Shortly after Charles Seage got me fired from Dawn Horse Press, I got a call from Bill Krenz.

He wanted to know if I would come back to work as an "outside hire". He had a lot of typesetting he needed done, and only one other devotee besides myself had been trained on the machine. It wasn't as if you could bring in a good typist and put them right to work. It took a few weeks to get up to speed on the formatting codes and other quirks of computer typesetting circa 1982.

Bill wanted me to come in at night, after the regular crew had gone home. My work would be waiting for me, I could work three or four hours, or longer if I felt like it, and then lock up when I was done. I said sure.

We worked out an exchange agreement -- I would get an hour of typesetting on my own projects for every two hours I worked for him. I didn't ask him if he had cleared my employment with higher-ups. I just assumed that there was something o.k. about it from his point of view, otherwise he wouldn't have asked me.

So shortly after I was "fired", here I was back at the Press. I would arrive after dinner. Usually Bill would still be there, and one or two others. They would work on for an hour or so while I got into the typesetting. And then they would bid me goodnight and go off to their families or other community duties.

As I recall, they had stopped using a second building for Dawn Horse Press, and the typesetting equipment had been moved into Talking God Seminary. My memory isn't clear on where the printing presses went -- but they may have been moved to Marin County.

There I was, working alone in the Talking God Seminary building, banging on the keyboard night after night for several weeks.

When I was done my work I would go upstairs and meditate in the communion hall before going home. This was a very interesting experience, sitting alone in the dark in this large room, facing Frank's chair on its dais. Sometimes I would sit for a couple of hours, just drifting in and out of bliss-states.

No one bothered me. Every one who worked in the building during the day was just grateful to be away from the place. Many were up at the sanctuary, doing other forms of service, or they may have been at study groups.

One night toward the end of this period I had the urge to climb up on the dais and sit in Adi Da's big chair, just to see what it was like. I knew this was probably one of the most taboo things you could do, from the point of view of a Daist. But on the other hand, why not? So I did it.

I sat in Frank's chair and looked out over the room. I tried to imagine how he felt, gazing down on a sea of faces, several hundred pairs of eyes floating like fish in the sea, all looking back at the fisherman.

I sat there for about ten minutes, and then reality suddenly shifted, and I found myself actually seeing through his eyes. I was experiencing the gathering of devotees the way he did, and it was a very interesting experience.

I could see their faces before me, and they didn't seem like individuals to me, but one great mass of life. They weren't differentiated from one another -- their minds all bled into one another, and their life force merged into a single field of energy.

It was my own energy and life force as well. Just as he says, "there is no separation". The room was a sea of happiness.

I didn't repeat this experiment, but I was pleased with the information it gave me. One can only hypothesize as to whether I was actually picking up the "afterglow" of Frank's presence. At least it was an entirely positive experience -- I was relieved to know that the chair had no darkness in it.

During this time my wife was working in the Lake County Public Schools and I was spending my days writing. In the evenings I would go down to the Seminary building and typeset for Krenz. (My personal typesetting wasn't suppose to start until I finished the whole project I was doing for the Press.)

A number of people I knew in the Community where moving away from Lake County or dropping out of Daism entirely. Sometimes they would come over to my house and we'd spend an afternoon talking about our experiences with Daism. Our discussions tended to be very critical of the community -- less so of Frank.

But one woman came to see us who had been "intimate" with Frank off-and-on in the 1970s. She really got into Frank's case with us, and told us stories that would curl your hair. She was the first person I spoke to directly who was able to describe, first-hand, the "sexual experimentation" of the Garbage and the Goddess period.

As I hope I've made clear, lots of rumors and stories had circulated for years. But when I confronted Susan and Craig Lesser about the stories, in January 1981, they denied them flatly and told us they were nothing but lies.

Later, of course, everything would come out during the public scandal of 1985. At that time the community-at-large was given the lame explanation that "these things were kept secret because you weren't spiritually mature enough to understand them." The revelations of 1985 were followed by Georg Feuerstein's book and his personal account. Other personal accounts would begin to surface once AOL and the Internet were born. (One suspects that the "worst" is yet to come, in the form of books yet to be written by former Daists.)

But in 1982 the average Daist who was not in the "inner circle" had very little to go on. To hear a person who had been an actual participant describe Frank's sexual antics to us in detail was a shocking blast of truth.

At that point we knew it was time to pack up and get the hell out of Dodge. Daists weren't "our people", and Da Free John certainly wasn't "our guru". Maybe he was somebody's guru, but he wasn't ours.

As it happened, Charles Seage came by one evening just as Bill Krenz was giving me my orders for the night. Seage took one look at me and burst a gasket.

"What is he doing here? I thought I told you to get rid of him? I want him out of here --- RIGHT NOW!"

Krenz looked disgusted. He nodded to me. I packed my stuff and skeedaddled.

The next day I called Bill and we talked. He said it was unfortunate, but there was nothing he could do. I reminded him he still owed me a bunch of hours for my personal typesetting. He said he would figure out some way to keep our agreement.

Sure enough, in a couple of days he called to say he had set up an arrangement with a company in Napa. I could go down there and use their typesetting machine any evening I wanted, until the work was done.

In October of 1982 we moved to Vermont. Although I stopped reading the Daist literature, I didn't stop having dreams of Frank. In some of these dreams he seemed pissed off that I had not capitulated to his will. He indicated I could have been a v.i.p. in his community if only I had not resisted his attempts to "master" me. These dreams continued for years. It was like we were playing a chess game that didn't want to end.

The extent of Frank's abuse of devotees was revealed to the world in 1985, with the O'Mahony lawsuit and the public media campaign of Mark Miller. Even the local newspapers in Vermont carried the story. And once again I was confronted by my mother, who happened to catch the NBC Today Show expose the day it was broadcast.

"You're so lucky you got your family out of there," she said. "He's really an awful man. I'm amazed that you, of all people, would fall for that kind of thing."

Indeed. I'm a little amazed myself, when I look back. But there it is.

In compiling this account, I have tried to be faithful to my experiences and perceptions from that time, for better and for worse. I have tried to show the play of opposites that whirls around Frank -- both light and dark. I have recorded the visions and spiritual events just as I remember them, or as I wrote them in my notebooks when they happened. And I have tried to show how the perception of Adi Da as a great and luminous being is continually contradicted by his own actions and by the actions of his devotees.

I have reported both the light and the darkness of Franklin Jones, and I haven't made an effort to reconcile these opposite sides of his nature.

If I have left you with a riddle, so be it. It may be a riddle that can't be resolved -- or it may be one that has several mutually exclusive answers.

My own answer is to trust my heart.

In his 1927 book, The Kingdom of Happiness, Jiddu Krishnamurti put it about as well as it has ever been said:

It is in trying to follow the orders, the ideas, the visions of others that you go wrong. I can point out my ideal of Truth, of perfect peace, of loving-kindness, but you must struggle and arrive at it for yourselves. I can lay down the principles of Truth, but through your own Voice, through the obeying of that Voice, you must develop your own Intuition, your own ideas, and so you will come to the goal where we shall all meet. This is for me the big thing in life. I do not want to obey anybody, it does not matter who he is, so long as I do not feel he is right. ...Instead of being the ordinary and the mediocre, you will listen to this Voice, cultivate this Intuition, and so discover new avenues of life, instead of being swept aimlessly along the path of another.

My answer, regarding Daism, is that it has shown itself to be inexorably opposed to the profound wisdom embodied in that quotation. What that implies about Franklin Jones (aka Da Free John aka Adi Da), I leave to you to decide for yourself.