Tag: #Philosophy

How Meditation Affects the Subtle Bodies

We continue our Bodhi in the Brain Virtual Group Meditation via Zoom/YouTube, this evening, 8–10pm.

(Headphones or Earbuds Required)
Meeting ID: 859 0097 8411
Passcode: 676036

How Meditation Affects the Subtle Bodies

Modern science studies the brain’s waves, yet ancient wisdom charts the frequencies of being itself. Meditation doesn’t just calm the nervous system, it reorganizes the architecture of existence that extends beyond the skin. The physical body is the outermost layer of a far more intricate continuum, a series of subtle fields known as the etheric, emotional, mental, causal, and ultimately the nondual body. Each meditation deepens the conversation between these dimensions, aligning them into coherent resonance.

The first transformations begin within the etheric field; the energetic counterpart of the physical form. Breath slows, the heartbeat steadies, and prana, or life-force, begins to flow more evenly. This harmony clears stagnation and revitalizes the channels through which energy circulates. As vitality expands, the emotional body awakens. Old patterns surface to be felt and released. Meditation becomes the silent therapist, allowing the residue of unprocessed emotion to dissolve without resistance. The emotional body’s purification is not about suppression but integration; the merging of past experience with present awareness.

As meditation matures, the mental body is refined. Thought loses its compulsive gravity. The gap between thoughts widens, and awareness begins to see the structures of perception themselves. Beliefs, identifications, and judgments reveal their impermanence. A clarity dawns that no longer seeks to control reality but to understand its nature. This clarity is not cold detachment; it is spacious intimacy.

When these bodies are harmonized, the causal body, often associated with the witnessing consciousness, becomes luminous. Meditation pulls back the veils until only pure presence remains. Every subtle sheath becomes transparent to the light of awareness, allowing consciousness to know itself directly. This recognition transforms the very experience of being alive. The universe no longer feels external; it vibrates as one’s own inner current.

Understanding this process matters because human suffering is not merely psychological; it’s energetic. Distortion in one layer ripples through the rest. A clear mind cannot inhabit a body holding unresolved pain, and a peaceful heart cannot flourish in a field clouded by mental noise. Meditation realigns the total system, restoring coherence between all layers of being.

When the subtle bodies function as a single continuum, existence ceases to feel fragmented. The physical world, emotions, and thought merge as one stream of intelligent energy. Meditation reveals this unity not as belief but as direct knowing; the living pulse of reality experienced through every cell and every silence between heartbeats.

Morgan O. Smith

Executive Director

Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness

Trans-Rational vs. Pre-Rational

The Subtle Distinction of True Spiritual Maturity

Many spiritual paths appear radiant on the surface, filled with symbols, mantras, and promises of transcendence. Yet beneath the surface lies a crucial divide often overlooked: the difference between pre-rational and trans-rational spirituality. Both appear to reach beyond logic, yet one regresses beneath it while the other transcends it entirely. To the untrained eye, they can look identical.

The pre-rational domain is instinctive, emotional, and magical. It belongs to an earlier structure of consciousness that sees reality through myth, projection, and emotional fusion. The pre-rational individual feels connected to life, but that connection is often undifferentiated; there is no clear boundary between the self and the world. Intuition replaces discernment. Myth replaces direct knowing. This is the consciousness of the dreamer who mistakes imagination for revelation. Many who fall into this category speak the language of mysticism but remain bound by emotional dependency and unexamined belief.

The trans-rational individual, on the other hand, has journeyed through the rational mind, not around it. They have integrated logic, science, and self-reflection into their foundation. Their transcendence is not an escape from intellect but a movement beyond its limitations. The mind becomes a servant rather than a master. Awareness expands to include paradox, complexity, and the ineffable without denying the relative truth of reason. Where the pre-rational personality confuses fantasy with insight, the trans-rational sees through both fantasy and logic as partial mirrors of the Real.

