I have spent years trying to describe what happened to me, and every time I speak about it, the words become more suspect.
Language can outline an experience, but it cannot contain it. At best, words point like the crooked finger of an old monk who knows he’ll die before finishing the sentence.
What happened felt like the culmination of every practice, every prayer, every insight. I thought I was climbing a mountain of understanding, reaching ever-higher plateaus. The views grew wider, the air thinner, my confidence stronger.
Then there was nothing.
Nothing to stand on.
No summit.
No climber.
Not even a fall.
Awareness no longer rested on any subject or object. There was no watcher, no witness. The entire machinery of spiritual seeking—so intricate, so earnest—collapsed without fanfare.
What remained didn’t feel like a state. States come and go. This had no coming. No going.
No arrival.
It wasn’t some radiant oneness to bask in. Even calling it oneness implied there could have been twoness.
It wasn’t emptiness in the Buddhist sense, the elegant doctrine that everything is dependently arisen and thus without essence. That too felt too architectural, too systematic.
It was simply nothing that needed explaining.
Not a blank.
Not a void.
Not a silence that replaced noise.
Silence and noise lost all difference.
Thoughts continued—because why wouldn’t they?
Breath moved.
The world appeared precisely as before: sounds, colours, forms.
Except no one stood behind it all, calling it mine.
No vantage remained from which to call anything anything.
The sense of being a person—so carefully cultivated over a lifetime—dissolved like salt in water. But even that suggests a process. The truth is it never had any reality to begin with.
This wasn’t annihilation in the frightening sense. It was astonishingly gentle. The self didn’t die screaming. It simply wasn’t found.
Where had it gone?
Nowhere.
Because nowhere was needed.
There was an uncanny intimacy with everything. Not the intimacy of closeness, but the absence of distance.
A bird calling outside wasn’t outside.
A passing thought wasn’t inside.
Nothing was outside or inside.
Without a center, there was no periphery.
No boundary defined what I was or wasn’t.
There was no I to define.
This wasn’t bliss in the usual sense—no narcotic wash of pleasure.
No ecstatic union.
Ecstasy requires an experiencer.
There was no experiencer left to feel enlightened.
And so the phrase “I had an enlightenment experience” is a lie spoken for convenience.
Experience implies an owner, a timeline, a sequence of events.
This wasn’t an event.
Events happen in time.
Time didn’t stop; it lost its claim.
Past and future stopped being places to travel.
What about now?
Even that lost its centrality.
This was so direct, so unarguable, so empty of specialness.
No claim to make.
No badge to wear.
No insight to hold.
No teaching to give.
Nothing was revealed.
Nothing hidden remained.
No questions answered.
Questions fell away for lack of a questioner.
The sacred and the profane lost their separation.
There was no vantage from which to prefer one thing over another.
Life went on.
Dishes washed.
Conversations happened.
Traffic lights changed.
Anger arose.
Tears fell.
Laughter erupted.
All of it completely itself.
No attempt to improve or transcend any of it.
Nothing to transcend.
No one to be improved.
If anything changed, it was this relentless dropping of all pretenses.
All strategies.
All defenses.
Even the defense of being spiritual.
Especially that.
No seeker.
No sought.
No path.
No realization.
Just life, unadorned.
Not life as concept.
Life as immediacy.
Life with no one living it.
And I see now that every attempt to name this diminishes it.
But that’s the game of words.
Let them fail.
I won’t call this truth.
Truth is too grand.
Too final.
Too proud.
I won’t call this liberation.
Liberation implies something bound.
Nothing was ever bound.
I won’t call this God.
God suggests someone else.
Something else.
Otherness itself dissolved.
This wasn’t merging.
Not two to merge.
No return to source.
No departure.
No source.
Just this.
No this.
And even writing that betrays it.
So here I will stop.
Not because I have finished.
But because there is nothing left to finish.
Morgan O. Smith
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Morgan O. Smith 