In early 1981 I had recurring dream of a transcendent white city. It was a place of great peace, and there were people living there that I knew -- spiritual men and women who were part of some great work in consciousness.

I thought of it as "The City of the Heart", because of the way it made me feel to be there, and because of the compassion and wisdom of the inhabitants.

There was one man in particular I would meet every time I visited this sacred city in dreams. He was my guide in this place, but he was also like a brother to me, somebody I was linked to in a way I can't describe. Apparently he had died years ago, but we had known each other before he died, or perhaps in another lifetime. As I think about him now, I realize he could very well be my closest boyhood friend Jackie Potter, who died of leukemia at age 11.

Being with him, and with "my people", made me understand that during my time on earth I am far from my real home, like a stranger in a strange land.

This dream, and others like it, had the effect of preventing me from entering into total identification with the Daist Community as I began this period of intense "guru seva". Although I put my heart into my service to Da Free John and his community, I never lost the feeling that the Daists weren't "my tribe".

Now, a Daist interpretation of my dream might be that I was generating this dream as a means of "avoiding relationship" with the community and with Master Da. According to that view, the dream was a protective mechanism of the ego.

But the fact was, despite their general cheerfulness, the Daists were an alienated and alienating lot. They were difficult to like. They made life very hard for each other -- which I believe was a reflection of the way Frank treated them. In 1981 the power games were much as I had seen in 1975, except they had become more skillful at playing them. They would "stroke" a newcomer like myself with admiration and flattery and once he had taken the bait, they would begin to push at him and bully him in an attempt to slowly dominate him and break his will. "Surrender to the guru" it was called, but for some reason they felt that this surrender had to be coerced.

It was the classic cycle of seduction and abuse, expressed as a totalitarian religious cult. As we know now, this was Frank's own native psychology, and it has continued to permeate the community of his followers to this day.

It wasn't my experience that Frank's peculiar "method of the siddhas" was effective in making people productive members of the the ashram. On the contrary, many of the Daists I met at that time had a curious passive quality -- as if their individuality had become permanently immobilized. They lived for the next announcement from on high. They waited for the next order or pronouncement from the lofty zone of authority to come crashing down. They were always on edge, like a dog waiting for its master to throw a stick or take it for a walk. They kept their attention on Frank at all times, and nurtured the unflagging desire that he would give them one more opportunity to see him, to be with him, or to just sit before him and sing his praises.

Nobody at Talking God Seminary was taking much initiative. My wife and I began our service there in The Dawn Horse Book Depot -- the catalog department of the community bookstore. Periodically the Book Depot would mail nicely printed catalogs to the thousands of people on their mailing list. Orders would come in, and they would be filled from a windowless storeroom under the meditation hall. The storeroom was lined with shelves laden with the books of Da Free John as well as spiritual books from many other publishers. This operation was, in effect, an extension of the old Dawn Horse Bookstore on Polk Street in San Francisco -- and before that, the Ashram Bookstore on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

The Dawn Horse Book Depot, as we found it in 1981, was in complete chaos. There were drawers full of unfilled orders and orders piling up on desks, all with checks still attached. Some of these orders had been sitting around for weeks! The books needed to be pulled and packed, shipping labels needed to be typed, and the checks needed to be taken to the bank. The telephone rang constantly -- usually it was a caller asking why their order was delayed or why they had been sent the wrong books.

The people who ran the Book Depot seemed to be doing as little work as possible. For one thing, they were distracted by a constant barrage of demands coming from other parts of the organization. For another they seemed to see this storeroom as a kind of refuge where they could hide out and relax, enjoy a little community gossip, and wait for lunch. I began to understand why Frank spent so much breath criticizing his followers!

You can be sure they were pleased when we showed up, ready for action. Within minutes of taking off our coats, we were set to plowing through the backlog of catalog orders, pulling books from the shelves, packing, typing, and trucking off packages to the post office. This work would be our service for the next several months, six hours a day, without pay.

Beyond that, our participation included attending talks, both at the Seminary and at Vision Mound Sanctuary, and taking part in group meetings at various residences around Lake County.

