My wife and our daughter had been away visiting relatives during the weeks in 1975 that I read The Knee of Listening and first saw A Difficult Man. When they returned I was bubbling over with my recent experiences.

My wife thought I'd gone loco. Here we had been moving along nicely with our Jungian work (we had been in Jungian analysis for more than two years). We were even looking into the possibility of becoming Jungian therapists, and making plans to travel to Zurich to study at the Jung Institute. Now I suddenly had a strange enthusiasm for learning more about some mad guru who called himself "Bubba Free John"!

Finally I convinced her to give the film a chance. We went together to the Polk Street store, bought our tickets, and sat down to watch A Difficult Man. It was my second viewing, and I had a sense, from the discussions around us, that a lot of people in the room had seen the film more than once.

About half way through the movie my wife broke into tears. "What's the matter?" I asked her. She was obviously moved by what she was seeing. "He's what people are supposed to be," she said.

That night I had this dream:

DREAM. With nine others I am taken to sit in meditation with Bubba Free John. He seems to have degenerated into an abusive guy who is loudly berating his followers. I keep watching him for a sign. He glances at me a couple of times, our eyes meet, but nothing registers, there is no zap of recognition.

Then for a second, reality shifts, and I see through the qualities he is displaying, and look directly into his real nature as God. I start to move forward through the crowd and manage to touch him. Instantly I fall to the floor.

I am conscious of the ooh's and aah's of the gathering, so my experience is somewhat played to them, to show them I am a special one. This prevents full immersion. Meanwhile Bubba Free John totally ignores me.

One of his followers comes over and takes my head in his lap. "Leave me alone!" I say.

"Hey, you're conscious!" he says. He seems surprised that I am still awake -- "What's happening?"

"I don't know. I'm not in my head anymore. I fell into my chest."

The man instructs me to let go and fall into my stomach with a downward breath. "Your guru will have to pull you out of it," he says.

End of dream.

The night after the dream of 'falling into my chest', Bubba Free John appeared as a pool of light next to my bed. I noticed that I too was a pool of light. Our two pools of light merged until they became one. We were not separate beings, but one. The experience was ecstatic, and brought me awake. I lay there for about an hour thinking about it, then drifted back into sleep and quite ordinary dreams.

Up to this time I had been very much a follower Meher Baba, the great spiritual master who was a disciple of Upasani Maharaj and Shirdi Sai Baba, among others. (Even today I feel nothing but love and respect for Meher Baba. And I still meet him in dreams from time to time.)

So it was something of a surprise when a day or so later I had this dream:

DREAM. Visiting Meher Baba's estate, a great mansion in the Heart center. Lots of cars in the driveway, light is pouring out the windows, a wonderful party is in progress. Then the scene shifts, I am in a car, and Franklin Jones (Bubba Free John) is driving me and another young man down the sloping driveway and out the gate. "Hey! Where are you taking us? I don't want to leave this place!" I say. "Don't worry," says Jones, "we're just going to a little store down the street."

This was followed the next night by another merging vision:

VISION. A night of merging physically with Franklin Jones. His subtle body appeared floating next to mine and then gradually slid into mine, until we became one and I woke up in a state of ecstatic bliss.

During the late summer/early fall of 1975 these kinds of visions and dreams continued to roll in, and each one seemed to show me a new facet of the author of The Knee of Listening and The Method of the Siddhas.

DREAM. A visit to Bubba Free John. His body seems enormously fat. He is in his underwear, being massaged by one of his female disciples. He has three eyes. The one in the middle of his forehead is clear and perfect, the others seem ordinary and human.

The right and left "human" eyes are blue, with white coronas around the pupils. The corona of the right eye has a burst of white on one side. As we talk I lose whatever doubts remain. He is God. I really love him, and he begins to acknowledge and reciprocate that love. At first he won't look into my eyes, then he does. What he sees, I don't know, but he appears deeply affected.

In the dream I understand that he lives like an archetype, in the eternal bliss of God. I see him as an unborn, always luminous being who never split into the cross of opposites that is at the root of human consciousness.

"I am fully human," I tell him. "I come to you through the cross. Are you going to be crucified this time?"

"I am not going to be crucified," he says.

Strangely, the play of opposites is moving over the whole surface of his big body. I can feel the pull of moods -- approval/disapproval, love/hate. It seems wholly arbitrary which one he expresses. He can express either with equal truth and conviction.

End of dream.

Why am I dredging up these dream-notes from 25 years ago? Well, first of all I want to be completely forthright in these discussions -- like many people who have been involved with this man, there was a time when I had very positive experiences of DFJ, and even thought of him as a perfect and pure manifestation of the Absolute. Secondly, as someone else mentioned, there is an almost unbearable paradox (or is it contradiction?) in the way Franklin Jones affects people. On the one hand many of us have had quite profound illuminations sitting in darshan with him -- and on the other hand we are also faced with the facts of his flawed teaching, his insatiable self-worship, and the stream of reports of his abusive behavior toward his intimates.

I eventually learned the answer to these contradictions, of course: all real illuminations are your own. That is to say, they are of the selfless Self and not dualistically attributable to an "other". And yet for all his flaws, the man was a catalyst for many of these events, so it is difficult to dismiss him out of hand. The reality is much more complicated than that.

This may become apparent in some of the subsequent experiences I want to relate.

Elias