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
Where am I? The Awakened GPS
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What is the location of an awakened consciousness that is beyond space/time? How do we situate ourselves in space when the dualities of local/nonlocal or near/far are dissolved? The mystical traditions teach that longing for union with the divine beloved or Source is inherent in the human soul. What happens when that distance disappears, union is attained –and, even more, we identify with that Source? Our cosmic location becomes “I am That which is Everything, Everywhere.” Or, as Dr Neil put it, “I’m free from being anywhere.”
Greetings, welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to pose the question, where am I? Rather than who am I? The perennial question, where am I? And we tend to think of that in local space-time, right? Where am I located and where will my GPS take me from here to there, from near to far, from local to non-local? But what happens when those dualities dissolve and the sense of distance disappears? Where am I? Where am I? Where is your identity located? In the mystical traditions of all the different lineages, this distance between the seeker and the source, the lover and the beloved, is often highlighted. They write and speak about longing and yearning of the individual soul for the divine, for the beloved. What happens when that's attained? When the union with the beloved is reached, and then the identification with the beloved is even reached or attained. Or attained is kind of an action word, but realized, unfolds in awareness. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Okay, Dr. Neil, where am I?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you well, the the ego, that means the identification with the body, the emotions, the mind, the roles, the sense of self that is in time, was born at a certain time, and is growing and is getting old. That is the world that we live in. That's the world that most of us understand about the question, where am I? I am here sitting next to Connie, in front of a computer screen, and later on I'll be somewhere else.
SPEAKER_01In front of our grandkid's trendle bed.
SPEAKER_00Right. So that's the sense of duality, whereas there's an observer, there's an observing process, and there's an object of observation or knowing or feeling or seeing. For me, once I became aware of my ego, that all became integrated. So the ego has a sense of identity that says I'm something, I'm somebody, I'm Neil, I'm here, I have a story, I have an identity. So it all became integrated in the sense of wholeness, a sense of a whole story. And then once I found myself going beyond the ego, which felt initially like uh emptiness, there was no ego. Ego was just a construct, it was just a fabrication, and the body was empty, it had no substance, it had no uh reality to it. The emotions were just fleeting and passing, the mind as it is now was is empty, and the um the identity is uh fleeting. So once I passed that, I I moved into an empty space. And the empty space saw that I'm aware in that empty space is that I'm not the doer. So the hand is moving across the screen, but it's not me moving it. The ego used to be what was identified as moving. The mouth is speaking, but it's not me speaking. I have no thoughts behind it, I have nothing to say, it's just coming out directly from the source. And the basic emptiness of the body, the mind, the soul, even the soul, which has been through many lifetimes, my soul has anyway, uh, that's empty too. That's that's personal in some ways, that is a construct. Um so moving into the emptiness, one moves to a place where uh identity changes. So firstly it changes in terms of the ego, because it's empty, but then it changes in terms or did change in terms of expanding awareness to being an observer of the galaxy. I found myself looking at the Milky Way galaxy, and um that was very strange because my body still here in this room right now, while I'm right now I'm looking at the Milky Way galaxy, and yet there's no contradiction in that because the emptiness is actually everywhere, it's out of time and space, it's beyond time and space, and so as access to any point in time and space, that means that I can actually go back to the Big Bang and experience the Big Bang as it was, as it is, as it will always be, and I can go to another galaxy and be uh an observer of what's happening in that that other galaxy. You know, I can go to places where people go where they die and live on those planes too.
SPEAKER_01So um so you have a freedom.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the question is where am I? I'm free. I I am actually nowhere and everywhere, and the best way to describe it is to describe it as being free, free from any identification. You know, so when I was looking at the galaxy, I noticed that initially I was observing it, but then I became one with the galaxy, and I am the galaxy. Uh, and that seems to be in the process of movement, that observing, knowing, perceiving, experiencing, and then joining that oneness, that reality.
