THE KNEE OF LISTENING
The Life and Understanding of Franklin
Jones
Copyright 1971 By
Franklin Jones
All rights
reserved
Chapter 6:
The passage to the Guru
Nina and I left California sometime
in the last weeks of June, 1964. My mood was one of intense
excitement and expectation. There was no doubt at all in me
that I was about to begin the ultimate adventure of my life.
I was willing to make any sacrifice and to go any here in
the world in order to abandon myself to the sources of our
highest good.
The trip itself was a comedy of
frustrations. We traveled in an old Chevrolet station wagon
that seemed to explode on schedule every hundred miles. It
was loaded to the windows with the belongings we felt
necessary for life in New York. There were boxes of books,
blankets and sleeping bags, various clothing, pots and pans.
And three necessary cats.
Up until this time I hadn't been
entirely without teachers. I had learned from many people
and environments. Now I was seeking a teacher who could lead
me into a whole new cheer of experience and knowledge . I
was in pursuit of the Guru, a master of the very Self of the
universe. But I had also known a Guru of a certain kind for
nearly two years. I had even lived with him. He was my cat,
Robert.
If a man is sensitive to the
movements everywhere within and without him, every kind of
object or creature becomes a communication. He cannot help
but receive the teaching, under any circumstances, if he is
a real listener. Indeed, even the most inert objects know
the same bliss of unqualified existence that is the root of
our own consciousness.
My own way of life had been an
absolute devotion to this way of listening, so that I had
never before required a Guru to teach me in the formal and
traditional manner. In fact I didn't even know what a "Guru"
was until these last days. And even if I had heard of such
persons or matters before I would have considered them
impossibilities, like Christ.
Thus, my experience throughout life
progressed freely and profoundly, always generating new
forms of clarity and awakening. As a result, I was fully
capable of finding teacher in the most oddball sources, and
I could give myself to be taught by such sources just as
consciously and even formally as any monastic disciple in
the "ashram" of a Swami founded in the ancient Scriptures
and rules.
For nearly two years, then, I had
been very attentive to my tomcat, Robert. At the end of my
year at Stanford I went to say good-bye to two old friends,
Cynthia and Vito, with whom I had shared many hours of drug
adventure and conversations about art and literature. Their
cat had just given up a litter of kittens, and they were
making the usual attempt to pawn them off to their
friends.
I told them I was going back to New
York for the summer and didn't really know when I would be
able to provide a home for a cat. But when I looked at the
litter of kittens I saw a little one with huge eyes, a dark
one with long hair that sat in deep calm and watched me. I
fell in love with him immediately, and Nina and I pleaded
with our friends to keep him for us.
The long summer passed as I have
told you. And by the time we found our house in the redwood
forest the following September we had entirely forgotten
that we owned a cat. But one day Cynthia and Vito arrived
with Robert. We were absolutely happy to have him, and so
grateful and surprised that our friends had kept him for us
all that time. I named him Robert purely out of humor. He
was such a strong animal presence, with an economy and grace
that made our idiot brand of human living seem so
unconscious and confused. I gave him a human name just to
remind myself of the difference in him .
Robert was quite a large cat now.
He had matured beautifully, and all of his instincts were
wild. He seemed perfectly placed in himself. We decided that
he should have a lady cat for his consort, and so we were
happy when some other friends in Big Sur offered the pick of
their new litter.
The Big Sur litter contained only a
pair of orange tiger cats, both females, with twin markings.
We took them both. And we brought them home to Robert
so that he could enjoy his ladies in the wild.
Robert and his ladies always lived
completely independent of us. He left food for them, but
they came and went at will. Their manner of living was so
pure and intelligent, so direct an enjoyment, with such
effortless capability for survival, that Nina and I soon
became enamored of them. We watched them constantly in the
sheer pleasure of seeing life lived as an instinctive
perfection. Their solutions to the hour by hour
confrontations that humanity tends to by-pass or escape were
an example to us of unproblematic existence.
When we left our home the redwoods
and moved on to the beach at Tunitas, our cats were just
drawing into their maturity. We were wondering if Robert
would choose only one of the lady cats for his consort, and
if this would create problems with the remaining one. But we
were not surprised when both of the lady cats began to swell
up in obvious pregnancy.
At the time this seemed to me a
perfectly moral solution to Robert's domestic situation. He
seemed to love and tend them both completely and without
conflict, so that he appeared to me a master of domestic
peace, even a model of sanity and strength to human
householders, who always seem unable to solve the problems
created by their traditional and conceptual monogamy.
