Tag: meditation

The Architecture of the Ideal

Why the Myth Matters More Than the Man

Whether Jesus walked the earth or not is irrelevant to me. I am less concerned with the historicity of a man than I am with the utility of what he represents. Jesus is a technology. So is the Buddha. So is Krishna. These aren’t merely personalities from the past; they are structured mechanisms—living blueprints—for the cultivation of inner transformation and the evolution of civilization.

They function like algorithms for awakening, coded into the myths and memories of culture, waiting to be activated. Each offers a symbol-set, a behavioral protocol, an ethical framework, and a psychological mirror. Whether or not they existed, they exist. Their presence in the collective psyche is undeniable, and their effect, observable.

Civilizations have risen around these templates. Wars have been fought in their names, yes—but so have peace movements been born, arts been inspired, and lives reoriented toward compassion, surrender, and truth. These are not minor outcomes. These are pivotal shifts in the trajectory of human consciousness.

When a society lacks mythic technologies, it spirals. When the sacred is reduced to opinion or dismissed entirely, a vacuum forms. And into that vacuum pours the lesser gods of the day—greed, algorithmic manipulation, ego-as-brand. The sacred figures stand not because they are flawless historical beings, but because they point beyond history. They are fingers, pointing not to the past, but to what is possible—personally, collectively, cosmically.

To see Jesus as a technology is to acknowledge the architecture of possibility. To understand the Buddha as a psychological operating system is to awaken to what it means to be truly sane. Whether temporary or permanent, these peak states—compassion without condition, awareness without center, love without lack—are doorways we are meant to pass through, again and again, until their impermanence no longer discourages us, but refines us.

Maybe they were fictionalized. Maybe they were real. Doesn’t matter. They were necessary. They remain necessary. Because without the fiction of perfection, how would we recognize the direction of our ascent?

Morgan O. Smith

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The Stage Beyond Oneness

When Even the Kosmos Falls Away

There comes a point when even the most expansive vision collapses—not from error, but from completion.

On the path of awakening, seekers often journey from the confines of selfhood to a union with all things. Ego dissolves, and what once felt separate now reveals itself as interconnected. Compassion grows. The heart blooms for all beings. One begins to live for the Whole.

But for some, even this union becomes too crowded.

Even the notion of “One” becomes too noisy.

This is the threshold where Kosmocentric awareness—a state of profound unity with all life and existence—gives way to something quieter, more radical. Not a deeper connection, but the quiet erasure of the very need for connection. Not expansion, but the release of expansion itself.

This is acentric awareness.

Not centered on the self.

Not centered on the world.

Not even centered on the All.

Acentricity does not point toward identification with something greater. It simply makes no identification at all. No vantage point. No witness. No center from which to perceive. It does not declare that all is One—it no longer needs such declarations. Truth requires no thesis here.

Reality just appears.

Without context.

Without a watcher.

Without the echo of a thought that says, “I am aware.”

Call it suchness.

Call it the absence of everything, shimmering as everything.

Call it the stillness that doesn’t oppose movement, because it was never still.

This isn’t transcendence. It isn’t detachment. It isn’t a stance. It’s the utter end of stance—the collapse of spiritual architecture, without the rubble. It doesn’t reject the world. It simply no longer perceives it as something to accept or reject.

And what does such a life look like?

Unremarkable.

Utterly simple.

Perhaps quiet, perhaps animated.

But always empty of claim, even the claim to be empty.

There are no teachings left to transmit. Not because truth has been mastered, but because it was never a possession. No more climbing. No more seeking. No more union. Not even rest—because rest would imply effort once existed.

This is the unborn silence that does not speak—not even through the mouths of sages.

It appears as a leaf falling, as someone stirring soup, as the sound of a crow at dusk.

And you might pass by it without knowing.

Because it doesn’t need to be known.

It just is.

And it is no one’s.

Morgan O. Smith

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Once Enlightened… Your Problems Have Just Begun

The illusion is that awakening is the end of the road. That the moment the self dissolves, suffering bows out, and the curtain falls. But what if that moment is not an arrival, but a beginning?

