Formlessness

“ All that has form, sound, and colour, may be classed under the head thing. Man differs so much from the rest, and stands at the head of all things, simply because the latter are but what they appear and nothing more. But man can attain to formlessness and vanquish death. ”

“ If I could have been in physical shape like these, how despicable in comparison I am; to be shapely of form is so infinitely beyond wealth, power, fame, all that ambition can give, that these are dust before it. Unless of the human form, no pictures hold me ”

“ But what is ‘your body’ here but a percept in my field? It is only as animating that object, my object, that I have any occasion to think of you at all. If the body that you actuate be not the very body that I see there, but some duplicate body of your own with which that has nothing to do, we belong to different universes, you and I, and for me to speak of you is folly. Myriads of such universes even now may coexist, irrelevant to one another; my concern is solely with the universe with which my own life is connected. ”

“ And it is easy to survey the world which is selfless, to find there vanity and illusion, and then to return to one’s self into congenial darkness and the equivocal consolation of some psychological monster. But, if the object is to understand, there can be only one thing which we have to consider. It does not matter from what source our principle is derived. ”

“ Could we look, indeed, at the human form in its simple, unallied physical structure,--on that, for instance, of a beautiful woman,--and forget, or rather not feel, that it is other than a form, there could be but one feeling: that nothing visible was ever so framed to banish from the soul every ignoble thought, and imbue it, as it were, with primeval innocence. ”

“ But this consideration forces us still further, and we feel compelled to ask ourselves, whether, with our minds constituted as they are, we can believe in, or understand any thing wholly immaterial? Whether we can imagine the existence, for, example, of "force" without matter?—a shape which is formless?—a form visible to the eye, yet wholly immaterial? ”

“ Now that you may see how solid is my proof; if one marks carefully his savage face, the whole habit of his body, does not one seem to see as it were the very image of all vices? And herein is the wisdom of Nature to be praised, that she has pent this soul of deformity in a fitting body. ”

“ Thus, throughout the Universe, as interpreted by our Physical Ego, we find phenomena ranging themselves under the form of positive and negative, the apparently Real and the Unreal.
The Good making manifest its negative Evil. ”

“ And we may remind ourselves at this point of a fatal mistake. If you take appearances, singly or all together, and assert barely that the Absolute is either one of them or all—the position is hopeless. Having first set these down as appearance, you now proclaim them as the very opposite; for that which is identified with the Absolute is no appearance but is utter reality. ”

“ Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a God, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the unsubstantiality of all forms, and formal being for itself. And shall we explain a by x and then x by a—give a soul to the body, and then a body to the soul—ergo, a body to the body—feel the weakness of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very weakness the substratum of the strength? ”

“ One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. ”

“ These we see with our physical eyes and call the object, man. We incline to think if these parts are comely, well shapen, strong, beautiful, the possessor may march on to success. "Trust not to appearance." Were the body the root of all things, or of especial worth, the race would be to the swift, the fight to the strong. But that seen, felt, heard, is not the real self. ”

“ Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing:—the soul wished the body meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth. ”

“ It is the body, therefore, not the soul, that, in a natural state, and free from the accelerations of accident, seems first to degenerate. The grace of symmetry, the charm of expression, may last with our existence, and delight to its latest date ”

“ Whatever the mental phenomenon may be, I am convinced that the physical is vestigial—a trace of our former savagery, a suggestion of the lively past, when the struggle for existence involved more muscle than mind. ”

“ What has chiefly tended to take mind, in the eyes of learned and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its apparently irregular and wayward character. How different the manifestations in different beings! how unstable in all!—at one time so calm, at another so wild and impulsive! It seemed impossible that anything so subtle and aberrant could be part of a system, the main features of which are regularity and precision. But the irregularity of mental phenomena is only in appearance. ”

“ But, as themselves and as they come to us, they are no less certainly appearance. So far as we know them, they are but inconsistent constructions; and, beyond our knowledge, they are forthwith beyond themselves. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, facts are to stand for actual finite events, or for things the essence of which is to be confined to a here or a now—facts are then the lowest, and the most untrue, form of appearance. And in the commonest business of our lives we rise above this low level. ”

“ The problem calls upon us to answer how these aspects and respects are consistently united in the one thing, either outside of our minds or inside—that makes no difference. And if we fail, as we shall, to bring these features together, we have left the problem unsolved. And, if it is unsolved, then change and motion are incompatible internally, and are set down to be appearance. ”

“ Presently, desire of separate existence awoke in these shadowy things, a lust of corporeality grew upon them, and hence at last the fall into physical life, the realisation in concrete form of their diaphanous individualities. ”

“ It is a construction riddled by inconsistencies, a working point of view, which is of course quite indispensable, but which cannot justify a claim to be more than appearance.
And the soul is clearly no more self-subsistent than the body. It is, on its side also, a purely phenomenal existence, an appearance incomplete and inconsistent, and with no power to maintain itself as an independent “thing.” The criticism of our First Book has destroyed every claim of the self to be, or to correspond to, true reality. ”

“ But on the other hand, because everything, to complete itself and to satisfy its own claims, must pass beyond itself, nothing in the end is real except the Absolute. Everything else is appearance; it is that the character of which goes beyond its own existence, is inconsistent with it and transcends it. ”

“ Confusion of the physical senses leads to confusion of the moral sense; and weak, miserable bodies with hysterical nerves, though they may dream dreams, and see visions, cannot do good healthy work in this world. ”

