Author, Philosopher, Spiritual Teacher, A Lead Facilitator at Sacred Media's Integral Mastery Academy, Founder of Yinnergy Meditation/Neurofeedback, Bodhi Mental Care & Wellness, Co-founder of KeMor Centre for Innovative Development
The moment a seeker sets out on the path, a paradox quietly begins to unfold. Every step forward seems to promise arrival, yet what one hopes to reach has never been absent. The illusion of a distance to cross is what fuels the journey, and still, that distance does not exist.
Awakening is not a reward at the end of a road; it is the recognition that the road itself was always part of the illusion. The mind measures, compares, calculates progress, but the truth it seeks cannot be measured, compared, or progressed toward. Presence has no edge, no centre, no circumference. Nothing stands apart from it, nothing can be added to it, and nothing can be taken away.
Those who search often feel both exhaustion and longing, as if running toward a horizon that continually retreats. Yet horizons retreat only because they were never there to begin with. What is sought is closer than breath, closer than thought; it is what makes breath and thought possible.
To realize this is not to abandon the journey, but to recognize its true nature. Every path walked, every practice undertaken, every longing felt, each is a movement within what has never moved. The path is not a bridge toward truth but a gesture of truth itself, echoing as experience.
When this becomes clear, striving gives way to simplicity. Effort yields to intimacy. What you are searching for does not arrive because it has never been absent. No path leads to what has no distance.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
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
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
Admiring Her Beauty Without the Need to Possess It
She stood before you—radiant, complete, untouched by your desire. You saw her beauty not as something to claim but something to witness. No attempt to preserve it. No hunger to prolong the moment. Just presence.
This is the essence of non-attachment. The ability to recognize the luminous without needing to make it yours. To love deeply without ownership. To appreciate fully without clinging. To admire, and then walk away—not because you don’t care, but because you’ve seen clearly.
Desire often masquerades as appreciation. It sneaks in, subtle at first, until the gaze becomes gripping. The mind begins to script stories: how it could be, how it should be, how it must be. But true seeing requires no continuation. It is complete in its own silence.
Beauty invites reverence, not possession. When you see her—whatever or whatever she is—truly see her. Let that moment be enough. Let the gaze be unpolluted by longing. Let the love be real because it is free.
To walk away isn’t abandonment. It is freedom for both the viewer and the viewed. There is no trace left behind. No emotional residue. Just the echo of a sacred glimpse, unbroken by need.
And isn’t that the deepest form of intimacy? To allow something or someone to remain what they are, without the distortion of your grasp?
Non-attachment does not dim the light of love; it refines it. It teaches the heart how to hold everything while clinging to nothing. It teaches the soul how to dance with impermanence, and still call it sacred.
Sometimes the most awakened gesture isn’t to stay, or to reach, or to take—but simply to witness beauty… and bow.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
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
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
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
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
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
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
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
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
A seeker walking the delicate balance between opposites may one day find themselves at the threshold of the most profound realization imaginable. A moment beyond all description, where the entirety of existence collapses into a singularity of knowing. Not a knowing of the intellect, but of something far deeper—an understanding so complete that it dissolves all doubt, all separation, and all longing.
This is the moment of total arrival, the point at which all seeking ceases because there is nothing left to seek. The mind, body, and soul align in a way that makes all past experiences seem like faint whispers of truth. The illusion of boundaries vanishes, revealing the pristine reality that has always been present—an awakening not to something new, but to what has been hidden in plain sight.
Within this instant, fulfillment is no longer an aspiration but a living force vibrating through every cell. The distinction between subject and object crumbles, and what remains is a radiant presence, an unshakable unity. The notion of a separate self fades like mist before the rising sun, and what is left is a boundless openness, an expanse where nothing is missing.
Words fail. Concepts falter. Language collapses under the weight of such an occurrence. It is neither thought nor feeling, neither sensation nor perception. It is an unnameable state where the dance of duality finally rests. It would be as elusive as the silence between heartbeats if there were a word for it. A paradox that cannot be dissected, only lived.
Reaching this pinnacle does not come from effort alone or from waiting in passive expectation. It is not a reward for discipline or devotion, yet it is freely given to those who surrender all pretense of control. It arrives not as a thunderous event but as a gentle revelation, as if the universe exhales and everything becomes clear.
And in that clarity, tears may fall—not from sorrow, nor joy, but from the sheer intensity of realization. The great mirage of the self dissolves, leaving only the recognition that there was never anything to grasp, nothing to claim, nothing to own. Just a pure, unshakable knowing that transcends all dichotomies.
