Universal colors

Oh I understand! :+1:

1 Like

I have a vaguely developed idea that there might be a connection between samadhi and the giant balls of gas in space, ie. stars. It’s just from listening to people’s experiences and reading but occasionally i hear someone say how they got absorbed fully into the sun, and another person told me that he felt an outward pressure and a force going to the center in an experience he had, but it reminded me of the two forces in a star (gravity and radiation).

There are stars such as blue hypergiants, yellow ordinary stars, red giants and red dwarves, white dwarves. There are black holes too which might correspond to the base of nothingness. Ahhh, this is all maybe such papañca but i find it fascinating. Maybe someone with knowledge of astronomy could chip in with more details. This theory needs better structural development, ie. kasina colors are hierarchical, why is a white dwarf more advanced than a blue hypergiant which is massive? Is it denser? What color are neutron stars?

OK, at the very least we can say that an ordinary earth fire can take on all the four colours mentioned above. If you are a fire worshipper, you’d have all the four elements present in front of you to meditate upon (bowl of water or river nearby as well), as well as the four colors in the fire.

3 Likes

Mapping astronomy to the planes of consciousness does seem to generate some new perspectives. Let’s look at some quotes from DN33.

not focusing on perceptions of diversity, aware that ‘space is infinite’

There are a lot of planets and stars, but space is bigger. Also quantum physics asserts that space is not zero energy–it bubbles with possibility. Even the gravity/radiation dance comes into question with the introduction of new concepts such as negative mass. Experientially in real life, all this might just boil down to a practical perspective of “don’t get too caught up in specific forms and/or concepts because the space of possible forms is infinite.”

In terms of star colors and their meanings, the spectra are determined by what is burning (i.e., which elements) and how fast the star is moving towards/away from us. Conceptual frameworks are useful for their universal simplicity. Attaching too much meaning to a concept can limit its utility and lead to odd contortions. Just see how astrophycisists discuss dark energy and dark matter, etc. trying to express why we can’t quite explain astronomical observations.

In terms of sutta colors, it gave me much more confidence to realize that the colors are not random but are in fact a coherent set of colors with a very pragmatic viewpoint. One can represent what one sees with blue, red, yellow paints on a white canvas. Notice that this color interpretation is specific to human eyes. It is not valid for other species who can see into UV or into IR. Because of this, I’d be reluctant to assign sutta colors to astronomy because, well, what color are gamma rays or neutron stars? We can’t see them directly and the Buddha did not mention them.

Regarding black holes and nothingness, I’m not entirely comfortable with that association. Black holes are full of stuff in a finite space. Black holes are much more “everything here” rather than “nothing here”. To understand the dimension of nothingness, perhaps it would be better to start not with astronomy, but from understanding what it means to go beyond the dimension of infinite consciousness. Taken quite lilterally, consider infinite consciousness, then let it go.

2 Likes

Since last year I have been puzzling on “visions of white”. It gradually dawned on me that there is a simple explanation. Human eyes are built up of rods and cones. Cones are responsible for color vision and there are three types of cones to match the visions of color described in the suttas (i.e., blue, yellow, red in the EBT sense).

Rods, however, are sensitive to light and dark. Each human rod cell can see about 9 photons. The eye itself starts noticing visions having about 90 photons as tested in dark rooms.

Because of this, visions of white absent color would be the most difficult to discern because they have the least light. For me this explains entirely the ordering of the EBT visions. Blue is easiest to discern on its own and white (absent color) is the most difficult to discern on its own. I had had the misconception that white was solely the presence of full color (i.e., RGB xffffff). However, white is ALSO what is seen for any dim light absent color (i.e., rod cells only). In this regard, white transcends all color as both the brightest as well as the dimmest light discernible.

Therefore, the EBT colors are the human-perceived colors, not the spectral colors (e.g., not UV or IR).

5 Likes

Interesting to note that some animals can see UV and IR.

2 Likes

Yes, and birds have five types of cone cells, so I suppose a bird EBT might describe … six levels of color mastery. :eagle::face_with_monocle::wink:

5 Likes

Is this link in order @karl_lew?

1 Like

:scream_cat: oh my. The link is quite dead.

To my great surprise, I am not able to edit the post even though I am the author. :thinking:

The links point to a past lifetime of Voice. The correct link is ten universal dimensions of meditation. In general, one can follow the original links by simply typing the text into Voice. I think this post may have been authored before Blake gave us voice.suttacentral.net.

