In early 1982 I was invited to a late night meeting, on the sanctuary grounds, with William Tsiknas, Nina Jones, and a number of other community bigshots. I am not sure why I was invited, but Georg Feuerstein was also there. Georg, a well-known Yoga scholar, had recently become a formal student of Da Free John, causing quite a sensation both within the Daist community and among his scholarly peers.

The meeting was ostensibly a brain-storming session -- Tsiknas (Daji Boda) was looking for fresh ideas about how to spread the word to the world. I remember how respectfully he listened to the new people, myself included. Unfortunately I also got a creepy feeling he was stroking us, with the hope we would come away from this meeting with a sense of self-importance, and be gradually drawn into the complex of leadership-ego that whirls around Frank.

The session went on all night, and the sun was coming up when I finally arrived home. I was due back at work at Dawn Horse Press a few hours later.

I was invited to several such sessions. I was later told these "all-nighters" weren't unique -- in fact, they had been going on for years. No wonder the "old-timers" looked wasted!

During 1982 Georg Feuerstein would spend quite a bit of time at Dawn Horse Press, working on various projects. As I recall, his first undertaking was a long introduction to Nirvanasara, Frank's attempt to put both Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta in their place relative to his own teaching. Recently I asked Georg for permission to post this introduction on The Daism Research Index. He told me quite firmly that he never wants that essay to see the light of day again.

Those of us who got to know Georg found him to be quick-witted, intelligent, and extremely likable. He had a bright spiritual gleam in his eye and an intensity of concentration that made me wonder whether he was on the verge of real enlightenment. Clearly he had been a serious yogi and gained some extraordinary insights.

Unlike most other newcomers, Georg and his wife were drawn quickly into Frank's personal company. Georg was a "real catch" for Daism -- everybody knew that and said so. A person with his scholarly reputation could have a tremendous effect on recruitment. The question was, would he stick around once he found out what was going on behind the scenes?

Right away Feuerstein was given a copy of Garbage and the Goddess to read, and his response was carefully gauged. When the book didn't appear to put him off, he was gradually initiated to the more "esoteric" levels of the guru's behavior.

Georg commemorated this initiation in his 1991 book Holy Madness, which is subtitled "the shock tactics and radical teachings of the crazy-wise adepts, holy fools, and rascal gurus." Frank gets a chapter in that book, which many have said includes a description of Georg's own introduction to "crazy-wisdom" at Frank's house in 1982. (This description was excised from the 2nd edition published in 2006 by Hohm Press -- making the uncensored 1991 First Edition -- published by Paragon and Penguin -- the one to own.) This unattributed first-hand account, clearly written in Feuerstein's undisguised style, typifies the kind of activity that was being carefully hidden from the hundreds of us working in the "outer" community -- as well as from the world at large:

I had been a formal student for only a few months when, one night [in 1982], my wife and I were invited over the Da Love-Ananda's home. [Throughout Holy Madness, Georg uses Frank's current name, circa 1990, "Da Love-Ananda".]

Both of us felt an inner need to make personal contact with him, since we had only seen him in quite formal situations. So we were understandably very excited about the invitation, but also a bit terrified, because we knew that our teacher was a "difficult man" and we could expect to be tested by him.

I found my spiritual hero sitting on his big bed, holding a glass of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He was enveloped by a cloud of cigarette smoke. My heart sank. In that moment a cherished image in me was destroyed...

[The narrator then describes how Frank bullied him into drinking beer, although he hadn't touched alcohol in years.] ...So I chucked my resistance and had a beer. And another. And another.

Meanwhile Da Love-Ananda was talking to us, puffing cigarette after cigarette, and downing one drink after another. His conversation got increasingly animated, amusing, but also barbed. He had his talons in me. I knew this was to be "my" evening. I answered his various questions respectfully but guardedly, listened to his barrage of good-natured criticism, told my story in as humorous a way as possible, laughed with him and at myself, and even risked quibbling with him a few times, but all the while stayed carefully defended. Despite large amounts of beer, I remained relatively sober.

[As the evening progressed, Frank told somebody to put on some rock n' roll, and everyone began to dance.]

...The psychic energy in the room was phenomenal. It seemed to increase whenever he raised his arms. I began to feel an incredible wildness inside me, which was scary. There was a strange inner drama unfolding between him and me. He wanted to break down my walls, and I badly wanted them up. Yet, there was something deep within me, a still observer perhaps, that wanted to see them crumble as well.

...Strange waves of energy welled up inside my body, threatening to explode my mind. I was feeling manipulated and feared that I had become involved in a terrible cult. Yet, the voice of reason in the back of my mind always convinced me just in time that these feelings were all nonsense, products of my paranoia. Each time I talked myself into hanging in just a bit longer.

[After softening up the new devotee with words, alcohol, and music, Frank cut to the chase:]

...In front of me, my wife was being sexually prepared for the guru. I coped with my violently irrational feelings by going into emotional numbness. Happily, I did not have to witness my teacher bedding my wife. We were all asked to leave the room. I was sent to a different building where I sat for several hours in the dark, dealing with the emotional hurricane that had been unleashed in me. Finally I got a handle on my feelings. I realized that one of my greatest attachments was to my wife, and that the guru was doing radical surgery on me for that. I had asked him, indirectly but loudly and clearly, to help me in my struggle for enlightenment. That night he was doing just that.

