CHAPTER ONE
The "Bright"
"I directly perceived the guiding Purpose of my life: to restore True Humor"
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.
From the beginning, in the early Spiritual "Brightness" of my life, I directly perceived the guiding Purpose of my life: to restore True Humor (or the all-transcending quality of Happiness, that can persist, or, otherwise, constantly come forward, in the living being under all conditions, whether the conditions appear to be positive or negative).
Throughout my life, I have been moved to Communicate (or to Reveal, to Transmit, and to Awaken) the fundamental Source and Substance and Condition of True Humor to others.
Ordinary humor can appear in many forms, as the seemingly undauntable mood of life-enjoyment, as the hilarious pleasure of laughter, as the fairy-tale ease of faith, as the self-congratulating certainty of mental knowledge, and as the overriding excitement of even all the greater and smaller bodily victories.
But True Humor has only one living Form (and one ultimate, or inherently perfect, Form), Which is Real God, Perfect Truth, or Reality Itself.
If my Purpose (even from the beginning of this lifetime) has always been to restore True Humor, and (likewise) if my Motive has always been Founded in the "Bright", death and the fear of death have (also from the beginning of this lifetime) always been the counter to my Presence — the source of contradiction, fear, mystery, and despair.
next: What Is Consciousness?