One evening I heard Robert and the
lady cats hissing and growling in the yard. I went out and
found the three of them surrounding a fourth. It was a young
gray male who had somehow wandered into Robert's territory.
The three cats stood almost motionless in a circle about the
fourth, and their primitive signals continued for what must
have been several hours, even while Nina and I passed to
sleep.
In the morning all was quiet.
Robert and the ladies were lying in various parts of the
house asleep. I went outside to enjoy the morning sea, and I
came upon the place where they had surrounded the stranger
the evening before. I made an awesome discovery. In the
center of the circle where they had stood there was a
perimeter of gray hairs, and in the center were stains of
blood and fragments of the inner parts of the dead animal.
The cats had apparently cannibalized the intruder.
I showed
the place to Nina, and we were really astonished. But our
cats came out gentle in the morning, showing no signs of the
sacrifice in signals of guilt or anger or lust. They seemed
to us an ancient triangle of righteousness. And their
justice confounded all our reasons, so that we could only
admire them as beings who seemed to enjoy the free
consciousness of higher laws that all humanity had long ago
forgot.
But something had occurred in the
mutual life of our cats that they were about to solve
according to their peculiar laws. The ladies were fully
pregnant now, and they had begun to keep a distance from one
another. That evening Robert remained in the house with only
one of the ladies. The other had disappeared.
For several days we looked
everywhere for the second lady cat. But finally we decided
that she must have wandered away or been killed somewhere on
the highway above. We even supposed that Robert may have
chosen the one and banished the other to her own survival.
We had no idea that he had only found a way to create his
domain in two entirely separate realms.
For a full year Robert remained
with his single consort. Her kittens were born and grown.
Robert would leave at sunrise and pass over into tie hills,
but every evening at sunset I would hear him calling as he
descended the rise behind the house. He would return to eat
and sleep with us and his lady until the following morning.
We assumed that this was merely the
pattern of his wildness, and that he must have spent his
days wandering and hunting. His consort always remained
behind in the area of the house, and he would often bring
her a bird, a rabbit or a mouse to eat. Or she would capture
some small animal just at sunset and offer it to him when he
returned home.
After a year of this we had settled
fully into the cycle of the lives of our cats and never
expected to see the other lady cat again. But one day I
noticed something a little strange about the lady who
remained at home. Her hair seemed somehow furled and matted
in an unusual way. At first I only noticed this and simply
accepted it as the result of her climbing about in the
woods. But the next day I examined her more closely, for she
had also acquired some kind of new intensity. Her paws
stretched open and she constantly touched my feet, insisting
on my attention.
When I picked her up I saw that it
could not be Robert's domestic bride. Her hair was wild and
full, and its ends were bleached by weather. Her exposed
nose and the pads of her feet were also bleached by water
and air and sunlight, and they were all freckled by spots
that I knew did not belong to the lady who remained behind.
And even the edges of her eyelids were pink and white. Her
eyes were wild as only those could be that had lived and
survived in wilderness.
It was obviously the long lost lady
cat. When Nina came home we looked her over together. And we
welcomed Robert in the evening. He preened her and loved
her, and we began to understand the intelligence of his way
of life. When the two ladies had first become pregnant,
Robert must have led one into the wild. And afterwards he
divided his time between them, tending one in the wilderness
by day and returning to the other at night. Again we
marveled at this justice, this untroubled, thoughtful and
inexplicably kind order of their survival.
When we awoke the next morning
Robert and his wild lady had come bearing gifts. Sitting in
the top of a storage basket surrounded by soft cloths were
four wide-eyed baby cats, two dark and two orange, with long
soft hair. They were four of the most beautiful and fresh
creatures I have ever seen. Nina and I laughed joyfully at
them. Robert and his lady had also produced miracles in the
alchemy of wilderness.
As the days passed we also saw what
must have been a further development of Robert's plan of
living. The lady cat who had remained domestic the previous
year disappeared, as her sister had done. I think it was
their plan to exchange their states of living and carry on
the same pattern as before. But we found the lady dead near
the highway. She had been struck by a car while moving off
into the wild.
It was about this time that Nina
and I began to prepare to move to New York. Robert's
children surrounded us in great numbers now. Along with the
new four there were at least five others from the domestic
lady. And there was another stray that seemed to wander in
from nowhere but who was allowed to remain. We named him
Sanjuro, because he was such a tough, self-contained rascal,
and he handled himself like the samurai depicted by Toshiro
Mifune in Japanese movies. We had also acquired a little
black female whose manner was irresistible. She was a little
stalk of a creature with tall legs, and we knew her as "the
fastest cat in the West." We called her "the Bitty."
