Preface to the Study of The Knee of Listening
“You could say that The Knee of Listening is sufficient and that I didn’t have to say or write anything else again…”
“The whole Teaching is a development on the foundation laid in that first book. The Teaching is a way of serving the possibility of the same Realization in other people. In some sense The Knee of Listening is sufficient by itself, as a description of the Way and its Realization…”
“So in some sense all the Teaching is a commentary on The Knee of Listening. All the other books I have written are an elaboration on it.”
“The Knee of Listening is an esoteric textbook of the highest type. It is a Transcendental manual. If you studied it truly, considered it fully, you would bypass all of the first six stages of life and enter directly into the seventh. If you were truly intelligent, merely one reading would be sufficient to move directly into the seventh stage of life, not merely into the play of the origins of the seventh stage of life but into the Translation stage…”
” I have communicated this essential Principle all along. No matter what the complexity of the development of this spiritual life that I have been considering with you at any moment, I have always summarized it and returned you to the essential Principle. That Principle is the summary of Bubba Free John’s entire life, which he has described in The Knee of Listening…”
“In The Knee of Listening I described it as “Understanding.” It is the same as Love, unobstructed feeling attention, God-Communion…”
What is consciousness? This is the basic question posed in The Knee of Listening. What is consciousness”?
The Knee of Listening and my life …is essentially devoted to a single argument, perception and learning. It is Understanding, or the actual process wherein the great search and all separative consciousness is dissolved. When this understanding is …basis of one’s life, then life becomes creativity without dilemma or qualification.
…That one simplicity is contained in all pursuit’s, all seeking, all truth, religion and spirituality that takes the form of “God-Realization”, “Self-Knowledge”, and every kind of search for answers. All of these are the form and fruit of what I call Understanding. When any man or group of men attain that radical perception and begin to found their life in it, then they have begun an entirely new period in the evolution of life. The “new age” will be the age of such understanding, and it will no longer be characterized by the great search.
The “great search” is the name and character of the present age. The new age will be the age of great light. It will no longer pursue a return to its foundation, the source, the fundamental and prior reality. It will not be characterized by search or return but by presence, manifestation without trouble. I have come to say this and to communicate it as radical truth to aid in building the consciousness requisite to the new age. The new age must be already founded in that which the present age has sought.
Unpublished talk