Tag: Ultimate Reality

The Fourth and Fifth Perspectives

Human understanding evolves by taking positions.
At first, reality is personal. Experience belongs to me. Then it becomes relational. There is you. Then objective. There is the world. These perspectives organize life, language, and survival. They also quietly assume something deeper: a vantage point from which all of this is known.

The fourth perspective emerges when that assumption is examined.

At this level, identity no longer anchors experience. Thoughts, sensations, and events appear without belonging to a self. Awareness is no longer located behind the eyes or inside the body. Experience is revealed as happening within an impersonal field. Nothing is owned. Nothing is central. Knowing continues, yet no knower can be found.

This recognition often carries clarity, peace, and coherence. Reality appears seamless. Distinctions soften without disappearing. Functioning remains intact, but the sense of authorship dissolves. Many traditions stop here and mistake this discovery for the final truth.

That pause matters.

The fifth perspective does not deepen the fourth.
It removes the need for it.

The idea of an underlying field, awareness, or witnessing presence is seen as another explanatory structure. Useful, elegant, even beautiful, but unnecessary. The question of what everything appears within loses relevance. No ground is required. No container is implied. No reference point is privileged.

Reality no longer needs to be described as nondual.
It no longer needs to be described at all.

This is not an experience. It does not arrive. Nothing stabilizes. Nothing collapses. The framework that seeks a final position simply fails to apply. Language continues to function, but without metaphysical commitment. Perspectives still appear, but none are taken as true in themselves.

The fourth perspective reveals that there is no centre.
The fifth reveals that even that revelation was optional.

This does not result in indifference or withdrawal. Action continues. Care continues. Creativity continues. Meaning appears where it always did; within context, relationship, and response. What falls away is the assumption that reality needs a final explanation to be complete.

Ultimate reality is not hidden behind experience.
It is not accessed by climbing to a higher vantage.
It does not require awareness, unity, or silence to validate itself.

What remains is remarkably ordinary.
Life unfolds. Language speaks. Understanding happens.
Nothing needs to be added. Nothing needs to be removed.

The difference lies only here:
no perspective is mistaken for what is real.

Morgan O. Smith

AI for Wellness and Spirituality Summit

February 9 & 10, 2026

https://aiforwellnessandspirituality.com/mosm

Ego Death Is Not a Metaphor

Ego death is often spoken about casually, yet nothing about it is casual. It is not a poetic phrase, nor a dramatic exaggeration. Something very specific occurs—precise, unmistakable, and irreversible at the level of insight.

This is not a biological event. The body remains alive. The brain continues to function. Memory does not disappear. Consciousness does not black out. What vanishes is the internal reference point that says, this is me. The structure that once organized experience around a personal center dissolves, and with it goes the assumption of separation.

No negotiation happens here. No partial surrender. No internal debate. Doubt does not survive the moment. The mind does not ask whether this is real. Verification becomes unnecessary because the one who would seek confirmation is no longer present.

Psychological death may sound abstract until it happens. When it does, the body reacts as though an actual death is occurring. Survival instincts flare. Meaning collapses. Familiar orientation fails. Yet awareness remains clear—perhaps clearer than it has ever been. This clarity is what distinguishes ego death from unconsciousness. Awareness does not dim. It expands beyond the need for identity.

Enlightenment does not occur after ego death. Enlightenment is what is revealed when the ego can no longer interfere. The ego cannot be refined into truth. It cannot be educated into realization. It must fall away entirely, because it is structurally incapable of holding what is uncovered.

At the causal level of realization, identity no longer rests in form, personality, history, or narrative. Cause and effect are no longer observed from the outside. They are known as oneself. Everything that arises is recognized as both originating from and resolving into the same source. Nothing stands apart. Nothing is accidental. Agency is no longer personal, yet responsibility is absolute.

Deeper still, even causality dissolves. Distinctions between origin and outcome lose meaning. What remains is not many things connected, but a single indivisible reality. This is what Advaita Vedanta names Absolute Monism; not a belief, not a concept, but a lived recognition.

Time no longer appears linear. Past, present, and future are not sequential events but simultaneous expressions. Every occurrence, across all scales and dimensions, is apprehended as one movement without edges. Beginning and ending collapse into the same point. Eternity ceases to be a duration and reveals itself as immediacy.

The ego cannot survive this recognition. It was never meant to. The ego exists to navigate relativity, not to comprehend totality. Asking it to grasp nonduality is like asking a shadow to contain light. The moment the ego loosens its grip, what remains is not annihilation, but the recognition that life and death were never opposites.

Ego death feels final because it ends the search forever. Nothing remains to achieve. Nothing remains to defend. What is discovered was never acquired. It was always present, waiting for the interference to stop.

This is why enlightenment is never uncertain. Anyone still asking whether it happened is still standing outside the threshold. When it occurs, the questioner disappears, and only knowing remains; silent, complete, and beyond reversal.

