The Significance of Franklin Jones
aka Bubba Free John, Da Free John, Da Avabhasa, and Adi Da Samraj
Franklin Jones, now known as Adi Da Samraj, is not really a vartma-pradarshaka guru but rather one of the figures I noticed when I had already found the path, and because I had found it. I came across his book The Enlightenment of the Whole Body in the late 1970s. By that time, he was known as Bubba Free John. This name was derived from the meaning of the name Franklin and the fact that Jones is derived from John; Bubba, which Jones said he was called from childhood, means, according to himself, “brother”.
He was already a controversial figure, partly because of his spectacular claims regarding his own status, and partly due to his early use of drugs and the sexual practices he had introduced at one stage as part of his “crazy wisdom” teaching, purportedly in order to shake his students out of their limiting, conventional ego-identities and patterns. Jones himself obviously came to realize how much opposition these hippie practices, similar to those of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (subsequently Osho) at the same time, would provoke. He decided to withdraw the book in which he and his followers described an impersonalistic antinomianism which may have been reminiscent rather of the Esalen Institute and one strand of Western Gnosticism than of anything in the East.
The hippie generation to which his first followers belonged displayed an often truly bizarre (in view of their alleged anti-authoritarianism), uncritical belief in new authorities, which made them treat such authorities – even quite regardless of what the authorities themselves claimed – in an often “cultic” manner. They wanted their gurus to be divine beings and treated them and presented them accordingly. And some of the gurus complied. The most extreme and spectacular example of all of this is probably Prem Rawat’s (Guru Maharaj Ji’s) early years in America. But it was extreme also in the case of Rajneesh/Osho. Indeed, it probably affected to some extent all Eastern teachers who gained a substantial Western following in the 1960s and 70s.
It must also be kept in mind that the charges of abuse, deception, exploitation, and cultism of various kinds are almost always, and systematically, even professionally (i.e., as a profession) made, with motives quite different from that of the truth, against spiritual teachers in our age, particularly in the West, who challenge the statistical normality and the conventions of a social and individual life adapted to the standard functional patterns of a materialistic civilization. While there were clearly some hippie – and also Christian – cults that were more or less debased, that normality and those conventions are today themselves ever increasingly so.
At the same time, it must be noted that Jones was different from Prem Rawat and Rajneesh/Osho in that he was himself a Westerner (he placed much emphasis on his being the first to do what he did in the West) and indeed himself to some extent, as it seems, a hippie. And his own claims were certainly extravagant.
Through a young German woman, Ruth, whom I met in Heidelberg and whom I discovered was a follower of Jones (she had a huge portrait of him in her home and we immediately started talking almost exclusively about him), my study of his teachings was later renewed and deepened. By this time, Jones had published what was considered another of his major works, The Dawn Horse Testament, using the name Da Free John, and I learnt he was now known as Da Avabhasa. Later, Adi Da Samraj was to become his ultimate or definitive name.
As in the earlier work, there were in The Dawn Horse Testament some things, pertaining to the more technical aspects of yoga as expounded by Jones, which I did not fully understand. They are very complex in themselves, and even more so through the way they are coordinated with the stages of life and the stages of membership in his spiritual community. And they contain things which it is less than clear precisely from where in the tradition of yoga Jones has taken them. Jones also represented the onesided understanding of Vedanta (with the familiar, inevitably ensuing ambiguities and contradictions) and the adaptations to Western modernity characteristic of the Neo-Vedantist tradition to which he belonged – he expressly situated himself in the line from Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and also in relation to Ramana Maharshi, Nityananda, and Muktananda, the latter being his immediate, personal teacher. He differed from the Neo-Vedantists, and indeed from the whole of the advaita tradition, in speaking consistently of the absolute (beyond the exoterically conceived God of Abrahamism as well as advaita‘s personal God as a product of maya) in personal terms, as the absolute person. But he denied any ultimate distinction of finite personal beings from that personal absolute within their spiritual unity, i.e. he denied the ultimate reality of finite beings.
