At long last, The Fire Kasina, by Shannon Stein and Daniel M. Ingram, is now available for free download.

Many thanks to Duncan for all his editing, typesetting, cover art work, and publishing help.

May this book benefit all beings. May the technologies of deep concentration practice be used skillfully by practitioners.

Wow! Will devour it today and follow the instructions. 

Deepest Gratitude and Metta to all involved!

Reading it right now. It’s a wonderful resource! 

<3

Yesss! just what I need, excellent timing too!
Thank you so much Daniel and Shannon, you guys rule!

With Metta
FranKo

Thanks you both for making this available.
I dived in halfway (thinking to give it a thumb through )but just kept on reading.

Liking the conversational(ish) style very much.
WIth Love

This is so great. Many thanks!

The book claims to describe a method of developing supernatural abilities but so far nobody was able to demonstrate them: 


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_Challenge


We can make a small experiment here: I will generate a pseudorandom natural number in the range from 1 to 1000. Then I will create an autodestruct link with this number via privnote. It can be read only once, then it is destroyed. I will post this link here. You will post your guess of this number. Someone whom you nominate from this forum will look at the link. We compare the results.

I would love the siddhis to be real but I am sorry I am so far skeptical. I hope you are not angry at me. I will perhaps try the kasina meditation myself to find the truth.

--mettá--

Number-guessing telepathy? Boring. Man I just want to walk through walls, fly and shoot laser beams from my eyes. What page is that on?

Millions of thanks to you and Sharon!

Sorry if this rubs your lamp the wrong way, but I think your priority should be to find out if jhana is an urban myth? Just curious, how do you think 'skeptical' is helping you deal with the hindrance - Doubt?

 been practicing fire kasina for a while, 
got inspired by daniel´s reports.

look forward to read the book.

thanks daniel an shannon

Doubt is in no way a hindrance. This demand of blind faith is the most repulsive aspect of buddhism. The Bible isn't true just because it is claimed in it. This demand of giving up one's own critical thinking and replacing it with obedience to authority is the domain of all sects and cults.

De omnium dubitandum est.

Wow. Where did you get these 2 'facts' from? :o

.
How about NOT having doubt aboutt WRONG dahmma. Where would this lead? ;-)  

Give the practice about 12-15 seriously good hours of your very best honest effort in an appropriate setting with appropriate guidance by a skilled practitioner following instructions exactly for about 3-4 weeks and draw your own conclusions. The dharma invites one to come and see for themselves.

This seems to me to be a gross misunderstanding of doubt and faith in relation to meditation. As far as I understand it, when practising, if you doing a technique thinking "Ooh, don't know if I'm doing this right, what, is breathing really helpful? That teacher is obviously a twat if s/he thinks this will do me any good", then confusion arises and clarity is lost. Faith then refers to the opposite, when you trust that the instructions you have received are good and you can follow them to the letter. 

Questioning is another issue and I believe this is the kind of doubt you are thinking of, as in scrutinising experience to its very essence, and is clearly a good thing, and sounds like something very Buddhist to me.

Blind faith, typically in a god, thinking that all you have to do is believe and then all life's problems would be solved or what have you, is something a little different.

What do you call that feeling when someone is giving you detailed instructions on how to jump off a plane? Is it skilful to use that feeling and wriggle out skeptism in the instructions, thus not following and possibly failing at said task/life? Look to the source for the issue. Same reasons why many have jumped off a plane and pulled the chute at the worst possible timings – panic, fear, doubt, anxiety, worry, etc. Isn’t it weird the hindrances look supremely logical/similar now? Instructions in the suttas (repeated ‘unnecessarily’ for good measure) were given to people who may not be able to read a single word, but the problem is they never thought that it will fail to deal with scholarly people whom instead, analyse simple instructions to death.

Faith/belief: You do not have to jump off a plane now, do you?! Did you sign up for it with disbelief?

Praise be!

Daniel, what sellers in Europe do you recommend for getting the Fire Kasina as a print book? The kind that work for the benefit of, if not all beings, then at least for more than a few people?

In theory, it is available on Lulu at cost ($4.65 US anyway).

In practice, apparently there is some glitch where sometimes it won't print properly at some facilities but not others?

Give it a shot and see what happens. The ever helpful Duncan is trying to sort this out now.

Update: I ordered from lulu.com on Dec 6 to Spain, and the book arrived today, Dec 27, from France. Price 5,20 euros + 5 euros shipping. I think the print quality is better than average: either the ink is darker than normal or it stands out more from the page because the font size is biggish.

Any chance at an ePub or Mobi format edition so we can read these on Kindles or other e-readers? Heck, if someone did that, they could put it on Amazon, Kobo, and iBooks. Even for a few dollars, people would buy it and it would pay for the editing trouble (at least a little).

I created an (imperfect) epub version using Calibre.  
It is good enough for Siri to read it to me understandably, which was the desired goal,
but has many odd word-breaks and other minor visually evident "typos" 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k49bxpb9n5mv2dk/the-fire-kasina.epub?dl=0

(Calibre is pretty great free software for this kind of thing, FWIW https://calibre-ebook.com/)

Best,E