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Franklin Jones & Rudi, Part I
by William Patrick Patterson
His core teachings incorporate many of the ideas he learned from studying the
Kahmir Shaivite and Advaita Vedanta schools of Hinduism, but they also contain his
own original insights and opinions about both spirituality and secular culture. Many
observers note that the spiritual practices and experiences typically engaged in by Adi
Da and his community tended to reflect the Occult tradition or possibly a degenerate
version of Guru Bhakti Yoga (guru worship), more than the “nondualism” emphasized
in much of his written material….In 1983 he predicted that before he died all of
humanity (whom he called “five billion slugs”) would acknowledge him, and said that if
he had not come to Earth all of humanity would have been destroyed.
Adi Da was considered a controversial figure due to persistent accusations that
he was having sex with large numbers of devotees, drinking obsessively, abusing drugs,
engaging in incidents of violence against women, and financially exploiting his
followers. Critics claim these activities were primarily a reflection of Adi Da’s own
personal desires, preferences and character flaws, and were generally engaged in with
little regard for their impact on others. Some claim that their consent to participate with
Adi Da was gained through fraud, deception, or cognitive dissonance. Others state that
they were harmed or traumatized by his abuses. Adi Da consistently claimed that all his
activities were forms of selfless spiritual teaching or “crazy wisdom,” designed to reflect
devotees’ own tendencies back to them and thereby accelerate their spiritual
development….In 1985, tensions escalated when a number of exdevotees requested an
audience with Adi Da to air grievances, and he refused to communicate with them. As a
result, various lawsuits were filed against Adi Da, his organization, and former
members. Adi Da himself refused to respond to any of the charges made against him at
that time, preferring to withdraw into seclusion in Fiji during the controversy and allow
devotees to defend him. He finally emerged from seclusion once the media attention faded
and the lawsuits had been settled, only to fall into despair and feelings of failure that
contributed to this suffering a major breakdown in 1986. This breakdown was later
explained by Adi Da as an incident of death and resurrection that he called the “Divine
Emergence.”
—Lake County News, December 7, 2008
When Knee of Listening: The Early Life and Radical Spiritual Teachings of
Franklin Jones was published it carried on its back cover three strong
endorsements. Said Alan Watts, one of the luminaries of the New Age:
“It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all
about… a rare being. He is a perfect and authentic manifestation of eternal
energy of the universe, and thus is no longer disposed to be in conflict with
himself.”
Said the occult writer Israel Regardie:
“A great teacher with a dynamic ability to awaken in his listeners
something of the Divine Reality in which he is grounded, with which he is
identified and which in fact he is. He is a man of both the East and the West;
perhaps in him they merge and are organized as the One that he is.”
Said the great yogi Swami Muktananda:
“Chiti Shakti, the Kundalini, which brings about Siddha Yoga, is activated
in you. The Inner Self which is the secret of Vedanta, the basis of religion, the
realization of which is the ultimate object of human life, is awakened in you.”
The book, published in 1972, could not have been launched at a more
fortuitous time, for only two years before three spiritual teachers—Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, Chögyam Trungpa and Swami Muktananda—had first come to
America and ignited the spiritual craving and search among young and old alike.
And here was an American master, only 33 years old, who had reached the
pinnacle of spiritual realization. That his rise thereafter was meteoric was not
surprising, but few if any could have foreseen his subsequent fall and
withdrawal to an island sanctuary where he lived the life of a selfexiled king
among his devotees.
Born November 3, 1939, and raised in Queens, New York, Franklin Albert
Jones early on had a number of experiences with what he termed “the Bright.” It
was an “Energy of LoveBliss,” he says, which his parents were insensitive to
and refused. Family life was not harmonious. He describes the situation as the
interaction of “quiet, longsuffering, fathered mother. Emotional, violent,
elaborate fatherboy. Crazy, secluded, independent son.” A sister, Joanne, was
born when he was eight years old but was too young to be included in his life.
Jones was brought up in the Lutheran Church and became an acolyte. He might
easily have had an academic career, for he received a degree in philosophy from
Columbia University and then an M.A. in English literature from Stanford
University in the fall of 1962. He, like Ken Kesey (who gave his own account in
his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and many others, volunteered as a subject for
drug experiments at the nearby Veterans Administration Hospital. During a six
week period he was given LSD, mescalin and psilocybin. The Sufi saint Meher
Baba said that “LSD is America’s Jesus Christ,” and so it was in terms of opening
people up to higher dimensions of reality, but for many it simply enlarged their
narcissism.
Gigantic Thumbs
Jones and his girlfriend, Nina, went to live in a cabin in the mountains
above Santa Cruz where she supported them while after he meditated, did drugs
and tried to make sense out of what he had experienced by immersing himself in
books of hermetic wisdom. As a child he had seizures in which he would become
delirious and feel “a mass of gigantic thumbs coming down from above and
pressing into some form of myself that was much larger than my physical body.”
During his drug experiments this “thumbs” experience recurred, and when he
allowed it they “completely entered my form. They appeared like tongues or
parts of a force coming from above. And when they had entered deep into my
body the magnetic or energic [sic] balances of my being appeared to
reverse. . . . [Then] I seemed to reside in a totally different body, which also
contained the physical body.” He eventually came to the conclusion that what
controlled him and everyone else was “a largely unconscious or preconscious
logic or structure, a motivating drama or myth, [which] acted only as an
arbitrary limitation, and it never appeared directly in the mind or in our works
and actions . . . it needed to become conscious in each of us before any creative
work or freedom was possible on its basis or beyond it.” He came to recognize
his own myth as the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, which he characterized as
being about “the universally adored child of the gods, who rejected the loved
one and every form of love and relationship, who was finally condemned to the
contemplation of his own image, until he suffered the fact of eternal separation
and died in infinite solitude.”
