Trying to get an idea of how form affects us is similar to trying to describe the outside of the bottle from inside the bottle.
One of the difficulties I see with form is that I almost unavoidably assume it's a fulcrum with which I can gain leverage over my inner work... over myself... or perhaps even over heaven.
Form looks that way; if it's inserted and applied to my awareness, I think, it will have the force to do. Yet it doesn't. Only by inserting the self into the self and becoming the self can there be any action of the self. Form can't act. The difference between form and self is vast, very nearly unattainable to ordinary understanding. Original self doesn't have any form in it; it acquires it, a complex question which we are left asking, because we live within that problem.
Those who have been following the series of recent essays about essence will perhaps already understand that this question touches on relationship to essence; inhabitation of essence. To inhabit the self with the self is to abandon form, which grows in the soil of personality.
Form is a property of the outer circle, a necessity, but it can't really provide any force of being. It's a framework to hang things on, not a foundation I can build on. It only looks like one.
In imagination—which is the place it exists, from a perspective of being—form is an enormous force which actually has its own presence, its own power, and can dictate how things should be. I imagine that if I align myself with it, it can do work for me; yet form can't actually initiate anything, it can't begin anything for me. It doesn't unlock any inner doors; what it unlocks is my imagination about inner doors. Only the self facing the self can face the door and open it.
To go within and see directly that it's this organic relationship of self to self; to touch on the sensation of the self knowing the self, before the form and even without the form; this is the question.
It's not as though there is no form; there is. But that in and of itself has to become a question. I am completely identified with form. So much so that I don't even see it is an identification. Every iota of my understanding crystallizes around this kernel; and assigning it power actually takes me away from my responsibility to myself, to my Being, and to others.
In minding the form, never mind the form; what am I?
I respectfully hope you will take good care.