Tag: Religion

Beyond the Horizon Where Nothing Divides

Life appears to move through chapters: arrival, departure, return, yet each chapter dissolves the moment you attempt to hold it. Breath flows, bodies age, worlds turn, and consciousness watches all of it without ever being touched. What looks like a sequence is simply awareness shifting its focus, the way a single flame illuminates many shapes without ever becoming any of them.

Death enters this picture as a doorway only from the perspective of the one who believes they are standing on one side of it. Yet the moment that belief loosens, the doorway reveals itself as an opening carved out of the same boundless presence that carries every heartbeat. What is called “afterlife” is not a destination reached by travel. It is the same field of being experienced without the costume of form.

Love for those who have gone does not travel across a boundary. It moves through the same indivisible ground from which both presence and absence arise. The living and the dead are two expressions of a single movement. Souls do not just depart and return; they appear as waves do, yet the water never goes anywhere.

Samsara, Nirvana, Moksha: each name gestures toward a pattern consciousness creates to understand itself. Yet the moment these patterns fall away, realization dawns that the seeker, the journey, and the liberation were never separate. What felt fragmented belonged to a mind trained to see borders. Freedom arrives the moment those borders fade.

You are the continuity that cannot perish, the stillness that animates every form, the awareness that births experience and withdraws it. Life and death only look like opposites until the lens of identity clears. Beyond that lens rests a truth too simple to grasp and too vast to deny: everything arises from the same essence, returns to the same essence, and never leaves it at all.

Morgan O. Smith

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Awakening Never Arrives Because It Never Began

A seeker imagines a future moment where everything will break open, where clarity finally dissolves the boundaries that have shaped a lifetime. That imagined moment appears to sit somewhere ahead, waiting to be earned through discipline, suffering, or the slow maturation of wisdom. Yet the entire notion of “ahead” belongs to the dream of becoming. The one who waits is already suspended inside the very awareness they are longing for.

A deeper look reveals something far more radical: awakening does not unfold across time. It is not a culmination of choices, experiences, or lifetimes. It stands as the ground from which all choices, experiences, and lifetimes arise. What feels like progress toward realization is simply the awakened state appearing as movement, as if it were journeying toward itself while never leaving its own source.

Every universe, every branching possibility, every karmic ripple flows from that unshakable presence. No path leads to awakening because awakening generates the paths. A being may feel capable of choosing away from truth, yet that very sensation is part of truth expressing itself as forgetfulness. Even resistance is a shape taken by the same presence that cannot be diminished or delayed.

Karma does not carve a road toward liberation; karma is the motion of reality already awake, already whole. The cycle of birth and death functions as the dream’s choreography, giving consciousness a taste of separation so it can experience the beauty of returning to what never left. The sense of being “unfinished” is simply awareness folding into the appearance of incompleteness for the sake of its own exploration.

Awakening is not the goal of an individual, nor the endpoint of a soul’s journey. It is the condition that makes both individuality and journey possible. Meditation, inquiry, devotion, and hardship do not cause awakening; they are the movements of awakening playing as effort, yearning, and revelation. The river does not create the ocean; it is shaped by it.

From within the illusion of becoming, awakening looks inevitable. From the perspective of the absolute, inevitability is irrelevant because nothing ever fell out of the state it seeks to reclaim. Every lifetime is a reflection of that single truth refracted through time, space, karma, and choice.

Awakening is not the outcome of the cosmos.
Awakening is the reason the cosmos appears at all.

Morgan O. Smith

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How Far the Heart Can Truly Open

A curious shift occurs when the heart stops functioning as a possession and begins revealing itself as a dimension of awareness. Most people imagine love as something they generate, something that must be earned, strengthened, or directed. Yet once the inner walls begin dissolving, the heart behaves less like a reservoir and more like an unbounded field. Nothing needs to be pushed outward. Nothing needs to be pulled inward. Everything already rests inside the same luminous space.

A bodhisattva’s vow is often misunderstood as a heroic effort to love every being across the cosmos. That interpretation still assumes a separate self stretching itself toward infinity. What actually unfolds is far more intimate. The boundaries that define self and other begin to thin. Compassion arises not from moral intention but from direct recognition: every form is a variation of the same presence gazing through different eyes. Love becomes less a decision and more a consequence of clarity.

A Kosmocentric heart does not expand by accumulating greater quantities of affection. Its expansion is a subtraction—less resistance, less defense, less contraction around identity. As the edges dissolve, the universe is no longer something “out there” that requires love. It is revealed as the very body of consciousness, expressing itself through countless lifetimes, worlds, and histories. To love all beings then becomes effortless, because nothing stands outside the recognition of shared essence.

