In 1975 many of the people one talked to when one approached the Daist community had a curious zombie quality, as if they were in the grip of a powerful hypnotic force.

Bubba's followers were self-consciously cheerful and direct, but if you looked into their eyes they often seemed to be suffering inwardly, as if in the grip of an enchantment or an invisible power.

I remember especially Jim Steinberg, who was running the Polk Street bookstore at that time. To me it seemed obvious that he was in the process of being absorbed by something larger than himself, and there was a kind of terrible psychological destruction going on in him. It didn't look much like liberation to me -- rather, it looked awfully like bondage and loss of soul.

I had many conversations about his guru with Jim, and he confessed to me that after he first got involved with Franklin Jones he began to wonder if Franklin was the anti-Christ. "I'm still not sure," he said, "but I plan to stick around until I find out."

Around this time I read Garbage and the Goddess, and began to listen to audiotapes of Bubba's wild and unfettered talks. It became quickly obvious that this man was not the compassionate guru one expected, but a dissolver and destroyer of mindforms, who did not accept any kind of limitation. I began to get a sense that he was devouring the people around him, and that a unstoppable act of will had been unleashed him. In one dream he appeared as a golden shark who was eating people alive!

He made no secret of his glee at his ability to exact submission from others less conscious than himself. In fact, he rubbed their faces in it. Was he really "enlightened" -- or had some demonic force taken possession of the body and mind of Franklin Jones? (This question has come up more than once over the years.)

My dream communication with Franklin, as it unfolded from that point forward, oscillated in the play of opposites that I had seen moving over the surface of his body. Sometimes he was Divine Light itself. Other times his consciousness seemed to encompass -- and permit -- negative possibilities that I was loathe to accept.

According to his own testimony, he had fallen perfectly into the Heart -- but in doing so, he seemed to have become indifferent to the fate of the world. The world could blow itself up and his body with it -- so what! He was not a messiah who must suffer the dissolution of the dream. Let the dream dissolve!

(How different his mood would become in the decades that followed, especially after the lawsuits of 1985 and the subsequent "death experience" with which he pretended to shed his sociopathic personality.)

So almost from the beginning, as he did to others, he put me in two minds -- I was both attracted and repelled by the man. Feeling both fascination and repulsion at the same time, I knew that nothing would be resolved unless I made an effort to reach out of my subjective perceptions and make formal contact with Franklin Jones himself.

At the time I was using the I Ching almost every day. So I threw the coins, asking this ancient Chinese oracle whether I should go to Bubba Free John. With its usual directness, the I Ching responded:

"Letting oneself be drawn / Brings good fortune and remains blameless," it said. "If one is sincere, / It furthers one to bring even a small offering."

(to be continued)