YOU MUST FEAR THE DARKNESS

Someday you are going to feel the "old one" coming over you -- you are going to feel death approaching. Then you will realize the consequence of your mediocre and self-deluded choices.

As long as you are able to resort to sex, or whatever form of distraction appeals to you, including gross-mindedness altogether, you lazily go for it. You have not yet come to the point in life where one runs out of distractions. You have not hit the "bottom of the barrel" yet. That will come. In the meantime, you could continue deluding yourself -- but you must not allow yourself any longer to continue this self-delusion and mediocrity.

...You can talk yourself out of sadhana only because you are not sensitive to your actual situation. You are not afraid of it. You are too de-sensitized to feel your own fear, to see that you are actually in a situation of horror -- darkness and nothingness!

...Until then you do not have any great reason to do sadhana. You may have peripheral motivations, but you do not really start doing sadhana until you are afraid, until you have "located" the dark nothingness in which you are really sitting. That dark nothingness cannot be covered up by any pleasure in the body-mind.

...When you really discover the dark nothingness at the root of your egoity, then there is nothing you can do about it -- nothing whatsoever. There is nothing you can do to cover it up. There is no "relative comfort". The inherent discomfort takes over your life.

Then you surrender to Me.

...What you must become sensitive to is not merely (or only) the necessary impending reality of physical death. Rather, you must allow yourself to be sensitive, moment to moment, to the nothingness and the real darkness that is at the root of the ego-"I". The deep root of your ego-"I" is a knot of darkness, a squeeze of nothingness. You think you "contain" some sort of sublime "inwardness" because you are still "feeling your oats", feeling your relatively lively body-vitality, feeling sexual distraction, and so on. You have not yet discovered your real situation. It is not merely that the body dies -- you do! That is the darkness, the impending nothing that your self-contraction is making for you.

When you discover that, then you will want Me -- the One Who does not die, the Indivisible Person of Light and Love-Bliss, Who Alone Is, Always and Already.

Adi Da Samraj

I love these hell n' damnation speeches that Frank gives from time to time. They are right out of the Cotton Mather Playbook. And they certainly emphasize the superficiality of Daism and its fearful approach to spiritual life.

What ever happened to "Come to me when you are already happy?" (Frank's famous 1975 sound-bite.)

Based on an acquaintance with many spiritual people, it seems to me that unless you are already spiritually sensitive, simply "hitting bottom" and feeling "darkness and nothingness" won't prepare you for spiritual life.

That is to say, to make good use of a spiritual teacher you need to have a degree of sensitivity and awareness, beyond primal fear, to the spiritual dimension of life. Your ego already needs to be "softened", not contracted and crying out in panic for somebody to "save you from death". (Another Frank sound-bite, circa 1980: "I will save you from death.")

Secondly, even if you are in a crisis of existential fear, you should never seek out a guru as "the answer" to that fear. Frank-ly, if you choose to follow a guru out of fear, you are almost certain to treat that "guru" as an idol, and to fall into cultic dependence -- just as the Daists do. And then you become subject to another kind of fear -- fear of the Guru!

As Hinduism and Frank's own siddha-yoga tradition say, at the appropriate moment, the real Guru always finds you -- not the other way around. There is destiny to the meeting -- it is not a choice you make based on "the fear of death".

Fear of Dying is the Last Illusion

BTW, what is this "fear of death" stuff anyway? Have you ever seen old people die? I have, a number of times. In every case there was a process of transformation that occurred, before the actual dying, in which the person reached a state of resignation and acceptance, and sometimes manifested spiritual awakening.

Even my dear mother, who her entire life never wanted to talk about death, achieved a kind of wisdom and humor on her deathbed. "Who would have thought it would come to this?" she said, managing a weak smile as she confronted death.

In general, "fear of death" is an experience that arises in middle age -- the so-called "mid-life crisis". Preferably it comes up around age 20 or so, when ego-development is just reaching ripeness, and it suddenly dawns on a young person that in fact death is real, and they are really going to die. (Frank went through that very crisis of fear in his 20's, as he describes in his autobiography, The Knee of Listening. One wonders what he learned from it, because he appears to have gone through similar crises several times since.)

Once the reality of death is beheld by the young person for awhile, the spiritual reality that transcends death may begin to show itself. That's what is said to have happened in a rapid and absolute sense for Ramana Maharshi, and to lesser degrees for a number of other saints and holy-people. In my personal experience, the existential crisis, at age 20-21, led into several years of intense dreaming and visionary experiences. This in turn caused me to enter a Benedictine Monastery at age 25, where I stayed for 2 1/2 years.

Why the Old Die Without Fear

If one manages to live to "a ripe old age", a natural rhythm usually sets in, as the body and mind unconsciously (and consciously) begin to prepare for death.

I am sure that a few people die kicking and screaming -- maybe a lot of Daists do! But for most of the uncountable billions who have gone through the door, death is a process that the body expects and accepts.

According to cognitive scientist Francisco J. Varela, studies have shown that at the time of dying, the physical body releases endorphins -- natural opiates -- that relieve pain and may cause death to be a blissful physical experience. [From Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying ~ an Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama, edited by Francisco J. Varela, page 200. Varela passed away in 2001. See this link for more information.]

Another chemical change affecting consciousness during dying is hypoxia -- oxygen deficiency and an accompanying increase in carbon dioxide in the blood. (In controlled experiments conducted by Dr. Joseph Atkinson, based on the research of the Hungarian physician L. J. Meduna [see also this link], patients reported experiencing "an all-consuming oneness with God" during carbon-dioxide poisoning.) [From Parting Visions, by Melvin Morse M.D., page 85. See also Surviving Death, by Geoff Viney, pages 214-15.]

However, physical death is one thing -- ego death is quite another. The two kinds of death are commonly confused with one another, because the ego tends to identify with the fate of the body. In fact, Daists are taught to believe that the ego dies with the body. Whether it does or not is a question for another time -- suffice to say that there is no need for the ego to be so fixated on the body that it refuses to "die" until the body dies. Frank would agree, I think. However, he persists in using the ego-body identification -- and the fear of physical death -- as a whip to keep his "devotees" submitted to him.

Frank's "fear the darkness" mob-control speeches are calculated to impress young, inexperienced and unwise egos -- the very people he captures for his cult, and often the easiest people to exploit.

The use of fear as a tool of religious conversion is standard procedure in cults and fundamentalist religions. Curiously, although Frank is avowedly "anti-cultic", he has never been averse to using cultic-methods in controlling his disciples.

But then, as Adi Da said in one of his more lucid moments, "Everything I give you is garbage. I expect you to throw it away, and you worship it as the precious revelation of the Lord!"