I've been practising Kasina meditation with a yellow circle on my phone for about a month. I don't do colossal amounts (my main practice is Burbean jhana, which takes up most of my sitting time) but I have noticed some interesting side-effects. Firstly, the after-image purple colour sometimes floods my vision and when I'm steeped in a bit of samadhi it trails over things.
The question I have regards the second side-effect. I have started to notice these subtle revolving triangles in my vision. At first, they seemed to arrive when in a state of some samadhi, but now I can actually "tap into" them and make them arise with varying strength. Sometimes they are fluffy and blurry with no particular colour, and sometimes they are rainbow coloured or sharply white. It's usually easier to see a small one at the central point of my vision, and sometimes I can sort of "consolidate" this. It seems like they are always connected in a sort of tunnel that I can move backwards and forwards within and sometimes it feels like my vision itself is bordered by a very large triangle.
So my questions are:
- Can I use this to create a patibhaganimitta? I believe I've read somewhere that it's advised not to "construct" the counterpart sign, just to wait for it to arise, but sometimes it feels like I'm going in the direction of creating a nice bright triangle I could focus on with plenty of pleasure. Any ideas around this would be welcome.
- Does anyone have any insight into why different people see different things after practising with a kasina? For some reason, I feel like this appearance is important to me, and that I should explore it, but I don't know why.
I often come up with little imaginary stories about my practice and I had this idea that the triangles had been "gifted" to me by a past life teacher. I quite like this idea, but I'm not totally sure what I could do with it. As an aside, I'm aware that this narrative is just make-believe but sometimes these mystical narratives bring me a bit of motivation so I like to explore them (I'm slowly dipping into Burbean imaginal practice although it's all rather casual at the moment).
At the moment, one of the main things I do with this effect is to just watch it, and examine the way the shapes change and interact with each other. Sometimes I try to focus on the tiniest grains of the image, and sometimes zoom out. This is actually a pretty new of practising for me, and it seems to have some sort of "vipassana" vibe to it, but if anyone has any advice about things to avoid or to focus on, that would be great.
Thanks in advance for any advice or anecdotes relating to this. Also this is my first post so if I've broken any rules please let me know - I've looked through the FAQ and stuff but couldn't see anything.