All in all there were about a dozen
cats around us, living in various degrees of dependence and
wildness. As we prepared to leave we gave them to various
friends. On the last day we gave two of Robert's "wild
flowers" to Ken Kesey. But we kept Robert and his wild lady
and the Bitty.
Thus, on the day we left
California, we packed our belongings in the station wagon
along with the three cats for the long drive across America.
We couldn't part with these companions. Their way of life
had become a necessary vision to us, a sign and at least a
memory of the intelligent wilderness that was the example of
beauty and sanity by which we ourselves were moved and
consoled in California.
Robert himself was nothing less to
me than my best friend and mentor. He was more, not less
than human to me. I watched him with fascination. I followed
him through woods and watched him hunt. I tried to
understand his curious avoidance of the sea, and how he
could sit on the cliff above the sea, watching the evening
sun, and the wind blowing his hairs heroically about his
head. The mystery of his pattern of living, his ease and
justice the economy of all his means, the untouchable
absence of all anxiety, the sudden and adequate power he
brought to every circumstance without exceeding the
intensity required, all of his ways seemed to me an epitome
of the genius of life. And he communicated with me so
directly that I was always disarmed. He would call me when
he returned in the evening. He would touch me whenever he
needed my presence. He would lie with me as if with
conscious intention to console me with his living presence.
And I loved him as deeply as the universe itself.
I couldn't leave such friends
behind. yet I was aware that my adventure was about to be
renewed. I was seeking a teacher for a whole new order of my
mind. Hereafter the wilderness could not be the model for my
seeking or my healing. In New York the cats would have to
live in an environment whose unreality and absence of
instinctual intelligence, not to mention the absence of
human intelligence, was a critical problem even for human
beings. They would have to survive in an artificial
enclosure, the hardward of human evolution. There would be
no possibility for the hunt, for natural solitude, or for
any of the native signs and obstacles of wilderness that my
animals had mastered even an aeon ago.
Even as we traveled we realized the
dilemma of our cats. Several times the car blew up and we
were stranded in the desert. The tires would explode at
will, and we had often to remain stranded for hours without
food or moving air, in pitiless heat. The cats strained and
gagged in the breathless air with dry lungs, so that we were
afraid they could not survive.
When we finally arrived in New York
I went to my parents to be reconciled. And Nina and I found
an apartment in the lower end of Greenwich Village, on
Houston Street. It was a dark place with the enclosed odor
of a long-degraded humanity that had been confused with
refuse, immobility and death. I began to look for my new
teacher, and we settled into our new, unnatural order of
living.
The cats had to remain contained in
the apartment, except for the relative freedom of a rear
window, a fire escape, and an adjacent roof that could be
reached with a small jump of perhaps two feet. I was afraid
for my cats in this environment. We were four stories above
the ground, and a slight miscalculation could mean a fall to
death. But I considered that it was better for them to enjoy
even this little freedom, and I consigned them to the
survival power that had been demonstrated in wilderness.
After a few weeks I could feel the advancing presence of
what I sought. I knew it was perhaps only a matter of days
until I would meet my teacher. It was a rainy evening, the
fourth of July. I returned from a walk in Washington Square.
Firecrackers and a few amateur fireworks tended to draw my
attention into distant streets and alleys, and into the sky
above. When I came in the door to the building the superin-
tendent met me. Robert had fallen from the roof. Since no
one was home, he had called the A.S.P.C.A. to take him away.
I asked if Robert was dead. He said he wasn't sure, but he
pointed to the fire escapes high above, as if to say: How
alive could he be after such a fall?
Nina had been out shopping during
that time. I went upstairs and found that she had returned.
We called the Animal Shelter, and they told us Robert was
dead. We turned away from one another in separate sorrow and
wept. It was a grief more profound than any I had ever
known. The death of my little dog when I was a boy had taken
me by surprise. Then I hadn't expected death, and when it
came I was moved to follow her to the place of continuous
life beyond the world. But Robert's death was no surprise at
all. The news of it came to one who bore the knowledge of
death, so that when it came there was no movement in me
toward any other place. There was only the incomparable
sorrow of a broken span of living. There was only the
absence of that dear one. His mortality appeared in a world
whose livingness I had come to know as far exceeding the
image and power of death. But, for all the sphere of living
energy that I knew informed the world and was its truth,
there remained the fact of this end, this disappearance,
this implication of truth within the blissful void.
I recognized that Robert had been
my teacher in the wilderness. He had filled my eye and owned
a thread of attention in my heart. I knew him and he knew
me. Nothing could replace that state of life or console its
absence. I treated him in death like a saint. I had him
cremated and kept his ashes for some time before I buried
them outside my parents' house. I observed my grief and,
kept my mind focused in the hope of new events. I knew that
Robert's passing was the sign of the arrival of my teacher
in the human world.
