Author, Philosopher, Spiritual Teacher, A Lead Facilitator at Sacred Media's Integral Mastery Academy, Founder of Yinnergy Meditation/Neurofeedback, Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness, Co-founder of KeMor Centre for Innovative Development
Maya survives by costume. Names, stories, identities, and roles, each layer persuades awareness that something solid is happening. The spell works because the layers are convincing, not because they are true.
Removing them is not an act of destruction. Nothing is torn away. Nothing is violated. What falls off was never stitched to reality in the first place.
Belief drops first. Then interpretation. Then the quiet assumption that experience belongs to someone.
What remains cannot be described without borrowing from the very illusion that has just dissolved. Language reaches for shape, but shape no longer holds. Meaning loosens its grip. Time forgets how to move forward. Causation loses its authority.
No hidden essence appears. No final revelation arrives. No sacred object waits beneath the last veil.
Maya does not conceal truth. She is the activity of concealment.
When nothing is left to remove, there is no witness standing apart, no awareness peering at emptiness. Seeing collapses into what is seen. Knowing continues without a knower. Function carries on without ownership.
This is not transcendence. This is intimacy without distance.
The world resumes exactly as before; faces, traffic, obligations, joy, grief, but the spell has lost its teeth. Appearances no longer demand belief. Forms no longer claim authority. Experience is free to arise without needing to justify itself.
Maya, stripped of every disguise, reveals no secret. Her final gesture is silence.
Something subtle hides behind every assumption about life. We speak of beginnings, endings, origins, destinies, memories, plans. Language slices reality into segments and calls the slices time. Past. Present. Future.
Direct experience never confirms this division.
Look carefully.
No one has ever stepped into yesterday. No one has ever arrived at tomorrow. Everything that has ever appeared shows up only as this immediate presence.
Not a moving present. Not a fleeting instant.
A boundless, indivisible now.
Mind imagines a line stretching backward and forward, yet perception offers no such line. Thought tells stories about what was and what will be, but those stories arise as present thoughts. Memory occurs now. Anticipation occurs now. Even the idea of history unfolds now.
Remove thought for a moment and see what remains.
Only this.
A beginningless display with no edge to trace. An endless unfolding with nowhere to land.
Nothing truly starts. Nothing truly stops.
Birth and death appear as transitions inside perception, not events happening to existence itself. Waves rise and fall, yet water never begins or ends with any single wave. Every form behaves the same way. Appearance comes and goes. Being does not.
Cause and effect seem separate only because mind arranges events into sequence. First this, then that. Push, then response. Action, then consequence.
Observe more closely.
Cause and effect share the same instant. The spark and the flame are one movement. Seed and tree are different names for one process.
Nothing travels through time to produce something else. Everything co-arises. Each moment contains the totality.
That means creation and destruction are not opposite forces.
They are the same gesture.
Every perception is simultaneously appearing and disappearing. Each sight is born as it fades. Each sound vanishes as it arrives. Reality recreates itself continuously without carrying anything forward.
World dissolves and reforms faster than thought can measure.
Continuity is a useful illusion.
Life becomes lighter when this is recognized. Regret loses its grip because there is no past to fix. Anxiety softens because there is no future to secure. Control relaxes because nothing stands outside the present to manage.
Responsibility remains, yet it feels different. Actions arise from clarity rather than fear. Choices flow from immediacy rather than projection. Compassion deepens because everything shares the same timeless ground.
Nothing stands apart.
Every face, every event, every challenge expresses the same indivisible happening.
No separate moment waits elsewhere. No hidden realm holds another version of reality.
This is it.
Not a fragment. The whole.
Eternity does not stretch forever. Eternity reveals itself as what never moves.
Human understanding evolves by taking positions. At first, reality is personal. Experience belongs to me. Then it becomes relational. There is you. Then objective. There is the world. These perspectives organize life, language, and survival. They also quietly assume something deeper: a vantage point from which all of this is known.
The fourth perspective emerges when that assumption is examined.
At this level, identity no longer anchors experience. Thoughts, sensations, and events appear without belonging to a self. Awareness is no longer located behind the eyes or inside the body. Experience is revealed as happening within an impersonal field. Nothing is owned. Nothing is central. Knowing continues, yet no knower can be found.
This recognition often carries clarity, peace, and coherence. Reality appears seamless. Distinctions soften without disappearing. Functioning remains intact, but the sense of authorship dissolves. Many traditions stop here and mistake this discovery for the final truth.
That pause matters.
The fifth perspective does not deepen the fourth. It removes the need for it.
The idea of an underlying field, awareness, or witnessing presence is seen as another explanatory structure. Useful, elegant, even beautiful, but unnecessary. The question of what everything appears within loses relevance. No ground is required. No container is implied. No reference point is privileged.
