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
Awakening and Attachment to Family and Friends
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What is attachment, and how does it evolve? Dr. Neil describes the nature of attachment when we identify as egos, as souls, and as Spirit or pure consciousness. Is non-attachment the goal of spiritual practice? He explores the experience of attachment while living in non-dual states and duality at the same time.
Greetings. Welcome back to our podcast. Today we're going to talk about awakening and attachment. There's so many misconceptions and beliefs about the need to be rid of attachment in order to become enlightened. And we're going to use the framework that we've explored in earlier podcasts. So if you listen to the podcast about identity, who am I as an ego? Who am I as a soul? Who am I as spirit? One with everything. This is the framework we're going to use to explore Neil's experience of attachment to family and friends as he's gone through these various stages. Okay, so Dr. Neil, let's start with just kind of the basic ego attachment, what most people experience every day.
SPEAKER_00Right. So householder life is all about attachment to the body, to the emotions, to the thoughts, to the beliefs, but also to people in your life. The spouse, uh, children, grandchildren, siblings, um, community. Uh, and you can be in service to them or service to the higher purpose in them. But the householder path is not the same as the ascetic path, the uh sadhu or the monks path, which involves letting go of family, friends, and various attachments to money, power, and so on.
SPEAKER_01Okay, but the meaning of attachment changes as we go through these stages and the experience of it changes. So, what is um attachment when you're living as a soul?
SPEAKER_00So when you're a soul, you you can you can have awareness of past lifetimes in which you were connected to people. Um, you can be aware of uh time between lifetimes when you're disembodied, which I have, and you can uh be aware of attachment to um to a body and being incarnated. Um, how does that involve family and friends? Well, usually we come back many times with the same group of people, and uh and the intimacy is more easily recognized.
SPEAKER_01And so when you're living as a soul, how do you experience attachment to family and friends? What's that like?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's different to the average person, the average person who's attached in an ego sense, if they lose a spouse or a child or a family member goes through a lot of grief, uh, and and is less when one is living as a soul.
SPEAKER_01Why? Why is that?
SPEAKER_00Well, because well, I'll give you an example that's will probably explain it better than the theory. Uh, my mother died about just over a year ago, and uh, she left her body, I watched her leave her body, and she went to one of the subtle planets of existence between lifetimes, and I've been talking with her there, and uh so the connection is not lost, so whereas in an unenlightened state, there's a lot of grief and despair and sadness and loss because you you do believe that death is an end, even if you have a philosophy of it not being the end, it's part of the ego's attachment. Whereas if you're living as a soul, then you recognize you've had previous lifetimes, you know, and between lifetimes, and you have future lifetimes, and people don't disappear from your life, they just move on to another plane or another level, and then a relationship continues.
SPEAKER_01And so, what is that like for you emotionally? What how has the emotional attached? Because I know at the end of her life you became very close, you weren't close for a long time, and then you did become close. So, what was that like emotionally for you as she transitioned?
SPEAKER_00It was sad, it was a brief period of grief, and then there was a connection, reconnection. So the sadness and the brief period of grief was because of ego attachment, which we all have if you're a householder or if this is your spiritual path. Um, but it didn't last. But after a day or two, it was gone, and I was connecting with her in where she was, and she was kind of surprised at me saying hello to her. She said, Why are you here? I'm dead, you're not. Said, Yeah, I'm I'm there as well as in the body, I'm with you as well as in the body, because this is all part of my consciousness, so that's a soul awareness, and it's a soul-to-soul relationship, yes.
SPEAKER_01So you're relating soul to soul, not in your roles as mother and son, not in your um other identities, but in as souls.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's there too. There is um that's still around when a person dies for a while. There's still this relational connection because of uh attachment, you know, for the person's attachment, and your attachment to some degree. So you still call her mother, even though um, for example, Connie here. I remember her from a past lifetime, which she was uh a nun. So, you know, so it was not the same relationship as now being married, but the soul continues its connection and uh and the soul incorporates all the previous knowledge. Um, another example would be my father. My father died when I was 18 years old, uh, and he went on to be reborn, um, got married, has children and grandchildren in a whole nother world. And I can see that because it's in my consciousness, it's all a part of my consciousness, everything is there. So um, if I communicate with him, am I communicating with him on a on uh his current lifetime? No, I'm communicating with him as a soul, and that soul has awareness of his current lifetime.
