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 Transcending the Linear Timeline
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Dr. Neil describes the conventional experience of time -- past, present, future -- as the ego’s time. But he suggests that this is a mental construct because he also experiences divine time, in which creation, maintenance, and destruction are ongoing in every moment, and soul time, which is more cyclic and has no beginning or end. Since he has consciously realized these three subjective experiences of time, he has changed the way he works with patients to focus less on the past and more on the present moment, because it’s all here now.
Greetings. Welcome back to the podcast. We're going to talk today about transcending linear time. We've been discussing in a number of podcasts how Dr. Neil can see or hear or connect with non-local objects in space. And it occurred to us, you know, space-time are the same matrix. And so we wanted to discuss this in the context of time and non-duality. Okay, take it away.
SPEAKER_01So ordinary consciousness assumes that we have such a thing for time, that there's the a past, present, and a future. And that these are all part of our awareness and part of our development and growth. And that's true. It's in duality. We need to actually take care of these issues. We need to be active participants. However, if one looks more closely at time, the past is gone. One cannot really live and change things and grow things in the past. And the future is uncertain. I mean, we can project some ideas about the future, but we don't know what's going to happen in the future. And the present, the moment, is very transitory. It comes and goes. So as soon as we put attention on it, it actually disappears. Uh, because it's now in the past. So time is a construct in the sense of the mind, the big mind. The um dual consciousness actually is somewhat of an illusion.
SPEAKER_00Dual consciousness?
SPEAKER_01So the ego has duality, it's consciousness.
SPEAKER_00So the ego lives in linear time.
SPEAKER_01Ego believes in linear time, but even with the ego, one can begin to examine time and see that it's it's maya, it's somewhat of an illusion because one cannot change the past, one cannot project fully the future, and one cannot uh live in the moment because it's transitory, it goes as soon as you put attention on it.
SPEAKER_00My my hunch is we needed to name them because it creates a narrative structure for the ego's life. I mean, the ego lives in narrative time, past, present, future, as a story.
SPEAKER_01All all human beings live in that as egos, they live in a sense of time being part of the story of life, but the more subtle levels of consciousness don't have that.
SPEAKER_00What do you mean?
SPEAKER_01Well, if we take the divine level of consciousness and examine it, how does it relate to time? So divinity, um, from my perception creates, maintains, and dissolves all in the same moment. So it doesn't it doesn't have a sense of time, it's uh it's creating uh the entire cosmos, including the subtle planes, the astral, mental, buddhi, got big celestial plane, it's creating the entire cosmos and then dissolving it each moment, and uh, and in some ways making a story out of the process as well. So, from a divine perspective, there is no such thing as time, time is an illusion because from that point of view, there's no past, no future, it's all being created moment by moment.
SPEAKER_00And you said from your experience, so how do you experience that?
SPEAKER_01I experienced that sense. I was driving down the road in my car, and all of a sudden I realized that Brahma, the creator in Hinduism, was creating the whole story of what was in front of me, what I was, and Vishnu was making a story out of it. Vishnu, the god of story, the god of maintenance, maintenance, and Shiva was destroying the or undoing, taking it back into being, into its consciousness. And so for me, that that awareness is there right now that Brahma is creating this, or even even in Western religion, God creates, God governs, and God dissolves. So there's awareness there that this is happening in time space.
SPEAKER_00And so, how do you live with that awareness and at the same time function in linear time?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm not living in that awareness alone, I'm living in the ego state, which is necessary if one is not living in a cave or living in a monastery or an aesthetic. Uh, it's necessary because you have to make choices and decisions, and the ego's best tool for that. Of course, the soul is somewhere in the middle between these two layers, these two levels. So the soul is immortal, it's uh it comes into life, life, and then moves on to death and between lifetimes and reincarnates again. So it has uh, and I'm aware of past lifetimes, and I'm aware of being in the present moment with my soul being present here in this body, in this room, in this cosmos, in this universe. Uh, so I'm aware of that.
SPEAKER_00But you use the word past lives, yes, that sounds linear.
SPEAKER_01Well, the soul does live in a linear sense, but the linear sense is very vast, it's it's eternal, so it has no beginning and no end, so it's it's there forever, and in some ways, the soul can connect with the divine and can connect with the ego sense of time, so it's actually a bridge between the two.
