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 describes moving his attention between duality and non-duality during daily life as he looks at an object, speaks with someone, or feels something. This simultaneous bounded and unbounded awareness gives him access to blissful states and to subtle sources of knowing. He describes his initial awakening during a migraine and his current experiences of physical pain in the context of his vast awareness.
SPEAKER_00
Hi, we're back with a new podcast episode for you. And today, Dr. Neil is going to explore living in duality and non-duality at the same time. So, Neil, um, what is your experience of living in both conventional or normal duality, meaning the world of opposites, emotional opposites, physical opposites, theoretical and spiritual opposites, and non-duality, the world in which the opposites have been reconciled. How do you live in both states at the same time?
SPEAKER_01
Duality, where there's a subject and an object. So right now I'm looking at a picture, and there's an eye behind the observation, and there's um there's visual capacity, and there's an object that I'm identifying as a picture frame with the picture of myself in it. That's duality. Duality is for me always available. Um, it's not about being in one state or another state, it's about duality always being a focus of attention and perception, and the same applies to non-duality. So non-duality means to me that I am able to be present physically in this body, in this room, and in the galaxy, or visually seeing the galaxy. So there's no here or far. There's uh both are present with attention. Uh, there's no um past or future, uh, both are present and available to my perception. Perception meaning memory, sight, and so on. So not the non-duality uh for me is as basic a state as duality. I I don't believe that one transcends duality and um is forever in that state. That's not my experience. My experience is that one transcends a state and experiences a more unified state and then integrates it into the sense of self that is there before, before that transcendence.
SPEAKER_00
So we're looking at a photo of you on my desk. Yes, I think it was from Lake Tahoe.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was.
SPEAKER_00
And so in the context of duality, you're the subject, and the photo is the object.
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
SPEAKER_00
So in the context of non-duality, what's your experience of that photo?
SPEAKER_01
Well, the photo, I am in the photo as well, not just as a picture, but myself, my essence, my consciousness is in that photo, observing this body, which we call Neil. So the photo is not does not have visual capacity, but it has a sense of being, uh, which is in the body as well as in the photograph, and so um there's no separation, just like the tree outside the window. I can see the tree with the duality, and the tree can see me with duality. Um, the tree doesn't see in the same way, but the consciousness is in both, uh, and it can be dual or non-dual. Non-dual meaning that my attention in looking at the photograph or at the tree uh is can be flipped both ways. I am the universe, and I am observing the universe. Duality and non-duality are both part of my consciousness, it's at not never not at the same moment, but at the same time.
SPEAKER_00
And so, how does this happen? Would you call them different states? Are they discrete states or are they overlapping states? And so, how do you experience them during the day?
SPEAKER_01
Most of my day is spent in duality because I'm a grounded person. I'm not living in a cave in which my goal is to actually be permanently in a non-dual state. Most of my day I'm functioning um normally eating, sleeping, um, talking. And so there's a dual awareness. But um just with attention, uh, I can move my consciousness instantaneously to the non-dual state where the nearness and farness, the time and space collapses, and I am on both sides at the same time. And there is a capacity to be totally non-dual, in other words, in pure awareness as well. There is that capacity.
SPEAKER_00
Can you say more about that? Yeah, um, I am you mean when you're meditating?
SPEAKER_01
No, in my daily life. Um, how would I describe this? I am I am looking at the universe, and there's nobody here. I am not, I'm empty. I am there's no self that is looking, there's just an observation that is happening, and the universe is looking at this body or creating this body, uh, and it's empty too. It's it doesn't really truly exist, it's merely a vehicle for the consciousness of the the one who creates this universe. Does that answer your question?
SPEAKER_00
So you can move your attention from self-other, i thou, to the emptiness or the pure consciousness that's beneath subject and object.
SPEAKER_01
Correct.
SPEAKER_00
What's that like? I mean, if you're with a patient and you're in a subject-object conversation, would you move your attention to the emptiness for some reason?
SPEAKER_01
Uh yes. Uh, there's a lot of bliss and joy in the emptiness or the non-duality. In other words, being it, not nobody being here. So um, right this moment I'm in bliss. And so just answering this question and perceiving you as somebody I'm talking to.
