kasina - mantra or no mantra?

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David Matte, modified 3 Years ago at 11/1/20 4:52 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 11/1/20 8:55 AM

kasina - mantra or no mantra?

Posts: 108 Join Date: 8/3/19 Recent Posts
Hello everyone.

Lately I have been fascinated with kasina practice using a LED candle as the initial object.

The confusion I have is with the recommendation to keep a mantra going during this practice, as written in the fire kasina book.

At some points during the practice, I feel as though the mantra is getting in the way of concentrating on the visual field. It feels as if I should be keeping my attention solely on the visual field and not anything else. 

At one point, during a period of what felt to be deep concentration, it felt natural to just drop the mantra, then it felt difficult to summon it back again — all I could do was focus on the dot without the mantra. 

It would be nice to hear opinions of those who have done this practice. Do you recite a mantra with the practice? Is there a loss if one doesn't recite it?
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Hector L, modified 3 Years ago at 12/24/20 10:31 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 12/24/20 6:40 PM

RE: kasina - mantra or no mantra?

Posts: 139 Join Date: 5/9/20 Recent Posts
I don't, I just look at the murk or dots or whatever. Just tried 'blue' kasina yesterday from mentally generated sensations of the color and it did evoke pleasurable feelings. Edit: Just saw this Michael Taft video that might be helpful 
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Hector L, modified 3 Years ago at 12/25/20 3:56 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 12/25/20 3:56 PM

RE: kasina - mantra or no mantra?

Posts: 139 Join Date: 5/9/20 Recent Posts
So as an experiment to see the effects of a mantra, I picked the Lucia di Lammamore mad song from The Fifth Element
as my mantra (because the singer is blue!) for the blue kasina and it seems to work for me. I was able to hold on to the song in a loop as
the concentration object easier than the blue color and managed to trigger more visual blue stuff into a sort of star shaped
field with lots of blue dots in it. It was easier to invoke the piti feel with the musical mantra than with the blue visuals
maybe because the mantra had a time signature in it that can be synced with the breath whereas blue didn't.
Lots of fast flickering stuff in the visual field as well.
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Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 12/25/20 4:11 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 12/25/20 4:11 AM

RE: kasina - mantra or no mantra?

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
hi david, i can't speak to the fire kasina specifically, but I do know from a lot of mantra work in general that once you get to where it is palpably laborious to invoke the mantra, you just take that as the fruit of the mantra and let it go. "during a period of what felt to be deep concentration, it felt natural to just drop the mantra, then it felt difficult to summon it back again — all I could do was focus on the dot without the mantra," is, from my best understanding, exactly what you are looking for, in using the mantra in the first place.

If you find yourself in the emptiness and then the nothingness and then, uh, umm, and everything has disappeared completely, you could try making the effort to invoke the mantra, just to see what happens, although at that point, it may take you eons to remember what the mantra was. If you can't remember the mantra after a few more eons, and you haven't taken rebirth yet, please send a postcard, as we will all be interested in your reports at that point.
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