By many, many other names: The many lives of the late Avatar Adi Da Samraj

Part 1

In the book that keeps on giving (to me at least), Robert Ellwood's Islands of the Dawn: The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand includes a two paragraph profile on the Johannine Daist Communion. I quickly became fascinated in trying to figure out why this group had a presence in New Zealand and why, as with soooooo many other groups I profile, the New Zealand branch of operations persists with an official centre of operations; a distinction that was as notable in its heyday as it is now. So, join me on yet another multi-part episode, as we explore the many names and lives of Johannine Daist/Adidam founder Franklin Jones, aka Avatar Adi Da Samraj, aka Bubba Free Love, aka…

You know what, let's get all the name changes out of the way before we actually talk theology and controversy. Over the course of his “career” as a spiritual teacher, Jones and his movement would undergo several name changes as a way to mark the spiritual progress of his work on earth.

According to the Encyclopedia of Hinduism (2007) the name change timeline is thus:

  • Late 1960s: Received the spiritual names of Dhyanananda and Love-Ananda from Swami Muktananada.
  • 1972: When his religious community got underway, he initially went by Franklin but soon went by Bubba Free John
  • 1979: Became Da Free John
  • 1986: Became Da Love-Ananda
  • Late 80s: Da Avabhasa (The bright)
  • 1990: Became Da Kalki
  • 1994: Adi Da Love-Ananda Samraj
  • 1995: Became Adi Da Samraj

Da Avadhoota, a likely play on the Sanskrit word avadhūta, is also referenced in some sources, while the Wikipedia page lists other name changes as Dau Loloma, Hridaya-Samartha Sat-Guru Da, and Santosha Da.

As per the Adidam organisation, changes in the group's name have been just as prolific:

The basic teaching of Jones was called the Way of Radical Understanding. Jones argued that everything is God, and the division between an individual and the divine is an illusion or a “psycho-social self contraction”. In order to break out of this self-contraction and reunite with the divine, or transcend, one should be in a devotional relationship with their spiritual master and move through the seven stages of life:

  • First Stage — "individuation/physical development"
  • Second Stage — "socialization"
  • Third Stage — "integration/mental development"
  • Fourth Stage — "spiritualization/Divine Communion"
  • Fifth Stage — "spiritual ascent"
  • Sixth Stage — "abiding in consciousness"
  • Seventh Stage — "Divine Enlightenment: awakening from all egoic limitations"

The fourth to sixth stages are the highest stages of human development, and are mostly obtained by saints, yogis and sages. The sixth stage is interesting as it is the exclusion of awareness of the outside world, in both its material and spiritual dimensions, but is non-permanent. With regards to the seventh stage, the aforementioned saints, yogis, and sages were aware of the seventh stage. The leader of the Joannine Diast Communion claimed he was the only person who had been born with the full capability to embody that level of awareness, and as the first seventh stage adept, he was also the only one who needed or was able to do so.

It must have been very lonely at the top for this guru, as no one would ever supersede them. But never fear dear reader! You too can taste transcendence! All you need to do is have some basic self-understanding and turn your devotion to the guru, in order to tune into the divine.

The man at the top of this new age pyramid? A middle-class art grad named Franklin Jones from Long Island, New York. Jones was born in 1939, and would claim that he sacrificed the reality of being in a state of perfect freedom and awareness of reality - what he would call the bright - at the age of two. He did so in order to identify with the mortality and baseness of humanity.

He also had the sort of baby photos any guru's PR department would die for.

Allegedly, a spiritual master in India named Upasani Baba prophesied that an all powerful Avatar would be born in a European country. Jones and his followers would later claim that he was the avatar in question, based on interpretations that “European” referred generally to all Western countries. Indian spiritual master Mehar Baba, who was a disciple of Upasani, also claimed to be the subject of the prophecy.

Jones always had an inclination towards the spiritual. He had aspirations to be a Lutheran Minister through high school, but dropped that when he went to College in 1957. He obtained a BA in Philosophy from a respectable university, Columbia University, in 1961, and then an MA in English Literature from Stanford in 1963. It was during his postgraduate studies that he started developing what would later be the founding ideas of his movements, and would read theosophy, psychology, and books by Edgar Cayce.

But, rather than become a monk, Jones made different conclusions:

“I knew that no other possibility was open to me but that of exhaustive experience. There appeared to be no single experience or authority among us that was simply true. And I thought, “If God exists, He will not cease to exist by any action of my own, but, if I devote myself to all possible experience, He will indeed find some way, in some one or a complex of my experiences or my openness itself, to reveal Himself to me.” Thereafter, I devoted myself utterly and entirely to every possible kind of exploit. No experience posed a barrier to me. There were no taboos, no extremes to be prevented.”

I mean, this is fairly refreshing to read in light of the disingenuous moralising of other gurus and church leaders.

He also got to take a lot of psychedelic drugs as part of paid drug trials, but it was largely his girlfriend, Nina, who supported him financially through her work as a school teacher. After some time in California, Jones returned to New York and was briefly swept up in the same cultural interest in eastern philosophy and practices that helped Jones' contemporary Sri Chinmoy grow his own loyal following. The first major influence on Jones' life was an antique dealer named Albert Rudolph, who in turn was a disciple of Bhagavan Nityananda and Swami Muktananda. Rudolph encouraged Jones to get clean, get a job, and get married. Jones was in a Lutheran seminary school in 1966-67 when he had a life changing panic attack; He had his mind blown by the realisation of the totality of reality without the ego, but his professors were not on the same page. Jones soon left the seminary and tried his hand with a Russian Orthodox Seminary, before taking a more mainstream job with PAN AM as a means to fund his pilgrimage to see Muktanada. Jones and his wife also joined Scientology, which led to him cutting off contact with Rudolph - but his sojourn with the e-meter enthusiasts only lasted for a year.

