Tag: Spirituality

The Divide

Between the Remembered and the Realized

Enlightenment isn’t a collection of vivid memories. It isn’t a library of altered states or a gallery of peak experiences pinned to the walls of time. Enlightenment, in its truest sense, is what remains when all those moments pass. It is not recalled—it is present.

A spiritually enlightened being doesn’t describe what happened—they speak from what is. Their language may touch on form, but it arises from formlessness. It isn’t commentary on a past event; it is the echo of what is silently alive in that moment. Words are merely the condensation of what remains wordless within them.

Contrast this with the one who has had many spiritually enlightening experiences. There is often great sincerity, beauty, and wisdom in their sharing. But listen closely: their narrative carries timestamps. “This is what I saw… what I felt… what I realized…” There’s a distance, however subtle. A witness telling you what the moon looked like—rather than being the moon, shining right now, regardless of who’s watching.

This difference isn’t about hierarchy. One isn’t better, holier, or more awakened than the other. But there’s a distinct quality when realization is not merely visited, but abided in. When the identity that would lay claim to an experience has dissolved entirely.

Here’s the paradox: a being can be spiritually enlightened without ever having what we label as a “spiritual experience.” No blissful union, no white light, no serpents of energy climbing the spine. Their clarity is not the aftermath of an event—it is the absence of confusion. No fireworks. Just light.

They may speak little. Or not at all. There is no need to convince, convert, or collect followers. They are not on a path—they are the ground from which all paths appear.

On the other hand, a person with many enlightening experiences can describe with breathtaking poetry the landscapes of the soul. But unless those experiences have dissolved the one who experienced them, the self remains—refined perhaps, but still separate.

True awakening isn’t an experience you remember. It’s the end of the one who remembers.

This is why the most profound truths often arrive without announcement. A falling away, not an acquiring. A silent recognition that this—yes, this—is what always was. And suddenly, the need for experience evaporates. Presence alone becomes sufficient.

Morgan O. Smith

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It’s Not About You, or Me

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

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Beyond Comprehension

Dwelling in the Field of Opposites

Want to understand the mind of God? Think of two opposites, accept those two opposites, become the two opposites, go beyond both, erase both, yet include. Even then, it won’t be understood.

Fire and water seem to be opposites. Yet steam arises at their meeting point—a form that is neither purely one nor the other, yet depends on both entirely. This is not the cancellation of difference but its transformation. What appears is both, neither, and something beyond classification.

To become opposites means allowing yourself to be fierce and gentle, clear and confused, bound and free, without settling on any of these as the final truth. It is to hold them fully, see their mutual necessity, and recognize that their apparent contradiction points to something that includes, exceeds, and dissolves them without denying them.

Human longing for comprehension seeks the safety of closure—a single statement that ends all questioning. Yet the source of all perspectives cannot be bound by any one of them. Every claim about it is true, false, and everything in between.

Stepping into the space where opposites remain distinct yet inseparable invites a new kind of seeing. Certainty and doubt illuminate each other. Every perspective holds a partial truth, a partial untruth, and a silent remainder that escapes both.

Silence here is not mere emptiness but a fullness that holds every possibility without settling on any. Words illuminate and obscure in the same breath. Every statement unveils something while hiding something else. Language does not capture what is beyond it but points, imperfectly, toward what cannot be bound.

This is not a teaching about removing opposites so they disappear into sameness. It is about becoming vast enough to hold their full tension, to see that going beyond them does not reject them but includes them in a larger whole. The mind of God is not merely where opposites cease to matter but where their interplay, necessity, and transcendence are equally revealed.

Here, everything can be affirmed, denied, and moved beyond at once. Nothing is excluded. Nothing stands alone.

Morgan O. Smith

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Into the Heart of All Things

Love That Contains Everything

There comes a moment on the spiritual path when pain is no longer theoretical. It moves from being news headlines or distant horrors into something you feel as if it were happening inside your own body. Starvation in one region of the world burns in your own gut. The terror of assault trembles in your own bones. The rage of a lynching mob snarls behind your teeth.

