You can shift it any way you want however an automatic in neutral and the transfer case in neutral trying to go into high or low there will be a lot of grinding. Even worse if the idle is high. Selling and working on these since new we learned what to educate customers to do. You can shift it but it needs to be rapidly or else grinding will happen. To me the instructions were designed for manual transmissions. The way I explained takes any torsional load off the drive line and it will not grind.