SPEAKER_00So, soul time we could call it, sounds more like it's cyclical rather than linear in the sense that it's in the cycle of return, like the seasons, right? We're born, we die, we're reborn, we die, we're reborn, and in that process, the soul is evolving and carrying the consciousness that's evolving.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, it's kind of like that. Um, the ego is born, is developed as part of the life cycle, and then dies or leaves itself and gets ideally reabsorbed into the soul. The soul is actually expressing itself through the ego, through the body, through the mind, through the heart. It's expressing itself and it's returning the fruits of the lifetime back into the soul. So um, that doesn't mean everybody has that process. So most people, when they die, go to the astral plane or the mental plane and continue to live out a personal life that's very um identified with an ego structure. Um yesterday somebody told me that a good friend of mine, Barbara, visited with them, and uh it was very clear and very present, and she's she was on a mental plane.
SPEAKER_00She died several years ago.
SPEAKER_01No, it's probably about a year.
SPEAKER_00Oh, it's a year, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So um, you know, her sense was that you know she's still operating on that mental plane, and so she has an ego, a sense of separateness, an identity, and uh and can communicate for people who are open to that.
SPEAKER_00So let's come back to our theme. So Barbara's on the mental plane. What is her sense of time?
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. So the time on the physical plane is very concrete. I mean, it's it's uh it's like a clock, you know. It's uh well when you go to the astral plane, it becomes more fluid and a little less grounded, and the mental plane even more so. So thoughts are creating a reality. So time is much an illusion on the mental plane than it is on the ego plane, on the embodied ego plane.
SPEAKER_00So, does Barbara have any sense of time passing or how long she's been there?
SPEAKER_01Let me ask her. She says it passes very quickly. Yeah, it's it comes and goes quite rapidly, more rapidly than the ego and physical plan.
SPEAKER_00So that's her subjective experience.
SPEAKER_01Subjective experience, just like my subjective experience is the ego experience, which is subject-object and process, and linear time, and divine time, which is no time, uh, because everything is created at the moment. There's there's no such thing as past or future to all the moment, and soul time, which is infinite and progressive and developmental. So, you know, I assume this lifetime I'll be more advanced than the previous lifetimes, and future lifetimes will be more advanced than the present lifetime. Of course, there are uh some other subtle dimensions like emptiness, which is a divine level, true emptiness, the divine level, and obviously time is created out of that. So, how would that happen? Well, that's sort of like the big bang. Before the big bang, there was emptiness, the divine was sleeping, the void, the void, the divine was it's in itself, and then the unmanifest universe uh was created in that space, kind of like the dreamer, the dreamer of the universe, dreamer of the cosmos. And so I can have a look at that by separating myself a little from that, and there's a knower or knowing that can experience that sense of uh uh unmanifest universe, can look into it and see it, and from the unmanifest universe, the manifest universe is created. That's the big bang. So there's this one specific point that's created um out of nothing, uh, and explodes into time and space, initially by just being divine in a single moment, and then creating all the different layers uh of awareness uh in that in a moment.
SPEAKER_00So but I find myself thinking automatically that that Big Bang is in the past, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's the human perspective. So we're looking at it in terms of something that happened from the past. But if you're if you look, if you look at a telescope and you look at the furthest galaxies, and there are billions of them, but the furthest galaxies from the from the telescope, from the human eye, so to speak, one discovers that there it takes something like 13 billion years for the light from the furthest galaxies to reach us. So, what does that mean? That means that we are seeing something that happened 13 million years ago and doesn't exist or probably doesn't exist anymore. It's probably dissolved or exploded, or maybe something has happened to it. So we're experiencing a sense of time out of context of what's what's going on.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, that's a great example because we're we're seeing the past in the present, we're seeing the light from billions of years ago in this moment, and it doesn't even exist anymore, right?
SPEAKER_01So, what's time, what does time mean? It's relative to our experience.
SPEAKER_00And what about psychology and its focus on the past?
