The Most Slept-On Meditation Object

In “The Most Slept-On Meditation Object,” Vince Horn introduces the kasina — the visual concentration object that dominated Early Buddhist practice yet is barely used today — and lays out a 12-week curriculum that maps color & elemental kasinas onto the full arc of the eight jhānas, and then finishes with the technodelic practice of breath kasina.

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💬 Transcript

Vince Horn: So welcome to Kasina. The backdrop for this practice, as you all know — this is really meant to be a concentration-based practice. So when I zoom back out to kind of the bigger picture for me, looking at all the different ways we could meditate, this is one technique that is part of the approach that I would just simply call concentration.

And concentration for me is the practice of bringing attention to a single point, the result of which is unification. We become one with the point of focus. We become fused or merged, you could say, with the object. Of course, there’s a gradual process by which that happens. It’s not that we instantly merge, although sometimes that can happen.

And the kasina in this case is a visual orb or a circle. It is literally a visual point. It literally translates — the word — into English as All, Whole, or Complete. That’s the meaning of the term kasina. And it occupies a really important place in the Early Buddhist tradition.

It’s listed in the Visuddhimagga, which is an important commentary, a commentarial text that was written a thousand years after the time of the Buddha, but is kind of like a super hardcore nerdy meditation manual. In that manual, it lists 40 different meditation objects that you can use to train your concentration, and to go deep in concentration. And a full quarter of these 40 are these visual kasina objects.

So it’s literally the most common object you’d see in the Early Buddhist tradition. And yet you’ll notice in modern times, it’s one of the least commonly used. So that’s quite interesting. I think because of that, kasinas are one of the most slept-on meditation objects in modernity. We’re somehow not tapping into the tremendous power of using the visual processing systems that we all are born with, which actually dominate our nervous system.

Looking into this, researching this, I found out 30 to 40% of the brain’s cortex is wired for vision. Compare that to hearing, which is only 3 to 5%. We are deeply visual beings. Under typical conditions, actually, vision uses 5 to 10 times more bandwidth than touch, which is the second most bandwidth-intensive sense.

Neurobiologically, we are actually deeply wired to see. And also from a neurobiological perspective, circular orbs make really good concentration objects, and there seem to be a few reasons for this that I’ve been able to kind of detect.

One is there’s a really similar parallel between our eyes and the shape of our eyes and the shape of the kasina. Your retina is basically circular, and lenses in our eyes focus light in concentric rings, so the round shape of the kasina maps neatly onto the geometry of our eyes.

And like I said earlier, so much of our brain is actually wired for visual processing, and the early visual neurons are tuned to detect edges and symmetries. In the visual processing, that’s among the first things that happen — we detect edges and symmetries. Circles, of course, are pure symmetry, so there are no sudden directional shifts when you’re looking at a circle. The signal is much more clean and predictable. This is another reason I think the kasina is such a powerful object.

We also have to consider how attention — human attention — has evolved. Here, smooth, continuous boundaries tend to stand out against jagged, natural edges. Think rocks, branches, trees.

So if you see things like berries or fruits or faces, the Sun, the Moon — all of these natural objects that humans have been evolving with — we evolutionarily can reward these things with quick detection, because they’re important for our survival.

And then finally, I just note that when you’re resting your attention on a circle, there’s no privileged starting point.

There’s no point at which your attention can look and be like, “Oh, that’s the point that you start with.” So your eyes don’t keep darting to all the angles and ends. Actually, they kind of do. I’ll share from my own experience: I’ve noticed, as I rest my attention in the kasina, if you get focused, you can actually start to see the ways your eyes are constantly, very rapidly looking for edges.

And you’ll see, actually, in the circle — this is my experience — you’ll see in the circle all of these sort of edges at the very edge of the circle constantly being re-perceptualized. But because there isn’t any privileged edge to stay with, your mind can kind of rest more in the circle itself, so it’s easier to hold in meditation.

So these are some of the reasons I think the kasina is a really natural object to focus on, and that we are, in a sense, hardwired to be able to. I suspect that’s why in early Buddhism, 10 of the 40 objects were kasinas. And I suspect also, based on what you all have shared and just kind of thinking more deeply about this, in some ways, maybe this is why kasina isn’t the most popular form of meditation, because it potentially is too effective, right?

If you have an experience where suddenly things get really intense or trippy, like you’re tripping on psychedelics, you might be like, “Oh, whoa, wait a second. Let me chill for a minute. I’ve got to go to work in the morning.” “I’ve got to go on a date tonight,” or whatever. “I’ve got to take care of the kids, take care of dinner.”

Yeah, that actually could be quite disruptive. If you’re a meditator or monk living a thousand years ago in a monastery and everyone around you is just constantly tripping out on things, it makes sense. But in the modern world perhaps, it’s a little bit disruptive to get into such deep concentration states so rapidly, or maybe we just don’t have a reference point for it with other objects of concentration, so it’s maybe a little scary.

