Adi Da Causal

There is a lot in the 1971 version that is not in the latest edition of the Knee of Listening ( 2004) on the other hand there is also a huge amount added to the later version. Adi Da ( then Franklin Jones)briefly associated with Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) -a quite famous instigator and inspirer of Western Youth to go “Eastward”, after he abandoned the limitations of drug induced consciousness expansion, this sympathetic and prophetic quote from Adi Da proved to be accurate

“When I met him he was animated and storied at Kesey’s, but, like myself, about to enter on a long adventure into the kinds of spiritual consciousness promoted in the East. We were to meet again in 1970, in the company of the same Guru. But he seems ready to pass forever into the habit of Indian devotion, whereas, for me, the paths of yoga, of occultism, of mysticism and all of the tradition of that remarkable consciousness I was about to experience would only be another brief stage in the simplicity of understanding”

Another famed but passing association of his time “on the Beach” was Ken Kesey, described here

“There was Ken Kesey, a novelist who had written at the Stanford workshop and who has since gained notoriety as an exponent of drug culture.”

When Adi Da stated “We were to meet again in 1970, in the company of the same Guru ..” in relation to Baba Ram Dass, he was referring to the 1970 visit of Baba Muktananda to the US described here

Baba and Rudi arrived in the company of “Baba Ram Dass.” Ram Dass was previously known as Richard Alpert, the man who, along with Timothy Leary and others, had done much to create the current “drug-culture” among younger people. I had met him several years before at the home of Ken Kesey in northern California. Since then, like myself, he had been led into the experience of Indian spirituality.

Ram Dass was now trying to reverse the karma of those who had become devoted to drug culture. He wanted to turn them to the devotional path of Indian spirituality. He had met Baba in New York and subsequently volunteered to engineer Baba’s California visit, as Rudi had done in New York.

I met them all quite openly, but without any desire or motivation to become involved in the whole drama of Baba’s American tour. They stayed for several days in Pacific Palisades, then on for two weeks in northern California and Utah. They returned again at the end of October, and flew on to Hawaii November 3rd, my birthday.

I was interested in seeing how Baba’s Presence would affect me and how he would respond to my own discovery. I sat with him while large groups of people chanted devotions and gazed at the Guru. I held his foot, I chanted, and I meditated.

In the first hours of his visit he blessed me with his peculiar form of the Shakti. And I moved with the experience, abandoning myself utterly to the familiar physical movements and the merging in the mind. I shook and fell on the floor. I watched Baba. I enjoyed the communication of his Shakti. I listened to him advise people to turn within and seek the “blue pearl” and the “blue person” in the sahasrar, the seat of consciousness in the head. I listened to him detail the various forms of vision, internal sounds and experiences, and I experienced them along with him.

In my own case as a young man reading this remarkable book in the early 70’s, in the remote cloisters of Hobart Library, perhaps the one description that had the most impact on me ( Adi Da was writing about the various effects of the Shakti) was this, a literal undeniable miraculous physical effect, witnessed by another. There was no mistaking it, flowers cannot move from a nailed position.

“These manifestations were not simply internal. Frequently my perceptions coincided with certain external events. Thus, a friend once came to see me after a long stay at the Ashram. We bowed to Baba’s picture and felt the Shakti fill the room. Just then, the flowers that were nailed about the portrait flew off and landed at our feet.”