When all is said and done about the great affair of religious cultism and spiritual community, it still remains true that human beings need to grow beyond the subhuman round of mob societies. Human beings need to adapt to their own higher functions and to the Living Transcendental Reality. And the Way in which this is done is in intimate spiritual community. The process of higher human, moral, mystical, and evolutionary spiritual adaptation is a cultural process. That process is necessarily self-transcending, not merely self-fulfilling. And it requires both technical instruction and practical guidance by one who is an Adept in the total process, Therefore, it is not a merely self-manipulative process of private experience, but a self-sacrificial process — in community with other practitioners, and in a mutually sacrificial relationship with a true Spiritual Master (to whom one may not be related merely as a submissive child or a rebellious adolescent is to a parent, but only as a responsible aspirant, awakened to Wisdom and Truth, is related to an Enlightened Teacher and Initiator and Guide).

The creation and development of an authentic community or culture of evolutionary spiritual practice is an immensely difficult affair — because people are, in general, so profoundly afraid, self-possessed, adapted to archaic and self-defeating patterns of thought and behavior, and constantly disturbed by childish and adolescent motives toward chaotic self-fulfillment.

Therefore, even the communities of experimental spiritual culture bear all the evidence of the growing pains, the tackiness, the immaturity, and all the other bewildering deficiencies that otherwise mark the secular and subhuman order of the world.

Some imagine that this is scandalous, and so they criticize even authentic cultural experiments with a kind of negative "gotcha" mentality that implies nothing but a viciously destructive intent. This is a tendency that can easily be observed in the popular media of TV, newspapers, and magazines.

Therefore, resist all attempts to be "officially" and dogmatically informed — whether for or against — about religion and the significance of religious institutions and teachers of religion. Consider and experience that entire affair yourself. And be humored by the realization that the popular communications media are fundamentally motivated by the necessity to propagandize and entertain, through fascinating and alarming messages. That is how they make their money and achieve their power. And we ourselves have taught them to do so, by childishly submitting to be entertained, and even demanding to be entertained and told what is black-and-white true. (Unfortunately, the price we all are paying for entertainment and glib analysis, as a substitute for Truth and direct experience, is our universal reduction to a controllable and exploitable mob that has no reason for existence other than to be pleasurably distracted and consoled.)