One thing, though: suddenly I read (yesterday or the day before) a sermon delivered in the U.S.A. by an American (who is a rabbi, a pastor and even a Catholic priest all at the same time!). He heads a group, a group for the "unity of religions." A fairly young man, and a preacher. He gives a sermon every week, I think. He came here with some other Americans, stayed for two days and went back. But then, he sent us the sermons he had given since his return, and in one of them he recounts his "spiritual journey," as he calls it (a spiritual journey through China, Japan, Indochina, Malaysia, Indonesia, and so on up to India). What shocked him most in India was the poverty - it was an almost unbearable experience for him (that's also what prompted the two persons who were with him to leave, and he left with them): poverty. Personally, I don't know because I've seen poverty everywhere; I saw it wherever I went, but it seems Americans find it very shocking. Anyway, they came here, and in his sermon he gives his impression of the Ashram. I read it ... almost with astonishment. That man says that the minute he entered this place, he felt a peace, a calm, a stability he had never felt ANYWHERE else in his life. He met a man (he doesn't say who, he doesn't name him and I couldn't find out), who he says was such a "monument of divine peace and quietude that I only wished to sit silently at his side."... Who it is, I don't know (there's only Nolini who might, possibly, give that impression). He attended the meditation - he says he had never felt anything so wonderful anywhere. And he left with the feeling this was a "unique" place in the world from the point of view of the realization of divine Peace. I read that almost with surprise. And he's a man who, intellectually, is unable to understand or follow Sri Aurobindo (the horizon is quite narrow, he hasn't got beyond the "unity of religions," that's the utmost he can conceive of). Well, in spite of that ... Those who already know all of Sri Aurobindo, who come here thinking they will see and who feel that Peace, I can understand. But that's not the case: he was enthralled at once! page 95 , Mother's Agenda , volume 4 , 23rd March 1963