SPEAKER_01And so those are different levels of consciousness. So we could say that where am I, the location of identity is different in different levels of consciousness.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah. Where am I depends on on where you identify, and that's always possible to change. So there's no place that you reach to that's permanent, because wherever you, well, that's my experience, wherever I go, there's always another place that I could go to. Or another or that place is transparent, even the emptiness, emptiness empties at some point itself out into the cosmos, so it becomes manifest. Even that, uh, even the oneness dissolves into the multitude. So there's no end to the process and no stuck place in the process.
SPEAKER_01So it sounds like the dissolution of near and far, local and non-local distances dissolve. These are some of the dualities that dissolve when this question is answered in realization. Where am I? I am that which is everything everywhere.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm still sitting in this room, in this body, observing the screen, looking through the walls, what's outside of this room. That is, I I guess the best way to describe it is transcend and include. In other words, that remain, the duality remains, but the non-duality unfolds from that.
SPEAKER_01So you're aware that you're still in the chair, in the room, in the house.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I'm very conscious of maintaining my separate um identity because I'm a householder. Uh I need to function in the world, I need to function in terms of my career, I need to function in terms of this podcast. So I'm not um just a bliss bull.
SPEAKER_01Or psychotic.
SPEAKER_00Or psychotic. Yeah. I mean, it's not about going somewhere and being that. It's about I am here and I am there.
SPEAKER_01So we did some earlier podcasts on the subtle planes and the traveler, right? And sort of moving through space, your consciousness moved through space to another plane, but that has shifted now.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So my initial sense of self was sort of moving somewhere or experiencing some distance thing that I was connecting with. But I found with time that that was not the reality. The reality was that I was everywhere and there was nowhere to go. There are there are non-dual states like pure awareness, like knowing, like love. These states have no subject, no process, no object. They just exist as they are, and they are who I am, and they seem to grow. There's more and more of them, uh, of these non-dual states that are beyond space and time. They are beyond space and time, or they include space and time.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so I want to return to the subtle planes. So you had this experience of your body was empty, and the whole cosmos was in your body, and you had this experience of your astral body emptying out, and your there's no language, your movement, your traveling to the astral plane changed.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Well, the identification shifted from the firstly away from the individual sense of individuality to the cosmic sense of self, and then moved to a sense of I guess the best word would be divinity, where I was actually experiencing myself as the as the universe, and that started to empty out. In other words, um, first I moved into the body, and everything was in the body, including the universe, including you know, the whole reality and consciousness, and then it sort of at one point it started to become transparent, quite the opposite of being full. And I found myself leaving the body and going to the astral plane, astral projecting, I guess one would call it, going to visit people on the astral plane, and that was kind of more real than I had experienced before. Before I could see it, I could hear it, but I couldn't smell it, I couldn't taste it, I couldn't feel it. Now I could actually experience those things more fully with the astral body. Uh, and then that sort of merged once again away from observer and observe to being the astral plane. So this was the sort of a divine manifestation, firstly, of the physical universe, then the astral universe, and then the mental universe, and so on on the different universes.
SPEAKER_01Tell us about the mental plane.
SPEAKER_00Well, the mental plane is a very interesting plane because thoughts are real there. So, for example, there are people on the moon who live on the mental plane. We can't see them with your physical eyes because they don't exist on that plane, they exist on a mental plane, and how they create reality is by consensus, so they all get together and they create beautiful waterfalls and mountains and cities, and these are thought forms, and they're short-term, they don't last forever. Um, but they're exquisitely beautiful, and the mental plane seems very clear and clean.
SPEAKER_01So when you move your attention to the mental plane, what's your experience now? Are you going somewhere? Are you is it in you?
SPEAKER_00No, it's here, and there's nowhere to go because I am that. Um, but as you said, what am what's my experience? Well, my a good friend of mine, Barbara, is died a little over a year ago, so she's on the mental plane. She picked me up while I was doing this podcast, you know, and uh and noticed my presence on the mental plane. She said she she kind of knew what I was doing, she got thoughtful and and sent me a form of love.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so if that sounds like an observer.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's difficult to describe because you know experience is is both. So I am subject-object process, and I am one with everything. There's no reason to actually divide them up and say one is more real than the other. These are these are realities.
