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
Maya survives by costume. Names, stories, identities, and roles, each layer persuades awareness that something solid is happening. The spell works because the layers are convincing, not because they are true.
Removing them is not an act of destruction. Nothing is torn away. Nothing is violated. What falls off was never stitched to reality in the first place.
Belief drops first. Then interpretation. Then the quiet assumption that experience belongs to someone.
What remains cannot be described without borrowing from the very illusion that has just dissolved. Language reaches for shape, but shape no longer holds. Meaning loosens its grip. Time forgets how to move forward. Causation loses its authority.
No hidden essence appears. No final revelation arrives. No sacred object waits beneath the last veil.
Maya does not conceal truth. She is the activity of concealment.
When nothing is left to remove, there is no witness standing apart, no awareness peering at emptiness. Seeing collapses into what is seen. Knowing continues without a knower. Function carries on without ownership.
This is not transcendence. This is intimacy without distance.
The world resumes exactly as before; faces, traffic, obligations, joy, grief, but the spell has lost its teeth. Appearances no longer demand belief. Forms no longer claim authority. Experience is free to arise without needing to justify itself.
Maya, stripped of every disguise, reveals no secret. Her final gesture is silence.
Nonduality appears disarmingly straightforward. Nothing is separate. Reality is one. No division truly exists. The mind nods in agreement, almost bored by how obvious it sounds. That very ease, however, conceals a depth that resists containment. What seems immediately graspable slips away the moment it is examined.
Simplicity unsettles the intellect. Complexity gives the mind something to work with; layers, distinctions, problems to solve. Nonduality offers no such footholds. It removes the scaffolding the mind depends on while leaving awareness intact. The result feels paradoxical: clarity without structure, certainty without conclusion.
The mind instinctively tries to stabilize the insight by forming opposites. Simple versus complex. Absolute versus relative. Unity versus multiplicity. These contrasts feel necessary, even helpful. They provide orientation. Yet nonduality does not deny distinctions; it denies their independence. Distinctions function, but they do not stand alone.
Remove the boundary between simplicity and complexity, and both are revealed as conceptual movements rather than opposing truths. Simplicity contains complexity without effort. Complexity resolves into simplicity without loss. Nothing needs to be excluded for wholeness to be present.
This is where theory reaches its limit. Conceptual understanding can describe the inclusion of all distinctions, but description is not realization. Comprehension at this level is accurate yet incomplete. The mind can map the territory without stepping into it.
Nonduality understood as an idea remains elegant and coherent. Nonduality recognized as reality dissolves the need for coherence altogether. The question of complexity no longer arises, because nothing stands outside what is already complete.
Thought can approach this recognition, but it cannot cross the threshold. The final movement is not analytical but surrendering the need to resolve the paradox. What remains is neither simple nor complex, neither one nor many. What remains is what was never absent…Yet, it is.
You’re Already Expressing the Greatest Expression and Don’t Even Know It
Nothing needs to be added to you. Nothing is missing. The most extraordinary expression possible is already happening, quietly, without effort, before any attempt to improve it.
Existence does not wait for permission to appear. It does not consult identity, achievement, or spiritual progress. It expresses itself as breath, sensation, perception, memory, confusion, clarity, longing, boredom, and awe, all without ever stepping outside itself. What you call you is one of its gestures, not its source.
Search often begins with the assumption that something essential has not yet arrived. That assumption creates movement, effort, discipline, and endless refinement. Yet the impulse to seek arises from the same field that is supposedly being sought. Awareness looks for awareness. Being attempts to arrive at being. The loop sustains itself through misunderstanding.
Existence is not something you perform well or poorly. It is not a role to master or a state to stabilize. It is already complete before thought comments on it. Every attempt to improve it belongs to the play of expression, not to a lack that needs correcting.
Notice how little effort is required to exist. Heartbeat continues without consultation. Sensations arise without rehearsal. Thoughts appear without being summoned. Even the sense of being a separate doer arrives spontaneously. None of this requires your management.
What feels ordinary carries no deficiency. The mundane is not a lesser version of reality waiting to become sacred. Washing dishes, forgetting names, feeling tired, feeling inspired, each appears from the same depth. Existence does not divide itself into meaningful and meaningless moments.
Awakening is not an upgrade layered onto life. It is the recognition that life never needed upgrading. What falls away is not existence, but the belief that existence must become something else to be valid.
