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Go to Dear Franklin Jones.com and use the promo code Jones for one month free. It's a sunny afternoon in 1979.

Franklin Jones walks onto the lawn of his sanctuary in Northern California.

Before him sit hundreds of his to the front of his congregation. He looks striking, circular white cap, collared, white shirt, white pants,

like a priest from some ancient order, or like someone emulating one. Jones gets up on a raised platform and makes the announcement.

His followers will no longer call him Franklin.

He's no longer some guy from New York or your spiritual buddy, not anymore. Now his followers must call him

da, which in Sanskrit means the giver. For many this is the moment when Jones goes from being a teacher to something else.

I am the heart who arms the space, who is the right and left.

I am the heart who stands between the arms, who seems the double mind until I'm known, who keeps the body living while the mystery survives.

And when all things have turned to me, my instant will be this, that seems the

dark and wordless death or underground, and still I am the heart. A few years later my parents and I join his congregation. My parents

attend classes with other members, read his books, listen to his tapes, poster our house with his picture.

By the mid-80s, Jones has about a thousand followers.

He had set up publishing houses and study groups in the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, Malaysia,

all over.

These members, including my parents, donate 10% of their income to the group, and this money,

as well as donations from wealthy followers, is used to buy property in Northern California, as well as an island in Fiji that had belonged to Raymond Burr. You know, Perry Mason?

The group buys the island for 2.1 million, that would be about $5 million today. Only about 40 of Jones's followers live there regularly.

As for Jones, he's there part of the year, the rest of the time, at a sanctuary in Northern California.

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