Author: morganosmith

Morgan O. Smith is a certified meditation instructor and spiritual teacher who has dedicated his life to guiding others in their quest for inner peace. He is the founder of "mind@ease" in the Toronto District School Board and has worked as a provincial youth outreach worker. In 2010, he launched Yinnergy Meditation, a project that fosters emotional, mental, and spiritual growth using audio-induced deep meditation techniques. In 2011, Morgan established the Yinnergy Appreciation Awards to honor young individuals who have made a positive impact on their communities. Yinnergy Meditation has been employed in various settings, such as non-profit events, schools, detention centers, healthcare facilities, and by clients worldwide. Morgan's unwavering commitment to his work and community has earned him numerous awards, including the 2023 R.I.S.E Community Initiatives Award. As a philanthropist, Morgan supports various projects by donating his time and resources to non-profit organizations, grassroots community initiatives, and radio and documentary projects. He has collaborated with institutions like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and has presented his findings at the Institute for Consciousness Research (ICR) 37th Annual Conference. Morgan's insights have been featured in podcast interviews, including "Guru Viking" with Steve James and "Waking the Wild." Morgan's insights inspired Arian Herbert's thought-provoking book "The God Behind The God" and he is the author of the book "Bodhi in the Brain."

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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https://subscribepage.io/oTSZQu

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
• easeCoast
• 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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Awakening Never Arrives Because It Never Began

A seeker imagines a future moment where everything will break open, where clarity finally dissolves the boundaries that have shaped a lifetime. That imagined moment appears to sit somewhere ahead, waiting to be earned through discipline, suffering, or the slow maturation of wisdom. Yet the entire notion of “ahead” belongs to the dream of becoming. The one who waits is already suspended inside the very awareness they are longing for.

A deeper look reveals something far more radical: awakening does not unfold across time. It is not a culmination of choices, experiences, or lifetimes. It stands as the ground from which all choices, experiences, and lifetimes arise. What feels like progress toward realization is simply the awakened state appearing as movement, as if it were journeying toward itself while never leaving its own source.

Every universe, every branching possibility, every karmic ripple flows from that unshakable presence. No path leads to awakening because awakening generates the paths. A being may feel capable of choosing away from truth, yet that very sensation is part of truth expressing itself as forgetfulness. Even resistance is a shape taken by the same presence that cannot be diminished or delayed.

Karma does not carve a road toward liberation; karma is the motion of reality already awake, already whole. The cycle of birth and death functions as the dream’s choreography, giving consciousness a taste of separation so it can experience the beauty of returning to what never left. The sense of being “unfinished” is simply awareness folding into the appearance of incompleteness for the sake of its own exploration.

Awakening is not the goal of an individual, nor the endpoint of a soul’s journey. It is the condition that makes both individuality and journey possible. Meditation, inquiry, devotion, and hardship do not cause awakening; they are the movements of awakening playing as effort, yearning, and revelation. The river does not create the ocean; it is shaped by it.

From within the illusion of becoming, awakening looks inevitable. From the perspective of the absolute, inevitability is irrelevant because nothing ever fell out of the state it seeks to reclaim. Every lifetime is a reflection of that single truth refracted through time, space, karma, and choice.

Awakening is not the outcome of the cosmos.
Awakening is the reason the cosmos appears at all.

Morgan O. Smith

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When a Father Leaves This World

Something in a Son Learns to Stand Alone

Early yesterday morning my father passed away after having two strokes, a heart attack, and kidney failure. This post is dedicated to all the sons who have lost their father due to sickness, neglect, or old age. This one’s for you.

Shock has its own silence, and within that silence a son’s heart begins to unravel truths he never expected to face so soon. A man can be fully grown, seasoned by hardship and triumph, yet the moment a father leaves this world, some interior strand pulls loose. Something young within us calls out for the one whose presence once anchored our direction.

A father shapes more than memory. He shapes the subtle architecture of a son’s inner life; how he walks, how he listens, how he holds his ground, how he softens. Even when adulthood arrives, there remain chambers inside the psyche still waiting for the father’s voice, his guidance, his steady reassurance. When he passes, those chambers echo. They awaken. They ask to be met by the man we must now become.

Loss doesn’t simply remove a person; it shifts the very gravity of our existence. It brings forward unfinished pieces, unspoken blessings, unasked questions, unseen vulnerabilities. These become the new teachers. The absence of the father becomes its own curriculum, urging us toward a deeper maturity that can no longer depend on his presence.

A father’s death forces a son into a confrontation with himself: How do I continue the journey without the one who walked before me? Who do I trust with the tender questions he once held? These questions cut straight to the core, yet they also reveal an unexpected truth: our fathers prepared us more than we realized. Their lessons, their mistakes, their strength, their humanity, all of it remains as quiet guidance within us.

What they could not finish in us becomes our responsibility to finish ourselves. This is not abandonment. This is initiation. It asks us to embody the lineage, to rise with the heart they shaped, to stand as the continuation of everything they once carried.

In Loving Memory of my dad, Bishop Elpedo A. Smith

Morgan O. Smith

How Far the Heart Can Truly Open

A curious shift occurs when the heart stops functioning as a possession and begins revealing itself as a dimension of awareness. Most people imagine love as something they generate, something that must be earned, strengthened, or directed. Yet once the inner walls begin dissolving, the heart behaves less like a reservoir and more like an unbounded field. Nothing needs to be pushed outward. Nothing needs to be pulled inward. Everything already rests inside the same luminous space.

A bodhisattva’s vow is often misunderstood as a heroic effort to love every being across the cosmos. That interpretation still assumes a separate self stretching itself toward infinity. What actually unfolds is far more intimate. The boundaries that define self and other begin to thin. Compassion arises not from moral intention but from direct recognition: every form is a variation of the same presence gazing through different eyes. Love becomes less a decision and more a consequence of clarity.

A Kosmocentric heart does not expand by accumulating greater quantities of affection. Its expansion is a subtraction—less resistance, less defense, less contraction around identity. As the edges dissolve, the universe is no longer something “out there” that requires love. It is revealed as the very body of consciousness, expressing itself through countless lifetimes, worlds, and histories. To love all beings then becomes effortless, because nothing stands outside the recognition of shared essence.

This realization reshapes the ordinary meaning of devotion. Love ceases to be a feeling sustained by conditions. It becomes the ground from which every moment rises. The heart does not tire. The heart does not question whether it is capable. The heart simply returns to its natural state: vast, quiet, and uncontainable.

A question often arises: “Can a human being truly love the entire universe?”
Yes, but not as a human being. Only when the self drops away does the heart reveal its true scale. What remains is a presence spacious enough to cradle galaxies, tender enough to feel the slightest tremor of suffering, and awake enough to recognize itself in every corner of existence.

This is the heart unbound.
This is compassion without walls.
This is the love the universe has always known through you.

Morgan O. Smith

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