Trying to express your “highest self” quietly assumes you are not already doing so. That belief fractures what is whole. The greatest expression cannot be improved because it is not a product. It is the fact of appearing at all.
Nothing needs to stop. Nothing needs to be transcended. Even misunderstanding belongs. Even confusion is permitted. Even the desire to arrive somewhere else is part of what is already complete.
The miracle hides in plain sight because it has never announced itself. Existence does not sparkle to prove its worth. It simply continues, endlessly creative, endlessly sufficient, endlessly itself, appearing as you, without asking whether you recognize it.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
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
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
I have spent years trying to describe what happened to me, and every time I speak about it, the words become more suspect.
Language can outline an experience, but it cannot contain it. At best, words point like the crooked finger of an old monk who knows he’ll die before finishing the sentence.
What happened felt like the culmination of every practice, every prayer, every insight. I thought I was climbing a mountain of understanding, reaching ever-higher plateaus. The views grew wider, the air thinner, my confidence stronger.
Then there was nothing.
Nothing to stand on.
No summit.
No climber.
Not even a fall.
Awareness no longer rested on any subject or object. There was no watcher, no witness. The entire machinery of spiritual seeking—so intricate, so earnest—collapsed without fanfare.
What remained didn’t feel like a state. States come and go. This had no coming. No going.
No arrival.
It wasn’t some radiant oneness to bask in. Even calling it oneness implied there could have been twoness.
It wasn’t emptiness in the Buddhist sense, the elegant doctrine that everything is dependently arisen and thus without essence. That too felt too architectural, too systematic.
It was simply nothing that needed explaining.
Not a blank.
Not a void.
Not a silence that replaced noise.
Silence and noise lost all difference.
Thoughts continued—because why wouldn’t they?
Breath moved.
The world appeared precisely as before: sounds, colours, forms.
Except no one stood behind it all, calling it mine.
No vantage remained from which to call anything anything.
The sense of being a person—so carefully cultivated over a lifetime—dissolved like salt in water. But even that suggests a process. The truth is it never had any reality to begin with.
This wasn’t annihilation in the frightening sense. It was astonishingly gentle. The self didn’t die screaming. It simply wasn’t found.
Where had it gone?
Nowhere.
Because nowhere was needed.
There was an uncanny intimacy with everything. Not the intimacy of closeness, but the absence of distance.
A bird calling outside wasn’t outside.
A passing thought wasn’t inside.
Nothing was outside or inside.
Without a center, there was no periphery.
No boundary defined what I was or wasn’t.
There was no I to define.
This wasn’t bliss in the usual sense—no narcotic wash of pleasure.
No ecstatic union.
Ecstasy requires an experiencer.
There was no experiencer left to feel enlightened.
And so the phrase “I had an enlightenment experience” is a lie spoken for convenience.
Experience implies an owner, a timeline, a sequence of events.
This wasn’t an event.
Events happen in time.
Time didn’t stop; it lost its claim.
Past and future stopped being places to travel.
What about now?
Even that lost its centrality.
This was so direct, so unarguable, so empty of specialness.
No claim to make.
No badge to wear.
No insight to hold.
No teaching to give.
Nothing was revealed.
Nothing hidden remained.
No questions answered.
Questions fell away for lack of a questioner.
The sacred and the profane lost their separation.
There was no vantage from which to prefer one thing over another.
Life went on.
Dishes washed.
Conversations happened.
Traffic lights changed.
Anger arose.
Tears fell.
Laughter erupted.
All of it completely itself.
No attempt to improve or transcend any of it.
Nothing to transcend.
No one to be improved.
If anything changed, it was this relentless dropping of all pretenses.
All strategies.
All defenses.
Even the defense of being spiritual.
Especially that.
No seeker.
No sought.
No path.
No realization.
Just life, unadorned.
Not life as concept.
Life as immediacy.
Life with no one living it.
And I see now that every attempt to name this diminishes it.
But that’s the game of words.
Let them fail.
I won’t call this truth.
Truth is too grand.
Too final.
Too proud.
I won’t call this liberation.
Liberation implies something bound.
Nothing was ever bound.
I won’t call this God.
God suggests someone else.
Something else.
Otherness itself dissolved.
This wasn’t merging.
Not two to merge.
