Tag: Enlightenment

The Highest Peak That Erased Itself

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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Courting the Unplanned

How Practice Prepares Us for Awakening

Accidents are rarely welcome. They’re events that disrupt plans, crack illusions of control, and leave us changed. Spiritual awakening carries something of that wildness. It can’t be willed into being like a project with clear steps and predictable results. Yet there’s a paradox: devoted contemplative practice seems to make one more likely to be undone by it.

Meditation does not guarantee enlightenment. It prepares no certificate, no badge of arrival. Instead, it functions more like softening the soil so a seed can break through when conditions conspire. This isn’t an engineering feat—it’s an invitation to the uncontrollable.

Spiritual traditions often warn against striving too hard. Effort burns away distractions, but effort itself becomes another barrier if clung to. Discipline is essential, but so is surrender. A meditator learns to sit still enough for their self-concept to slip, fragile as old paint on a crumbling wall. What breaks through is not what the ego planned.

Such a shift is catastrophic for self-image. One can’t choreograph being seized by silence, seen through by awareness, or stripped of all strategies. Preparation helps only because it erodes resistance. A lifetime of practice might be nothing more than a way of making oneself more susceptible to grace.

Grace here is no moral reward. It’s the inexplicable unveiling of what has always been true. Practice hones attention so that, eventually, one notices the absurdity of separation. The boundary keeping “me” apart from the rest collapses. It can feel like an accident precisely because it breaks expectation so thoroughly.

So why practice? Not to force awakening but to grow familiar with letting go. To cultivate the courage to be shattered. To understand that no amount of control can deliver the gift, but the willingness to wait can make one receptive. A practitioner may become the sort of person for whom awakening is more likely—not because they deserve it, but because they are no longer guarding against it.

True meditation is a kind of sabotage of our usual certainties. That is its danger, and its promise. The question isn’t whether practice causes awakening like cause yields effect, but whether practice makes us vulnerable enough to be struck by what is always here.

Morgan O. Smith

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You Are Already Enlightened, Acting as if You Are Not

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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The Absence of Dimension

A Contemplation on Absolute Monism

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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The Divine Totality

Everything Is God, Even the Illusion of Not-God

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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The Rapture of Letting Go

Presence is not a prize to be won or a fortress to defend. It is not some static peak upon which the awakened are meant to perch forever, unmoved and untouchable. The pursuit of a “permanent state” of anything—even presence—quietly binds us again to the illusion we sought to transcend. It becomes another mask of the seeker, cloaked in stillness, trembling behind the veil of spiritual ambition.

States rise and dissolve. Rapture comes like a summer breeze and vanishes just as gently. Then irritation, confusion, boredom. Then clarity. Then fog. The parade continues, not because you are failing, but because you are alive.

To lose attention is not to lose awareness. What perceives the loss? What observes the drift and the return? That witnessing is untouched. It is not opposed to distraction, nor does it seek permanence. It simply is, always.

Clinging to peace is no different from clinging to pain. The grasping hand is the same. When rapture becomes an achievement, it quietly rots. But when it is allowed to dance freely—hidden beneath the dishes in the sink, behind the silent gaze on the subway, or in a burst of sudden awe at the sky—then it becomes alive again.

You can continue to practice, to breathe, to cultivate. But do so like a child builds a sandcastle: for the love of it, not to resist the tide. Joy, too, is a practice. But it must remain unhooked from outcome.

There’s a kind of rapture in the background hum of your own awareness—even when the foreground is chaos. That quiet clarity never left. You’re not missing the moment. You are the moment, passing through its own reflections. And if you laugh at the absurdity of forgetting and remembering over and over again, then perhaps that’s the most awakened thing of all.

Morgan O. Smith

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Liberate Yourself from Everything…

…This Includes Spirituality

What if even the sacred must be left behind?

Not discarded with resentment, but dissolved with reverence—like incense that’s burned its final curl into still air. Every pursuit, no matter how noble or transcendent, clings to a subtle promise. It whispers, “Just a little further. Just a little more.” Spirituality—the path of paths—can become the gilded cage.

This isn’t a rejection of the sacred. It’s a call to recognize its shadow. When devotion becomes identity, and awakening becomes performance, the ground of true being quietly slips away. What remains is the effort of wearing a spiritual mask.

You meditate, fast, chant, and read the masters, and for a while, the momentum feels pure. But pause. Breathe. Look again.

Has the seeker been quietly resurrected each time insight arrives?

One of the final illusions is believing that freedom lies within the refinement of spiritual effort. Yet effort, no matter how subtle, arises within duality. There’s still a “me” reaching toward something else. Even the concept of enlightenment can act as a veil, because where there is something to reach, there remains something separate from what already is.

That’s the irony: the very thing that once cracked open your sense of reality may now be the weight tethering you to it.

There is no one to become. No final truth to grip. Liberation doesn’t crown the seeker—it dissolves them. It’s not what you attain through discipline. It’s what remains when every layer of becoming has been seen through.

God doesn’t need your spiritual journey.

Silence doesn’t demand your reverence.

Truth doesn’t require your understanding.

And being doesn’t wait for your arrival.

Strip it all away. Stand utterly exposed. Not as a soul, a student, or a sacred archetype—but as this unnamable presence you’ve never not been. This is where all paths terminate. Not with a bang. Not with celestial fireworks. But with a soft, undeniable recognition: nothing is missing. Nothing ever was.