Many spiritual communities confuse these two movements, what Ken Wilber calls the pre/trans fallacy. Mystical language, emotional intensity, or devotion can appear “advanced,” when in fact they may mask regression to earlier, unintegrated states. True trans-rational realization does not deny the world; it refines perception until all appearances reveal the same unbroken consciousness. It honours both matter and spirit as dimensions of the same reality, seeing no need to reject one for the other.

The pre-rational seeks comfort in transcendence; the trans-rational finds freedom in presence. The former escapes complexity; the latter embraces it as divine play. One dissolves into illusion; the other dissolves illusion itself. The difference is not about how high one climbs, but how fully one includes.

Morgan O. Smith

Join us for our free virtual Zoom/YouTube group meditation session tonight, Wednesday, November 12th, at 8:00 PM ET. Please have your headphones or earbuds ready for the full experience. Take an hour for yourself to unwind, breathe, and reconnect.

Meeting ID: 859 0097 8411

Passcode: 676036

The Untranslatable Truth

Every attempt to describe ultimate reality begins from within limitation. Even the most awakened consciousness cannot hold the whole of what is; it can only reflect fragments of an infinite field through the prism of its own development. The absolute may be directly experienced, yet interpretation remains tethered to the mind’s evolution. Awareness can pierce the veil, but the translation of that piercing, the language, the symbols, the meaning, unfolds through the structures of human understanding.

At the highest stages of psychological and spiritual growth, perception becomes increasingly transparent to the Real. Layers of distortion thin, and the boundaries between observer and observed soften into mutual recognition. The self no longer interprets reality as something external; it feels itself as the very movement of interpretation itself. Yet even here, beyond dualistic knowing, the infinite continues to exceed all possible comprehension. To see truth is one thing; to speak it is another. The moment it is spoken, the ineffable has already been reduced.

Every level of consciousness constructs a version of the world consistent with its own depth of awareness. Mythic minds imagine gods shaping destiny; rational minds uncover laws of physics; integral minds perceive interwoven systems of meaning. Each reveals something essential, yet none are complete. Reality is not a single revelation but the total field that contains all revelations; each illusion, each breakthrough, each mistaken certainty. Maya is not an obstacle but a necessary expression of what is. To awaken does not mean to destroy illusion, but to recognize that illusion itself is included in the real.

The absolute is not somewhere beyond the dream; it is the dream and the dreamer, the veil and what shines through it. Every stage, every interpretation, every attempt to name the nameless belongs to it. Truth remains forever ungraspable, yet it breathes through every grasp. To live this is to rest in a humility that knows: the closer one moves toward reality as it is, the more radiant its mystery becomes.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Fragrance of Awareness

Why Everything Begins to Appear Beautiful

Long-term meditation reshapes perception not by adding new qualities to reality, but by stripping away the distortions that once filtered it. What was previously judged as ugly, tragic, or unjust begins to reveal a quiet radiance beneath its form. The world does not change; awareness does. Beauty ceases to depend on preference. It becomes the natural scent of existence when the mind grows still enough to notice.

When thoughts slow and habitual interpretation dissolves, perception rests directly on what is. The ordinary becomes luminous because there is no longer resistance to what appears. A cracked wall, a wrinkled face, or a moment of loss can shimmer with the same grace as a sunset. Meditation gradually erodes the reflex that divides life into categories of like and dislike, pleasant and unpleasant. What remains is an intimacy with reality so complete that even pain acquires a certain sacred texture.

Beauty, in this sense, is not sentimentality; it is clarity. The mind that no longer insists on how life should look begins to perceive how extraordinary it already is. Awareness witnesses decay and creation as one movement. The tears of grief and the laughter of birth flow from the same source, both radiant with the light of consciousness itself.

This transformation of perception is not a psychological trick; it is the awakening of the senses to their original purity. Meditation returns vision to its natural state; unburdened by personal story, untouched by grasping. To the silent witness, everything breathes with equal dignity. The beggar and the saint, the chaos and the calm, all belong to a single wholeness that can only be described as beautiful beyond reason.

