Which town?

There She was, on the top floor of the central building of the ashram, seated in Her armchair, so tiny and so sovereign, and when one came at Her feet, one found oneself in the presence of an egoless reality. Before Her, like one shipwrecked at last touching the shore, the body itself became conscious of an immemorial aspiration for Truth.

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Architecture was then on the edge of a new approach of its public function.

The forerunners of the day were introducing a second level of reading and apprehending the visible – by inserting a detail that repeats itself or is found at several different scales, by the immergence of a discreet rhythm subtly animating the built whole. These were the first inklings of the manipulation of the perceived, of the advertising techniques which today, with the evolution of graphics and informatics ignoring all borders, dominate the material daily existence of nearly all human beings, through a sort of global monoculture that tends to reduce even knowledge to a circulated consumer good – allegedly for everyone’s pleasure and benefit. Such were the first signs of a tidal wave that would invade the world – the formula, the style, the fashion and the trend, the design, the technological tyranny of “communication”, the abject submission to image: the dream object the lack and wanting of which dominates each one’s thought, life, desire and even one’s ideal. So much so that it is even often said by some today that the duty and the necessity to materialize the lines of force of the galaxy antecede and take precedence over those of becoming authentic servitors of the Divine – and

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