Category Archives: blogs

15 Mar 2013 · 12:03

Inspiration/Expiration – Blog No. 23

inspiration_signInspiration is powerful.  It motivates you to act.  Feeling inspired does not mean sitting dreaming about possibilities.  It means sitting and dreaming, of course, but it means more than that.  It means doing something with the energy generated by your ideas.  Good ideas create good vibes.  Bad ideas do not.  Bad ideas sometimes supercede good ideas.  It happens.  That is because a bad idea is usually disguised as a good idea in the head of the thinker.   It is astounding what you can convince yourself of if you are determined.  Use your inspiration to inspire others.  What greater gift can you give the world?  Inspire your colleagues by being the positive guy.  Inspire your family by being real.  Watching somebody be real is a privilege.  It is a pity we do not do it more often.  It is a good way to show respect for ourselves and regard for another person.

46234_expired_timeExpiration is equally powerful.  It is the opposite of inspiration but it does not feel like it is.  It does not feel like demotivation and it does not feel too much like breathing, either.  To me, it feels like death.  We expire, eventually.  When we have done what we were sent to do on this planet, we die.  Try not to be sentimental about death.  It happens all the time.  There is no point in fearing it.  It is a freedom.  It is a state we should learn to understand better, not dread.  We have become a little too precious about death in the 21st century, despite our being bombarded with terminal facts and figures that defy reason and belief.  Death is in our faces every day.  What we learn is that we are alive, then we are not.  Death is life.  We should not hang on too tightly to the departed – as hard as that can be – we must let them move on without us because our possessiveness hinders their ability to leave this material plane.  Do not cause your loved ones to have to wait forever for you to be over them, because they will wait for as long as you need them.  Let them go forwards.  They have a path that needs travelling, they have their own footprints to find.  They have their own karmas to meet.  Remember that when you are dead you do not feel sad for the living.  You do not feel.  Those of us left behind, feel.  That is life.  If we can realise that being dead is not a punishment, we can evolve.  Dead is simply where you end up after being alive.  How you die is what is important.  We should all aspire to dying in our sleep – that is a treasure unlike any other.

We keep a spirit alive by letting it breathe through us.  Do not be selfish with your breathing.  When you speak of the dead, try to speak of them with love.  It is a good thing for you and it is a good thing for them.  The dead are best pleased to hear words of love.  They are no different to the living.

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11 Mar 2013 · 10:35

Acceptance – Blog No. 22

quote1The wise thing to do when faced with adversity is to accept it.  That is the first thing to do.  After you have accepted it, you can decide how to proceed through it.  Adversity is not averse to confrontation.  Learn to hit back at it.  I think resistance is the most common reaction when it comes to adversity.  Accept that you will resist it.  It’s natural.  Then watch it for a while, work out how best to penetrate its shell.  Adversity always carries heavy armour.  If you can see at the outset how to get beneath this armour then you will save yourself time and you will save yourself pain.  You will expose at its core its purpose – to challenge, strengthen you.  To bring you to a new understanding.  Adversity is a worthy adversary.  If you understand its lesson before it turns your life inside out then you can transcend its negativity.  It’s possible to rise above your trials while they’re happening.  This is a skill you can cultivate and you can put it to good use in your everyday.

Do you tend to your troubles with a dedicated mind or a mind distracted by every other thing?  The problem is when you are distracted by every other thing.  Troubles, when they come, like undivided attention.  It is important, however, that you do not give them undivided attention for too long.  Then they become bigger than they were when they arrived.  The challenge is to keep them from growing and escalating.  It takes mind control and a deep faith in the power you hold over yourself to receive adversity in good faith and prevent it from swallowing you whole.  Do not allow your mind to wander down dark alleyways all day, unsupervised.  Be aware of what you are thinking, when you are thinking it.   Keep the negatives in perspective.  They are a part of your day, that is all.  Do not allow them to be more than a part of your day.

Your mind is particularly helpful when it comes to mapping your actions, if you bother to ask it why it makes you do what you do.  I do believe in mind over matter.  I think the power of the mind should never be underestimated.  Not in adults, and most certainly not in our today-children.  Are you aware how fast their synapses are firing?  Their little brains are eager, ready for their world.  We need to trust that they have evolved, ready.  We need to defer sometimes to their judgement.  This world is theirs to inherit.

