Sunday 27 November 2011

Mythmaking: Improvising the reenchantment of the world


Language

Lots of people aren't happy are they? Some will scream at you if you say a reason is 'we are oppressed'. They will deny it, explain it away, apologise for it, usually mention Darwin, and claim that this is how things are supposed to be so deal with it, and it is naive to question the 'real world'... but I am a questioner and question all that myth. We live by myths. We live by stories, because all of this is a complete Mystery, isn't it? Do you know where you come from, why your here, and where your going, how all of this thisness came to even be? Like me? I don't. The only thing we have to explore these questions are stories, and our current ones have the mask of 'science' on which pretend to tell you what actually is the case, the "facts", "the reality"--but is that so?-- I am not trying to discount myths, but rather try and explore which are the ones that are benevolent from those which are malignant.

I consider the stories that are good to be ones that make us feel at ease, free, joyful, bubbling with sense of humour, real, inspired, and playful, and feeling deep with and respectful of nature, and stories that are bad make us mistrust ourselves, and others, paranoid, uneasy, seeing nature as dull, dead, dangerous, a commodity to misuse, a general dis-ease about ourselves and our bodies and the world, having no sense of meaning, and a desire to be sadistic and hurt others, and to be blind to goodness and evil. Like George Orwell revealed, there are those who want you to be befuddled and think war is peace, ignorance is strength, slavery is freedom.

Have you ever had a walk, or been sat down, doing the washing up, gardening, or just daydreaming, and you are aware of your thinking, and how your thoughts are naturally creating little stories? It can happen just glancing at a tree, or scratching your head-- and if you were asleep these thinkings and images would come to you as actual dreamscapes. Our story-making creativity is innate, we are creative beings living within a creative unfathomable mystery which manifests as such diverse forms, and markings, and colours and sounds, and feelings.

A huge part of the malignant tale many of us are incased within has to do with the "Word", with writing, language, spoken, and it can usually be as like the water fish swim in---invisible.

"... Authorities have always tended to honor and reward those who close man's mind by confusing his tongue, and have always tended to fear and punish those who open it by the plain and proper use of language. In so acting, authority has donned, successively, the mantle of Religion, of the State, and in our day, of Mental Health or Psychiatry. But it matters not whether confusion and stupefaction are inspired divinely, governmentally, or psychiatrically -- the result is the same: the parentification of authority and the infantilization of nearly everyone else...

Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is thus the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control of man." - Thomas Szasz

So words, written down, spoken at us, often repetitively, and then words inculcating our minds, mould our vision of the world, and the ones in control of the symbol systems are the ones who wield power over us. Let us take a look at the present myth of these technocratic times:

The coercive story is that you are a robot which has no free will! Think about this for a while.
What did this myth replace?

In the 'previous' orthodox religious Christian myth you were a 'sinner', born into 'original sin' for some disobedience your first so-called ancestors, Adam and Eve, did against 'God'. The sin was written down in a book about Adam and Eve eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which God had forbidden. So the main point is that they had disobeyed God's will, and in so doing mankind was somehow in debt to 'Him' and his Church, and once the Christian myth was forced onto the world by Rome, the story was set down that this same 'Father' gave his only son, Jesus, as a blood sacrifice so that mankind's original sin/debt would be paid off if you were willing to be saved by the blood of Christ.


Esoteric Christian Myth

The covert, esoteric meaning of this myth is this:
Prior to the myth of Jesus, the Goddess had been demoted in various patriarchal mythologies. In the biblical myth of Genesis, the Goddess had been demoted to a mortal woman, Eve, and had been created from Adam's 'rib'. The 'rib' is really meaning the rib which goes all the way round, and whose shape resembles the cap of a mushroom, for as John Allegro explains in his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, for these interpreters of the mind-altering mushroom, the stem of the mushroom referred to the phallus, bearing the cap envisaged as the woman's sexual part, the vulva.
In a past blog I have explored how this 'hidden' myth is also androcentric regarding its deifying the male 'God's sperm' (and therefore of course meaning male sperm) and demoting the Goddess' womb (and womens wombs) which for male-supremacists becomes mere receptacle for the 'superior' seed. So even in the deeper layers of the myth, which was for the understanding of the initiated only, we see this suppression of the Goddess, women, and nature!
In ancient Greek mythology we see how 'God's' creativeness, mind, as 'Logos', was the demoted Goddess, yet at least still recognized as feminine, but the biblical patriarchal myth-makers were not happy with this so a male logos was demanded which became the myth of Jesus. He was 'God made flesh'. He was the phallic psychoactive mushroom containing 'God's' powerful spermatozoa, which when eat, by the mindsets who believed this particular interpretation, would channel the 'word of God' as prophesied by the eater of the psychoactive fungi, and any other mind-altering vegetations.

