From Buddhist Geeks
From KennethFolk.comKenneth Folk teaches Buddhist meditation and nondual awakening, and hosts an online dharma forum at kennethfolk.com. Kenneth began practicing Theravada Buddhist meditation while working as a professional musician in 1980, and later completed extensive long term meditation retreats in Asia and the U.S. under the tutelage of Burmese masters Sayadaw U Kundala and Sayadaw U Pandita, and American meditation master Bill Hamilton, among others. Kenneth Folk is one of the few spiritual teachers willing and able to speak openly about enlightenment from both the gradual and suddenpoints of view. His "3 Speed Transmission" method of teaching combines the most pragmatic aspects of Theravada Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta in a way that is easy for modern practitioners to understand and apply. Kenneth's goal is to help others find the happiness that is not dependent upon conditions.
Website: KennethFolk.com
Twitter: @KennethFolk
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." 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, aversion, dullness, sleepiness, bliss, exhilaration, triumph, self-loathing. Name them and be free of them. They will not cease to arise. They will never cease to arise; but they are not "you;" we know that because if there is a "you" it is the one who is looking, not what is being looked at.
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 is not relevant except to the extent that it helps you to label and therefore objectify them.
(If you master the practices up to this point, you will be an arahat. Nothing further is required for the arahat attainment.)
Second Gear:
5) Objectify the subject. Who am "I"? Turn the light of attention back on itself. Dwell as the impersonal anddisinterested witnessing consciousness.
6) Objectify the subtle, non-local sense of knowing that arises along with each thing that is known. If this knowing is itself known, it is not "I". To notice this subtle level of being is sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss).
Third Gear:
7) Surrender entirely. There is Awareness, even when you are no longer present.
May you awaken now. (If it takes you twenty years it will have been worth every minute.)
Kenneth Folk
March, 2010