When “I” Speaks After Awakening

After a nondual recognition, language returns before identity does. Words reappear, grammar resumes, and the pronoun “I” steps back into the conversation—not as proof of separation, but as a functional bridge. Speech requires a subject. Silence does not.

Many misunderstand this moment. Hearing someone say “I experienced awakening,” the listener assumes a reinstalled ego, a self reclaiming authorship. Yet what actually occurs is translation. Experience moves through the narrow gate of language, and language has only a few handles to grab reality with. “I” becomes one of them.

Avoiding the word altogether often creates greater confusion. Saying “nothing happened” suggests absence rather than transcendence. It implies insignificance, when the opposite is true. Something fell away so completely that no object remained to point at. Language struggles most where realization is most total.

A distinction helps here.

Turiya refers to the formless witness; the ever-present awareness that observes waking, dreaming, and deep sleep without entering any of them. It is silent, empty, untouched. This is not an experience in time but the condition in which time appears. Many awakenings stabilize here, and rightly so.

Turiyatitta goes further. Even the stance of witnessing dissolves. No observer remains to stand apart from what is observed. Awareness recognizes itself as the only reality there is. No inside, no outside, no vantage point left. This is nonduality without remainder.

When speech arises from this recognition, “I” no longer refers to a psychological centre. It does not point to a thinker, a chooser, or a personal narrative. It points to the Self; Para Brahman—without division. Atman, ego, witness, world collapse into a single field, not blended, not unified, but revealed as never having been separate.

The same word is used. The referent has changed.

Confusion arises when listeners assume the old meaning still applies. The word “I” sounds familiar, so it is treated as familiar. Yet meaning does not live in the word. Meaning lives in the depth from which the word emerges.

A realized individual does not abandon language. Language is abandoned as identity. What remains is utility. Communication happens. Teaching happens. Relationship happens. None of it reinstates separation.

The paradox resolves itself quietly: the ego can say “I,” and the Absolute can say “I.” Only one of them believes it is something.

Silence knows the difference. Speech borrows it.

Morgan O. Smith

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Ego Death vs. Super-Ego Death

When individuality dissolves—and when the collective mask collapses

Ego death has become familiar language within spiritual circles. It often refers to the collapse of the personal story; the felt sense of “me” as a separate centre of control, identity, and continuity. Thoughts still arise, sensations still move, yet the claim of ownership quietly disappears. Experience continues without a narrator insisting it belongs to someone.

This event can feel absolute. Many report vastness, silence, love without an object, or a direct recognition of being awareness itself. The personal mask falls away, and with it the emotional gravity of self-protection, shame, pride, and comparison. Life continues, yet it is no longer filtered through the need to defend or improve a fictional self.

Still, something subtle often remains.

Beneath the personal ego sits another structure, far less discussed and far more persistent: the super-ego of the collective. This is not merely morality or social conditioning. It is the internalized voice of humanity itself; the inherited myths, hierarchies, spiritual ideals, political narratives, and cultural agreements that define what counts as real, good, awakened, successful, or worthy.

Ego death removes the personal actor. Super-ego death removes the stage.

Super-ego death is not about becoming rebellious or rejecting society. It is the dissolution of the unseen authority that claims reality must conform to shared agreements. This includes spiritual identities just as much as material ones. The enlightened persona, the wise teacher, the healed one, the awakened exemplar, all of these belong to the collective ego, even when the personal ego has already fallen.

This is why some awakenings still feel constrained. Freedom is tasted, yet behavior unconsciously bends to invisible rules. One no longer needs approval as an individual, yet still seeks legitimacy through lineage, doctrine, community, or role. Silence is known, yet language is chosen carefully to avoid exile from the group.

Super-ego death arrives when even the collective lens loses its authority.

No tradition holds the final word. No framework owns truth. No spiritual map is mistaken for the territory it points toward. Morality is no longer outsourced to consensus. Meaning no longer depends on agreement. What remains is not isolation, but radical intimacy; life meeting itself without mediation.

