Adi Da Knee of Listening 1971 part 1
Beezone has an online copy of the 1971 (I believe this was the first version publicly released) Knee of Listening, the first book written by Adi Da and his best known work. I stumbled across a copy of this book in the Hobart (yes Tasmania) Library in the early 1970’s and it blew my mind, I read it all in one day. I was a somewhat desperate seeker at the time around 17 years old, my head full of the traditional seeking and finding, methodology, still current in spirituality to this day. On first read, I loved the adventure, Adi Da‘s (then Franklin Jones) marvelous meetings with powerful beings, great forces and his wonderful shakti filled life and experiences. The imagery of great siddha’s and yogis’s such as the tough and earthy Rudi (Rudrananda), the powerful and enigmatic Baba Muktananda and the benign and incomprehensible Baba Nityananda was riveting, yet the ending of this book put me into revolt and deep disturbance (as I am sure it has many others) –The spiritual search and all its imagery and methodology are futile for the goal they seek — certainly not a popular message compared with the opposite tangent, beautifully described in Yogananda’s ” Autobiography of a Yogi ” So after first reading it several times–just to make sure I got this extremely (at the time) unpalatable message correct– I resolved to never go near it again!
Of course in spiritual life nothing is quite that simple, I had a very powerful dream about Adi Da around that time and continued to be haunted by the message of the Knee of Listening. I had a periphery involvement with Ananda Marga who had quite a strong presence in Hobart in the 70’s, I spoke to one of their Acharya’s about the shakti and its effects, to be fair I don’t think the man had any understanding of this phenomenon and dismissed it as “mind”, he told me to forget this nonsense, meditate twice a day for the rest of my life and “Moksha” ( liberation in the yogic system) is guaranteed !
Tags: knee of listening, shakti