Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

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Eddie Z, modified 4 Years ago at 6/24/19 1:57 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/24/19 1:57 PM

Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 15 Join Date: 6/3/19 Recent Posts
About a month ago, a number of friends of mine were discussing fire kasina practice and recommended that I give it a try. I did some reading on it, and decided to make it a daily practice and see how it would work out for myself.

I had started with a candle flame, but having a technophilic tendence, ended up finding something I wanted to experiment with more. I found a virtual reality headset compatible video for kasina. It's a completely black field with a single bright white dot that I could use for my practice.

I've decided to start recording my experiences here in order to be more organized, and help focus myself a little more. I don't know if anything I share here will be particularly useful to anyone else, but if anyone would like to comment or anything like that, I welcome it.

One particularly interesting experience I have happened last week. I was focused on the afterimage, and recharging it by opening my eyes when it would phase out too much, and kept following this through until an interesting image started to arise. The round afterimage become the iris of an eye. This image zoomed out to be the third eye on a Buddha. This image then further zoomed out, and that Buddha was held within the iris of another Buddha. This zooming out continued, and it was basically a Buddha within the eye of a Buddha over and over again. But then the single Buddha zoomed out to become a field of Buddhas. This field then zoomed out to be an ocean of Buddhas, which seemed to swell with a myriad of different colors. Finally, this ocean of Buddhas seemed to fold in upon itself like a tube, and then popped out of exisistence.

Another experience that happened recently that I found interesting was that a very specific color seemed to predominate my practice for that day. This very particular shade of pale blue, in hexedecimal colors it would be #9BE7FF, kept swelling up and was extremely vibrant. It doesn't seem that objectively interesting, but it wasn't a color I was particularly expecting to appear, so it struck me as interesting to myself, I guess. emoticon

Also, has anyone else had the experience of obtaining the afterimage, then briefly falling asleep, only to realize that you were asleep and waking yourself up, and cycling through this a few times until the sleepiness was suddenly gone and you were extremely focused?
Jason Massie, modified 4 Years ago at 6/24/19 5:24 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/24/19 5:24 PM

RE: Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 124 Join Date: 10/18/16 Recent Posts
Can you share what you are using for your vr setup and configuration?

Sleepiness usually happens with dissolution or the beginning of the 3rd jhana. For confirmation, I would expect a stable, detailed, possibly spinning dot before and fearful and/or wide elements after. 
Anna L, modified 4 Years ago at 6/24/19 9:56 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/24/19 9:56 PM

RE: Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 232 Join Date: 1/21/17 Recent Posts
Eddie Garou:
 I was focused on the afterimage, and recharging it by opening my eyes when it would phase out too much, 


Cool, i thought i was the only one who did this (the "recharge" by opening and closing eyes). 

I am also interested in what specific headset you are using and how it compares to the candle flame? 
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Eddie Z, modified 4 Years ago at 6/25/19 9:11 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/25/19 9:11 AM

RE: Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 15 Join Date: 6/3/19 Recent Posts
For this particular practice, I'm using an Oculus Go headset:

https://www.oculus.com/go/

And this is the video that I am using for the kasina:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsIIxaPgJ5I

I would recommend turning the sound down as it's a bit too loud for me.
What I actually do is use a pair of headphones linked to my phone to generate brown noise and a mild isochronic beat instead of the audio in the video.

I tend to prefer using this over a regular candle, but there are trade offs.

The afterimage isn't as strong as a candle's, so it can take some work to get. However, the patience pays off, in my opinion.
The black background allows images to arise a little more naturally, and doesn't get influenced by objects that are around the candle.

Also, when staring at the dot, you can notice some interesting phenomena, like phantom movement. The dot will seem to move around when in fact it isn't going anywhere.

It's a bit more challenging, but I like it.

VR is actually what lead me to this place, so I guess it's no surprise that it's my preference in terms of practice.

Hope this is helpful!
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Eddie Z, modified 4 Years ago at 6/25/19 9:20 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/25/19 9:20 AM

RE: Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 15 Join Date: 6/3/19 Recent Posts
Last night's practice was a bit of a struggle. Couldn't seem to get comfortable and focus, and kept on shifting around a lot.

The afterimage went from a black dot ringed with green to a black dot ringed with violet after a few attempts.

A red dot did come in at one point, but phased out a lot.

As I started to settle in, I would get a lot of tingling and body chillds. This helped the discomfort to settle down a lot.

The field around the afterimage became dominated by a pale lavender that ended up dominating my entire field of vision.

Visual elements were very basic. Triangles and pyramids, mostly. There were some brief feelings of floating and flying, but nothing particularly strong.

Overall, last night's session was tough, and concentration was difficult.

This morning's session was a lot easier for me. The afterimage wasn't as strong as last night's, but I had intense body sensastions of electricity and chills. I experiences moments where I was "out of phase" with my body.

There were moments where it seemed like I lost the afterimage, but I would persist and stick with it, and that's when I would start to get visuals and flashes.

This morning, it was flashes of violet lightning, and pyramid visuals. Triangles and pyramids tend to pop up a lot for me.

Typically, the afterimage dot will be where a triangle will appear.

No 3D visuals this morning, however.
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Lewis James, modified 4 Years ago at 6/26/19 5:36 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/26/19 5:36 AM

RE: Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 155 Join Date: 5/13/15 Recent Posts
Very interesting. I'm a programmer with some game dev experience and a VR headset. If one were to have an interactive version of this, what sort of features would you look for? 
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Eddie Z, modified 4 Years ago at 6/26/19 10:09 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/26/19 10:09 AM

RE: Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 15 Join Date: 6/3/19 Recent Posts
The ability to change the color, intensity, size, and distance of the dot would be fantastic!
Also, being able to adjust the isochronic or binaural sound would be really good.

Being able to import an image would be excellent, or being able to use a traditional candle flame would also be good.
I could see importing a song would be very good.

A timer could also be incrediblty useful for this.
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Lewis James, modified 4 Years ago at 7/1/19 5:53 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 7/1/19 5:30 AM

RE: Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 155 Join Date: 5/13/15 Recent Posts
Great ideas! I've made a start on it, and so far have a disc and a candle. Not very fancy yet - need to write some shaders for the intensity as it's not really bright enough to work properly right now.


https://imgur.com/a/ReKsBHE
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Eddie Z, modified 4 Years ago at 7/1/19 10:03 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 7/1/19 10:03 AM

RE: Eddie's VR Kasina Practice

Posts: 15 Join Date: 6/3/19 Recent Posts
Nice! Yeah, intensity of the image is a bit of a challenge, but I think having the totally void background is a benefit.

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