pure mental material

Intelligent support for digital text (in the face of negative academic and literati reaction) from Tim Parks in The New York Review of Book:

"The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end. More than any other art form it is pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself."

Full article here

formless consciousness

From a spiritual perspective, the universe is entirely permeated by its underlying basis, formless consciousness. That means everything that can be perceived as having form in the world, from the most basic subtle forces to hard compact matter, is essentially conscious. Formless consciousness and material substance constitute the totality, two sides of a single entity. It follows that formlessness is beyond time and space, and amounts to an infinite absolute that material form is defined against. 

direct perception of formlessness

Speculative spirituality:

There is a debate within spiritual schools of thought about whether form is actually a substance, or simply an illusion, amounting to false perception. They are not really opposed though, in my view. I think it is a case of how the direct perception of formlessness is experienced by the authors of the texts that originated those schools. Take the differences recorded in the Vedanta, the Eastern philosophical tradition I most closely adhere to, and which for me has the clearest definitions of the subject.

Two distinct schools would be Samkhya and Advaita. In the Samkhya school (consolidated between 5th and 2nd centuries BCE), the formless absolute and material form are said to be separate and distinct from one another. Material form arises from formless consciousness and clouds it, producing the effect of the experience of separation in the human organism that evolves within it, a state that remains until the essential nature of the world is directly perceived by detaching from the material covering that obscures it.

Yoga is the process by which this detaching occurs, and the school is closely associated with the clarification of yogic practices. In Advaita (the dominant school consolidated by Shankara around 788-820 CE), a similar analysis of clouding is proposed, but no substance is implied, simply ignorance. Removing ignorance is a achieved through questioning the nature of reality and meditating on its essential nature.

Another school, Kashmiri Shaivism (975-1025 CE), developed later, and proposes that formless consciousness, which it calls Shiva, and material form, which it conceives of as cosmic energy, and calls Shakti, amount to two sides of the same entity.

In this school, as in the Samkhya school, the universe of form is conceived of as emerging from the formless basis as a process giving rise to what they term the elements of space, air, fire, water and earth, which produce the senses of, respectively, hearing, touch, seeing, tasting and smelling. These are the reflections of consciousness in the elements.

The process is viewed as one of increasing contraction of the primal state of energy or substance, which otherwise reflects formless consciousness in its infinite fullness. So, each further contraction produces an increased covering of its reflection of the basis. When energy/substance is fully emerged to the earth state, the most dense, it produces a hard materiality that all but covers and cuts off identity with the basis.

It is never completely covered, however, because the material foundation remains the primal energy state (space) and all the states that continue to emerge from the formless basis (air, fire, water). There is no separation between states of energy. So fusion of all the states occurs and this mixing gives rise to the evolution of individualised forms (though they are entirely interconnected within the totality).

How forms emerge and are constituted as dynamic parts of the whole will be the subject of future specualtive posts.