I discovered that a lackadaisical attitude wasn't confined to the Book Depot. Every day at specified times, everyone would gather in the second floor communion hall at the Seminary to meditate before the Master's chair. Frank's powerful spiritual energy filled this room, and it was something like a drug experience to sit there in silence for an hour or so -- except when it rained. On rainy days buckets would be set up around the Master's chair -- and even on the chair itself -- to catch the water that dripped noisily from the ceiling.

I asked Angelo Druda and others why they didn't fix it. "Oh, we tried," said Angelo. "It has been doing this every year for years, during the rainy season."

After a couple of weeks of meditating to kerplunking raindrops, I asked one of the maintenance people, as politely as I could, if I might take a shot at fixing the leak. "Sure, why not," he said. "Who knows, maybe you'll be the roofer with the magic touch!"

The maintenance man and I obtained a bucket of all-weather roofing patch and a couple of putty knives. In the midst of a typical Northern California downpour we threw a ladder against the roof of the meditation hall and climbed up to have a look. It didn't take long to find where the water was getting in. There was an air-conditioning unit that protruded from the roof directly over the Master's chair. The seam where this structure connected to the roof was seriously cracked. Obviously it had dried out in the tremendous heat of the Lake County summer. Just as obviously it needed to be patched every autumn, before the rains came.

For a few days after the dripping stopped, and the buckets were no longer necessary, I was treated as a minor celebrity at Talking God Seminary. I hated to disillusion my adoring fans by telling them that anybody with half a will could have fixed that damn leak!

Apparently the problems we saw at The Dawn Horse Book Depot and in the maintenance department were just the tip of an iceberg of inaction and incompetence. Despite the cult's well-known pose of "professionalism", one of the ongoing characteristics of Daism has been lots of talk and big plans, combined with half-hearted or non-existent execution. It was as if they believed that just talking about something would make it happen. (Sort of like the way they approach enlightenment.) By 1981 the community was in serious financial trouble due to mismanagement.

Frank's response was to give one of his withering harangues on practical matters and order his devotees to hire a professional CEO to come in and straighten things out.

So one day this very friendly and very smart man in a business suit showed up. He was a consultant whose specialty was helping non-profit groups get organized and put their finances in order. According to what I was told, he had just come from working with Esalen in Big Sur. As I recall he had agreed to accept a flat payment of $35,000 for three months work -- half his usual fee, but not a bad sum in 1981.

The new CEO was set up with an office, and one by one the heads of various departments brought their books and records to him, until his desk was piled high with paperwork. He faithfully poured over it all and tried to make some sense out of it.

This went on for weeks, with people scurrying in and out of his office, until finally the hired gun was ready to deliver his report. He had some very sensible and practical suggestions about management structure, how responsibilities should be divided and delegated, and how funds should be allocated. He presented large graphs and wall charts showing every aspect of the organization, including how it was currently structured, how it was not functioning, how much money it was bringing in, and where the money was going out.

One of the most interesting charts showed the overall income for the last five years. This chart revealed that when Frank was in California, the income would go straight up. As soon as he left for Hawaii or some other place where devotees couldn't see him, the income would go straight down. Needless to say, income was currently in a deep trench, because Frank was in seclusion in Hawaii.

Finally the consultant gave the community leaders the hardest news: Master Da himself was spending far too much money. "I'll put it bluntly," he said. "If it wasn't for your Master's spending habits, you would be doing fine. You would have more than enough income to cover all your expenses. My suggestion is that you ask him to cut back and work within a budget. Also, as gently as you can, tell him it would be financially beneficial if he could make himself more available to his followers."

Needless to say, the CEO was gone and forgotten two days later. And nobody you talked to seemed to have a nice word to say about him.

After awhile, my wife took a break from service at the Book Depot and began teaching at Mound Builder, the community elementary school. (More about that later.)

I was invited to attend staff meetings at Daism's Laughing Man Magazine, where I got to know Saniel Bonder, David Todd, and Bill Stranger, among others. I was also asked if I wanted to be a typesetter at Dawn Horse Press, working for minimum wage. There were rumbles that Master Da would soon return to Lake County, to oversee completion of "The Manner of Flowers", his new house on the Sanctuary grounds. Newly written manuscripts were preceding his return to California, and busy hands were needed to set them in type, print them, and take them to the bindery.

So began the last and perhaps most interesting period of my personal involvement with Franklin Jones and his community.

(to be continued)