This 'non-participatory' approach is also typical of New Agers and their 'channeling'. They claim to be in contact with some invisible entity, and then speak as if possessed by it. Monica Sjoo has explored how much of what these people supposedly 'channel' is often very reactionary and more so reflects their thinking, which can include prejudice against others, including women, people considered less developed than their own 'race', and so on. An example of this reactionary thinking is the channelings of the Theosophical Movement founder, Madam Blavatsky, and her 'revelation' about "root races" and the superiority of the 'white Aryan race', and of course this 'Secret Doctrine' was to greatly influence Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the myth of Nazi Germany!



Non-participatory 'channeling' comparison with visionary ecstatic experience

Sjoo compares the participatory forms of channeling with the more ancient immersive visionary ecstatic experience:
"[New Agers believe] 'light filled beings' work with us in mental communion...as mediators coming from our own thinking and intuition and involve intellectual understanding of 'higher worlds'; the emphasis being on the conscious...non-participatory and detached onlooker - consciousness fostered in patriarchal societies, as opposed to ecstatic mediumship women shamans' communications with Goddess/ nature and her spirit realms. W.I. Thompson...implies that the ancient ecstatic trance-states of the shaman, during which she or he lost their everyday consciousness, meant they were 'swamped by the unconscious'. I think that is precisely because men and women like Spangler, Trevelyan, Alice Bailey and Eileen Caddy fear to go into the deep and luminous darkness, where the Goddess is encountered in ecstatic visions and dreams, that the 'channelings' and voices they come up with are but creations of their own patriarchally conditioned and limited minds" [Return of the Dark/Light Mother or New Age Armageddon? Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future , page 156]
The people who do this may very well believe they are being channeled, but the danger is that what we often 'hear' channeled sounds very like limited views that create division between people, and the body, women, other species, nature and people of colour! This 'nonordinary' form of theatre will usually collects followers whose critical thinking seems to be left at the door. And this is precisely how dangerous myths originate and proliferate when people tend to accept and stop asking questions.
How for example are we to know that they really are channeling some invisible entity, and even if they were, does that justify being told information we do not agree with, and feel right with, because their invisibility somehow makes what they communicate beyond questioning? Should we not also question actual non-ordinary entities if we had to, and if we so chose, if we did not agree with what we were being told, surely this is our own free will?

There is a link between the prophets of the Bible and New Age channeling. The very Hebrew term for prophet, "nebi", literally means "channel", and if we remember that the 'God' these so-called prophets were supposed to be channeling was the very same invention of a patriarchal priesthood who suppressed the Goddess in their storytelling this should make us very wary as to what was being channeled! Who was the prophecy benefiting? Surely the very mythmakers themselves who wanted us to believe in an absolute dualism between a 'creator' and his 'creation', and have people ashamed of their disobedient ancestors, Adam and Eve, and thus of themselves and others.


Authentic mythology

I think it is always important to understand the essence of authentic mythology. It is not history, it is you and me actually participating ourselves in ecstasy and experiencing communion with our depths and nature's depths in a dynamic continuum. It is not dependent on author-ity as such, of a set-in-stone interpretation, no matter how ancient, because experience is dynamic and living now; but of course sensing ancient mythos or stories or folklore which also respects these deep meanings connects us via meaning through time and space, for in these ecstatic realms time and space yields their usual hold over our sense of history, the 'past', 'present', and the 'future,' that rigid sense time which is of course promoted by a mechanistic culture which encapsulates us in a linear view of mechanical time.

