by Jayādvaita dāsa (ISKCON New York)

Filling our eyes and minds, extending throughout the universe, form, in this material world, is everywhere. Even when invisible, all things have form. We cannot imagine a formless mountain, a formless child, a formless snowflake or even a formless atom because by nature a thing and its form are inseparable. But because matter always exists within a form, we sometimes wrongly assume that spirit itself must be formless. To attain perfection in spiritual life, one must overcome this misconception and realize the transcendental form of Krsna.

By mental speculation one concludes that because material forms are temporary, spirit, to be eternal, must be formless. This reasoning, however, is illogical, like the conditioned thinking of a cow in a barn. If a barn catches fire, the cows there will naturally be frightened, and it may be that whenever they see red in the future, they will fear another blaze. Similarly, we know that the forms of matter are doomed. Not to speak of our own bodily forms, enduring for a mere fifty or one hundred years, even the greatest forms, like the planets of our universe, are destined for dissolution. In the material world, form deteriorates and disappears, nothing escaping impermanence. But unfortunately, by the imperfect process of mental speculation, we assume that because the forms we know are material and temporary, this fleeting nature must apply to all form. This mode of thinking, which may be described charitably as imperfect and more accurately as immature or even childish, is accepted by three classes of thinkers: atheists, voidists, and impersonalists.