Jones did make a brief visit to India in 1969, where Muktananda authorised Jones to train others into the practice of Siddha Yoga and gave him the first of what would be many spiritual names, Dhyanananda and Love-Ananda. However, when Jones returned to Muktananda's ashram in 1970, he was displeased to see that the ashram had gotten more popular with Westerners and was changing because of that, including a disinterest in Jones on the part of Muktananda. Dismayed by the emptiness of this experience, Jones went to visit the shrine of Nityananda where he allegedly had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who allegedly directed him to extend his OE to include a pilgrimage throughout Europe.

Franklin Jones in 1969

Jones eventually returned to the US later in 1970, and came to the conclusion that his goal in life was to recapture the bright that he had abandoned in infancy and share it with the world. He started with a bookstore/spiritual centre in Los Angeles, first called Shree Hridayam Satsang, and then the more internationally recognised Dawn Horse Books. In the meditation hall inside the centre, Jones would sit in front of small groups and transmit his happiness. Through his combination of guru/disciple-ship, pop psychology, and counter-culture insights, Jones began to accumulate a number of followers and start a formal ministry that would initially go by the name of The Dawn Horse Communion, and he also assumed the first of several self-given names, Bubba Free John. Many of the followers joined Jones in a communal living situation, while others moved en masse to San Francisco.

It would be a tipping point in other aspects of his life as well, as Jones divorced Nina (although she remained a devoted follower of his) and officially severed ties with his own former guru, Muktananda. However, while Jones claimed to serve the role of spiritual friend to his followers, some recall that that friendship was nonetheless formal and distant; much like Muktananda was as his own influence grew. In late 1973, after demanding his students live a restrictive and abstinent lifestyle, Jones introduced a cycle of celebrations that lasted through to July 1974: after periods of abstinence, Jones would allow his followers to indulge in all the things they had been depriving themselves of: drugs, alcohol, sex, “junk” food, you name it. Then, devotees report, Jones would unleash his spiritual power that elevated his students to a higher state of awareness. Some followers had no such divine revelations, while others had visions and other bodily changes.

Franklin Jones in 1973

Jones appears to have based this series of events from the tradition of “crazy wisdom” that appears in medieval Sanskrit, where holy or wise people are so overcome with holiness that their behaviour appears mad because in their enlightenment they have truly cast off worldly concerns. In his book Holy Madness: The shock tactics and radical teachings of crazy-wise adepts, holy fools, and rascal gurus, Georg Feuerstein compared these parties to what he called Tantric Feast; Under the guidance of a guru, students would break the taboos of Hindu society to bring about a change in consciousness.

As fun and stereotypically ‘70s as these epic parties sound, the after-effects of this period would haunt Jones and his followers for decades to come. In 1974, Jones called on his students to disrupt their “cultic” associations with each other as he believed that relationships were entered into for the sake of the ego, and thus were a barrier to the journey to transcendence. Called the “Saturday Night Massacre”, Jones ordered his members to break their marriage vows and forget their attachments and jealousies. What followed was an era of the group marked by events both boundary-breeching and bizarre in their childishness; orgies, pornographic film productions, and drinking binges punctuated with pranks and food fights.

All of it in the name of gaining “crazy wisdom” from a “crazy” adept. In his podcast series Dear Franklin Jones, Jonathan Hirsch explores the aftermath of these parties (and more) in interviews with current and former followers, including his own parents.

On July 7th, Jones declared that the lessons he taught during this time should be enough for his students to allow them to be responsible for themselves and as a collective. For his part, Jones declared that he was retiring, and hoped that his students would only require his spiritual presence rather than his physical one. Of course, this never lasted long, and he would participate in the “sexual theater” of 1974 again, although on a smaller scale and only with his trusted inner circle. Meaning that many in the wider community had to maintain their ascetic life, while the guru partied. Jones' teachings from this period are captured in his third book called Garbage and the Goddess: The Last Miracles and Final Spiritual Instructions of Bubba Free John. Jones' intended message was that one had to become unattached from the finite realm (the “garbage”), as well as experience elevated mystical experiences (the “Goddess”, the feminine or dynamic principle of experience) in order to reach enlightenment.

Images from Garbage and the Goddess

While the party was over for most followers, the success of the book attracted people who were more interested in the parties recorded in the book, rather than the spiritual message Jones claimed to have wanted to make. To that end, it is one the few books in Jones' bibliography that was withdrawn from market and not rereleased.

Jones and his group came under scrutiny in late 1978 in the fallout of the Jonestown massacre. Many people made connections between Jim and Franklin, but the effect Jonestown had on mainstream culture was clear: as Hirsch contemplated on his podcast, having a guru was no longer cool, but actually kind of dangerous. Three weeks after Jonestown, Franklin Jones gave a talk on his own criticism about cultism, and the problems with joining cultic groups.

In our next newsletter, I'll explore the transformation and scandals of the 1980s, the New Zealand connection, and where the group is now after the death of Franklin.