The Dawn Horse
It is not unusual for disciples to believe that their guru is an avatar with a unique, world-transforming destiny. It is unusual for such a one to hail from Long Island and have the surname Jones. Born in 1939 to Lutheran parents, Franklin Jones died in 2008 as Avatar Adi Da Samraj. In between he adopted about a dozen names, beginning with Bubba Free John and running through Da Love Ananda and others, each one purportedly linked to a quantum leap in consciousness.
According to his official biography, Jones was a spiritual rarity, one who is born fully enlightened. He relinquished that status, it is said, in order to experience the rigors of worldly existence, the better to teach others. After majoring in philosophy at Columbia and earning a master's in English literature from Stanford, he diligently pursued what he called his reawakening. For four years he studied with Rudi, then spent time in India with Muktananda, who apparently recognized the American as a "Realizer." In 1970, in the Vedanta Society temple in Hollywood, Adi Da "became reestablished in the continuous state of illumination that was his unique condition at birth."2
Two years later, around the time that his autobiography, The Knee of Listening, was released, he began teaching in a Los Angeles storefront. Eventually he established a community north of San Francisco and an ashram in Fiji, which became his primary home. At its core the path he taught was a traditional guru bhakti, in which progress hinges on the disciple's ability to resonate with the tuning fork of the guru's grace. It is a demanding path, and Adi Da made no bones about it. About ten thousand disciples came and went from his "cooperative culture" over the years, never more than two thousand at a time. Thousands more have been arm's-length followers. 10
In his thirty-seven years of guruship, Adi Da made only a handful of public appearances. Seekers found him through word of mouth and his flood of written work. Hailed as masterpieces by the likes of Alan Watts, his volumes include plays and a trilogy of novels in addition to spiritual treatises. The books stood out early on because accounts of higher consciousness by Americans were rare, and because few memoirists had Adi Da's blend of philosophical sophistication and creative flair. (He also painted well enough to have his work exhibited at the prestigious Venice Biennale.) Combine a literary gift with charisma and a claim to avatar status, and you have a recipe for attracting devotees. One of them, Bill Gottlieb, was an editor at Prevention magazine when he came upon an Adi Da book in the mid-1970s.11 "I read it in a sweat of delight and surprise," he told me. "It was beautifully written, and a brilliant critique of contemporary spirituality." That Adi Da was a young American, not an older Indian, also appealed to him: "He wasn't culture bound, tradition bound, or history bound." Gottlieb became a formal disciple in 1990 and has lived in the Adi Da community ever since.
Adi Da was steeped in the Vedic canon and professed the utmost respect for tradition, counting both the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda and the Nityananda-Muktanananda-Rudi lines as "my present-Lifetime lineage gurus." At the same time, he was an unrepentant iconoclast and a daring provocateur. In the mid-1970s he became the poster boy for "crazy wisdom," taking the sexual and spiritual revolutions to the limits of experimentation. Partner switching, orgies, and all manner of sexual expression were personally choreographed by the guru, who sometimes doubled as lead dancer with partners of his choosing. Sometimes he initiated alcohol-soaked revelry, a radical departure from the disciplined lifestyle he normally advocated. The period was justified by devotees as a master teacher's brilliant burst of boundary-busting and ego-shattering. The logic goes like this: to free up energy for higher spiritual pursuits, we need to be released from our psychosexual hang-ups; Indian traditions are ambivalent about such matters, and in any case they don't translate well to modern life; therefore it falls to an awakened Westerner to shatter the constraints of social convention. To disciples, the possibility that Adi Da was motivated by personal gratification is out of the question. To outsiders, the theory is a giant rationalization for licentiousness and abuse of power. It must be said that to this day, some devotees who were subjected to what most would consider cruelty and humiliation express gratitude for the experience. Others, of course, remain bitter. In the late 1970s, a $5 million lawsuit was filed by former disciples, attracting considerable media coverage. As scandals go, this one made the clandestine affairs of other gurus seem quaintly Victorian. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the suit alleged "imprisonment, sexual abuse, assault, brainwashing, involuntary servitude, and clergy malpractice." (It was settled out of court in 1986.)
By all accounts, Adi Da's world never again came close to the wildness of that period, but some degree of crazy wisdom and psychosexual processing remained part of his methodology. Musician John Wubbenhorst, a disciple since 1997, told me that Adi Da was "not afraid to go into the pit of snakes and reflect people's emotional and sexual hang-ups with complete frankness and depth. He strips away all the ego stuff, and if you're not mature or self-responsible enough to handle it, it can be really difficult." He compared it to mastering his instrument, the Indian bamboo flute. The payoff in both cases is ecstasy, he said. Therein lies the ambiguity: one person's crazy is another's wisdom.
Whatever history decides about him, Adi Da was a catalyst for important inquiries into the meeting of East and West. His behavior prompted several scholars, in particular his own early student, Georg Feuerstein, to examine the phenomenon of crazy wisdom, elucidating why it can be efficacious in some circumstances and disastrous in others. 12 Adi Da also became a case study for a related investigation: how can a presumably enlightened master behave in such a way as to cause pain to others? Unlike other scandalized gurus, Adi Da was not an Indian monk at sea in the land of temptation, so his behavior could not be explained as an artifact of culture shock. Perhaps the leading figure in the inquiry was Ken Wilber, whom critics assailed for his exuberant praise of Adi Da before the revelations surfaced. When asked about it in 2007, Wilber said, "I think it goes to show that you can make significant gains in awareness, including enlightenment, but that enlightenment, per se, does not fix everything in the psyche or the body." That conclusion is now widely accepted.
In addition to Feuerstein, two other former Adi Da disciples have made an impact on the spiritual scene. Saniel Bonder was with Adi Da for twenty years until leaving the fold in 1992 and creating a teaching of his own. Called Waking Down, it is aimed mainly at longtime practitioners who want to get their feet back on the ground. The other is David Deida, whose popular books and workshops explore sexuality and male-female issues in a spiritual context.13
Adi Da died suddenly in November 2008. In addition to furious ex-students and adoring disciples, he left behind three daughters with three different mothers, a museum's worth of paintings, about sixty books, and an organizational structure that he designed to keep his legacy alive. 14