Reality no longer needs to be described as nondual. It no longer needs to be described at all.
This is not an experience. It does not arrive. Nothing stabilizes. Nothing collapses. The framework that seeks a final position simply fails to apply. Language continues to function, but without metaphysical commitment. Perspectives still appear, but none are taken as true in themselves.
The fourth perspective reveals that there is no centre. The fifth reveals that even that revelation was optional.
This does not result in indifference or withdrawal. Action continues. Care continues. Creativity continues. Meaning appears where it always did; within context, relationship, and response. What falls away is the assumption that reality needs a final explanation to be complete.
Ultimate reality is not hidden behind experience. It is not accessed by climbing to a higher vantage. It does not require awareness, unity, or silence to validate itself.
What remains is remarkably ordinary. Life unfolds. Language speaks. Understanding happens. Nothing needs to be added. Nothing needs to be removed.
The difference lies only here: no perspective is mistaken for what is real.
“As they say, before enlightenment, chop wood carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood carry water.” This phrase is often repeated as reassurance that awakening does not remove one from ordinary life. Yet when examined carefully, it exposes a deeper paradox that cannot be resolved by sentiment alone.
Wood is Maya. Water is Maya. The body that lifts the axe is Maya. The action of chopping is Maya. The sense of a doer performing the act is Maya.
Nothing in the scene escapes appearance.
If awakening reveals that all phenomena are expressions of Maya, then what is being chopped? What is being carried? One cannot act upon illusion from outside illusion. Maya does not stand opposed to some other realm where truth resides. There is no second substance available to intervene.
This is where the saying begins to point beyond itself.
Before awakening, chopping wood feels purposeful. A future outcome motivates the action. Hunger will arise later. Cold must be prevented. Life appears as a sequence of needs demanding management. The world seems solid, personal, and unfinished. Actions feel necessary because something is believed to be lacking.
After awakening, the appearance of chopping may continue, but necessity dissolves. Nothing is required for completeness. No future state needs securing. The movement of the body happens without reference to deficiency or gain. Action no longer attempts to fix reality.
Wood is chopped, not because it must be, but because chopping happens.
This distinction is subtle and easily missed. Enlightenment does not negate Maya. It reveals its status. Appearance continues without being mistaken for truth. Function remains without belief in ultimate significance. Life moves, but no longer claims ownership of movement.
Chopping and carrying are no longer means to an end. They are expressions without agenda.
The phrase does not suggest sameness of experience across awakening. It points to sameness of appearance with a radically different orientation. The world looks the same, yet its weight has vanished. Consequence still operates, but urgency evaporates. Responsibility remains, but without the burden of identity.
Nothing is being done for reality after awakening. Reality is not managed, improved, or corrected.
Action occurs because appearance unfolds. Movement moves because movement is present. Maya dances without needing justification.
After enlightenment, chopping wood carries no metaphysical significance. Carrying water does not symbolize humility or virtue. These interpretations belong to the mind seeking meaning where none is required.
What remains is effortless participation without belief in a participant.
No one chops Maya. No one carries Maya. Maya appears as chopping and carrying, empty of centre, complete as it is.
That is what the saying gestures toward when read beyond comfort. Nothing special happens after enlightenment—except that nothing is believed to be happening to someone anymore.
Most spiritual seekers chase after enlightenment like it’s a distant prize withheld by the universe. The irony is that the essence being sought is precisely what animates the search. Enlightenment is not something to acquire; it is the underlying fact of being itself. The real dilemma lies not in discovering it but in maintaining the performance of ignorance.
Ask yourself: what does it take to pretend you are unenlightened? Notice the strain involved in sustaining identification with fear, ambition, conflict, desire for control. There is an ongoing maintenance of separation. One must continually rehearse the drama of being a self apart from life, a fragment cut from the whole.
This play of forgetting is not accidental. It has its own intelligence. It permits a dance of contrast so that awareness can better know itself. Yet the tragedy for many is forgetting that it is just a dance. They get lost in the mask they designed. The seeker clings to questions of how, when, and why—missing the silent answer that has always been here.
Enlightenment is not an achievement, but a recognition. It is the falling away of the need to be other than what you are. Once seen, it’s impossible to unsee, though one can still pretend, out of habit or fear. The invitation is to drop the effort, even to be enlightened.
No authority can grant it, no ritual can guarantee it, and no teaching can deliver it because it has never been absent. The teacher points. The student imagines the distance. The truth remains.
To realize this is to see that nothing needs fixing. Even the belief that you are not yet free is simply another expression of freedom. This is the cosmic joke: you are already what you are seeking. The only cost of knowing is the willingness to stop pretending otherwise.
Morgan O. Smith
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What dimension is the experience of absolute monism?
