Excerpt From "Some Notes on the False Teachings of Daism" -- Adi Da vs. Narcissus
By Elias
…. Ongoing approval-disapproval is one of the hallmarks of Daist ideology. Every action (and every thought) of every disciple is continuously vulnerable to judgment and evaluation by the Da-Guru, his subordinates, the community at large, and the disciple herself (through the internalization of the Da-Guru's demands). In Daism the authoritarian quality of the guru-disciple relationship caused it to long ago reached a stasis in which no awakening-transmission occurs.
Year after year the Da-Guru only compounds the situation by endlessly berating disciples for failing to live up to his demands, and 'failing' to release the self-contraction! And so Daism developed not as a transmission of the Realization, but as a circular teaching of culpability.... Narcissus (a name for the ego or self-idea [and one of the central ideas in Franklin Jones' early teachings]) is defined then as an adversary of the Da-Guru and his Grace. The ego is defined as Da-Guru's self-contracted opponent, struggling in vain against the radiant transmission of the Perfect Liberation of Divine Realization.
Throughout the Daist rubric there are numerous variations on this theme. However, in the earliest books, one finds the suggestion that the ego 'can be allowed to rise and fall, without awakening the motivating sense of dilemma.' In this regard, the earlier teaching is closer to the ancient [Perennial Wisdom] idea that Liberation is the natural state of existence which has been covered up by an error of view -- or, as Franklin Jones used to put it, 'the failure to Understand.' However, in its emphasis on Narcissus, even early Daist ideology is a philosophy of blame, which assigns a negative value to the conscious state of virtually all human beings (except, of course, Franklin Jones). As such, in the view of this commentator, the Daist ideology is not and has never been a teaching of Liberation, but a teaching of culpability, or sin, not that different from ancient patriarchal systems in which guilt was assigned (and forgiven) from a central authority."