This does not produce chaos. It produces clarity.

Action becomes responsive rather than obedient. Compassion arises without ideology. Ethics emerge organically, shaped by direct contact rather than inherited commandments. One may still participate in society, teach, lead, love, and create, but without the invisible pressure to represent anything.

Personal ego death says, “I am not who I thought I was.”
Super-ego death says, “Reality is not what we collectively agreed it must be.”

Very few speak from this territory because it offers no badge. Nothing can be claimed. No position can be stabilized. Language points, then dissolves. Authority evaporates.

What remains cannot be organized, branded, or defended.

Life continues, unowned, unruled, uncontained, expressing itself freely, without asking permission from the individual or the crowd.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Greatest Expression

You’re Already Expressing the Greatest Expression and Don’t Even Know It

Nothing needs to be added to you. Nothing is missing. The most extraordinary expression possible is already happening, quietly, without effort, before any attempt to improve it.

Existence does not wait for permission to appear. It does not consult identity, achievement, or spiritual progress. It expresses itself as breath, sensation, perception, memory, confusion, clarity, longing, boredom, and awe, all without ever stepping outside itself. What you call you is one of its gestures, not its source.

Search often begins with the assumption that something essential has not yet arrived. That assumption creates movement, effort, discipline, and endless refinement. Yet the impulse to seek arises from the same field that is supposedly being sought. Awareness looks for awareness. Being attempts to arrive at being. The loop sustains itself through misunderstanding.

Existence is not something you perform well or poorly. It is not a role to master or a state to stabilize. It is already complete before thought comments on it. Every attempt to improve it belongs to the play of expression, not to a lack that needs correcting.

Notice how little effort is required to exist. Heartbeat continues without consultation. Sensations arise without rehearsal. Thoughts appear without being summoned. Even the sense of being a separate doer arrives spontaneously. None of this requires your management.

What feels ordinary carries no deficiency. The mundane is not a lesser version of reality waiting to become sacred. Washing dishes, forgetting names, feeling tired, feeling inspired, each appears from the same depth. Existence does not divide itself into meaningful and meaningless moments.

Awakening is not an upgrade layered onto life. It is the recognition that life never needed upgrading. What falls away is not existence, but the belief that existence must become something else to be valid.

Trying to express your “highest self” quietly assumes you are not already doing so. That belief fractures what is whole. The greatest expression cannot be improved because it is not a product. It is the fact of appearing at all.

Nothing needs to stop. Nothing needs to be transcended. Even misunderstanding belongs. Even confusion is permitted. Even the desire to arrive somewhere else is part of what is already complete.

The miracle hides in plain sight because it has never announced itself. Existence does not sparkle to prove its worth. It simply continues, endlessly creative, endlessly sufficient, endlessly itself, appearing as you, without asking whether you recognize it.

Morgan O. Smith

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Giving Birth to the Sacred Within

This reflection was inspired by Maureen Catabian, one of our head facilitators at the Integral Mastery Academy. She is a nun and a Religious of the Good Shepherd in the Philippines, with 34 years of vowed life and seven years of missionary service in Burkina Faso and Senegal. Last week, she facilitated an online Advent Reflection and Centring Prayer session that offered a quietly penetrating insight into the symbolic depth of the Christian story.

Rather than approaching Mary and Jesus solely as historical figures, she spoke to their interior meaning, the way these symbols live within the human psyche and soul. Her reflection pointed toward a radical possibility: each of us is capable of symbolically giving birth to Christ.

This is not a biological claim, nor a mythic abstraction. It points toward embodiment. To bring forth Christ means to allow our highest qualities: love, compassion, humility, courage, truth—to move from potential into expression. Christianity, at its core, is not belief alone but participation. The aim is not to admire Christ from afar, but to become more Christlike.

