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
The Non-Dual Body
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Dr. Neil describes his discovery of the nonduality of empty mind, empty body, empty cosmos, as he transcended three kinds of apparent duality: body-mind, self-other, and individual-cosmos. This episode is focused on the latter, as he perceives the planets in his body, the macrocosm in the microcosm—as above so below. And he calls the cosmos a giant empty body that enfolds an infinity of empty bodies, like our own, all arising and dissolving together.
Greetings, welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to talk about the non-dual body. As Neil's consciousness has continued to expand, he has transcended a number of dualities, starting with self and object, which he'll tell you about, and mind and body. And we've um explored these in some earlier podcasts. And now we're going to talk about transcending or going beyond the microcosm and the macrocosm, the um local experience of the body-mind, and the experience of the cosmos and how they reflect and mirror each other. Okay, Dr. Neil.
SPEAKER_00Off I go. So all is empty. The body, this body is empty, the mind, the objects of perception are empty, and the cosmos is empty. This is not an intellectual understanding, this is an experience of mine. Um, although it can be understood intellectually as well. I mean, the we could look at the body and perceive that this it's a solid object, however, there's more empty spaces between the atoms and the body than there is actually uh no spaces or small spaces, and that's true of everything, including the mind, including the cosmos. Out of the emptiness of the body arises the ego, and by that I mean um the physical, emotional, mental, intuitive aspect of ourselves, the sense of identity of who I am, the name, the the function of the relationship. This identity of Neil arises out of the emptiness and moves into the thing called the ego. And when one transcends the ego, and one moves from ego to uh beyond ego, one uh moves into the emptiness again. So my experience is that once I actually allow myself to relax and have emptiness in the body, in the emotions, in the thoughts, in the sense of self, so there's another emptiness that arises. And this is this emptiness can be expanded to include not just the physical universe that I experience, but the entire cosmos, the solar system, the galaxies, the subtle realms, astral, mental, buddhic, and so on. So all of those emerge out of this emptiness, same emptiness, but from a different perspective.
SPEAKER_01And so what I'm hearing you say is the essential nature of everything is not what it appears to be. As the Buddhists would say, it's not substantial or permanent if it's empty.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's correct. It's a difficult concept intellectually to grasp. That's why it's useful to talk about it as the huge spaces between the suns, the stars in our galaxy, the huge spaces between uh the atoms of the physical body, the mind's capacity to actually move between huge spaces between different thoughts and feelings. So it's useful to think that way because it gives you a sense of the possibility of emptiness being the essential nature of reality.
SPEAKER_01Rather than these things or events or objects that we think are essential.
SPEAKER_00Right. So if I look at a tree, there's a subject and an object looking at a tree. Subject is the eyes, me, the identity, the tree, and they're separate objects, and there's a process of looking. But if I look further, if I look at the tree, I see in the tree there's an emptiness, and there's an emptiness in me, and out of that emptiness, the same emptiness arises the sense of myself and the sense of the tree. So this is a jewel arising, and they arise together. So without a sense of self observing, there is no tree, and without the tree existing, there is no sense of self either. It's empty.
SPEAKER_01So that's that's kind of the transcendence of the subject and object in your direct experience of the essential emptiness of both of them. Um, earlier in a podcast, we called this the perception of self in the object, a kind of unification of the two.
SPEAKER_00Right. So consciousness is um is a way of understanding it, and that's more a Hindu orientation, while the emptiness is more a Buddhist or a Jewish perception. So having a self, an identity that that is the self, the personal self, the collective self, the cosmic self is another way of looking at it. But now I'm beginning to see that the self arises out of emptiness, which is more a Buddhist philosophy or a Buddhist perception.
SPEAKER_01So let's just clarify for our listeners that your experience evolves.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01And so there may appear to be contradictions in earlier podcasts because your actual direct experience is changing and so your language is changing.
SPEAKER_00Yes, this process of talking it out with you is actually changing my experience and my perception. And so my experience is that everything arises at the same time, including the cosmos, the universe, it all arises and dissolves. So in Hindu mythology, um, the arising of the cosmos, the entire existence is an activity of Brahma.
SPEAKER_01The creator.
SPEAKER_00The creator, the creator of it all, and at the same moment, Shiva, the destroyer, is dissolving it all back into the emptiness. So it's it's created by Brahma out of emptiness, and it's dissolved by Shiva back into the emptiness. So it's it's uh it has this moment-by-moment existence, and you're experiencing that now, yes, and at the same time, nothing exists, it's empty, the only way it can all exist, but the perception of the cosmos is not the same as the human orientation of ego, which is here's a subject and there's an object, and we can describe ourselves and the object as separate, as uh individually motivated, but the cosmic, the deity, the divine, does not have a subject-object, all of it arises at the same time, and all of it dissolves at the same time. It's not within time and space, it happens outside of time and space.
SPEAKER_01Ah, that moment that we call eternity.
SPEAKER_00That's enlightenment.
SPEAKER_01Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00The perception of that is enlightenment, the experience of that is just oneself is enlightenment.