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08 Mar 2013 · 10:04

DNA – Blog No. 21

30DNA Studies should be included in primary school curricula.  Imagine the suspense, waiting for the results of who you are to arrive in class.  Every child should contribute a sample of their own DNA and then study his or her heritage.  Each child must learn just how important what makes us up, is.  When you demonstrate to a child who it really is you will see prejudice disappear like magic.  How can you possibly be racist when you discover that in your life chain you have links made of every texture and colour?  I look at black people and wonder how much black is in me.  I wonder how much white is in them.  Coming from Zimbabwe, I have an inherent blackness, my heart belongs at home in Africa.  But I am white.  I have learned that this happens, and it doesn’t matter.  It is how you feel inside that is of consequence.  Until we appreciate properly the resonance of association with others, it seems we will not be able to see beyond the pale.

I think DNA should be on everyone’s minds.  Yours, that of your friends, your family.  For even you and your brother, your sister, are not the same though you share the same DNA.  Its existence is miraculous.  DNA tells our life stories.  All of them.  It tells us of the lives of those that came before we did.  It is a living history.  A certain truth.  I think we learn experience before we live it.  I think it is through watching our parents tackle life that we understand how to be.  This is both a good thing, and a bad thing.  It depends on your role model.  Being that we all play roles in this life, it is vital to realise that you may be someone’s role model.  If you have or had no parents to watch, I think you will adopt the ways of those role models most invasively in your space.  If you feel a love as a child, that is invasive.  If you feel a hatred as a child, that is invasive.  Do not make the mistake of thinking that invasive applies only to a violence.  A child’s space is invaded by many things, much of the time, until it is six.  A child’s retention – its ability to learn – during this time is mind-blowing.  I don’t think respect is a given when it comes to modelling yourself on another.  We emulate others because we respect them, of course.  We also emulate others because they seem to have a power that perhaps we feel we do not have.  We copy what works for them in the hopes that it will work for us, too.  This mimicking is not often a waste of energy, but it is not overly productive.  When something is done 33 times, it becomes a habit.  The same act must be not done 33 times in order to turn this habit around.  Be yourself for 33 days in a row.  No holds barred.  It’s a real challenge.  Imagine spending the next month being completely honest and speaking your mind.  What a relief?  You might be surprised.  Truth is one of those things that a lot of people are not bothering to hear.  They are not deaf, these people, they have just mastered the art of selective hearing.  To penetrate their particular stony silence we need to have something very relevant to say.  Ignorance understands relevance, if nothing else.  I think in a world as self-obsessed as this one we need to prove to people that they are relevant.  We can start by showing them who they are.

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04 Mar 2013 · 09:36

Love/Hate – Blog No. 20

tumblrkwxd3rlAI51qa9utro1500largeFor there to be equilibrium on a universal scale, we need to balance the scales of love and hate.  There is a lot of hate circumnavigating this globe of ours.  There is too much war.  Too many old wars.  I am not speaking about the peace-making efforts of international forces, either.  Their’s is a job and they do it with our welfare in mind.  I don’t think it is easy to be trained to kill another man.  It goes against our very grain.  Ours is the will to live.  Where there is man pitted against man because belief-systems differ, there is war.  War of heart, war of mind.  When you explain to a boy that he will hate another man because of what he stands for, you are taking away his freedom.  When you tell a boy that he has enemies before he has had a chance to explore a life without strife, you are forcing your prejudice down a virgin throat.  It’s abusive.  Why can these violent nations not see what damage they are doing to their own children?  They are systematically crippling generation after generation of boys, men.  The hatred that is cultivated in dark man-corners and passed on proudly from father to son is thwarting the evolution of a lot of males on this planet.  In order to progress, you have to change your thinking.  You cannot escape this reality.  I, for one, am tired of hearing Israel and Palestine bleating about the same grievances they’ve been bleating about for decades.  Their voices are noise, their words, empty.  The fact of the matter is they do not want to find solution – that is the point that should be made.  Why does everyone skirt around this issue?  There is too much deliberate ‘not-offending’ going on in our first-world societies.  Too much lip-service and arse-kissing.  How far do we go with covering up how flawed a lot of belief-systems are?  The men who perpetuate war are behaving like children.  They will all have the last word and they will all have their way in a world that must accommodate everyone.  Did you not hear that we are all entitled to an opinion, as long as we don’t think it’s the only one?  When did anyone on this planet get anywhere worthwhile without compromise?  When you are dealing with real people, you must employ diplomacy and you must be prepared to adjust your opinions.  Compromise means you look at a situation from other sides.  You appreciate that there are people whose ideas are bigger, better, than your own.  You do not hold on to an old rage.  What is the point of that?  The horrors happened, people died.  The point is to prevent the situation from escalating further and the only way to do that is to get these old schools of thought to modify their thinking.

