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
Spirituality, Shadow, and Politics
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A few days after the US election, Dr. Neil explores the primary human levels of consciousness: alligator, tribal, individual, soul, and non-dual. He describes their traits and what it may mean for the tribal level to take power for the evolution of consciousness. He suggests that we can engage in activism with a broader and deeper awareness that we are all connected and that our activism does not stem from ego or personal attachment but is part of a larger flow of life. So, rather than spreading darkness by perpetuating more shadow projection, enemy-making, and right/wrong thinking, we can help to spread the light.
Greetings. Welcome back to the podcast. We're five days out from the US presidential election, and it feels to many of us that the world is darkening. There's a lot of distress, fear, disappointment, despair. So we wanted to um make this recording right away to offer you a different perspective from the point of view of someone who's living in awakening or non-dual awareness and politics. And so we call this spirituality shadow and politics in order to kind of um contain what we see is happening now in human awareness in the world, all over the world, and um offer you a different perspective. Okay, Neil, take it away.
SPEAKER_00So the best way to understand non-duality and politics is to include a higher level beyond non-duality, which is non-duality and duality occurring at the same time. So we'll start with duality. So human beings have come to this planet. We've been on another planet before we came here, and we're evolving on this planet, and the base level of human existence is what I'd call alligator mentality or caveman mentality, which is survival, pure instinct, and survival. Kill or be killed, take what you need with no morality, with no regard for position, and very individual, physically individual.
SPEAKER_01And no sense of the well-being of another.
SPEAKER_00Only your immediate family, your spouse and children, and no sense of anything more than that.
SPEAKER_01And how many people, what portion of the human population is in alligator consciousness?
SPEAKER_00About 30% live in this primarily in the state.
SPEAKER_01Dog eat dog world.
SPEAKER_00Dog eat dog world.
SPEAKER_01Okay, what's the next level?
SPEAKER_00Next level is what I'd call the agrarian or the uh farming community, where people have to work together, support each other, and become mutually involved and survive as not as an individual, as a community. And this um form may be very small, like a small community, or it may be um like a religion or a philosophy or a political party, could be uh anything in which there's a group consciousness which is primary. And the sense in this consciousness is that one either survives or perishes as a group, and the worst thing that can happen to an individual in this community is to be ostracized and kicked out. Usually that means death because there's no ability to survive as an individual, one survives only in terms of the community.
SPEAKER_01And what's the identity of people in tribal awareness?
SPEAKER_00Probably about 40% of humanity.
SPEAKER_01Yes, but what is their identity? What do they identify with?
SPEAKER_00They identify with their tribe, you know, with surviving as a member of their tribe. It's they don't identify with right or wrong, morality or immorality. Uh, they don't identify where the person is uh cruel or kind or um a tyrant or a savior, as long as they are part of your community and are leading you or uh leading the community or functioning in terms of the community.
SPEAKER_01And so if I am my tribe, how do I see other tribes as the enemy?
SPEAKER_00So in the tribal sense, there's primitive defense mechanisms. Um, in psychology, we we learn about these. Um is enemy making, so we project out to the other tribe that they're the enemy, they want to destroy us, and we have to destroy them first. We have to dominate them first, we have to submit them to our will. There's a denial of morality of right or wrong, no social consciousness, and there's a splitting. Splitting means either with me or against me, with us or against us. There's no ability to see human beings as a whole. This is a tribal consciousness.
SPEAKER_01And so we see that in the wars. I remember President Bush said you're with us or against us.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01We see that in Israel, in Palestine, Russia and Ukraine today. We see that in Republicans and Democrats, and people all over the world projecting their own shadows, making enemies, and believing good and evil are really exist as separate entities in these groups.
SPEAKER_00Right. And there's a level of denial that means there's no internal self-reflection. So there's no ability to see a member of the tribe as being negative or destructive to the to the tribe.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so we don't see ourselves clearly, we don't see our members clearly, and we don't see other groups clearly at all. We're really blinded by the tribal identification.
SPEAKER_00Yes, because survival means denying any right or wrong behavior, attitudes, philosophies. Denial means that who we are as a group is paramount, is the only thing that counts. It's harder to see in large groups, for example, uh religion. It's harder to see in a large group or uh country, Democrats or Republicans, it's harder to see. So the next level uh of evolution for humanity as a whole is individuation. That means one is an individual, separate individual, with one's belief systems, one's philosophy, one's belonging. So in this system, one might be a socially politically conscious, and that might be primary and physically not conservative, liberal.
SPEAKER_01You mean conservative about something, progressive about something else?
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_01So it's an individual values are separate from the group.
SPEAKER_00One has left the tribe and one has left the community and become an individual with one's own philosophy, ideals, beliefs, and and uh story. And about 30% of humanity is this stage. When we say the stage, we mean that they've they've been in a previous stage, but they've included they've transcended it into the next stage that included the previous stage. So one can be an individual and be a republican, but being a republican is not primary, it's tertiary. One is an individual first.
SPEAKER_01Carl Jung spoke about individuation as a necessary stage of separation from groups, because the sway of the collective is so powerful, people don't think for themselves and don't find their own values or their own voice or their own purpose in tribal awareness.
SPEAKER_00Right. And in individual awareness, one begins to understand that one has a shadow as a dark, unconscious side. And perhaps this is appearing in the opposite tribe or the another tribe that doesn't believe the same things as the other. So there's a beginning of an awareness of a dark side of ourselves as well.
