When I pointed out on the Daism Forum that Adi Da's official biography, The Promised Godman Is Here, exploits Christian millennial expectations, one Daist loudly complained that I was imagining things. According to this man, Frank would never, in your wildest dreams, capitalize upon the millennial expectations surrounding the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Christ.

The Promised God-Man Is Here was published in mass market paperback in 1998, and a press agent was hired to promote the book to the widest possible audience. The author of the book, Carolyn Lee, says in the introduction:

Turn to the teachings of the principal religions -- Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim -- and you find an ancient prophecy common to all: There is an All-Surpassing God-Man yet to come -- a final Avatar, the ultimate Messiah, a consumate Prophet or Enlightened Sage, a Spiritual Deliverer who will appear in the "late-time", the "dark" epoch when humanity is lost, apparently cut off from Wisdom, Truth and God. Buddhists call that Expected One "maitreya"; Hindus, the "Kalki Avatar"; Christians, the "second coming of Jesus"; Jews, the "Messiah"; Muslims, the "Mahdhi". In other words, the great religious traditions all promise a future Bringer of Salvation and Liberation, One Who will perfectly answer all human prayers. ...Our confession to you, as the devotees of Avatar Adi Da Samraj, is that the One Prophesied has Come. The Godman Promised for all humankind, and even for all beings, is here -- in the Person of the Ruchira Avatar (the Divine incarnation of "Brightness"), Adi Da Samraj. [PGM, pages 1-2]

Frank's personal involvement with messianic tradition goes back to his being born in the West, with its collective psyche thoroughly saturated with Judeo-Christian traditions, and raised in a Christian faith...even studying for a time in a seminary.

In the late 1960's Frank's Christianity fell into the background as he steeped himself in "siddha yoga" studies with his gurus Rudi (Swami Rudrananda) and Swami Muktananda, and made several trips to India. On his second visit to Swami Muktananda's ashram in 1969, the Swami said the Kundalini-Shakti (divine feminine energy or "Goddess" power) had become active in him. At that time he gave Franklin the name Dhyanananda (one who finds Divine Bliss in meditation).

It seemed to Frank that he had left Western religion behind -- that he had been initiated and absorbed into the mysticism of India. (Frank actually called himself "Bubba Dhyanananda" for awhile.)

He was thus startled when ten months later, on his third visit to Muktananda, all his submerged Christianity came rushing back, in the form of a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

I had been pulling weeds for perhaps half an hour when, suddenly, I felt a familiar Presence, as if a friend were standing behind me. I stood up and looked behind my shoulder. Standing in the garden, with an obviously discernable form made of subtle energy but without any kind of visibility, was the Virgin, Mary, Mother of Christ! My first impulse was huge laughter. I had spent years of total non-sympathy for Christianity. I felt I had paid my religious dues. I saw that whole religious tradition as merely a symbolic and ritual communication for what were really matters of direct consciousness, pure self-awareness, and Vedantic conclusions about reality. Now, as if I were faced with a cosmic joke, I stood in the Present of Christ's Mother! [The Knee of Listening, page 126]

The Christ vision is reported in somewhat cursory manner in the various editions I have seen of The Knee of Listening. But in the notes which Frank recorded in a diary he was keeping at the time he had the vision, it is reported this way [emphasis added]:

20th June, 1970. I first was visited by Our Lady, Our Mother, in the garden of Shri Gurudev Ashram, Gavdevi, Ganeshpuri. She taught me to honor her with the prayer Hail Mary. And then she held before my mind an image of a rosary, until after several days I bought one in Bombay.

And she showed me her Son, Our Lord, whose face of whitest Light has appeared directly before me in a total mystical field of vision that somehow seems also to begin at the level of the physical heart. Its brightness always faces me, and it creates the deepest peace and love and bliss in me.

Since this revelation there has also been a continuous deep ecstacy and joy in my heart that is so great I dare not allow myself to be fully aware of it, or to experience and manifest it completely.

That the Divine Kundalini-Shakti took the form of the Blessed Virign Mary, in this place, at this time in his life, seems to indicate a connection being formed in the depths of the psyche, between his Christian roots and the Hindu mysticism that he had embraced. As a matter of fact, this vision of Mary and of Jesus Christ came after virtually all of his "Vedantic" realizations except the "final" one in the Vedanta Temple in Los Angeles, two months later.

Frank's long identification with the Christ of this vision, whose "brightness always faces me", can perhaps be inferred in the title of the book See My Brightness Face to Face, which was published 27 years later. Now this "brightness" faces you, and he hopes you will be as overawed as he was on seeing the face of Christ in the garden of Muktananda's ashram.

A year later, in 1998, Frank published the book The Promised Godman is Here. In Chapter 19 ("The All-Completing Avatar") of this "formally authorized biography", there is a section titled "The Fulfillment of the Avatar Tradition", which includes a discussion of the prophecies of the promised messiah arriving on a white horse:

Such an image of the final Divine Deliverer riding a white horse is not exclusively Hindu. It is deep in the human psyche, surfacing also in the last book of the Bible, which prophesies, in vision, the "second coming" of Jesus of Nazareth:

And now I saw heaven open, and a white horse appear; its rider was called Trustworthy and True...His eyes were flames of fire and his head was crowned with many coronets... On his cloak and on his thigh a name was written: The King of kings and the Lord of lords. Revelation 19:11-21

The chapter goes on to report that at least two devotees intuitively felt "such archetypes to be prophecies of Avatar Adi Da's Appearance."

In the Book of Revelation, Christ is referred to as "the Alpha and the Omega" -- the First and the Last, the God who is present at Creation and who returns at the end of time to pass judgement: "'I Am the Alpha and the Omega,' says the Lord God, who is, who was, and who is to come, the Almighty." (1.8) "I Am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give water from the well of life free to anybody who is thirsty." (21.6) "I Am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Happy are those who will have washed their robes clean, so that they will have the right to feed on the tree of life and come come through the gates into the city." (22.13)

John's statements are meant to evoke the words of the prophet Isaiah (44.6): "Thus says the Lord...I am the first and last; besides me there is no god."

And what does Frank say?

I Am the First and the Last, the every where, anciently and always. Promised (and Universally Expected) True God-Man of the "late-time" (or "dark" epoch). I Am, now and in all future time, the Divine World-Teacher, the Divine Heart-Master of all My devotees (East and West). Therefore, My life and Work and Person must be understood and appreciated in the context of the total (One and Great) Tradition of mankind, East and West. And even those who do not, in any then present time, become My devotees are -- now, and forever hereafter, during and after (and forever after) the Avataric (physical) Lifetime of My bodily (human) Divine Form (here) -- always Divinely Blessed by Me to better understand and appreciate their own (possibly confessed) traditions, and even all "other" traditions, by rightly understanding and appreciating Me and the One and Great Tradition I Have Come here to Represent and to Complete and to Completely Fulfill. [PGM, pgs 495-6]

In private talks, Adi Da has predicted that eventually all Christians will recognize him as the Second Coming of Christ. At Christmas time his devotees are known to revel in Handel's "Messiah", thinking blissfully of their guru, Franklin Jones.

As for the book, The Promised God-man is Here, if -- as my Daist friend protested -- the Daist "missionaries" weren't conscious of the messianic archetype that was stirring in the world psyche at the time the book was published, I can only conclude they are a lot more naive than they have previously seemed.