I think the bible is questionable as a life-manual.  It is an interesting metaphor, a vivid story – and the ten commandments are good – but as a work of fact (dare I say truth?)  it fails dismally.  I think too many people take its lessons too literally and this raises questionable expectations of a god, his son, his spirit.

I think the Koran speaks a great truth.  Allah cannot have as many followers as he does without having something truly inspiring to say.  Perhaps their ‘religion’ is timeless, the Muslims.  Their language is fluid, it is evolving and spinning and whirling like a dervish, and their faith is very strong, a feature of their society.  Perhaps we could all learn something from a people who understand devotion.  Do you know how powerful the reach of devotion?

I think it’s time we asked one another what it is that we can do to make amends in this fractured world.  We cannot ignore that we have issues, complex issues of hatred to try and overcome.  I believe they can be overcome.  I believe the amount of hatred directed at the Germans – purely because of the Holocaust – has done a lot of damage to their existing psyches.  It is a form of oppression – the with-holding of love from a people – and a lot of love has been with-held from Germany because of their past.  It is time to move on from their dent in the past.  Rwanda has moved on.  That was a genocide on some scale.  Can you imagine being hacked to death with a machete?  Bodies lining the streets for weeks – piled so high cars had to drive over them to get by?  That kind of horror is as bad – if not worse – than anything done to the Jews during the war.  Can we not accept that there were two bloody great wars and get beyond their reach?  For gods’ sake.  I think god waits for the alarm of peace to sound.   We would all do well to work towards that silence.

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01 Mar 2013 · 12:20

Role-playing – Blog No. 19

Dice and Poker Chips on Game TableConsider yourself a player.   A life-player.  You are one.  You cannot think that life is not a game.  It is an elaborate game of chance.  How exciting is the notion that you can change totally the direction of your everyday by doing one small thing differently?  That is some clout.  Like touching the steering wheel at 220km/h on the autobahn.  The smallest nudge has big implications.  How comfortable are we accepting that we are all role-players?  I think a great many people are either in denial, or are unable to reconcile their own manipulation with themselves.  We are all manipulators.  Every single one of us.  How skilled we are at manipulating is testimony to the teachers we had as children.  We learned from watching our parents manipulate each other.  We learned from being manipulated.  Even as a child you know when you are being manipulated.  It is impossible not to feel coercion.  You can hide from it, or hide it from yourself, but in every exchange you have with another there is some form of manipulation underway.  It’s about wants and needs.  We all want our needs met.  How closely do we pay attention to the needs of others?  Perhaps not closely enough.  But we are all built from the same basic stuff.  In that way we start life equal.  We are all of an egg, a sperm.  But we are equal only at the point before fertilization.  After fertilization it becomes clear how successful our genetic coding is – because we are not genetically equal by any stretch of the imagination.  It depends how far our parents’ bodies had evolved by the time we were conceived.  It depends how good the best of each parent actually was at the time of conception.  We have unique patterns of personality, as individual as our experience of the world.  We are not the same, but we are one.  We are part of the diversity, our thoughts are part of the far-reaching collective unconscious to which we all have access.  We are alone in our perception of the world and alone in our expression thereof, but in each of us is the same driving nature, we all face the same need to self-actualise.  How much time do you spend ruminating on life with the great masters?  You should meet them in your head.  One by one.  They all live there.  You have to learn how to speak each one’s language.  In fact you cannot appreciate your own mother-tongue until you learn another language.  Each language houses a different reality.  We need to share our learning and celebrate our diversity.  We need to take on the roles we create for ourselves and play them to the best of our ability.  There is no coincidence in your being where you find yourself.  You have carved for yourself the niche in which you find yourself confined.  If you are confined, you need to free yourself.  Or you need to be free of yourself.  The self is a great oppressor.  It, too, is an efficient manipulator.  But celebrate that.  It is your choice to benefit from your own experience.  It is your choice to learn who you are and to make yourself stand out by virtue of your understanding of life’s lessons.  You were made to do something.  Find out what it is by seeing where you have sent yourself.

