Focus on fire rising through your form, from the toes up, until the body burns to ashes but not you.
- Prerequisite — watch a real cremation: don’t philosophize, only see. The eyes need visceral material so imagination later has something real to work with. (Buddha sent every new disciple to the burning ground for three months, day and night, until they saw their own body on the pyre.)
- Prerequisite — dissolve the fear of death. You are already half-dead: birth placed you inside the realm of death; only the second half remains. Death is not an accident — it is the one certainty. Fear blocks the technique because it makes you recoil before the fire can reach deep.
- Pre-technique (15 min immediately before sitting): exhale deeply and close the eyes as air goes out — go inward; let the body inhale on its own and open the eyes — go outward. Rhythm: exhalation = inward, inhalation = outward. Deep exhalation empties you into a taste of death’s peace. Without this readiness the body-armor of fear prevents entry.
- The practice: lie as a corpse. Bring attention to the toes — the point farthest from the ego, which crystallizes in the head. Feel fire rising from the toes: legs, thighs, trunk, each part turned to ash. Move slowly upward until the head too disappears. You remain only as the watcher on the hill.
- The test that it is working: when imagination reaches depth, memories also stop — because memory is stored in brain cells, which are matter, part of the body. If thought still runs while the body supposedly burns, the fire hasn’t gone deep enough. In a successful moment: no mind, no memory, only pure watching.
- Pitfall (from Q&A, discourse 54): if during the witnessing you notice ‘I am watching,’ the I is still present — the ego claiming the meditative state. True witnessing has no I (only a bare ‘amness,’ a sense of being, remains). Awareness and ego cannot coexist even for a single moment, as light and darkness cannot. If ‘I am aware’ still arises, you are thinking, not witnessing — and that is the only criterion.
- Timeline: at least three months of daily one-hour practice. Some day suddenly the gap opens — you actually see the ashes and recognize the witness. The technique simply separates you from the body; once you know that gap you can live in the body without being identified with it. From that moment you know experientially: the ego was always false, only an identification with body and mind.