Which town?

12

There was in those days a sort of ardor in the world, a ferment was at work in the societies. Already, well before this inauguration, quite a few wanderers and eccentrics, men and women, had gravitated around the ashram and the more audacious of them had moved up to build their huts near to the plateau, on the edge of a canyon, or else on one of the beach lands.

She received each of them.

To each of them She gave Her presence.

Those of the ashram whose hearts had grown in Her atmosphere were welcoming them quietly, but there were those who feared these breakers of conventions who were confusedly attracted to a new freedom.

*

It would be an open town.

A multitude of pressures and tensions were already active = the public attention, with its mixture of hostility, ignorance and expectations, the official attention – local, national and international – with its inevitable rigidities and interests, the conduct of those responsible for the launching of the various works, the behavior of the newcomers, the divers responses and reactions of the villagers, all these factors together constituted a shifting flux which She must contain and embrace in harmony. And it was through the most practical and immediate matters as they arose that She dispensed concrete signs of reference to this “higher and truer consciousness”.

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