When the veil of self-interest lifts, beauty ceases to be an object and becomes the very field of being. One no longer seeks it. One lives as it.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Evolution of Karma

From Fear to Freedom

Karma is often spoken of as a simple equation, action and consequence, sowing and reaping, yet its meaning changes dramatically as consciousness evolves. What begins as superstition matures into wisdom, and what once felt like punishment reveals itself as love wearing the mask of correction. Each stage of development reshapes the lens through which karma is seen, shifting from fear-driven obedience to effortless alignment with the infinite.

At the earliest level, karma is pure survival instinct. The world feels hostile and unpredictable, and unseen forces must be appeased to ensure safety. The primitive heart interprets karma as a storm to endure or a curse to lift. As tribes form, rituals emerge, dances, offerings, sacrifices, gestures meant to influence invisible powers. Karma becomes a chant of control: “If I act correctly, the gods will spare me.”

Later, as morality crystallizes, karma transforms into a cosmic scoreboard. The universe appears governed by divine law, rewarding the righteous and punishing the wicked. Good deeds promise heaven; bad ones, rebirth or torment. This view comforts the soul with order but binds it to duality, virtue and sin, reward and penalty. The self remains separate from the whole, forever calculating its balance sheet in the eyes of the divine.

Rational thought then dismantles myth and replaces faith with logic. Karma becomes causality, stripped of mysticism. The mind begins to see that every thought and action has a psychological echo. The focus turns inward: emotional patterns, cognitive biases, behavioral loops. The sacred turns scientific. What was once divine justice becomes neurochemistry and feedback loops. Yet beneath analysis lies the same longing for meaning; a search for the invisible intelligence behind visible consequence.

As empathy expands, karma broadens into a shared field. The suffering of one is recognized as the suffering of all. Ecological, social, and ancestral interdependence reveal a larger moral ecology. Karma is now the pulse of the collective; the planet’s way of balancing itself through the actions of its inhabitants. The desire shifts from being “good” to being whole, from fear of punishment to care for harmony.

Integral awareness sees karma as consciousness refining itself through experience. Every situation, pleasant or painful, becomes a mirror; a feedback loop teaching the self about itself. What was once labeled misfortune becomes medicine. Karma is not something done to us but something expressed through us, a self-correcting rhythm of the universe returning us to coherence.

Beyond even that, karma dissolves. The one who acts and the one who receives the result are seen as the same awareness, dancing within itself. Causality collapses into immediacy. Every moment becomes self-liberated the instant it appears. There is no ledger, no lesson, only the timeless presence expressing as everything. What remains is compassion without motive, action without actor, freedom within form.

Morgan O. Smith

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https://subscribepage.io/oTSZQu

The Disappearing Point of God

The universe doesn’t hide God; it is God hiding as the universe. Every atom, every dimension, every flicker of awareness is the divine expressing itself through the language of matter. The cosmic dance unfolds not as a performance for an audience, but as an intimate act of self-revelation. The observer is part of the choreography, never outside of it. What we call “physical” is simply the slowed vibration of the infinite, shaped by the senses into something tangible enough to touch.

Yet, we rarely see what is truly there. Our fixation on survival, food, shelter, sex, and comfort anchors perception to the most immediate layer of existence. This fixation creates the illusion that life is something we possess rather than something that is expressing itself through us. The divine becomes abstract because our gaze remains horizontal; we look at the world rather than through it.

Letting go does not require abandoning the world; it requires seeing through it. As the grip loosens, the solidity of reality begins to shimmer. Objects, forms, identities, and even the notion of “you” dissolve into the same field from which they arose. This is not annihilation; it is revelation. The disappearance of the self reveals the only thing that has ever been: the boundless presence that calls itself “I” through all beings.