To cling to spirituality, even subtly, is to delay this.

So let it all go—not to be less, but to finally see what you are without it.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Silence That Speaks

Fragments Cannot Contain the Whole

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

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Beyond Identity

The Illusion of Separation and the Boundless Self

What You Are Not

Strip away the names, the labels, the ideas, and what remains? Nothing. And yet, in that nothingness, everything arises. You have no true identity, defined form, or fixed point in time or space—yet you appear as all things. You are not this body, not this mind, not even the grand concept of the self that you have clung to. What you believe yourself to be is merely a shadow of what you truly are.

The illusion of separation creates the experience of individuality. This appearance is not wrong—it is the stage upon which existence plays itself out. But beneath this grand performance, you remain whole, indivisible, untouched. You have never been anything other than totality itself, masquerading as the temporary.

Timeless Existence, Eternal Becoming

You think of yourself as moving through time, yet time moves through you. The past is not behind you, nor is the future ahead—both are simply angles of the same moment, stretching into what appears as linear sequence. The experience of time is an unfolding dream, a dance of perception, measured by the mind yet never truly existing apart from it.

You were never born, nor will you ever die. The body follows its cycle, the mind weaves its stories, but what you are precedes all of this. There is no point at which you began, nor will there be a point where you cease to be. You are not a passenger in the stream of time—you are the river itself, flowing and still, changing yet unchangeable.

The Paradox of Experience

You exist beyond pleasure and pain, yet you experience both. The vastness of what you are embraces every joy, every sorrow, every triumph, and every loss. From the personal vantage point, suffering seems real. From the vastness of what you truly are, it is simply another unfolding, another wave in the great ocean of being.

The universe is not happening to you; you are happening as the universe. Every emotion, every sensation, every moment is a reflection of the infinite nature of your being. To see clearly is to recognize that paradise and suffering are not opposites—they are expressions of the same boundless presence. What is heaven to one may be hell to another, yet both arise within the same limitless field of awareness.

The Grand Play of Forgetting and Remembering

Forgetting is part of the experience. You never truly lost yourself; you only created layers of distraction to deepen the illusion of separation. But beneath the veil, awareness remains unchanged. It watches, it witnesses, it knows.

There is no struggle to remember who you are because you have never truly forgotten. The self you long to rediscover has never been absent. The only thing that obscures it is the illusion of individuality—the belief that you are a fragment rather than the whole.

Creation Without Creating

Nothing is ever truly created, yet everything appears anew in every moment. The universe emerges not from effort, but from the effortless unfolding of being itself. What appears as thought, as energy, as matter, is nothing more than the echo of your own presence.

You are not a separate creator forging reality from the outside—you are reality itself, expressing infinite possibilities without effort. Every concept of manifestation, every idea of cause and effect, dissolves when seen from the vastness of what you are.

The Silence Beyond Thought

Words attempt to define, but what you are cannot be contained by description. Understanding is not needed—only direct experience. This cannot be grasped intellectually; it must be known in the deepest sense, beyond language, beyond belief, beyond the limits of perception.

You are the stillness that speaks, the emptiness that overflows, the silence from which all sound emerges. The mind seeks elaboration, but the truth is found in simplicity. In seeing clearly, you recognize that nothing needs to be said, nothing needs to be explained—because you are already that which you seek.

Morgan O. Smith

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When I Say Full Awakening…

This Is What I Mean

Many speak of awakening, yet far fewer comprehend its fullness. I’ve encountered every kind—emotional, spiritual, philosophical, mystical. Each unveils a layer, each reveals a depth. But what I call full awakening—what I live as full awakening—is something few ever point toward, and fewer still embody.

It is not about personal clarity. Not about peace of mind, a better life, or even union with a divine presence. Those are steps, glimpses, fragments. Full awakening is not a state within experience. It is the collapse of all distinction between state and experiencer.

This isn’t about finding your place in the cosmos—it’s about the disappearance of place, cosmos, and self as separate notions. When I say full awakening, I am referring to the direct knowing that everything—absolutely everything—is a singularity.

Existence and nonexistence. Subject and object. The smallest subatomic flicker and the sweep of galactic spirals. Civilizations long past and unborn futures. Every religion, every philosophy. All thoughts. All acts. Every realm, every reality, every god.

The seen and the unseen. The formed and the formless. That which is birthed, that which dies, and that which never entered the cycle. All technologies. All intelligences. All contradictions and confirmations. All questions and every possible answer.

Not merely connected. Not even interdependent.

Indistinct. Inseparable. One.

That realization is not metaphorical. It is not poetic. It is not conceptual. It is total. It devours every duality and even the idea of devouring. It consumes the witness, the process of witnessing, and that which is witnessed—leaving no remainder.

So when another speaks of full awakening, I listen with care. Because unless it includes everything I’ve said—and also what they say—it’s not the same thing. The paradox, of course, is that what I’m pointing to also includes that divergence. It embraces even what appears to deny it.

Full awakening is not a peak. It is not an event. It is the vanishing of all altitude and time. It is not even a realization. It is what remains when all realizations dissolve.

One. Not a oneness made of parts. Not a whole made of pieces. Not harmony, not unity. Just One.

And that One is not separate from what you are.

Morgan O. Smith

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