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
Waking Up to the One Life of Everything Everywhere
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Dr. Neil describes an overview of his journey from psychic intuition to the Knower, to the Traveler beyond space/time, to the dissolution of subject/object and becoming One with the objects of perception near and far. At that point, he realizes that there is nowhere to go, Everything in his body. Then he experiences astral projection but not as the traveler; he becomes One with the astral body and plane. Then this expands to the mental, buddhic, and celestial planes. Then it expands to the galaxy, and he is That. His latest realization includes a golden orb whose beings are creating and dissolving the manifest world.
Hi, welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to talk about a kind of overview of Neil's evolution of consciousness and how he woke up step by step to the profound realization that it's all one life, that reality is non-dual, and that everything everywhere is basically we could call it emptiness or consciousness. So, Neil, how did this start?
SPEAKER_00I think I'm going to go back to Dr. Neat, who you I observed using a pendulum, to uh look into my body and my mind and to see what the problems were, what the solutions were. So that kind of fascinated me, and I started to use the pendulum myself. So I would ask questions, and uh pendulum would give me answers yes or no, or maybe, or sometimes I'd use diagrams that had like a circle with with uh 12 divisions so that I could see what was going on and give me complex answers. And I thought this was kind of in an intuitive sense initially.
SPEAKER_01So I thought I was connecting with some part of me that intuitively knew or was part of the well, it may have started that way, it may have started with opening your intuition, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, maybe it started with open intuition or connecting with the place where everything exists. So that's where it sort of began, and I started to use this to find out things about life, what decisions should be made, and I started to trust it more because it seemed to give me good advice.
SPEAKER_01And then later you used it with patients.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I later on I I would before I saw a patient, I never did it in front of patients. Before I saw them, uh I would do a what I'd call a reading and find out where their problems originated, what age, what stage, and what their um treatment should be, and what their prognosis was. And then I saw them and analyzed the situation and found out that my pendulum knowing was accurate. So it was kind of like mind-blowing because it was a validation process, yeah. It actually validated it, and the you know, some people might say, well, that's just the pendulum movie, but that I've validated it, it was correct according to my intellect and my training and my my life, and um and so that continued to evolve from psychic intuitive framework to what you call the knower. Yeah, well, there was a part of me that was sort of traveling places, so I would um imagine that this place I was going to, this place of knowledge, was a place I was traveling to. And uh I was reaching beyond my ego to a place where somehow all the answers to all the questions were known. The only thing that I couldn't access was my ego story, my own personal story. And I kind of figured that that was because I needed to live it, not to actually know about it. I mean, to make decisions and live the human life.
SPEAKER_01So when you say traveling, it sounds like you're separate from it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it felt like it was separate from me.
SPEAKER_01So it was a state, knowing was a state in you, and yet it subjectively felt like you had to go somewhere.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, I had to go to the state the pendulum was accessing.
SPEAKER_01Okay. And so there's an observer, and there's the state of knowing, and you're moving there, and that's the initial experience. And then what happened? Like, let's say you're knowing something um about the tree. So then what happened?
SPEAKER_00I was guided to start to look at this not as going somewhere, but this was uh the home of all knowledge. Some people would say the cashic records, but it was beyond the cashic records. It was a place where uh there all knowledge existed, and I kind of felt that I was one with it, and that's because I was pushed into acknowledging that by an old friend who said, Claim it, claim that that is you. I am the knower, I am the knower, or in the knowing. Now I see it as the knowing, and that connected with my sort of religious background, Judaism, where God is omniscient, all-knowing. So there was a sort of validation that there's a place where you know everything, or can know everything, except the ego story.
SPEAKER_01So you recognized that you weren't actually separate from that state.
SPEAKER_00No, I was one with that state, and and also able to separate myself from that state and ask questions of that state. So there was this dual process of non-duality, being one with it, and duality, being an observer or able to ask questions of it.
SPEAKER_01And that's kind of been a theme for you, living the dual and the non-dual states.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I don't quite believe that you know one totally separates oneself from the not from the dual state into the non-dual state. I think that's the temporary stage. Some people do that when they're intense, but they're like this. They feel that they're non-dual. Um, but the dual duality wakes up sooner or later as well.
SPEAKER_01So it feels like you're connecting to something, which is the duality, but the reality is that you are that thing, whether it's me or the tree or the galaxy or the knower. Both are true, both are true, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So, you know, we we in spiritual practices one learns to deny the ego, to deny the duality in order to actually reach the non-duality. So there's a technique or practice to do that, but truth about it is both are real. That's a technique that is to give you access.
SPEAKER_01And so then what happened was your body emptied out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, well, the knowing became cosmic.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00In other words, I was able to look at the galaxy, I was able to be everywhere, so I recognized that not the knower, the knowing was not local. And so that's how I know I I could access knowing or became the knower, was because I was everywhere.
SPEAKER_01So it wasn't just a local object.
SPEAKER_00No, it's not just an object, say in the room, or you uh thinking about it, ability to see things beyond time space, beyond locality. Okay, to know them.
SPEAKER_01And so it's not really it's seeing it, but it's also being it.
SPEAKER_00It's being it and seeing it and feeling it and hearing it. And it's subtle senses of taste and smell where not particularly world about it, but the others are okay, and so then your body shifted. Yes, then I kind of moved into the from this abstract knowing cosmic sense of being everywhere to being local in the body. So my body seemed to contain everything. So the uh the galaxy and the consciousness and all the physical reality became embedded in my body. I was I was still identified with it all, but it was physical, and uh my body was this the the vehicle of consciousness.
