How Consciousness Woke Me Up

Dr. Neil describes his personal journey of awakening from a past life to this rebirth, young age, teachers and guides, practices, and life circumstances. He emphasizes that his journey is not monastic; it’s a householder becoming a full human being and using what life offers as his spiritual curriculum.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Greetings, welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to explore how consciousness woke up, Dr. Neil, his personal journey from a young age to today, in terms of his evolution of consciousness. And it's a little bit different perspective from other people who've woken up. And one of the points that we're sharing is that everyone's journey is unique. So this may not be your journey, but it's Dr. Neil's, and we want to offer it as an archetypal example of becoming a full, fulfilled human being. Okay, Dr. Neil.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Well, I remember my one of my first teachers, Dr. Neat, was a healer, um, who said to me um that there was not enough time to do the spiritual journey on the western path. And that was actually his story, not mine. Um, because mine was a different story. So I remember in the previous lifetime, as I've shared before, being a Brahman priest in a Hindu temple, a Shiva temple, having two wives and a bunch of kids, and doing a lot of chanting and meditating and spiritual practice, and focused attention on waking up, particularly in the last 10 years of my life there, and waking up uh to consciousness, and having consciousness wake me up to myself. Um, the distinction, the importance of that journey was that it was part of a uh tradition, fairly dogmatic, structured uh tradition that built an ego that was um isolated and somewhat uh distinct. Like most religions, they um they build a sense of body, emotion, thought, imagination, heart that is very solid, that is very traditional. And uh that was my experience in that lifetime. And in terms of chakras, I moved from the third chakra to the seventh. I'm gonna skip down the fourth, the heart, the planetary chakra, the psychic celestial, and moved straight from a sense of ego to a sense of being and consciousness. As a result, when I died in that lifetime, I remember going straight to Brahmaloka, the divine place of bliss, well-being, and not getting stuck anywhere in the process, which was the traditional idea of waking up in the east. And yet, the truth was there was no growth in that waking up state. There was bliss, there was well-being, there was joy, uh, there was a sense of connection with all the beings there, but there was no um continuing evolution, continuing evolution. So ultimately I became bored of some part of me and recognized that I needed to go back and have a human life that involved waking up the other chakras, the fourth, fifth, sixth chakras, as well as stabilizing the basic, the base chakras. So I recognized that and uh took the journey back through the layers of consciousness uh into uh a body, uh, into my mother's womb, um, and chose her particularly because she was driven, goal-oriented, and would keep me on my feet and growing, which was not where I was, I was not growing. So this was her particular gift to me, as well as love. She was really loving. So I entered the body, and I guess the thing that Connie said was rather than me waking up to something, something woke me up, consciousness unfolded inside of me. So, what I've discovered is that the soul, which is not Atman, which is uh eternal and evolving and growing, is uh has been present in this lifetime from the beginning, in fact, before this latha, and and has been involved with the psychology and the body and the emotions and the thoughts and guiding this being, uh, as well as various spiritual masters have been guiding this being as it's unfolded throughout the life cycle. And I guess what I'm trying to share in this um podcast is the human journey, the journey through um different stages of human development that doesn't necessarily require intense spiritual practice, particularly in the early years, but is part of the human evolution. So being in a body and exercising and playing sports grounded me, and many other practices were body-centered and were identified, uh identified, helped me identify with the physical body because I was kind of tripped out before I came here, and uh and the emotional world um and the mental world and the the heart level. So, how did that happen? Um that happened because the experiences of this life that were created for the point being or consciousness uh were all about living well, eating a healthy diet, exercising, good food, uh good attitude, and a lot of training in healthy ways of living. Becoming a psychologist, which opened up the heart and the throat chakras and kept them open, which helped me to be other-centered and caring for others rather than just myself and caring for humanity and the planet.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

So let's move to your early spiritual practices. So you first were drawn to Jewish mysticism, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Um I was raised as a Jew. What did that mean? That meant that my parents, who were not religious in any way, but believed in human kindness and uh service and caring, sent me to Jewish day school, after school, in order to learn how to be a good Jew and uh and do a bhag mitzvah, which is the 13-year-old ceremony of one becoming a spiritual being in the Jewish tradition. So that struck me deeply, and I went way beyond my parents in that tradition. So became religious, went to yeshivas, which are Jewish uh graduate schools, and uh and studied Jewish mysticism and had a great deal of joy in uh in singing and dancing and celebrating the Jewish traditions.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