SPEAKER_00
So, one benefit of it is your own ecstatic experience. Is there any other benefit to moving your attention there?
SPEAKER_01
Well, there's many awarenesses. Um, when you say own, there's no subject or object in the experience of ecstasy, bliss, joy, love. They don't have objects or subjects, they are just states. Is it valuable? Well, who doesn't want to be in bliss just by putting their attention any time of the day or night?
SPEAKER_00
Does it benefit your patients or me or your friends?
SPEAKER_01
I meet people where they are. So most of my friends don't know my inner world because they wouldn't understand it. It's uh it belongs to those people who have had some exploration of this journey and have some awareness of it. So I can talk to those people because they would relate to what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_00
So, do you think this the non-dual access that you have affects your physical or mental health?
SPEAKER_01
I I would say that that the physical and mental health uh is run by something else than the duality and non-duality as states. So there are lords of karma who create this individuality of this collective nature, and uh and they sustain it. In other words, they don't desire for a deconstruction of duality into uh non-dual states for everyone. They want the maya, the illusion, the journey, the the um the story of life to unfold so that the uh creator of this cosmos can experience itself through many, many um sources. So there's there's no there's no uh there's a desire to maintain the physical universe, and that's why most people can see beyond it. There's a desire to maintain the astral universe, the emotional one, uh, or the mental universe, or and even the subtle ones, Buddhic, atmic and the causal realms. So the desire to maintain the structures of them and the access to them. So few people can actually get beyond uh the separateness.
SPEAKER_00
Well, we know that many highly evolved spiritual teachers have died of cancer and other issues, so it sounds like there's some disconnect between the lived experience of enlightenment or non-duality or emptiness and physical health.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I can't say that there isn't joy and happiness and well-being in the non-dual state, there is. And the fact that you can have access to it at any time certainly affects the well-being and the psychological functioning uh and spiritual functioning. So we can't say that it doesn't do that, it does. However, we we don't come here to be enlightened, we come here to be human, and these great masters or spiritual teachers who die of diseases. Um, that's the human journey, and trying to avoid it doesn't help life. Um, of course, one can reincarnate or one can reach a level which I seem to be moving towards, in which one does not pass on to the next world with all of the consciousness one stays in this world even when the body dies.
SPEAKER_00
So I think what I'm trying to get at is um there's some teaching that awakening means the end of suffering.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's an illusion.
SPEAKER_00
So is there a difference between pain and suffering? Is there a way in which your level of consciousness? I mean, you have several sources of physical pain on a daily basis. How does your level of consciousness affect your experience of that?
SPEAKER_01
Well, when one is empty, you know, pain is something that's out there, it's not part of my immediate consciousness. When I'm empty or full of everything, either one. So I'm in a blissful state, and that can be connected with uh suffering and pain as being one of the states, so it doesn't overwhelm me necessarily. Um, my initial experience of waking up to the fact that I am a being was actually having a migraine and staying totally focused on the migraine and being present with other people who were talking about their awareness. And I woke up to the fact that I'm not the migraine, and the migraine did disappear. So um, so can can uh can consciousness affect the body? Yes, it can. I don't think it uh affects life or death. I think people have a story that is preset before we come here to this planet, and most beings, especially the masters or spiritual ones, have a set life story. They don't want to be here indefinitely. I have no desire to be here indefinitely.
SPEAKER_00
It occurs to me that life and death is the ultimate pair of opposites.
SPEAKER_01
Well, they're both illusions. So, yeah, death is an illusion because uh I've already experienced my own death from past lifetimes, and even in my consciousness, I can go beyond death right this moment to subtle realms where I would exist after the body dies. Uh, so death is an illusion in that sense because we live forever, the soul has no beginning and no end, uh, and both as an individual soul as and as a collective soul. So life uh is an illusion because it's a construct, it's something that the creator of this universe and the lords of karma and the celestial beings have created so that there's a rich experience and uh and a capacity to experience itself, the um the creator itself from many, many different perspectives.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, shall we land there? Thank you, and we'll see you next time.