You will find that some of you are more refined than others.  Some of you understand life better.  It depends how emotionally intelligent you are.  You need to foster emotional intelligence.  You bring it up in you, like a child.  You cannot play the life game until you tend to your inner child.  It holds the dice.  You know how powerful the drive of the subconscious when the inner child is in control?  It is something to behold.  That is always something to think about before you switch to auto-pilot.  Let your subconscious speak, but perhaps do not let it act for you.  You can never guarantee the way an encounter with the ego will go.

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25 Feb 2013 · 12:25

Respecting – Blog No. 18

War_child-viIn some cultures, respect is an intrinsic part of an everyday.  It permeates every action, word, deed.  Other cultures cannot spell the word.  I think this imbalance is having a major impact on the stability of our world.  Respect is taught to children.  It is taught, it is not inherited.  As is accountability.  You show respect in order to teach respect.  Particularly to children.  Are you aware that by the age of three a child has developed a significant part of its moral make-up?  It learns from what it sees.  By three, a child’s values are established and it has garnered important life skills that will assist or hinder it on its journey to adulthood.  That means children are to be treated with care.  Some cultures currently do not understand this.  Try to remember that the world you promote to a child is the world they will believe exists.  It is not easy to change early impressions.

Every child that is abused or exploited is a child destroyed.  Every childhood destroyed, is sacrilege.  The value of the purity contained in the true experience of growing up should not be overlooked.  The value of proper nurturing by parents should not be overlooked, either.  The true experience for a child is about preserving the innocence for as long as you can.  Importantly, preserving innocence is never about lying to a child.  It is about protecting a child from the adult content of our world.

It is a serious failing that we have as many broken children on this planet as we do.  Too many children have seen too much, too soon.  For the particular crime of child abuse (emotional, physical, circumstantial or spiritual) – for it is a crime against Nature to damage a child – there is no absolution.  Your karma and your end of days will teach you just how frowned upon cruelty to children is.  Remember that in our time a childhood is short.  That is how it is.  Life moves quickly for us all.  I see a problem in that there are no halcyon days for a great many children in this world of ours.  In a world as adept as this we should not allow our governments to sidestep this issue.  They must allocate more funding to social services.  They must train more social workers and pay them properly to do the jobs that can make a difference to a child’s life.  The world needs more volunteers who wish to heal hurt children.  The warring nations of this world need to take accountability for destroying their own children with their pointless vendettas and stop blaming peacemakers for their lost youth.  To teach hatred to a child is child abuse.  Israel should think about that.  Hamas should think about that.  Syria should take note and Osama bin Laden’s lost followers should stop brainwashing themselves and martyring innocents.

I think the global community must be more concerned about what is going on in its front garden.  A childhood can never be reclaimed.  As such, each one should be treasured by the adults – us – for the sake of the small person who is learning its way in our big world and for the sake of the adult that that child will become.  It is simple.  If respect is not shown for you, for your innocence as a child, you will find it difficult as an adult to reconcile respect for yourself with an everyday.  You will learn how to disrespect your inner child as an adult and this has dire consequences.

Assess yourself.  Recognise that the wounded child in you demands respect.  And yes, we all have one.  If you missed a childhood or were not taught respect when you were younger then teach yourselves what it is now.  Do this by watching others respect you.  If others do not respect you, it is because they have seen no reason to do so.  That is often hard to accept.  If you care, accept it and give them reason.  If you do not care, you are on the wrong planet.  You will feel better for some respect.  Perhaps it is most important to remember that it is necessary to nurture respect in yourself and others because it is fundamental to love.  And without love, we cannot fix the broken children, or adults, in this world.  The responsibility is ours.