SPEAKER_01So your body had to be emptied first, it was empty. I remember you used the word transparent.
SPEAKER_00That came later.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. Okay, so this is an earlier stage.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so first thing I came into the body and experienced myself as the body, and then the body started to expand. So it was not just local, it expanded to fill the room, expanded to fill the country, expanded to fill the cosmos and the galaxy and the universe, the physical universe. So the body became cosmic, so not just local. So yeah, so it was both local and everywhere in the physical universe.
SPEAKER_01So again, separate and non-dual.
SPEAKER_00Separate because I was one with the body and non-dual that I could observe.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's not non-dual, so separate observing it, and non-dual because everything was in it, being it, yeah. Okay, so then you had this experience of astral projection.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so what happened was I was meditating and I noticed that my body, you know, was emptying out, was transparent, which was a new sensation for me, which was kind of curious. So I followed it and found that I moved my awareness to the astral plane. And what was interesting about the astral plane was it was more vivid than my previous knowledge and awareness of it, which I I did have. I mean, I could actually go visit people who were dead and communicate with them beforehand. But that was the traveler, yeah, it was a traveler, it was dualistic that was auditory and visual. Uh, but now with astral projecting, I found that I had left my physical body behind and that I was connected with beings, smell and taste as well as vivid sensory experience. So it became much more real. And then with time that moved to a place where rather than visiting people and traveling, I became one with them, and then became one with the whole astral plane.
SPEAKER_01So there was a non-dual experience of your astral body in the astral plane.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and I kind of realized that this was the divine creating the physical universe, which I was one with. The divine was creating the astral universe, and gradually that moved up to include the mental universe, Buddhic, the Attic, celestial universe. So the oneness expanded to include all of those, and it's the manifestation of the divine creating these planes, it sort of originated with a big bang, which scientists believe is a physical process in the physical universe, but it also exists on all these other planes: the astral plane, the medical plane, the bully plane, the upper big plane, the celestial plane. So it was this one point, and you know, I know this because I can go there, you know, you know, I'm outside of time as well as space. And so the the Big Bang was an explosion uh that created the physical universe, the and all of the other universes. And I was both an observer and one with it all. And that was the sense of identifying with manifestation, the sense of creation happening. And as it happens, it starts up pretty primitively with a beginning manifestation of these different levels of cosmic planes, and then becomes more and more detailed.
SPEAKER_01So the manifestation from the source took place over time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it has that feeling, you know. Truth about it is more suddenly, you know, time is an illusion.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was gonna say it's also timeless in every moment.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the sort of way of looking at it from a timeless point of view is that everything is manifesting every moment rather than the way human beings normally see it as a continuous time frame. It's like the entire cosmos has manifested and then manifests again, just like this hand is moving across the screen. I'm moving, you know, the ego thinks it's moving this hand, but from a divine perspective, the whole universe is moving every second.
SPEAKER_01So recently you've been talking about a golden orb.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it seems to be something that exists uh at the end of all creation, it includes everything, the physical universe, the astral mental, all the different planes, and there's a creator in the creative process in the center, and it's non-personal, it's not a personal creator, so it's um is it more than one being?
SPEAKER_01Is it yeah?
SPEAKER_00It's a whole bunch of beings who function to create the cosmos, and what they're drawing on is the energy of creation, and they're living it out like embodying it, just like we embody these bodies. So rather than one creator, there's beings that are manifesting as the creative process, and that's my kind of edge awareness.
SPEAKER_01Okay, shall we come back to this present moment? Is there anything you want to say about what you're experiencing?
SPEAKER_00It's infinite, the unfoldment of consciousness just keeps growing and going places. I would urge people who are awake to keep exploring. Don't stop there. Keep exploring because there's more and more and more. You know, it's infinite, the actual variety. It's almost like it's created a more complex form in order to be and others to grow.
SPEAKER_01Well, for you, I think the initial waking up was a beginning. Yes, that's what you're saying.
SPEAKER_00Waking up seems to happen at the beginning, although I had duality before I had waking up.
SPEAKER_01Well, everybody has duality.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but a vast duality.
SPEAKER_01You had a vast duality. Do you mean a non-duality?
SPEAKER_00Well, I firstly thought that when I looked at the galaxy, I was looking at something outside of myself. And then I joined with the galaxy and realized that I was one.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I see what you're saying.
SPEAKER_00So my kind of growth process is looking at as an observer and then joining with the observed to uh go beyond the subject object and process be one with whatever is.
SPEAKER_01So the knowing and the observing became non-local before they became non-dual. You were looking at the galaxy and then you became the galaxy. That's what you're saying?
SPEAKER_00Correct. And that's been my general process. So like looking at a tree, first process is uh is to actually observe the tree, not to be one with the tree, to observe the tree, uh, to look deeply into the nature of the tree, the elements of the astral, and so subtle subtle perceptions, subtle plane, subtle perceptions, and then to realize that the essence of me is in there is the same as the essence of the tree, and that I am one with the tree that came afterwards, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So wherever you are, our listeners, and thank you for listening. Where whatever your state or stage of consciousness, I think what Neila's saying is there's more. And so stay with your practices because we have friends who have some expanded experiences and then they stop. They just kind of lose the motivation to continue to explore. And for some people with certain kundalini risings, it continues anyway, whether you meditate or do inquiries or not. But for other people, it's important what I'm hearing you say is to stay open and continue exploring because the unfolding can go on.
SPEAKER_00It does go on. So it'll go it can go on very slowly for some people and more rapidly for those that put attention to it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so thank you for listening.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Bye bye.