“I was born with subtle knowledge of the ‘Bright’. I sought until I understood and knew the Heart as myself. The I have lived to enjoy the Fullness.
What I communicate is the Form of Reality, which is the Heart, the Bright, and the Fullness as a simultaneous and unqualitifed actuality.
I am the Heart, who appears through the Bright as the enjoyment of fullness. I exist as the Heart. I am conscious as the Bright. I am always present as the Fullness. These I am. They are not parts of me, but they are me. Neither is secondary to the other, nor radically prior to or separate from the other. There is no confusion. There is a brilliant shout that is the single of everything. In it all things continue as enjoyment, truth and creative play.” – Franklin Jones (Adi Da Samraj), 1971.
“The point of view from which our work is generated as that of Amrita Nadi, the Form of Reality, the Form of God, and the entirely awakened intuitive life, which is the foundation of all manifest existence. The foot of that Form, the root of that Form is, of course, the Heart. And that Foot, that root of the mind, is what the Advaita tradition means by the Self. What I mean by the Heart, by the Self, is the Form of Reality, the very Self, the very Form, inclusive of the bright.”
Adi Da Samraj (Franklin Jones) – 1973
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” ‘it 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 “Amrita Nadi.” 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 Consciousness, the perfect Light of Consciousness, the intuition of God-Light.
Essentially, the Bright is the intuition of the uncreated Consciousness-Light of God. Perhaps various phenomenal manifestations of this Light may be associated with this intuition, 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 intuition (not visualization) of the God-Light, the reflected Light or Creative Consciousness-Force, as it appears in the various functions of the descending and ascending mechanisms of man.
“As a baby I remember crawling around inquisitively with an incredible sense of joy, light and freedom in the middle of my head that 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. lI was the Heart, who lightens the mind and all things.”
Fundamentally, the condition that is being described here is that of the Amrita Nadi, the complete realization of the Divine Form, which includes the intuition of Real-God, the God-Light, or the selfluminous Power of God, and the relationship between these.
So Amrita Nadi, or the Form of God, was the fundamental enjoyment from the beginning. And the term “the Bright” is used to mean the entire enjoyment of Amrita Nadi. It is also meant to refer to the peculiar quality (conscious brilliance, radiance, living joy) of the intuited Light of consciousness. But, as you see, the Light is always related to the Heart as its foundation. Its foundation is in the Heart, or Real-God, of whom the Heart is the intuition. Its center is in the midst of the Heart. That awareness, that conscious enjoyment in space, centered in the midst of the Heart (whose psycho-physical locus is on ,the right) is the Bright. It is the entire source of humor. It is Reality. It is not separate from anything. Non-separation, or abiding in God as one’s Condition, is the nature of that humor.
And then there is another description of the Bright, meaning Amrita Nadi, or the full realization and intuition of the real condition:
“…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 consciousness. 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 light and life in the heart that was reflected 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.”
***
“Ordinarily we do not remain aware on the deepest level of the mind. We are either concentrated in its extensions, at the level of sense awareness or in the processes of concrete thought. Occasionally we slip into a deeper level, similar to the one to which we pass in dreams or sleep, and there we experience the day-dreams, the subliminal memories, emotions and motivations that underlie our working life. It was my purpose to remain continuously aware at this deepest focal point of the mind. That was also a point at which I often concentrated in the “bright.” It is a point deep within the head, but it monitors all the levels of consciousness, the physical body and the experiences of the sense organs, the vital centers in the lower body, the great center of being and energy in the heart, the peculiar order of subliminal imagery that perhaps moves out of some creative center analogous to the throat, and all of the passing perceptions, the images, ideas, sensations, forms, memories and super-conscious communications that are generated in the parts of the head.“
The Understanding on the Beach
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 described 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 was the complication, part of the usual complication of birth. This was the karmic complication that produced the adventure that followed from that 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 to become realized. In other words, instead 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 as 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, provided all of the various obstacles or alternatives to this enjoyment. There are two major things communicated in this chapter. The first is Amrita Nadi, called the Bright, rooted in the Heart. And the second is this notion of humor, this purpose that was discovered in the Bright, this purpose in the very nature of Reality, which includes the world. The purpose of the Bright is 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.
Back to Chapter 1 – The Knee of Listening
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When enquiry has settled in the heart, awareness develops as what Ramana, Ramana Maharshi, calls the ‘Amrita Nadi . I call it the ‘Form of Reality.’ It is the circuit of current from the heart to the head. As a child I knew it as the ‘bright’. In the unqualified state all identification, differentiation and desire have ended. There is only unqualified relationship realized in enquiry to be already the case. This realization is simply consciousness as the Amrita Nadi, the form of Reality, and it is experienced as the ‘bright’, the unconditional bliss of presence, of perfect knowledge, whose source is the heart, reality itself. Therefore, the bright is the form of that reality which is consciousness. It is a true and real, the birthright of all existence.
Knee of Listening – Chapter 9
“The Life of Da Kalki (Adi Da) is what in India is called a “Rahasya”, or sacred Mystery. It transcends anything we can ever say about it. His Life has been, as He Says, “an adventure and unfolding in the ‘Bright” – the Radiance and Bliss and Love of the God State that He also describes as the Divine Shakti”
Shakti
I called the most subtle region the “Bright,” because it is only Light. All of life descends from it, and returns to it in a continuous cycle, conducting it as force, becoming movement and form. But even this Light is a reflection of the Heart, unqualified existence, just as the moon reflects the sun. This Heart, which is the source of all light and life, and of which every thing is the reflection, is itself without quality. But the Heart, the Light and the Life are all included and transcended in that which is very Truth, the Great Form.
The Method of the Siddhas – Chapter 10
Continue to The Study of The Knee of Listening – Table of Contents