The insane world any sane person can see right now is the toxic fruit of millenia of the denial of, and violence imposed against the freedom of sacrificing rigid views which divide us from our own being, nature, and others, animals and humans. Many people take this situation for granted, as the only reality, and some will fiercely defend the actuality of, for example, dropping bombs from aeroplanes, onto babies, children, women, men, other species. They will also accept the same about the millions of animals who are tortured and killed in the name of science, and the food industry, and corporate product 'testing', and what is being done to Mother Earth in the name of 'progress'.


Learned Helpessness

Many also feel so battered from so much abuse, coming from all different angles relentlessly that this can have the psychological effect of inducing "learned helplessness" This terrible psychological torture was, as usual, first used on animals:

Experiment - Detail

In Part 1 of Seligman and Steve Maier's experiment, three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Group 1 dogs were simply put in the harnesses for a period of time and later released. Groups 2 and 3 consisted of "yoked pairs." A dog in Group 2 would be intentionally subjected to pain by being given electric shocks, which the dog could end by pressing a lever. A Group 3 dog was wired in parallel with a Group 2 dog, receiving shocks of identical intensity and duration, but his lever didn't stop the electric shocks. To a dog in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random, because it was his paired dog in Group 2 that was causing it to stop. For Group 3 dogs, the shock was apparently "inescapable." Group 1 and Group 2 dogs quickly recovered from the experience, but Group 3 dogs learned to be helpless, and exhibited symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression.

In Part 2 of the Seligman and Maier experiment, these three groups of dogs were tested in a shuttle-box apparatus, in which the dogs could escape electric shocks by jumping over a low partition. For the most part, the Group 3 dogs, who had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on the shocks, simply lay down passively and whined. Even though they could have easily escaped the shocks, the dogs didn't try.

In a second experiment later that year, Overmier and Seligman ruled out the possibility that the Group 3 dogs learned some behavior in Part 1 of the experiment, while they were struggling in the harnesses against the "inescapable shocks," that somehow interfered with what would have been their normal, successful behavior of escaping from the shocks in Part 2. The Group 3 dogs were immobilized with a paralyzing drug (Curare), and underwent a procedure similar to that in Part 1 of the Seligman and Maier experiment. A similar Part 2 in the shuttle-box was also undertaken in this experiment, and the Group 3 dogs exhibited the same "helpless" response.

However, not all of the dogs in Seligman's experiments became helpless. Of the roughly 150 dogs in experiments in the latter half of the 1960s, about one-third did not become helpless, but instead managed to find a way out of the unpleasant situation despite their past experience with it. The corresponding characteristic in humans has been found to correlate highly with optimism: an explanatory style that views the situation as other than personal, pervasive, or permanent. This distinction between people who adapt and those who break down under long-term psychological pressure was also studied in the 1950s in the context of brainwashing"


This is a rigid unfeeling mindset which believes animals are machines, and have no rights at all, and are here for 'mankind's' goal of 'scientific exploration' and 'product testing'. These 'experiements' reveal more about the 'experimenters' than they do about anything else. But one of the reasons I mention this vile evil experiment is to show that how they think and feel about other species they feel about humans, and a big reason for this kind of research is to control us as like they do their captive 'lab-animals'.

Our 'shocks (and their cops now can actually use electrocution weapons on us) are what their propaganda delivers, fear mongering, keeping us in a permanent state of shuddering anxiety, worry, and paranoia, fear for survival, and of course, if in line of fire, having bombs raining down on us filling the air and water and earth and our bodies with depleted uranium, and other forms of pollution, bullets flying our way, etc. Along with their abuse on animals, causing also massive extinctions of species, and humans, they do the same with the natural world---deforestation, pesticides, fracking, oil spills, genetic engineering, radiation pollution, etc etc.


Tarsands--Ecocide



And it seems no matter what you do you cannot turn these shocks off, and if you 'turn' one off, two or three etc pop up to shock you more, no sense of power,---so eventually many people become very despondent, demoralized, feeling helpless, learned helplessness. This constant brutal attack on planet Earth, Mother Earth, which together with the abuses possible from day-to-day living in cultures which are all affected by this overall insanity in the way people, families behave with each other will of course have real effects on our sense of well~being, and when we naturally 'cannot cope', this will be classed by the mechanistic myth as a 'breakdown of the biological-chemical machine' called 'mental illness', and toxic drugs are pushed as 'treatment', and of course they have the ECT machines also at the ready to "shock you out of 'clinical depression' --more shocks; these people seem to love shocking others don't they? Some people are not allowed to be aware of, and/or are in denial just how brutal everything is! One mustn't know one is oppressed for the very 'knowing' is considered mental illness, and even if you don't know but get 'symptoms' of being oppressed you receive the same diagnosis!



