Fire Kasina Questions

Ian, modified 8 Years ago at 3/18/16 5:40 PM
Created 8 Years ago at 3/18/16 5:36 PM

Fire Kasina Questions

Posts: 16 Join Date: 8/16/13 Recent Posts
Hi all,

In the past, my meditation has floundered since it has been more boring than pleasant and seemed like a chore. Thus, my goal is to get my concentration ability high enough so that I can repeatedly achieve a pleasant absorption-like state, hopefully a soft first jhana, that will motivate me to meditate more often and with more vigor as well as set me up for productive insight meditation.

With this in mind, I've been spending 1-2 hours a day for the past week meditating with a candle flame per the usual method, which I'll outline here:

I stare at the flame for a minute or two, doing my best to "glue" my attention to it by following its every flicker, change of color, etc., and then I close my eyes. If the flame was bright enough and I spent enough time looking at it, the afterimage immediately shows up and is neon green. After a minute or two, this green color will change into a deep magenta color, although the change is not continuous - the green will become grayish and then parts of it will start to look magenta, but then the green color will come back a few times until finally the magenta color is fully established. At this point, I continue to stare at the magenta blob until it eventually fades into an ill-defined bluish haze, and then I repeat by opening my eyes and looking at the flame. 

A few days ago, I began to notice that when I'm looking at the afterimage, particularly once it has become magenta, I can perceive little spinning objects that are like bicycle wheels without the tires. They basically look like little spinning sets of spokes, but they aren't gold, like the ones Daniel has described as markers of the second jhana. They are magenta, like the rest of the afterimage, but either a little bit darker or lighter than the rest of it. I can perceive these more frequently and in more detail if I make a conscious effort to do so, but so far I have not been able to observe one of these "spinners" for more than a second or two. When I try to look directly at them, they either fade away or spin off to the outside of the magenta blob. Sometimes there are several of these spinners at once at different spots in the blob.

I've also noticed that if I ignore the spinners and try to concentrate on the afterimage as a whole, I can sometimes get a sense of enhanced concentration where I'm not having to put as much effort into maintaining that concentration, but there is still definite effort involved. I would not call this an altered state by any means - it seems more like access concentration.

My main question is this: if I want to gain definite access to the jhanas for the reason I cited above, should I move my attention to the spinners or should I ignore them and continue putting all of my attention on the afterimage as a whole? Are there any pointers or cues you guys could give me for making that jump from access concentration to the first jhana while doing fire kasina meditation?

Thanks in advance for any advice!
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tom moylan, modified 8 Years ago at 3/19/16 7:24 AM
Created 8 Years ago at 3/19/16 7:24 AM

RE: Fire Kasina Questions

Posts: 896 Join Date: 3/7/11 Recent Posts
howdy ian and welcome,
you are definitely on the right track.  my candle flame kasina work is nowhere as deep as daniel's etc. but still you must recognize the generally similarities of what you are experiencing and what daniel wrote about, right?

i think its unhelpful to think that there are different kinds of concentration.  which means that access concentration and first jhana concentration are built from the same stuff...concentration!

what you are doing is exploring how your mind works and training your concentration.  the better your concentration becomes the more detail and control over it you will have.  for my money the most important aspect of developing good concentration is curiosity.  so look at what is interesting in the phenomena that pops up.  look at it closely.  wether it is the rim, the spinners, the color, the field behind it, the size, the fluctuation...whatever keeps you interested in it, bathe in that.  absorb your attention in that.

you are building your concentration muscle and as that strength builds the object will remain longer, your attention will drift less and boredom will fade away too.  you will notice more subtle qualities of the object and how your mind interacts with it.  you can see how each new emerging change in the blob corresponds to the stages of insight and from that you can infer jhanic stages if you want.

just my two cents, but keep us posted.  i love these kasina reports.

cheers

tom
Ian, modified 8 Years ago at 3/19/16 11:48 PM
Created 8 Years ago at 3/19/16 11:48 PM

RE: Fire Kasina Questions

Posts: 16 Join Date: 8/16/13 Recent Posts
tom moylan:


My response in purple

howdy ian and welcome,
you are definitely on the right track.  my candle flame kasina work is nowhere as deep as daniel's etc. but still you must recognize the generally similarities of what you are experiencing and what daniel wrote about, right?

i think its unhelpful to think that there are different kinds of concentration.  which means that access concentration and first jhana concentration are built from the same stuff...concentration!

