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
Aging into Awakening
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Dr. Neil explores spirituality through the lifespan in the context of the new longevity. Is it important to build an ego before transcending an ego? Is it important to earn money, build relationships, and contribute to society before practicing meditation? What is the ideal age to begin a spiritual practice? What are the risks of starting too early and skipping developmental stages? What is the purpose of later life according to most spiritual traditions?
Greetings, welcome back to the podcast. Today, Dr. Neil is going to talk about aging into awakening and the evolution of consciousness through the lifespan. So this is an especially important topic for baby boomers, but it's also going to have a lot of information for people of any age who are interested in their own spirituality and doing spiritual practices. So, Dr. Neil.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Let's start with a couple of questions.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Is there a best time, an ideal time of life to begin spiritual practice? And it seems to me that because the lifespan has changed so dramatically, I mean, it used to be 45 years and now it's twice that. And there are people in their 80s and 90s who are healthy and thriving and looking for purpose. And so, in the con in that context of this new longevity, I'll just repeat my question. Is there an ideal time for the expansion of consciousness? What are the different traditions tell us about that? And what are the sort of requirements, the developmental needs that we want to establish before we actually begin to expand our consciousness?
SPEAKER_00Yes. So having an integrated ego is a prerequisite for spiritual practice. And what does it mean to have an integrated ego? It means that you physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially are functioning well in terms of the culture and in terms of yourself. And you're able to begin to look for what more needs to open up. When does this happen age-wise? Some people believe midlife, like Jung uh spoke about midlife, and some people believe it's 49, like in Judaism. It's the time to look uh into the uh mystical realms. And some people believe if you're an ascetic or a monk, you can start at birth or be very young. But that's because there's an a structure, highly structured culture uh in those systems.
SPEAKER_01And so are there risks to extended meditation before cultivating this integrated ego? And maybe we could say more about the integrated ego as the sort of launching pad for spirituality.
SPEAKER_00Well, meditation practices can be to integrate the ego. In other words, if one observes the body, the emotions, the thoughts, the heart, one can begin to um see what is missing, what needs developing, and grow it, grow compassion, grow an integrated framework. But the dangers of starting too early is developing a pre-trans fallacy, which Ken Wilbur speaks quite a bit about. In other words, um early childhood uh looks uh has similar indications of spirituality than as older age spirituality. So um, and one can get caught up in uh believing one is spiritual, but having not been cooked fully.
SPEAKER_01So let's explain the pre-trans since you brought that up.
SPEAKER_00Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01So it's pre-ego development in distinction to trans ego beyond ego development. Yes. And some of the similarities are the experiences of union and boundarylessness and sense of oneness with objects or people.
SPEAKER_00Right. So if you go see a therapist and you're having poor boundaries, loss of ego, their main task is to help you to have better boundaries, uh, have an integrated sense of ego, have a sense of self that is not neurotic or psychotic or depressed.
SPEAKER_01It's more consolidated.
SPEAKER_00More consolidated, it's functioning well, you're happy, you're successful, uh, you accomplish the goals of the society in which you're born.
SPEAKER_01So that's psychological inner work.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a part of the part of the work, is to grow the mind and the emotions and the heart so that it's um healthy and well.
SPEAKER_01But for people who don't have that consolidated or integrated ego, what are the risks of practicing transcendence?
SPEAKER_00Well, for example, if you don't have enough money and you don't have a or don't have a work ethic that supports that, so one can attempt to use spirituality for that purpose. So um there are certain practices in Buddhism uh where you chant for money, and that's um mostly it's gonna take you down the wrong path, it's going to build the ego in a sense of using the spirituality and trapping it. It's gonna create difficulty later on in life.
SPEAKER_01So there's a lot of literature now about the risks of meditation. People have had have kind of been gotten lost in depressive states, in um loss of boundaries, even in psychotic states. So, what I'm hearing you say is these kind of psychological risks can come about because the body, mind, heart, that all compose the aspects of ego are not grounded enough, don't have enough foundation before trying to spiritually bypass them.
SPEAKER_00Yes, if you're on a householder path, a western-oriented path where individuality is important and functioning as an individuality is important, so then that needs to be taken care of before you begin a more esoteric journey. And that's very much grounded in Yume's philosophy as well as religious practices for Christianity, Judaism, and uh Islam. However, um, if you are part of an institutional framework as a monk or living an ascetic life, living in a cave, living in an ashram, living in a monastery, so there's rigid structures that provide ego consolidation and allow you to develop spirituality. However, one may not find that that type of person is very compassionate for other ways of being. If they don't cultivate the heart with their practices, if they don't, if they're cultivating a sense of quick integration of the ego by uh religious practices that are rigid, that define behavior, define emotions, define cognitive structures, define how the heart is supposed to operate. So you lose some of your humanity with those paths. So let's there's a risk of that.
SPEAKER_01So let's use you as an example and your last lifetime in India.
SPEAKER_00The last lifetime I was a Brahmin priest in a Shiva temple. I was married, two wives, a bunch of kids, uh, and serving the community I was living in. And my goal, spirituality, was become enlightened. It didn't have much orientation towards humanity, towards the planet, towards subtle psychic soul realms, was about bypassing those and attaining Satchirananda, bliss being consciousness, which I did. And that's a valid path. However, it misses out some of the human development that I just spoke about.