The thread of 'thinkers' who maintain the divisive mechanistic myth, and the City

To reiterate then, the current malignant myth of these Earth, animal , and human, torturers is that humans too are robots with no free will, and the 'thinkers' responsible for the making of, and contributing to, this myth include Rene Descartes, Sir Issac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, Wilhelm Wundt, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, etc. And many believe this prevailing myth because it is dressed up as philosophy, and science, but is really pseudoscience also known as scientism. This myth took over the orthodox religious myth previously oppressing people and nature, but of course has absorbed it unconsciously--So now, for example, instead of the myth of the 'City of God', or 'New Jerusalem', in some future promised to the "faithfull", the vision now is for a promised Technocratic and Pharmacratic City of Man for those who will follow the technocacy without questioning it or challenging it.

City-states derive from the patriarchy, the 'city-state' originally 'polis' in Greek, is where our term politics comes from. Men in robes/suits with grim faces in 'control'---the 'management', running things.


"Our word "politics" is derived from the Greek word polis. Sometimes this word is translated "city-state." But it means more than just "Los Angeles" or "New York City." The Polis was part of an ideology. We could even speak of the Polis as a religion. When we speak of "the polis," we speak of the Humanistic faith that man's institutions—specifically the State, with its philosopher-kings (Harvard-trained bureaucrats), its "smart-bombs" and its manipulation of the economy—can bring social salvation."


Urbane men of the city would look down on, belittle, and secretly fear, the 'pagans', which actually means countrydwellers. What the secular mindset does then is replace 'God' with 'Man', and the promise now is not some emerald, and jewel laden, gold paved, city from God, but the Transhumanist techno-state built by 'Man'.
So see how they first create a story or myth which claims we are biological computers, and then offer the means to 'upgrade' us and nature in some promised future with advanced technological parts. Meanwhile their mass entertainment media primes impressionable young minds for this brave new world--called 'predictive programming'-- so it will appear cool to get chips put into the body and therefore be able to immerse oneself deeply into the entertainment provided by the big corp sponsors.



The psychedelic transhumanism infiltration

The most well-known and influential leaders in the psychedelic community, Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson (both Leary and Wilson were deep Aleister Crowley devotees) spanning the generations were psychedelic transhumanists? Leary "predicted" genetic manipulation of the body, and leaving Earth in spaceships, and was against the Ecology Movement which he thought was a hundrance to 'our' destiny of leaving the "womb planet" Earth, and this is all laid out in his book Exopsychology.



McKenna "predicted" (his mentor was Aldous Huxley who also "predicted" the elites control over the masses) everyone being able to download their minds/consciousness to a central computer and thus be 'immortal', and us "returning to galactic Centre". These charismatic leaders are rarely questioned because it is not considered 'cool' to do so. To me this is the softening up of people to trust the powers -that-be's technological myth as saviour, and making it seem a cool hip thing to get microchipped, and 'upgraded' without seriously questioning ulterior motives, and being aware of how this agenda is connected with the long history of brutalization of others, and nature.
The pressure to conform to this cyborgism will be 'terrorist threat', and the money threat--that if you dont confrom and get chipped then you will be seen as suspicous, having something to hide, and also not being able to get money to live, and of course being 'uncool' as many people who don't own or use mobile phones will be made to feel. Feeling afraid to be seen as 'inferior'.

Arron Russo, interviewed by Alex Jones, claimed his friend, one of the Rockefellers, told him that they wanted people chipped so they had quicker access to turn their money-supply off via computer. More dependence more power! So the 'McKenna cool' will be used as carrot to get the 'cool people'to not question their agenda, but rather willingly plug their brains into the State computer, the stick.




