The Dharma is so powerful, that it can be glimpsed even through this man. He's a finger pointing to himself while he tells you about the moon. To be all Zen about it, I'd say he's not a finger pointing at the moon. Enlightenment is something that just happened as an accident. But, once he died, so did his followers and whatever message he had was jumbled and never once addressed the question, "How can I be like you?" The answer, you can't. They are highly charismatic people and obviously something happened to him in the past to change him. Listened to him, watched him interact with others.
I met Da Free John once, as he was calling himself at the time, many years ago (he's dead now). The Gurus of the world are a mixed bunch. At least it doesn't seem his teaching is designed to suck people into some sort of money producing program, like IT or such.
As I said, his words can spark a desire for something deeper in people, and I hope their search brings them to reading the Noble Truths. The man will collect some speaking fees, his self-help books will sell some copies and most will end up in thrift stores, and perhaps his message will spark a few people to seek something deeper. The Buddha set out deliberately to find the secret of eliminating suffering and in the end gave us a prescription that we can follow to do the same.
What is he actually teaching? Unless you wake up one morning with an unexplained, overwhelming sense of bliss and wander off to live in shelters for a couple of years, he's not teaching you how to follow in his footsteps. Learning how to swing a hammer is not the same thing as building a house.īut, here is the main thing that places him with the ranks of Enlightened Gurus that have come and gone. Mindfulness and quiet mind meditation are tools, only one part of the 8-Fold path. He seems to think disassociation is the same as egoless enlightenment, and it's not. His history describes a psychological breakdown resulting in a fugue state that lasted several years before he began his own teaching. Chalk it up to an old Buddhist with cranky opinions this morning, please, and make up your own mind. I'm going to give a rather harsh assessment here, with apologies to anyone who follows him. He is not teaching the Noble Truths and 8-Fold Path. His teaching is a mixed reguratation of mindfulness, cognitive psychology, and Pop Zen. He's just another Great Enlightened Guru, without the East Indian trappings. Read some of his writing and watched the video, read a bit from his website, and I'm not impressed.