No return to source.
No departure.
No source.
Just this.
No this.
And even writing that betrays it.
So here I will stop.
Not because I have finished.
But because there is nothing left to finish.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
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
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
Most speak of choice as if it lives at the surface, where preference, fear, habit, and desire jostle for control. But what if true free will does not arise there at all? What if it exists at the root, before thought forms into options, before “I want” emerges to justify itself?
This root is the causal realm: the source of all motion, where intention is not split from manifestation. It is not personal will in the usual sense—no ego negotiating with life to get what it wants. Instead, it is pure causality aware of itself, setting everything in motion without conflict or division.
At the surface, people speak of freedom as the power to choose between alternatives. Yet these alternatives are already conditioned. They are branches of a tree whose root has already determined their growth. To speak of freedom at the stem while ignoring the root is to mistake effect for cause.
However, the paradox reveals itself when one sees no real division between root and stem. The freedom to choose at the surface becomes genuine only when it is recognized as the expression of the root itself. Every choice becomes the revelation of causality. There is no separate chooser apart from the choosing.
This is what lies beyond the ego’s belief in control. The ego claims “I choose” without realizing that its very claim is already part of the causality it denies. True free will is not the assertion of control over life but the recognition that you are life itself choosing, moving, unfolding.
To see this is to dissolve the illusion of separation. Responsibility is no longer a burden but realization: the root chooses through you, as you. There is no conflict left. Choice becomes transparent, ego falls away, and causality shines unbroken.
This is freedom—not as license, not as negotiation, but as total alignment with the source of all that arises.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
Religion need not be a creed one defends or a ritual one performs. For some of us, it is the recognition of the bars we forge around our own minds—and the relentless devotion to dissolving them. Liberation becomes both the path and the sanctuary.
This isn’t about conversion, salvation, or belonging to any particular sect. It is about noticing the prison of belief itself. Every concept, every identity, every longing for certainty can become a gatekeeper denying entry to our own boundless nature.
Liberation demands a fierce honesty. It asks that we examine the illusions that hold our suffering in place, not as moral failings but as invitations to see through the lie of separation. The true heresy in this religion is clinging to what we think we know about ourselves, about others, about reality itself.
No priest is needed here. Authority resides in awareness, and awareness has no master. The teacher is the arising of life as it is—grief, joy, confusion, clarity. Each moment grants a new chance to recognize the play of experience without getting caught in it.
Liberation is not found by rejecting the world but by perceiving its emptiness and fullness simultaneously. Every object, thought, and sensation is free of substance even as it shines in unmistakable vividness. This paradox isn’t a puzzle to solve but a doorway to live through.
When liberation is the religion, love ceases to be a commandment and becomes the ground of being. Judgment collapses, not because everything is permitted, but because everything is understood as oneself. The compulsion to divide the sacred from the profane, the pure from the impure, loses its grip.
Such a path offers no final doctrine. It holds no promise of eternal reward. Yet it is more generous than any creed that trades truth for comfort. It is the faith of those willing to die before death—to watch every cherished certainty burn so that what cannot be burned may reveal itself.
Those who walk this path do so alone, yet never apart.
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!
Ultimate Reality doesn’t struggle to be known. It is not bound by time, thought, or perception, yet it plays with the illusion of being hidden. The one truth pretends to be many, and the One Self feigns division to taste reunion. But there comes a point—not always through effort, not always through grace—when even the illusion can no longer hold itself together.
It is not that Reality finds something new. It is that it no longer clings to the story of separation. The hand once clutching the dream loosens, not because it was forced open, but because the dream exhausted itself.
Falsehood requires maintenance. It must be believed, repeated, and reinforced. It relies on memory, identity, and the fragile continuity of thought. But what happens when the source of all this no longer cooperates? What happens when Reality drops the illusion of control?
There is no dramatic shattering. No cosmic trumpet. Only a quiet falling away of the effort to be something. What remains is neither void nor fullness—it is prior to both. Unnamable. Undeniable. You were never on a journey to find it. It was what you were before the seeker appeared.
To witness this unraveling is not an achievement. It is a disappearance. The one who thought it could hold Reality in its grasp is seen for what it was: a ripple mistaken for the ocean.
And when the ocean stops pretending to be a ripple, nothing changes—except everything.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
Morgan O. Smith 