David K's Fire Kasina Log

David Kyle Spencer, modified 4 Years ago at 12/2/19 11:46 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 12/2/19 10:38 AM

David K's Fire Kasina Log

Posts: 48 Join Date: 11/21/19 Recent Posts
This Practice occured in two seperate intervals (Total practice time: around 90 minutes) from Dec 1st-2nd, 2019. Original notes for the first half practice were in shorthand and I've left them as-is, though I've gone back and fleshed out the details on the overnight/back half Kasina while they're still fresh in my mind. 


5:30 PM CST 12/1/19

Object: Candle with pitch dark background (app)



+2 minutes: saw mental purple right away, drifts down, then as a combination object dead center


+2-6 minutes: added mantra to practice, second jhana vibration effects, heightened focus, see read dot (so small!) Purple color rip, the murk, jhana rapture


+2 minutes: flames of all sizes, interactions between object and murk, shift/defocus into 3rd jhana, massive color rip, revealing space filled with numerous images, object reappearing at different size scales all over


+4 minutes: purple color shift down, color object center, able to hold for minutes at a time, reorient object, fix in center, jhanic effects, field of vision suddenly consumed by flame, images of candles, curious and very detailed conic sections rotating in flame 


+4 mins:
can recall object at will, let it dissolve and bring it back with a thought, surrounded by luminosity, no murk but strobing lights and heightened vibrations, falling back to rest in 3rd jhana 



11 hour interval break


4 A.M. 12/2/19

+10 mintes: candle app open on black BG field, room lights down, Nam Myoho Renge Ko on a 3 hr loop on YouTube. 
Quickly vibrating up to 3rd Jana. Medium-high dose of Kratom, which helps "unfix" Ego resistance while leaving The Observer intact. Some ambient anxiety. Open sequence is no longer follow the purple square. Now it's SEE THE RED DOT. See the inky Murk, but this is quickly replaced by strong visuals. Pixelization begins. 

Passing into 4th Jana...beginning to cross some barrier, I think. It must be the 4th Jhana, because it has that magicky potentiality, that buildup...but how refreshingly fullsome-feeling and focused! Very astral-esque with it's muted shadows and washed out blueishness, but w/o the random disembodied thoughtforms I remember floating about like space junk in my teens. This is...cleaner. 

I can see through my eyelids. A series of extremely high resolution images, I can zoom. 

Back to it.

+10 minutes: color splashes, vibrant gradients of green aqua purple opening like a fan at an angle. Can't find the purple, can't find the black, just figures, people, things sharpening but like a very lucid dream, this is fine but not where I wish to be.
Reset, refocus, now the purple is very deep, but the red dot is missing.

Found it! It shifted down and left. Zoom in on it and it dissappears.

PURPLE IS VERY, VERY SOLID. I can summon the original image within it, flick back. Fewer random visuals, but a high jhanic effect that feels almost like, no IS...also Vipassana. This wants very badly to become an Insight meditation, but I'm sticking with Jhana. Rethinking/resensing space.

NOTE: Mantra words seem to have shifted to Nam Myoho "LATE BE CURE"

+10 minutes: Fast reset. This level of focus is astonishing, the depth of it, the solidity. Close my eyes, Murk! nothing but  Thick sticky Murk everywhere...the moment is pregnant with something, building to another state. legs begins to shake even though sitting half-lotus....

I SEE THE WHITE WHISPS! They looked spectral at first, like a wraith reaching out thin arms to grab me, but contained apprehension and noted, explored. Whisps everywhere, flying at me, whisps of white in the inky blackness...Mantra distorts further into "Dam Byhoho La-De-Ku"

:: Quick bathroom break and back at it for 15-20 this time ::

Back, reduce light further, sip water, quick vape...enough sampling. Time to shove!

+20 mins: 
Open by hitting the candle image with every different "type" of concentration previously familiar with, there is no remembering or recalling I'm just doing it, hitting it from ten diff angles. Candle splits, flips inside out, breathes, vibrates, dissappears...Focusing Ability is almost beyond what I believed possible now, a level of unified concentration I've never quite experienced except in deepest Non-Duality, and even then not like thisThis is like caressing the flame, hypnotizing it...massaging it......

Back in, and I'm on the threshold of a new state now, something expansive. I'm not exactly sure what jhana I'm in, whether some heightened version or J4 or J5, but my instinct tells me J5, which means I'm on the edge of Boundless Spaciousness. But if this is what Boundless Spaciousness means, then it's another case of "perfectly accurate, easily misleading" because I sense that this isn't about an OBE or stretching my Consciousness out to fill the universe - at least it doesn't have to be. 

I think Taft uses that route in guided meditation: expanding to fill the street, the block, the city, the country, the Earth the solar system the Galaxy the universe, the multiverse, but if you know anything about the true scale of the universe, then you know that such an "expansion" can never be more than a form of imaginative projection...though I'm sure it's effective, it's also a long walk through by definition and anyway, I have an idea that externalizing visualization is not the only door.

Why reach out at all when the space within this body and this room is already boundless and interconnected with every other point in space? All it should take is a perceptual shift, to REALIZE what already is...

There's a sort of electric 'crack!' sound/feeling/whatever-it-is and I'm in. 

No visuals. Okay...No random noise, no purple, no flame no grid squares or pixelated reality just flowing darkness. This is nothing like that. It's more like Unbinding, a sense of wholeness, of Inter-Being. There is the perception vast non-static inner space

When is the last time I (selfing) took a breath? 

1 minute? One and a half? 

I'm not even sure I'm breathing. 

I can't hear the Mantra anymore just muffled syrupy tones, consonants and vowels drifting in space. 