That very question quietly collapses under its own weight.
To ask “how many” is to divide the indivisible. To quantify is to measure a mystery that can only be met in its own silence. Within the direct realization of Turiyatita—that which lies beyond even Turiya—there is no vantage point from which to count, compare, or classify. The moment dimensionality is assigned, we have already slipped back into the architecture of mind, where form assumes primacy over essence.
Still, the mind hungers for some orientation. So let’s turn the prism slowly, exploring this from a few distinct angles—not as answers, but as offerings.
1. Relative Lens: The Architecture of Experience
Certain esoteric traditions offer a gradient of consciousness: from the dense contours of the material (3D), to subtle inner time-space (4D), toward integrative fields of unity (5D and above). These serve as helpful metaphors, allowing seekers to understand how consciousness may expand or refine. Yet even the loftiest of these is still part of the dream—within the cosmic play of form.
From this lens, the direct encounter with nonduality might appear multi-dimensional, even interdimensional, because it defies the logic of linearity. It feels vast, borderless, paradoxical. But it is still being interpreted by a relative mind, even if only for a moment.
2. Transcendental Lens: The Priorness of the Real
Absolute monism is not located anywhere because it is not a location.
Dimensionality implies structure. It assumes contrast. But the Absolute is prior to all arising. It is not 1D, 5D, or 12D—it is the generative zero-point. The stillness that allows all movement. The background that isn’t separate from the foreground but holds all images without ever becoming one.
It is not empty like a void; it is empty like ungraspable fullness. The kind of emptiness that births stars and dissolves gods. Not confined to being or non-being, but transcending both.
3. Direct Realization: The Collapse of All Coordinates
No map leads here.
Direct realization is immediate and unmediated. Not because you reached a peak, but because the climber vanished. There is no experiencer—only experiencing. No mind reflecting on awareness—only awareness aware of itself.
Here, space has not been born. Time has not begun ticking. Even the concept of unity dissolves, for there is nothing to be unified. What remains is suchness—pure presence prior to presence. A silent explosion of is-ness so complete it leaves no trace.
Not a Dimension. Not Even a State.
So what do we call it?
Nothing.
And everything.
To speak of “the dimension of absolute monism” is to subtly betray it. Better to say: it is the absence of dimension in which all dimensions arise and dissolve. Not a high place, but the place before place. Not a peak, but the disappearance of altitude itself.
A Final Whisper
Absolute monism is not the highest dimension. It is the absence of dimension, where even “one” dissolves. Here, all becomes what it has always been— indivisible, unbounded, unspoken.
Morgan O. Smith
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A peculiar clarity arises once the mind exhausts its chase for permanence. Once the striving quiets, what remains is not a revelation in the ordinary sense—it is the revelation of revelation itself. God. Not as something other, but as the very condition of knowing, being, and non-being.
God is not a person, nor a power among powers. God is context itself. Not just the backdrop, but the totality—the undivided field in which all division appears. It is what Hindus call Para Brahman: the Absolute of the Absolute. The final substratum, beyond form, formlessness, and even beyond the duality of beyond and not-beyond.
Yet the paradox defies all rational anchoring: God is also imagination.
Not a figment. Not illusion in the dismissive sense. But the supreme imagining—consciousness dreaming within itself. The universe, with all its matter and mind, all its chaos and beauty, is that imagining. And because God is not apart from its imagining, God too is that imagining.
Which means this: both God and the universe are imaginary.
And also utterly real.
What we call “real” and what we call “imaginary” collapse into a single gesture when seen from God’s standpoint—which is no standpoint at all. From this viewless view, there is no separation between the dreamer and the dream, the Absolute and its expression, the Formless and the formed.
Yet the beauty of this is not that everything dissolves into sameness. The beauty is that everything becomes itself without needing to stand apart.
God and the universe are one and the same. And because they are one and the same, they are also not the same. The distinction is not contradiction. It is the very nature of what is. Distinctness does not negate unity. It reveals it.
This is not spiritual poetry. This is ontological exactness. If anything is to be absolute, it must include even the capacity to contradict itself. That is the very mark of its absoluteness.
So, what is this that appears as a tree, a thought, a thunderclap, a kiss, a death, a silence?
It is God. It is the universe. It is imagination. It is reality.
One singularity. Absolute Monism.
To see it is not to figure it out. To see it is to disappear into what cannot not be.
Morgan O. Smith
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There comes a moment so still and unfiltered that perception collapses into the clarity of being. Not being this or that, but being everything. And not just metaphorically. Not just poetically. Literally everything—formless and formed, seen and unseen, finite and infinite—is God.