Rudi & the “Force”
After two years in the mountains he realized that he needed a teacher. He
had a vision that he would meet his teacher in New York in an Oriental art store.
And so in June 1964 he and Nina left for New York. Searching the streets of
Manhattan, that September he came upon Rudi Oriental Arts on Seventh Avenue
just above the East Village. When Albert Rudolph, a short, heavyset moonfaced
man known as Rudi and later Swami Rudrananda, approached, Jones weighed
over 230 pounds, though he was not nearly as large as Rudi. A selfdescribed
“libertine, drinker, drug user, a useless and impractical dreamer, a passionate
madman,” Jones felt uncomfortable and foolish but immediately felt the Rudi’s
“Force,” or Shakti, as he would call it. Jones asked him what he taught and was
told “Kundalini Yoga.”
“Are you an adept at this yoga,” Jones asked.
“You don’t teach it if you can’t do it,” he was told.
Rudi asked if he worked.
“No, I have just been writing, and I live with my girlfriend. She works,”
Jones said.
Rudi told to him get a job and come back in six months or a year and
walked away.
That night Jones wrote Rudi a long letter and had Nina deliver it to him
the next day. Where Rudi’s behavior had been brusque with Jones, he was very
warm and open with Nina and immediately accepted her as a student.
The next day Jones again went to see him and again was told to get a job.
Within a few weeks, he was also accepted.
Rudi had been in the Gurdjieff Work some five years or so before leaving,
and so much of what Jones was given early on was on observing and working
with selfpity, negativity and selfimagery with an emphasis on making efforts.
Jones’ main interest was in Rudi’s ability to transmit Force (this
capitalization of words would in time, as with his The Dawn Horse Testament,
make much of his writing unreadable except for his most ardent devotees).
Complete Embrace
Class began about 7:30 in the evening. Rudi sat on a raised platform. His
chair was a large mental trunk covered by a bearskin. Incense would be lit next
to him and, with the devotees spread out before him, either sitting in yogic
postures or on folding chairs, the class would begin. He would speak about some
aspect of the Force.
I give a higher energy directly to you. The first or second time that I open
to a new student, a spiritual energy flows from both of us and comes
together as in a complete embrace. There is nothing sexual about it. The
meeting occurs in another dimension. But it symbolizes the beginning of a
real relationship between us. Once this connection is established, you have
only to absorb the energy that comes from me like water from a faucet.
This is much easier than having to extract energy out of the atmosphere
through your own efforts. But it is still work.
Afterward, sitting up straight in a lotus posture, he would close his eyes.
When his eyes opened Jones said “they appeared to be deep set and very wide.
Rudi’s eyes would then move from person to person in the room, focusing on
each one for a few seconds or a minute or two. The idea was to relax and
surrender to Rudi so the energy could be passed or ignited. At the end of the
class, he might give another talk, saying:
A teacher is really a servant—something many teachers would rather
forget. In some Buddhist scripture it says, “The Buddha is a shit stick.” It can’t
be put more graphically than that. Just because a higher force flows in a
genuine teacher, does not mean he is to be worshipped. His function is to serve
the student’s potential. Most teachers demand a great deal of respect, which is
correct, if it is the cosmic force that is respected. But it too easily shifts into
honoring the personality of the teacher. It requires a willingness on the
teacher’s part to surrender the subtle advantages of his role, for the relationship
to remain mutually productive. No situation, no matter how satisfactory, is an
end in itself. It is all material for surrender. You build to give away. Otherwise,
what starts as creation ends as a prison you have constructed for yourself.
Devotees would then line up, as Rudi passed from one to another giving
each a big bear hug.
Rudi was 11 years older than Jones, born to a poor Jewish family in
Brooklyn whose father abandoned the family when he was young. His mother
was quite violent toward him.
Great Passions & Appetites
Jones came to see Rudi as “obviously a man of great passions and
appetites, a figure of Gargantuan vitality and huge pleasures, and a very strong
and masculine (but also demonstratively homosexual) character.” The stronger
and more confident Jones became the more he came into conflict with his teacher.
“Rudi’s tendency to command an exclusive and limiting right for himself [as a
unique source],” said Jones, “became a source of conflict between us, although I
never outwardly manifested that conflict until the day I left him.”
Part II continued in The Gurdjieff Journal #49
Notes
1. Quiet, longsuffering, fathered mother. Jones, 1992 edition of The Knee of Listening
(Los Angeles: Dawn Horse Press, 1992 edition), p. 34.
2. Drug experiments. Franklin Jones, Knee of Listening, 1972 edition, pp. 1718.
3. A mass of gigantic thumbs. Jones, pp. 2021.
4. A largely unconscious or preconscious logic or structure. Jones, p. 16.
5. Universally adored child of the gods. Jones, p. 26.
6. Libertine, drinker. Jones, 1992 edition of The Knee of Listening, p. 140
7. Are you an adept at this yoga? Jones, pp. 99–100.
8. A man of great passions and appetites. Jones, 1992 edition of The Knee of Listening,
p. 158.
9. Rudi’s tendency. Jones, p. 52.
First printed in The Gurdjieff Journal.
William Patrick Patterson is the author of seven books on The Fourth Way, the
latest of which is "Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing WorldTime."