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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 and disinterested 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



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omnipleasant embedded / no-self ? (page: 1 2) 23 Jul 20 2010, 2:53 PM EDT by omnipleasant
Thread started: Jul 16 2010, 9:23 AM EDT  Watch
Once again, perhaps a newbie question, but "to be embedded in your experience" is this what is meant by "the illusion of self"?
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telecaster How to get enlightened (page: 1 2) 20 Mar 25 2010, 3:45 PM EDT by jgroove
Thread started: Mar 24 2010, 2:28 PM EDT  Watch
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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