Sometime in early 1976 -- I'm not sure of the exact date -- I got a phone call from a friend of mine who was in the Daist community. "Hey, do you want to sit with Bubba?" he asked.

"Sure," I said, without hesitation.

"Be at the Dawn Horse Bookstore on Polk Street at seven o'clock. I'll meet you at the door."

It turned out that Frank was in San Francisco for the day, and he was giving a darshan session at his Polk Street headquarters. Officially the darshan was for community members only, but my friend thought that my wife and I would be allowed in.

As it turned out, the door was guarded, and people were being screened to make sure no uninvited guests or street people entered. But another friend of mine, Terry Patten (whom I had met through fellow-poet Andrei Codrescu) was at the door. "I know these people," said Terry. And he let us in.

We climbed the steep stairs to the second floor, where the community had rented space for offices, a bookstore, and meeting rooms. As you climbed the stairs you could look up and see a huge black and white picture of Frank, his arms outstretched, smiling down at you.

The darshan was held in the same large room where the movie "A Difficult Man" had been shown. We also used to go there to see movies about Jung, Ramana Maharshi, and other spiritual figures.

We left out shoes in the hallway, piled with hundreds of other pairs of shoes, and entered the communion hall.

The place was already crammed with of people, sitting shoulder to shoulder. There must have been three hundred or more devotees in there, already seated, waiting for their Master.

We found places just inside the door, on the fringe of this great press of flesh, and then we just sat and waited.

A raised platform had been set up on one side of the room, directly in front of where we were sitting. There was Bubba's guru chair, with piles of fresh flowers arranged artfully around it. "Just like at a funeral," I thought.

Many pairs of eyes gazed expectantly at the chair. Some people were having "kriyas", some were emitting soulful sighs. But there was also a general air of informality in the crowd. Many were talking and laughing, just like friends at rock concert.

As we waited I tried to collect myself for what, for me, was a momentous occasion. This was the man whose books had swept me away with their truth and humor. This was the real star of Garbage and the Goddess and of that impressive film, "A Difficult Man." Most importantly, this was the man who had appeared so forcefully in my visions and dreams, and with whom I felt a profound connection, in spite of whatever disappointment I had felt during my visits to Persimmon in December of the previous year.

I had no idea what was going to happen, but I tried to prepare myself by relaxing into an open and receptive state.

And then everything grew suddenly quiet. A door opened, and Bubba Free John entered the room, accompanied by two other people. Immediately almost everyone in the room bowed their heads, right to the floor. I remember that I just sat there, a bit stunned, trying to absorb him with my eyes.

This was the young Franklin Jones that people still know from the early photographs -- he was thin and strikingly handsome, and wearing a colorful silk shirt and pants and his famous beanie-hat.

He went quickly to the dais, stepped up on it, and then turned and looked over the crowd of semi-prostrate devotees. He stood there for a moment, and then took his seat. His assistants laid flowers at his feet, and then backed down the stairs and sat in lotus position on the floor. Clearly, he was the Master of this moment.

I don't recall that there was any chanting or any prayers. I do recall that he didn't speak a word.

What he did do was similar to what people say he used to do in the early days, in Los Angeles. He looked around the room, looking at each person in turn. He seemed to focus his eyes on their foreheads, or just above their heads. He took great care to look at everyone -- each person in turn. Finally he was turned half around in his chair, looking at me in the corner.

I saw his face go from stern inexpressiveness to a smile. Wow -- was he smiling at me or the person next to me? It seemed like Frank and I looked at each other for about an hour. In actuality it was probably no more than a minute or two. Then he turned back toward the center of the room and closed his eyes.

What happened next was not anything I could have expected. I began to see filaments of soft light coming out of the air above his head, streaming downward into the crown of his head. I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn't imagining things. The filaments didn't go away.

The light had a curious quality to it, as if one was looking into another dimension. It wasn't at all like an inner vision, in which light appears to the inner eye, or when the ajna chakra puts on a display. It was as if my outward focused senses had suddenly been granted the capacity to see and experience something not of this world. That's the only way I can describe it.

As I watched, a sphere of light began to grow around his head. It grew very large, and then when it reached a certain point it stopped expanding. Then, astonishingly, the sphere of light left his head, went out a little ways, and descended until it was over his chest. And at that point the sphere of light entered his chest and grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

There was a brief pause, and then the filaments of light began streaming down into the top of his head again, just as before. And just as before, a globe of light grew around his head, moved out and down to the chest area, and vanished into his heart.

This visual event must have happened twenty or thirty times -- I didn't keep count. As it unfolded, I tried to understand what it meant -- what was he doing? Was he bringing divine consciousness down from above the sahasrar and merging it with the physical heart? Was he "circulating the light", in the manner described in The Secret of the Golden Flower, in a kind of esoteric alchemy? Or was I simply observing a visible sign of his method of meditating?

There was no way that I could grasp what was going on, or what he was demonstrating for us. But that experience stayed with me for many years. I thought about it often, and I can honestly say that it did help me greatly to understand something of my own bodily relationship to the reality of the spirit.

What proved most remarkable to me though, was the fact I was having a literal outer experience of something that was clearly taking place in the consciousness of this man. And it wasn't the same as "seeing auras", which in my experience involved purposely putting my eyes out of focus. I was able to focus directly on this vision, examine it, step back from it, think about it, and put my mind into any kind of state I wanted to. It was just there, like a bus in the street...or a great bird in the sky.

After a time the vision stopped. Frank opened his eyes and looked around. He relaxed, and gave some kind of signal. A beautiful young woman came up from the crowd carrying gifts. She was wearing a very revealing outfit, and as she bowed to Frank, she seemed to purposely show him her naked breasts. She laid the gifts at his feet, and he bent down and touched them. Then there was another signal and everyone bowed to the floor. The two assistants helped Frank out of his chair and picked up the gifts. Then Frank, the assistants, and the beautiful young woman quickly left the hall. Someone whispered in my ear: "That's his lady for tonight."

Everyone remained seated until word came that Bubba Free John had left the building. At the signal that it was time to leave, the whole room seemed to rise at once and make for the doors. People were jostling each other, pushing and shoving to get to their shoes, and talking in loud voices. We moved out of their way, taken aback at the general chaos around us. I just hoped our shoes could still be found when it was over.

As everyone knows, the Polk Street bookstore was destroyed in a fire that started in the grill downstairs. The community moved its offices to Lake County. That was a great disappointment to those of us who use to go there to the Polk Street store to browse the books and drink in the energies that seemed to saturate the place.

I often wondered whether Frank's yoga had been too much for the psycho-physics of the building. He had brought visible fire down to earth from realms above this world, and that fire had finally manifested as real fire, gutting the Ashram offices, bookstore, and communion hall.

(to be continued)