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22 Feb 2013 · 12:13

Love understands – Blog No. 17

neon-love-sign-3Where do you go when you have no answers for your questions?  You go inside.  Deeper inside.  When you think you have no further resources, open to yourself.  That sounds easier than it is, perhaps, but it is only at the point where you feel yourself facing a brick wall that you will come to realise that you have a way to go yet.  With every fibre in your being you will realise that your challenge is only beginning.  That is no reason to get dispirited.  Emotional brick walls are daunting to meet and tricky to bypass.  Over the obstacle is always possible, but the problem is you leave it behind, unattended.  Under the obstacle – not advisable.  You should not like to find yourself crushed by the weight of it.  Around the obstacle is an option, but that takes too long.  And besides, going around it you give yourself a lot of work as well as an extra choice – left or right – which is a bit like meeting the Sphinx at the crossroads and wanting to go straight.  I should add that going straight is the best way.  It is the hardest, but it yields the best results.  Plough through the questions posed by your inner Sphinx and go through the wall.  Some walls you will pass through easily.  Some you will not.  Some you will bang your head against, time and again.  They say that it is insanity to do the same thing over and over, expecting different results.  It is only insanity if you do not ultimately achieve your end goal.  That might take you seventeen attempts, it might take you two, but you can rest assured that if you work from your heart and you keep trying, you will succeed at what it is you need to succeed at.  That we will find what we are seeking is an indisputable law of Nature.  Do not be tempted to give up – on yourself – when you find yourself hitting your head against a wall.  You have to brace your mind, put your head down, and try again.  The wall will eventually give way to your persuasion.  It always does.  You have to be sure you are approaching it right, that’s all.

Understand that there is a love to which we all owe our allegiance.  The love within.  It’s source is bigger than every single one of us on this planet, and it is enormous when all of us are put together.  Love begets love.  It seems such a tired concept, such an over-used ideal.  But it’s there.  That love is constant.  It is what keeps us alive.  Do not take your love for granted.  Recognise it.  And if you cannot see it – then search harder.  Everyone has access to love.  Everyone.  And everything, has beauty.  Choose to see it.

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18 Feb 2013 · 15:34

Magic attributes – Blog No. 16

matrixWe all have them.  If we knew how best to harness the magic we possess as human beings, the world would be a fairer, better place.  Do you know how much magic we waste, with the measuring of dreams and the marking of just one reality?   Our refusal to allow ourselves to understand ourselves in every single light does not help in the universal scheme of things.  Why should you be afraid of what you will see in your light?  In fact, why should you be afraid of what you will see in your dark?  Your dark is often where the best insulation lies and beneath that layer of asbestos there is a valuable perception of ourselves that we should not be alarmed to meet.  Get through the asbestos, and face facts.  When you come face to your face you will see just how fragile your reality.  But do not forget that the fragility of reality is endearing.  Reality is only what we make of it.  It has a life-span of our say-so.  It has a sell-by date.  The fact that reality is so intolerable for so many should make us eager to get rid of it and generate a new one.  Why do we hold so tight?  Who says we can’t generate a brand new reality?

The fact that we can conceive of multiple realities is testimony to our magic.  The nature of our magic.  If you cannot conceive of numerous realities then you perhaps need to expand your consciousness.  You need to exercise your brain, tax your mind and improve your capacity.  You need to do emotional aerobics.  You are your own frame.  Your physical frame, and your mental frame.  Remember that.  Make sure you give yourself enough space to move around inside your frame.  It will be the size you decide.  Do not lose sight of your particular uniqueness – your wants and needs – when you stretch your own frame, expand your capabilities within – and without – yourself and you will be awed by what you find.  You will be awed, too, by what you see.  First – open your eyes.

Trust your dreams.  They know from experience where you are taking yourself.

