My father was always a salesman, and my mother was always at home. They could always use a little ordinary humor, but I always loved (and love) them, and love was always the premise of our life together. That is why we were always free to be so reckless, stupid, unfeeling, uncommunicative, unhappy, and separate!
None of that ever amounted to anything less than an enjoyment of our separate spectacles. Quiet, long-suffering, fathered mother. Emotional, violent, elaborate father-boy. Crazy, secluded, independent son away.
I always grew up on Long Island — mostly in a town called Franklin Square, which was not named after me, or my father (whose name is also Franklin). Mother is Dorothy. A sister, Joanne, was born when I was eight years old, whom we also always loved (and love), except she and I grew up at separate times and not together.
I was early brought to the Lutheran Christian Church, and so became combined with the mind of Christianity, and especially with the myths and legends (or the so-called history and historical person) of Jesus of Galilee.
Eventually, the ideas I received from that early association with Christianity became crucially important life-supporting beliefs for me, after my own "Bright" Strength of Being had been (temporarily) undermined by my experience of the human world of conflict, illusion, and death.
Indeed, even quite early, I began to see there was a fundamental difference, or a very basic unlikeness, between myself and others — not a difference of ultimate essence, and not at all a social or (otherwise) merely physical difference, but a difference of point of view, and of experience, and of life-practice.
Thus, schooled by conventional religion, and puzzled by the conventional mind and the disturbed manner of others, I gradually (but only tentatively) accepted the three root-conventions of the common mind: the idea of "God" (as "Creator", and as separate from all "creation"), the idea of separate self (in my case, and in all cases), and the idea of the world (as itself separate, and as itself composed of separate "things", or absolute differences).
One of my most significant early memories is the Event that clearly marks the beginning of my transition from the gratuitous Spiritual "Brightness" of my earliest childhood to my life of seeking — which transition was, as you will see, motivated by my intentional identification with all mortal beings, and by my intentional identification with all the problems of mankind, and by my suffering of all that followed from my consequent ever-decreasing presumption of the "Bright" Itself.
In this crucial early Event, I was walking to the movies with my mother and father. As was frequently the case with them, they were having an argument.
My mother plays the "tar-baby", which (if you remember Uncle Remus) was set down on a log by Br'er Bear and Br'er Fox in order to trap Br'er Rabbit. She is quiet and passive, and my father very quick, loud, and threatening violence — until he gets stuck and fades away, pretending he will never be heard from again.
That scene was one of their lifelong characteristic games, and so it really makes no difference what aroused it in this case, as I am sure I did not know at the time. I remember there was a full moon — shining, but orange and shadowy. I have no specific recollection of what movie we were on our way to see. I must have been about six or seven years old.
What appeared to me then was a kind of archetype of all conflict. There was the act of separation, and that act was destroying the Spiritual Energy of Love-Bliss. I very clearly and directly experienced the effects of this conflict and separation.
I could feel the embracive rays of Love-Bliss-Energy that surrounded us and moved in a delicate network of points in and through our bodies. I could feel those rays of Love-Bliss-Energy being cut by the negative emotional acts of my parents. As a result of their loveless actions, dark vacuums were being spotted out around us and between us.
And I was about to make one of my most significant early attempts to Communicate that there is only Love-Bliss-Energy, and to Prove it was so by an actual Spiritual Transmission of that Love-Bliss-Energy Itself.
I remember silently expanding the "Bright" Love-Bliss-Energy from my heart, while, at the same time, trying to distract my parents by pointing out the moon, and by asking them questions about God and life, so they would be calmed, and enabled to feel the Love-Bliss-Energy of the "Bright" I was Transmitting to them.
Their ordinary humor did return a little. My father seemed quieted, and my mother was answering my questions. Nonetheless, I felt their basic refusal, and their basic insensitivity to the "Bright".
We went to the movie, and all the while we watched I felt a pressure in my solar plexus and my heart, where the Love-Bliss-Energy was refused and pushed back. But at least the argument was gone, for the night.
The conflict between my parents was a constant field of experience for me as a boy. By no means did they argue all the time, but those events were a persistent and arbitrary danger, and they formed an early ground of disturbance and of understanding in me.
And, in the crucial Event I just described, my parents' profound insensitivity to the "Bright" — and, indeed, their fundamental refusal of It (even though It was Freely Transmitted to them) — gave rise to (or, at least, most profoundly confirmed) a deeply felt concern and urgency in me that became the means for me to fulfill the guiding Purpose of my life.
The Knee of Listening The Divine Ordeal Of The Avataric Incarnation Of Conscious Light by Adi Da Samraj
Avatar Adi Da's Spiritual Autobiography tells the miraculous story of His unique Incarnation and Revelation in the West for the sake of Liberating all beings.
learn more ISBN: 1-57097-167-6 6" X 9" paperback, illustrated, 840 pages
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