Tag: perspectives

Beyond the Self

The Seven Perspectives of Awakening

Most discussions of growth and consciousness circle around the familiar: self, community, humanity, cosmos. Yet the movement of awareness does not stop there. The journey of awakening stretches beyond common frames, carrying identity through successive widenings until even perspective itself dissolves into the unnameable.

First Person – Egocentric

Awareness begins with the single pronoun: I. At this stage, the centre of existence is survival, desire, and self-interest. Spirituality here often means seeking relief, comfort, or control. The lens is narrow, but it is the soil from which broader care must grow.

Second Person – Ethnocentric

Identity expands to we. Family, tribe, religion, or nation become the circle of belonging. Meaning and devotion are tied to group loyalty, while outsiders remain less significant. Spiritual life often manifests as faith in a shared path or allegiance to a sacred tradition.

Third Person – Worldcentric

The pronoun shifts again, embracing they. Humanity as a whole is recognized as one family. Every person, regardless of background, is seen as worthy of dignity and care. This is the ground of universal ethics, human rights, and global responsibility. Spirituality speaks in the language of compassion that knows no borders.

Fourth Person – Kosmocentric

Perspective opens to all. Identity now includes every sentient being, every ecosystem, every galaxy. Care extends beyond human concerns to the life of the Earth and the vast cosmos itself. Spiritual experience often takes on a mystical quality here, where the boundary between self and universe fades into transparency.

Fifth Person – Evolutionary/Integral

A new horizon appears: awareness not only of beings and worlds, but of perspectives themselves. The self sees how “I, we, they, all” arise, evolve, and interrelate. Nothing is fixed; everything is a process. Awakening is understood as developmental, dynamic, ever-unfolding. The soul learns to hold multiple truths at once, to integrate rather than divide.

Sixth Person – Nondual

At this point, perspective collapses. The subject-object split dissolves. I, you, we, they, all, perspectives—everything appears as movements of the same luminous field. This is not an expanded view but the direct recognition that views themselves are appearances within awareness. Spiritual awakening here becomes radical intimacy with all that is.

Seventh Person – The Unmanifest

Beyond even the witness lies the groundless ground. This is not a vantage point but the source of all vantage points. No subject, no object, no seer, no seen. Pure Suchness. Emptiness that is full. From here, compassion arises not by choice but as the spontaneous flow of reality itself.

Closing Reflection

Each stage includes what came before and reaches beyond it. To live awakened is not to discard the earlier circles but to embrace them as nested truths. Self-care, community bonds, global ethics, cosmic reverence, evolutionary vision, nondual awareness, and the unmanifest ground—each is real, each is necessary. Together, they sketch the arc of awakening as it bends toward wholeness.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Weightlessness of Perspective

How much weight does a point of view actually hold?

None. And yet, it seems to shape entire lives, govern nations, define relationships, and breed conflict. But the more one deepens into the ungraspable expanse of reality, the more all perspectives—including one’s own—become like shadows cast by a flame none can touch.

I do not feel resistance toward those who oppose my view. I feel space—vast, immeasurable space. Not tolerance, not passive indifference, but a kind of cosmic shrug. This universe is too immense, too precise, too paradoxical for me to waste even a flicker of energy defending a perspective I know was born out of a temporary configuration of memory, biology, and environment.

What I see, I see through a filter: race, culture, conditioning, gender, language, trauma, karma, personality, neurochemistry, and a moment’s breath. Someone else sees through a completely different lens. To argue over the differences is like two waves debating who touches the shore more truthfully.

Each wave is made of the same water.

Ultimate Reality does not conform to opinions. It cannot be contained by agreement or disagreement. It isn’t found in right or wrong, winning or losing. It is not trying to prove itself. It simply is, and isness doesn’t care how it’s described.

This is not nihilism. It’s reverence. Reverence for the mystery so wide, so total, that every perspective is valid precisely because none of them are.

The deeper the realization, the more perspectives one can hold. Not juggle, not compare, not rank—but hold. To see from the eyes of the enemy and the beloved, the oppressor and the oppressed, the doubter and the devotee. To feel into each vantage point, not to believe it, but to understand it from within.

Eventually, you don’t just hold perspectives. You become the capacity for perspective itself. You become the silence before thought, the awareness behind all positions.

From there, disagreement becomes theatre.

Opposition becomes dance.

And the only thing that matters is the stillness that allows it all to appear.

Morgan O. Smith

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