Buddhist cosmology lists three worlds stacked on top of each other: a realm of desire down where we live, a realm of pure visible form above it, and a formless realm above that. It reads like a map of heavens — places you might be born into. Dukes flips the map on its side and reads it as something you can climb now, in a single sitting. The three realms aren't real estate. They're the levels your own consciousness passes through as it meditates: from the world of grabbing and wanting, up into pure form, and out past form entirely. The cosmology is a meditation manual someone mistook for geography.1
Dukes is glossing the Buddhist "Triple Realm of Existence" (found in the Majjhima Nikaya 3 and Digha Nikaya 3) — Kamadhatu, Rupadhatu, Arupadhatu.2 Standard accounts treat these as cosmological strata: the realm of desire, the realm of form, the formless realm, three tiers of the universe a being can be reborn into. Dukes keeps that, but front-loads a second reading: each realm "corresponds to" a level attainable by meditation.3
The correspondences are exact in his telling. Kamadhatu, the realm of objects of desire, is "the world of our everyday experience" — things we identify through mind (nama) and experience through body (rupa).4 Rupadhatu, the realm of visible forms that don't create desire, corresponds to "the condition which could be attained by meditation practice upon the elements and their various manifestations or colors, i.e., the kasina."5 Arupadhatu, the formless realm, corresponds to "the condition which could be attained by meditation on the four immeasurable spheres" — infinite space, infinite perception, nothingness, and neither-perception-nor-non-perception.6
So the three "worlds" are also three depths of absorption. And crucially, Dukes preserves both readings at once: "According to one's spiritual development we can be reborn in and of these three realms."7 You climb them in meditation; you can also be reborn in them. The map works in both directions.
Before the climb, Dukes lists four "pre-meditative experiences" that must be generated first — a warm-up ladder leading to the foot of the realms:8
Read the progression and you see something dropping away at each rung. At A, there's joy plus thinking-about-it (contemplation and reflection). At B, the thinking is gone — just calm, oneness, and joy from concentration alone. At C, even the active joy thins into physical ease plus equanimity. At D, everything has been pared to "equanimity and awareness only" — no joy to report, no object to dwell on, nothing left but bare awareness holding steady. This is recognizably the jhana ladder: each stage subtracts a factor the previous stage still leaned on.
That bare-awareness endpoint (D) is the doorway. From there the realms open. Working with the elements and their colors — the kasina disks — stabilizes consciousness into pure form: Rupadhatu. Push past form into the four immeasurable spheres — space, perception, nothingness, the edge past perception — and you're in Arupadhatu. The "rebirth" language Dukes keeps isn't a contradiction; it's a claim that the state you can touch in a session is the same state you could be reborn into. Meditation is a preview of a destiny, and the destiny is just a meditation made permanent.
This page reframes the vault's cosmological material as operational. Anywhere the Triple Realm appears as a map of worlds, this page supplies the second axis: it's also a map of states you climb. That handshake is the book's whole method — Dukes habitually reads metaphysical furniture as practice instructions, and this is one of his cleanest examples.
Elemental Consciousness Principles gets its meditative payoff here: working with the elements (the kasina) is the specified route into Rupadhatu. The elements aren't just a theory of how consciousness manifests — they're the rungs you actually climb on. And Sunyavada gets a phenomenology: the "sphere of nothingness" and "neither perception nor non-perception" in Arupadhatu are what the approach to emptiness feels like from inside the cushion, not just what the logic argues.
The single most important phrase in the passage is small and easy to skip: we can be reborn "in and of these three realms."7 Read it slowly. In the realms is the cosmological reading — you take birth somewhere in the stacked worlds. Of the realms is stranger: you are reborn as the realm, your very condition is that stratum.
This tiny clause is where Dukes's two readings fuse. If you can be reborn of a realm — if your being can be Rupadhatu rather than merely occupy it — then the realm was never a place. It was always a condition of consciousness, and "rebirth" into it is just that condition becoming your standing state. Which is exactly what deep meditative attainment is: a state of consciousness stabilized until it becomes where you live. The cosmology and the meditation manual were never two things. The "and of" clause is Dukes quietly telling you they're identical: the formless realm is not a sky you go to, it is a depth of awareness you become. Birth into it and absorption into it are the same event seen at two timescales.
