The above advertisement, published to coincide with Swami Muktananda's visit to America, was a direct result of Frank's break with Muktananda in the summer of '73. It was also a slap in the face to the entire guru tradition that Frank claimed to uphold and fulfill.

Curiously, the ad appears premonitory: it foreshadows the course Franklin Jones' exploitative "teaching work" would take over the next thirty years, culminating in tacky hard-sell baloney like The Promised Godman is Here.

In 1986, after it became readily apparent that Franklin Jones had joined the select company of discredited and fallen gurus, it occurred to me that somebody ought to start a newsletter about him. I made up a sample issue and named it "The Free Journal". I had access to a mailing list, and I managed to line up a few contributors. The newsletter was intended to become a forum for wide-open debate and discussion of Da Free John aka Da Love-Ananda (in 1986 he had changed his name once again).

Then my business-life got very hectic, and the project had to be put on hold. But the idea of creating a vehicle for people to speak out about Frank was still in the back of my mind when I joined America Online in 1994. In September of that year I started the "Master Da" forum on AOL. In no time at all the forum attracted a steady flow of posts, including a few allegedly from Adi Da himself, who posted under the screen names LordBuddha and World Tchr. Consider the following exchange:

Subj: Cowards
Date: 94-12-21 21:23:57 EST
From: JohnD513

I am surprised at how many people participate on this board and keep there real identities a secret. I am further baffled at how many folks use concepts and terminology that where given birth in the teaching of Adi Da and then use them to try and prove He isn't who he says He is or that His teaching work is not as significant as it really is.

I am a new member to AOL and cannot update my profile. As soon as I can I will (drop me a note and I will give you my name and address). In the mean time, why don't you pseudo religious scholars step out into the light.

P.S.: I can't believe some of the online names that are being used. They reveal how you really feel about God (Atman, Buddha, whatever you prefer to call Him). The show a true lack of respect. Most noticed: Solar Lord, Sri George and Siddha Moe.

---

Subj: What *is* a name?
Date: 94-12-22 03:18:17 EST
From: Bob Anatta

John D, I don't understand your problem. If I tell you my "real" name, will you know me any better than you know me with my AOL screen name? What if I'm not interested in having a personal relationship with you?

I find your post quite humorless, frankly. Think of all the "screen names" Franklin Jones has taken over the years. He's convinced you to honor and respect these names...and maybe he's taught you something about Liberation by his use of names. But it appears you didn't "understand".

As far as you know, all the people signing on to this forum could be Spiritual Philosophers who have given themselves Names to signify their identity as Spiritual Philosophers. Why do you assume otherwise? In fact, it is exactly the case.

What if someone told you that Adi Da himself had signed on to this forum under an "assumed" name? What would you say to that...hmmm?

Master Bob

---

Subj: The Master's Name
Date: 94-12-22 09:13:04 EST
From: World Tchr

To JohnD513, Re "Cowards":

Tcha's to Bob Anatta for his post on this subject. How can anyone judge how someone "feels" about God from his or her screen name? It is a heart matter. Also, how dare you use the name "John", which has obviously already been "taken" by the Subject of discussion here?

By the way, I actually AM Adi Da, posting here.

Love, World Tchr

P.S. If you'd understood My Teaching, you'd know that you are Me too, by the way.

P.P.S. That's why I originally called the upcoming winter holiday "God In Everybody Day", hmmm?

Happy Saturnalia,

Your Own True Self

Frank or a pretender? A source who claimed to know told me that World Tchr was in fact Adi Da, who for awhile was amused that somebody had started a forum about him on AOL. I think the fact that he only posted once or twice and then vanished is a pretty good indicator his amusement didn't last.

Be that as it may, the AOL Master Da forum roared along for a couple of years, until the World Wide Web sprang to life, and at that point I transferred my attention to the Ken Wilber Forum on the newly created Shambhala website.

Ken opened discussion on his forum with an essay renouncing his previous endorsements of Adi Da. This precipitated a firestorm of messages, from all sides. In fact, for the first year or so, well over half the posts on KWF were about Daism. I remember many of the messages were from current Daists, taking Ken to task for his "betrayal" and pleading with him to reconsider.

I made a number of new cyber-friends on KWF -- and reconnected with a few old ones (like JCB) who had participated heavily in the AOL Da forum. KWF was a crazy place, completely unsupervised and vulnerable to spam attacks. There was even a flaw in the forum software which allowed a single post to change the font, font size, and color of every other post on the forum!

In spite of the problems, a very real community of ideas began to coalesce, much like a gathering of university friends at a local cafe. One compadre, Andy Plath, suggested to me that we needed a back-up forum, in case Ken and Shambhala got tired of our talking about Frank all the time and decided to shut down KWF.

I agreed, and so in May 1998 this website was born (lightmind.com), and in August of that year the Daism Forum came into existence. A few months later another cybernaut (Sri Bob aka Sioux Marshman) and myself collected some of the best Da-related posts into an "online book" we called The Knee of Daism.

The Daism Research Index followed not long after. And now here is this weblog, compiling some of my own essays on Adi Da/Da Free John/Franklin Jones from the past five years.

Frank-ly, the main idea in doing this Blog about Frank is to get the man out of my system. I feel that I have pretty much exhausted what I have to say about him. Others may still have plenty to say, but I am ready to leave him behind and move on to clear sunny skies.

Toward that end I have also included the narrative called The Magician, which describes many of my personal experiences with Frank and with his community from 1975 to 1982. Some of this material was published in different form on the Daism and X-D forums. But much of it is newly assembled from contemporaneous notes and other relevant source material.

Between 1974 and today, many thousands of people have passed through the gates of The Mountain of Attention, Frank's sanctuary in Northern California. I am hoping this little weblog will inspire at least a few of you to compile your own recollections and thoughts and publish them on the Internet for the whole world to see.

all my best,

Elias

As of this month, I have closed the open forums on lightmind.com and lightgate.net, including the Daism Forum. If you have been an habitue of those message boards, then you already know my reasons for doing this. The forum posts will remain available for reading for awhile, and then they too will go the way of the dodo. A new set of forums, much easier to maintain, has been started at http://lightmind.ning.com/forum.

In the meantime, someone notified me that they have built a website compiling a great deal of the material that we accumulated on lightmind. It can be found at: http://www.adidaarchives.org/index.htm.

I have also initiated a new spiritual blog, Transition Notes. This is expected to evolve into something else, depending on how energy moves through my brain. Comments and questions about this blog are welcome at the ning forum