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The Knee of Listening
The Life and Understanding of Franklin Jones
Chapter 20: The Wisdom of Understanding
No Witness
Religion and spirituality are a call to the “Witness”
that is the source, the reality and the truth. The “Witness”
is the “God” of religion and the “Self” of spiritual
philosophy.
But the call to the Witness is made by men, or by a state
of knowledge that has adapted to the form of ordinary
humanity. The call is always made to those who suffer, who
do not know. Thus the call is a cure for ignorance and
misdirection. The call and the dilemma are inseparable, and,
just so, the call and the dilemma are the structure wherein
the Witness is intuited and pursued.
In fact there is no Witness. Even the “I” and “me,”
“you,” “it,” even the “Thou” have no exclusive reality. All
of these are functions, moments within a great process. And
only that process itself, as a whole, is reality. There is
no stability, no sufficiency, no epitome in the unique form
of anything. Every manifestation is a moment inseparable
from the force and consciousness of the whole.
When understanding replaces the dilemma in the heart of
life, then there is no longer any possible attraction to the
call to the Witness. That call is seen to be an extension of
the dilemma and not a function of reality. Real
understanding is an unmoved sublimity since it is no longer
separate from the whole or separate from anything. And this
non-separation is a matter of consciousness, of depth, not
of vision or thought. Thus, it is not “satori” or some
developed and psychic state. Nor is it a matter of feeling
the same as, equal to what one perceives, etc. It is a
creative state in which the dilemma, the motivating idea of
separation has been eliminated. That is it entirely.
To such understanding, such unqualified real life, there
is no recourse, no resort, no liberation, no Witness. There
is no exclusive alternative to life or consciousness or
relationship itself. There is simply the removal of the
dilemma through understanding, and with it goes all
fascination, all exclusive motivation, all identification
with what is separate and supported only by its limited
capsule of energy. Reality or understanding knows there is
no Witness, no other, no self, no limited and separate
identity. Indeed, the state of Witness is the dilemma. In
reality there is the process itself, and I am never at any
moment different from the manifestation itself. There is no
prior consciousness, no spirit, no Self, no God. All
distinctions are communications in dilemma. And the truth is
not that there are no functional operative and relational
distinctions or roles, etc., but that the force of conscious
and creative life that always, already exists does not
identify with them. Conscious life is free of the
identification with contradiction or separation.
From the viewpoint of real understanding all things can
be described quite differently than from past fixations in
dilemma and the great search. There is no entity anywhere
and no Witness, great or small, to any entity. There is no
God, no Self, no Universe, but only reality, the unqualified
bliss of creative presence. To give it a name prior to
understanding, or to pursue it as a goal is to abandon it
entirely. That which is the Witness is true, but that which
is pursued as the “Witness” is death itself.
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