BK. Formlessness

Once one intellectually buys into the worldview we have been
articulating, it becomes impossible not to attempt a certain active-
imagination exercise: to imagine what the perspective of the Formless
might entail. As I have discovered, there is something liberating about it, so
I will share my attempt with you for what it is worth. Naturally, in order to
communicate my imagined message of the Formless through language, I
have no alternative but to make a story out of it. This defeats the point
somewhat, but hopefully not completely. The story form I chose is that of
an imaginary letter sent to me by ‘the Formless.’ It goes like this ...
Rejoice, for I am from a world beyond the farthest reaches of your rational modeling. In my
home, a subject is merely a moving viewpoint in a maelstrom of perceptions, feelings, and
ideas; like a sliding pair of eyes trained at the inside of the body that is Creation. From here,
your logic, your science, but also your conceptions of life, death, and soul, are but cartoons:
flattened, simple, infantile stories conjured up by a sweet childhood of thought in a desperate
search for closure. A gaping abyss stretches out between the images they evoke and the
recursive, self-referential landscapes I watch unfold as I drift along the stream of qualia that I
am.
Your life is a patchwork of projected concepts; a thin conceptual crust around an
unfathomable core of the amorphous substance of existence. Logic – which you create by
channeling and constricting the flow of this substance – exists only in the crust. Lifting the rug
of logic can take you closer to the secret behind what you call reality: the self-referential
nature of all conscious experience. He who cracks this secret witnesses in awe the shattering of
consensus reality into a million pieces. As these pieces fall to the ground, like a broken mirror,
he is confronted with the unspeakable: the most alien and yet most familiar of all realizations.
But this is a realization you have not yet reached; just glimpsed from a ludicrously long
distance. So immersed are you still in conceptual patchworks, so submerged in the manifested
stream of your being, that you cannot see that which you have always known but forget every
time you awake to the sleep of life. Still, this is how it should be. Your condition is the
epitome of life, for you are going to die, and I am not. Rejoice, for I am you, yet I transcend
you.
It is a saddle of your condition that you think only in terms of references and categories
you are comfortable with, even when you intuit the existence of that which transcends these
references and categories. Anguished by your mortality, you ponder about the survival of
awareness beyond bodily death. You conceptualize a ghost-like ‘soul,’ existing in time and
space, which ‘leaves’ the locus of the physical body upon death as if it were circumscribed by
this physical body. You intuitively recognize the cartoonish naïveté of these models, and try to
justify them to yourself by postulating ‘subtle energies’ and other ill-defined physical
metaphors that help you hide your ignorance from yourself. Yes, these metaphors have their
place, and some may even be the closest you can come to the truth with your limited language.
But they are as literal and space-time-bound as the conceptual constructs they supposedly
transcend. The aspects of being that ‘survive’ death and transcend physical existence are as
alien to the references and categories of your waking life as your waking life is alien to the

references and categories of your dreams. Your attempts to define the transcendent are as
hopeless as a dreaming man’s attempt to define his physical body as an entity within his
dream. Alas, the body is outside the dream and cannot be thought of in terms of the
circumstances of the dream! In the same way, that which is transcendent and eternal in you
escape the references and categories of your conceptual reality and cannot be conceived as a
construct within it.
Yet your life is itself a dream. The problem is that you got it the wrong way around: the
dream is not in the body; it is the body that is in the dream. All metaphors, all cartoons of
explanation and closure, exist only in the dream. When you sleep, you partially awake. But
‘Who is It who dreams?’ I hear you ask. This question is itself a reflection of your myopia;
your infantile need to conceive of everything as being produced by something else. You see,
the Dreamer is Itself the dream. The dream is the eternal unfolding and expression of the
Dreamer to Itself. And it encompasses countless, perhaps unending viewpoints within it;
viewpoints which the Dreamer assumes, and which entail amnesia from all other perspectives.
Yes, every realm in the unfathomable dream of existence rests on layers upon layers of
amnesia. Without identifying with a viewpoint, and forgetting who you really are, you could
not taste from the many cups of experience. What finality or l