Cultivating Meditative Concentration Can Break Through the Obstruction of the Aggregate of Form

When you first begin sitting in meditation without yet having meditative concentration (samādhi), what appears before your eyes when you close them is black. With a slight degree of meditative concentration, the colors before your eyes are gray. As meditative concentration strengthens, what appears before your eyes is red. When meditative concentration strengthens further, what appears before your eyes is pale red and pale yellow, or grayish white; after that, it becomes white. Purple is similar to red, perhaps a bit lighter than red. This is the phenomenon of the obscuration of the aggregate of form (rūpa) becoming smaller and smaller; meditative concentration can reduce the obscuration of the aggregate of form.

When you cultivate meditative concentration to the point of breaking through the domain of the aggregate of form, once the domain of the aggregate of form has been passed, there is no obscuration whatsoever in the colors you see before your eyes—you can see everything. No matter what obstructions there are, no matter how far away or how high a place is, you can see it all.

When you cultivate meditative concentration to the point of breaking through the domain of the aggregate of feeling (vedanā), having gone beyond the domain of the aggregate of feeling, you no longer have any sensation of cold, heat, touch, or pain in the physical body. You can be free of painful feeling, and you also pay no heed to pleasant feeling.