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12 Feb 2013 · 14:50

You, we, and I – Blog No. 14

selflessnessTake the time to sit with yourself and ask yourself how attached you are to yourself.  If it were required of you to let go of yourself – your entire being as you today know it – how hard would you find that to do?  Perhaps for some that kind of non-attachment comes easily.  It depends on your upbringing (a lot depends on your upbringing, incidentally) and it depends on your life view.  For some the need to hold tight to the self will be intense, the fear of forsaking, abandoning – all the emotive words – leaving, oneself to one’s own devices too huge to contemplate.  I happen to think that until we let go of every single one of our preconceived notions about ourselves we will be trapped on the hamster-wheel of life.  We will be bound to our own fates.  In order to gain control, we need to lose control.  We need to let go.  It takes some bravery to step inside one’s own mind and do a stock-take.  The longer you leave it, the more daunting the task.  Best to visit with yourself often when you are young, and you are never going to be as young as today.  Ironically, it is only by stepping inside of one’s mind that one can find the objectivity needed to separate yourself from the destiny you have prescribed for yourself.  It takes some doing, too, to take your own destiny on, and change it.  Destiny can be pretty set in its ways, like a deep-sleeping dragon.  The thing to understand is that each small change you make will have an immediate effect on your future.  Immediate.  That is how powerful our hold over ourselves is.  The bigger picture changes slowly, that is the way of things in this world.  But it starts to change from the moment you make that first change.  Choose to have an effect on your future because it will happen for you, regardless.  Better to be in control – on some level – of where it is that you are going and what it is that you are doing.  We do not reserve the right to control everything that happens to us in this life-space.  Life as an everyday is too unpredictable to find ourselves ever getting complacent.  Surely?

The problem is, we do get complacent as human beings.  We become caught in the rut of routine (which speeds time up, incidentally – so break with routine for a slower life) and we follow our peculiar habits as humans, as attached to those as we are to the notion of ourselves.  It makes a lot of sense to separate willingly with your own tradition.  It teaches you something new about the self you are letting go of, every time.

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08 Feb 2013 · 09:00

God Lost – Blog No. 13

reflections on Christ - crucifixionI suspect God was on his way back to earth to take human form when he got side-tracked and subsequently lost. I think he tapped into the Jesus saga and was so horrified at what his humans had done to his son that he quite lost the plot. I do not imagine when God and Jesus met again – after the ascension – that things in the God household were overly cheerful. Jesus must have had questions. Like – how could you do that to me? I think the trauma visited on his system by his crucifixion experience would have left scars. Big ones. God would be answerable for those scars. The other thing for Jesus, is that he knew that should life roll around in the good way of reincarnation, then he was in trouble. Who would want to come back as Jesus? I think he’s been running ever since, from his own identity. That means, in effect, he is here on the planet. In spirit, at least. Like a Highlander, maybe. There can be only one. We should find Jesus’ presence comforting. I think it is safe that a lot of people do. What worries me is that a great many people think he is actually coming back to save them. I think they expect clouds and trumpets and palm leaves and donkeys, on some level. I am not sure that was ever on Jesus’ agenda. Large scale saving after his event. I think his work was his word and he came and said what needed to be said. Then he died. His job was done. He went back to being a right-hand man. Or so the stories go. To me, Jesus was into teaching, guiding, showing a path in which he had faith. Faith being what faith was, in his time.

How can a God gain empathy unless he spends time touching other people, and being touched? That is how we learn empathy. Human contact. But how could God come back as a human? He couldn’t. He could come back as half a human. Undoubtedly he would have to hold a part of himself sacred and pure – so he could remember what he was like before the ‘life experience’ changed him – and that would be the half that would be waiting for him upon his return to himself. If Jesus’ spirit is on the planet, then God’s spirit is on the planet. I think the God spirit is lost, trying to find Jesus, whose spirit is still running scared. I would be scared if I had been Jesus. I think God is busy watching our daily horrors unfold before his eyes. He is watching the steady massacre of his planet in silence. I think he is astounded by what meets his eyes. Perhaps he is waiting patiently for us to wake up and see that what we have on the ground is what was promised above? The important thing to remember is that in the traditional sense, there is a hell below, a heaven above. That leaves a real space where we are, which is here and now. It’s about time we took the time in this now to bend our reality towards paradise.

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