This is no metaphor. Consciousness itself breaks open to encompass every cry, every injustice, every cruelty humanity has ever inflicted on itself or on the earth. There is no distance left between observer and observed. The entire spectrum of suffering is laid bare without filter or anesthetic.

Mystics have called this the dark night of the soul, but the phrase barely hints at its magnitude. It is not your personal night alone. It is the night of the whole species, the whole cosmos. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, genocides, rapes, wars, the silent grief of mothers burying children, the loneliness of elders abandoned, the silent weeping of animals led to slaughter. Even the death of worlds, the cold ending of stars.

This unbearable totality can seem like the end of sanity. It is, in fact, the end of the false self that pretends it is separate from any of it.

What follows is not relief but a deeper unmasking. Your own buried fears, resentments, and desires surface with equal force. You see your potential to be the perpetrator as well as the victim. There is no moral high ground left. You become both the murdered and the murderer, the liberator and the oppressor.

This is not punishment. It is a purification so complete it destroys every shield you held up against reality.

Something unexpected happens when there is no more defence. Love appears—not a comforting emotion, but a force that can hold everything without turning away. This love does not choose sides. It does not say “this is holy, that is unholy.” It does not deny the reality of atrocity. It enfolds it.

Ultimate love contains the screams and the silence after. The destruction and the rebirth. The cruelty of humanity and its boundless mercy. The ugliness of our shadow and the beauty of our tenderness.

This is the same force that drives a mother to shield her child from harm and the same force that calls the contemplative to pray for the world. It is what lies behind the tears of remorse, the acts of forgiveness, the revolutions that upend injustice, the small kindnesses that go unnoticed.

Such love is not naive. It has seen everything. It knows what humans are capable of at our worst. Precisely because of that, it offers compassion without condition.

Spiritual awakening, at its deepest, is not an escape from the world’s pain but an embrace of it so complete that the illusion of separation collapses. What remains is love that refuses to exclude anything.

Love that has become vast enough to be the world itself.

Morgan O. Smith

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Courting the Unplanned

How Practice Prepares Us for Awakening

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

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The Root of Choice

True Free Will and the Causal Realm

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

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My Religion Is Liberation

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

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You Are Already Enlightened, Acting as if You Are Not

Most spiritual seekers chase after enlightenment like it’s a distant prize withheld by the universe. The irony is that the essence being sought is precisely what animates the search. Enlightenment is not something to acquire; it is the underlying fact of being itself. The real dilemma lies not in discovering it but in maintaining the performance of ignorance.

Ask yourself: what does it take to pretend you are unenlightened? Notice the strain involved in sustaining identification with fear, ambition, conflict, desire for control. There is an ongoing maintenance of separation. One must continually rehearse the drama of being a self apart from life, a fragment cut from the whole.

This play of forgetting is not accidental. It has its own intelligence. It permits a dance of contrast so that awareness can better know itself. Yet the tragedy for many is forgetting that it is just a dance. They get lost in the mask they designed. The seeker clings to questions of how, when, and why—missing the silent answer that has always been here.

Enlightenment is not an achievement, but a recognition. It is the falling away of the need to be other than what you are. Once seen, it’s impossible to unsee, though one can still pretend, out of habit or fear. The invitation is to drop the effort, even to be enlightened.

No authority can grant it, no ritual can guarantee it, and no teaching can deliver it because it has never been absent. The teacher points. The student imagines the distance. The truth remains.

To realize this is to see that nothing needs fixing. Even the belief that you are not yet free is simply another expression of freedom. This is the cosmic joke: you are already what you are seeking. The only cost of knowing is the willingness to stop pretending otherwise.

Morgan O. Smith

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The Absence of Dimension

A Contemplation on Absolute Monism

What dimension is the experience of absolute monism?

That very question quietly collapses under its own weight.

To ask “how many” is to divide the indivisible. To quantify is to measure a mystery that can only be met in its own silence. Within the direct realization of Turiyatita—that which lies beyond even Turiya—there is no vantage point from which to count, compare, or classify. The moment dimensionality is assigned, we have already slipped back into the architecture of mind, where form assumes primacy over essence.

