Awakening as Pure Process — Insights from Kenneth Folk

'There is only experience, always moving, referring back to no one'

Photo by Henry Julius on Unsplash

I came to Buddhism as someone bruised by evangelical Christianity and its brutal certainties. At one point I was — in the words of an old hymn — a Christian soldier bearing the cross of Jesus, going off to war with a mission to vanquish our heretical foes. In this battle, anyone who questioned the church’s dogma was taking the first step toward defeat.

Buddhism offered relief from all that certainty-sickness. While meditation practice and ethical behavior are required, belief is not. In fact, I was taught to test the Buddha’s teachings and take nothing on faith.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that I eventually found my Buddhist edifice cracking at the seams. Some of the teachings seemed mysterious and untestable to me.

Mainly I struggled with an arrival fallacy — the concept of nirvana as a final destination, the end of suffering. While I’ve tasted relief from suffering on many occasions, I am far from being free of it.

These doubts were a problem until I encountered the teachings of Kenneth Folk— in particular, this Q and A posted on Dharma Overground.

I find this Q and A astonishing — the most liberating thing I’ve ever read about Buddhism. Following are some quotes from this document along with my own comments.

…the process of waking up involves becoming aware of experience, then becoming aware that there seems to be someone having the experience, and then becoming aware that this apparent someone is also an experience.

Kenneth says that we can break this process down into smaller steps. For example:

• It starts with identification, where I experience no separation between myself and whatever mind state arises in the moment. This is complete fusion with experience. There’s no me apart from whatever mind state arises in the moment.

• Skill in meditation starts when I can assign names to those mind states — for example, fear, anger, sadness, confusion.

• With a little more skill, I can speak in ways that separate me (subject) from those mind states (objects): I [subject] feel FEAR [object]. This language presumes a subject — an I — who stands apart from all those mind states and experiences them.

• When attention turns back inward to that I, things get really interesting: We don’t find it. We don’t find someone who always stands apart from objects and simply looks at them. We find what’s seen, but we can’t find the seer.

• Eventually we see the sense of I as just another object, another experience that flickers on and off, continually arising and passing.

We can break this down into even finer steps, but that’s roughly the process. It moves from identification to subject-objects to objects only, where the subject disappears. That last step is also called non-duality and no-self.

“No experience is more real than any other, or prior to any other,” Kenneth adds. “There is only experience, always moving, referring back to no one.”

Just to be clear: Experiences of an I do arise from time to time. And this is fortunate, because such experiences allow me to state my name and address, get a job, open bank accounts, and perform all the other tasks needed for living in the material world.

Kenneth urges us to welcome and even celebrate these trips back to the world of self and objects. But we can take these trips without seeing them as final or definitive — the screen through which we filter all other experiences.

…one might believe that we should “eradicate the self!” and that the goal of spiritual practice is to find a way to live in which there is no sense of “I”. I don’t find either of those perspectives useful.

I avoid presenting non-duality or no-self as a dogma. Believe me, no one likes to be told that they’re nobody and they don’t exist.

Kenneth suggests a much better option: Just invite an inquiry. Ask questions: What is the self? Where do we find it?

Besides, you can’t reason anyone into non-duality. This is an insight that’s acquired through the practice of meditation rather than thinking.

In addition, there’s no need to preach about getting rid of the self. If it doesn’t exist in the first place, then there’s nothing to be eradicated.

There’s also no need to get attached to experiences of no-self. According to Kenneth, such experiences are often pleasant but they have no special ontological status: They’re no more real or less real than any other experience.

In short, there’s no arrival. There’s no end point or destination — no mind that stays quiet forever, no endless bliss, no final experience. There’s just pure process — one experience after another. As Kenneth puts it: “There is no place to hang your hat.”

Nibbana [nirvana]…as it was explained to me, is not a special kind of experience. It’s not an impersonal background glow of awareness into which we will merge. It’s not pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It is simply the end.

Kenneth refers to nirvana as “the complete and utter lack of experience.” For those of us raised Christian, this at first seems intolerable. Surely it’s better to have experiences — that is, to be alive in some form — than to have no experiences at all, isn’t it?

But remember what it was like back in the Buddha’s lifetime. The prevailing belief was that you were destined for infinite rebirths in countless realms ranging from heaven to hell. You could be reborn as a dung beetle or a dog or demi-god, depending on your karma. The only way out of this cycle is to stop being reborn. This means that you won’t have any more experiences. But you won’t suffer any more, either, because no one is there to suffer.

From this standpoint, nirvana doesn’t sound very warm and fuzzy. In fact, it sounds like pure oblivion — complete loss of consciousness. Will this be pleasant, unpleasant, or neither? Well, we can’t know. So we can stop trying.

I never expected to be so disappointingly flawed and human after more than 30 years of diligent practice…and to see, after spending significant amounts of time with some of the greatest Buddhist teachers of our time, that they too were just people.

I find this immensely comforting. It speaks to the experience of feeling so ordinary, even after years of meditation practice. This is what Kenneth gives us — full permission to be ordinary.

Awakening is experience without clinging or resistance, and this is wonderful. But it’s no panacea. Awakening lightens the load considerably, but it won’t solve every problem.

Kenneth reminds us to cut ourselves loose from any expectation of perfection, now or in the future. This is true of spiritual teachers, too: They struggle with sex, money, illness, and death just like the rest of us. Even if we practice for a lifetime, we’ll still have blind spots. Nobody is special, and it’s all okay.

Awakening is the full flowering of our humanity, not our perfection. There’s peace even in that.

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