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
Dr. Neil’s Experience of Many Kinds of Emptiness
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"Form is emptiness; emptiness is form." This adage from the Heart Sutra describes non-dual reality in Buddhist terms: all form is basically empty, that is, neither permanent nor substantial. And emptiness, as the source and nature of form, is reality. Dr. Neil describes the stages of his direct experience of emptiness, from empty action, to empty speech, to empty mind, to empty self, to empty object, to empty cosmos. As he awakened to the formless self that underlies the forms of ego, he awoke to the emptiness of all forms—and the nonduality of self and world.
Greetings. Welcome to the podcast. Today we're going to discuss the many forms of emptiness as Dr. Neil experiences them. And I'm sure if you've been in a spiritual community or have done readings in Buddhism or other traditions, you've come across this term, emptiness, empty self, empty mind. And maybe you've wondered what is that like to experience that? When the Buddha said that his mind was empty, what is that about? And does it change? Is it a static state? Um, what does it feel like? Um, so we're going to discuss the many ways in which emptiness or the experience of emptiness um has evolved for Dr. Neil. Take it away.
SPEAKER_01Well, this was not my first path, um, but has evolved since then and includes many different levels of emptiness. So um I think the first sense of emptiness was as you can see, the hand is moving. And an ego, the ego part of me, which still exists, means moving the hand. But if I let go of the ego, the hand is moving itself. There's nobody there moving the hand. I can't find the source of anything except emptiness that is moving the hand, and that's true of the body in general.
SPEAKER_00So this is empty action. Empty action in Chinese or Chan Buddhism, it would be called wu-wei. There's no doer, there's no will in the arm movement.
SPEAKER_01Correct.
SPEAKER_00And it's kind of unusual that that was your first experience of emptiness, I think, at least in the literature, that's unusual. What happened next?
SPEAKER_01Well, the next is um empty mind. So when I sit right now and I look at my mind, there's no thoughts going on, there's no content, it's totally empty. I guess that's what the Buddha was referring to when he meant empty mind.
SPEAKER_00The contents of consciousness are not preeminent, the thoughts are not gripping.
SPEAKER_01There's no there's nothing there. It doesn't even feel like there's an unconscious, doesn't feel like there's uh something emerging, it's just purely empty. There's no uh there's no content unless I put attention on something that needs calculation or thought. So that vehicle is possibly there, the mind, when I need it, but otherwise it's not there.
SPEAKER_00And so how are you speaking?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a weird thing because uh one would imagine that without thoughts, without the contents of thinking and all of the development of language uh that a child goes through, development of communication styles and functioning, uh, one would need to have thoughts, feelings, or combination of those, but that seems to have disappeared. So speech is another thing that is spontaneous. Like right now, there's no thought behind my speech, there's no uh process that is going on that is pre-conditioned of speech speech, it's spontaneous. No rehearsal, no rehearsal, totally spontaneous speech.
SPEAKER_00Does it feel empty?
SPEAKER_01Well, there's nobody directing it. So when I had an ego, I would think before I spoke. In fact, when I was trained as a psychologist, um, I was told to shut my mouth and wait until I could think of something that was very important that would take the client, the patient to a deeper level of uh awareness that was important, and then to speak. So there was a lot of thinking that was going on, but now there's no thinking. Speech is spontaneous, it's its source is empty, it's not divine, it's not um ego-based, it's not driven by the body, it's totally spontaneous.
SPEAKER_00And so empty action or non-action, empty mind or no mind, empty speech, or spontaneous speech, which is actually written about in the Vedas, and then what happened next?
SPEAKER_01So next was awareness of the ego, sense of identity as uh everything that I define myself as body, motion, thoughts, heart, functioning, um, identities, psychologist, father, child, all of my identities dissolved. And uh so there was an emptiness, and there's a direct experience of a sense of emptiness.
SPEAKER_00So we could call that empty self, empty self, no self. And what is that like?
