The form and the formless
Or, what it's like to fall up a wall.
It wasn’t that I forgot gravity existed. It was more like I’d forgotten how it works.
I was still in the afterglow of ceremony, yet had my wits about me, and had gone for a long walk to get ice cream. But as soon as I took a bite, I felt a wave of shame, like this wasn’t something a spiritual person would do.
Still one foot in each realm, I felt this rejected part of myself start to make a break for it. They knew the routine: time for the exile to be pushed aside again, repressed and slowly festering, becoming some kind of injury or disease. The next thing I knew, hands full of Topo Chico and frozen dairy, half of my body was resisting while the other half was trying to run up the wall before me, as if I would just ascend sideways, Super Mario-style. Next thing I knew, I was tumbling, bleeding, and gasping for air (yet managing to preserve most of my dessert).
When you spend a lot of time in the world of the formless, it can be hard to remember that this one has rules.
Some of them are non-negotiable, like gravity and breathing. But even these can be bent; see the stories of yogis who reportedly levitate and stop or slow their breath for so long people think they’re dead. And this is where things get tricky.
They say “the ceremony is real life,” but who defines what’s real? Many describe the psychedelic experience as “more real than reality,” and neuroimaging shows that brains in this state behave much like they do during dreams. In Inner Work, a playbook for Jungian dream analysis, author Robert Johnson uses almost the exact same language to describe the world of sleep.
He also describes how people in some Australian Aboriginal societies spend up to 2/3 of their lives in ceremony. When I read that, I felt both validated and frustrated. In many traditional cultures, those with particular spiritual, creative, or healing abilities would be initiated into special roles, such as medicine people, spiritual leaders, diviners, or visionaries. But in the urban industrialized world, we contort ourselves to fit a homogenous culture, and often find ourselves in careers, social groups, and families that don’t align.
Learning about cultures where ceremony is the most important part of life reinforces my belief that this behavior is much more “human” than the cycles of consumption and production by which most Global Northerners live. We draw divisions between ritual and “real” life, living and travel, work and play and art—but if the work could be something that feeds your soul, has artistic function, and bridges the astral and material realms, would we really need these lines?
It’s a question I know other creatives, artists, and folks who practice and pursue spiritual healing have pondered. For if you follow the path far enough, your body won’t let you vibrate at those old frequencies anymore.
At the same time, this world has rules, and we cannot run up walls.
Such is the dance of the formless versus the form. Ram Dass talks about the spiritual path being about bringing the astral down into the physical, flowing back and forth between Earth and heaven. Some say that the role of the artist is to make all that heavenly stuff manifest; I posit that the artist and the mystic are one and the same.
Yet in a recent call for patrons of my favorite podcast, “Third Eye Drops,” Erick Godsey said that even artists need to bring food back to the village. And there’s where the dreamy ethereal collides with the world of objects, bills, and deadlines.
To make a living with your art, you have to make choices. And I, for one, could make a much better living if I made more of them. I’m constantly finding myself writing and rewriting things I probably had right the first time, not to mention pouring forth thousands of pages I never publish, because I feel like I haven’t perfectly conveyed whatever it is that I’m trying to communicate (if I even know what that is). But your fellow villagers, Godsey said, don’t need to understand what the experience of killing a deer is like—they just need to eat.
To truly understand something, you have to live it. No matter how poetic your description, you will never be able to replicate what it was like to stalk that regal beast through the pines; how it felt to watch the life drain from their eyes; the silence after. The tragedy of language is that words will always fail. Even the most immersive art is still just a shoddy facsimile.
I think the work of the artist, the healer, and the spiritual leader is the same: to nourish society by reminding them of what is beautiful and true, but also by reflecting the pain and struggle we all share. It’s our job to let people know they’re not alone; to bring relevant experience to life in just enough detail that they are inspired, entertained, or both; and in the end, to ensure that everyone’s belly is full.
My scrapes were deep, and took a long time to heal. I kind of hoped I’d have a scar, but the evidence vanished. Instead, I will just have to remember what it felt like when my form crash-landed from the formless into the world of immovable objects, and hope that in sharing the experience, somebody else who is struggling feels a little bit more seen.