Mary, understood symbolically, represents a state of interior openness. Virginity here does not refer to sexuality, but to non-attachment. Untouched by compulsive grasping. Uncolonized by fear, status, or possession. Present in the world, yet not shaped by its distortions. Such a state allows something sacred to be born through us rather than merely spoken about.

Seen this way, Christ Consciousness is not exclusive to one tradition. Buddhism speaks of Buddha Nature, the innate capacity for awakening and compassion. Vedanta speaks of realization, whether framed through non-duality or devotion. Language shifts, symbols vary, yet the movement is the same: the flowering of what is most whole within us.

Love your neighbour as yourself.

This teaching becomes transformative once the meaning of “neighbour” expands. Love matures as perspective matures. Identity widens from ethnocentric to worldcentric and finally to kosmocentric. Care stretches outward until it includes not only those who resemble us, but all beings, all life, all existence.

Christ Consciousness dissolves the narrowness of “us and them.” What begins as personal devotion ripens into a universal ethic: care rooted not in obligation, but in recognition. The other is no longer other.

Spiritual maturity does not ask us to escape the world. It asks us to meet it without being possessed by it. To act, serve, speak, and love from a place no longer ruled by fear or fragmentation.

Each moment offers the same question Mary symbolically answered:
Will something greater than habit be allowed to move through you?

This is not a miracle reserved for saints. It is the quiet work of becoming transparent to love.

Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas to you all.

Morgan O. Smith

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Learning to Become the Whole Picture

A Meditation Exercise

Most of us move through life identified with a very small point of reference: this body, this role, this story. This blog explores a contemplative exercise that systematically expands perception from the smallest point imaginable to the largest conceivable whole. Step by step, it trains the mind to release its attachment to identity, scale, and centre. Practiced over time, this form of meditation prepares awareness for the possibility of non-separation, where the sense of being a separate observer gives way to experiencing reality as a single, undivided whole.

A dot appears.
Small. Definite. Easy to hold.

That dot rests on paper.
Paper rests on a desk.
Desk belongs to a room.
Room belongs to a house.
House stands on a street.
Street unfolds into a community.
Community expands into a city.
City into a province or state.
Province into a country.
Country into a planet.

The planet moves within a solar system.
The solar system turns within a galaxy.
The galaxy drifts among countless others.
The universe opens into immeasurable depth.
Depth gives way to the possibility of many universes.

Awareness keeps widening.

At some point, the exercise stops being imaginative.
Perspective shifts from accumulation to release.
Each expansion loosens attachment to the centre point, once called “me.”

Identity thins out.

Roles dissolve first.
Status follows.
History fades.
Gender, race, profession, success, failure, each quietly falls away.

No effort required.
Only patience and repetition.

What remains does not feel like loss.
What remains feels like scale.

Meditation, practiced this way, trains the nervous system to tolerate immensity.
Mind learns not to contract when boundaries disappear.
Attention becomes flexible enough to hold paradox without panic.

Something subtle happens over years.
The observer no longer stands apart from the observed.
The dot never vanished; it was never separate from the page, the desk, the room, or the universe.

When awakening arrives, should it arrive, the shock is not annihilation.
The shock is familiarity.

Nothing new appears.
Only the removal of a mistaken centre.

Preparation does not guarantee realization.
Preparation simply reduces resistance.

Five years of daily practice is not a demand.
Five years is a gesture of seriousness.
A declaration that truth matters more than comfort.

Eventually, there is no one imagining the multiverse.
The multiverse imagines itself; without edges, without names, without division.

Silence holds everything.

Morgan O. Smith

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All Perspectives, Held at Once

The mind is trained to move. It scans, compares, chooses, rejects. Such motion gives the impression that reality must be approached piece by piece, perspective by perspective, as though truth were a puzzle assembled over time. Yet there is another mode of knowing; one that does not move at all.