SPEAKER_01Well, how would I describe this? I'm aware as an analytical human being of my uh teenage years and my adult years and my story. I'm aware as a psychologist having delved into the unconscious material of my five-year-old, six-year-old experiences, and even deeper as a soul having experienced also through psychology, zero to four years old. I'm also aware with um hypnotherapy, which I did 10 sessions on my on the birth canal, the experience of passing through the birth canal and the interrogate environment. So that's part of the consciousness of the soul, and I'm aware of that in this moment, and uh and also aware of myself coming into this body uh from uh the divine, another perspective from the source, from the source, from the Brahma Loka.
SPEAKER_00Okay, but what I'm asking is let's stay focused on time. So, psychology is rooted in changing our past to expand our awareness or heal pain in the present, right? This field is rooted in linear time, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Some psychological models.
SPEAKER_00And but you've had this experience with your own hypnosis and with hypnotizing other people that those moments of early life are still here, they're present.
SPEAKER_01Everything is present in the moment.
SPEAKER_00So say more about that.
SPEAKER_01Um, yeah. Psychology is about bringing everything to the present. So one delves into the past because it informs the present. Um, does it mean it controls it? Not necessarily, but the past is a thought, is an idea, is a memory, is a construct. And um while I was working in psychology, I used to do a lot of um analysis of people's childhood in order to understand their present behavior. But I kind of woke up to the idea that that was actually somewhat regressive and that it was better to be staying in um present moment and experiencing everything that the person was bringing to the present moment. Um and that was more and is more real.
SPEAKER_00Oh, so you changed your clinical practice because of that?
SPEAKER_01Yes, because I'm now living in the present moment, and it doesn't, even though I could understand the past, I had this habit for a while of um when I would see a new patient, before they would walk in the door, I would go look psychically at them and see what their problem was and what caused it and what the remedy would be. Um and that gave me a sense of empowerment. But um that was looking into the past with the psychic or a spiritual ability. Uh, but I found that living in the present moment is far more effective than delving into the past because it's all here anyway.
SPEAKER_00It's in the body, it's in the body, it's in the motion, it's in the mind, it's in the feelings, it's in the unconscious.
SPEAKER_01It's here, it's it's manifesting itself in the moment.
SPEAKER_00So it's an illusion that memory is in the past.
SPEAKER_01It's an illusion that memory is only in the past. Ah, so it's a way of looking at it. In other words, um the ego wants to look at the past and protect against the future issues that are difficult to deal with. Okay, but the truth about it is we're immortal beings, we don't have a beginning, and we certainly don't have an end as a soul. And the divine aspect of ourselves is creating and and unfolding, taking back into itself its consciousness and our awareness at the same time.
SPEAKER_00So there are all these kind of little points that we're making, but I don't know if they've been can if the dots have been connected around the theme of time. Um, the sense that I have is that the subjective sense of time is different in different levels of consciousness, and that you carry with you duality and the ego state and ordinary time, that you carry with you soul time and your awareness of um the soul's births and rebirths and its eternal nature, and that you carry with you a sense of divine consciousness in which everything is created and maintained and destroyed in this moment, ongoing, which is a kind of a zen thing, you know, now it's all here, now in this moment, right? So, how do people apply this perspective in their own lives? How can this be helpful?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's helpful to see death as an illusion, a sense of uh construct, because it removes the fear of death, or at least most of it. So that's a very helpful form of it. It's uh it's helpful to see things from the divine perspective because it's so more permanent and so much more heartfelt.
SPEAKER_00Doesn't feel permanent at all to me. It feels completely fleeting. Yeah, well, it's if everything is in the moment.
SPEAKER_01In other words, if I look at the divine creation of this moment, everything that I can experience in this moment was is created by the divine in this moment. It's magnificent, it's pure genius and pure bliss, and beyond the ability to even imagine. I mean, you can imagine a billion galaxies with each having a billion stars in them. It's beyond imagination, it's ecstatic. So um to me, you know, I live in a lot of bliss and joy and ecstasy because I perceive time as a construct.
SPEAKER_00You've really transcended linear time even while you live in it as a body-mind, Dr. Neil. But your consciousness has gone beyond it. So it's it's kind of another duality that you've transcended. I mean, we've talked about all these different dualities.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it's a non-dual awareness, but also includes a dual awareness and also includes the in-between awareness between non dual and jewel, which is infinite.
SPEAKER_00Okay, should we land there?
SPEAKER_01With pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Thank you all for listening.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, bye bye.