I am well aware that Frank has said "There is no separate person." And yet his is a path of interminable accusation and abuse of this non-existent separate person!

Unlike Ramana Maharshi, who made it obvious that "no separate person" exists, Frank's conflicted teaching posits and reinforces the existence of this "separate person" at every turn.

Daism is a dark and ego-based view of the human condition. Great Spiritual Masters like Maharshi and the Dalai Lama teach that human beings are essentially good, and already living from a core of purity and divinity. The infamous "self-contraction" is, for most people, simply a matter of ignorance or wrong view. Once human beings taste the nectar of real wisdom, they tend to respond like bees to honey. (After all, Reality is much more attractive, pleasing, nourishing, and satisfying than that which does not exist!)

Frank is unable to deliver the nectar that would attract real devotees, so he falls back on blaming the whole human race for "failing" him! In doing this he never recognizes that he has made himself part of "the problem". In order to maintain his desired isolation from "the five billion slugs", he must continually convince himself of the "failure" of everyone -- his devotees included. And to make sure they continue to "fail", he works overtime to obscure people's instinctive (and natural) divinity with an old-time religion of "sin".

The authoritarianism and plain lack of compassion in Daism is based on Frank's self-fulfilling "war" with his projection of a personified "separative ego" upon devotees (as well as upon humanity at large).

Adi Da's cynical ego-based view of the human race is itself the adversary (or Shadow) he must have in order to maintain the separation from the human race that he desperately craves.

I would go further to say that Frank himself represents a mode and process of self-contraction upon the formless divine. This has become fairly obvious to everybody except those who have been blown over by his sales talks about himself or bought his brutal description of themselves as "loveless assholes".

A compassionate way to look at Frank is to compare him to a twisted tree with wormy apples. Frank is, after all, just part of nature. No blame! (But I don't have to eat them apples.)

IMHO, until Frank understands the essential innocence and purity of the human condition, he will forever be fixated on his idea the "self-contraction", making it into a reality against which he can push and continually raise himself up in his own eyes.

The Simple Power of Devotion

The human ego is also a fact of nature. May we say that a healthy ego is necessary in order to reach the point where one willingly surrenders the ego? We certainly may say that, for the real avatars have been saying it for millennia.

The humor and sense of self-worth of the healthy ego flows effortlessly into the ecstatic I AM of the ocean of divine Self.

The guilt-ridden ego of Daists is simply neurotic and forever stuck in a psychic-loop that orbits the frowning authoritarian archetype of the Da-guru.

You can't (and shouldn't attempt to) destroy the healthy ego with flamethrowers of criticism and bullying accusation. Let it be, and the self-actualized jiva will invariably, at the due time, move into sacrificial mode upon sighting the Beloved. Then, having fallen into Love, what once seemed a separate and difficult thing will, inevitably and rather swiftly, dissolve forever in the infinitely Obvious. And why not?

It is perhaps not surprising that a religion which places such an emphasis on authoritarian dualism, should stumble so hard over the simplest truths of the bhakti path.