SPEAKER_01Okay, but I think for our question today, where am I? The mental plane is not somewhere out there.
SPEAKER_00No, it's here.
SPEAKER_01It's not a distant, it's not a near-far polarity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, non-dual non-dual consciousness has no space to it. So there's no time and no distance. You are everywhere at the same time. So I could travel to another galaxy or another planet or uh or to a fine small particle, part of an atom. So it has no uh time or space to it, so one is free to go wherever one desires. So you know, I was recently asked, you know, where where is your consciousness? Where is it located? And I said it's free, it's it's it has freedom, it can go anywhere, it's not bound by any form, and that includes a sense of enlightenment or awakefulness. It's not bound by that because there's always more, and there's always there's other stuff.
SPEAKER_01So if you can go to the galaxy or go to the atom, not go to. Be with.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's why the language is so useful. It's it's it's useful to say go to because it's understandable, you trans want to translate it, but it's not the experience. The experience is that it's kind of like um like tuning a musical instrument, you're just tuning it to a different frequency, and you are that frequency, and it's part of you.
SPEAKER_01And so for all the mystical teachings that you know speak and write about this distance, this inherent longing to close that distance.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you get further and further away from it as you long. In fact, you know, most of the mystical teachings feel tell you you need a guru or a teacher or a priest or a divine being to wake you up from your longing. Because the longing actually pushes you further away, because it it's an identification with your separateness as compared to being joined with the you know, and so it actually pushes you away from waking up. So, um, you know, so if you have a guru or a teacher, often they'll take you right to the edge where you are observing reality, like the galaxy, and then they'll just push you over the edge by removing your mind so that you become somebody who's aware, not somebody who's perceiving an object. You are awareness, you are pure awareness.
SPEAKER_01And so the traditions like bhakti yoga, the devotional traditions that teach, you know, or mystical Christianity that teach this yearning, can people can get stuck because they're identifying with the yearning. I went through that myself. I wrote a book called The Holy Longing, and and I recognize that in a way I was identifying with that separateness, and it was kind of holding me there, telling me that story. I'm not there yet. Where am I? I'm not there yet.
SPEAKER_00Right, and that's a story because we are there, we are all there, we are one, and one has to realize that. Realizing that is like claiming that, it's like going beyond this idea that I'm going to wake up, I'm going to become something bigger, I'm moving somewhere, or I'm failing to do it, I'm not doing it correctly. These are all misconceptions, but that push you more into the ego rather than actually help you go beyond the ego, beyond this idea of time and space going somewhere on becoming something.
SPEAKER_01And yet, we do need practices. I mean, we're not promoting the neo-Advaita popular stuff now that you don't have to do anything because you're always already that.
SPEAKER_00No, like I said, it's it's about getting really close, ego and divine, the ego and consciousness, ego and pure love, getting really close to that identification, and then something can shift you so that you wake up to something that's beyond you. So for me, I was hounded by some friends who are awake. They hounded me. They said, claim you're awake, claim you're awake. And they were relentless until I actually accepted I was awake. And then the reality of it unfolded.
SPEAKER_01So this idea of location is so rooted in our identity, and if we're identified with all these stories that we're not awake and we're not close enough, and we're not there, and we're spiritual failures, then that's getting reinforced.
SPEAKER_00Correct. So, you know, it's even death idea that you're gonna die. You're not gonna die, I'm not gonna die. I'm moving on to my next plane. Uh I'm dropping the body, as they would say, rather than identifying with it. Yeah, so there's a need to see attachment and identification as that which limits that limits you time and space.
SPEAKER_01And we do have earlier podcasts on both of those themes for people who are interested. There's a podcast on attachment to family and friends, and there's a three-part podcast on who am I? Living as ego, soul, and spirit. So, what we're trying to orient toward today is this question of the cosmic GPS, right? Where am I? If I am everything everywhere. Any last words?
SPEAKER_00Yes, you're in infinite places, you're an unbounded being. You know, you're beyond time space as well as being in all of time and space. There's no limit to where you can go, and the spiritual journey does not have any limits on time and space.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_01See you next time.