Liber FMA

(Form and Formlessness, from a Letter to John)

Form is and is changing, and the changes are new form all the time, and forms are changing.
Form is from nothing and within nothing.
In the formless will all forms appear and connect.
Form supports form, changes make more changes, and the flowing changing of form is supportive.
All that is possible is to look for support.
Form is supportive, and the only real question is which forms are supportive?
Support is known in and as movement, and support balances movement and allows movement to balance.
Suffering is and can end, and suffering is only conditions among form wherein more support is possible.
With lesser rather than greater support, holding and effort replaces balancing and movement.
Suffering has specific reasons to begin and continue due to the support of all forms.
Looking for greater support requires vulnerability rather than control in order to feel what is unsupported and to move toward its support.
Looking for greater support requires presence rather than dissociation in order to see the availability of greater support and to feel the change between greater and lesser support.
Forms sought out are found in formlessness, form changing is formlessness form.
I am neither the perceptual system of forms nor the formlessness.

(Why I'm writing)

In my life, I have made problems for others and myself. Increasingly, I find that others also create problems for me, and I see why it is I had created problems in my past (as well as I why I continue to do so).
It is very annoying and sometimes painful when the confusion of others creates problems for me. It is very tragic for others to be confused about what it is they really want and trying to have what they don’t really want. Learning how to be less confused is relatively simple, like learning a game, but part of The Game is vast in scope and depth. It’s almost hopelessly easy to get lost in that vast part without figuring out the rules of The Game itself. Everyone learns games in different ways, and there’s no really right way to teach a game; a game explanation takes as long as it takes for a given player to stop being confused and start playing intelligently. Because of the pain and tragedy of others playing poorly, it makes sense for me, who has somewhat figured out The Game, to try to help others get their handle on the rules. It also makes sense for me to go to this length for the sake of my own continued learning: explaining The Game to others is a classic intermediate-level-player tactic for finding gaps or incongruencies in understanding.

(My Game, given to L-)

For the eager-to-play hands-on learners, I have this tactic for coming to discover rules:
There are four phases in a turn—these are also basically two phases, with the first being three. These are:
1: Look for stillness/silence
1.2: Be stillness/silence
1.3: Be in stillness/silence while watching (chosen perceptual zone)
2: What do you/what did you notice?
Phases 1(.x) and 2 can be done sequentially or simultaneously. 2 can seem to refer to cognitive insights realized from 1(.x), and also to the precondition/opener for 1. If the former is implicitly or explicitly assumed, it behooves one not to put 2 before 1, but this can work by maintaining only a light grip on one’s theories. The idea is more to notice that which wasn’t previously noticed.
Turns are cyclical and generate a positive feedback-loop over time. This tactic can be employed basically anywhere, anytime, for any amount of time, and to observe any given phenomena, situation, person, object, etc.
While this tactic can be intended to achieve specific results—such as coming to know what one really wants, or processing intense feelings, or silencing the mind and coming to presence—results are only achieved by committing precisely to the instructions, rather than by accidentally putting attention on the intention or its object. It can be assumed that stillness/silence is neither ‘there’ nor ‘not there.’ ‘Being’ stillness/silence is a bit like playing pretend, assuming the perceptual viewpoint of an identity or character. Being ‘in’ stillness/silence to watch phenomena begs the question of what you are.

(The Purpose of Narrative, from an essay on Magic for Revolutionaries)

We deduce this present moment as having come from ‘a past’ (because of how we can tend to experience the present). We can also tend to assume that the present moment comes from ‘the past’, meaning some fixed and unchanging ‘this happened’ or ‘that happened’.
Due to how things are, ‘this (story)’ or ‘that (narrative)’ is always insufficient to demonstrate the past, or what actually happened. This is apparent after five minutes’ contemplation: can you write the story of what’s happening right now in your vicinity? Okay, sure, you can write whatever you just imagined—but what didn’t you include? The motion of the air? The radio waves? The beating of your heart, and its precise connection to your breathing? The contents of your unconscious?
Way more is happening in actuality, always, than can be captured by our narrative abilities. A single glass-windowpane moment of spacetime, containing the whole Universe, would require infinite description to capture the totality of its contents—especially given that its totality is not only physical phenomena, but also the invisible world of human meanings which connect disparate phenomena by analogy.^[1]
Like it or not, that invisible stuff is physically present in subtle ways: as reflections, as ciphers and codes, as recursions, as shapes in negative space, and so on.
This matters because any given story is either specific or vague; the tendency, especially for leftist Marx-leaning types, is to think that specificity (such as that of material analysis) is closer to veridicality (or Truth, sorry,) but this can be just as true in the other direction. Vague story more accurately captures a larger swathe of phenomena, meaning that the vast complexity of a given historical moment is better represented by virtue of being potentially present rather than explicitly excluded. A vague story can be more functionally true than a historically verifiable one, and yet the same is true in reverse.
[...]
The purpose of stripping away a specific historical narrative is twofold: the first is that saying what actually happened is impossible to do in narrative form, and is basically lying. Sometimes lies are useful to conserve energy, sometimes they serve to enable specific outcomes to manifest. The second is that what actually happened exists in a kind of existential void within which manifold pasts (as in ‘a past’, not ‘the past’) can be found, all of which range from specific to vague in ways that render them all ‘almost-true’ across a spectrum of veritable-to-mythic.
Revolutionary historical study has, basically, the same underlying structure as all working magic: enter that weird, liminal space within which infinite possibility and potential can be accessed, and pluck out the true-lie that effectively generates the desired outcome.
In other words, strip away the conventional narrative used to generate ‘mundane reality’ by ‘explanation’ and find a different story. We can do this with the existential void of ‘the past’, but the void just exists. It’s there just as ‘stuff that isn’t nothing’ is there—and by ‘there’ I mean here, right now.^[2]