Still, The Dawn Horse Testament was a remarkable book. The important and interesting thing about Jones was his innovatively creative Western articulation of some of the Eastern spiritual teachings. Ken Wilber’s praise clearly seemed to most knowledgeable readers to go too far: “The event of Bubba Free John is an occasion for rejoicing, for, without any doubt whatsoever, he is destined to become the first Western Avatar to appear in the history of the world. His Teaching contains the most concentrated wealth of transcendent wisdom found anywhere, I believe, in the spiritual literature of the world, modern or ancient, Eastern or Western”; “The Dawn Horse Testament is the most ecstatic, most profound, most complete, most radical, and most comprehensive single spiritual text ever to be penned and confessed by the Human Transcendental Spirit.” But others’ positive assessments seemed reasonable.
I have problems with Jeffrey Kripal’s postmodernism and postcolonialism, and his somewhat predictable PC reinterpretation of Ramakrishna, but there is truth in his account of his darshan of Jones, in his suggestion that Jones was “a contemporary religious genius”, and in his account of Jones’s “spiritual effort of cultural translation and transformation” – all in Kripal’s foreword to Jones’s autobiography, The Knee of Listening. According to Kripal, Jones “succeeded in making the nondual spirituality cherished in the traditions of Asia relevant to the Western mind”. Presenting an important ”‘esoteric history’ of the siddha-guru in the present age”, Jones’s “penetrating questions about traditional Asian forms of spirituality and their teachers are animated by a spirit of deep concern, existential commitment, and profound love”. “No reader”, Kripal continues, “professionally or personally invested in Asian forms of spirituality and concerned about their effective (as opposed to dysfunctional) translation into Western culture can afford to ignore” Jones’s textual corpus, which “constitutes the most doctrinally thorough, the most philosophically sophisticated, the most culturally challenging, and the most creatively original literature currently available in the English language”.
It “stands in a long modern Western textual transmission” that “begins with Charles Wilkins’ translation of The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon”, “develops and deepens through Max Mueller’s Sacred Books of the East series”, and “extends into the previous century primarily through such spiritual classics” as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, The Collected Works of Swami Vivekananda, the collected works of Sri Aurobindo, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Swami Muktananda’s Play of Consciousness (which, Kripal points out, “Adi Da (as Franklin Jones) helped to edit”), and the works of Krishnamurti, Yogananda, Alan Watts, and Chogyam Trungpa. More works could of course – and, in my view, should – be added to this list.
Kripal rightly stresses that the importance of Jones’s corpus lies not least in its use of the English language, that the “English idiom has been enriched by a kind of hybridized English-Sanskrit, and that a new type of mystical grammar has been created, embodied most dramatically (and, to the ego, jarringly) in Adi Da’s anti-ego capitalization practice, in which just about every grammatical move is nondualistically endowed with the status once imperially preserved in English for the non-existent ‘I'”. Jones’s autobiography, The Knee Of Listening, can, Kripal says, “be read…as an esoteric history of the embodiment, in the West, of a remarkable type of nondual consciousness that was first discovered and cultivated in different forms and tongues in Asia”.
This emphasis on the linguistic side of Jones’s work seems to me important. It is a central aspect of the significant new phenomenon, stressed not just by Jones himself but by Wilber and others, that he was a Western – Western-born – guru making claims similar to those of the Eastern ones. Indeed, his claims went beyond theirs, as Muktananda (himself not uncontroversial) pointed out. By now, there are many other Western gurus, who claim strict guru status in virtue of their Eastern gurus’ authentication or certification. But it is interesting to note that Jones did not claim authenticity only on such traditionalist ground, but – while acknowledging tradition broadly and perennialistically conceived, including Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhists, emphasizing its importance, and encouraging its study – partly disagreed with Muktananda and his other teachers, and pointed also to the further, original revelatory elements he claimed to have added himself.
