Form and the Formless

There is a spiritual realm where the price of admission is to leave all vestiges of identity at the door. In that realm, there is no identity, there are no forms at all, and no names. To enter there requires something more (or less) than passively letting go of forms, which opens us into the field of consciousness but no deeper, because the passive approach leaves our personal individuality at the center. To enter the formless takes surrender: surrendering our identity, surrendering into the void, surrendering into total presence in this moment.

What does it mean to enter the formless? In this context, the word form refers to everything perceptible by our senses: all objects, all things, everything we see, hear, touch, taste, or smell, our thoughts and mental images, our body and all we perceive of it, and our emotions. To move beyond forms means to move beyond our body, beyond ourselves, beyond our world, beyond even our consciousness, and into the world of no-thing.

Behind any video there is a blank screen. Behind the printed page, there is plain paper. Behind sounds there is silence. Behind thoughts there is simple awareness. In the same way, behind all that we see and sense there is the emptiness, the formless void. Everything comes on top of that. Everything comes out of that. Everything is unified in that.

How to approach the formless? There is an approach in front of us and another behind us. For the former, we bring ourselves totally into this moment. Our attention is full and here, seeing what we see. Our awareness is full and here, covering all that we see and hear and the rest. We are so completely present in this moment that nothing of us is left behind, nothing left unattended to. We have no spare mental capacity to support a pseudo identity, for we engage our whole capacity in being here, now. We stay in this. Thoughts are rendered weak and mute in the bright light of our attention. There is no room for them. We are so completely here that our attention, our will-to-be, reaches from the visceral touch of this physical world all the way back to the fathomless touch of our formless source. This is the Tao. This is the Purity acting through us and as us.

The first inkling of the formless in this state is that our mind is not labeling what we see, our mind and emotions are not judging what we see. What we see just is. We just are. We see things as they are, without any filters or reactions. Inner stillness, that great precursor of and pointer to the formless, pervades our being. We recognize that the stillness inside us reflects the stillness outside us. The inner stillness and the outer stillness are not separate. There is one stillness under everything, behind everything. And within that stillness there are no forms. This is simplicity itself.

The other approach is directly inward toward the formless. We move ourselves, our inner position, tracing backward along the beam of attention toward the within: behind our senses, behind our thoughts, behind our emotions, behind ourselves. We let go of being somebody. We let go of being nobody. We let go of being anything at all. We negate ourselves and our ordinary awareness. What was inside becomes outside as we pass behind it. Unlike the vast space of consciousness, in the formless there is no space, nor time. Yet its very emptiness is its power. Nothing to interfere, nothing to distract. Its emptiness is its purity.

With practice we begin to be able to maintain contact with the formless, even as we go about living fully in a life full of forms. We realize that forms and the formless, that our senses and the Sacred are two sides of the one reality we inhabit.

For this week, please become the formless.

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