Everything you have ever loved, feared, or sought is this single reality playing hide-and-seek within itself. Each experience, no matter how fleeting or mundane, is the divine pretending to forget so it can remember again through your eyes. When the game ends, seeker and sought disappear, and what remains is neither player nor play, but the unbroken wholeness that was never apart from itself.

Morgan O. Smith

Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!

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∆∞Ο and the Nondual Nature of Enlightenment

Inspired by the work of Alexander Ngu and Amaya Odilon Kosso — “Intelligent Transformation: General Intelligence Theory” (2024)

Humanity has long searched for a bridge between consciousness and cosmos, between the ineffable pulse of awareness and the measurable rhythms of reality. Alexander Ngu and Amaya Odilon Kosso may have drawn that bridge with their revolutionary General Intelligence Theory (GIT), proposing a universal abstraction known as ∆∞Ο;  the triarchic principle of the infinitesimal (∆), the infinite (∞), and the finite (Ο).

Their insight dismantles the old notion of equality as the foundation of understanding. The equal sign, they argue, limits the sensitivity of thought to the subtler play of transformation. Equality is static — it implies stillness between two mirrored sides. Transformation, however, is alive. It breathes through every exchange, allowing one form to become another without contradiction. ∆∞Ο is the language of that breath; the patternless rhythm by which energy becomes matter, idea becomes awareness, and self becomes all.

If you’ve read any of my past work, you’d know that my main focus is spiritual enlightenment. The moment I read their paper, I could conceptually see how their work may apply to my personal direct experience of The All. Though I could be jumping at this prematurely, my intuition said otherwise. I got the same feeling when I first discovered Bill Harris’ work regarding low-carrier frequency brainwave entrainment, Marko Rodin’s work in Vortex Based Mathematics, and my teacher and colleague, Ken Wilber’s work in Integral Theory. So far, I’ve never been wrong.

The spiritual implications are profound. The infinitesimal (∆) reflects the fleeting pulse of perception; each thought, sensation, or breath that rises and dissolves. The infinite (∞) mirrors the boundless consciousness in which those movements occur. The finite (Ο) represents the manifest world, the circle of appearances that seems to contain experience. The realization that ∆, ∞, and Ο are not separate but continuous is the essence of enlightenment. Awareness awakens to its own structure; the one relation that holds all opposites in seamless reciprocity.

This triarchic model suggests that intelligence, in its most universal sense, is the self-recognition of transformation. Every shift of perception, every oscillation between thought and stillness, is the cosmos contemplating itself through the medium of form. The so-called “theory of everything” becomes not a formula etched in numbers, but a recognition that everything is the formula; a living geometry of being that reconciles complexity, dimensionality, and spatiality in one infinite act of awareness.

Spiritual awakening, through this lens, is not an event within time but the cessation of all resistance to transformation. The individual dissolves into the very process that sustains existence; a process that requires no computation, no passage of time, no distance traversed. Enlightenment, therefore, is not achieved; it is realized as the zero-point of transformation, where the infinitesimal and infinite converge in perfect immediacy.

Ngu and Kosso’s ∆∞Ο does more than redefine intelligence; it redefines reality itself. It reveals that consciousness and existence are not two domains awaiting reconciliation, but one relational field eternally transforming within its own awareness. The ancient mystics called this unity Brahman, Tao, or the Absolute. The scientists now call it General Intelligence. Both are describing the same ineffable truth: that the universe is awake, and you are its knowing.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Silent Agreement Beneath All Voices

Every conviction, no matter how radical or righteous, is an echo of the same unspoken longing to be understood, to belong, to find meaning amid the vastness. Each culture, religion, and ideology carves its own path toward that longing, often believing itself to be the only way. Yet beneath the words, beneath the gestures of defence or devotion, there hums a single vibration that does not divide.

Those who dare to listen beyond preference hear it clearly. The louder the debate, the clearer it becomes that all sides are pleading for the same recognition of their humanity. The fundamental call is not for dominance but for understanding; to be seen through the eyes of unity rather than difference.

