The Knee of Listening – Chapter 10

By the time I left for India for my first visit the fundamentals of my seeking and learning had already been acquired. There would be many new and marvelous experiences in the coming years, but these would only serve to confirm what had already been demonstrated.

Thus, I think it would be useful to include portions of the journals I kept while in seminary and which developed during the year or nearly two years that followed my first trip to India and my second visit there in 1969. This will enable you to become acquainted with the line of thought that existed during that time and which forms the fundamental concepts of that truth that has been given through my experience.

In November of 1969 I edited my journals and put them together without interpretive comment or autobiographical framework. I called the book Water and Narcissus (The Form of Consciousness). After giving the book to various friends and people familiar with the publishing market, I decided the book was not suitable for publication. As a result, the present book has evolved, which seems to be a more valuable medium for this experience and the radical knowledge to which it points.

The original journals in their edited form comprise about two hundred typewritten pages. They provide an exhaustive picture of my thoughts in meditation and in the reflective condition to which the experience I described in the last chapter had brought me.

I won’t include that entire journal here, but I will try to reproduce the portions of it that are important to an understanding of this matter of truth and to the processes of my life which will follow.

The journal began a few days after I took up study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, in the fall of 1966. As you read it, allow the framework of my life and the experiences outlined in the last chapter to provide a guide for your understanding. After the dramatic experience of awakening in seminary the ideas take on the more specific form latent in my previous writing. I will make an indication of that event at that point in the journal. At other times I will add whatever interpretive commentary seems valuable. However, you should read it as a whole, for it is a continuous development in a single force of consciousness. And it is not written for my sake, nor is its truth determined by my life at all. If it is true, you must recognize its truth by contemplating it in relation to your own experience.