So from in Jewish mysticism, you found some practices and yet you um kind of got in trouble there.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

No, I didn't get in trouble there. I just at some point uh woke up to the fact that I was not truly believing in the dogma, the laws. In Judaism, there's a lot of a lot of um rules about behavior. They say there's 613 of them, so it's a very uh behavioral oriented tradition. And I remember when I was um well in my early 20s, um, I had um an epiphany. I was lying in bed on a Friday night, and uh the the laws in Judaism are that they you're not allowed to switch on the lights uh because it's an action of work, and you're supposed to rest on the seventh day of the Sabbath. And I wanted to read a book and I was in conflict about it. Uh, and I looked at myself and saw that what held me back from switching on the light was not my belief or my faith, was my sense of belonging, as tribal. And at that moment I had shifted to a more independent person and let go of all my trappings, and within weeks I was free from the Jewish perspective.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

And then you met a teacher, I think he was a homeopath, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:56

He was a teacher on the journey. I was meditating uh five hours a day at that point, trying to get back to Brahmaloka, which was a big mistake, but I didn't know that at the time. And uh I was guided to meet this teacher who was very um spiritually advanced, and he would talk to my soul, like soul to soul. Uh and still, these still now sometimes I remember what he said, and it applies to the moment, not where I was. Uh, and uh so he was somewhat of a guide, and uh there were other guides uh spiritually um at the time, but he directed me to back into my body more, so eating meat, um, exercise, having sex, having intimacy, getting married, having children. Uh so the household of a path. And so I spent the next 20 years deeply invested in that. There were spiritual teachers, um, but nothing significant in the sense that it was life-changing. That happened later on. I knew from Jewish mysticism that at 49 he embarked on an inner journey, and that was the time to do. So I postponed that to part of development until then.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

And so, what happened after this guide? Were you doing TM after him?

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Yeah, I was doing transcendental meditation, the cities, and which are the uh advanced practices, and too much of them, but it was actually before him. Oh, that was before, yeah, because uh those those were making me sick, because it was not my dharma, my path to actually be transcendent, to go back and do that same journey again.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

And so then you got married and had kids, yeah, and you immigrated from South Africa to Los Angeles, yeah, which was an important move, and then what unfolded?

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Well, what unfolded was living a householder path, which was uh service and love for my wife. There was a great love between us, and uh and and I was very forgiving and understanding. There's a really deep development of compassion and kindness and forgiveness.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

She was your marriage became the teacher for a while.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Marriage became a teacher for many years, and being a psychologist, which is a very broad field, was an organizational psychologist, a clinical psychologist, um, was immense training on stilling the mind and the body and the ego and being there for someone else, and eventually finding that I could actually feel God and the other person teaching me at the same time as I was being a therapist for them.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

So we go into that at length in the podcast on uh being a psychotherapist as a spiritual practice, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:22

That was definitely a very important part of the spiritual practice, not so much in terms of the transcendent spirituality being consciousness, bliss, uh, but much more in terms of the heart and the planet, much more in terms of caring, compassion, and empathy and and understanding and training, not to be centered in my feelings. And even the marriage with Connie was uh first few years was a deep training on being present with my own feelings and learning how to be reflective rather than expressive, not turning them against myself, but not turning them against her, and learning to be present with the emotional world.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

So you ended up divorced from your first wife and met me. And in our past 25 years, we've met a number of teachers who have guided you.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Yes, correct.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

So I think maybe first was the man in the TM world and the Satsang.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

It was a community of people, Sangha or Satsang, who were conscious beings, who listening to them and being present with them helped me to um learn about transcendence again.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Well, it helped you to claim the level of consciousness that you were already experiencing as it was reflected in other people's evolution.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Yes, I think uh Dr. Neat uh taught me um how to connect with the knower, you know, or knowing, if we want to see it as a verb, which is the nature of divinity, um which is in religious terms one would say God knows everything, God is omniscient, but in conscious terms, it means that there's a level of awareness which everything is known, and there were techniques to connect with that that I learned from him, observing him, because that's what he was doing, and it was almost like I took it in. So these these different teachers along the way were all guides from my soul, my being, uh, to wake itself up in this form.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