Morgan O. Smith

AI for Wellness and Spirituality Summit

February 9 & 10, 2026

https://aiforwellnessandspirituality.com/mosm

Existence Is Not the Measure

The statement “God exists” sounds reverent, yet it quietly diminishes what it claims to honour. Existence is not a neutral category. It is a condition. To exist is to appear within time, to persist across duration, to occupy a framework where before and after apply. Existence implies location, sequence, and limit.

God, if the word is to mean anything absolute, cannot be confined to such a framework.

To say God exists already places God inside something else. Time becomes the container. Space becomes the stage. Existence becomes the rule God must obey. That framing does not exalt God; it reduces God to an object among other objects, distinguished only by scale or power.

A more precise statement unsettles most theists:
God does not exist.

Not because God is absent, unreal, or lacking. Quite the opposite. God is beyond the category of existence altogether. Existence belongs to the realm of manifestation. God is not a thing that manifests; God is that by which manifestation is possible at all.

Existence requires time. Something exists now, or then, or for a while. God, described as eternal, cannot be stretched across moments. Eternity is not infinite time; it is the absence of time. When time disappears, the verb “to exist” loses its footing.

Yet the paradox deepens further.

Non-existence seems to offer an escape. If God does not exist, perhaps God is non-existent. But non-existence remains a conceptual category. It can be named, contrasted, negated. It operates within the same logical field as existence. Both rely on distinction. Both appear only where something can be opposed to something else.

If non-existence is conceivable, it already participates in being. A possibility that is truly nothing cannot even be held in thought. The moment non-existence is entertained, it has already entered presence.

Here the framework collapses.

God, said to be beyond existence, must also be beyond non-existence. Whatever transcends both cannot be limited by either. Existence and non-existence become expressions rather than boundaries. Time and space arise as localized conditions within something that never enters them.

And this includes belief itself.

To hold a belief about God’s existence, to deny it, or even to question it, must occur within existence. Belief requires a thinker. Thought requires duration. Opinion requires perspective. Every stance taken for or against God is already operating inside the very field it attempts to define or negate. The debate itself belongs to manifestation.

The claim “God exists” is therefore not wrong ; it is partial. It refers only to the aspects of reality that appear within time and space: galaxies, minds, causes, effects, events. These are not separate from God, but they are not the whole either.

God is not an entity within existence. Existence is an activity within God.

Once this is seen, the opposition between theism and atheism dissolves. The atheist rejects a God who exists as an object. The theist defends that object. Both remain bound to the same assumption: that God must exist to be real.

Reality does not require existence as a predicate. Existence is something reality does, not something it is.

Nothing stands outside this. Nothing escapes it. Nothing contradicts it.

Existence is all there is; and what is cannot be reduced to existing.

Morgan O. Smith

Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!

https://subscribepage.io/oTSZQu

The Weightlessness of Perspective

How much weight does a point of view actually hold?

None. And yet, it seems to shape entire lives, govern nations, define relationships, and breed conflict. But the more one deepens into the ungraspable expanse of reality, the more all perspectives—including one’s own—become like shadows cast by a flame none can touch.

I do not feel resistance toward those who oppose my view. I feel space—vast, immeasurable space. Not tolerance, not passive indifference, but a kind of cosmic shrug. This universe is too immense, too precise, too paradoxical for me to waste even a flicker of energy defending a perspective I know was born out of a temporary configuration of memory, biology, and environment.

What I see, I see through a filter: race, culture, conditioning, gender, language, trauma, karma, personality, neurochemistry, and a moment’s breath. Someone else sees through a completely different lens. To argue over the differences is like two waves debating who touches the shore more truthfully.

Each wave is made of the same water.

Ultimate Reality does not conform to opinions. It cannot be contained by agreement or disagreement. It isn’t found in right or wrong, winning or losing. It is not trying to prove itself. It simply is, and isness doesn’t care how it’s described.

This is not nihilism. It’s reverence. Reverence for the mystery so wide, so total, that every perspective is valid precisely because none of them are.

The deeper the realization, the more perspectives one can hold. Not juggle, not compare, not rank—but hold. To see from the eyes of the enemy and the beloved, the oppressor and the oppressed, the doubter and the devotee. To feel into each vantage point, not to believe it, but to understand it from within.

Eventually, you don’t just hold perspectives. You become the capacity for perspective itself. You become the silence before thought, the awareness behind all positions.

From there, disagreement becomes theatre.

Opposition becomes dance.

And the only thing that matters is the stillness that allows it all to appear.

Morgan O. Smith

Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!

https://subscribepage.io/oTSZQu

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

Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!

https://subscribepage.io/oTSZQu

Which You is God Within?

Those who speak of God as not being outside of you often mean well—but which “you” are they pointing to? The body? The persona? The memory of identity that walks through time? Or something deeper?

There’s a difference between saying God is not outside of you and realizing why that’s so. If God is all, then every appearance—internal, external, formless, formed—is God. This includes the illusion of separation. To claim that God is not outside of you while affirming that something is external still subtly upholds the illusion of division. That illusion, too, is God—played through veils of thought, language, and perspective.

