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by Charles Carreon
©
Introduction: This essay was originally written in 2003, and posted on
the American-Buddha.com website. The epilogue was written today, June
13, 2009.
Just the other day, for the first time, I found myself
interested in Franklin Jones. I found this book of his, The Promised
God-Man Is Here, at “The Bookwagon”, down in the Ashland Shopping
Center. It's a big book, like a Michener novel, with a picture of a fat
white man with his palms facing forward at chest level. He's wearing a
saffron robe on his upper body, his legs and knees are bare, his head is
slightly back-tilted, and he seems to either be beaming spiritual energy
at us, or keeping his distance. Since he's sitting in the midst of an
aura of wavy gold lines, I think beaming is intended to be conveyed. The
purity of the subject addressed by the book is signaled by the white
cover, associated in Tibetan iconography with pride, vajra, the north
and the god realm.
The book is by "Carolyn Lee, Ph.D.," one of the numerous
female devotees who have cast themselves on the funeral pyre of
Franklin's love. Cause he's a ramblin' man, a complete unknown, a rollin'
stone, a rompin' stompin' heaping hunk of burnin' love. That's Franklin,
Lord above, and as on earth so in heaven, and also at the seven-eleven.
This man is bad! He is so bad he should be locked in a cage with Dr.
Laura and Judge Judy, and forced to satisfy their unnatural lusts. Or
required to share a lifeboat with Chogyam Trungpa, Krishnamurti, and
Madonna for company, and a package of beef jerky and a bottle of Crown
Royal to liven up the experience. Just imagine how many ways that could
turn out.
Bubba Free John was Franklin's moniker when first I heard
of him, back in the days when "The Knee of Listening" was the kind of
thing the older hippies worried about. I was only worried that I wasn't
getting enough time in the sack with sexy chicks, and serious religion,
like serious politics, did not hold my attention. Now I find out that,
for all of the religious overlay, his concerns were much like my own,
but more grandiose. His recent outpourings indicate that he is now even
more convinced of his eternal worth to humanity than he was back in the
hippie era, but even then he knew he deserved more than the average guy.
He made a career out of stealing women from gullible young hippies who
could be buffaloed. The prettier the girls, the better, and Franklin
established a system for getting the couple stoned and drunk, having his
pals separate the guy from the chick, after which Franklin would seduce
her and initiate her into Franklin-worship. Later on, Franklin's
assistants got a share of the flesh they helped bring to the altar.
Being ready to drop your drawers and get physical was
very much a part of the Franklin scene. Going with his strengths,
Franklin accumulated as many as nine official wives, a condition bound
to incite envy in those of small experience. Franklin's power over women
gave him power over men, and the clique of seducers at the core of his
gang gave him the macho support that provokes swooning among members of
the fairer sex.
Franklin cuckolded large numbers of men, who stood silent
and helpless as their women shucked off their clothes and walked into
bliss. The men, deprived of their testicles, couldn't help but hang
around. They could lessen the pain by pretending that God had taken
their woman. If they pretended Franklin was divine, they could hang
around and try to win back the love that had been whisked away from
them. They might even get one of Franklin's other castoff women.
On the other hand, if a woman had money, Franklin could
always separate her from her man by tossing a new woman his way.
Then, she would look to Franklin to heal the wound. Franklin could help
her understand that the new relationship was also a good thing. She just
needed to open her heart. Keeping her purse closed wasn't helping.
That's the way it is in a religious community. You open up your heart,
your purse, your legs. Wherever your treasure is, you share it.
This simple formula for a happy and successful cult kept
Franklin fed, stoned and caressed for around thirty years. In The
Promised God-Man Is Here he again recorded and revised the history
of his achievements for posterity, laying out a feast for his devotees.
If you were not a believer, this book won’t make you one, but it can
still be enjoyed as a study in psychopathology, in which the true
character of the patient's delusion is gradually revealed by the steady
accumulation of character details.