SPEAKER_01Well, there's it's like there's there's nobody there. All of this is happening, but nobody is there making it happen. Not not even divinity, uh, and it opens the sort of the doorway to expanding a sense of consciousness for me, or did open a doorway to other kinds of perception of reality.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so that perception led to empty object.
SPEAKER_01Yes, so if I look at a tree, I can see the subject, object, and relationship with the tree. I could see that duality, but if I keep looking at that tree, uh, so the subject and object are in each other. So I am in the tree, the tree is in me, and then that disappears. So the object becomes empty. The tree is nothing, it's not really there, just a hollow form, without a soul, without an empty, it's empty.
SPEAKER_00Without substantiality, they would say in Buddhism, without anything permanent, without consciousness.
SPEAKER_01Oh, even without consciousness, without consciousness, which which at one point I was experiencing that the consciousness that is me and the consciousness that is the tree were the same. But now I have a sense that there's there's emptiness there as well. Empty self, empty object, empty self, empty object, empty process of looking.
SPEAKER_00So there's a famous adage from the Heart Sutra that goes form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
SPEAKER_01Right, yeah. So that's dissolving the paradox of the relationship of the sense of non-duality, moving to non-duality with form and emptiness.
SPEAKER_00And subject, object are not dualistic, they're both empty.
SPEAKER_01Well, that came later with me.
SPEAKER_00But I I'm talking about that phrase that there's no sense of the difference between form and emptiness. So if um if people react to the word empty with other connotations, you know, like empty means meaningless, empty means not lasting, empty means um impermanent, insubstantial, um, no content. Those have some emotionally negative connotations. Can you talk about that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, when I look at emptiness, it's blissful, it's ecstatic, it's it's um it's joy, it's not a negative state, it's just the source of all in the universe that's unfolding, comes out of the emptiness and goes back into the emptiness. So you know, my next sort of growth was to begin to expand consciousness because when one is empty, a way of looking at emptiness is there's no um time and no space in emptiness. So because there's no space-time, one actually can enter into awareness of something in space-time from a new perspective from a whole different mode. So, you know, so I could empty I could enter into the body, the communication with you. I could enter into that, but I could also enter into a cosmic awareness. So the galaxy, for example, I find myself looking right now at the galaxy and noticing its rumbling and its movement and the earth going around the galaxy and the black hole in the middle of the galaxy. So there's this sort of capacity to observe because the emptiness provides a no-time, no space conduit to enter into some moment in time and space. So there's a sense there also that the galaxy or the galaxy is empty. I am empty, and the galaxy is empty.
SPEAKER_00And you mentioned source. Is the source empty? I mean, we talked about subject-object, so the ultimate object is this ontological divine source, and is that empty?
SPEAKER_01Yes, um, you know, in Judaism, God is known as uh both the ruler and creator of the universe, and also as beyond that in the sense of emptiness, sense of uh Ein Sof. Ein sof, yeah, that was the term.
SPEAKER_00The void.
SPEAKER_01So the boy, yeah, so the void seems to be more mysterious and more deeper than form, and yet it's empty than oneness, yet it's empty.
SPEAKER_00So is the oneness, is the experience of oneness possible because you're empty and it, the object is empty? Same essential emptiness?
SPEAKER_01Oneness is the first emergence of from the emptiness, like the big bang. Before the big bang, there was um, and I could say that because I can go there. For the big bang, there was nothing, there was emptiness, and then there was potentiality, it was uh and the unmanifest, the unmanifest cosmos, the um the thought of the cosmos in the divine, um, but nothing manifested from it. Um and and then the manifest emerged as a point of creation that was the first oneness of existence.
SPEAKER_00So it was separate, but it was one with the source at that at that instant.
SPEAKER_01Well, it emerged from the source into a sense of oneness, yeah. So, you know, so that has been defined as you know, as oneness, and that's when one shares identity with all creation.
SPEAKER_00So is emptiness different from pure consciousness?
