Common sense therefore, is diluted, highly diluted reason. And if democracy is based on the supremacy of reason then must we all realize the sagehood within us, the potential non-dual being where of course democracy is no more democracy, for here there is none other than oneself. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ makes everyone, everything yourself. And reason surely is the holiest way to sagehood. The higher you go in the hierarchy of reasoning the more you see the majesty of universality. (‘The maximization of man’s rational potentialities,’ says a contemporary scholar, ‘is the natural goal of every culture.’) You don’t have to love. You love because you cannot do anything else. Gandhi’s non-violence is released here from the trammels of political self-sufficiency. Love has no geography. Or politics.

What then can we do with democracy? How understand it? How transform it? What is the way to lead one from common sense to reason, and ultimately to higher reason?

Do not, if you will, permit an outsider to say, do not argue about bussing or non-bussing,5 for the opposite of anything is not the real thing. Indeed wheresoever there is an opposite, it implies a limitation, a division. The whole can never be the other side of a thing. The whole is the thing in its thing-less state—it is the rose.

VI