up the uh awareness of oneself as being part of everything, and and then the awareness should should or can pass to being nothing, and everything being empty, and that sets the ground for pure love, where one is that, and that is who you are, and there's no beginning or end, it's not there's no ego. So the love arises out of the emptiness, the love arises out of the emptiness, but this or the or emptiness arises out of love. You know, you're looking at beginning and end here, and uh what comes first and what comes second.
SPEAKER_00That's like consciousness or love, emptiness or love, right?
SPEAKER_01But there's one thing that I do recognize is that this this consciousness, this uh, this state of pure love transcends um emptiness, transcends fullness, transcends duality, and lifts one up to uh um a more very ecstatic level. No, so right now I'm in ecstasy.
SPEAKER_00So you're saying that love is a priori, love comes first.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's like saying in the beginning there was God, and God was love, and that's the nature of the being who is the creator of this cosmos, this universe. The 83 cosmoses, and the the one that created this is is uh in essence is love, that's its nature, and we are intrinsic to it. We were here, we are here as part of that.
SPEAKER_00Okay, thank you, Dr. Neil. Thank you, thanks for listening.