This realization reshapes the ordinary meaning of devotion. Love ceases to be a feeling sustained by conditions. It becomes the ground from which every moment rises. The heart does not tire. The heart does not question whether it is capable. The heart simply returns to its natural state: vast, quiet, and uncontainable.

A question often arises: “Can a human being truly love the entire universe?”
Yes, but not as a human being. Only when the self drops away does the heart reveal its true scale. What remains is a presence spacious enough to cradle galaxies, tender enough to feel the slightest tremor of suffering, and awake enough to recognize itself in every corner of existence.

This is the heart unbound.
This is compassion without walls.
This is the love the universe has always known through you.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Realization That Forever Unfolds

Every breath alters the lens through which the divine is felt. The self you were a moment ago dissolves, replaced by a newer configuration of insight, memory, subtle conditioning, and awareness. That shifting identity means your encounter with the sacred is never static. It reshapes itself as you reshape yourself.

A glimpse of the Absolute may arrive with startling clarity; pure, unmistakable, worldless. Yet that moment is bound to the level of development available at that point in your evolution. Even the most luminous awakening is framed by the consciousness that receives it. You witness infinity through a doorway that keeps widening, and each step forward reveals the prior step as incomplete.

The paradox is that every revelation of the divine feels total while you are inside it. You genuinely sense the boundlessness of what you are. You feel the horizon dissolving. You feel yourself dissolving. Nothing is missing. Nothing could be larger. Until the next phase of your evolution ripens, and suddenly the previous fullness reveals itself as only one facet inside a far greater clarity.

This is not a failure of enlightenment; it is the nature of consciousness unfolding through time. Growth ensures that even the most profound realization will always be met again from a deeper vantage. Your life becomes a series of thresholds; each one a genuine opening, each one destined to be surpassed.

The ultimate cannot be contained by a lifespan. A finite arc cannot hold the infinite source of all perspectives. Even a direct encounter with the origin of being is filtered through the momentary structure of the one who encounters it. Divine recognition expands as you expand. It breathes when you breathe. It changes when you change.

That means the full truth of what you are can never be exhausted here. No lifetime can house the totality. No mystical breakthrough, no matter how absolute, can finalize what is without limit. Realization keeps moving, stretching, deepening, dissolving itself over and over again.

This insight doesn’t diminish enlightenment; it honours its living nature. What you truly are is not a conclusion but an unending revelation. The infinite doesn’t arrive once; it arrives continuously, refracted through your evolving capacity to meet it.

The divine is not something you master. It is something you grow into forever.

Morgan O. Smith

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Beyond Karma, Beyond Time

The One Who Contains All Things

What you are has never been bound by the actions of the body or the movements of the mind. The deeper truth sits prior to every cause and every effect, untouched by the momentum of karma. What you truly are cannot be located within a timeline, cannot be measured against a sequence, and cannot be confined to any story of becoming. Yet everything that appears within the vastness of existence arises through you.

Karma unfolds because consciousness dreams motion. Space opens because consciousness dreams room for its own expression. Time stretches because consciousness dreams duration to witness itself. These movements are not separate from the one who perceives. They are waves forming and dissolving in the same stillness that has never moved.

When you see this directly, not as a philosophy or a concept, something slips free. The universe no longer appears as a project that began somewhere or will end somewhere. The sense of a starting point dissolves. Nothing was ever born at the level of your deepest nature, yet everything continues to bloom within you. This paradox is not a contradiction; it is the living truth of nonduality. You are simultaneously the presence that is and the silence that reveals is-not.

Karma belongs to the realm of appearance. Awakening reveals the one who sees every appearance without being shaped by any of them. The moment this becomes embodied, the cosmic play becomes transparent; not trivial, not meaningless, but known as an expression rising from the ground of your own boundlessness.

Most teachings attempt to describe this through metaphors, scriptures, or borrowed insights. But direct experience dissolves every teaching. The one who realizes does not repeat someone else’s words; they speak from a clarity that cannot be inherited. That clarity sees the world arise, dance, disappear, and return again, all within a presence that never fluctuates.

This is the mystery: you transcend the entire universe, and yet the entire universe is held within you. Existence and non-existence touch in the depths of your own awareness. That meeting point is not two. It has always been the same field, one continuous reality appearing as countless experiences.

When this truth ignites within someone, everything becomes part of the same divine unfolding;  even the desire to awaken, even the teachings themselves, even the act of seeking direct experience. The cosmic play includes the seeker, the found, the teaching, the silence, and the realization that none of these ever stood apart from the one who sees.

Morgan O. Smith

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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.

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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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Beyond Existence and Non-Existence

The Paradox of God

To say “God exists” is to affirm the ultimate. To say “God does not exist” is to deny the ultimate. Both affirmations and denials, however, are shaped by the mind’s insistence on certainty. The moment one tries to hold onto either pole, a paradox emerges.