SPEAKER_01So, what was the consequence?
SPEAKER_00Consequence was that I got bored with uh being after I died with being in a place of bliss and well-being, uh, and came back to be a full human being and integrate not just money and relationship and family and community and and humanity and the planet, but a sense of fullness about success of successfulness about being a human being.
SPEAKER_01So the point here is that you attained some level of awakening or non-duality, and you were still reborn because you had bypassed important stages of human development.
SPEAKER_00Yes, correct.
SPEAKER_01And although this process was fairly conscious for you and you chose your rebirth, you still have had to spend this life doing a lot of inner work.
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_01And balancing that ego development with your spiritual development.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, it appeared that I started spiritual development young. However, um, that was just about recapitulating my previous lifetime and then turning towards the spiritual. My first guide, Neat, Dr. Neat, told me that I needed to give to eat meat, to uh to get married, to have children, and to live a householder life if I was to survive after deep meditation and getting sick.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because early practice left you ill and weak. Correct. Which doesn't mean you continue to eat meat, and just that you needed balance, you needed more balance and what we're calling ego integration or consolidation.
SPEAKER_00Right, which is what I did for 20 20 years.
SPEAKER_01So, in terms of aging and the lifespan, you're now 69. Uh-huh. Your body, anyway, is 69, and you've been awake for a number of years. It's hard to say that because it's had so many different stages unfolding, different qualities and traits to your experience and states. So that's been happening in your 60s. And now, as I was saying earlier, there are all these people in their 70s and 80s and 90s who are looking for meaning and purpose. So, what can we say now to those folks in that stage of life?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so integrate your ego so that you have a fully functioning, well-integrated sense of self. Um, and that means having enough money for your life, having good personal relationships, community relationships, sense of humanity, a sense of being part of the planet. And once you've integrated that into a fully ideal self, ego self, then you're ready for the spiritual path. Uh, so that's the first step. You can't bypass it. Well, you can, but you're gonna come back again. So once one has accomplished this, then one goes further into transcendence, transcend and include. So one transcends the ego. And the um the elements of this, the first stage is awareness of oneself as a soul, that means becoming aware of past lifetimes, becoming aware of soul functioning and directing the ego. That means being a part of the soul group that you belong to, and what your purpose is as a soul, and being aware of subtle realms like the astral, mental, buddhic atmic, the planes of the those that are not embodied. So the soul awareness is very complex and worth deeply exploring. And the second aspect is becoming conscious of mortality, your own death, so that one begins to integrate that into the ego, and that's a complex procedure as well. And the third one is um shadow awareness, so becoming aware of your own shadow.
SPEAKER_01And why is that important?
SPEAKER_00That's important because shadow will continue to act out and be self-destructive if you're not conscious of it.
SPEAKER_01So, this is a way we include moral and ethical development and conscience.
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_01But it's also the shadow is also, you know, as the unconscious, it's a path into depth within ourselves. So for people who want to do inner work, it's an orientation to the inner world. Shadow work is an orientation to go inside and cultivate deeper self-acceptance and self-knowledge. Right. So you're saying then that in a way it's similar to what I wrote about in the inner work of age. There's a shift in identity from role to soul, from what we do to who we really are.
SPEAKER_00From doing to being.
SPEAKER_01And there's a shift in awareness that we have all the time in the world, and we're denying death, to really allowing in the limited sense of time for this lifetime, and what that means to our priorities, how we spend it.
SPEAKER_00Correct, how we value it. These are the first steps of aging, uh, you know, spiritually, which is integrating the ego, shadow awareness, soul awareness, and um mortality awareness. It's the first stage of spirituality.
SPEAKER_01And what comes next in aging as spiritual practice?
SPEAKER_00Well, that's being uh doing deeper practices that allow you to investigate the divine levels of consciousness, so the emptiness that allows us to be everything. So I'm aware that I am empty and that allows me to be everywhere. So my consciousness is unbounded, it's not bounded by the body or the ego, it's everywhere, and begin to understand the connections that everything is everywhere, everything is pure awareness, it's consciousness. Uh, and that's really a very complex field.
SPEAKER_01So we m we should this is about identification. We identify with body, mind, ego, and then eventually we identify with soul, and we identify with spirit or everything, pure consciousness, right? And that this kind of unfolded for you in a kind of a natural way, but it doesn't happen to everybody like that. Um, I think we we don't want to risk setting up some ideals or standards for people, like saying, you know, completely do your ego's homework. That's never gonna happen. Nobody's ever gonna really finish, uh, really become an ideal ego, right? But what we're doing is we're trying to describe this process and the way that it unfolded for Neil and the way that it's unfolded for other people we know. But we don't want to set this up as shoulds or even ideals. We're just suggesting here the sort of the some stages on the path for older adults. So it seems that what makes this different, what we're describing for people in their 60s, 70s, 80s? What makes it different for older adults like us?
