Formlessness and Individuation

An individuated person with an integrated authentic personality, set of authoritative values, beliefs, with self-acceptance, self-awareness, honesty, self-esteem, self-respect and self-love spends alot of time building a functional relationship with themselves. Sounds self-centered but in practice, it’s self-effacement that neglects the self that is bound to reemerge corrosively in the world we deceivingly relate to ‘selflessly’. Self-effacement isn’t a path to formlessness, because it treats the nihalation of the self as an implosive and null fact as opposed to a dynamic emergence of the self from a productive (rather than void) no-thingness. Self-effacement only denies our agency in the loving world, our right to consciously choose for ourselves, and often times results in self-seeking relations to others whose love we instrumentalize as means to the end of our feeling loved. Whether they remain rigid or fluid, an individuated person enjoys a more soulful kind of freedom that comes from knowing their essential and personal natures, from living in line with their nature. Contrastingly, a person who remains unindividuated, unaware of their preferences or the character of their volition, also remains amorphous, composed entirely by the sum total of their past and present circumstances, swayed in whichever way with no intentionality, integrity, values, or boundaries to stand by. The unindividuated person revokes their own agency, whether in avoidance of the moral responsibility of the self’s role in co-creating itself along with their circumstances, or as a misguided appeal to a state of undifferentiated unison with the world, with nature, a person, God’s Light, a flawed attempt at ‘riding the wind.’ Even formlessness requires we first know the shapes of our wills, especially since there always remains a will that is aware of its own non-awareness, always being to identify its own non-being.