The richness and precision of the traditional Sanskrit literary corpus seems to me to be only in the beginning stages of the necessary translation into adequate, corresponding Western terminologies. Not least, the problem caused by the fact that many of the Western terms inevitably used have connotations related to the specific Western historical, intellectual settings in which they emerged, still remains. The confusion produced by some of the specific Abrahamitic connotations of the term ”God” (and despite their impersonalism and radical monism, the Neo-Vedantist Indian transmitters were themselves guilty of this through their own adaptations to Abrahamism) is but one example of this; the less obvious cases of common Western philosophical terms need to be closely studied too. The subtle differences introduced by the factor of the specific Western meanings have to be more consciously and explicitly sorted out, and removed, in the continued process of translation in the future. Only in this way can the Western terminologies reach the same level of precision and nuance as the original ones.
The rich development of the Western languages throughout the centuries, and the potential for further development that it makes possible, should make this quite feasible. The only problem is that this development, or at least the modern part of it (which is not the least), has taken place in the context of the exploration of subject matter different from that of the traditional Eastern ones. This makes adjustment, redefinition, and creativity of a kind which calls for deep and historically new hermeneutic reflection necessary. The terms must be dislodged primarily from the modern rationalist references, but also to some extent the pre-modern ones, e.g. some Aristotelian ones, and transposed to and reconceived in terms of a proper, intra-traditional conceptual understanding of the Sanskrit (etc.) ones.
At a particular historical stage, Jones seems, as Kripal claims, to have made a contribution to this centrally and decisively important process of textual transmission which began in the late eighteenth century. Although he was not specifically occupied with the questions of translation in a narrow sense, he did to a considerable extent creatively develop a vocabulary and language of his own for the Western expression and communication of some of the truths of Vedanta and Yoga. In his writing after The Dawn Horse Testament, which has recently been collected – together with some older material – in The Gnosticon, The Aletheon, and the forthcoming The Pneumaton, whose Greek titles, like that of his 1982 book Eleutherios, emphasize the specifically Western aspect of his spiritual agency, this language can perhaps be said to be developed further still, although he there becomes preoccupied primarily with the meaning of his own avatarhood. A kind of heroic, kataphatic exuberance characterizes Jones’s work. Regardless of substantial doctrinal (and other) objections in light of a more complete and historically informed understanding of Vedanta, it is historically significant, and important on the formal level, as it were, that his Western followers now use or at least have access to his new synthesizing English-Sanskrit language which partly incorporates, partly modifies, and partly translates (mainly) Sanskrit terms and expressions in new and creative ways – and perhaps even that they consider themselves to have in him their own Western avatar.
This contribution should also, I think, be distinguished from the peculiarities of the early hippe context and reception (Jones was, significantly, endorsed by Alan Watts, for instance – in characteristic manner: “It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about…One who knows that he is the Godhead from the beginning doesn’t have to use any kind of force to be that – whether spiritual, moral, or material…a rare being”; “It looks like we have an Avatar here. I can’t believe it, he is really here. I’ve been waiting for such a one all my life.” Watts was of course among the most influential senior authorities in the counterculture.) George Feuerstein’s Holy Madness: The Shock Tactics and Radical Teachings of Crazy-Wise Adepts, Holy Fools, and Rascal Gurus (1991), and the collection of scholarly essays he edited, Humor Suddenly Returns – Essays on the Spiritual Teaching of Master Da Free John: A Scholarly Tribute (1984), seem to me important for the understanding and assessment of the Jones phenomenon. Quite a few scholars keep endorsing him.