Before awakening, the ego fights battles it believes are personal. After awakening, the battlefield is not smaller—it’s vaster, quieter, and infinitely more subtle. The old problems—desire, fear, control—don’t disappear. They shape-shift. They clothe themselves in spiritual garments and reintroduce themselves as paradoxes: “Should I speak, or is silence more aligned?” “Is this surrender or passivity?” “Am I still pretending there’s a me who can do or not do?”

No one warns you that after the clouds part, the sun may burn.

Liberation is not the end of pain. It’s the end of avoidance. One no longer flinches. One no longer hides. You feel fully raw, exposed, without anesthesia. And still, you sit. Still, you breathe. Still, you bow.

You now see with clarity what others can’t. You watch the mechanisms of ego turning behind the eyes of those you love, and the weight of compassion grows heavier, not lighter. You begin to weep for the world—not out of despair, but from a reverence so deep it bends your knees.

Once you’ve seen through the illusion of self, the world becomes impossibly intimate. Every leaf becomes your body. Every scream, your own. Every cruelty, a mirror reflecting the exact frequency of your forgotten selves. There is no refuge. There is only recognition.

You don’t get to leave the world. You return to it—with your skin ripped open, your boundaries gone, and your heart unarmored. Enlightenment doesn’t make you untouchable. It makes you unable to turn away.

There are no medals for realization. No applause for dissolving. No reward for merging with the absolute. What you get, instead, is a silence that never leaves you. A love so vast it terrifies the small mind. A clarity that strips you of every comfortable lie.

And you carry it.

Not as a badge.
As a burden.
As a blessing.
As a vow.

You walk through the world invisible, but more alive than ever. And your problems—they don’t vanish. They deepen. They purify. They sanctify.

Not because you are broken.

But now, you are whole.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Divide

Between the Remembered and the Realized

Enlightenment isn’t a collection of vivid memories. It isn’t a library of altered states or a gallery of peak experiences pinned to the walls of time. Enlightenment, in its truest sense, is what remains when all those moments pass. It is not recalled—it is present.

A spiritually enlightened being doesn’t describe what happened—they speak from what is. Their language may touch on form, but it arises from formlessness. It isn’t commentary on a past event; it is the echo of what is silently alive in that moment. Words are merely the condensation of what remains wordless within them.

Contrast this with the one who has had many spiritually enlightening experiences. There is often great sincerity, beauty, and wisdom in their sharing. But listen closely: their narrative carries timestamps. “This is what I saw… what I felt… what I realized…” There’s a distance, however subtle. A witness telling you what the moon looked like—rather than being the moon, shining right now, regardless of who’s watching.

This difference isn’t about hierarchy. One isn’t better, holier, or more awakened than the other. But there’s a distinct quality when realization is not merely visited, but abided in. When the identity that would lay claim to an experience has dissolved entirely.

Here’s the paradox: a being can be spiritually enlightened without ever having what we label as a “spiritual experience.” No blissful union, no white light, no serpents of energy climbing the spine. Their clarity is not the aftermath of an event—it is the absence of confusion. No fireworks. Just light.

They may speak little. Or not at all. There is no need to convince, convert, or collect followers. They are not on a path—they are the ground from which all paths appear.

On the other hand, a person with many enlightening experiences can describe with breathtaking poetry the landscapes of the soul. But unless those experiences have dissolved the one who experienced them, the self remains—refined perhaps, but still separate.

True awakening isn’t an experience you remember. It’s the end of the one who remembers.

This is why the most profound truths often arrive without announcement. A falling away, not an acquiring. A silent recognition that this—yes, this—is what always was. And suddenly, the need for experience evaporates. Presence alone becomes sufficient.

Morgan O. Smith

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It’s Not About You, or Me

You may resist hearing it, but nothing here was designed to serve your preferences. Existence doesn’t negotiate with your plans. The ocean doesn’t adjust its tides because you’re having a hard day. Mountains don’t bow to your ambitions. Storms don’t hold back for your convenience.

There is a strange freedom in recognizing that you are not the axis of this world. Your fears, longings, and beliefs are weather patterns blowing through a vast sky. Even your discomfort with this fact is not a problem to be solved—it is part of the very order you imagine resisting.

