The Life and Understanding of Franklin Jones
1971 By Franklin Jones
The Knee of Listening – Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – The “Bright”
I was born November 3, 1939 in Jamaica, Queens County, New York, at 11:21 a.m. The sign of Scorpio should indicate to you the kinds of forces that aliened 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 descend. The sign of Scorpio is 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. And the external adventure of my life has turned me in and out of every kind of spiritual and religious path, every kind of ascending means, and likewise every form of pleasure, ecstasy and self-indulgence.
So much is all I know about the signs of my birth. For whatever reasons, 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 radical 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 .I would call 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 an incredible sense of joy, light and freedom in the middle of my head that was bathed in energies moving freely 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 an light in the midst of what is entirely energy, bliss and light. I was the power of Reality, a direct enjoyment and communication. I was the heart, 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 it was really not a matter of anything else. That awareness, that conscious enjoyment and space centered in the midst of the heart is the “bright.” And it is the entire source of 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 great humor that I describe how I existed all this time.
For further reading go to:
1. The Bright
2. Amrita Nadi
4. The Life of Understanding – Chapter 1 – Adi Da’s 1973 Course on The Knee of Listening
5. The Knee of Listening – Chapter 2
6. The Knee of Listening – Table of Contents
– Important adjunct to reading of chapter – Adi Da discussing chapter