How to Get Enlightened

What would I say if I had just five minutes to give comprehensive instructions for awakening?

You are unenlightened to the extent that you are embedded in your experience. You think that your experience is you. You must dis-embed. Do that by taking each aspect of experience as object (looking at it and recognizing it) in a systematic way. Then, surrender entirely.

Do these practices, exactly as written:

First Gear:

1) Objectify body sensations. If you can name them, you aren't embedded there. Notice sensations and note to yourself: "Pressure, tightness, tension, release, coolness, warmth, softness, hardness, tingling, itching, burning, stinging, pulsing, throbbing, seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing." If I am looking at something it is not "I".

2) Objectify feeling-tone. Are sensations pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? If you can sit there for five minutes and note pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral every few seconds, you are not embedded at that layer of mind.

3) Objectify mind states. Investigation, curiosity, happiness, anxiety, amusement, sadness, joy, anger, frustration, annoyance, irritation, aversion, desire, disgust, fear, worry, calm, embarrassment, shame, self-pity, compassion, love, contentment, dullness, sleepiness, bliss, exhilaration, triumph, self-loathing. Name them and be free of them. These mind states are not "you;" we know this because if there is a "you" it is the one who is looking, not what is being looked at. Below, we will challenge the notion that there is any "you" at all.

4) Objectify thoughts. Categorize them: planning thought, anticipating thought, worrying thought, imaging thought, remembering thought, rehearsing thought, scenario spinning thought, fantasy thought, self-recrimination thought. Come up with your own vocabulary and see your thoughts as though they belong to someone else. The content of your thoughts is not relevant except to the extent that it helps you to label and therefore objectify them.

Second Gear:

5) Objectify the apparent subject. Who am "I"? Turn the light of attention back on itself. Who knows about this experience? Are you causing this experience in this moment? To whom is this happening?

Third Gear:

6) Surrender entirely. This moment is as it is, with or without your participation. This does not mean that you must be passive. Surrender also to activity.

May you awaken now. (If it takes you another twenty years it will have been worth every minute.)

Kenneth Folk
March, 2010
(Revised March 2011)

 

I have a basic simple question. This is the kind of question I think I've never asked because I was afraid it was a "dumb question."
Okay:
I've been able, I think, to do the exercise of naming and noting my sensations, thoughts, feelings, etc. I've penetrated the object, and have seen objects arise and pass away. In fact, I could sit down right now and after a short period of noting, I'd start feeling A&P-like raptures of one degree or another.
BUT - I don't really think that I ever really see all these objects and experiences as "not me." I - my awareness - focuses on the objects, notes them, etc. but still just figures it is "my leg" or "my scalp" or "my skin" etc. that is producing the sensations, or if I am feeling something, then, I am feeling something. I. Just because I can note an experience, why does that experience become "not me?"
Now, I do get that there is no permenant self because I know I can't find an "I" or a "me" anywhere that is permenant and unchanging. It's just not there. But, honestly, at each moment or micro moment that the consciousness/awareness in this body right here notes an experience happening in this body there is no sense that "oh, that isn't me." on the contrary, it actually feels like the combination of the sensations/feelings/thoughts and the awareness of them in the moment is "ME" for that moment.
I mean, the awareness contained in this body is aware of experiences from this body, I can't as far as I know note your sensations and you can't note "mine."
Okay, what am I missing?
I get impermanence, I get no self, and I get that it's all very unsatisfactory. But that deeper sense of all three of those things that I think some of you have from disembeddng from your experience I don't think I have.
Cont.

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