My Dear Daughter,

Exactly three months after returning to Vietnam and meeting with Brother Alpha to ask about my practice, I am now summarizing the meditation I’ve done during this period—based on my limited understanding through our conversations, along with what I’ve observed and experimented with in practice. In our first conversation, I came to realize that I had stumbled into the Realm of Formlessness purely by accident and due to a misapplication of the meditation method that Brother Alpha had previously shared. Admittedly, I felt a bit disappointed—though Brother Alpha said that if I kept doing what I was doing, I would eventually succeed, just without knowing why I succeeded. Despite his rather strict tone in that session, Brother Alpha patiently and thoroughly explained the theory to me. According to him, without understanding the theoretical foundation—without a right understanding of this field—we wouldn’t even know what we’re practicing. Moreover, with clear understanding, we can “self-audit our own practice without needing to ask anyone.”

The theory revolved around a single core question: What are the Form Realm and the Desire Realm, and how can we distinguish them?

+ Form Realm: Anything that has a material structure. This includes all images perceivable by the senses (e.g., seeing a table with our eyes, smelling a scent, etc.) or by thought (e.g., closing our eyes but still seeing the image of a table in our mind. That is, even imagined images fall within the Form Realm—this includes dreams).[1]

+ Desire Realm: Everything aimed at gratifying the senses (e.g., craving food upon seeing a delicious dish—even craving it while imagining a favorite dish with eyes closed).[2]

Therefore, the Desire Realm in fact belongs to the Form Realm, and Form Meditation also lies within the Form Realm.[3] Practicing Form Meditation means gradually eliminating both mental and material elements of the Desire Realm—especially the 12 types of Unwholesome Mental States (Greed, Hatred, Delusion), and form-elements generated by the mind such as the nose (smelling), the tongue (craving food), the body (bodily sensations like itching, heat, cold, etc.), gender characteristics, and bodily forms produced by food (hunger, stomach aches, bowel urges, urination, etc.). In place of these, one develops the five Wholesome Mental Factors of Form Meditation: Initial Application, Sustained Application, Joy, Bliss, One-Pointedness, and Equanimity.

The two diagrams below illustrate, in rough terms, the structure of mind and form within the Form Realm. Diagram 1 symbolizes our state before meditation. At that point, the wholesome mental states of Form Meditation were very limited (i.e., the red section), while the majority were part of the Desire Realm (i.e., the blue section), since they serve to gratify the senses (seeing what we like, hearing what we enjoy, smelling pleasant scents, tasting delicious foods, experiencing physical pleasures, and thinking about things that make us feel good, indulging in habitual thoughts or surface-level reasoning). The goal of Form Meditation is depicted in Diagram 2: to remove and transform these mental and physical elements and replace them with the five Wholesome Mental States of Form Meditation. 

(End of Part 1/7)  

Notes:

[1] It’s important to remember that physical objects in daily life—such as a table, a lump of clay, or a fish—are only one type of material form (with weight and size) within the Form Realm. The Form Realm contains many other types of materiality, such as a lump of clay imagined in the mind, or a glowing lump of clay visualized during contemplation. See Chapter VI of the Abhidhamma for details on the 28 types of material form.

[2] The Desire Realm consists of 11 realms: 4 unfortunate realms (Hell, Animal, Hungry Ghost, and Asura), and 7 fortunate realms (Human, Cātummahārājika Heaven, Tāvatiṁsa Heaven, Yāma Heaven, Tusita Heaven, Nimmānarati Heaven, and Paranimmitavasavatti Heaven). The lower a realm is, the more it is dominated by mental and material elements of the Desire Realm.

[3] Brother Alpha also briefly explained the Formless Realm, which is the realm of concepts and thought—not images. For example, love, freedom, or greatness are abstract notions that cannot be touched. More closely related to meditation practice: mentally calculating a math problem belongs to the Formless Realm but visualizing and drawing the numbers out to solve it belongs to the Form Realm. Therefore, the Form Realm and the Formless Realm coexist in parallel—this is a very interesting idea. The Form Realm involves suffering; the Formless Realm involves suffering too—suffering through thought. That’s precisely why we train to eventually even let go of those thoughts: Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception → Cessation of Feeling and Perception.