> The premise for this assertion is a bit baseless unless we alter 'throughout human history' to 'for the last two-hundred years or so'. I suppose that depends on your definition of human. Either we have miscommunicated or you have a very strong civilizational/ethnocentric world view. The latter is too unkind, so I will choose to believe we have miscommunicated. (The only thing that has been published in the past 200 years has been facile, and perhaps willful, misunderstanding.) > I disagree with the idea of 'pseudo-public', as it was as public as any highly educated discourse; a great deal of the finest esoteric thought was printed and in public circulation). I was referring to matters well before Guttenberg's wonder machine. But yes, 'scribes' did write, and master architects did write in stone, and various groups even sang their discourse under the very nose of the local heterodoxy. So that's the "public" part. But it was in fact 'pseudo-' public as the content was esoteric and generally misunderstood (as it was intended to be) by various intelligent fools. I mean, really, how many people understood (back then) what that "subtle point"/"pole" currently in vogue in the West as "Rumi" intended by his Masnavi (much less now)? The filter remains functional.