Imagine a stick of incense burning. As you watch the rising smoke drift toward the sky, it may seem for a moment as if the smoke looks like something. But the smoke never actually assumes any fixed form. It is continuously moving, reshaping itself the very instant it seems to take on a particular shape. Our experience is just like this.

It’s strange because it seems as if there’s something here that’s being encountered, something we seem able to identify. From one perspective, we’re experiencing fixed, identifiable forms, both the supposed objects of the world that we think of as being more or less unmoving and the internal world of subjectivity. But when we feel the flow of experiencing, we can notice that what we’re labeling as and believing to be identifiable things are, like the rising incense, continuously dissolving and in that sense, utterly without form.

The world of experience and circumstance appears as something we can grasp hold of and render with words and concepts. But when we look a little more closely, we can see that this is only half of the story, for all the things we think of as having fixed, identifiable forms do not.

Forms seem to be present and recognizable. Things seem to be a certain way. But when we try to pin down what that way is, it moves away from us, shape-shifting like the rising smoke. Try it right now. Try to keep what you’re calling the present moment from becoming something else. Try to hold it in place long........

© Psychology Today