It doesn't really matter whether, Leary, McKenna, and RAW, were aware they were feeding the elitst agenda, but that people unquestioningly accept what is being said without critical examination. As of old, it will suit the controllers to infiltrate the movements who use mind-altering substances because even though these substances can and do help us see through such propaganda, they can also be used to inculcate dangerous belief systems. In the past it will have been the belief that nature and the body were traps capturing a 'divine spark', as was the myth of Orphism, and Gnosticism, movements themselves influenced by Eastern philosophy, and in turn influencing Christianity.



David Icke's paranoid neo-Gnostic myth

Another 'leader' who is a big influence on people looking for alternative understandings of reality is David Icke, but Icke is also coming from a neo-Gnostic perspective. He believes that there are evil entities who prevent us, even after death, from 'progressing' into 'spiritual liberation' (in Gnosticism these 'evil entities' were called the "Archons"), and keep us 'coming back' to Earth to be slaves of the elite who themselves are shapeshifting "Draco reptilians". David Icke claims to have drank the South American psychedelic brew, Ayahuasca, and in the experience which followed, he reports he was told by a supernatural feminine voice that the moon, and all reality we see is a sinister illusory construct of these evil entities, and how their base is on the 'artifical' moon and they try and mindbend us for evil purposes. Of course, all of this nonesense is malignant myth, creating a paranoia about nature, others, the cosmos, and even nonordinary experience like NDEs etc, which are our depths, and yet he also ironically harps on about "infinite love"!



The myth of the biochemical machine

When looked at closely, the patriarchal mindset and its proliferation of myths, all try and denigrate the natural world either by demonizing it, calling it illusory, or mechanical and dead. So even though one branch of such beliefs may criticize another branch they yet still carry on the same fear-ridden agenda at root. As Silvia Federici reveals, they have created a false pseudo reality using all fields, religion, philosophy, theatre, literature, 'science', and so on, to make us believe we are machines living in a mechanical world, and universe. They thus choose to dis~enchant the body and nature. They did all this to fit us into their industrial fascism/Capitalism. This is why the drugs they aren't waging 'war' against treat us like machines. If you are sad they push anti-depressant pills at you which do not encourage any deep exploration of the roots of your sadness, the meaniings, nor recognizing how the people and culture around you may be contributing to your dis-ease, but are to crudely, supposedly, 'regulate' chemicals in your brains, for we are said to be--in their myth-- biochemical machines who when not 'functioning 'normally' this means our chemicals are 'out of balance'.

Same is so with visionary experience which can possess us, and other nonordinary experience; these phenomena can be termed 'psychotic' by the mental health movement, and they have 'anti-psychotics' at the ready to suppress what in actuality are the self-healing powers of our deeper spiritual being. But the 'mental health' mythmakers want to turn all this deep experience 'off'--as though we are a machine-- with their drugs and in doing so often do great harm to body and soul. This is hard to see for many because the whole staged scenario built-up around us and inculcated within us is geared to the belief we are frantic driven biochemical android consumers, be 'normal', shop or die!



The roots of the fear and hatred of nature

So all of this pressure to conform is built-up all around us and in us, and even avenues that seem to offer escape are also coming from same toxic root-stock---one which makes us paranoid about Earth, our bodies, others, and other species, and it is this fear we need to see through because planet Earth's Web of Life is literally being destroyed. If it is not demonized, it is said to be merely illusory, or just a mere machine with no feeling or soul or depths on being in eternal communion with our depths of being. So what are the roots of this schism?

As I understand, it is when the 'son' becomes hostile to his 'mother', and then this is enforced on others, and on nature for nature has very anciently been seen to be a mother, for we are born out of our mums, and thus nature, and are nurtured both by mum and nature, and then die within nature.

Why would a son become matricidal (and this is shown very dramatically to occur for the first time writ down as mythology in the Bablylonian myth, Enuma Elish where Marduk--the son--attacks the Great Cosmic Mother Goddess, Tiamat, Her name also literally meaning the 'Deep', the ocean, the Mother of all, from whence all life came)?

