One of the most bizarre characteristics of Daism is the facade of "authority" it tries to present. Daism doesn't wait for you to be convinced -- it peppers you with a "hard sell" that is slick, arrogant, and deaf in both ears.

Like Scientologists, Daists are programmed to communicate a patronizing sense of their own superiority in all matters, spiritual, psychological, intellectual, etc etc...you name it, they are smarter than you or me in just about every department!

This they learn from Frank, whose interminable "one-upping" masks a profound inferiority complex.

The purposes of this false front are to control the language of discourse and to grab the "chair of teaching" away from the genuine sages. The "mask" of Daism is also intended to push the interested observer's mind into a pre-determined shape below the threshhold of consciousness.

Studying the scriptures of Daism is thus not simply a matter of meditating on a teaching and finding insight -- but a matter of being assaulted by rhetorical bombast and larger-than-life imagery. It's a matter of Frank's ten thousand photographs -- an endless series of fright-masks (and I-am-you-masks) designed to take control of the mind-stuff through the unconscious (or least conscious) parts of your being.

In using these methods, Daism is much like any autocratic political movement -- it puts on the the dress, the uniforms, the symbols, the grand imagery, and all of the stage-props that will hypnotize an audience into submission.

And those who point out Frank's "Wizard of Oz" game are anathema, of course, because the last thing Daists want is for their game to be penetrated and exposed -- "re-cognized" as it were.

Pompous rhetoric and the megalomaniacal bombast aside, what does Daism really have to offer as a teaching?

Daists don't even notice that much of the time they are communicating in cliches, platitudes, and dull old saws -- or just thieving ideas from other people's books.

The overall effect of taking in the plethora of Daist admonishments, old wives' nostrums, and posturing pseudo-wisdom is not Divine Bliss, but extreme Nausea -- both in the Satrean sense and in the "eating rotten food" sense.

Daism is like a new-age pinata, all dolled-up with grandiose symbols and ritual baubles...and you break it open and a half-eaten jelly donut and three mouse turds fall out.

On the other hand, according to Frank everything he has to offer the unenlightened is the most profound revelation of all time. As he himself says:

"...the mere reading of of it could convert any being on earth (or anywhere else) from the life of ego-possession, mortality, and darkness to the life of Divine Love-Bliss, without requiring the slightest qualification in the case of any being that moves or is!"

I think he has always imagined that by sheer force of personality (and a good measure of siddhi) he could eventually intimidate everyone into prostrating before him in abject worship and surrender. And you know, it worked for a few...so who's to say it couldn't captivate many?

My dear Inuit friend Kwaday Dan Sinchi (who has studied Daism and met many Daists) says that it is the fool-of-masks who looks down his long nose at others and boasts loudly to his own ears that he is superior in wisdom.

"The average Daist is a fool who informs everyone that he knows better for them than they know for themselves. And the fool that Daists follow is the master of all fools, a fool supreme who has never demonstrated the humility of true wisdom."

Thanks, Kwaday. May you always speak with the voice of your grandfathers.