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Author Topic:   The Game of Mystery
yourfriendinspirit
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Posts: 2528
From: California, USA
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posted September 21, 2007 01:50 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for yourfriendinspirit     Edit/Delete Message
THE GAME OF MYSTERY...

It is said that Linda Goodman Participated in the Research For This Article....

THE GAME:
After Reading This Article,
Can You Guess The Title Of It?
THE GAME WILL LAST UNTIL SOMEONE GUESSES CORRECTLY...
I will Place Hints In New Posts As Needed To Keep The Game Alive...

____________


The sprawling grid of tract developments and shopping malls that is Fort Collins, Colo., eventually peters out miles from the city's old cow-town core amid winter-yellow fields and rolling, snow-streaked prairie. Something like half of this land, split-levels and sagebrush alike, is bought and sold through a single Fort Collins real estate company known as The Group Inc.

Welcoming a visitor into his sleekly austere downtown office, Larry Kendall, The Group's co-founder, projects a cornstalk-plain, boy-next-door freshness that has remained with him since his Kansas boyhood in a town that he says was ''like 'Mayberry R.F.D.' '' The brass plaque on Kendall's desk reads: ''Life is a lively process of becoming.'' Kendall arrived in Colorado in 1973 with a new M.B.A. and a lot of ambition; today, his company employs 55 people. In 1987, it sold more than $90
million worth of Fort Collins real estate.

Kendall, who is 41, is also a product of the 1960's, and when he came to Colorado he
dreamed of creating something better than the ''tight, backstabbing and adversarial''
way of doing business that he had learned in his graduate classes at Kansas State
University. He found one solution in a succession of ''New Age'' trainers, whose
theories of personal transformation are a burgeoning influence on Colorado's corporate culture. Acting on the principle that ''we are limited only by our belief
system,'' these trainers have taught Kendall's salesmen and secretaries to perform exercises on a 30-foot high wire, to break 12-inch planks with their bare hands and even to walk barefoot - at a fast clip - on burning coals.

With a boyish smile, Kendall pulls from his desk drawer three forks twisted like corkscrews. ''My receptionist did this one,'' he says. ''These two I did myself.'' Last year, Kendall explains, he led 30 staffers to a park in the Rockies where an ''energy channeler'' flown in from New York showed them how to bend forks through the power of mental concentration. ''Our goal is to maximize the potential of each member of the organization, and then to maximize the potential of the entire group,'' Kendall declares.

''Unlimitedness is our natural condition.''
Larry Kendall scarcely sees himself as a radical. Indeed, last year he was elected
president of the Fort Collins Chamber of Commerce. He is, nevertheless, part of a
movement that is subtly beginning to make itself felt as beliefs that were once
relegated to the countercultural fringe find more and more adherents in middle-class America. ''Since the mid-1960's, there has been a steady increase in openness to metaphysical and occult ideas in the United States,'' says J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, Calif. ''Beliefs that have existed for a long time on the metaphysical periphery are now becoming very much part of Middle America.'' New Age philosophy is becoming the religion, or at least the ethos, of a growing proportion of the young, professional middle class that is now beginning to move into positions of responsibility and authority in American society.

The New Age Movement is a protean phenomenon that embraces cults like the Church of Scientology and the Unification Church, nominally secular self-improvement
programs like Lifespring and est, and a myriad of ''teachers'' who blend psychotherapeutic techniques with Eastern mysticism, the occult, the ''healing power'' of pyramids and quartz crystals, pre-Christian paganism or witchcraft and other forms of spiritualism.

Increasingly, it also includes a significant constituency that has absorbed
''transformational'' values through some form of personal therapy, professional training courses or even public education. What virtually all participants in the New Age movement have in common is the belief in a cosmic destiny for mankind, which
individuals pursue mainly through mystical examination of the self; and in a ''new age'' of existence that will be peopled by superior beings who have undergone a process of inner ''transformation.''

As Barbara Marx Hubbard, a leading New Age visionary who believes that humanity is
genetically ''preprogrammed'' for enlightenment, puts it, ''A new order is being born that will be as different from what exists now as the Renaissance was from the Middle Ages.''

Nowhere has New Age thinking had a more profound impact on conventional society
than in Colorado. Meditational techniques have become common fare in the state's
public and private schools. Thousands of workers in some of Colorado's most
prestigious corporations regularly attend management motivation courses based on
the teachings of New Age theorists. By one estimate, as many as 50 percent of Denver
executives have undergone some kind of ''transformational'' experience.

Mary Somers, a Denver psychic, claims that each year she ''cleanses'' the spirits of
former tenants from between 500 and 600 homes for area real estate agents.

According to Cynthia Kisser, executive director of the Cult Awareness Network, a
Chicago-based organization that provides information on cult activities, Colorado ''is a fertile market for a wide array of cults, perhaps second only to California,'' which has about nine times Colorado's population.

