In this first instalment we discuss the circumstances and organisation of the retreat, the instructions for the fire kasina practice, the stages of concentration arising from the practice, problems in the translations of the standard texts, the need for both focussing and widening the attention, colors and the manipulation of colors, the ‘ebbing two-color’ phase, the role of the element of fire in the retreat, the attainment of hyper-vivid imagery across various sensory modalities, ‘pseudo parallax’ imagery (images that act like perceptions), animated 3-D imagery, the ‘molten gold’, and the ‘low resolution’ versus ‘high resolution’ image spaces.

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