"[T]he Enuma Elish is the first story of the replacing of a mother goddess who generates creation as part of herself by a god who "makes" creation as something separate from himself" The male act of creation presented in the Enuma Elish is accompanied through the murder and mutilation of the primordial Mother Goddess, arguably the most extreme and invidious denial of female generativity conceivable'

Tiamat and Marduk, the wisest of gods, advanced against one another.
They pressed on to single combat, they approached the battle.
The lord spread out his net and enmeshed her.
The evil wind, following after, he let loose in her face.
When Tiamat opened her mouth to devour him,
He drove the evil wind, in order that she should not be able to close her lips.
The raging winds filled her belly;
Her belly became distended, and she opened wide her mouth.
He shot off an arrow, and it tore into her interior;
it cut through in inwards parts, it slit her heart.
When he had subdued her, he destroyed her life;
He cast down her carcass and stood above it.” (Heidel, Babylonian Genesis, 40-41)


Well, we all have free will, and can make choices. I can this minute go out and murder, or kiss someone, if I so choose, but I choose not to, but the possibility is there. Same is so for someone who chooses to join the military and kill others, to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, or joining a police force and use force against peaceful people in the streets, and so on.
I think it is something to do with when the thinking part of the self assumes dominance over feeling---this can be clearly seen in Rene Descartes' case: His philosophical epiphany was "I think therefore I am", and then his 'thinking' would suppress any feelings he may have naturally had regarding the animals feelings he tortured thinking them machines. The empathic interrelationship he repressed. The animals became objects to his objectively thinking-mind.


The moon god and the Dark Goddess

In prepatriarchal mythology, the moon god willingly descends into the underworld, realm of the Goddess, in her dark aspect, usually symbolized with dragons and serpents. This is also symbolized of course as the phases of the moon, where the Dark Moon is the Crone, Hekate, and from whence is mystery, the unknown, death and regeneration. So we can plainly see how the imagery of 'out there' is correlating mythically, imaginatively, associatively, with the 'in here' process of transformation. Nature is respected and reflects our own depths of dynamic being.

With the androcentric mythmakers, or the 'sons' who rebel against their Mother, the natural world, they create myths envisaging a sun god replacing the moon god and therefore we begin seeing images, and are told stories, which become written down, of 'heros' storming into the underworld, province of the dark aspect of the Goddess, and attacking and killing dragons and serpents: sun-hero Perseus beheading the Goddess Medusa is a good example! So there appears to be a simultaneous fear and suppression of their own depths, and of 'wild nature.'

---In biblical myth the God says "I AM WHO I AM", and in philosophical myth Rene Descartes says "I think therefore I am" This arrogant stance of 'I am' assumes a predominance over all that I think I am not, including all the dark unknowingness of mine and nature's being, of otherness.
'I AM'! is kind of stubborn brattish defiant stance that will not yield to the dark mysterious engulfment and loss of control that is source of ego-death and rebirth. It 'KNOWS', and will not 'suffer' unknown events which will transform. It cannot see how 'life' and 'death' are words which have been abstracted by a thinking mind to appear as intellectually independent objects, rather than terms describing dynamic continuum which cannot be grasped by language which presumes analytical abstractions are real in themselves, and even in actual conflict with each other. You can clearly see this theme throughout such kind of thinking, religiously, philosophically, secularly, and so on.



Livingdyingregenerating swirling flowing mythic experience

I love imagery. When I am in nature, and look at trees, and leaves blowing in the wind, and moving clouds, and the air on my skin, and my moving thoughts and inner images, all of this is magical and full of meaning. Also when I see images creatively portrayed in mythology, including the imagery in the patriarchal myth the Garden of Eden (which the word denigrates) this all fascinates me~~~the sacred tree, the serpent in the tree, the magic fruit, and the transformation the eating of this fruit brings, all beautiful, powerful.

I also love the ancient Welsh myth of the Goddess, Ceridwen and her Cauldron, which she has a boy, Gwion, stir. She is brewing a magical elixir for her ugly son, but I do not have to go into the detail of this myth word for word following the letter of 'established' tale, although I am aware of it, because I sense its inner meaning from the imagery of the tale. How the drinking of the magical psychedelic brew transforms the person into other forms of life including animals, fish and so on.
I can imagine the stirring of the brew in the moonlight making a swirling blue~black dark bubbling intensely living vortex as she chants spiralling melodies which you will fall into and doing so spin into unfathomable mysteries because this is where death is, and whereever death is so is life and regeneration.











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