The day after my personal experience, Da Love-Ananda got into my wife's case for a while and then he returned to me, presumably because I was the more defended. This traumatic episode left both of us raw for several months, but it also proved a valuable initiation. We both had been skinned to our bones and were allowed to look into niches of our respective characters that we previously had chosen to leave in the dark. We were also very clear on another point, namely that our guru meant business. He was no mere cosmetic surgeon; his knife cut deep.

Feuerstein goes on to report "I never quite understood why we were asked to keep the whole incident quiet. ...The secrecy smacked of elitism and hypocrisy, because while we were busy partying, the rest of the community was living a fairly strict daily discipline of diet, exercise, meditation, and service."

The admonitions to secrecy were honored up to a point. You would hear the odd bit of gossip, or somebody would make a vague allusion to ongoing "sexual considerations". I remember that Georg spoke to me about being "tested" by Frank, and how he had dared to talk back to him a little, from the perspective of scholarship. But Georg never breathed a word about parties, or of any traumatic ordeal such as he later included, unattributed, in his book Holy Madness.

When asked about the reported incident recently, Georg refused to confirm or deny that the account he included in Holy Madness was in fact his own story, written in his own words. He did request that this article be presented "without implying that I and my former wife Trisha were the actual subjects of the story." Although that implication was assumed right away by some reviewers and by Daists who read the book when it first came out, only a thorough-going textual analysis could prove whether or not Georg is in fact the author of the first-hand report of Frank's sexual abuses. Until the censored 2nd edition of Holy Madness was published, one tended to give Georg the benefit of the doubt -- he has been tremendously forthcoming in publishing material that must have caused him professional embarassment. And he has repeatedly taken the Daist inner circle to task for their hypocrisy in hiding "the Master's excesses" from the general community and the world. As Georg's unnamed source says, above, "I never quite understood why we were asked to keep the whole incident quiet. ...The secrecy smacked of elitism and hypocrisy, because while we were busy partying, the rest of the community was living a fairly strict daily discipline of diet, exercise, meditation, and service."

Georg lasted a lot longer in Daism than I did. As late as 1984 he was still writing introductions and editing Frank's books. The last Daist publication I can find with his name attached is Humor Suddenly Returns "Essays on the Spiritual Teaching of Master Da Free John: A Scholarly Tribute edited by Georg Feuerstein". It includes an essay by Fred Allen Wolf, well-known author of Mind into Matter: A New Alchemy of Science and Spirit and The Spiritual Universe: One Physicist's Vision of Spirit, Soul, Matter, and Self. Also one by Ed Brennan (see interview below).

In 1995, I had a chance to talk to Georg at Open Secret bookstore in San Rafael, California, where he was giving a talk on Jean Gebser.

He seemed to me to have lost the "edge" he so clearly possessed in 1982. He told me he was still living in Lake County, not far from the sanctuary. I asked if it bothered him to be living "in Da Free John's energy field". "Not at all," he said. "I never think about him". I told Georg that some of us had started a "Master Da" forum on AOL, and invited him to participate. Georg shook his head. "I don't want anything more to do with him," he said. "I have got him out of my system." [This turned out not to be the case, of course. Google Georg Feuerstein Adi Da for links showing his ongoing consideration of Franklin Jones.]

Georg's current attitude towards his former guru is summed up in an interview with Edward Brennan was posted for a time on Feuerstein's Yoga Research and Education Foundation website, and excerpted below:

Brennan: That's when you became a student of Da Free John as he was known then?

Feuerstein: Right. I was favorably impressed by Adi Da's teachings, as expressed in his rather unusual book Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House! It shows him at his most intellectual side. Of course, when I arrived at his center in Northern California, I quickly discovered that he was no polite Krishnamurti but a madcap spiritual teacher, quite fond of shock therapy.

Brennan: How did you react to him when you got to know him?

Feuerstein: I was intrigued, but my basic emotional reaction to him was one of unease. He made it very clear that he was out to undermine the ego in all its manifestations. That's the fundamental function of the guru, as the dispeller of spiritual darkness. I was drawn to him because of that role. Yet I didn't trust him at a basic level.

Brennan: But you stayed with him for several years.

Feuerstein: Yes, despite my lack of trust in Adi Da, I recognized that he could be helpful to my inner process. In retrospect I can say I learned a lot from him. He was constantly challenging my conventional assumptions about myself and the world, and I was eager to grow. So I rolled with the punches. But there came a point when I felt I had assimilated whatever lessons he was offering me. I didn't want to repeat classes but move on. I periodically reviewed my discipleship and involvement with his community, and when it became clear to me that I had stopped growing, I left. In retrospect, I feel that perhaps my lack of trust was not only a limitation within myself but a perceived limitation in him as a teacher. His crazy-wisdom style of teaching, I believe, has confused and hurt a lot of disciples. Some are still smarting years after leaving the community, perhaps because they had joined and left for the wrong reasons. In my own case, I feel I have benefited but I am reluctant to recommend him as a teacher. When someone asks me whether they should become involved with him and join his community, my standard response is: only if you are serious about self-transformation and can handle heavy criticism. I believe that he is an adept with considerable powers, but I also sense an absence of compassion in his writings and his interaction with disciples. Of course, stalwart disciples of his have pointed out to me on a number of occasions that I just don't see his compassionate side. Perhaps. But I'd say that if someone is compassionate, it is obvious to just about everybody, and a lot of people are wondering whether there is enough of this quality in Adi Da's teaching and life.