Never content with one name where an evolving string of
them will do, this avatar morphed from Franklin Jones to Bubba Free John
to Da Love-Ananda, to Da, Adi-Da, and finally Ruchira Avatar Adi Da
Samraj. Rarely able to reside in one place for more than a few years,
Franklin up and left his faithless pseudo-disciples in a huff on
numerous occasions. Of course, some say he fled Marin County in order to
avoid more heat arising out of lawsuits against him by abused students,
but I think he just got in a snit. There was pace and staging to
Franklin's inner freak show. He managed to keep his devotees on pins and
needles about his dreams, his heart palpitations, his swoons, his
depressions, his crying jags, his decaying health, his mission to save
the world. They feared his judgments, the cruel accusation that they
were undermining his mission by failing to generate devotion, cash,
contacts, the things a messiah needs. How can you save a world that
doesn't want to be saved? The things a guru has to do with his own
hands! Are we out of Valium again?!
Yes, he confronted them about it! The slacking, the fake
devotion, the heel-dragging, the complete lack of concern for the fact
that there were FOUR BILLION PEOPLE on the earth who NEVER HEARD OF DA!
WAITING! HE REMINDED THEM: THIS IS INCARNATION THEY ARE WAITING FOR,
BUT DA'S DISCIPLES are SLACKING! Back in the mid-eighties, when they
first moved to Fiji, Franklin told them, he would MAKE HIS MOVE! Well,
he did! But did they? Nooooooo. They just sat there with their
simpy devoted faces and LET HIM DOWN!
It was true. Da was God, the baby God. Sitting in a
diaper full of shit, screaming for somebody to wipe his butt. Waving his
rattle-sceptre, screaming for food, comfort, adulation. His disciples
did their job. They adored him and shut him up. They did it in shifts
until he died. That was the task his devotees took on, and as Da was
their witness, they fulfilled it.
Epilogue
On November
27, 2008, Franklin Jones was working on an art installation of massive
painted aluminum constructions. Inflated estimations of the artistic
heft of his output had already been floated, and so it appeared that Adi
Da was about to enter his Warhol phase. With the international art
market tanking, his entry into the field was well-timed, since artists
able to fund their own shows and grease the publicity machinery that
sustains buzz and prices are a rarity, and good reviews could be bought
cheaply. Then Time, that wounds all heels, pulled its rug smoothly out
from under the feet of the man, and at the age of 69, the bullshit
ceased to flow. At least from the mouth of Adi Da himself, which had
ceased to produce words about the same time as his heart stopped
beating. His devotees, of course, had just begun. Using the Internet,
they began proclaiming on his behalf:
As devotees know, Beloved Bhagavan Adi Da Samraj is a
Divine Yogi. There is a long history of such beings having very
unconventional “death events” or moments in their lives. We have seen
this in Beloved Bhagavan’s Case in many circumstances in the past -- the Ruchira Dham or Lopez Island Event, and the Divine Emergence, as merely
two of them. Certainly it is the hope of this moment, as we write, that
Beloved Bhagavan will Re-Enter His Body and begin a new Phase of His
Work. It is our hope and intention that He will Re-Animate the Body and
wake up.
Franklin Jones, being merely human, did not “wake up”
from his heart attack. But those who had known and loved him consoled
themselves on a website dedicated to his memory by posting audio
recordings with a focus on the following message:
That Adi Da will always be eternally present, and
furthermore, that He has provided us with all the means necessary to
locate Him, making His Presence forever available to us.
At this point, our jeering and laughter reach their
proper end, because the absurdity of Adi Da’s self-promotion, and the
slavishness of his disciples’ adulation stand revealed in their
completeness, and whatever there was to expose about the man in life,
death has taken the laboring oar, and we may rest from our exertions.
This epilogue thus is properly concluded with an epitaph, and since
Jones was a false guru from the sixties, made of ordinary American clay,
his epitaph from the pen of an American boy, whose music will play on
and on long after Jones’ silly sermons are forgotten:
“And castles made of sand
Slips into the sea
Eventually…”
Jimi Hendrix
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