(Immersing in Form, paraphrased from a conversation with A-)

When I last got crossfaded, I had an interesting experience: I became immersed in the nondual experience of form.
By form, I mean sensory content. You can think of it as ‘outer appearance’, in which the outer appearance could be assumed to hold some essence that connects many different ‘appearances’ across contexts of time and space.
Sensory content is basically unified. None of it is separate—your experience is a totality, and all apparent ‘separations’ in it belie the unified whole that it is.
There are ‘things’ because our attention can provide for us parts out of the whole, so it can also be said that there are many forms.
Take, for instance, bodily sensations minus thoughts. You can focus on somewhere like your hand, and thus say that there’s a hand, which is different from your head, your feet, and so on. However, the apparent separation is a feature of a form—the form which is the thought of the hand.
Concept is form because it is a perceptible object just as is a chair, or anger. However, the appearance of these forms belies the unified whole of form. Bodily sensations minus thoughts means the recession of forms to make apparent the unified whole of the bodily form: sensation is ‘all there’.
You can nearly think of it as like a sheet, where all of your sensation shows up somewhere on this sheet. The tendency is to think that this sheet wraps around an empty space and separates that space from the ‘outer space’ of ‘other forms’—but it also actually is possible to perceive the unity of sensation as a flat sheet.
The sheet is form, and all perceptual content shows up on it. That includes thoughts, imaginal scenes and memories, the visual field, smells, sounds, sense of motion, and so on. If it can be perceived, it’s there.
Again, there’s a tendency to think that this sheet wraps around an empty space, but this isn’t so. The sheet can’t be differentiated, really, from empty space.
Form is formlessness, formlessness is form. Formlessness speaks to the inability to put shape to form in order to ‘fix it into place’, which is also a description of its impermanence. Where are the edges of the ‘sheet’? What shape is your mind? Where on the sheet is smell in relation to sight? And where is it that you’re seeing the remembered image of the 2008 Avatar movie poster while your eyes are open, watching the world outside the bus window go by?
Because the sheet of form is formless, it’s typically more convenient even if untrue to make it ‘sensible’ with separations. The trouble is that each form follows the same rules: form is formlessness, formlessness is form.
The form of the body is not separate from form. The form of the thought of the body is not separate from the form of the body. For both, there is no thought, no body, only form, and no form. The form of the thought and the body are both, equally, form and formless. The body and the world are not separate. The experience of self and other belies the unified field of experience.
What about the form of formlessness? Well, what are you?
It’s a functional reality that moving and concentrating attention on different areas of the perceptual field has a corresponding effect on its composition (the state of experience at present). For instance, focusing awareness on your hand produces a change in the sheet—while you’re noticing more there, you might consequently let go of awareness of your butt on the chair, or your feet on the ground, or your breath—but the composition of the sheet is, as you might know it, the content of your attention and awareness: has the sheet changed shape? Or have areas of it gone dark while others glow bright?
It neither can be said that there’s ‘this sheet’ and ‘that sheet’—form and formlessness are the entirety of the perceived internal and external universe, uniting all distinct perceptions of internal and external universe. In that case, the subjective universe of ‘my’ experience is only a concentration of awareness in the sheet, form and formlessness, just as my experience is a sheet of the whole perceptible universe, which is form and formlessness.
What is the movement of attention? What is the contraction or dilation of my awareness? When attention is concentrated on an area of the sheet, that space fills up with phenomena; all investigations yield perceptions. The character of those investigations may differ, such as between scientific, mystical, religious, mathematical, or political inquiries—but in general, the nature of deep investigation is that it produces the kinds of perceptions that expand awareness and return attention to its roaming movements around the sheet.
Attention roams as a function of interest, and interest is directed by many forces interacting with attention. Attention itself is of those forces, which is to say that attention is a function of interest, and vice versa.
Awareness is capable of taking in the whole sheet. By immersing in, being, finding silence and stillness, awareness can expand suddenly: silence and stillness are within and amidst all, and all is from and within silence and stillness.
Silence and stillness are formlessness; ‘silence’ is a form which gives way to formlessness; the All can be apprehended in silence, being that form is found in formlessness; the awareness and attention that apprehend Silence and All, form and formlessness, are essentially similar to form and formlessness.
Attention is not separate from its object, and awareness cannot be spoken of except as the formlessness of experience which forms appear within; and formlessness, being a unity within which forms appear, is thus a form: formlessness is form.