SPEAKER_01So that can lead to the end of splitting and projection eventually.
SPEAKER_00Yes, that's the next step in integrating the opposites into a wholeness.
SPEAKER_01And what comes after individuality?
SPEAKER_00Well, let's take a jump because there are some steps which are art-centered and planetary-centered. But let's go to the soul. And the soul is complex. In a previous lifetime, I was a Brahmin priest in an uh Indian temple, and I was quite conservative. I've had a philosophy and I had a religious orientation, and I did the same acts daily, and I had a purpose uh which I was identified with. So one if one looks at things from a soul perspective as a soul is evolving, it's much more complex than saying one belongs to a particular group or is an individual.
SPEAKER_01So that tells us from that level of consciousness that we are not our ideology, we are not our political beliefs, we're not even our values, that's not our spiritual nature.
SPEAKER_00Correct. We are immortal beings evolving and growing and becoming more, and we go through different experiences which we choose in part or we're delegated in part, uh, which is a part of our growth as individuals.
SPEAKER_01So, what are politics about from the point of view of non-dual awareness?
SPEAKER_00Well, before we get to non-dual awareness, let's take the next level up, which is the celestial level, which is the realm of God or gods. And there's a story in Indian mysticism called the Bhagavad Gita, in which um Arjuna, a king and a warrior, has his army ready for battle, and they're preparing for war against an enemy. And Arjuna sees that the enemy is filled with his relatives and friends and community, and he's in conflict because he doesn't want to kill or be killed by his tribe, by his community, and a god or one of the Hindu gods, Krishna comes to him and says that this is not your battle, this is my my war. I am doing this. You need to empty yourself from the belief that this is your personal action and allow me to have my divine play, play of the gods. It's an illusion that this is your family and your community, and you need to actually allow the spiritual being to act. So the celestial level teaches us, if we can live in it, uh, that this world is the play of God or the gods of the divine beings, and human beings are merely the pawns or the tools, and we need to get our consciousness out of the way so that this can actually unfold.
SPEAKER_01What I'm hearing you say is that what's happening now with the election in the states and the elections all over the world of more autocratic leaders and the dangers to democracy in many, many countries, is that there's something larger that we can't see that's playing out, and that we are all vehicles of that. That's correct, or expressions of that.
SPEAKER_00That's correct. So, morality is part of the heart and the planetary awareness, the human or planetary awareness, which we did not cover. However, one needs to act or allow activity to happen through one, which is purposeful and assertive and compassionate and direct, and not uh not happening through the ego, through it happening happening bypassing the ego. Um, so it's not about our separateness, this is about the whole story of the whole creation.
SPEAKER_01So you've spoken a lot about emptiness and your sense of that everything arises out of it and falls back into it, and that this story that's playing out that we're seeing as politics now, in some way, we're reifying it and solidifying it and making it more real than maybe it is. But at the same time, we're not dismissing the very real suffering of people, people who are experiencing hunger, war, bias, fear now, a lot of anxiety. So we're not minimizing that, but what we're trying to do is expand the context in which it's happening.
SPEAKER_00So the context of being of emptiness in moving into cosmic awareness, universal awareness. There's no opposites, there's just a oneness. How can one do to oneself what is wrong when one is not identified with one's separateness, but with connectedness with everything? So if one is truly identified with that, then one sees everything in terms of the whole. And the morality is one of the whole, not of the individual or the tribe.
SPEAKER_01But you know, we've had spiritual teachers who abuse people use that rationalization.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm connected to everything, and so what I'm doing is always right action.
SPEAKER_00That's the reason why I began this talk with the juxtaposition of non-duality and duality. Duality is a higher level of development, and these include moral behavior, purposeful action, and one needs to pass through the different stages of the human development. So one can't bypass being a fully human being.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so just to emphasize, we're not proposing spiritual bypass here.
SPEAKER_00No, but I am proposing passionate action that is not personal. In other words, my mind is empty, and these words are coming out of my mouth, and they're expressing the divinity that is the cosmos, and they're assertive and purposefully and political. However, I'm not attached to the outcome.
SPEAKER_01So if somebody wants to join the resistance now and defend the climate, or defend underrepresented groups, or you know, fight the police or whatever it is, fight the what the administration is going to do to the schools, then what is the right standpoint and level of awareness to bring to this fight?
SPEAKER_00Non-attachment. So get yourself out of the way, get yourself out of being uh caveman, agrarian, an individual, a human being, get yourself out of that and allow this to happen through you passionately and purposefully. This is not about non-activity. If your role is to be purposefully, just like Arjuna in the story, uh, then that's your purpose.
SPEAKER_01Your dharma.
SPEAKER_00Your dharma, your reason for being, your right action, right action, and you know, and one has to have compassion and caring. Just like I said, that's part of the story.
SPEAKER_01So I think with the awareness of these four levels, people can have a map. Are you acting out the alligator? Are you acting out the tribe, tribal identity? Are you acting out as an ego? Are you acting for the um well-being of all living things? All humanity, well, humanity and animals and the planet, all living things. And so if you can check your motivation and your feeling state and ask yourself, what is in my shadow here? Cultivate shadow awareness so that you're not projecting, you're not making an enemy and adding to the darkness, right? You're not splitting good and bad and right and wrong. You're acting from this other level that we're talking about, which is a flow state, basically, joining the larger flow of life. So even if you don't have Neil's level of consciousness, you can know this intellectually, and you can hold the understanding that everything is connected to everything. I'm connected to the people who I'm most repelled by.