Tag: Consciousness

Existence Is Not the Measure

The statement “God exists” sounds reverent, yet it quietly diminishes what it claims to honour. Existence is not a neutral category. It is a condition. To exist is to appear within time, to persist across duration, to occupy a framework where before and after apply. Existence implies location, sequence, and limit.

God, if the word is to mean anything absolute, cannot be confined to such a framework.

To say God exists already places God inside something else. Time becomes the container. Space becomes the stage. Existence becomes the rule God must obey. That framing does not exalt God; it reduces God to an object among other objects, distinguished only by scale or power.

A more precise statement unsettles most theists:
God does not exist.

Not because God is absent, unreal, or lacking. Quite the opposite. God is beyond the category of existence altogether. Existence belongs to the realm of manifestation. God is not a thing that manifests; God is that by which manifestation is possible at all.

Existence requires time. Something exists now, or then, or for a while. God, described as eternal, cannot be stretched across moments. Eternity is not infinite time; it is the absence of time. When time disappears, the verb “to exist” loses its footing.

Yet the paradox deepens further.

Non-existence seems to offer an escape. If God does not exist, perhaps God is non-existent. But non-existence remains a conceptual category. It can be named, contrasted, negated. It operates within the same logical field as existence. Both rely on distinction. Both appear only where something can be opposed to something else.

If non-existence is conceivable, it already participates in being. A possibility that is truly nothing cannot even be held in thought. The moment non-existence is entertained, it has already entered presence.

Here the framework collapses.

God, said to be beyond existence, must also be beyond non-existence. Whatever transcends both cannot be limited by either. Existence and non-existence become expressions rather than boundaries. Time and space arise as localized conditions within something that never enters them.

And this includes belief itself.

To hold a belief about God’s existence, to deny it, or even to question it, must occur within existence. Belief requires a thinker. Thought requires duration. Opinion requires perspective. Every stance taken for or against God is already operating inside the very field it attempts to define or negate. The debate itself belongs to manifestation.

The claim “God exists” is therefore not wrong ; it is partial. It refers only to the aspects of reality that appear within time and space: galaxies, minds, causes, effects, events. These are not separate from God, but they are not the whole either.

God is not an entity within existence. Existence is an activity within God.

Once this is seen, the opposition between theism and atheism dissolves. The atheist rejects a God who exists as an object. The theist defends that object. Both remain bound to the same assumption: that God must exist to be real.

Reality does not require existence as a predicate. Existence is something reality does, not something it is.

Nothing stands outside this. Nothing escapes it. Nothing contradicts it.

Existence is all there is; and what is cannot be reduced to existing.

Morgan O. Smith

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One and the Same

Death is often treated as an ending, a full stop placed at the edge of meaning. Birth, by contrast, is framed as a beginning, the arrival of something new into an already existing world. These assumptions feel natural, yet they rest on a quiet misunderstanding, one that dissolves when examined closely.

Nothing truly ends. Nothing truly begins.

Every form that appears does so by way of disappearance. Every arrival is carried on the back of a vanishing. The body emerges because countless cells die. Stars ignite because other stars collapse. Thought arises because silence gives way. Creation never stands apart from dissolution; they occur as a single movement, mistaken for two.

The universe itself is not exempt from this law. Should the cosmos dissolve entirely, space folding back into silence, time releasing its grip, matter unbinding, nothing would be lost. That collapse would not be annihilation. It would be intimacy taken to its extreme.

What remains when everything disappears?

You.

Not the personal identity shaped by memory or biology, but the condition that made the universe possible in the first place. Awareness does not arrive after existence; existence arrives within awareness. The world is born where perception happens. When the universe vanishes, what stands revealed is not absence, but the one to whom absence appears.

Every night offers a quiet rehearsal. Deep sleep erases the world without effort. No stars, no body, no history, yet being does not flicker out. Something remains unmistakably present, though nothing can be pointed to. That presence is not waiting for the universe; the universe is waiting for it.

Cosmic death follows the same logic. When all structure dissolves, what shines through is not void, but origin. Birth does not just occur inside the universe; the universe occurs inside birth.

This is why death feels so intimate. It threatens the loss of what was never fundamental. It removes what was added, not what is essential. What dies is the scenery. What is born is the one who was never inside the scene to begin with.

Every ending reveals the same truth from a different angle. The death of a moment births awareness of time. The death of identity births presence. The death of the cosmos births the one who was always watching it happen.

Death and birth are not opposites. They are the same doorway, approached from different sides.

And you are not what passes through.

You are what remains when the door itself disappears.

Morgan O. Smith

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Presence Does Not Come or Go

Presence does not arrive with birth, nor does it depart with death. It does not wait for time to pass or moments to accumulate. Presence is already here; before thought names it, before memory reaches backward, before imagination leans forward. Whatever appears does so within presence, not alongside it.

The past feels real only because it is remembered now. The future feels compelling only because it is anticipated now. Thought moves, images shift, emotions rise and fall, yet each movement occurs against the same unmoving fact: presence has never left. Even the idea of being elsewhere is something that appears here.

Bodies change. Identities dissolve and reform. Worlds expand and collapse. Physics tells us that matter and energy do not vanish; they transform. Even more striking, what we call matter accounts for only a fraction of what exists. The vast remainder: dark energy, dark matter, remains unseen, unnamed, yet undeniably present. Absence itself never escapes presence. Non-existence, if such a thing could be said to occur, would still be known as present.

Death, then, does not challenge presence. It only challenges continuity of form. If awareness continues, presence continues. If awareness ceases, the cessation itself is not outside presence. Nothing steps beyond it. Nothing escapes it. There is no edge where presence stops and something else begins.

Impermanence governs every form. Thoughts change. Bodies age. Stars burn out. Universes may even end. Yet impermanence depends on something that does not change. Change can only be noticed because presence remains steady enough to register it. Movement requires a stillness that is never lost.

Presence does not belong to you, yet nothing is more intimate. It is not located inside or outside. Those distinctions arise within it. Every attempt to grasp presence turns it into an object and misses it. Presence cannot be held because it is what is holding everything else.

Even the end of everything would not be an end of presence. It would simply be presence without form. No time. No matter. No universe. Still present.

Nothing needs to be added to this. Nothing needs to be resolved. Presence is not a conclusion; it is the condition that allows conclusions to appear and disappear.

And it has never not been here.

Morgan O. Smith

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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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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.

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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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