SPEAKER_00Well, the ego requirements are often settled. So you have enough money and you can for whatever your level is, doesn't mean you have to have a lot of money, doesn't mean you have to have a little money, but one needs to have enough that that's not going to bother you. One your relationships are settled, they're functional, they're not neurotic or dysfunctional, and they don't take a lot of your energy. Uh your mental construct and beliefs are happy and valid and create a sense of well-being, and you're connected with humanity and the planet. Planet means the earth. So uh once you've established all of that, then one is ready for uh the more advanced stages that we spoke about earlier.
SPEAKER_01But again, I think this is rare. I think it's rare that anybody's gonna meet those standards.
SPEAKER_00One can do always do the bypass, which uh seems to be very common today, which is jump from primitive ego awareness or attachment to the emotional mental body, sense of being an ego that's structured, and then moving straight to the like I did, to the seventh chakra, to the field of being, field of pure awareness. So one can always do that uh and come back and do the human journey another time. And that's very common with gurus, religions, philosophies, very common practice to skip the stages of human humanity, connecting with the planet, connecting with all the subtle realms.
SPEAKER_01So I'm feeling a little confused here because it seems to me there's a tension between, you know, someone is 70, 75 years old, they only have so much energy, they don't know how to prioritize their inner work. And some people are telling them to just meditate all day, and some people are telling them to go back into therapy and finish their unfinished business. And what I'm hearing you say is you have to do that first before you can really dive into spirituality, and that's an ideal, it's a beautiful ideal, but I don't think it's realistic for too many people. So for people who want to explore spirituality in later life and really move their identity, they know maybe they know, you know, they're not their bodies, let's say. They probably don't know that they're not their minds. They're still identified with their beliefs and attitudes, right? The teaching in Buddhism about non-attachment to the view is about, you know, releasing our attachment to our point of view on everything. We think that's who we are, right? I am a liberal democrat or whatever it is. So there are so many aspects to this and dimensions to it, and we only have so much time and energy at this stage of life. So I'm wondering how to advise or guide people and how to prioritize this.
SPEAKER_00And whatever you do is okay because we're not just here for one lifetime, we're here for many lifetimes. And there's no end to spiritual development or human development. It's ongoing and always will be bright. So um, you know, follow your heart, follow what's what takes you into bliss, joy, what takes you into the places of well being. As I said, uh it's interesting because Connie is looking at me as talking about the ideal. I didn't live the ideal. I lived the path in my last lifetime where I jumped and I left down a bunch of stages.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And I had to come back to do it more consciously and integrate it. And so, you know, sometimes it's about small things, developing kindness, developing compassion, developing detachment. So, you know, and these are these are big enough for many people in one lifetime.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that's a great point.
SPEAKER_00So I I mean I remember a Chinese lifetime, a Buddhist lifetime, uh uh Islam lifetime, a Jewish lifetime, Catholic lifetime. So, you know, you've been around. I've been doing this a long time. So and you know, so it doesn't surprise me that I'm I've come here to be integrated all together. So one needs to take the long route and not get caught up.
SPEAKER_01So I can say, you know, in some ways, when you know where you're really attached, so for me it's been about mind. So when you know where you're really attached, then you can work on releasing your identification with that as a small step. I am not my thoughts, I am not my beliefs, I am not my view, my points of view, and so I can actually design practices for that for myself. Yeah, you could do that, and that's something that everybody could do. So if you're really attached to your appearance or to your productivity or to your success in the world, you can find ways just to begin to let go and make space, just make space in between those qualities and what you feel about them. And then there's this incredible sense of freedom that happens with that. This real sense of you know, your identity expanding.
SPEAKER_00Yes, there's a constant growth of identity. So, you know, we were we were all once cavemen or cave woman or cave children, so you know, we lived on that primitive level until we you know grew and became part of the agrarian culture, part of the tribal culture where we planted vegetables and fruits and and ate those and survived together as a community, or died together as a community, you know, and most of us have grown to become independent individuals, but not everyone. No, not everyone, but most of us have become independent or some independence, some sense of uh my identity is who I am, and it's complex. It's not simple, you know. I'm not just kind, I can be cruel, I can not just happy, I can be sad, I'm not just uh friendly, I can be nasty. So uh, you know, we have complex identities and uh and this constant process of moving one's awareness to more expanded sense of self to transcend and include the previous ones.
SPEAKER_01To go beyond and also carry them with us, carry them with us.
SPEAKER_00So, you know, the the idea of detachment is a temporary mechanism because one doesn't want to lose any part of the journey. So uh practicing detachment or letting go is a temporary mechanism, one needs to come back and uh integrate that into one's sense of wholeness.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so I think the message here is the purpose of later life is about exploring spirituality and hopefully experiencing some states beyond ego. And for a few people, expanding that to stage or level of consciousness beyond ego, and all of the great traditions teach us that. It's not Neil and I aren't making this up, comes from every mystical and spiritual tradition, religious tradition, that this stage of life is about uh moving beyond our attachments to temporary things and into the divine world. Do you want to come back to the present moment where you're at now?
SPEAKER_00Growth is continuous and inevitable and has no beginning or end.