In the weeks that preceded the
event of my meeting with my teacher I had informed myself
with every kind of study. I had passed from the remarkable
news that life was expanded beyond mortal phenomena. It was
no longer a matter of proving such things to be true. I was
certain enough of them on the basis of experience and
reliable communication that I did not pursue phenomena
themselves. I had increased my knowledge of such things to
include a new viewpoint, a more inclusive philosophy along
the lines proposed by mystical and spiritual literature. My
reading encompassed the literate works of Christian saints
and the classical writings of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism,
Hinduism, Vedanta and yoga. I was acquainted with the works
of Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti, Sri Ramakrishna, and Sri
Aurobindo. I felt particularly drawn to these more oriental
teachers, whose path was liberation and fulfilment of a
dramatic and miraculous kind, free of the dogmatic and
ritualistic limitations of symbolic and traditional
religion. I felt that the importance of Christ was not his
image and the motivations of his following, but the very
nature of his freedom and power as a fundamental gift of all
beings.
I was attendant mainly to the yogic
paths and to the truth proposed alike in Vedanta and
Buddhism. The ways of discrimination and practice proposed
by Vedanta and Buddhism, even Zen Buddhism, seemed to me
unavailable or artificial. They seemed to require a path
apart from the constant and usual action. But the one truth
of the Self, the non dual Reality, the unqualified Divine
that included all things, seemed to me the highest
expression of my own experience, whether in the "bright" of
my childhood or in the peculiar revelations of my youth in
college and in California. Thus, I was moved to seek a
teacher, a guide who could lead me into the full
consciousness of this primary truth, with all its
capabilities and joy. And such a teacher would rightly, it
seemed to me then, be adept in the yogic processes and in
the functions of higher consciousness that seemed to me the
practical way of enjoying what was symbolically represented
in the cool Scriptures of Vedanta and Buddhism. Curiously
enough, my reading then as always had seemed to be dictated
by the laws of my own necessity. What is given me to read is
always appropriate and immediately consequential to the
manner of my present development.
Thus, as the day of my meeting with
my teacher approached, I began to read works that dealt with
the peculiar yoga of the "Kundalini Shakti." I read such
works as The Serpent Power by Sir John Woodroffe, and I
found in them keys to many of my own experiences. The
descriptions of the various "chakras" or spiritual and
creative centers in the body, and the details of experiences
generated in each stage of spiritual ascent brought a
clarity of order to the progress of many of my own seemingly
arbitrary states.
I saw that what I called the
"bright" was a fundamental spiritual consciousness in which
the whole "chakra body" was awake and open to the intuitive
faculties of energy and light. And my experience in college
appeared as a sudden awakening of the Shakti, the basic and
conscious energy that manifests and leads back to the
highest source of consciousness, the Self, or Siva that is
eternally calm.
I knew that my own path of life and
the meaning of all life was in this process of Siva-Shakti,
the endless unfolding and return of consciousness, energy
and experience, and its consistent foundation in the pure
infinity of unqualified, transcendent being. Thus, I began
to expect a teacher who would lead me further into a more
conscious, natural and regulated revelation of this same
process.
I had
read the work of Paramahansa Yogananda as we drove across
country. I found in him a curiously sane and beautiful
example of the kind of life and experience I needed to touch
as my own. But I knew that I required a teacher who was
presently alive to guide me through my peculiar problems of
seeking.
I was only uncertain of the precise
direction of such seeking. The fundamental spiritual path as
it is proposed in the various literature's seemed to divide
at a certain point. The typical motive of the Oriental
teachings was in the direction of an absolute liberation
from all forms of experience and life consciousness. Such
teaching is typical of Vedanta and Buddhism, in the
classical works of Zen masters and such modern saints or
Avatars as Ramakrishna and Maharshi.
On the other hand, the teachings of
Christianity, of Western occultism, and of such Eastern
saints as Sri Aurobindo indicated a path whose goal was in
life or at least not radically opposed to life. They drew on
the ultimate perception of all the Scriptures which
variously state that this is "God's plan and creation,"
"this is That," "Nirvana and samsara are the same," "there
is only one, without a second." They proposed a sacrificial
existence of surrender and reception wherein life is moved
toward a perfect vision or evolution. I found even in the
mind of the iconoclast, Krishnamurti, a sense of life that
is not divorced from the process of existence. And, though I
desired greatly the incomparable peace of highest knowledge,
I tended to sympathize with this latter path of realization
and creativity whose purposes are a Divine Life rather than
a pure separation into absoluteness.