I could totally see that. So just want to kinda honor the reality of that.

The way I want to approach this training together in kasina — we have 12 weeks from here, and I’ve kinda laid out the kasina training in a very specific kind of curriculum. The first eight weeks will just be focused on working with visual kasina, and each week we’re going to move between different kasinas.

We’re going to try a different object. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting that you all should be following along with your own personal practice with that kasina, although if you do that, you’ll probably get some benefits. You’re very welcome to engage with this content in whatever way seems appropriate to your practice, just as a reminder.

I know you’ll do that anyway, but you don’t have to make this your primary practice while you’re doing it if something else is primary. But of course, the more you engage with the practice, the more you’ll learn.

In the first four weeks, I want to focus just on the arc called the Rūpa Jhāna arc, so focusing on the first four jhānas. So each week we’ll both cover a different kasina — in the first four weeks, we’ll focus actually on the color kasinas, just simple visual orbs that are made of a solid color. We’ll start with Red in the first jhāna, then we’ll move to Yellow in the second jhāna, Blue in the third jhāna, and White in the fourth jhāna.

And I have some reasonings for that. I think that’s kind of the best matchup that one can make between the actual colors and what they evoke, according to tradition and my experience, and the qualities of each of these jhānas. So we’ll both be exploring the jhānas as we go along, exploring these progressively more subtle states of meditative absorption, while also exploring different kasina objects that seem to pair nicely with each jhāna.

In the second four-week chunk, you could say, of the training, we’ll shift toward what are called elemental kasinas. Some of you mentioned practicing with a candle flame, the classic fire kasina. Here we’ll turn toward using elements to help us access what are called the arūpa jhānas, the formless jhānas, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth jhānas.

So week 5, we’ll focus on the earth kasina and use that to scaffold our way into infinite space. What? Earth and infinite space? Those seem like opposites. Yeah, in a way they are, but there’s longstanding tradition in — actually, multiple practice traditions I’m aware of — where you can use the earth element to help you get connected more with space.

In this case, we’ll work on sort of expanding the earth element to include all of space, and then removing the earth element. And what’s left when you remove the earth? Space.

With week six, we’ll shift toward the water kasina, and we’ll use the reflective quality of water as a way to explore the jhāna of infinite consciousness, which is very similar in terms of the mirroring, the containing everything without being anything, the fluidity of consciousness, the fluidity of water.

In the seventh week, we’ll shift to the fire kasina, and explore the jhāna of nothingness. Fire consumes, turns everything into formlessness, you could say. And then finally, in the eighth week, we’ll focus on the air kasina, but we’ll use an interesting kind of Tibetan Dzogchen-inspired imagery, which is the rainbow on blue sky to explore the kasina of neither perception nor non-perception.

Air is the most subtle element. As you know, it’s invisible, known only through its effects, and the rainbow, something perceived but not there, a pure perceptual event with no location or substance, neither perceived nor not perceived.

That is the kind of pattern that I’m proposing that we follow for the first eight weeks, and then in the last four weeks, which is completely optional if you’d like, this will require a little bit of an additional investment on your part if you want to do the last four weeks, because for the last four weeks, we’ll be focusing on what I call the Breath Kasina. And the Breath Kasina uses — or it requires, actually — a wireless respiration belt. This is the one I’ve used to design the breath kasina. And we’ll use the kasina.app, which is a web application developed over the last couple years as an aid, both in the visual kasina section.

If you’d like a digital kasina object, you could absolutely use it. If you want to make your own analog kasina, of course, you can do that as well. That’s going to be completely fine and maybe preferable for some. But you’ll need the digital version to do the breath kasina practice, because what the breath kasina is, is it’s a way of linking together a visual circular orb and your real-time breath.

As you breathe in, the orb expands. As you breathe out, the orb contracts. I developed the idea for this a long time ago because I was struggling to integrate my experience with visual kasina practice and somatic breathwork. I felt like they were bringing me in almost opposite directions. It felt like a real problem.

So in my mind, I was like, well, if I could just visually see the kasina and have it be linked with my breath, I could somehow merge my awareness of the two into a singular somato-visual meditation object. That only became possible for me to actually build as AI has gotten better, and I’ve been able to use those tools to actually take this concept and make it reality.

And it turns out it works extremely well. So for the last four weeks, we’ll be focused on the breath kasina. Again, for those that would like to purchase a respiration belt and follow along. If you’re not interested in doing that or if you’re not feeling the resonance with it, totally understandable, totally okay.

But in the last four weeks, what we’ll be doing is basically focusing on some different things that I’ve learned about breath kasina, different practices I found helpful there, some foundational ideas and also talking about some more advanced integration, because we’re really talking at this point with the breath kasina about advanced practice of kind of weaving together, stitching together different sensory experiences into a bigger whole, which is more complex and more integrated.

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