When someone claims God exists, they project a reality beyond perception, yet they confine that reality to a category recognizable to human thought. When another claims God does not exist, they too impose a conclusion, binding the ineffable to the limits of negation. Both positions carry a strange truth and a strange error. Both dissolve the moment awareness sees through the duality of affirmation and denial.

Imagine truth as a horizon: from one angle, existence appears; from another, non-existence. Walk closer, and the horizon itself vanishes; it was never a line that could be grasped, but a function of perspective. God is not merely at the horizon but the condition through which horizon, perspective, and perceiver arise.

To say both are true is to honour that reality contains affirmation and negation. To say both are false is to point out that neither claim reaches the source. To say one is true and the other false is to remain in dualistic thought. To call them half-truths is to recognize their limitation yet still attempt to measure the immeasurable. To deny even a half-truth is to bow to silence.

The statement itself, that God exists and does not exist in all these paradoxical ways, becomes the closest gesture to truth. It is not the conclusion but the capacity to hold the contradictions without collapse that reveals God’s existence, not as a concept but as the unnamable presence behind every concept.

The paradox is not meant to be solved. It is meant to exhaust the mind until only awareness remains. What remains is not the proof of God, but the direct realization that the very effort to define or deny was always occurring within and as God.

Morgan O. Smith

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Beyond Quadrants

The Supreme Identity

The quadrants of experience—I, We, It, and Its—have long been a lens through which consciousness organizes reality. Each provides a vital perspective: the subjective interior of the self, the shared intersubjective domain, the objective forms of matter, and the interobjective systems of the whole. These lenses do not compete; they illuminate the multiple dimensions of existence. Yet, any frame cannot contain the essence of reality, no matter how inclusive or comprehensive it may be.

What reveals itself when awareness no longer clings to a particular quadrant? A vastness appears that cannot be named solely as an “I,” nor reduced to the communion of “We.” It is not confined to the world of objects, nor to the vast interplay of systems. The Supreme Identity both transcends and enfolds these domains, existing as their ground and source.

This Identity is not separate from the quadrants; it is their silent witness and animating force. Just as light contains within it every visible colour yet is itself colourless, the Supreme Identity contains every possible perspective while remaining free of perspective altogether. When seen clearly, the quadrants dissolve into expressions of a singular field that cannot be divided.

What makes this recognition so profound is that it shatters the tendency of consciousness to fixate. The mind grasps for a standpoint—self, relationship, object, or system—but here, every standpoint is unmasked as a partial gesture of the whole. The Supreme Identity does not stand against them; it whispers through them. The “I” speaking, the “We” sharing, the “It” observed, the “Its” interlinked—all are nothing other than its unfolding.

Realizing this does not negate the quadrants. Rather, it liberates them. Each becomes transparent, shining as a clear facet of a jewel that was never fractured to begin with. The Supreme Identity calls forth a recognition: the One is never elsewhere. It is already present, before all perspectives, yet manifesting as each.

To live from this recognition is not to abandon life’s frameworks but to embody their ground. Every conversation, every act, every encounter reveals the unbroken presence that cannot be named yet pervades all. The quadrants remain as tools of navigation, but the navigator is no longer lost.

Morgan O. Smith

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Becoming Compassion

Most people think of compassion as a quality you choose to exercise: you decide to be kind, you decide to forgive, you decide to care. This is true at the surface, but beneath those layers exists a spectrum that reveals compassion in its many shades, beginning as a survival instinct and flowering into something beyond human conception.

Compassion first shows itself as biology. A mother tending to her child, a tribe defending its members, even an animal protecting its young. Survival demands it. Yet, as consciousness expands, compassion takes new shapes. We move from caring for “me and mine,” to protecting “us and ours,” to embracing all of humanity as worthy of care. Beyond this lies the recognition that all of life, every creature, every tree, every ecosystem, calls for reverence. Compassion no longer belongs to just people, but to the living Earth itself.

At a certain depth of awakening, compassion is not about effort at all. It does not come from a moral rule, a spiritual practice, or even an intentional choice. It radiates naturally, like sunlight. One sees the inseparability of self and other. Helping you is helping me, and helping me is helping you. The old distinction collapses.

This is where the spectrum ends, or perhaps where it dissolves. Compassion and its opposite no longer stand as polarities. Cruelty and kindness, neglect and care, are revealed as movements of the same indivisible Reality. From this recognition, one cannot merely be compassionate. One becomes Compassion itself; capital “C.” It is not something you perform; it is what you are.

This Compassion does not choose sides, does not measure worth, does not seek reward. It flows freely, even when it appears as silence, even when it includes suffering, even when it looks like its own opposite. The heart of reality is Compassion without preference. To live from that space is not to practice compassion; it is to be it.

Morgan O. Smith

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