SPEAKER_01Ah, okay. So in his current incarnation, he probably wouldn't recognize you, probably not, but right, but in the soul-to-soul world, you remain connected, correct.
SPEAKER_00Okay, if I had to visit him in the where he's at, he's in another country. I would probably recognize him.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so the third stage we've spoken about is living as spirit or I am everything, I am pure consciousness, emptiness, one with everything. So in that state or level of consciousness, um, what is emotional attachment like to family and friends?
SPEAKER_00In a way, it doesn't exist. Um, because everything is present. There is no past, no future, no here, no there, no subject, no object, no relationship. Everything is one pure level of awareness, nothing, nobody is closer to me than somebody else. So that level of awakeness, non-duality, and can be experienced as emptiness, as fullness, as peace, as oneness. Um but that level, the idea of family and friends disappears. Uh and um but not forever.
SPEAKER_01What do you mean?
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, the the soul awareness is still there, and um and that's part of the um non-duality when one moves through non-duality to the next level, which is um awareness of non-duality and as well as awareness of the specialness and importance of everybody, everybody's unique and everybody's special, and everybody's created in the in beauty and love.
SPEAKER_01And so let me see if I understand this. So you're saying that there's a non-dual awareness when you look at me or your son or your daughter or your friend, and at the same time, there's a dualistic awareness that we are in some way special to you. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00More like non-dualistic is the initial level in which everything is the same, but non-dualistic and dualistic at the same time, uh, is really at this level is about everybody being unique, everybody being a creation of the divine, everybody being special, it's less personal in terms of relationship, and it's more transpersonal, transpersonal.
SPEAKER_01Okay, but you have a lot of people in your world who are special to you. You have members of a men's group from 20 years, right? You have your kids, your grandkids, yes, your brothers, you're very close to, your sister, you know, and moi so explain or describe to us your experience of what it's like to see us as divine, but also see us as unique to your karmic relationships.
SPEAKER_00Well, the best way to explain it is transcend and include. In other words, we initially have an awareness of ourselves as a body and as emotional, as a personality, and as someone who has relationships, and that never disappears. That sense of separateness never disappears, but we can transcend that and move into the emptiness, and out of that emptiness comes the fullness, and uh being able to be everywhere out of time space, in time space, uh, and then into the non-dual states, this more subtle non-dual states. So nothing gets excluded, everything is added. So, you know, being on the spiritual path often is about negating a certain level in order to experience the next level, you know. So um, so there's a teaching in um Vedanta called neti neti. In other words, the practice is I'm not this, I'm not that, I'm not any that, I'm not anything. Everything that you become aware of, you're not. So you're negating everything until you get to a place where you can you have pure awareness, you have consciousness that can't be negated. It's it seems permanent for that moment. So those are all paths, but those are not the actual ultimate level because one always has to come back and include what you've left behind, what you've disavowed in in your past. So my love for you is not smaller, it's bigger. It doesn't just include your body, you know, your our emotional connection, our our um mental congruency, our lifetimes of being close together, our many lives. Doesn't exclude that. Uh even if I'm in a non-dual state in which everything is the same, that still exists within that consciousness. But there's another level that's higher than the non-dual state in which you're divine, and your individuality is divine.
SPEAKER_01So the object is divinized. First, the object is disappeared, like neti neti, the object is eliminated.
SPEAKER_00Yes, there's no subject, no object.
SPEAKER_01So now what you're describing is not the disappearance of the object, but actually the I want to say divinization, the um the holiness of the object. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, and uniqueness and specialness, and every point uh in creation is special, is unique. It's being created this moment and dissolved this moment. So it's it's divine. A relationship is not uh an empty thing, it's it's a real thing. In fact, in some ways, the relationship is bigger than the physical body or the emotional or the personality or even the intellect. So the uh the relationship is the form out of which it all unfolds. So it's it's um it's more real than what we usually consider real, which is objects in our world.