When awareness rests in itself, perspectives no longer compete for dominance. They appear simultaneously, without hierarchy. Subjective feeling, objective fact, cultural meaning, and systemic pattern are no longer separate lenses fighting for authority. Each arises as a facet of the same totality, already complete.

Grasping all perspectives at once does not require encyclopedic knowledge or intellectual speed. It requires the absence of contraction. The moment the need to stand somewhere collapses, the whole field becomes visible. No viewpoint is excluded because none is defended.

Contradiction dissolves here; not because differences vanish, but because opposition depends on identification. When awareness is no longer anchored to a single position, opposing views reveal themselves as complementary expressions of one indivisible reality. What once appeared irreconcilable is now seen as mutually arising.

This capacity does not belong to the personality. It is not a skill developed through effort or refinement. It emerges naturally when the sense of being a separate observer relaxes. What remains is a silent comprehension that does not argue, does not conclude, and does not seek resolution.

From this clarity, compassion becomes effortless. Every stance, every belief, every action is understood from its own internal logic. Judgment falls away, replaced by direct recognition. Even confusion is seen clearly, without resistance.

Such seeing does not flatten the world. It deepens it. Distinctions remain, yet none claim ownership of truth. The full spectrum of existence is held without strain, like light containing every colour without favouring one.

Nothing new is acquired here. Something false simply stops obscuring what was always present.

Morgan O. Smith

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Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness Meditation Sessions

We’re excited to share that Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness now offers audio meditation sessions via YouTube you can listen to anytime.

Explore immersive music entrainment experiences designed to support nervous system regulation, emotional balance, and deep inner stillness, including:

• Beats over Brahman
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• Sacred Sonic Continuum
• 51st State Meditation

Each session blends sound, rhythm, and intention to meet you where you are—whether you’re grounding, releasing, or resting in awareness.

Subscribe now and begin listening today.

https://www.youtube.com/@BodhiCare

Morgan O. Smith, Executive Director of Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness

My Eyes Are Wide Open, Yet I Continue to Blink

Awakening does not arrive as a permanent gaze locked onto the infinite. It arrives as a rupture—clean, unmistakable, irreversible. Something collapses that never quite existed, and what remains does not need to convince itself of anything ever again.

That first rupture carries a strange innocence. Consciousness recognizes itself without reference, without scaffolding, without an observer left standing outside the recognition. Separation dissolves, not as an idea, but as a lived impossibility. That moment cannot repeat. Once the false center is seen through, there is no way to sincerely reinhabit it.

And yet—experience continues to pulse.

Eyes remain open, yet blinking persists.

Subsequent moments can arrive that feel just as total, just as decisive, just as final. Not because awakening has reversed, but because what awakening illuminates continues to reveal its own depth. Conditioning loosens further. Residual identity releases its grip. The nervous system grows more capable of bearing intimacy without contraction. Intelligence, love, emptiness, embodiment, each may come forward as if for the first time.

Each arrival feels absolute because it is absolute relative to what had not yet been surrendered.

Blinking names this rhythm without dramatizing it. Awareness does not dim, yet perception opens and closes. Identity does not return, yet orientation subtly reorganizes. What collapses is never truth itself, only the way truth was being unconsciously framed.

Peak realization and trait realization quietly diverge here. Peaks still occur; sometimes vast, sometimes ordinary, sometimes devastatingly simple. Traits deepen; less visible, more pervasive, harder to narrate. The need for confirmation dissolves even as revelation continues.

Classical traditions have always known this, though rarely shouted it. Zen never stopped at a single seeing. Advaita never mistook first recognition for final embodiment. Mahayana never separated emptiness from compassion. Kashmir Shaivism never treated recognition as a one-time event.

Each spoke differently, yet all pointed to the same subtle fact: awakening is not repeated, but it is continuously clarified.

Blinking does not interrupt sight.
Blinking protects it.

