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The Knee of Listening is determined to communicate about
“the Bright” again and again, in many ways, to describe what
this term means, what this condition is. So it is not meant
to be completely described in the first section of the book.
And it is always described from an experiential point of
view, from the point of view of the various phenomena
related to it. Therefore, the term “the Bright” is used in
different ways throughout the book. Sometimes it is written
with a capital “B,” sometimes it is written with a small
“b.” But it is always meant to be essentially the same term.
Sometimes it is used as an equivalent for the Heart,
meaning, though, the Heart in the midst of its reflected
consciousness or light. It is most often used to refer to
the Bright of
Essentially the Bright is the intuition of the uncreated
light of God. Perhaps various phenomenal manifestations of
this light are associated with it, as I have described. The
God-light is the reflection of Real-God. The Bright is the
reflection of the Heart. It is all a duplication of the
ultimate structure. In the first three pages of The Knee of
Listening the Bright is described in terms of the whole
mechanism of the perception of the God-light, the
reflected
“As a baby, I remember crawling around inquisiitively
with an incredible sense of joy, light, and freedom in the
middle of my head. It was bathed in energies moving freely
down from above, up, around, and down through my body and my
heart. It was an expanding sphere of joy from the Heart. And
I was a radiant form, a source of energy, bliss, and
light.
I was the power of reality, a direct enjoyment and
communication. I was the Heart who lightens the mind and all
things.”l”Very early in life, I conceived the purpose in the
Bright. It was to restore humor. Throughout my life, I have
been moved to find and communicate the fundamental source of
humor to others. It appeared in many forms, as enjoyment,
laughter, faith, knowledge, but at last it has only one
form, which is reality itself.
On the level of my earliest recognition of it, it was my
simple state, my common state, my ordinary state. There was
nothing peculiar about it from my point of view, nothing
special about it. It was consciousness itself, prior to any
experience. But it was not distinct from my life. It was not
mysterious or awesome. There was no shadow, nothing hidden
in it. It was not motivated. It knew no beyond. It had no
sense of time, nor had it yet begun to feel any kind of
confusion or identity with existence as personality and
experience. It was an operating center, without dilemma or
unconsciousness. It knew no divisions in itself. Many
energies were communicated within it. There was joy in the
body, its light cell life, its respiration and circulation
of force and pleasure. There was a current of energy in the
heart that rose into the head through the throat. And there
was an energy below the heart that rose up into it from
below. There was a surrounding energy that was spaceless,
but which had a locus above the head. And all of these
energies were a single current of life and light in the
heart that was reeflected as enjoyment in the head. That
form of consciousness was bright, silent, spaceless, fUll,
knowing only and entirely this thing itself, and seeing no
problem, no separation in the fact of life.
The thrust of this first chapter is to describe, in
experiential terms, without philosophical justification,
this condition, which is the very same condition that is
deescribed throughout the book. The chapter ends, “But my
first twenty years were the gradual undermining of this
certain existence by all of the ordinary and traditional
means of life.” This is the complication, part of the
complication of birth. This is the karmic complication that
produces the adventure that follows from this point. Because
this condition, that was simply enjoyed from the beginning,
turned out by observation not to be the condition allowable
in this world. It was not the condition that people allowed
one to live. It was not the condition that people lived.
It was not the state that was acknowledged in the world.
It was not the premise of ordinary activity. So all of the
ordinary and traditional means of life gradually undermined
the simple living of this condition, and forced it tobecome
realized. In other words, inst~ad of simply being lived as a
prior state, it had to be brought into life. It had to move
into life, transform the vehicles of life, and present
itself to life. So this is the thrust of the rest of the
autobiography, the work or adventure of realizing or
bringing into life this prior enjoyment.
The world, then, provides all of the various obstacles or
alternatives to this enjoyment. There are two major things
communicated in this chapter. The first is Amrita Nadi,
rooted in the Heart. The term “the Bright’ is used to refer
to it as well as to the reflected light above. And the
second is this notion of humor, this purpose that was
discovered in the Bright, this purpose in the very nature of
reality as it appears in the world. The purpose of the
Bright was to restore humor, or to restore the world to this
enjoyment.
So there are two movements in my life as it is described
in these first pages. The first is this adventure of
realization, of bringing into life of this prior enjoyment.
And that is an activity I performed in relation to the
vehicles I was living. The other is the larger purpose
relative to the whole of life, to all other beings, and that
is to restore humor, or to bring this realization into the
condition of life for all other beings.
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