(On Love)

When I’m writing, am I thinking onto the page? Or am I speaking to someone I can’t see? And if I can’t see them, can’t hear them, how can I be speaking to anyone other than forms coming out of my own mind?
What’s ‘someone’? Form, formlessness, attention, awareness: there’s a ‘me’ here, certainly, but not really.
Admittedly, I used to be a solipsist. It’s an easy tendency to fall into: noticing nonduality, but privileging the feeling that there’s a ‘me’ here. After all, ‘I’ seem to be ‘where I am’, nowhere else. But where is here? Who am I? The ‘where’ is awareness; the ‘I’ is attention. Form and formlessness. But really, I am neither the perceptual system of forms nor the formlessness.
When I look at my girlfriend, my boyfriend: what is it that loves them? What is being loved? Where is the love coming from? It’s like asking: what is being silent? Where is the silence coming from? Isn’t Love, Awareness, Silence, each the ground of Being? The sustainer of movement? It’s not ‘me’ who is the source of this Love, but Love comes from its source through my form, through form and formlessness.
I am not ‘me’. I am neither form nor formlessness. I am not the attention or the awareness.
After all, if I am the attention and the awareness, then I am form and formlessness. If I am form and formlessness, there’s no ‘I’ that is the source from which flows Love through form and formlessness. Form and formlessness then would be the source of its own Love, it would be its own sustenance.
I am okay with not calling ‘me’ that ‘I’. I don’t know if I am okay with saying there is no I that isn’t form and formlessness, no I that’s also the source of Love. If Love, which I feel from my girlfriend, my boyfriend, comes from I, then I am my girlfriend, my boyfriend; and, neither me, nor my girlfriend, nor my boyfriend, are ‘I’; or, ‘I’ am known through my girlfriend, my boyfriend, and through me.
What about when I am interested in what they will do—and only watch and listen in stillness as they share of themselves? And then I don’t interfere. What about when I am concerned, and want to impart what I know so that they won’t encounter some painful fate? And then I am interfering. In either case, there is responsibility: responsibility to act rather than to stand by, responsibility not to act in order to let live what will. Is the responsibility to respond to the call as it is heard? There is the obvious call, and there is the hidden call. Where is that hidden call heard? When am I really moved by Love? What goes beyond the dichotomy of interest and concern?
Self-Love; Love of Other. Form and formlessness the medium. Maybe I’ve got something wrong.

1. Elaborating this stuff in linear, textual form would require turning it into pattern, which would also require ‘turning the page’ so to speak—immediately causing time to instantiate as the ever-generating of further windowpanes from this first one taken out of the whole. That is, the ‘book’ of a single ‘windowpane’ immediately generates the ‘book’ that is the Universe of space-time comprised of pages of panes. Still, the ‘first book’ exists ‘outside of time’ and is an unchanging, eternal description of the invisible patterns that cohere the physical world—it’s just that for these patterns to cohere, the physical world has to be elaborated in time.↩︎

2. This is the interesting part about reading magical texts—suspending belief for a moment, putting the book down to consider how such fantastical concepts as ‘inner planes’ and ‘subtle energies’ can be found immediately, present in one’s experience and already at hand. If an ‘inner plane’ is a real description of reality, how can that be? Pay attention—what’s going on? Where is it? This is half the reason that meditating is a foundational skill for magical practice. Is x concept a metaphor for something else, or is the metaphor a literal description of readily-apparent phenomena? And could it be both of those at once? How? As long as you agree to set aside a very specific descriptive belief about magic, like ‘shooting physical, plasmic flames from the hands and levitating my physical body of organs and cells multiple feet in the air’, you can always find ways to say magic is real and discover that that’s true. And even before that you can find out magic is real simply by seeing its results.↩︎