Throughout the summer of 1980 we continued to hear stories of Frank's drug use and unorthodox "sexual considerations". Most of these rumors weren't verified until several years later, when Beverly O'Mahony filed her lawsuit, and a number of Frank's long-time devotees turned on him in the press.

I had no personal evidence of Frank's alleged misdeeds, other than the few minor tip-offs that I described in earlier chapters of this narrative.

What I did have was an almost metabolic perception of Da Free John as a spiritual luminary of a very high order. Many others in the "outer circles" and on the periphery of Daism had a similar perception.

For an example of what I mean, I remember an experience that happened as we were returning home from a trip to San Francisco. Around noon, as we drove north along Highway 29 in Lake County, about five miles due East of Cobb Mountain and Vision Mound Sanctuary, I felt a surge of light coming from my left. Turning in the driver's seat I looked across the forest in the direction of the Sanctuary. There I saw a great spiritual sun rising behind the trees. The sight of it left me breathless.

I had to assume that Frank's consciousness had something to do with this experience, just as I had assumed that his realization played an active or at least catalytic role in many of my other visionary experiences.

And yet I was divided against myself by the rumors of his pathological behavior. The sense of contradiction he emanated caused me and many others to be wary and stand back from Daism. Just because he was a luminous being didn't necessarily make him a teacher one should follow. We were all too familiar with the legend of the fall of Lucifer, who was said to be the brightest among God's angels. Such myths strike a deep chord, because they rise out of archetypes in the human psyche. The fall of Lucifer depicts the pride and megalomania that can follow divine illumination. To coin a phrase, was Frank such a one?

The only empirical data we had were the books, the talks, and the people who followed him. Subjectively there were dreams, visions, insights, and positive transformations in consciousness. Placed against all of that was a swirl of gossip. The gossip, by itself, was not enough to convict the man.

When my brother visited from the East, we still had Frank's picture on wall. My brother wanted to know what Da Free John was all about, and we told him everything we knew. We gave him Garbage and the Goddess to read. We even drove him by the sanctuary. As it happened, on that day there was a huge celebration going on, and the parking lot was jammed. You could hear loud singing coming from Land Bridge Pavilion. We learned later that Frank had given darshan to members of the general public that day, and that some people had stood up and asked embarrassing questions.

In November, 1980, Frank returned to Hawaii. A few weeks later my brother sent me an article that had appeared in the supermarket tabloid "The Examiner". My brother, whose news diet consists mainly of The New York Times and Wall St. Journal, had chanced on the article while standing in a supermarket checkout line. He sent me a copy and he also showed it to my mother, telling her this was the guru I had been describing to her in my letters.

The article was titled "An Expert Exposes the Most Horrible Cults in America." It was subtitled "The frightening facts about the worst fanatics." It featured a picture of Franklin Jones, circa 1972, next to a picture of the Jonestown mass suicide. The article consisted mostly of statements by Dr. Lowell D. Streiker, "executive director of the Freedom Counseling Center, an agency that is devoted to reuniting families torn apart by cults".

Four cults were discussed: "The Land", "Church of the Free Communion", "Faith Fellowship", and "The Hare Krishna Movement". (I have done a web search on the two obscure groups, but their names are too generic to bring up any meaningful information. There are many links for Dr. Streiker to be found on the web. In addition to his anti-cult counseling, apparently he has appeared on Oprah and written an encyclopedia of humor. He has written a book called The Gospel Time-Bomb whose back cover states: "It is not the Moonies or the Hare Krishnas that we should fear," writes Lowell D. Streiker, America's leading expert on cults. "The fastest growing and most dangerous religious movement in America today is ultrafundamentalism - an extremist form of evangelical religion that shuns reason, forbids needed medical treatment, abuses women and children, and eagerly awaits the end of the world. The cults of the seventies were alien and exotic. These sects are as American as the Fourth of July.")

Speaking of "The Church of the Free Communion", Streiker is quoted by The Examiner as follows:

This group is located in Clear Lake, Calif., and is lead by a man who calls himself "Bubba Free John." His real name is Franklin Jones. They spend a lot of money on booze and drug parties. These parties are the church's form of worship and Jones presides over them. He tells members that they're ripping everybody off, but it's good for their consciousness.

At these staged happenings, he has commanded people to commit gang rape on female members and has videotaped it. He says it's a way of teaching women submission -- that's the major value for women in the church.

He keeps a number of women he calls "gopis" in a strange relationship. He'll ask at a meeting if there's any woman there who hasn't slept with him and if anybody admits it, they're selected as "gopi" for the night or even week.

Aside from the distortion about the parties being "the church's form of worship", almost everything else in the article corresponded to rumors and gossip that circulated among devotees, but which had never been officially spoken of or acknowledged by the Church.

Needless to say, despite its source, the article disturbed me. The inevitable phone call about the article from my mother also put me on the defensive. That the article was published in a supermarket tabloid was reason to dismiss it, obviously. However, the fact that it described the very things I was hearing from others, made me wonder what the hell was going on.

So on January 8, 1981, I sat down and wrote a letter to Da Free John. I mailed the letter to him, together with a copy of the article, care of the community's Clearlake Highlands P.O. Box. I didn't know whether Frank would ever see the letter, but somebody would, and I was eager to see what kind of response it provoked.

