Fire Kasina
Article
Fire Kasina is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 31, 2022 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Daniel has read texts on Fire Kasina which are filled with talk of magical powers”; “Meditation while staring at a bright light - traditionally a candle flame - is called “fire kasina””; “fire kasina meditation is hard and time-consuming”. It most often appears alongside Daniel Ingram, Kasina, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: October 31, 2022
- Last seen: October 24, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Daniel Ingram (2 shared issues)
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- Kasina (2 shared issues)
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- Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- Scott Alexander (2 shared issues)
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- A Mind Without Craving (1 shared issues)
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- A Ordem (1 shared issues)
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- Abraham Lincoln (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- AI risk (1 shared issues)
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- Alburitel (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I've listened to a lot of [meditation expert] Daniel [Ingram’s] interviews, including one with Andres Emilsson, and I think it's likely that he took on supernatural views for similar reasons that Scott mentioned in his post Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird? I think, for some people, taking meditation too far is analogous to taking psychedelics too far - causing illogical belief updates (either overfitting or underfitting their world model). Worse still, Daniel has read texts on Fire Kasina which are filled with talk of magical powers (I believe these are authentic accounts of hallucinations), and has given himself dramatic hallucinations (pointing even more in the too-much-psychedelics direction) by doing Fire Kasina.
Inline links: Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?
I have done both jhana and fire kasina, and can report them both as have real dramatic effects, but I interpret them in the same way I do psychedelic experiences: just more qualia, and in no way "spiritual". My hunch is that the spiritual feeling people have is a genetic thing, because I can't relate to it at all, even after very high doses of multiple hallucinatory drugs and many intense meditation experiences.
Daniel's favorite example of supernatural activity being proven real is when both him and his friend saw the same hallucination after multiple days straight of doing Fire Kasina. I always go to Josikinz's example where they had a friend who was having an out-of-body hallucination experience try to name a card, randomly drawn from a deck, that was placed on top of a shelf (out-of-sight from their friend). The friend's guess was incorrect.
Second, Ingram says that fire kasina meditation can sometimes result in complex hallucinatory images, usually determined by “suggestion”, ie the topics already on somebody’s mind.
Inline links: Ingram says
Fire kasina meditation also offers a potential explanation for an aspect of the miracle that I uncomfortably ignored during the original post: many witnesses said that they felt unusually hot, or that their clothes, sopping wet from the earlier rainstorm, dried faster than expected. Here is Ingram on his fire kasina practice:
By far the biggest problem with this theory is that fire kasina meditation is hard and time-consuming. It’s usually recommended for people who already have at least a few months’ experience with meditation. Even so, progress is slow, and the most reliable strategy is full-time focus during weeks-long retreats. Dr. Ingram warns that getting to the more advanced stages, including the color swaths and the complex images, might take “some significant number of hours [of meditating], such as eight to twelve per day for a few days” although “a few will have natural talent and be able to get into this territory on lower doses”. The part where you generate heat in the body takes even longer, “say, 150 hours at eight to fifteen hours per day as a rough guide for a competent practitioner”. This is probably why ordinary people looking at candles, electric lights, or the sun don’t see any of these things.