This problem of direction, which
has always been one of the most fundamental in my progress,
was motivated in me as I sought for my teacher. And it was
to form the basis for my first real questions when I met
him.
When we arrived in New York I began
to search for this teacher with peculiar certainty. I didn't
so much seek for him by effort as watch and listen for him
according to certain signs that I had learned. The vision
was clear to me that I would find him in an oriental art
store. So Nina and I went about the practical matters of
founding a household and a living, while I watched for him.
The move to New York was a shock to
us both in many ways. Our country life of wilderness was
past. Robert's death signified many things, the passage from
an old order to a new. I awaited a new teacher and a new way
of life. And the city life of humanity also stood in
contrast to the wilderness and natural rule by which Nina
and I had always lived. The material and mortal philosophies
had died in me, and the transition in the wilderness, the
exploitation of instinctual, animal and passionate laws
seemed inappropriate, not only to the great city, but also
to the new order of spiritual life to which we were
inclined.
I was quite confused by all of
this. The new way of life seemed to require a kind of purity
and enforced morality that was unknown to me or my cats. I
began to doubt my way of life. The kind of self exploitation
by which I lived and wrote began to seem immoral. Perhaps it
only created obstacles to the attainment of what I would now
possess.
I thought perhaps I should leave
Nina. After all, the way of spiritual life was largely taken
by celibates and highly disciplined saints. I became
overwhelmed with my lack of discipline. I had rarely worked
for a living in my life. I had never really supported myself
or anyone else. I was a libertine, a drinker, a drug user, a
passionate madman All of these emotions turned in me. It
became September. On the Sunday afternoon of the Labor Day
weekend my parents were driving us back to New York. We had
been spending the weekend with them on Long Island. We were
driving down Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, just a few
blocks from our apartment on Houston Street. As we passed
down the relatively deserted streets, I saw a small store on
the west side of the street. There was a large sign above
with the name "Rudi" and several written characters that
looked like Chinese calligraphy. The window of the store was
full of oriental sculpture and painting. As I looked at it I
became instantly certain that this was the place where I
would find a teacher.
After my parents left us at home,
Nina and I walked back to the store. It was only a small
store, and it was unceremoniously filled and even cluttered
with thousands of pieces of sculpture from all over the
Orient. There was a huge Buddha seated on a lotus in the
window. Standing in the rear of the store was a colossal
wooden Bodhisattva, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet tall,
holding a lotus in its hand and a crystal jewel in its
forehead. Everywhere were standing Buddhas, dancing saints,
and portraits of ferocious and sublime deities.
There was an aura of feeling and of
light surrounding the store, as if all of these sublime
entities had gathered to generate a center of force for any
who were ready to recognize it. I told Nina that this was
certainly the place I had envisioned and, as we left, I
planned to return the next day, during business hours.
The next day we returned in the
early morning. The door to the shop was always held open. We
walked in casually, concealing a great expectation. But
there was no one in the store who looked like a teacher.
There was only a little round Jewish lady, the epitome of
every shopkeeper I could imagine. We pretended to be mainly
interested in art, especially looking for a small Buddha to
stand in a place of meditation. The woman showed us many
objects in the fifty dollar price range. I was careful to
observe her for any signs of an impractical spiritual
nature! But she was all business, and I had the feeling that
I was really being sold. The whole quality of the place was
no different from a meat market or a 5 -and-10.
Finally, we decided to purchase a
small, antique, Japanese figure, a standing Buddha about
twelve inches high. The woman assured us it would be a very
powerful object for meditation. We passed to the rear of the
store, where she wrapped the object in newspaper and stuffed
it in a paper bag! We watched this with holy amazement, and
then my eyes turned to a pair of photographs on the wall.
The photographs appeared to be of
two different saints. Both of them were naked except for a
small loin cloth. One was an enormously fat man with the
appearance of awesome strength. And the other was a more
moderately proportioned man with a melancholy expression, as
if his mind were tuned to some distant place that was his
real home. Both of them had short hair and light beards that
seemed to indicate they had been totally shaven within the
past few weeks. And there was an undeniable, obvious sense
of power and presence generated by both men.
As I studied these pictures I
became fascinated, and my heart began to pound with
excitement. I asked the woman about the pictures. She said
they were her son's teachers. Her son was a spiritual
teacher, she said, and he was the owner of the store. I
asked how I could meet her son, and I was told that he was
away for a long weekend in the country, but he would return
the next day.
We left the store quite hurriedly.
Our business was over. But as we got into the street I began
to jump and run us down the block. I had found my teacher!I
had found the Guru!
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