“ It is true that with each problem we cannot say how its special discords are harmonized. But is this to deny the reality of diverse contents in the Absolute? Because in detail we cannot tell in what each solution consists, are we therefore driven to assert that all the detail is abolished, and that our Absolute is a flat monotony of emptiness? ”

“ It grows with years and attains its utmost perfection as the bodily forces fail. Then comes the disintegration of the body for new forms as the ages roll. If the material cannot be lost, how can the spirit, the ego that knows, and is as superior to the clay as the living face of woman is to the clod under foot? ”

“ Again: 'One central form composed of all other forms being granted, it does not therefore follow that all other forms are deformity. All forms are perfect in the poet's mind: but these are not abstracted or compounded from nature ”

“ And how all thought of fixity in anything had disappeared as a ridiculous illusion intended, maybe, by something to fool man into the belief that his world here, his physical and mental state, was real and enduring, a greater thing than anything else in the universe, when so plainly it was not. ”

“ The whole fabric seems to have tumbled to pieces; it lies in a horrible chaos. I can make no order within myself. Have I lied to myself? have I acted and postured the Great Man to persuade myself that I am one? ”

“ But, when once more we betake ourselves to reflection, we seem to have made no advance. For the incompleteness and relativity in the matter given by feeling become, when we reflect on them, open contradiction. The limitation is seen to be a reference to something beyond, and the self-subsistent fact shows ideality, and turns round into mere adjectives whose support we cannot find. ”

“ Either I see all the hidden weakness that's in men's natures, and bring it to the surface in their figures, or else I put my own weakness into them. Either way, it's a drawback to their presenting a truly manly appearance. ”

“ For there is a certain action of the body which has all its motions and its general condition in a state of harmony with nature, in which if anything goes wrong through any distortion or depravity, either by any irregular motion or disordered condition,—as if, for instance, a person were to walk on his hands, or to walk not forwards but backwards,—then he would evidently appear to be flying from himself, and to be putting off his manhood, and to hate his own nature. ”

“ And so they do, since they make a difference to the physical result, and since this result is not the consequence from a mere physical cause. But feelings and ideas, on the other hand, neither act nor exist independent of body. ”

“ It is a weakness comparable to the weakness of many premature religious syntheses; and it has the same soothing and disintegrating effect upon the creative energy of the mind.
What, as a matter of fact, hurts us all, much more than any tendency of life to be over-fluid and over-evasive, is the atrocious tendency of life to be inflexible, rigorous, implacable, harshly immobile. ”

“ The second point to emphasize is, inasmuch as the situation generally is reached in the definition of form, the passage from this tranquillity and blessed repose, or from the unbroken severity and force of self-consistency, forms which subsist in unfeatured equilibrium, that is to say, immutable both within and without, have to be set in motion and surrender their undressed simplicity. ”

“ All the corporeal side of the mind is now becoming unvital, non-mental, and in order to make it live again, imaginative impulse calls the mental faculties to descend into the corporeal, that it may become vital once more, even though that vitality be only "to defend a lie." ”

“ I have mentioned but a few of those instances, in which vanity or caprice have contrived to distort and disfigure the human form: your own recollection will add to these a thousand more of ill-understood methods, which have been practised to disguise nature among our dancing-masters, hairdressers, and tailors, in their various schools of deformity. ”

“ We need not fall back for conviction upon the hard shock of change. The whole movement of the mind implies disengagement from the mere “this”; and to assert the content of the latter as reality at once involves us in contradictions. ”

“ But is it certain, on the other hand, that the mere intellect can be self-satisfied, if other elements of our nature remain not contented? Or must we not think rather that indirectly any partial discontent will bring unrest and imperfection into the intellect itself? If this is so, then to suppose any imperfection in the Absolute is inadmissible. ”

“ For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. ”

“ But the same frequent divorce of inner aim and observable outward expression is also in part due to the confusedness of our inward purposes themselves, or to the fragmentariness with which we hold to these purposes, — in brief, to our powerlessness to retain before us the inner vision itself. ”

“ And if the Reality were not the complete identity of idea and existence, but had, with an outstanding element of pain, a necessary overplus of unsatisfied desire, and had so on the whole an element of outstanding idea not at one with sensation—the possibility of resolving this contradiction would seem in principle excluded. ”

“ To some temperaments it might seem as though this reduction of the immense unfathomable universe to a congeries of living souls were a strangling limitation. There are certain human temperaments, and my own is one of them, whose aesthetic sense demands the existence of vast interminable spaces of air, of water, of earth, of fire, or even of blank emptiness. ”

“ The now unclogged mind grasps with vigor any subject presented to it, the spirits are exuberant and the physical frame buoyant. But, is the trouble cured, is it permanently eradicated from the system? ”

“ As we live in these higher realizations the senses are not ignored but are ever more fully perfected. As the body becomes less gross and heavy, finer in its texture and form, all the senses become finer, so that powers we do not now realize as belonging to us gradually develop. ”

“ It would require an alteration of the position in which the intellect stands, and a transformation of its whole connection with the remaining aspects of experience. We need not to cast about for arguments to disprove our omniscience, for at every turn through these pages our weakness has been confessed. ”

“ For, taken at its strongest, it after all must be finite fact. It is determined from the outside, and so must internally be in discord with itself. Thus the beautiful object, viewed as independent, is no more than appearance. ”