Still, the mind hungers for some orientation. So let’s turn the prism slowly, exploring this from a few distinct angles—not as answers, but as offerings.

1. Relative Lens: The Architecture of Experience

Certain esoteric traditions offer a gradient of consciousness: from the dense contours of the material (3D), to subtle inner time-space (4D), toward integrative fields of unity (5D and above). These serve as helpful metaphors, allowing seekers to understand how consciousness may expand or refine. Yet even the loftiest of these is still part of the dream—within the cosmic play of form.

From this lens, the direct encounter with nonduality might appear multi-dimensional, even interdimensional, because it defies the logic of linearity. It feels vast, borderless, paradoxical. But it is still being interpreted by a relative mind, even if only for a moment.

2. Transcendental Lens: The Priorness of the Real

Absolute monism is not located anywhere because it is not a location.

Dimensionality implies structure. It assumes contrast. But the Absolute is prior to all arising. It is not 1D, 5D, or 12D—it is the generative zero-point. The stillness that allows all movement. The background that isn’t separate from the foreground but holds all images without ever becoming one.

It is not empty like a void; it is empty like ungraspable fullness. The kind of emptiness that births stars and dissolves gods. Not confined to being or non-being, but transcending both.

3. Direct Realization: The Collapse of All Coordinates

No map leads here.

Direct realization is immediate and unmediated. Not because you reached a peak, but because the climber vanished. There is no experiencer—only experiencing. No mind reflecting on awareness—only awareness aware of itself.

Here, space has not been born. Time has not begun ticking. Even the concept of unity dissolves, for there is nothing to be unified. What remains is suchness—pure presence prior to presence. A silent explosion of is-ness so complete it leaves no trace.

Not a Dimension. Not Even a State.

So what do we call it?

Nothing.

And everything.

To speak of “the dimension of absolute monism” is to subtly betray it. Better to say: it is the absence of dimension in which all dimensions arise and dissolve. Not a high place, but the place before place. Not a peak, but the disappearance of altitude itself.

A Final Whisper

Absolute monism is not the highest dimension.
It is the absence of dimension,
where even “one” dissolves.
Here, all becomes what it has always been—
indivisible, unbounded, unspoken.

Morgan O. Smith

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God Is the Real Imaginary

Absolute Monism and the Paradox of Reality

A peculiar clarity arises once the mind exhausts its chase for permanence. Once the striving quiets, what remains is not a revelation in the ordinary sense—it is the revelation of revelation itself. God. Not as something other, but as the very condition of knowing, being, and non-being.

God is not a person, nor a power among powers. God is context itself. Not just the backdrop, but the totality—the undivided field in which all division appears. It is what Hindus call Para Brahman: the Absolute of the Absolute. The final substratum, beyond form, formlessness, and even beyond the duality of beyond and not-beyond.

Yet the paradox defies all rational anchoring: God is also imagination.

Not a figment. Not illusion in the dismissive sense. But the supreme imagining—consciousness dreaming within itself. The universe, with all its matter and mind, all its chaos and beauty, is that imagining. And because God is not apart from its imagining, God too is that imagining.

Which means this: both God and the universe are imaginary.

And also utterly real.

What we call “real” and what we call “imaginary” collapse into a single gesture when seen from God’s standpoint—which is no standpoint at all. From this viewless view, there is no separation between the dreamer and the dream, the Absolute and its expression, the Formless and the formed.

Yet the beauty of this is not that everything dissolves into sameness. The beauty is that everything becomes itself without needing to stand apart.

God and the universe are one and the same. And because they are one and the same, they are also not the same. The distinction is not contradiction. It is the very nature of what is. Distinctness does not negate unity. It reveals it.

This is not spiritual poetry. This is ontological exactness. If anything is to be absolute, it must include even the capacity to contradict itself. That is the very mark of its absoluteness.

So, what is this that appears as a tree, a thought, a thunderclap, a kiss, a death, a silence?

It is God.
It is the universe.
It is imagination.
It is reality.

One singularity. Absolute Monism.

To see it is not to figure it out. To see it is to disappear into what cannot not be.

Morgan O. Smith

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