Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Knowing what these are precisely, and giving terms to them, can help us to know how to practice and clarify discussions. You need to concentrate to shut the ego and just experience life as it is. In February, 2017 Daniel saw light everywhereIn April, 2018, nine skilled practitioners went on retreat in France and gave very helpful reports and advice. Author and meditation teacher Daniel Ingram speaks with host Michael W. Taft about how the Fire Kasina practice can be used as an insight practice. No inside or outside. We have also produced a written commentary on the Vimuttimagga, which seeks to elucidate in detail how this technique is practiced. Just accept all these things, welcome them, and gently persist in paying attention the visual field. Then you can remove the bright light and try to keep looking at the afterimage. 2. fire kasina, and what it means for jhanic factors (and the nanas), 23:48 The appearance of the red dot nimitta and its In this session, host Michael W. Taft and radical dharma author and practitioner Daniel Ingram discuss the Fire Kasina practice, meditation and magick, working with archetypal forces and entities, Daniel's description of a fruition experience, siddhis and visionary experiences, Daniel's wizarding worldview, and much more. Once done open your eyes. [Brit monk in Philippines ], Latest Nondual Guided Meditations by Michael Taft, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h848WjDsbuw&t=665s. One of the initial qualities of the murk is that it causes us to space out, get lost in thought, and have a hard time concentrating. The color Green is associated with harmony, growth and freshness. In terms of the FK practice, if you havent at least reached stream entry, then dont spend much time playing with manipulating the images that arise in practice. We can practice in that direction by realizing that See In and and See Out are really just one field of Sight experience. By sorcery or powers we basically mean magic. These may spread out across the whole visual field. We can also use the blissful evenness of radiant, steady fire that just flows like an even stream of flame. When, while he is developing it in this way, it comes into focus as he adverts with his eyes shut exactly as it does with his eyes open, then the learning sign is said to have been produced. If you did see an afterimage, what did you notice about it? There is, of course, the nagging question of whether the siddhis, or magical powers, are real in any sense, but I wont go into that here. Superb elucidation. Mold the soil or clay to the shape of the tray. Why do we each have a specific color that is initially easier for us than others? Combine a heightened concentration skill with wholesome orienta-tion towards personal development in sila . Hopefully this will make it much easier for you to do it, and thats what the rest of this short article is about. Let me guess You are on this page because of two reasons. This week I thought I would post a piece on the Fire Kasina Meditation. In this first instalment we discuss the circumstances and organisation of the retreat, the instructions for the fire kasina practice, the stages of concentration arising from the practice, problems in the translations of the standard texts, the need for both focussing and widening the attention, colors and the manipulation of colors, the 'ebbing. This meditation can can help you revive especially when you feel dull or insipid. The more times we cycle up from the kasina object through the initial organized images to the murk, the more the murk will begin to organize. Thanks for sharing your experiences, I think you are going on the right track. Jhana. So it can be helpful to use something that is both easy to get an afterimage and symbolically meaningful to you. Download the image and make it full screen. Position the flower in such a way, two to three feet away from your sitting position. Best of luck with your practice! It has 8 "spokes" that could represent the 8-fold path in Buddhism, the way to awakening. I am happy you found this post interesting and engaging. For at least one person I suggested this to, this resulted in a fruition later that day (certainly not his first or only one of the retreat, but it broke the dry spell). ago I've been reading in this subreddit that doing Fire Kasina could potentially undermine my TMI practice because it's strictly concentration based Depends on how you practice. They become familiar, and the concentration power grows. Part of the purpose of this practice is to cultivate equanimity with whatever is present, not being attached to anything particular happening, while also training the mind in concentration and sensory clarity. The second kasina is water. This inner light is often called a nimitta,10 and the sensations of the breath are abandoned in favor of this luminous nimitta. However, here again the answer to the question is both, but in a different way. The key to developing our samdhi on all of the kasias, as the sign begins to emerge, is to pay attention to perception of uniformity, of evenness within the sign, within the object. Pay attention to the water, see the stillness and how it has molded the shape of the bowl. -Joseph, I am glad you learnt something new today. Would be cool to hear you expand on FK if you continue to experiment with it, especially with regards to cessations. by CoachAtlus [practice] Fire Kasina retreat I just returned on Monday from an 8.5 day fire kasina retreat inspired by the experiment described by Daniel, Florian, Duncan, and Shannon at firekasina.org. Just be careful