SPEAKER_01So you're saying the relationship, not you and me, it's the container or the dynamic, or yes, the relationship creates the individuality rather than the other way around. What do you mean? The two individuals come together. How is it that they're the other way around?
SPEAKER_00Well, it appears that two individuals come together because you're focused on the individuality, okay? But originally we were all part of the same consciousness, so let's call that divine consciousness, and out of that divine consciousness, human consciousness was created, and human consciousness is um eternal and it is constantly unfolding and is non-personal, it contains personal aspects of it, in other words, um, that's what we call our soul, individual souls, but it's part of the human consciousness, and that the individual souls are connected to each other because the original consciousness is one, is a unity, is a oneness, and the same with our separate identities, yeah, separate identities unfold because um we are actually one, and that's a way of beginning to experience another level of reality.
SPEAKER_01So I feel like I'm kind of getting something big here. So most of us think about relationship of couple as two individuals coming together and creating something larger. And what you're saying is that something larger preexists.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01And so if I listen to the description of us as souls going through various lives together, I don't know how you knew me when I was a nun in France, but somehow you knew me as a nun. So then maybe you were a monk there. I don't know. But so then that container is bigger than our marriage today. So it's out of that ongoing, incarnating, evolving consciousness that these two little individuals met again and created a life together. So it's like looking at it in reverse. I'm so used to looking at it as an individual.
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's really great. Okay, so let's come back to attachment now. So, how does your attachment change as you experience that soul-to-soul relationship and then that I am everything, everything is divine relationship, whether it's um like let's say with your kids. How do I experience attachment, emotional attachment? That's our thing.
SPEAKER_00The same as everybody. So, you know, in uh if you're if you're on a ascetic path, if you're alone and you're a monk, you're a sadhu, you're uh you're uh following a guru whose life that's your only your only attachment, um you know, then you give up everything in order to serve the divine, in order to become part of the divine. And it's a path. Ultimately, one has to reincarnate, just like I did, you know, in order to actually evolve the human aspect of relationship, which is to pick up the missing pieces, yeah. But my relationship with my kids is the same as anybody's relationship because it's egoic and ego never disappears. That's one of the big illusions.
SPEAKER_01Ego just grows bigger and bigger and bigger, so it includes more and more and more so you know, so it doesn't disappear, but it's egoic, but it's also soul with the kids.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's a soul connection, yes. And there's divine connection.
SPEAKER_01And what is that like? How do you experience that with the three adult children?
SPEAKER_00Unconditional love. The divine level is unconditional love. It's the kind of love that a mother has for a baby as the close as we can get, or a lover, two lovers who are you know deeply in love. It's very difficult for anybody to understand who doesn't experience this connection. If you haven't had kids yourself, it's very difficult to understand the willingness to give your personal life up. Like, for example, uh I reached the state where I realized that my son's life, one of my sons' life was more important than my life, and if there was a choice that had to be made between my life and his life, his life was more important. So the the gift of oneness of separateness, giving your separateness over to a higher level. And and it's very difficult. People understand my relationship with my daughter, for example, which is very close and very intimate. Psychologically, you might look at it and say that you know we're fused or we're overbonded. So you might look at it like that, or but it's it's a soul, it's a soul and a spiritual level connection. And it doesn't impede her individuality in any way.
SPEAKER_01Do you remember past lives with her?
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01We've never talked about that.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's no point in looking for past lifetimes. You know, it's a distraction from the journey, which is really about moving forward, growing more awareness, growing more unity. So, you know, so I don't look at past lifetimes unless it's relevant. This is it's part of uh something that comes to Me or I'm asked about it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so how about attachment to others? Like you have a brother you're very close to.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Oh, okay. So now we're talking about soul groups. So earlier I spoke about how divine consciousness uh unfolds a part of itself and creates human consciousness. And that means all human beings. And uh and out of that individual consciousness, human consciousness evolves. And your question again?
SPEAKER_01Steven.
SPEAKER_00Oh my brother. Well what happens is um people are part of a soul group initially. And so for example, my soul group is one of service and and knowledge and uh and healing. And um and I share this with many other beings who are part of my soul group, including my brother, who's part of my soul group. And it ha it so happens that we have the same soul group which bonds us deeply and and enables us to feel really close together, inseparable in some ways, inseparable through death, inseparable through rebirth.
