Eugene I. wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 11:44 pm
My understanding was that the "formlessness" is not a "mystical" state of the absence of forms, but formless/existential aspects of every form.
Yes, but I am just saying that when a mystic says he 'experiences formlessness' that formlessness may be relative. Also -- getting picky here -- there is no formless aspect of a form. There is a formless aspect of an ideational act, and a form aspect of an ideational act (though I note that I made the same mistake in my OP.)
But my main concern at this point is to question my use of the word 'formlessness' at all. Really, all I can say after the argument against horn (2) of the tetralemma (arguing that form alone cannot produce awareness of form) is that in addition to form there is "something more". Now it is easy enough to say that that "more" must be 'formless', but should we? Doing so seems to lead to reifying formlessness, which I see as getting overly abstract.
So, formlessness is present regardless whether any forms are present or not. Every form has these following formless aspects: beingness (every form exists) and awareness (every form is consciously experienced, in idealistic ontology at least). Any form is never separate from these two aspects and cannot exist and be experienced without them.
I see these statements as just tautological, not as having ontological significance. What exists exists, and what is experienced is experienced. To then go on...
Also, the formless aspects have some peculiar properties: they do not change in time and in their extent (there cannot be more or less existence or more or less experiencing, there is just existence and experiencing, the same all the time), and they never change from one form to another (i.e. every form exists and is experienced in the same way).
...is as I see it to reify, or at least pursue, an abstraction.
The formless aspects unify all forms into oneness because they are the same for all forms, basically, all forms are "glued" together in oneness in the formless aspects, without losing a variety in their manifestation. This is not an abstract intellectualization, one can experientially directly see in their 1-st person conscious experience that all forms are united into the oneness of the "space" of beingness-awareness.
But if one introduces relative formlessness into the disussion, the gluing can be ascribed to that, rather than some absolute formlessness. Now one might be tempted to say the hierarchy of relative formlessnesses must top out with absolute formlessness, but why bother? The pragmatist in me says we shouldn't bother, and instead concern ourselves on whatever relative formlessness is our immediate environment.
Some nondualists claim that these properties of formless aspects make them in some way ontologically more fundamental than forms, but I would not subscribe to such far-reaching claim.
Yes, and that was, and continues to be, one of my concerns in writing the essay.
I should note that much of your thinking here was my thinking when I wrote the essay but -- I won't say I've moved on, it's more a stepping back -- I just now think that such thinking is not useful. I would write it differently now. In some ways, I think the most important thing to take from the essay is that tetralemmic polarity is not understandable. Which is just another way of saying that our current intellect is limited. Maybe when we move up a level of Meaning (h/t Ashvin) one can cognize it. Or leave it behind.