You sit. First you're just here — restless, planning, the body itching, wanting the session to be good. Kamadhatu, the realm of desire, plain as day; you're in it. You settle. Joy comes, and with it the running commentary: this is going well. Rung A. The commentary fades and there's a clean calm, joy without the talk about it. Rung B. The calm deepens into a bodily ease so even that the joy itself quiets to mere equanimity. Rung C. Then even that thins: no joy to note, no thought to follow, just awareness holding, level and bare. Rung D — the doorway. Now you bring up the disk of color you've been working, hold it until it's steadier than the eyes that first saw it, until consciousness is nothing but luminous form. You've stepped out of the realm of desire into the realm of pure form without moving an inch. And if you push — let even the form go, open into sheer space, then into a perception with no object, then into a nothingness, then into an edge past perceiving — the form-world drops away beneath you too. You haven't traveled anywhere. You've climbed a cosmos that was inside the sitting the whole time.
The scriptural anchors are solid: the Triple Realm appears in the Majjhima and Digha Nikayas as Dukes cites,2 and the four pre-meditative stages map recognizably onto the canonical four jhanas (the subtraction sequence — vitakka/vicara dropping, then piti, then sukha — is the standard jhana progression, though Dukes doesn't use those Pali terms).8 The kasina-to-Rupadhatu and immeasurable-spheres-to-Arupadhatu correspondences are standard Theravada Abhidhamma mappings; Dukes is reporting received doctrine here, not innovating. [PARAPHRASED]
The interpretive move that is his is the insistence on reading the realms as meditation levels first and cosmology second. This is defensible — the correspondences are canonical — but the emphasis is a choice, and a reader could note that the early texts also clearly mean the realms as genuine planes of rebirth, not merely as states. Dukes's "in and of" formulation tries to hold both; whether the fusion is the tradition's own view or Dukes's harmonization is the open question.
Open: the four immeasurable spheres of Arupadhatu — are these strictly sequential (each entered only from the one below), or can a developed practitioner enter them in other orders? Dukes lists them as a ladder but doesn't say whether the rungs must be climbed in turn.
Dukes is reading canonical Pali cosmology, so the content here sits on firmer historical ground than his lineage-specific claims elsewhere in the book. There's no Kongoryuji-manuscript dependency in the Triple Realm material — it's well-attested suttic doctrine. The tension is purely interpretive: his "meditation map first" emphasis is a practitioner's reading that downplays the literal rebirth-cosmology the same texts plainly intend. Against the vault's critical-historical corpus, this is the recurring Dukes signature — taking a doctrinal structure and reading it as live operating instructions. Samuel would note the move; he wouldn't call it wrong, only motivated by Dukes's practical aims.
Where Dukes converges with mainstream Buddhist scholarship: the realm-to-attainment correspondences he draws are the Abhidhamma's own. The form-realm jhanas are reached through form-objects (the kasinas); the formless attainments are reached through the immaterial spheres. Dukes isn't bending doctrine to fit a thesis here — he's foregrounding a correspondence the tradition itself built in. The convergence is strong; only the relative weighting of cosmology-vs-practice is his.
States of Consciousness Mapping — Modern psychology maps altered states along axes of arousal, attention, and self-boundary. Dukes's realm-ladder is a pre-modern instance of exactly this project, with one feature the modern maps often lack: a subtraction grammar. Each rung is defined by what falls away (first discursive thought, then active joy, then bodily pleasure, until only bare awareness remains). The insight neither domain produces alone: contemplative phenomenology supplies the fine-grained subtractive sequence (what specifically drops at each depth), while psychology supplies the third-person correlates (the arousal and attention signatures of those depths). Run them together and the Triple Realm stops being either folklore or pure introspection — it becomes a testable claim that there is a fixed order in which features of ordinary consciousness disengage under sustained attention, and that the "realms" are just the named plateaus along that disengagement.
State Laddering — Influence and performance practitioners deliberately ladder people through emotional states toward a target state, because each state makes the next one reachable that wouldn't be reachable from the floor. Dukes's pre-meditative A–D sequence is the same architecture turned inward and self-applied: you can't reach equanimity-only (D) directly from restless desire; you have to pass through joy-with-reflection, then concentrated calm, then equanimous ease. The joint insight: both traditions discover that consciousness has adjacency rules — states are reachable only from their neighbors, not by a jump. Behavioral mechanics exploits the adjacency to move someone somewhere they wouldn't go directly; meditative practice respects the adjacency to climb where willpower alone can't take you. The same structural fact — no skipping rungs — is in one case a lever on others and in the other a discipline on the self. Which is why the most common failure in both is identical: trying to leap straight to the destination state and finding the floor won't release you.
Sharpest implication: the heavens of Buddhist cosmology may be a map of meditative depths that got read as geography — meaning "where you'll be reborn" and "how deep you can sit" are claims about the same ladder, seen at two timescales.
Generative questions: