HOW I CAME TO JOIN AND LEAVE THE COMMUNITY of Adi Da by \m
1968 - It's my karma to experience the death of my father at age 12.
Until then, I had your average happy childhood...then the spiritual search
begins in earnest for me. I start taking Hatha Yoga classes and reading lots of
spiritual books. Though a little too young to be a hippie, I partake in the
psychedelic revolution while in high school and into college and have lots of
amazing experiences. The only problem was you always came down from these trips
and I wanted the insights to remain permanently!
1972 - I was a regular listener to the spiritual radio shows broadcast on KPFK
on Sunday mornings. One day a guy named Sal Lucania is interviewed about this
amazing new spiritual teacher named Franklin Jones. "You enter the room where
Franklin is and you leave your mind at the door" he says. I file the name
Franklin Jones away into my ever-growing spiritual search databank for future
reference.
At this time I've graduated high school but am taking a year off before I go to
college. All my friends are on their spiritual searches big time. One close
friend in particular went to South America in search of a shaman and came back
to the U.S. disappointed and was chomping at the bit to find a teacher. He runs
across a Franklin Jones poster at the local record store (a favorite hangout in
those days) and attends a meeting. He comes back ecstatic - I've found my
teacher! I went all the way to South America and he was here in L.A. all along!
He gives me a copy of the just-published "The Method of the Siddhas". I am quite
impressed by that book and so go out and buy a copy of "The Knee of Listening".
I am even more impressed by this book. Nevertheless, I'm slated to go to college
in the fall and I wasn't about to join my friend at his new-found ashram, so I
just kept in touch and listened to his Franklin Jones stories.
1974 - I'm in my second year of college at UC Santa Cruz and am sick to death of
Academia and am thirsty for Real Life. My friend who joined the community in
1972 followed Franklin to Northern California where he became Bubba and they
acquired the land known as Persimmon.
While I'm attending college, my friend who joined in 1972 lures his high school
sweetheart away from her Yoga group and she joins him in Bubba's community and
they get married. Shortly thereafter, the "Garbage and the Goddess" period
begins and I am regaled with tales of "wild, ecstatic parties" taking place
every night at Persimmon, of incredible goings-on, of Real Spiritual Life taking
place, actually happening! Nevertheless, although I was growing increasingly
uninterested in college life, I decided to finish the year out.
1975 - At the end of my 2nd year of college, I was miserable, and interested
enough to contact the Dawn Horse Communion to request a correspondence course.
My plan was to supplement my college education with a little spiritual
education, maybe even join the community after college if the correspondence
course proved interesting. I called the bookstore in San Francisco, told them of
my situation. I was immediately told that since I lived so close (1 1/2 hours)
away from San Francisco that I should just come on up, that correspondence
courses were intended for people living far away from the community.
So one weekend shortly thereafter I packed my day pack and caught a ride to the
city and by late afternoon, I was walking up the stairway to the 2nd floor of a
Victorian building in the rather gay Polk St. district of San Francisco into the
Dawn Horse Bookstore. Apparently I had arrived simultaneously with about 10
other people that afternoon so in very short order I found myself in my very
first study group in a back room at the bookstore with these other newbies. I
believe it was Craig Lesser who was doing the indoctrinating that day while Jim
Steinberg ran the bookstore itself. We were introduced to the structure of the
community, more or less and told that before we could be "official student"
members of the community, we had to go through a 3-month study course and while
doing that, we were expected to find our own apartments in San Francisco and
become roommates.
The only "problem" with that was that I had a friend who was already a "student"
who lived in an "official" household, who had been my best friend in high school
and who, for the last 2 years had been peppering me with stories of this new
incredible spiritual life he was now involved in. So naturally he invited me to
stay at his place. My very first introduction to the community then was crashing
on the basement floor of the Moraga St. household for 4 days. So I got to see
members of that household participate in a Sadhana Group: that's where inner-circle
bigwigs came to the house to lead a kind of heavy-handed discussion/criticism
group where everybody took turns getting their asses kicked, er...I mean getting
their numbers called.
Some people had
"food trips", and some people had "clothes trips" and one guy had a "Latin Lover
trip". You were always getting called out for being "non-relational". Despite
the seeming mean-spiritedness of this, I was stoked! The people were genuine,
warm, funny and energetic! I was fascinated - it was realer than real. It was
intense. It was different. I was excited. Plus they did real community things.
There was a food co-op everyone shopped at. Some members ran community
businesses (anyone remember Gorilla Garage?) They had phone trees, a method
through which community news (and gossip) was speedily disseminated. I was
impressed and felt I made the right decision with my life.
Turns out I wasn't supposed to see any of this stuff, especially the Sadhana
Groups. So when the word (through the phone tree?) reached Central that a
Pre-Student was staying at a Student household, I was quickly summoned and
summarily told to go back to my newbie friends, find an apartment and take the
3-month pre-student course. Only then could I possibly become mature enough to
enjoy the privileges of a Student household. Of course, Pre-Students were not
allowed to go to Persimmon on the weekends.
So I got 2 roommates, found an apartment in the Richmond district, took the
Pre-Student course, bought food at regular markets, and generally was kept away
from my friend and all other Students - except the ones teaching the course, of
course. Seems they wanted a thorough pre-soaking in the Pre-Student culture. I
got on the Airola diet, did my first 3-day fast, and practiced the community's
watered-down hatha yoga. The Hatha Yoga courses I took earlier in my life were
more comprehensive and intelligently approached, but that's another story. I
started keeping Life & Meditation journals. I did my service at the bookstore by
being on a rotating crew of projectionists screening the "Difficult Man" film,
but was warned strictly away from talking to the public after the film was over.
Leave that to the more experienced Students, I was told. I looked forward to the
day the course was over and I could once again join a Student household and
start going up to Persimmon to see Bubba!
I will relate one experience I had right around this time which I found totally
odd. One night at the bookstore, after a screening, I was hanging out, smelling
the incense, listening to Keith Jarett's Bremen Solo Concerts on the bookstore's
stereo and generally soaking up the spiritual ambiance. In the next moment, I
looked out the bookstore window. It was nighttime. Across the street, on the 4th
floor of a Victorian apartment building, in front of a full length window, stood
a completely naked man who was smiling and masturbating in full view of anyone
within his line of sight. I looked away and was overcome with the oddity of
seeing such a thing through the window of the Dawn Horse Bookstore and wondered
about how anyone could be such a brazen exhibitionist.
Anyway I finished the Pre-Student course and was deemed to be ready for
Studenthood at that point. So I got to join one of the large, communal Student
households - there were 14 people in my house, 4, bedrooms and 1 1/2 bathrooms.
Married couples got their own rooms. The single guys were 4 to a room. Of course
at this point I was expected to get a full-time job and start tithing to the
community. I got a job as a walking messenger in the Financial District. Since
there had been a lot of partying going on in the community, all new Students
joining the community had to go get a syphilis test (this was pre-AIDS of
course). I KNOW I didn't have syphilis, but nevertheless I went to the clinic
and got a tissue sample scraped from my penis - (wow what fun), and brought back
the piece of paper proving I was clean.
Then the Day came, my first weekend trip to Persimmon. It was early spring, the
weather was just gorgeous and we all gathered for an early evening talk in the
outdoor Pavillion. Bubba strides in with his hand-made skullcap and flowing silk
garb and sits up on low yellow throne chair, smiling, looking around the room,
making eye contact with various people. Then he breaks into an uproarious laugh
and says "So, everybody is already enlightened, is that right?" and from there
proceeds into a lengthy, often very humorous talk that goes on for more than an
hour. I was impressed with his sense of humor, his charisma, and the 2 beautiful
women waving palm fronds at him throughout the talk. Wow, what a scene!
Shortly after I started going to Persimmon on weekends, the whole easygoing,
celebratory, happy-happy scene just STOPPED. Apparently word came down from on
High that certain inner-circle types were abusing their power as Sadhana Group
Leaders and that things were getting a little, oh perhaps too self-righteous.
That criticisms were getting over the top and that apparently there wasn't
enough "maturity" in the community to make real use of Sadhana Groups. So,
therefore a new era was about to be born - the "Divine Commmunion" era. No more
Sadhana groups. Now we were to start singing devotional hymns directly to Bubba
and he would, through our devotion, "absorb" us into his condition of radical
happiness.
We were constantly told that we didn't need a personal relationship with the
Guru in order to do sadhana and that while certain old-timers seemed to have a
VERY personal relationship with him, it was not necessary and in fact was to be
avoided - it was only another manifestation of our Narcissistic seeking.
Consequently, the inner-outer social dynamic of the community started to become
very pronounced.