Right you are - the similarity between my experience so far and what Daniel et al. have described on the forum and in the early part of their audio diaries is encouraging, to say the least. As far as thinking along the lines of intensity of concentration rather than types of concentration, I think you're right. I recall Daniel mentioning in a post that the "red dot" signifies the first jhana, which I take to mean that I'm in a sense in the first jhana already when I fix my attention on the red dot and that its a matter of increasing that concentration on the dot rather than modifying it directly. Does that sound right?


what you are doing is exploring how your mind works and training your concentration.  the better your concentration becomes the more detail and control over it you will have.  for my money the most important aspect of developing good concentration is curiosity.  so look at what is interesting in the phenomena that pops up.  look at it closely.  wether it is the rim, the spinners, the color, the field behind it, the size, the fluctuation...whatever keeps you interested in it, bathe in that.  absorb your attention in that.

This reminds me of something Nikolai (?) wrote on the Hamilton project about the usefulness of filling up the resources of awareness by paying attention to the color, shape, etc. of the object rather than using blunt force to "focus" on the object. I'll keep this in mind.

you are building your concentration muscle and as that strength builds the object will remain longer, your attention will drift less and boredom will fade away too.  you will notice more subtle qualities of the object and how your mind interacts with it.  you can see how each new emerging change in the blob corresponds to the stages of insight and from that you can infer jhanic stages if you want.

just my two cents, but keep us posted.  i love these kasina reports.

Of course.

cheers

tom

Thanks a heap Tom!
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Noah, modified 8 Years ago at 3/20/16 1:50 AM
Created 8 Years ago at 3/20/16 1:50 AM

RE: Fire Kasina Questions

Posts: 1467 Join Date: 7/6/13 Recent Posts
Ian:

My main question is this: if I want to gain definite access to the jhanas for the reason I cited above, should I move my attention to the spinners or should I ignore them and continue putting all of my attention on the afterimage as a whole?


I suck at concentration currently (slowly changing that), so this is purely brainstorming.  It might be too early in the jhanic arc to stop paying attention to the object.  So maybe you should wait till 4th jhana type territory, and then pay attention to the fireworks rather than your object??  Before a certain threshold of absorption, you might be prone to drifting/distractions if you drop the object.
Ian, modified 8 Years ago at 3/20/16 6:11 PM
Created 8 Years ago at 3/20/16 6:11 PM

RE: Fire Kasina Questions

Posts: 16 Join Date: 8/16/13 Recent Posts
Noah:

It might be too early in the jhanic arc to stop paying attention to the object.  So maybe you should wait till 4th jhana type territory, and then pay attention to the fireworks rather than your object??  Before a certain threshold of absorption, you might be prone to drifting/distractions if you drop the object.

This is definitely a concern, but right now I'm thinking that it might be ok. The spinners (in a way, I suppose they are like those fireworks with long tendrils that shoot outwards) don't so much appear alongside the object as replace the object. It's kind of like this: I see a magenta dot or blob, depending on what angle I was looking at the flame from, and all of a sudden the uniform magenta blob turns into a collection of magenta spinners. I get the sense that the uniform blob is a construction of the mind that when actually looked into turns out to be a bunch of smaller, rapidly changing, usually spinning, objects. Does that make sense?
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Noah, modified 8 Years ago at 3/21/16 5:32 AM
Created 8 Years ago at 3/21/16 5:32 AM

RE: Fire Kasina Questions

Posts: 1467 Join Date: 7/6/13 Recent Posts
@Ian:  Sounds really interesting.  I don't know much about signs, counter signs, and all that, so I have no idea personally.
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Stick Man, modified 7 Years ago at 6/11/16 4:53 PM
Created 7 Years ago at 6/11/16 4:53 PM

RE: Fire Kasina Questions

Posts: 396 Join Date: 9/23/14 Recent Posts
Did you know, that ancient cave art has loads of red dots, and that a respected theory is that the patterns of cave art are paintings of visuals found in altered states ?

Red dots in cave
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/clottes/themes.php

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