SPEAKER_01Oh, as oneself, right? Experience of it as oneself. Can you say more about your experience of that as yourself? So, for example, you were talking this week about the planets being in your body.
SPEAKER_00Right. So, um, my experience of the physical body is let's start off um with the the objective experience of it, the ego's perspective. Physical body is separate, so is the mental body, so is the uh intuitive vehicle. But once one transcends that transcends the ego, it's no longer separate, it's emerging out of the emptiness, and one is identified with that as emptiness, and that emptiness can extend to the solar system and arising and the planets being inside the body, not just outside the body. So there's an astrological element with a greater perception of reality.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so when you're lying on the couch experiencing that the planets are inside your body, um, we could say in the sort of lineage of esoteric mystical literature, the macrocosm is in the microcosm. The microcosmic body, your body, is mirroring the macrocosm, the body of the cosmos.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it's holographic. Everything is connected to everything, and everything is manifesting at the same time and dissolving at the same time. So, yeah, so it has that sense of um pure pure being.
SPEAKER_01And so holographic meaning each part is the whole and contains the whole, right? Each whole contains the parts. Ken Wilbur called it a holon. Right. So the holographic experience of the cosmos in your body is a transcendence of that that final duality of individual and cosmos or microcosm and macrocosm.
SPEAKER_00Right. So about a year ago, I started to experience the physical body expanding from a local to being in the room, to being outside of the room, to being in the city, to being in the planet, in the middle of the planet, and as well as observing the planet with other beings, to being uh part of the solar system, to having all of that inside of me at the same time, to being part of the galaxy, and having that inside of me at the same time, so observing and including, and the same thing with the cosmos, the non-physical universe included. So that expansion of self, of sense of body self, seems to include everything, and so rather than going inwards and outwards from the body, from the body, it became a matter of bringing consciousness into the body, and the body being a reflection of all that is.
SPEAKER_01So there's a school of Buddhism called Shingon that teaches about the embodiment of emptiness, and what they say is the cosmos itself is the body of the Buddha that we mirror in our own bodies, yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's the body of the divine. I can call it the Buddha or Christ or Jesus or God, but that we are in that body, and that body is in us, and it's personal. So, my expense of it is not just that it's collective for all of us, or all of existence, but it's it's personal as well. It's this body.
SPEAKER_01So you're living all these levels of consciousness at once, we could say uh-huh, the separate body-mind of Neil, right, the unified body-mind with the object of perception, your relationship perception, so that the body is interacting with the environment in a non-dual way, yeah, and the mind is part of that too. And first with a local object of perception, and now we could say with a global or cosmic object of perception, right?
SPEAKER_00We have organs of perception that are not physical. So the astral body has eyes, has taste, has, has uh capacity to experience the same way as the physical body does. And the mental body also has organs of perception, and so does the Buddhic and the Atmic and the celestial body, and so has the divine body that also has uh organs of perception. So the physical perception is holographic, it's a manifestation of the divine perception, it's just a different orientation to that perception. So that sort of explains to me how I can be here and in watching the galaxy at the same time. Same time as you're watching television, same time as I'm watching television, or uh it, you know, or I'm talking to somebody who's dead, you know, in another dimension, or community with the the gurus we've passed on.
SPEAKER_01So this non-dual body really contradicts the Western traditions of you know, flesh versus spirit, on I think, therefore I am, and all the dualities that are rooted into Cartesian thinking and scientific thinking and so on. I don't want to say Judeo-Christian because the mystical schools teach this as well, although you know the more esoteric schools are very dualistic. So, your experience of the non-dual body, what do you want to tell people about that and about why it's important?
SPEAKER_00Duality is important, and it's existed in human consciousness as primary for a few hundred years at least, if not more. Why? Because it allows us to know the physical, emotional, mental universes, and I can say that as a scientist, as a psychologist, in more detail. It allows us to perceive, even the galaxy allows us to perceive it in more detail, although we might use instruments to do that. So it's important and valuable. However, it's not the essential nature of reality or full nature of reality, because it doesn't include the non-dual perception of the whole, perception of the parts being connected with the whole, perception of the whole being in the parts, and the deeper truth of the spiritual teachings that everything is interconnected and arising and dissolving together. Right. We might say we are one, there's oneness or emptiness, uh, which out of which oneness arises. Mystically, one would say that before the cosmos existed, this cosmos, there was emptiness. The divine was dreaming, was empty, and then it manifested as a single point of light or sound, and then exploded into parts and manifested the whole of what we call creation, and at some point it will return back to that emptiness.
SPEAKER_01So we could say that the cosmos is one giant empty body enfolding within it infinite numbers of empty bodies.
SPEAKER_00That's right, yeah. So the cosmos is uh is empty, yeah, and there's infinite amounts of emptiness. That's that's another another way of saying that the emptiness is related to uh every aspect of separateness. And I just described that earlier how this physical body is empty, your physical body is empty, and that emptiness is is the same emptiness that manifests the cosmos.
SPEAKER_01Okay, should we land here?
SPEAKER_00Sounds good.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, everyone.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Connie.