Time to Reset! 

I open my eyes...not slowly but very languidly, almost slow motion like the cat that just ate the canary...and there is the flame. I sharpen my awareness and refocus. Now I know why no visuals: No alpha or theta waves. We'll just have to make some! 
+25minutes: I thought I'd found every way there was to focus and reshape an object, but intuitively I "know" yet another a new way to concentrate on this candle: I can use the Breath to caress it, to penetrate it to it's core.

It shifts, flips inside out and back again, shimmering one moment and dimming the next. It actually vanishes two or three times. I pin it with my mind, close my eyes and...

VERY sharp, deep radiating purple, BOLDLY 3D. No whisps, no pixels, no repeating patterns. Even the murk seems ephemeral and subdued now like a photonegative of a Halo...and there is the tiny red dot, as I focus on it it expands like a dilating pupil from a pinprick to a few mm in diameter.

The perception of "inner space" is very different now. It has more dimensionality. Nothing feels "Astral" or pixelated like it did before. I'm not sure how to describe it, exactly, so I'll just free associate...it flows. It's 960, full rotation and yet contains overlapping x,y,z axes. That doesn't begin to do it justice, particularly as it all misses the most important point: That I am somehow "seeing" all of this as a whole organism. I have no sense of eyes, ears, head or sensations separate from this Wholeness, this Being Here.

At the same time, it should be noted that very little ACTUALLY HAPPENING. I'd had the sense that Fire Kasina was was almost entirely a visualization sharpening tool, and it is! Not now. Now, nothing is happening. The imago, the purple candle-shape is just sitting there, twisting a bit from time to time, throbbing, vanishing for a split second and then coming right back. 

There is NOTHING NEW to see, it seems, and yet all sorts of interesting things are happening to me. My leg is shaking almost out of control. The "Nam Myoho" mantra is pure gobbledegook, almost like it was being played backward, or with the letters out of order. "Ko Ohoym enke Ramko ren Ohoho myo Ko Ren "Mo", it's all completely out of phase. My right arm is twitchy, I'm vibrating like crazy and yet at the same time, I'm already ready to leave. Between the four page introduction I just finished for a book I'm working on and The Irishman on Netflix (3 1/2 hour runtime), this has already turned into an All Nighter. As mindblowing as this jhana may be, it's taking a LOT of physical energy for me to stay here. 

Something Daniel wrote in MTCB drifts back to me (paraphrasing): "If Boundless Space gets boring it's easy to flip over to Boundless Consciousness" as they were more or less the same state.

Don't remember the rest, but that's fine...let me see, how to...hmm...like an overlap or non- ....

Wait, I got it: You just "turns on the lights"...
 

Flick! 

WOAH. Now that...THAT is something. People can't really imagine the universe...if you've ever seen a Power of 10 animation, then you know there's no way...but I understand now why it's called Boundless Consciousness. I've zoomed through this jhana before on the way to somewhere else, but that's what's so wonderful Fire K: It allows you to really plant your feet and look around. It's beyond beautiful... and completely impossible to describe, at least for me. This is the first time I've ever really stopped to smell the roses.

Light! But not Ain Soph Aur, the Limitless Light of the Q'Abbalists. Everything is swollen with resonating light. It's not continuous, though, it's discrete like quanta. It's almost like blobs (jellyfish?) of light?? There's really no way to describe it without being misleading. I've always viewed Consciousness from a network or operating system perspective, I've never considered anything this dynamic or this luminous, it's almost organic. I'm trying to think of analogies.

Do you remember those old mid-90s magnifying glass-style screensavers? Like that, but not. Or how a Superfluid like liquid helium will actually flow up, seemingly uninhibited by gravity because it has zero viscosity and other weird, quantum properties? Like that, but not. Or those liquid metal droplets the T1000 is made of in Terminator 2? Kinda (not really) like that, but not. Remember the way the forrest bioluminesces in Avatar
It was absolutely nothing like that, but that's those are the sort of images that spring to mind when I remember how it moved. Boundless Consciousness does nothing but move. I wouldn't call it "alive", but it certainly is lively. 
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Michial N, modified 4 Years ago at 12/2/19 3:36 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 12/2/19 3:36 PM

RE: David K's Fire Kasina Log

Posts: 102 Join Date: 10/27/19 Recent Posts
Awesome read, thanks for sharing.
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Michial N, modified 4 Years ago at 12/3/19 2:46 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 12/3/19 2:35 PM

RE: David K's Fire Kasina Log

Posts: 102 Join Date: 10/27/19 Recent Posts
I would be very insteretsed in sharing notes (talk over discord or skype?) on fire kasina. From what I can read, we seem to be somewhat in the same level (vein) of meditation. It could be helpful to eachother, or just fun to share. Let me know.

My kasina log. https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/16861938

Check out day 5 of my log.
David Kyle Spencer, modified 4 Years ago at 12/3/19 2:49 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 12/3/19 2:49 PM

RE: David K's Fire Kasina Log

Posts: 48 Join Date: 11/21/19 Recent Posts
Michial N:
I would be very insteretsed in sharing notes (talk over discord or skype?) on fire kasina. From what I can read, we seem to be somewhat in the same level (vein) of meditation. It could be helpful to eachother, or just fun to share. Let me know.

My kasina log. https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/16861938

Check out day 5 of my log.

I just finished rereading it. Shoot me an email at xanalystx@gmail.com
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Michial N, modified 4 Years ago at 12/3/19 3:27 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 12/3/19 3:27 PM

RE: David K's Fire Kasina Log

Posts: 102 Join Date: 10/27/19 Recent Posts
Sent.

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