Then, 2 1/2 months later, everything changed AGAIN. It seemed that on a
mysterious cycle only Bubba knew about (and why not, he was directing the Play),
the rug was to be pulled out from under the feet of community members. Nope,
Sadhana Groups are not the way, and now even Divine Communion was not
necessarily the way. This time the spirituality of ordinary life was our guide.
Just living, working, relating to our household members, doing service at
Persimmon on the weekends. With a hitch: we were now going to live truly
communally. A centralized Finance Committee was formed and we were to turn over
ALL our income to the committee, and they in turn will take care of all of our
material needs: pay the rent and utility bills on all of the San Francisco
households, give us free food from the co-op and free gasoline from a tank at
Persimmon. In exchange we all got $6 a month "spending money". This way we would
be truly "free" of material necessities and so could concentrate every more
intensely on sadhana!
1976 -
Living on $6 a month. During this time, my friend who had been in the community
since the L.A. days and gone through the "Garbage and the Goddess" times leaves.
I had had no contact with him for about 8 months since I "illegally" crashed on
the basement floor of his Student household when I first joined. He had since
divorced his wife (she remarried an inner-circler and stayed for another 10
years) and headed out to the "Straightener". We never did talk about his
departure, he just left quietly. Besides I was beginning to develop a party line
attitude, thinking that he was just squandering the opportunity of a lifetime by
leaving and that I had nothing to say to him.
After a while the $6 a month "experiment" died its own natural death and the
community entered yet another new phase. It seemed to me that the community
entered these new phases with some regularity, about every 2 1/2 months. This
phase involved Bubba almost totally withdrawing himself from public events, such
as talks to the community at large, and getting down to some Serious Partying
with the inner circle. These were the famous "What is an Ashtray" times, direct
considerations of enlightenment between Bubba and devotees. These were also the
times of sneaking into the kitchen at Persimmon and feasting on sumptuous party
leftovers. Some of the best meals I ever had were off other devotees' used
plates in that kitchen. Also, I noticed an ever-increasing stream of beautiful
young women who I had met during my Pre-Student courses disappearing into the
party scene at Bubba's house only to be seen days later hanging on Bubba's
elbows with grins larger than the Cheshire Cat's! They may just as well have
been wearing buttons that said "You'd look like this too if you'd just gotten
laid by the Spiritual Master". Of course, some of these women didn't have to go
through the Pre-Student phase at all - during this time Mark Miller and Miss
September 1976 joined the community and were accorded instant celebrity status.
Mark even got the infamous Saturday Night Massacre treatment performed on him -
just like in the G & G book!
At any rate, it looked like the return of ecstatic happy-happy times were upon
us, again. The partying filtered down to the Student household level, there were
some "naked" parties going on in San Francisco, people were smoking weed and
generally having a great time while they considered their enlightenment either
directly (if you got invited to Bubba's parties) or indirectly (the rest of us).
My household in particular took up the new party regime with a vengeance, which
lasted all summer and into the fall. Around this time, Bubba, who had fairly
completely withdrawn himself from public events, instituted what I call
"Assembly Line Darshan". That's where everybody lined single-file and waited for
the 3-minute opportunity to sit with him one-on-fucking-one in a little room
with bouncers at both doors. This was his concession to us for having withdrawn
from such things as public talks, I suppose.
Around this time there was one rather disturbing event. It was my First, Last
and Only experience of the death of a community member. It involved a rather
striking young woman, Adrienne Stranger (married to inner-circler Bill) who was
a member of my Student household for a very short time. She got whisked away to
the party scene quickly. Apparently she went to the wrong tatoo parlor in San
Francisco and came back with a nasty infection. I understand she had Toxic Shock
Syndrome. She refused to go to the hospital for treatment, preferring to be
spiritually healed by Bubba. She died after 3-4 days of high fever. I always
wondered whether her life would have been saved if she had chosen to go to the
ER right away.
At any rate, while the parties continued at Persimmon, the word came down that
all the partying in the San Francisco households should cease immediately and
everyone should start living the life-level disciplines again, stop smoking
weed, start eating Airola again and generally straighten up and fly right. There
were a few renegade households, mine among them, that didn't heed the message
right away. We required a personal visit from Cheech, himself an inveterate
Party Animal, before the party switch was finally flipped off.