what you seek, as you may notice that images and other effects in that realm of the hyper-real can also cause proportionally strong reactions in us. Until you reach the point when the patibhaga-nimitta (the counterpart sign) begins to arise. We can use the blazing, white, intense psychic heat of samdhi, when the energy is strong and powerful in the central channel and the sign glows brilliantly. It becomes the absence of all flickering and wavering of this flame that marks the sign of samdhi. However, cycling begins to develop slowly and organize the area outside and around the nimitta such that, when we begin to transition to something that is much more broad and inclusive, there is more to pay attention to that is interesting enough to hold our attention. We can use this to burn into sickness in the body, to penetrate deeply into areas that are blocked, where sickness has arisen, to burn out all kammic sickness or injuries where the life-force has become stagnant or cut off and bring this psychic heat of fire element itself back to the body in areas where it has faded. Up to this point, basically everyone I know experiences nearly the same sequence when they do this practice. This is a sign you've reached CEV Level 3. This could be while washing dishes, eating a meal, walking outside and so on. Basic Instructions for Practising Fire Kasina, RE: Basic Instructions for Practising Fire Kasina. So in terms of preparedness, you need to first find some object which is naturally yellow in color. I am going to revisit kasina practice in a few sections, adding bits of data, case reports, and theory to the initial presentation you find here as new concepts are explained and then related back to this practice. Your connection to infinite space only deepens as you realize there is something huge out there that is overlooking you and supporting you all the time. We can liken the effort to establish ourselves in samdhi to the effort we must put forth to establish a strong, even fire with good heart and a steady flame. Going slowly at first and starting in a darker room or doing this outside at night makes learning how to see these drawn colors easier. Eventually there comes a time when restlessness fades from the mind and we can just rest upon our object and it will continue to hold us in a state of concentration. We may seemingly find ourselves entirely into those worlds, as if we are fully lucid dreaming and yet totally awake at the same time. See what happens. By this point, you should also be able to do other things, such as draw in the air with that color with your finger and see what you drew hanging in the air. vipassana jhanas correlation with the Arising and Passing Away, 30:33 The appearance of the black/dark dot and entering The murk is frustrating until your concentration gets stronger, because while you may be practicing more and more, after you go through your sequence of images in the center of attention, the center of attention becomes more and more vague and dark and strange. Concentrate upon the sustained heat that it is producing. Im curious if you have ever done Tratak before and any differences you know between the practices other than not blinking. I personally can see dark purple very easily. You could use a brick, for that matter, but brighter objects and objects having greater color contrast with their background make it easier, so a brick would do better against, say, a blue or green surface. Focus on the flame, its movement and the contours. This was a very basic yet a profound practice which was fairly simple and did not require many skills. get all the other colors and elements, 17:00 Using kasina practice to enter the jhanas or develop Do this for 3 minutes and then close your eyes. Once the sign is reliably established, when we can bring it to mind at will within our meditation, when it is stable and even for one hour, two hours, three hours, time after time, we can just choose to place the mind somewhere within the sign. As you sit for this meditation particularly focus on the vastness and the ever expanding, borderless sky. We pick up immediately after subtle state-shifts that used to throw us off our game. steadying the red dot nimitta; changes in the color of the nimitta and the Heres what you need to do Take a clean tray (spherical in shape) and put some red colored soil or clay in it. It may acquire all sorts of fine details, change color many times, develop into other images, and even begin to seem alive, like you are watching an animation. And he should go on developing it in this way a hundred times, a thousand times, and even more than that, until the learning sign arises. Realize that concentration practices can cause very interesting or unusual side effects, so be sure to read the rest of this book before entering too deep into kasina practices, as that level of perceptual alteration can be a mixed blessing. Once done you can open your eyes. On repeated cycles through this, you will notice that, after looking at the flame (or other object) and closing your eyes, more of the background of the candle flame will also generate after-images around the central image. (Or as I prefer to call them Mental Image or External Sight, using the older labels.) So when you first encounter the FK meditation, its entirely natural to ask which is it, See In or See Out? If you are using a candle flame and its subsequent red dot as image, it will tend to gain green, blue, and purple rings around it with intricate yellow rapidly moving fine complex lines in the middle that shift and spin at high speed. Im just discovering meditation. See as only See. However, it seems