And so there was one person in particular who kind of recognized your level of consciousness and suggested that you claim it, and after that there was a real shift.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Yeah, um, he told me repetitively that all I needed to do was uh was claim the fact that I was awake, which I did, and that sort of started another the spiritual journey, the six and seven chakras opening up again and connecting with uh myself as a being. So that's opened up that part of the journey, and and the other part of it was um the diamond approach, which was a wonderful technique um which sort of advanced psychoanalysis to include the body and the soul and spirit in uh an un speaking and unfoldment process, so having a witness and speaking out the consciousness that emerged. Um, so that the the the primary technique of the diamond approach is um one of your main practices, yeah. It's one of my main practices.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

But before that, before we entered the school of the diamond approach, which we were in for about four years until we left, before that, we found a kundalini master.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Yes, Wamiji, yeah, um, who uh we did very intense spiritual practices to reroute the energy in the body from uh blocked process of not being able to get to the seventh chakra to uh to reconnect, and so there was a movement there which was positive, and so there was moments of recognition, moments of expansion, uh, moments of spiritual waking enlightenment, but not permanence like I have now. Now there's permanent access to all these spiritual levels, many of them uh that are subtle. And I recognize them when they've spoken to me or read to me or when I read them.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Well, we learned a lot about the kundalini from Swamiji and his US teacher, John Harrigan, and um her book, Kundalini Vidya. And one of the things we learned is that there are a limited number of ways that the kundalini rises, and in each of those risings, there are very specific blocks where the kundalini gets locked and um stops people from waking up. So you had this experience that their practices really kind of unlocked the blocks for you, and you began to have some direct perceptions, um, you began to um have really clear witnessing. You had, you know, there were a lot of openings there.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

Right. But in essence, I was awake before this lifetime, and uh in essence, consciousness was acting through my soul uh in unfolding this development of opening up the energy flow and the moving through the chakras, moving through the energy centers, and uh and developing the higher, the heart, the throat, the psychic perception, which continues. So there's a a sort of a pyramid process where the base chakra, the bottom chakra, the uh what's it called?

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Muladhara.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Muladhara, yes. Muladhara chakra keeps opening up and allows the other chakras to form as a pyramid. So you get higher and higher, but the base needs to be more solid and more solid and more solid. So, you know, so there's still continuous development of the body, the emotions, the thoughts, the beliefs, the attitudes, the connection with compassion with humanity, the planet, as the higher levels of being and awareness and divinity and emptiness and oneness uh open further.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

So I would say that you know, we went to India to see this kundalini teacher, and he was living a life like your past life, right? He was living the life of a sadhu, and totally focused on his practices, no relationships, no money, and so on. And it was an interesting reflection for the difference in the path that you've taken to become embodied and to be to develop the full range of being human. We saw some shadow issues in him because of his lack of development in certain lower chakras. That was really interesting. So these days, what is your practice and what is your experience like?

SPEAKER_01 22:27

Well, in some ways, this what we're doing here is my practice. So speaking out the truth and watching it unfold. And meditating is a practice, inquiry is still a practice, and life is a practice. So, my my general experience is that everything that's happened in my life and in your life, it leads you to more consciousness, it's sort of like opening the doors so that the divine can manifest itself in human form and experience itself from that aspect of awareness. So the divine is both inside of this being and outside of this being at the same time, so that there's a dual process that allows it to experience itself, and that continues to unfold in very interesting ways.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

So life is your curriculum, you could say, or like Ramdas says, it's all grist for the mill.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Right. Well, it's guided not by me, by the universe, by the cosmos, which sends teachers, which sends guides, which opens one up to life experience. And you know, some of them are important, like the first marriage, like the emigration, very important, learning to detach from a culture and being embodied in a new culture, so experiencing the transitions, uh, loving, loving people in my life, my wife, my kids, my grandkids, the the beauty of psychotherapy as a spiritual path, and the way it opens up certain chakras. So um, so it's all a guide from the inside and continues to grow.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

So let's ask our listeners to just contemplate this experience of yours and mine, which is that life itself is the teacher, and we can create the circumstances for the evolution of consciousness in the circumstances of our lives. Correct. In what shows up, and who shows up, and how we respond to it. It's all our curriculum. And we did do a podcast on aging into awakening through the lifespan, if that interests you. Okay, shall we land here?

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Sounds great.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Thank you all.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

Bye bye.