Beliefs are useful until they are mistaken for truth. When held too tightly, they become walls. When held lightly, they become windows through which consciousness observes itself from a thousand angles. The awakened mind learns not to choose sides but to perceive the underlying harmony that holds both sides together.

True wisdom is not born from agreement but from capacity; the capacity to listen without fear, to allow contradiction to breathe, to see that diversity of expression is the universe conversing with itself. Every person, every nation, speaks a dialect of the same cosmic language. The argument is never between right and wrong but between two reflections of the same light, each insisting that its brightness is original.

When this is seen, opposition dissolves. The wars of ideology lose their fuel. You begin to recognize that all are reaching toward the same ineffable truth, merely using different words to describe it. What remains is not a conclusion but a profound peace; the peace of seeing through the illusion of difference.

Morgan O. Smith

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Beyond the Quadrants

The Letting Go That Lets Go of You

Awakening does not unfold through accumulation but through dissolution. It’s not about adding layers of understanding, but releasing the very framework that holds identity together. Every seeker begins with an “I”—the observer, the experiencer, the one who longs for freedom. Yet that same “I” must eventually surrender its throne.

The paradox lies here: the “I” must decide to release itself. It chooses to let go, though the one who chooses disappears in the act. This gesture is not driven by resistance or desire, but by recognition —an intuitive understanding that attachment to any quadrant is still a form of identification.

The quadrants—I, WE, IT, and ITs—map the totality of human experience: the inner self, the collective, the objective, and the systemic. Each serves a purpose until awakening calls for transcendence. The I is influenced by the ITs—the systems, structures, and conditions of existence. These shape perception and possibility. Through the IT, awareness ripples into the WE, inspiring collective movement. And as the WE shifts, the I is again transformed.

This endless loop of causation refines consciousness but never liberates it. Liberation comes when the loop itself is seen through. When the “I” no longer clings to the role of observer or doer, the quadrants collapse into pure witnessing. There is no longer an experiencer and the experienced, a subject and its object. What remains is unconditioned awareness; the silent axis upon which all quadrants turn.

Awakening, then, is not achieved through effort but through profound surrender. It is the cessation of grasping at identity within any domain—personal, relational, empirical, or systemic. The quadrants remain functional but no longer define reality. They appear and dissolve within the same stillness that has always been awake.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Precision of Perception

Why Interpretation Shapes Your Awakening

Reality isn’t hiding. What conceals it is the web of interpretations spun by the mind: assumptions, projections, and inherited beliefs. Yet, paradoxically, it is through interpretation that one begins to peel away those very veils. Every interpretation is a mirror. The question is: what is it reflecting?

Interpretation matters because it reveals where you are on the developmental spiral. Crude, reactive interpretations reflect lower rungs of psychological growth; often rooted in fear, blame, or a need for certainty. As awareness matures, interpretations become more nuanced, inclusive, and paradox-tolerant. They start to echo the underlying unity of things, rather than just categorize them.

Interpretation is not merely a mental activity. It is a soul signal. The more refined it becomes, the closer it gets to silence, the point where no interpretation is needed. That is the paradox. The highest interpretation doesn’t claim to know; it bows. It listens. It dissolves.

Yet such dissolution is not a regression into vagueness. It is the clarity that comes when all interpretations have done their job and exhausted their usefulness. Then what remains is the directness of being—your true nature—not as a conclusion, but as the very absence of conclusion.

This is why interpretation is not to be dismissed but refined. It is a bridge. And the more accurate your interpretation of the world, the closer you walk toward the unconditioned—what no interpretation can contain, but all of them secretly point toward.

What you interpret is what you live. Misinterpret life, and you suffer. Align with it, and you awaken. Accuracy in perception is not about being “right”; it is about being real. Every step you take toward clearer interpretation is a step toward the Real that has no opposite.

Morgan O. Smith

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