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
Morality is Different in Different Levels of Consciousness
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Dr. Neil explores human evolution from caveman, to tribal, to individual, to heart-centered levels of consciousness. Each stage has its own moral/immoral behavior. For those few who awaken to non-duality, morality is not rooted in subject/object, but Dr. Neil suggests that they must maintain both dual and non-dual awareness to act morally. When the subject and/or object disappear, there is a risk of acting out immoral behavior unless morality has been grounded and internalized in earlier stages.
Greetings, welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to explore morality, partly because many of us are disturbed by the immorality we see all around us. Um, the sexist and racist behavior and speech, the xenophobic and homophobic behavior, the talk of vengeance and retribution. And um, we want to explore this in the context of the evolution of consciousness. So the main point from our point of view is that morality is different in different levels of consciousness. And Dr. Neil is going to um explore that in the framework that we've been using in the podcast. So I hope it's helpful to you.
SPEAKER_00Okay, um, so what brings this up? Um brings up that people are looking at gurus, teachers, priests, politicians, politicians, and seeing lack of moral behavior, sexually, financially, power-based. And so that's what brings up the subject. And how does this interplay with consciousness? Well, there are a number of different perspectives. The first one is uh human evolution, and human beings are early in the evolution. Um basic first level of human evolution is the caveman or the narcissist perspective. We should take care of yourself and kill and eat and survive your own wits, and the uh responsibility you have is just for your immediate family or your spouse and children. That aspect is still prevalent in our culture. I would say 30% of people are functioning on that level. Um, and even though they may have a veneer of being uh moral, they're not moral in terms of the culture we live in. Um and yet people do admire them because they're tenaceo and aggressive and uh pushy.
SPEAKER_01And often successful.
SPEAKER_00And often very successful because uh many of them become billionaires. Um and um and they don't have any value system which makes them treat people with respect or with care. Uh the next level up is the um the tribal level. Uh and our human beings learnt to uh plant vegetables and fruit and and forage for those and uh and do it as a community and protect each other and protect people. This sense is tribal in the full sense of the word. It could be a religious tribalism, so might maybe a major religion could be um small group, but the basic tenets of it are that you survive as a group and you die as a group. The worst thing that can happen to an individual in the system is to actually be kicked out of the group. They won't survive, can only survive as part of this tribal group, and we see a lot of that politically in our culture and socially, and uh either with us or against us.
SPEAKER_01And we see racial tribes, ethnic tribes, gender tribes, you know, people are identifying now with group identity at the species level. So what we're talking about now is humanity as a species rather than individuals.
SPEAKER_00Yes, so humanity is in its second planet, and uh we're about 60% of people live in this particular level of consciousness, primarily, it's their development. So the next stage is individuation into independent thinking, so that you might have conservative values on some regard and liberal values on other regards, you might belong to a community, but not necessarily feel like you are controlled or identified fully with the community, you're a marginal member, uh, but you think for yourself and you think as an individual. There's there's less people in this category than the previous one, and we kind of see that um we're not choosing our presidents, our leaders based on their superiority intellectually, socially, liberally.
SPEAKER_01So, what's the morality in this level of consciousness?
SPEAKER_00Morality is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That's the morality. Um, it's it's uh it's a conscious, ethic, ethical position, and many professions have this ethical value system.
SPEAKER_01So uh meaning do no harm, do no harm, care for the other, um, be compassionate. Um it's a value system that you aspire to, and it's independent thinking, so it doesn't necessarily mean you don't question the ethics you're given. You may question them, the ethical code, and you also care for yourself. It's not only other centered, right? We're not talking about codependency.
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_01Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So um the next step up is there's very few people in this level, is the heart level, where love thy neighbor as thyself is the key element, which is compassion, empathy, caring for all human beings, no matter what their race, creed, uh, sexual orientation is. And there are not too many people who live in this level, and never mind the more evolved spiritual levels. Why is this important? Uh, it's important because, as one enlightened person told me, there's no morality in being awake. Once one actually lets go of the ego and finds oneself in cosmic awareness, there's no morality, there's no right or wrong at that level. It happens and things just spontaneously unfold. And uh, if one has not developed morality or been identified with the body, emotions, mental, spiritual, uh, human value system, these uh these are not, as one person said, one enlightened person told me, I spend 15 minutes in ignorance. The rest of my life I've been awake, and I have no morality. I can do whatever I want to do, uh, and it just happens.
SPEAKER_01Because the belief is that the happening or the spontaneous action is rooted in the source, in yoga, in pure consciousness.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you cannot do any harm if you're awake, if you're enlightened, and that's an illusion. That's not true. Um, and some religious practices have addressed this issue in Buddhism. Right speech, right action, right um thinking addresses the issue and the ten commandments or the ten commandments, or the yamas and niyamas, correct. However, most of the spiritual practitioners bypass this, they move directly from third chakra, from a sense of independence and low morality to transcendence, to uh let go of the ego and transcend rather than develop the morality and the uh heart, the heart part of being a human being.
SPEAKER_01So, how do you teach moral development from the inside out? People are not getting it from the outside in, from parents and clergy and doctrine, it's not being internalized. And how you transmit that from the inside out?
SPEAKER_00Transmit that, teach that.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Um, in other words, this is a missing piece in our development.
SPEAKER_00I think it's important to stay focused on sense of separateness and develop the ego so that it's fully functioning, empathic, caring, moral, centered in um caring for the self and others. So it's important to develop that before you transcend that, or include that as part of your spiritual awakening.
