KNEE OF LISTENING
The Life and
Understanding
of
Franklin Jones
Chapter 20
1971 Knee of Listening
Franklin Jones – p. 568-569
I am interested in finding men who
are free of every kind of seeking, attendant only to
understanding, who will devote themselves to the intentional
creation of life in the form and logic of reality rather
than the form and logic of Narcissus. Such men are the
unexploitable presence of reality. They will not devote
themselves to turning the worlds to dilemma, exhaustion and
revolutionary experience, nor to the exploitation of desire
and possibility, nor to the ascent to and inclusion of
various goals, higher entities, evolutionary aims or ideas
of spiritual transformation. They will create in the
aesthetics of reality, turning all things into radical
relationship and enjoyment. They will remove the effects of
separative existence and restore the form of things. They
will engineer every kind of stability and beauty. They will
create a presence of peace. Their eye will be on present
form and not on exaggerated notions of artifice. Their idea
of form is stable and whole, not a gesture toward some other
event. They will not make the world seem but a symbol for
higher and other things.
They will constantly create the
form of truth while conscious of present reality. Thus, they
will serve the order of sacrifice and knowledge. They will
evolve the necessary and good and make economic and wise use
of all technology. They will not be motivated by invention
but by reality, which is the present thing to be
communicated in all forms. They will not pursue any kind of
victory for man, any deathlessness or overwhelming survival.
They will only create the conditions for present enjoyment,
the communication of reality, the form in which
understanding and real knowledge can arise, live and become
the public foundation of existence.
Thus, I would find a new order of
men who will create a new age of sanity and joy. It will not
be the age of the occult, the religious, the scientific or
technological evolution of men. It will be the fundamental
age of real existence, wherein life will be radically
realized entirely apart from the whole history of our
adventure and great search. The age envisioned by seekers is
a spectacular display that only extends the traditional
madness, exploitability and foolishness of mankind. But I
desire a new order of men who will not begin from all of
that but apply themselves apart from all dilemma and all
seeking to the harmonious presence of real
existence.
I am equally certain that such a
new order of men must arise as a force in the world in the
present generation or else this world must suffer the karma
of dissolution.