Rereading the letter 20 years later, I have to cringe at a couple of statements which show that, like many Daists, I had tried to rationalize the stories of Frank's behavior. Nevertheless I am also amazed at how direct and to-the-point the letter is. Here it is in its entirety:

Dear Da Free John,

The enclosed article from a scandal sheet called "The Examiner" lists the Free Communion Church as one of "the four most dangerous cults in America". It alleges that you, as leader of the cult, have presided over video-taped gang rapes and drug parties. It further alleges that you engage in promiscuous sexual activity with many female members of your community.

An intelligent person who had read your books might tend to dismiss a report of this kind in a newspaper like "The Examiner". A spiritually sensitive person who had experienced the Power of God that has manifested in you and through you might dismiss the charges as rubbish. Hopefully, for the future reputation of you and your teaching, the allegations are merely libelous and false.

But there is a troubling sense in many of us who are sympathetic to your teaching that in fact this news report is a reasonably accurate one. Over the years a consistent pattern of distressing rumors has flourished at the kitchen table discussions of those whose attention is turned to you. As recently as March or April of 1980, when my wife and I attended a celebration at your sanctuary, we heard the very stories now reported by "The Examiner", and others equally offensive.

In my own mind I am able to justify virtually anything you might do. I comprehend how your "theater" reflects and makes conscious people's hidden demons. Nevertheless I have deep misgivings that the popular imagination could ever comprehend this truth. The human mind, since ancient times, has looked to its heroes more for example than instruction. In the final reckoning, it seems to me, it is your actions that will resonate loudest among the present and future generations of man. The transformative effects of your words will be cancelled by repellent stories such as those reported by "The Examiner".

My own relationship to you, your teaching, and your community has been definitely influenced by the persistent rumors of your life among your intimates. In spite of the most intense visionary perceptions of the sunlike truth that lives you, in spite of the ongoing esoteric communion with you at the edge of the Divine Precipice, I could never associate myself culturally, socially, and politically with a Spiritual Master whose behavior, as reported by the grapevine and the press, was not impeccably sacrificial.

Even so, I have never ceased to proselytize for you and your work. I have told everyone I know about you, sent them your books, and have kept the scandalous rumors to myself, except when I felt my friend was capable of considering them with an open mind. But what am I to do when my own mother reads an article like the enclosed? Because I have told her you were a great world teacher, I will find myself back where I was in the sixties -- an outcast and a madman in her eyes.

Truly, no wise man, if he wants to create a positive influence in this world, can associate himself with a God-Awakened Teacher who appears bent on feeding himself and his followers to the moral outrage of the masses.

I would appreciate if you would write to me concerning the questions I have raised in this letter.

A couple days later I received a phone call from Susan Lesser, one of Frank's chief spokespersons. She said that she and her husband would like to get together with me and talk about my letter. So I invited them to dinner.

At dinner at our house, Susan and Craig were cheerful and straightforward and conveyed a willingness to discuss any controversial issue I might bring up. Their unequivocal response to the "Examiner" article was to dismiss it as a tissue of lies. "Nothing in that article is true," they said. "You yourself have seen his Divine Love. How could you even think for a minute that such things were true of Master Da?" I told them about hearing stories over the years, including at the celebration in April. Their response was that "there are jealous people who make these things up because they want to bring down the Master."

We talked for perhaps two hours. Most of that conversation is lost to me now, but I do remember a story that Craig told, about how he had been ordered by Master Da to sell the sanctuary. "I went through the whole process of talking to real estate agents and putting the sanctuary on the market. We even had a couple of interested buyers. Suddenly Master Da called me into his office. He was very angry. 'How dare you sell my holy sanctuary?' he said. 'How dare you do such a thing!'"

Craig looked chagrined as he told me this anecdote. Clearly he felt very guilty for having tried to sell Vision Mound Sanctuary. "But he told you to do it!" I said. "Yes. I guess it was a test," he said. "And I failed him."

The whole time he was talking to us, Craig's fingers were busy doing mudras. It was a curious performance, because they were sort of "faked mudras" -- awkward and without the spontaneity one associates with genuine mudras.

Throughout the evening Susan and Craig maintained an air of unqualified friendliness towards us, no matter what I asked them. They suggested that it might be a good thing if we got more involved with the community, so we could see for ourselves. Susan suggested that we pay a visit to Talking God Seminary and talk to Angelo Druda about becoming involved in the Lake County activities.

That sounded fine to me. And it was only a day or two later that we drove to the Seminary and sat down with Angelo.

Angelo (who, last I heard, is still in Daism) was to become our personal mentor in the group. He was one of Frank's street-wise guys, rough on the outside, but with a heart of gold. He did not hesitate to talk about his own doubts about Frank, and how it had taken him years to get beyond them. He told us how from the beginning Frank could always read his mind -- literally. And he described one defining moment, when he was granted a private darshan, that Frank revealed himself as God. "After that, I was finished," he said. "He had me by the balls."

The rest of the Clear Lake community proved equally amicable. We were accepted into their midst without any misgivings or hesitation on their part. In fact, they seemed to bend over backwards to make us feel welcome. My wife and I made the decision to accept their open-armed reception, for better or worse.

So it was that we began a period of service, attending meetings, and sitting in meditation with everyone at Talking God Seminary and at the Sanctuary.

We entered right into the whirlwind around Da Free John, and there we would be for the next year-and-a-half.

(to be continued)