When I use the word God, I’m not pointing toward a figure, a belief, or a doctrine. I am pointing toward existence itself—the Absolute, the Whole, Brahman, Para Brahman, the Unconditioned, conditioned, the Uncreated and created. That which includes form and formlessness, time and timelessness, birth and death, creation and dissolution, the ten thousand things and the nothing between them.
Everything is God. Not just contains God. Not just touched by God. Not just part of God. But fully and completely God. That which we call the universe is not just inside God. It is God. And God is also what lies outside the universe—if such a term can even be grasped. There is not a single thing, moment, action, or gap that is not 100% God. And yet, even the idea of “percent” breaks down in the face of such a realization.
God is not just somewhere else. God is not just merely within. God is not only beyond. God is not higher or lower or more subtle or more gross. No matter how crude or refined, every appearance is divine. Each atom, each sorrow, each beam of light, each lie, each truth, each pulse of your heart, each glitch in the system—is God being what only God can be and cannot be: itself, everywhere, nowhere, always, never been.
Multiplicity is not a contradiction, yet it is. It’s how God dances with itself. The illusion of separation is not some accident to be corrected, yet it’s that as well. It is part of the design, part of the intelligence. The appearance of duality is not a denial of oneness—it’s one appearing as two, or ten thousand. Each distinction—this object, that person, this tree, that thought—is the Absolute shimmering as particularity.
It’s easy to say this with words. The difficulty arises only when the words are taken as substitutes for seeing. Direct seeing dismantles the grip of identification. When one truly sees all of this—across dimensions, across appearances—as one singular Presence, there is no longer any question. And there is no longer any need for the question. One does not simply understand that everything is God. One is that understanding.
Yet here’s the paradox: To truly see this is also to see that none of it is God. No label can contain it. No concept can hold it. Even the word God must dissolve. Enlightenment is not just knowing this. Enlightenment is also the absence of needing to.
This is not a belief system. It is not an ideology. It is not a path with steps. This is the unteachable reality that always is. When the veil lifts—even for a moment—all questions are answered without being answered. Nothing changes, yet everything changes. One doesn’t become more spiritual. One simply stops pretending.
To recognize this is to realize: even the illusion is God. Even ignorance is God. Even the striving to awaken is God pretending to forget itself in order to remember more deeply. Even your doubt is divine. Even your forgetfulness is sacred.
You are not just a part of God. You are not just held within God. You are God. And so is everyone, everything, every grain of dust, every breath of silence, every broken thing that aches for healing.
The Absolute never needed your worship. It only waited for your recognition.
Morgan O. Smith
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Those who speak of God as not being outside of you often mean well—but which “you” are they pointing to? The body? The persona? The memory of identity that walks through time? Or something deeper?
There’s a difference between saying God is not outside of you and realizing why that’s so. If God is all, then every appearance—internal, external, formless, formed—is God. This includes the illusion of separation. To claim that God is not outside of you while affirming that something is external still subtly upholds the illusion of division. That illusion, too, is God—played through veils of thought, language, and perspective.
But when the idea of “you” dissolves into beingness itself, the paradox clears. You are not merely a part of existence. You are existence. And existence is God, not as a figure, but as totality. Even the idea of “outside” collapses, because outside implies another space, and there is no second to the One.
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing. It means everything is not-two.
Even nonexistence exists. Not as an object, but as a category known within existence. Its very naming proves its place within the whole. Therefore, there’s nowhere God is not—and no self outside of God to speak of God as elsewhere.
So, when someone says “God is not outside of you,” pause. Feel what is really being said. It’s not a statement about boundaries—it’s a pointer toward boundarylessness. Not about spiritual pride or metaphysical positioning. It is the erasure of location itself.
And in that clarity, what’s left is not you as you know yourself. What remains is what’s always been—God, appearing as you.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
Every word spoken about enlightenment is a slice taken from an indivisible whole. A shard. A sliver. No matter how sincere the voice or radiant the realization, the moment it’s articulated, it becomes partial. Even the most luminous sage can only gesture toward it, never deliver it in full.
This isn’t a critique of language. It’s the recognition that language belongs to duality. Enlightenment does not.
You may hear poetic metaphors. You may hear silence treated as a superior form of expression. You may even be told that silence is the teaching. But neither speech nor silence can contain the essence. Both exist within the play of contrast—true enlightenment is not caught between them.
It is not hidden. It is not revealed. It doesn’t arrive, and it cannot depart. Still, it permeates everything.
A leaf trembles. Breath returns. A thought dissolves before it becomes solid. Here, it is already shining.
It is not that one must understand. It is that one must stop pretending it needs to be understood. What remains when seeking falls away is not an answer, but presence. A presence so simple, so immediate, it often goes unnoticed—not because it is distant, but because it is too near.
You are not apart from it. You never were.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
Morgan O. Smith 