CHAPTER ONE
The "Bright"
"I have always been Seated in the 'Bright'."
On November 3, 1939, at 11:21 A.M., in Jamaica, Queens County, New York, I was born "Franklin Albert Jones".
The sign of my birth is Scorpio, marked by the images of Spirit and of Sex, the eagle and the crab. It is the sign of internal warfare, the problem and perfection.
The sign of Scorpio should indicate to you the kinds of forces that aligned to generate my birth. Whatever significance you may attribute to astrology, it is true that my personal life has often cycled high and low, marked by equal and opposing determinations to ascend and to descend.
And the external adventure of my life has turned me in and out of every kind of religious and Spiritual path, every kind of ascending means, and (likewise) every form of pleasure, ecstasy, and self indulgence.
The signs of my birth suggest (and have required) a drama of opposites. However, in spite of all of that, it has also been my lot to remain untouched by cosmic and human circumstance. This is perhaps the first key to what I must Communicate. From the beginning, I have also Known a perfect Alternative to the revolutionary internal dilemma of my natural existence.
I have played in the problem of my alternatives, but from my earliest experience of life I have Enjoyed a Condition that, as a child, I called the "Bright".
I have always known desire, not merely for extreme pleasures of the senses and the mind, but for the highest Enjoyment of Spiritual Power and Mobility. But I have not been seated in desire, and desire has only been a play that I have grown to understand and enjoy without conflict. I have always been Seated in the "Bright".
Even as a baby, I remember only crawling around inquisitively with a boundless Feeling of Joy, Light, and Freedom in the middle of my head that was bathed in Energy moving unobstructed in a Circle — down from above, all the way down, then up, all the way up, and around again — and always Shining from my heart.
It was an Expanding Sphere of Joy from the heart. And I was a Radiant Form — the Source of Energy, Love-Bliss, and Light in the midst of a world that is entirely Energy, Love-Bliss, and Light. I was the Power of Reality, a direct Enjoyment and Communication of the One Reality. I was the Heart Itself, Who Lightens the mind and all things.
I was the same as every one and every thing, except it became clear that others were apparently unaware of the "Thing" Itself.
Even as a little child, I recognized It and Knew It, and my life was not a matter of anything else. That Awareness, that Conscious Enjoyment, that Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Space of Infinitely and inherently Free Being, that Shine of inherent Joy Standing in the heart and Expanding from the heart, is the "Bright".
And It is the entire Source of True Humor. It is Reality. It is not separate from anything.
From my birth, I have not been centered in Scorpio or the dilemma of alternatives, but in the "Bright". So it is with True Humor that I describe how I existed all this time.
As a Conscious "creation", or by-Me-Embraced condition, "Franklin Jones" began one day while I was crawling across the linoleum floor in a house my parents had rented from an old woman named Mrs. Farr.
There was a little puppy, which my parents had gotten for me, running across the floor towards me. I saw the puppy, and I saw my parents. The "creation" of "Franklin Jones" began from that moment. All of the rest of the events that occurred during the two or more years before that moment were not the years of "Franklin Jones". He had no existence before that time, which was the Conscious (or Intentional) beginning.
The reason for this gesture was a spontaneous motivation associated with a painful loving of the people around me. It was not merely compassion for them, as if they were poor people I could help. It was a painful emotional and physical sensation in my heart and in my solar plexus. It was profoundly painful even then, and it always has been.
It was associated with the full knowledge that these people to whom I was committing myself were going to die, and that I would die. I knew that if I Incarnated in this life-form and circumstance, if I became this body and its lifetime, I would also die its death.
And I knew that, as this bodily incarnate being, I was, in due course, going to be separated from every one and every thing I loved in its lifetime.
This was all fully obvious to me — and, yet, this spontaneous gesture, this painful loving, this profound sensation, awakened in me and moved me into the body, animated me physically.
Thus, it was, altogether and simply, a sympathetic response that brought me into the sphere of human conditions, and of gross conditions altogether.
That response was identification with mortal existence, but it took place by means of Delight. In that Exaltation, the wound of mortality was forgotten.
Thus, it was not the noticing of mortality, in and of itself, that generated my Movement into this plane. Rather, it was the Love-Response, the attracted Response, in which all of the negative aspects of gross conditional existence were effectively forgotten — in Love, in Delight, in Love-Bliss.