SPEAKER_01And so what kind of attachment do you feel with him?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's an attachment that nothing can separate us, nothing can separate us because we're joined in the source, so nothing can separate us, except there um there's always uh the human side of yeah, the personality can get in the way. Personality can get in the way, like loss, you know. This doesn't mean I can't lose into debt or have conflict, or have conflict or uh or sadness or differences. Those those those are there, but they don't they're not powerful, they don't overwhelm me.
SPEAKER_01And what about the men in your men's group? What can you say anything about the kind of the nature of the attachment? Because you've been unbelievably committed to these guys for two decades, 24 years.
SPEAKER_00I'm in service to them, so it's really about helping to grow consciousness in eight members of the group, including myself. Helping to grow more awareness. So every retreat, and we had a habit of having two ahead of year, has a focus on something like love, joy, bliss, well-being, peacefulness. One coming up looks like it's going to be on connection. The fact that everything is connected to everything else. So it's about growing uh spiritual consciousness without talking about it like that. In other words, um, when I've attempted to bring up the fact that I'm uh awake, they've all forgotten about it in two minutes.
SPEAKER_01They don't have the framework.
SPEAKER_00They well, it's not their framework, you know. So um I learned very quickly that that's not a subject to talk about. Um, but talking about other things that are pathways to opening up more connection, more oneness, more wholeness, more peacefulness, more joy, more love, more better relationships, that those are things that are I can work on in the group, and I do, and I create coursework for the group, including for myself. So it's um exercises that I participate in personally with a group that uh I grow as well. So the the ego keeps that needing to grow more and more with time, so rather than the ego needs to disappear and be rejected.
SPEAKER_01So I have the sense that there's a lot of misunderstanding about attachment. When we look at people living a monastic life, we see their outward letting go, right? They're behaviorally letting go of family or possessions, homes, um, jobs, and so forth to enter the monastery or the convent. It's that there's a release of the obvious attachments, but we don't actually know if internally they're becoming unattached or freer or more liberated inside because that's hidden from other people. It's the inner world, right? Whereas there could be people walking through this world who looked very looked very attached. I mean, you and I went through a process of selling our house and getting rid of all of our possessions and downsizing, and people around us were freaked out. Like, why were we doing that? I found it to be so liberating just to simplify. But that's not the same as this internal non-attachment that we're talking about, this state of being non-attached to our beliefs, to our bodies, to our people, right, to our goals. I mean, for me, one of my biggest attachments has been to wake up. And it's been a whole journey to really kind of let go of the let go of the orientation, the goal orientation to that, and seeing how much of that has been my ego's agenda. So that inner work, I think, is really what you're describing. Because if people look at you from the outside, they would never know what you're experiencing inside. And there are a lot of kind of spiritual teachings that are misleading because they say let go of the outside stuff, right? Act as if you're not attached to the outcome, you know, or leave, leave your wife or your spouse, leave your children, leave your home, leave your material possessions, and go wander, go walk about, as you know, as they say in Australia or in India, go wandering.
SPEAKER_00Um, you know, so that's part of a spiritual path, you know, that sort of evolved because people there wasn't enough time for people to actually um incarnate and stay incarnated and stay um attached and go beyond that. So, you know, it's better to be attached to everything that I mean, you know, everything, the big everything, rather than being unattached, you know, to the little things.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so being attached to the big everything, not the little everything.
SPEAKER_00Because we are everything, we're we're not separate individuals, you know, we are everything, everything is within us, everything is part of what we are, everything is uh what we are. So um just like emptiness is the same thing, it's the same thing, just an experience from a different direction, you know.
SPEAKER_01So let's come back to this moment, and as we end here, maybe you can describe what you're experiencing right now.
SPEAKER_00Everybody and everything is my friend. So that to me is the is the uh simple idea of what consciousness is about. Nothing is separate. Every everybody is my friend.
SPEAKER_01Nothing is other.
SPEAKER_00Nothing is other.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Bye bye, everybody. Bye.