But Jones’s largely standard radical monism also makes it necessary, it seems to me, to problematize and reject some of his concepts and terms. (This may sound like this is all about philosophy and metaphysics only. But it is certainly not so: There is also the whole dimension of actual spiritual realization beyond that, as is always understood in Vedanta, for instance, which is not, despite some parallels and overlappings, philosophy and metaphysics in the Western sense. And it is primarily there that we find the partial truths Jones conveyed. The concepts and terms can contribute to that too.) The problem with the understanding and assessment of postmodernists and postcolonialists like Kripal, New Agers like Wilber, and general liberal, romantic counterculturalists like Watts and Feuerstein, however, is that they fail to see the extent to which, far beyond hippiedom, the textual transmission as a whole, not just Jones’s, has taken place in the context of the distinctly modern Western rationalist-romantic setting, that it is always more or less – and often more than less – shaped by it, and why, and in what respects, this is problematic. This often applies to Vivekananda and Aurobindo quite as much as to Jones. Specifically modern Western pantheism, as it emerged in the West in the course of the development of its distinct cultural dynamic and dialectic of rationalism and romanticism, and with its typical implications in various fields, is a constitutive element of their work. It is what draws them all to one specific strand of Vedanta (and sometimes to what they perceive as equivalents in Buddhism and Taoism), and makes them present that strand in a similar way. There are of course more strictly traditionalist representatives of Vedanta even in the West, but because of the dominant modernist dynamic they are not the ones who have become well known even here.
On his art website, we learn that before he emerged as a spiritual teacher, Jones, in addition to his general hippiedom, wrote a master’s thesis at Stanford on “the core issues in modernism focusing on Gertrude Stein and the painters of the same period”. The art which he himself produced in his later years bears witness to lasting modernist sensibilities. Of course, he seized on the spiritual intentions of some of the early abstract artists – successfully, according to one critic cited on his art website: “[Adi Da’s] pursuit of the spiritual paths found in early abstraction, from Kandinsky to Mondrian, and [his] translation of that pursuit into the digital age, restore a transcendental spirituality to the materialism of the machine aesthetic”. Others would point out, however, that this aesthetic is congruent only with a certain onesided understanding of spirituality.
In some respects, it does seem Jones may well have remained to the end the modern liberal hippie he sometimes looked like and his antinomian practices signalled that he was, even as a spiritual teacher. But there is also a higher side to hippiedom. He may have appeared with his spiritual transmission in and for, and thus with the specific adaptations to, a particular generation. It remains to be seen how those adaptations will be perceived in the future, and whether or not the modalities of his spiritual agency will appeal to future generations. Right now, it is at least clear that gurus with positions and claims like his – not to mention avatars – are not as appealing as they were to the purportedly anti-authoritarian hippie generation.
Ruth, who was much too young to belong to that generation, now significantly rejects male gurus sitting around in rooms, and treated as absolute authorities by submissive followers. When I first met her, it was I who asked questions about the legitimacy of some of Jones’s claims, and she who defended it. Now, I became a little disappointed by her disavowal of him. Although I did have questions, and still do, I had become aware of the significance of Jones long before I met Ruth. At the very least, it is the case that the general things Jones talks about are not only the centrally important ones, but ultimately also the only truly interesting ones. And, after all, gurus are and always will be needed (and women can be gurus too). Real spiritual authorities are absolutely necessary.
It is impossible for outsiders to ascertain what is true and not in the various allegations against Jones. And it is wrong, I suggest, to simply dismiss all transmitters of his kind because of them, without investigating the really interesting thing, namely whether or not they convey some at least partial spiritual and philosophical truths. Abrahamists, for instance, do not in general hold any moral high ground in doing so, and atheists even less.
I would recommend that those who have doubts about Jones bracket and suspend judgment on everything else about him, and study exclusively his main books (in addition to the titles mentioned above, these include The Method of the Siddhas). One must sometimes be able to ignore the endless disputes among former followers, scholars, and others about real or alleged problematic aspects of figures like Jones and the peculiarities of their times, and to glean instead whatever is – quite independently of what is true in the various complaints – objectively of real and lasting value in their contributions. Although he too exaggerates, I think Kripal points to what that is in Jones’s case.