Forms, Dancing in the Formless

by Brian Thompson

You experience life through the myriad forms appearing to you, one after the next, in constant and continual, never-ending succession. You take these forms to be the verifiable stuff of reality. Whatever you see, sense, and feel, you assume to be real.

But, what is the truth of this experience?

And, to whom are these sensations of changing, shifting, and disappearing forms appearing?

A form is an appearance within awareness that becomes cognized, regardless of whether it’s mind or matter. It could be a thought form such as an opinion, memory, concept, or belief, or it could be a sense perception of something physical in the world, either outside the body, or within.

You see this world of forms coming and going before you, and you become lost in how they appear. You become hypnotized by their dance, and you forget the formless presence in which they appear. You become enamoured by their beauty, bored by their plainness, and repulsed by their horror. You become addicted to the pleasure of how things look, clinging to that which you love while resisting what you detest.

When you attempt to define yourself by the gross (the world of forms), rather than the subtle (empty awareness), happiness becomes limited by the mind’s falsely created self-identity. When you overlook your true self of Awareness, the mind defines itself by its egoic impressions of the world, which creates the illusory self-concept called, “me”.

The mind’s image of itself (me) is always relative to the world it’s perceiving—which is the dance of false appearances—forms which have no independent reality of their own.

When you overlook the inherent emptiness of things, the contents of the mind appear to become a reality.

The world then becomes falsely personal, dominated by the ego’s subjective perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and beliefs, which it affixes to all people, places, and things.

And this is what it means to be asleep within the egoic dream—being ignorant to the absolute reality, which is the undeniable and unchanging impersonal presence of awareness.

Forms are nothing without you; you lend your invisible reality to all seeming things. The illusory world of form cannot be trusted. It is not real—only you, awareness, are real. No longer ignore your subtle emptiness that is your ever-present formless presence.

Something only seems to exist because of the nothingness in which it arises. It is the unknown, alone, that reveals the known. The form reveals the formless; the formless reveals the form. You cannot perceive fullness without emptiness.

This is the paradox of Truth—whenever you focus solely on forms, you ignore the formless. And when you focus only on the formless, you ignore the forms.

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