Dear community,
I have a question regarding the instructions given in the Visuddhimagga about the fire kasina.

It is said that you have to extend the sign like a farmer delimiting a plough with a cord but Daniel I. seems to never talk about that step in his online materials or in his books.

I've been working on fire kasina and kasinas for years now. The red dot-black dot sequence appears after just staring to the candle for a couple of minutes. Then, I got a red dot that might last all day long depending on the mundane activities. 

When I "focus" on this lasting red dot while sitting, I can not extend this sign as suggested in the commentaries. I got nice visuals, photorealistic images, things appearing when I "think" about them like they were summoned but so far, no extended sign.

I must add that somehow, I can extend the nimitta when working with the color disks. I can extend the red color in the mind like it is done when playing with the washes of colours using the fire kasina but the fire kasina sign remain a tiny dot in the mind.

Is there anyone out here who manage to extend the fire kasina nimitta?

Thank you so much!

I'm very grateful for all Daniel Ingram's work and free materials he offers. Thank you to all the people who offered their voice log about their retreats sharing their experiences.

Very briefly,

So far as I can tell, It is very hard to extend the red/yellow dot past a certain point (meaning not much at all), though you can start incorporating more things from around it sometimes as progress occurs, but, still, it remains a limited object.

You can expand out and eventually fill the entire field of vision with "color washes" of various colors, making them then "color swatches", as well as what we might call the "white and gold" or "molten gold" (see glossary at firekasina.org), but those are unforgiving objects, requiring high degrees of sustained concentration. If you get to the stage of "plastic", which is a natural evolution of the white and gold or molten gold, you can craft basically anything you wish in any color and texture and size and make that very stable. These are the territory of color and image control taking as object  progressively advanced "materials" with clearly different properties.

In the fourth screen/realms, anything goes.

 
Dear Daniel,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.
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I've been trying for some time now to extend the sign according to the Visuddhimagga instructions without much success . After a while not succeeding, I often go to the "color washes" mode playing around but it looks that my mind  has the tendency to want to go directly to the pitch "luminous" 3D black wanting to rest there. Sometimes visions of future events appear, planets or worlds I couldn't even have imagined. Sometimes, astral travel occur when I see parts of my body doing mundane things mostly in the kitchen

​​​​​​​Thank you again Daniel for your guidance, It will save some energy .