Ask yourself: When did this story become about you? When did the measure of truth narrow to fit your tastes? The self who wants life to behave is so small it forgets it is born of the very forces it wants to command. You and I are not exceptions to the flow. We are the flow.

Even the frustration that arises when someone says “everything happens as it should” is folded within the shape of things. It isn’t an error. It’s another ripple on the water, another branch growing from the same root.

There is no special exemption that spares you from the dance of impermanence. Life moves through every form—including your insistence that it ought to be different. Even that protest is part of the design.

So let go of the idea that it’s about you, or about me. Something far more mysterious is moving all of this, and we are its fleeting expressions—here for a moment, dissolving back into the whole.

Morgan O. Smith

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Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness

Expanding Access to Mental Health Tools for Marginalized Youth and Families

I’m proud to share that I recently founded Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness—a nonprofit organization dedicated to making evidence-based mental health support accessible to those who are often left waiting or overlooked. We offer free neurofeedback training and meditation sessions to youth and families living in marginalized communities. Our mission is to reduce barriers, provide practical tools for emotional well-being, and empower participants to cultivate greater awareness, resilience, and clarity.

We’re not just an idea on paper. Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness is already operational. Free meditation sessions and events are being offered online, including upcoming streams on YouTube, welcoming anyone who wants to participate. We’re also moving forward with the process of securing charitable status to expand our reach and impact.

What is Neurofeedback?

Neurofeedback is a science-based training method that helps people learn to regulate their own brain activity. It uses real-time monitoring of brainwave patterns, giving participants direct feedback to support healthier, more balanced mental states. The brain is a dynamic system, always adapting. Neurofeedback harnesses that natural adaptability to promote calm, focus, emotional regulation, and greater self-awareness.

Why Does This Matter?

Communities facing systemic inequities often encounter long wait times, high costs, or cultural barriers when seeking mental health support. Youth and families in these environments can experience heightened stress, trauma, and limited access to effective care. Neurofeedback and meditation provide practical, non-pharmaceutical tools that anyone can learn to use, supporting emotional regulation, mental clarity, and healing. By offering these programs free of charge, Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness aims to disrupt cycles of marginalization, foster resilience, and create space for lasting well-being.

How You Can Help

Our work relies on the generosity of those who share this vision. Donations enable us to keep sessions free for participants who need them most, expand our programming, and continue building accessible pathways to mental wellness. If you’d like to support Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness, please consider visiting our website:

🌐 www.bodhicare.org

Together we can make mental health support not just a privilege, but a right shared by all.

Morgan O. Smith

When Two Hemispheres Become One

Neurons Remember Samadhi

Hemispheric division was only ever provisional—a strategy of consciousness to explore its own depths in fragments. Beneath analysis and intuition lies a singular awareness undivided by thought. At the deepest level of samadhi, this becomes unmistakable.

The brain no longer labours to interpret. It surrenders. Left and right hemispheres fall into perfect accord, no longer mirroring separation but revealing the indivisibility they always contained. Neurons do not merely fire; they fall silent together, resonating with a profound coherence that has no opposite. This is not communication. It is communion.

Thought dissolves at its root. The compulsion to compare, measure, name—all of it collapses. Awareness rests in its own nature, ungraspable yet unmistakably present. It is not that the hemispheres stop working. They merge into a single gesture of knowing beyond knowing, a luminous stillness where there is no observer or observed.

Such samadhi is not a trance or escape. It is a return to the origin, the silent ground of all differentiation. The meditator does not disappear but is seen never to have been separate from anything. The brain itself seems to remember its oldest purpose—not survival or analysis but offering itself as a vessel for the unconditioned.

Neurons remember their wholeness. The body breathes without ambition. Mind rests without conflict. Awareness shines without commentary. What was divided knows itself as one. This is the simplicity hidden beneath all complexity, the union prior to all partnerships.

Such samadhi cannot be forced, only recognized when the mind ceases to grasp. It waits behind every breath, beneath every thought, ready to reveal itself when the seeker becomes still enough to listen.

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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