But when the idea of “you” dissolves into beingness itself, the paradox clears. You are not merely a part of existence. You are existence. And existence is God, not as a figure, but as totality. Even the idea of “outside” collapses, because outside implies another space, and there is no second to the One.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing. It means everything is not-two.

Even nonexistence exists. Not as an object, but as a category known within existence. Its very naming proves its place within the whole. Therefore, there’s nowhere God is not—and no self outside of God to speak of God as elsewhere.

So, when someone says “God is not outside of you,” pause. Feel what is really being said. It’s not a statement about boundaries—it’s a pointer toward boundarylessness. Not about spiritual pride or metaphysical positioning. It is the erasure of location itself.

And in that clarity, what’s left is not you as you know yourself. What remains is what’s always been—God, appearing as you.

Morgan O. Smith

Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!

https://subscribepage.io/oTSZQu

The Silence That Speaks

Fragments Cannot Contain the Whole

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!

https://subscribepage.io/oTSZQu

When Reality Lets Go of Itself

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!

https://subscribepage.io/oTSZQu

Beyond the Threshold of Awareness

The Unutterable Presence

There exists a state beyond all conceptual understanding, a dissolution of every boundary that once defined existence. It is not merely an experience but an annihilation of the experiencer—a cataclysmic merging into the unfathomable. This is not illumination in the conventional sense; it is the collapse of all divisions, the vanishing point where emptiness and form cease to stand apart.

Words fracture under the weight of such an encounter. No language can capture what has neither shape nor limitation. It is the ultimate paradox—utter nothingness brimming with infinite potential. The moment one seeks to grasp it, it recedes into the void. And yet, it is always here, unshaken, untouched, the silent witness that has neither beginning nor end.

The attempt to articulate such a realization feels like trying to hold onto the wind. It cannot be contained, only lived. Every atom, every unfolding event, every whisper of movement in the cosmos is a testament to this unnamable presence. It is not separate from life but the very fabric of existence itself—an unspoken language through which reality reveals its nature.

The mind, conditioned by duality, cannot comprehend this dissolution. To see it is to stand at the precipice of all that was ever believed, to watch as identity crumbles into the abyss of truth. What remains is neither self nor other, neither light nor shadow—only the boundless expanse of that which is.

This is not a state reserved for the few. It is always available for those who dare to surrender, to dissolve into the vastness without resistance. But such surrender is not an act of will; it is the natural outcome of seeing clearly, of ceasing to grasp at the illusions that veil the obvious.

Some may call it the Absolute. Others, God. But even these are mere echoes of something that defies every attempt to name it. It is not found through seeking nor lost through ignorance. It simply is.

To those who approach the edge of this knowing, there is only one certainty—what awaits beyond is not an experience to be had but the final recognition that there was never anything but this.

Morgan O. Smith

Yinnergy Meditation/Neurofeedback, Spiritual Life Coaching & My Book, Bodhi in the Brain…Available Now!

https://linktr.ee/morganosmith

Beyond the Veil of Illusions

The Great Unknowing

What if existence is not what it seems? What if perceiving solidifies an illusion so seamlessly that even doubt itself is part of the design? A void stands before you—not as absence, but as a fullness beyond measure, a nothingness so complete that it overflows into everything.

An infinite well that never depletes, an empty and endlessly abundant abyss, a silence that hums with the resonance of all things. This is not a paradox, nor contradiction, but the ungraspable nature of truth. What appears as reality is a mirage cast by a mind beyond comprehension, a dreamer whose thoughts pulse as galaxies and disappear as shadows.

Through the eyes of the Unseen, nothing can be known. The grand illusion dissolves, revealing a boundless awareness so absolute that it does not perceive itself: no division, no subject, no object—only the vast, unbroken continuum of being. And yet, within this awareness, every motion, every rise and fall, every struggle of opposing forces is but a breath in the eternal expanse of the unspeakable.

The universe, from its first ignition to the last flicker of existence, is a single, indivisible thought. It is neither cause nor effect but both simultaneously. It is the architect of all contrasts—light and shadow, ascent and descent, creation and destruction—yet untouched by any of them. What appears as the highest peak inevitably crashes into the lowest depth, and what seems like the lowest void is already reaching toward the infinite.

The mind that conceives all things exists beyond high or low, form or formlessness, self or other. To see through its gaze is to witness the great unraveling, the realization that all structure, all time, all space, all identity are mere fragments of a cosmic mirage. There is no here, no there, no now, no then. No self to know, no other to seek.

Upon dissolving into this nameless vastness, the final truth is revealed: within absolute nothingness, all things arise. And from this paradox, the great unfolding of existence continues—ceaseless, endless, immeasurable.

Morgan O. Smith

Yinnergy Meditation/Neurofeedback, Spiritual Life Coaching & My Book, Bodhi in the Brain…Available Now!

https://linktr.ee/morganosmith