Thank you.
:pray:

Thank you :pray: I look forward to reading it :grinning:

1 Like

Circling back to universal colors…

Blue, red, yellow fit with the receptors of the eye. But what then is white? Is white merely the fusion of blue, red and yellow? Perhaps…but there is another consideration.

The time of the Buddha coincides with the start of the iron age. The Iron Age starts at 500BC. Interesting date, right? Who else do we know from then? :meditation:

But back to iron. It takes heat to forge iron. And heat emits light. Indeed the progression of colors for forging iron is that the forge turns red, then yellow then…white. White hot is literally what we see to forge iron.

So the next time we study the eight dimensions of mastery, perhaps consider white-hot, the heat of forging iron, the final mastery.

AN8.65:8.1: Not perceiving form internally, someone sees visions externally, white, with white color, white hue, and white tint. Mastering them, they perceive: ‘I know and see.’ This is the eighth dimension of mastery.

There are in fact four receptors in our retinas. The “cones” detect blue, red, and yellow light. The “rods” simply detect light and are used for low light vision. Some animals, I believe, have only rods and don’t see color. Not an expert, just what I recall from reading in the past. So, the rods would ne analogous to seeing white/black.

Correction: Apparently, now that I look it up, it turns out that our cones detect long wavelength light (reds), middle wavelength light (greens), and short wavelength light (blues). So, we detect these bandwidths of light mainly, which our brain then turns into colors perception. I would suppose then that the meditations involve controlling how the brain is perceiving color by ignoring what the optic nerve is reporting.

2 Likes

Yes, quite right. And that closes the circle, because in the dark, white guides with hope. And when forging iron white melts iron, leaving behind all the dross of defilement. For me this was always puzzling, why would the Buddha end with white in the dark? But as we look into a forge in the bright light of day it resounds with a pure hot white that blasts away all impurity.

Cool blue. Red. Yellow. White.
white-hot-edward-howell

For the nerdy, black-body radiation does go to blue-white which is hotter than white, but that is probably stretching the analogy beyond relevance. At the start of the iron age, the only blue-white visible was in the stars. Oh wait…:laughing:

1 Like

Yeah. Now that I think about it again, in the day time, we see white when red, yellow, and blue are in equal amounts. They blend into just white. When there’s very little light of any color, it’s perceived as black. When one color becomes a little more intense that the other two, you see light shades. In art class, I recall that you can make any color from five primary colors: Red, yellow, blue, white, and black.

1 Like

These are also the colors of the stars and the dark of the night. The Buddha was enlightened in the three watches of the night. Above him stretched an infinite expanse of stars of different colors, all radiant beings that would burn us to the elements, stars in the infinite space of possibility, that long dark night that eventually filled the world with hope for millenia to come.

1 Like

There are two light laws, additive and subtractive for transparent colours and pigments respectively (electronic screens are transparent colours), and two sets of primaries, RGB and RYB. With physically mixing opaque colours the process is subtractive, meaning mixing RYB works towards black. Mixing transparent colours occurs through mixing light beams, which obey the RGB rule and when RGB are mixed, white results. “Primary” means colours that cannot be mixed, you have to have them to begin with. For example under the RGB law, reflected light beams of red mixed with green produce yellow. With physically mixing paint, you have to have yellow, and red and green produce brown or olive depending on proportions, both moving towards black from opposite sides of the mixing colour wheel, (different from the light colour wheel shown below) black being in the centre.

Colour diagram for light showing three beams of coloured light projected onto a background. Where the three colours overlap and mix in the middle, white is produced:

rgb-venn

I would compare these two opposing laws to sila, samadhi, panna, and anicca, dukkha, anatta, the latter related to the subtractive law and being worldly like pigments, the former additive and concerned with light. However the hardware used to produce coloured light beams relies on pigment-type minerals for its construction, and the threefold aggregates of the path in the same way rely on real-world experience of anicca, dukkha and anatta as the raw material for progress, and impermanence is the foundation of those.

3 Likes

Interesting topic! Here are both sets of primary colours, additive and subtractive.

image

With computer monitors, and lighting, being additive, many of us are now less familiar with the subtract mixing of pigments. On the other hand, in the Buddha’s time (up until quite recently) the mixing of pigments would be familiar, and mixing of light unfamiliar.

6 Likes