like a lot of people here have tried it without adverse effects on their energy channels, so go with what you feel works for you. Also, is there going to be more Fire Kasina material in the podcast? For example with the dharmachakra image you tried earlier, build it up in your mind as a single black dot, then a ring around the dot, then the 8 spokes of the wheel, then the outside wheel circle. Pick a kasina such as a blue disk, a computer-generated blue circle on a black background, or (my favorite) a candle flame. Heres what you need to do. That kasina practices are so neglected in modern times is astounding to me, as they are extremely powerful and efficacious. One of the several reasons that Shinzen switched from the old labels to the See In/Out labels was to emphasize that there was no real separation between external sight and internal mental images. The first fulfilment stage that we experience on the road to samdhi is when we can actually partake of the warmth that our fire is offering, or the reward that our concentration has produced. If you find these to be too imbalanced, add in attention to the other chakral areas and consider balancing the kasina practice with intermittent attention to those other areas and their corresponding emotional aspects in a skillful way. Once we begin to attain more organized colors beyond just black and grey emerging from the gloom of the murk, we come to a fork in the path, and I leave it to you to determine which fork you wish to take. Be patient and gently persistent, and it can rebalance. 25:50 - Ceremonial magic path to high concentration 27:25 - Crowleys Book Four28:00 - Concentration vs liberation 29:44 - A powerful experience on retreat 32:22 - Various applications of fire kasina34:42 - Safety warning 36:55 - Experiences of OBEs and the powers43:09 - Divine eye and divine ear experiences 46:54 - Psychic powers or a daydream?50:30 - Dangers of the powers 52:15 - Daniels guide for group retreats 01:02:14 - Practice dose advice and ideal retreat duration 01:09:10 - Aftershock and afterglow 01:19:15 - Intention, summoning entities, and retreat goals01:29:32 - Mania, psychosis, and the clinical view 01:35:07 - Daniels report from his recent intensive fire kasina retreat 01:51:19 - Kripals flip and coping mechanisms Daniel Ingram Episode Playlist- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlkzlKFgdkny_MJSecHyvKHPpvxTskBAC To find out more about Daniel, visit:- https://theeprc.org/- integrateddaniel.info- https://firekasina.orgFor more interviews, videos, and more visit:- www.guruviking.comMusic Deva Dasi by Steve James To learn how to make your mind calm, centered and focused with minimum efforts, I highly recommend you check out >>> Meditation Mastery Secrets. RSS (Opens New Window) 20 Entries . How long should you stare at the light source for before closing your eyes? Those of us with a more recreational bent will likely find these capabilities fascinating. Through sustained effort we concentrate upon our impression of fire in this way and gradually over time our concentration deepens. This meditation helps you release the feelings of loneliness and makes you connected to infinite reality. jhanic factors; how insight slips into concentration practices, 21:21 Beginning to describe the stages of working with a Im going to give these a go and especially the sunlight one which I really liked. I had only done the Fire Kasina meditation (FK) a couple of times in the past, in a very informal manner, so this was the first time I was engaging the practice in a dedicated way. The more refined dot (it might be some other shape, depending on what object you start with) is called the nimitta in the Pali commentaries. want to work with kasina practice; warnings about doing the practice intensely territory; what the transition from third to fourth jhana looks like, 47:20 Things a practitioner can look for to know when I usually transition to vipassana when I start seeing the yellow circle. In February of 2020, a three-week retreat happened again at Bryngarth. Now imagine the color, texture, shape of the soil in your mind for the next 2 minutes. Over time the afterimage will tend to become more stable and clear, representing your more stable and clear mind. The summary of these forks is that in one, we pick a color or, in the other, we allow the images to do whatever they do across a range of colors and pay more attention to the shapes that the colors organize into. Those who add a mantra may notice fifth chakra effects in the throat region. Eventually you begin to have experiences that can only be described as mental images appearing to be completely real or as if you are seeing them externally. Ive had somewhat of a spiritual awakening in the past couple of years. Staring at the screen is probably not great for your eyes, and some people experience a bit of eyestrain from this. I personally also like lying on a couch or on a bed and staring at an overhead light. You can observe the flow-and-gone qualities of the yellow dot, and that is insight-producing. But Ive done my share of staring at the wonder of nature with a blank mind, so I guess that counts. Many thanks to Duncan for all his help with editing, typesetting and the cover, as well as lending the good name of Heptarchia to it, as well as to Florian for helping Shannon with her retreat. We may start simply, noticing subtle washes and patches of color moving around. This is the "counterpart sign" of the Visuddhimagga kasina instructions, which when achieved allow access to jhana (absorption). I am to be honest hereI loved this post.
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