SPEAKER_01I mean, that's really what the field of transpersonal psychology tried to teach in the 1970s was including psychological development and inner work with spiritual practice.
SPEAKER_00Right. So I was a psychologist, I am a psychologist, and uh we have an ethical code that says do no harm, treat the patient or the client as more important than yourself, care for others, uh, and as many principles of honesty and ethics, and how you charge fees and um and so on. Um, those are all aspirational, and there are boards that govern those fields, and try to get people to conform to that with some kind of disciplinal punishment.
SPEAKER_01And yet you read the magazines, the professional journals, and you see how many people are violating the codes and getting their licenses revoked.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a common problem, and uh and those are the only people who get caught.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So what I'm saying is people are not internalizing this. You know, Ken Wilbur talks about lines of development. So they may have emotional, cognitive, or spiritual line of development that's advanced, but the moral line of development is missing.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and one needs to look at moral at morality as a separate line of development, not as the same as waking up or reaching a higher level of consciousness. One needs to include that in development of human growth and human beings. You know, being a therapist is a good training, was a good training for me. Developing compassion, empathy, caring, sense of all human beings are equal and not to reject. So the the aspirational level was valuable in terms of building character.
SPEAKER_01So most people are not psychologists or counselors, and even people who are are not internalizing the moral line of development. So how do we because this is global, this issue. Yeah, it's not even just local.
SPEAKER_00We're living in a narcissistic age where there are more people in the first level of human development and the second level than in the third level.
SPEAKER_01Caveman and tribal.
SPEAKER_00Caveman and tribal, yeah. And bypassing the heart development planetary awareness, people are treating the planet like an object, like it's there to be used.
SPEAKER_01So that's the fourth and fifth chakras.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, rather than even the sixth chakras, which is the spiritual beings, are sort of eliminated from our world. We're a very materialistic, materialistic culture right now.
SPEAKER_01So we get the we get the problem, we get the framework that each of these levels of consciousness or stages of human development has a different morality, has a different set of rules, and behaves differently. The caveman doesn't behave like the conscious teacher or psychotherapist.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the caveman mental morality is narcissism, is taking care of yourself and not anybody else, and that just the immediate family. So the caveman morality is um pure survival.
SPEAKER_01However, the caveman within, because as we transcend, we include the old stages of development. So if the caveman within gets activated, right, we can kind of see that with Trump every single day in the news, then that primitive, immoral, or amoral part of us may act out in a harmful way. Same with the tribal part. Somebody may be in the process of individuating from a group and becoming independent, but there's a crisis, and so they default back to a tribal identity, right? And protect the church or the whatever the group is, the family. So this is a kind of a process that is complex. All of it is within each of us, all of it is within the body of humanity. And I hope that this just kind of gives you a bit of a map to dissect what you're observing these days in human beings.
SPEAKER_00In more advanced levels of consciousness, self and the other are not separate. Um, and yet that doesn't translate into moral behavior because self and other are not consciously part of the heart, part of the moral development. So one could actually be quite advanced spiritually, uh where one sees others as part of themselves or loves others, cares for others, but not necessarily treats them well, doesn't necessarily treat others as or or planet as part of itself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so a priest could have an experience of Jesus that's an authentic unity experience and yet molest a child.
SPEAKER_00Correct. So how do we actually move our society into a more moral position? It's really about understanding the levels of development and teaching our children uh values that are how they treat each other. And for example, ask your children if you have them, would you like it if somebody treated you badly like you're treating them, your siblings or your parents? Uh, so that they you start to train the caring for others inherent in caring for oneself. Try to build that framework.
SPEAKER_01How would you feel if you were that person who's being bullied?
SPEAKER_00Right. And the same thing with financially, yeah, taking care of oneself financially, survival-wise, it's really important in an ethical way. So following an ethical pathway is one in which one does no harm to others, and having a career or a job that is not oriented towards harming others is important, and you know, at each level is development of that level. So if you're in a tribal sense, how does the tribal give to the rest of the world? How does it give to the rest of humanity? How does it give to you know what's its development as a tribe? Does it allow people to separate and individuate out of the tribal mentality? Or does it hold them back and be punitive or be controlling?
SPEAKER_01And how about non-duality, morality and non-dual levels of consciousness?
SPEAKER_00There's no morality, non-dual level, because there's no sense of self or other. Uh, there's a sense of uh non-duality means everything is the same, everybody is part of the whole, and there are higher levels than that, but from a non-dual perspective, there's no morality invested there.
SPEAKER_01So if there's no self another, and therefore no morality, it seems to me it's really important for those people to main also maintain awareness of the duality.
SPEAKER_00Yes, for example, in Buddhism, the uh philosophy is that the higher you go, more spiritually developed you are, the more your evil inclination grows as well. So the more propensity you have to do harm. So it has to be you have to be more diligent not to do harm, not to treat people badly, not less.
SPEAKER_01Um more light, more shadow.
SPEAKER_00So there's there's within these traditions, there's certainly a ground in this in opening the heart and being careful to be moral. Uh however, you know, the many people bypass the these issues.
SPEAKER_01But I think the point that I wanted to make was if you, some of our listeners, are experience oneness, experiencing some oneness states or non-duality, whatever name you give it, unity, consciousness, emptiness, that to also be aware that we live in a dualistic reality at the same time to hold dual and non-dual awareness together, together, so that we maintain an awareness of our impact on others, on the environment, on animals and people and the planet.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's not about transcending separateness and and becoming one or becoming non Jewel. It's about having both. And that's imperative in the development of consciousness.
SPEAKER_01Okay, thank you for listening.
SPEAKER_00Bye bye.