Da Free John (1939–2008)

This is a collection of talks by Da Free John, mostly from around 1980. It includes a couple essays by his disciples. There are also some introductory essays by the editor Georg Feuerstein.

I'm a Buddhist and have worked in science and technology, so this book covers topics that I have thought a lot about. I think Da Free John's main theological foundation is out of Kashmir Saivism. What he writes sounds a bit like Yogacara Buddhism. The universe is some kind of play of consciousness, er, Consciousness. This book makes constant use of Capital Letters to indicate the mode of a word, whether it is referring to the mundane level or the Transcendental level. Typographical dualism leads to ontological dualism, apparently.

There are some really nice ideas in there, e.g. the universe is like a bunch of software routines, layers of software, each layer interpreted or execute by the next layer down. I have seen this idea proposed as a semantics for object oriented programs, for example.

There is a beautiful essay on E=mc^2 being a modern version of "Christ is risen." That is beautiful metaphysical poetry but it starts to fall apart when it is taken too literally. That's one problem with this book, is that it takes metaphors too concretely. Da Free John brings up Rupert Sheldrake's M-fields and morphic resonance and takes that to the hypothesis that somehow if everyone got enlightened then the physical universe would be transformed into light or some such.

One problem with the book is that it is long on theory but quite short on practice. The practice seems to come down too much on just hanging out with the Guru. The whole Da Free John scene did seem to turn somewhat into a cult. It's a tricky business. Any kind of devotion that leads to transcendence is probably going to look like a cult. Are there good cults and bad cults? Probably it depends mostly on the student. Each of us requires a path that suits our character.

I think this is the first book of Da Free John that I have read, though I first heard about him many years ago. Did I see him on South Street one night in Philadelphia late at night, just hanging out watching the scene? Someone that looked a lot like him, anyway! I was a bit dubious about what I would find in this book. I got a lot more out of it than I expected. I think he stumbles over the edge in a few places... but some of that is just me being overly fussy about scientific metaphors.… (more)