On to the next phase! Time to cull and weed out! On one weekend visit to
Persimmon, we were told to gather as households and confront any household
member that wasn't pulling their weight, so to speak. If anyone was perceived to
be a "drag" on the overall spiritual energy of their household, they were to be
reported to Central and Dealt With. I was one such who was singled out in this
fashion and I was offered a demotion back to the Pre-Student level. Having been
in the community for almost 2 years at this point, and having had my eyes opened
as to the reality of community life, I couldn't bear the thought of this
demotion and chose to leave the community outright.
Now I didn't leave the community angry or upset or regretful. I did leave with a
rather low sense of self-esteem, however. It was my sincere belief that I was
just immature and not fit for "real" spiritual life. After all, I had joined the
community at age 19 and left at age 21, and most of the friends I made in the
community were older (mid to late 20s). I just figured I needed more life-level
experiences and that I would re-approach and rejoin the community with a renewed
level of commitment at some time in the very near future.
But this was not to be. A few days after I left the community I ran into one of
the newbies who I had met in my very first study group when I first joined.
During my entire time in the community, we had never talked. It turns out he had
left the community about 3 weeks before I had with his new girlfriend, who had
previously been one of Bubba's gopis! I don't know whether she was wife #6 or
wife #9 (pun intended) but she definitely was among the minority of women who
didn't think Bubba was a particularly hot lover and she certainly didn't enjoy
being in the stable. I became fast friends with this couple and started to hear
first hand stories about the party scene inside Bubba's house from 2 people who
were right there. I heard the rumors confirmed about the basement porno tapes
and other stories. We wound up forming an ex-community household in Marin County
in 1977.
1977 - These were very interesting times for me as my transition from the
community to the world was rapid, pleasurable and confusing. I still sincerely
believed in conquering my spiritual immaturity and rejoining the community, but
my new friends had no such illusions about themselves. Over the course of time,
our household became a kind of way station for people leaving the community to
come and talk it out with us. Josh Baran, the author of the book on "Dark Zen”,
was an exit counselor who would frequently come over to our house and talk to
the people who were leaving. I came to learn that some people were actually
being offered money by the community if they would just quietly disappear. One
couple that I know of received $10,000. This was no blackmail, it was
voluntarily given and accepted. The community was apparently extremely concerned
about bad publicity. I was visited by Steve Frappier once so he could determine
whether I was going to be a troublemaker or not. We even had a few informal
get-togethers with recent high-level defectors, including Sal Lucania himself
who was kicked out. I didn't know what to make of this except to realize that
there was a lot more going there than I had seen with my own eyes, clearly.
Nevertheless I persisted for some time in my internal struggle. Despite all of
this, I still firmly believed in my own spiritual immaturity and that someday
soon I would re-approach. My friends never pressured me, they just offered their
take on the situation and we lived our lives side-by-side in the hedonistic
Marin County scene of the late '70s.
1978 - 2 years out of the community now. Life was good. Somehow my feeling of
spiritual unworthiness had slowly disappeared on its own and my desire to rejoin
the community with it. I noticed my self-esteem had picked up too and all
without consciously working on it - the most natural of processes.
1980 - I leave the Bay Area and move back to Southern California, but stay in
close touch with my friends in Marin with frequent visits.
1984 - My friend divorces his ex-gopi wife and moves out of the Bay Area.
1985 - I receive a thick packet of xeroxes in the mail from my friend who was
sent the original package by the dear ex-wife. It's all the 1985 lawsuit stuff.
I am amazed that some of the ex-community folks actually persisted and did
something about all the hanky-panky that had been well known since the '70s. Of
course, it was a bigger deal now what with the island in Fiji and actual charges
of misconduct. I still felt somewhat connected to it as I knew Beverly O'Mahony
when she first joined the community and was still playing for the S.F. Symphony.
And I knew her husband before he became one of the powerful bigwigs in the
community.
Late 1980s - I had a habit of perusing the spiritual shelves whenever I would be
in a bookstore and was totally appalled to see new editions of The Knee of
Listening and The Method of the Siddhas out there all cleaned up and re-packaged
with a missionary slant. And all those name changes! And the Capital Letters!
Made me real glad I left when I did.
Mid 1990s - The Internet age was here and occasionally I would do a search on
"Free John" just to see what it would turn up. So I ran into the community's
original web pages and a lengthy essay by former member Scott Lowe called the
"The Strange Case of Franklin Jones", a quite accurate accounting of life in the
community immediately prior to my arrival there. I had a brief e-mail
correspondence with Scott after I read this.
2000 - Another internet search on "Free John" turns up Elias' forum. Holy cow!
There's still people out there interested in this man, which I find to be most
amazing.