Awakening does not require uninterrupted luminosity. It requires no defense against the natural oscillation of experience. Awareness remains awake whether perception sharpens or softens, whether insight detonates or quietly integrates.

Awakening happens only once.
Awakening happens endlessly.

The first time, separation collapses.
Every time after, whatever still mimics separation dissolves.

Eyes open.
Eyes close.
Nothing essential is lost.

That is not regression.
That is refinement.

Morgan O. Smith

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When Empathy Crosses the Threshold of Self

Empathy is often described as understanding another’s feelings, yet this description barely scratches the surface of its deepest expression. At its highest register, empathy ceases to be an act of imagination and becomes an act of participation. Something more radical occurs; identity loosens, boundaries soften, and awareness enters a living intimacy with another mode of being.

Such empathy does not merely observe suffering or joy from a distance. Consciousness steps into the interior rhythm of another life and begins to feel from within. Breath, sensation, and perception reorganize themselves. Experience no longer revolves around a private centre. A wider gravity takes hold.

Kosmocentric awareness emerges at this threshold. Attention no longer privileges the personal narrative or even the collective identity of a group. Life is sensed as a single field expressing itself through countless forms. Compassion, here, is not chosen. It flows naturally, the way heat radiates from fire.

To walk in the shoes of a bodhisattva is not to adopt a moral stance or imitate a spiritual role. It is to feel what it means to be animated by responsibility without burden. The heart expands beyond emotional warmth into something rhythmic and vast, beating not for one life, but for life itself. Suffering is felt directly, yet it does not collapse the system. The capacity to hold pain grows alongside the capacity to love.

Such an experience dissolves the familiar distinction between self and other. Helping another no longer feels like altruism. It feels like circulation; energy moving where it is needed, without hesitation or self-congratulation. Action arises spontaneously, guided by clarity rather than obligation.

This level of empathy cannot be sustained through effort alone. It arises when identification with the separate self loosens enough for consciousness to re-centre itself within the whole. What remains is not detachment, but intimacy without possession. Care without agenda. Presence without contraction.

Moments like these recalibrate what it means to be human. After tasting kosmocentric empathy, ordinary indifference becomes impossible to justify. Even when the experience fades, something irreversible has occurred. A deeper reference point has been established.

Empathy, at its summit, reveals itself not as an emotional skill, but as a shift in being. Life recognizes itself through you, and the heart learns a larger rhythm; one that beats for all beings, without exception.

Morgan O. Smith

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Beyond the Horizon Where Nothing Divides

Life appears to move through chapters: arrival, departure, return, yet each chapter dissolves the moment you attempt to hold it. Breath flows, bodies age, worlds turn, and consciousness watches all of it without ever being touched. What looks like a sequence is simply awareness shifting its focus, the way a single flame illuminates many shapes without ever becoming any of them.

Death enters this picture as a doorway only from the perspective of the one who believes they are standing on one side of it. Yet the moment that belief loosens, the doorway reveals itself as an opening carved out of the same boundless presence that carries every heartbeat. What is called “afterlife” is not a destination reached by travel. It is the same field of being experienced without the costume of form.

Love for those who have gone does not travel across a boundary. It moves through the same indivisible ground from which both presence and absence arise. The living and the dead are two expressions of a single movement. Souls do not just depart and return; they appear as waves do, yet the water never goes anywhere.

Samsara, Nirvana, Moksha: each name gestures toward a pattern consciousness creates to understand itself. Yet the moment these patterns fall away, realization dawns that the seeker, the journey, and the liberation were never separate. What felt fragmented belonged to a mind trained to see borders. Freedom arrives the moment those borders fade.

You are the continuity that cannot perish, the stillness that animates every form, the awareness that births experience and withdraws it. Life and death only look like opposites until the lens of identity clears. Beyond that lens rests a truth too simple to grasp and too vast to deny: everything arises from the same essence, returns to the same essence, and never leaves it at all.

Morgan O. Smith

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