Just Stop: When Awareness Surrenders to Itself

An Eternal Now SG

“Buddha-nature, the essence of awakened enlightenment itself, is present in everyone. Its essence is forever pure, unalloyed, and flawless. It is beyond increase or decrease. It is neither improved by remaining in nirvana nor degenerated by straying into samsara. Its fundamental essence is forever perfect, unobscured, quiescent, and unchanging. Its expressions are myriad.” – Nyoshul Khenpo

Joel Groover: So one question I had about your Three Speed Transmission had to do with when to try to incorporate what you call 3rd Gear practice. How do you know when to do it? I see 1st Gear as just infinitely vast territory. So do I not bother with the 2nd or 3rd gears until I have made a lot of progress in 1st gear, or do you go along with trying to do all three from the beginning? What is your recommendation?

Kenneth Folk: I recommend that you follow your interest. There will be times when, out of a clear blue sky, somebody will say something like “It is already done. There is awareness in this moment. You don’t have to do anything about that. You are home. Just stop.” Well, that is 3rd Gear. There are seasons of development in practice. One of the seasons is to be very receptive to this particular instruction. In a moment of feeling tired and overwhelmed and at wit’s end with all of this working-toward-something-in-the-future, it’s possible to take a break and realize that what you really want is already done. And why not? Why not be happy now?

JG: But then we would have nothing to do.

KF: Ha! And then the season changes and we go out and we find something to do.

JG: So each practitioner will have a sense of where the work needs to be done, right?

KF: Right. This naturally happens with 2nd Gear as well. You might be practicing–and who knows when this will happen–for me the 2nd Gear practice got really interesting after I had already attained Fourth Path. I was reading Ramana Maharshi and realizing that he was talking about something that was not entirely clear to me. That didn’t really surprise me, because I understood that there were traditions other than Theravada Buddhism. I had been practicing, after all, for more than 20 years and had lots of exposure to other traditions. I knew that a lot of traditions did not consider arahatship to be the entire understanding and that even within Theravada Buddhism there is a big difference between an arahat and a buddha. So I started looking around to see if I could understand what that was, what that could be.

And so when I stumbled upon this idea, or this practice, of turning the light of attention around, turning the light of attention back on itself and dwelling as the Witness, dwelling as the “I am”—I’m using terminology from all different places here, but that is how I think of it–this was a revelation to me. To really do Ramana Maharshi’s practice, to ask this question “Who am I?” And to realize that there is this sense of a transpersonal Witness that can be taken as object–to dwell as that Witness—all of that is very different from vipassana. This has to be considered an entirely different category of practice, because vipassana is all about the objects and this Witness practice is all about the subject.

So when the focus is on the object, that is what I call 1st Gear; when the focus is on the subject, that is what I call 2nd Gear. It’s a completely different category of practice. It leads to a different understanding. It objectifies different strata of mind, because you want the whole package, and this is not an investigative practice in the sense that vipassana is. We are not interested in the Three Characteristics when we do 2nd Gear practice. We are not interested in deconstructing anything. When you dwell as the Witness you are just dwelling as the Witness. You are objectifying the subject, which essentially makes no sense, but it turns out to be possible. Even the subject can be taken as object, and then the experience is that there is this infinite subject, and everything else is part of that.

So this sense of “I” is all-consuming and this Witness is complete. It feels complete unto itself. It does not want to do anything except to make love to itself.

You are humming along in this very stable experience of the transpersonal Witness that knows all this and all of the objects are seen as just part of the subject. Now, later on as you continue to dwell as the subject, the Witness softens. In my experience it took several years of nonstop dwelling as the subject—every time I could think about it, asking “Who am I?”

Every time I could remember to do it, I would ask “Who am I?” and dwell as the “I am” just as Ramana suggested. I believed what he said. For some reason, I found Ramana to be a very credible voice. He said the “I am”—dwelling as the Witness—is the stick that stirs the fire and is eventually consumed by it. Well, I believed him and I found that to be true, that you just dwell as the Witness with no effort to penetrate it, understanding that it will eventually burn itself out.

You will come to the next, more subtle level of understanding, where it is understood or it is seen that even the Witness itself is known by an even more subtle sense of knowing that arises along with each thing that is known… at that point you have arrived at sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss).

Now there is even more, and this is the convergence of 2nd Gear and 3rd Gear, when even the subtle sense of knowing goes away. You transition from 2nd Gear to 3rd Gear and there’s just awareness without any sense of a knower, or without any sense even of objects. There’s just awareness which has not yet diverged into subjects and objects.

JG: Now when it comes to that—3rd Gear practice as such—is it the case that we are all basically doing “fake it until you make it” practices in which we are sort of trying to not do anything at all in order to allow this to just be as it is, and that there will be those who have the actual 3rd Gear realization and people who are just sort of doing a practice that might ultimately lead to that?

KF: “Fake it ‘till you make it” is an important aspect of 3rd Gear practice because if you are going to teach 3rd Gear, you want it to be accessible to everybody who is listening to your teaching. And yet people are going to feel this experience at whatever level they are capable. People are distracted to varying degrees. When you are not distracted from Awareness at all, you just go away and there is just awareness. So that would be the pure and complete understanding of 3rd Gear.

And finally, there is a development that transcends and includes 3rd Gear, where all three gears are integrated as a seamless whole: not-one, not-two. Subject, object, and awareness can be, as Hokai Sobol says, “distinguished, but never separated.” So enlightenment is finally seen as the integration of the time-bound and the timeless, in which neither is reified and neither is denied. They are not picked apart and they are not smashed together. When sages say that “things are as they are,” it isn’t because they are trying to be cute; it’s just that there isn’t a better way to say it.

But while people are focusing on their 3rd Gear practice, there is this whole range of experience that can happen (including no-experience). They are all valid. They are all legitimate, and they are in many cases “fake it ‘till you make it.” Yogis are experiencing something. They are experiencing this surrender, and so they are less distracted than they were a minute ago.

In a 3rd Gear practice the idea is to allow recognition of the awareness in which that situation arises. This is one of the reasons that the Three-Speed Transmission is effective, because it scaffolds you into 3rd Gear. There are ways—the Advaita teachers and the Tibetan Dzogchen teachers are the masters of this—to talk people into allowing this recognition of awareness.

JG: Pointing out instructions?

KF: Yes. It usually takes time. It is nice if you can take 20 or 30 minutes to lead somebody into this recognition, and it takes a skilled teacher to do it. But you can also get there yourself, in a way that doesn’t require anyone to lead you. If you practice the Three Speed Transmission, you eventually get to the point—in 2nd Gear—where there is nowhere else to go; when you get to the recognition of the subtle sense of knowing that arises along with each thing that is known, you cannot get behind that. And yet you can see–there is a subtle drive, I suppose, to let even that go and to get to the next level of understanding, the higher level of understanding, whatever that is. It turns out that the only thing you can do at that point is to surrender. It is a natural thing to just give up entirely and let awareness recognize awareness as it is.

So 2nd Gear leads to 3rd Gear, and this is very much a part of Advaita Vedanta. This is what it means—this is what it really means when Ramana Marharshi says “the stick that stirs the fire and is eventually consumed by it.” When the Witness is consumed, you have just made the leap into 3rd Gear.