SPEAKER_01Different models, you know, the uh different spiritual, uh, mystical traditions uh have different models of what's ultimate. In in Hinduism, Brahman is ultimate, that means uh oneness with all, everything contained within the self, everything as part of the same unity. In Buddhism, there's another step, which is to go to emptiness, and we can go through all the different traditions, they all have their own format for what's experienced, and usually it's based on the culture that um people originate. But what I found is that I managed to go through uh Vedanta as an initial process to inquiry to a sense of emptiness that's Buddhist more than uh than Hindu.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the famous teacher Dojin or Dogen, Dhojin, I think, says there are 84,000 kinds of emptiness. So if everything is empty, if every form is empty, and every emptiness is form, and we translate that into Vedanta, it would seem to be saying it's all pure consciousness. I don't know if that's accurate. I don't know if I mean there's so many scholars who are comparing these um the teachings of these lineages, and I'm not one, but it would sound, it sounds that way to me. That your language has changed as your experience has changed, and as you've experienced more and more emptiness in these all these different realms: empty speech, empty action, empty mind, empty self, empty object.
SPEAKER_01Empty non-duality. So that's another level of this, which is um so I am aware of things like love being non-dual, there's no subject, there's no object that's directed to, there's no process that loving is good is going on, but love is there, and that's an object or a subject, or both, or neither. But behind that is an emptiness.
SPEAKER_00Emptiness is like the backdrop of the non-dual states. We did a podcast on the non-dual states.
SPEAKER_01One teacher described it as the forward part of the person is is full, is present, is one, and the back part is empty. Uh, and if you cut them in half, cut the person in half, the forward will still be full, and the back will be emptied. So these are directly related to each other, and you keep going, you're still gonna have that experience that form and emptiness are one, are part of the same process.
SPEAKER_00So I know in my training, first in Vedanta and then in Jungian psychology, I feel this internal resistance to no self, right? Because the self with the capital S for Jung was the center of the psyche. For Vedanta, it's called Atman, and it's the God, no, it's called Atman, and it's the God within, right? It's Brahman within us. So for me to make this translation, and I'm just wondering if other listeners are having that resistance or also feeling this reaction to the terminology. We didn't expect this. We didn't anticipate that Neil would start experiencing all these forms of emptiness when his practices were more rooted in Judaism and Vedanta. And yet, this is what's unfolded. So as we've kind of been exploring this, we've been moving toward this insight that emptiness means there is nothing permanent and substantial. Everything, it all must pass, right? It all passes away. Right. And at the same time, it's all interconnected. There's no, it's dependent origination in Buddhism. There's no independence in that lack of substantiality. There's no separateness. I'm not a separate, independent being. I'm actually connected to everything else, and my nature is basically the same as everything else.
SPEAKER_01Right. That's very parallel to this awareness that emptiness out of emptiness emerges the one. And the one is what we are, and it's well as the emptiness. So that um that's a way of understanding it. And the one is interpenetrated and can be seen from so many different perspectives, like we are joined in oneness. We there's only one thing happening, there are multitudes of things happening that are all part of the oneness, so that that space or in time space, that emerging unity allows for a great deal of complexity in there.
SPEAKER_00And I think I would just add that in the different lineages, there are teachings that emphasize different kinds of emptiness, like some Zen emphasizes empty mind, other traditions emphasize like Chinese Buddhism, empty action. Others emphasize empty self, like Vedanta, or empty object. They go there first. And so the way that this is kind of unfolded for you in stages, I think, is very it's eclectic, it's kind of non-denominational. Right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's correct.
SPEAKER_00You didn't kind of follow a path to make it happen this way.
SPEAKER_01No, I just explored reality.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Or explored me.
SPEAKER_00And it seems that now you go to emptiness in order to perceive reality beyond form. That's what's happened. Do you want to say something about where you are in this moment?
SPEAKER_01I'm in bliss. So emptiness brings up a great deal of bliss.
SPEAKER_00Okay, thank you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, everybody.