Posted on by Jhāna Jenny

Fire Kasina Results and Afterglow

Wow. Fire kasina is amazing practice. Very heady stuff. Afterglow is thick, rich, and heavy.

I used my fancy oil lamp, which gives a bright, steady flame and no wax to deal with. I sat in a chair, in the dark of predawn, except the blinds were open, the snow and ice were falling outside and the white ground reflected snowlight back up into my room—like a soft white nimitta.

Usually I see the red dot. This time, not really ever a stable red dot—more like threads of bright red briefly. Predominant color was a beautiful ice blue, pale gorgeous blue—the color of a pale blue lace dress I used to wear at age 20 to shoot pool in, just to distract the guys, just to get ’em off their secondary game.  This blue became a nimitta, but it kept fluxing, blooming, spreading, moving, unfolding, pealing back like flower petals being ripped off. This was some time after I passed through third jhana, which I knew by

inability to focus on the flame itself but only on the glare in the periphery, as well as by the nausea, which indicates Disgust:.

3sj.8ñ ← I hope this is a thing, Daniel. (I’m practicing using the new stages/states notation system from draft MCTB2.)

So on to fourth jhana, which was so magnificent that the challenge became resisting absorption into everything but the visuals. I was really at one point so deep into the spaciousness and the silkily disappearing breath that I forgot about the flame and visions. The afterglow was a-glowing without waiting for the session to end.

With eyes closed, I seemed to see in 3D into this ice blue forest of unfoldings. I saw leaves with veins floating down some water and then purple jelly fish, the lovely ballerina kind. It was an underwater scene—hey, Nick’s LAKE!! Just maybe. . . . Oh, wait. No jellies in lakes, just naked dharma boyfriend versions of nymphs, right?

I felt like I had a fruition somewhere in here, out of fourth: There was a forgetting, a leap forward, an out, and a wave of bliss. I was so deliciously off task, haha. 11n.4sj.5sj. and then it was on to fifth, and the seduction of this bodiless state was really too much.

Anyway, I’m going to try to do this practice some more. The afterglow is amazing, among other things.

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