The Absolute cannot be grasped by standing in a single place.
Any attempt to reduce it to one perspective—personal, relational, objective, mystical, or philosophical, inevitably distorts it. What gets mistaken for ultimate truth is often just a partial orientation mistaken for the whole.
To know the Absolute at full capacity requires more than a peak realization. It requires total perspectival inclusion.
From the first person, the Absolute is immediate presence; being as oneself. From the second person, it appears as intimacy, devotion, and encounter. From the third person, it becomes structure, law, and observable order. Each of these reveals something true, yet none is sufficient on its own.
A deeper shift occurs when perspective itself is examined.
The fourth perspective dissolves the centre. Experience continues, but ownership drops away. Awareness no longer belongs to anyone. Reality is no longer happening to a self or for a self. Knowing remains, yet no knower can be found.
Then even this gives way.
The fifth perspective removes the need for a field, a witness, or an explanatory ground altogether. The question of where experience occurs loses relevance. Nothing collapses. Nothing transcends. The demand for a final position simply falls apart.
At this point, God is no longer approached as an object of belief, a presence to merge with, or an awareness to stabilize in. God is known as that which remains valid across every mode of knowing without requiring allegiance to any of them.
This knowing must also scale developmentally.
Ego-centric concern gives way to ethnocentric identity, which yields to world-centric ethics, which eventually opens into kosmocentric inclusion. Each stage expands care, responsibility, and comprehension. None invalidates the others. Each must be seen through without being erased.
The same applies to the I, We, It, and Its dimensions of reality. Subjective experience, shared meaning, objective systems, and interobjective networks all reveal aspects of the Absolute. Excluding any one of them creates imbalance. Absolutizing any one of them creates delusion.
States of consciousness contribute their own disclosures. Waking reveals form and function. Dreaming reveals imagination and symbolic depth. Dreamless sleep reveals the absence of content. The witness reveals continuity without identity. Nonduality reveals the inseparability of all of it. None of these states owns the truth. Each exposes a different facet of what cannot be reduced.
Lines of development add further resolution. Cognitive clarity without emotional maturity distorts insight. Moral development without metaphysical depth flattens reality. Spiritual realization without psychological integration fragments embodiment. The Absolute is not known through excellence in one line alone.
Enlightenment, then, is not a single realization frozen in time.
It is the capacity to recognize the Absolute through every perspective without mistaking any perspective for the Absolute itself.
Such knowing does not claim finality. It does not announce arrival. It does not need to defend itself. It functions fluidly; able to speak personally, relationally, objectively, impersonally, and without position; depending on what the moment requires.
God is not found by climbing higher.
God is known by nothing being excluded.
Morgan O. Smith
AI for Wellness and Spirituality Summit
February 9 & 10, 2026
Morgan O. Smith 