Some will wonder how long it takes to arrive at such a moment. But time is irrelevant here. The moment is neither ahead nor behind—it is always now, waiting to be seen. To those who ask, “How do I reach it?” the only answer is: Stop. Be still. Listen.
Morgan O. Smith
Yinnergy Meditation/Neurofeedback, Spiritual Life Coaching & My Book, Bodhi in the Brain…Available Now!
The body is often seen as a vessel, a biological mechanism enabling experience and action. But what if we approached it differently? What if we recognized the body as the ultimate gift—intricately wrapped in layers of mind, emotion, and perception? This perspective shifts us from treating the body as a passive object to understanding it as an intelligent instrument of the infinite.
Each sensation the body offers is a doorway. The ache in your shoulders, the flutter in your stomach, the breath moving through your chest—these aren’t merely physiological events. They are signals, invitations to become aware of the mind’s imprints and the silent intelligence that animates them. The body reveals the unseen layers of the mind, not to entangle us but to set us free.
Consider the interplay of movement and stillness. A heartbeat pulses within every moment of quietude, a reminder that even in perceived rest, life hums with activity. Similarly, the mind often overlays the body’s simplicity with stories—self-judgment, desires, and fears. Yet, beneath this mental wrapping lies pure awareness, unclouded and ever-present.
True liberation doesn’t come from rejecting the body or attempting to transcend it but from embracing its divine design. The body is where the formless meets form, where consciousness expresses itself in tangible, palpable ways. When we cease resisting its messages and begin listening with curiosity, the body transforms from an object of control into a teacher of profound wisdom.
This realization is not merely theoretical. It can be felt. Try sitting quietly and attuning to the subtleties of your breath. Notice the places where tension resides, where the body’s natural rhythms feel interrupted. With gentle attention, ask: “What is this teaching me?” Often, the mind will resist—habitually seeking distraction or interpretation. But as you remain present, something deeper emerges: an understanding that the body and mind are not separate, but two facets of the same infinite presence.
Awakening is not about leaving the body behind but about fully inhabiting it. By appreciating its perfect gift and unwrapping the layers of mind that obscure it, we find ourselves drawn closer to our true nature.
The next time you feel pain, joy, or anything in between, pause. Let the body be your guide, not just a vehicle for experience but the very expression of life’s sacred mystery.
Morgan O. Smith
Yinnergy Meditation, Spiritual Life Coaching & My Book, Bodhi in the Brain…Available Now!
Beauty is often regarded as a fleeting, external phenomenon—a delicate arrangement of forms that pleases the eye or stirs the soul. However, the true nature of beauty extends far beyond superficial appearances. It emerges from the depths of perception, a reflection of consciousness itself. What we deem beautiful is not solely determined by what we see but by how we see. Even when confronted with humanity’s darkest moments, beauty can be recognized not as a denial of suffering, but as an intrinsic aspect of existence that transcends circumstance.
Consider the mind that bears witness to atrocities. On the surface, nothing but devastation appears to exist. And yet, the capacity to witness, to remain present with such horror, reveals something profound. Beauty resides within this presence—the willingness to face what is and still hold space for the inherent dignity of life, no matter how dire. It is not a naïve romanticism of suffering but an acknowledgment of the complex interweaving of light and shadow, both of which play their role in the human experience.
Atrocities test the limits of compassion, empathy, and humanity itself. When one can still perceive beauty in these moments—not the beauty of the event, but the beauty of resilience, of human connection, of the sacredness of life—it becomes clear that beauty is not bound to pleasure. Beauty, in its truest sense, is the capacity to remain open to life, to acknowledge the depths of pain without being consumed by it. It speaks to the heart of what it means to be fully alive: to see the world as it is, in both its horror and its grace.
This paradox—the existence of beauty within tragedy—challenges the conventional understanding of what beauty truly is. It invites a deeper reflection on the nature of perception itself. Beauty does not exist in isolation from suffering but within the totality of experience. To behold something, even amidst atrocity, is to acknowledge its place within the grand unfolding of life. It is to see that every moment, even the darkest, is imbued with the potential for transcendence, for deeper understanding, for awakening.
This is not a call to justify suffering or to dismiss the profound pain of human atrocities. Rather, it is an invitation to recognize that beauty is an ever-present reality, accessible not through avoidance but through the courageous act of seeing the world as it truly is. It is a recognition that the eyes of the beheld are not passive observers of life, but active participants in the unfolding of reality. The capacity to perceive beauty in all its forms is not a matter of circumstance, but of consciousness.
Morgan O. Smith
Yinnergy Meditation, Spiritual Life Coaching & My Book, Bodhi in the Brain…Available Now!
Morgan O. Smith 