Boulder, home of the University of Colorado, is ''the New Age's Athens,'' as a local astrologer put it. By some estimates, as many as a quarter of the nearly 80,000 people who live in this town, which spreads beneath the eastern scarp of the Rocky Mountains, have undergone some type of New Age training. Bulletin boards at Boulder's elegant Pearl Street Pedestrian Mall advertise bewildering congeries of ''life
and growth empowerment practitioners,'' specialists in ''balancing and aligning
energies,'' psychic reprogrammers, past-life regression experts, neuro-linguistic
programmers, crystal healers, teachers of ''planetary ascension'' and ''soul merge,'' and ''channelers'' who ''commune with the dead.'' There's even a self-described ''New Age accountant'' who lists ''rebirther'' among his qualifications.

Then there's the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Spiritual Emergence Network, offering support services for individuals who experience interior voices, a sense of past existence and ''profound estrangement'' from the material world -none of which are viewed by the network as symptoms of psychological disorder; rather, they are regarded as part of a ''natural process of spiritual unfoldment.''

The network's directors include the board president of the Boulder County Health Department and the nurse manager of Boulder Community Hospital's medical-psychiatric unit. So rapidly do fashions of the spirit proliferate in Boulder that, by comparison to some of the newer arrivals, the 14-year-old Naropa Institute, ''a contemplative college'' founded by the late Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, seems as staid as the Episcopal Church.

The current efflorescence of New Age spiritualism in Colorado trades partly on the state's traditional tolerance for unorthodox religion. In 1946, a columnist for The Rocky Mountain News declared, ''I am proud rather than regretful that Denver is a city of cults. The fact that we seek new ways - sometimes wrong ways indeed -toward the eternal verities is evidence we are a lively and aspiring community.''

Since the 1960's, the state has welcomed a steady stream of spiritual immigrants. A
few of the more prominent: Jose Arguelles, a mystic who conceived last year's mass
meditation known as the ''harmonic convergence''; the popular astrologer Linda Goodman; Shirley MacLaine, who wants to establish a center for ''healing'' and metaphysical study in the town of Crestone, and the entertainer John Denver, whose Aspen-based Windstar Foundation has brought together New Age theorists and various public figures, including Ted Turner, J. Peter Grace and former Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm. ''You see the footprints of New Age attitudes and assumptions all over this state,'' says John K. Andrews, president of the Independence Institute, a nonpartisan public policy research group based in Denver. ''Because of the large number of in-migrants, the high educational level and the traditional openness to new
approaches, people here may be more vulnerable than elsewhere to the New Age appeal.''

The mainstreaming of the transcendental began in earnest when countercultural
migrants, who had been attracted to Colorado in the 1960's by its cheap land, relative isolation and mountain mystique, fused with the massive influx of young professionals drawn by the state's economic boom in the 1970's. Between 1960 and 1987, Colorado's population leaped to 3.3 million from 1.75 million, as the state shifted from a horse-and-buggy economy based on mining and ranching to one fueled by new
high-technology corporations, government offices and financial services tied to the
for-a-time-booming oil industry.

When oil prices collapsed in the early 1980's, the economy plummeted along with
them, and the growing popularity of New Age ideas may to some extent reflect short-term economic and social demoralization. The boom's end left Denver with a spanking new core of skyscrapers that stand as half-empty monuments to a surge of prosperity Coloradans thought would never end. It also left the state with unemployment of almost 8 percent in 1987.

''For a long time, we had a competitive, sort of John Wayne attitude toward business,'' says a Denver businessman who is active in New Age groups. ''What we now need is cooperation, room for the magnificence of each of us to create an atmosphere where everyone can win, where there are no losers.'' The fact that New Age idealism seems to appeal as much to the successful as to the unsuccessful suggests, however, that there are deeper reasons for its popularity. ''

The New Age movement is a codification of the idealistic fervor, religious experimentation, anti-intellectualism, millennialism and self-immersion of the 1960's counterculture,'' says Carl A. Raschke, director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Denver and the author of a study on the historical origins of the New Age culture movement, ''and it reflects, in part, a generational mid-life crisis.

The 60's generation has come up against the limits of opportunity and human mortality, and in the New Age movement it is seeking an innocence and immortality that is beyond
human grasp.''

The hard pink light of dawn streams through the Holiday Inn's rooftop restaurant as a
smartly tailored woman named Bonnie Andrikopoulos calls to order the weekly
breakfast meeting of the Win/Win Forum, a Denver organization whose nominal purpose
is to promote a philosophy of stressless cooperation in business and personal
relations.

Andrikopoulos, Win/Win's president, is a ''personal consultant'' whose business card states: ''People have results in their lives, or the reasons why they don't.'' The 60 or so corporate executives, bankers, stockbrokers, venture capitalists, management consultants and other professionals abandon their coffee and French toast, and turn away from an information table where some have been pursuing books on spiritualist ''channeling,'' healing with crystals, oriental philosophy, stress reduction and business management.

Andrikopoulos first calls on a representative of Beyond War, a group that claims a national membership of 10,000 and maintains that when enough people visualize
peace through inner self-discipline, war will automatically cease. ''Beyond War gave
me a whole new way of feeling about war,'' declares the woman, who, like many of the
people in the room, appears to be in her late 30's. ''From it, I've learned that there is nothing 'out there' to change. The only place where change takes place is in yourself.'' ''The 'Win/Win' view is that everything, every transaction is spiritual,'' explains John Longman, an account executive for a brokerage firm, who is the forum's vice president. ''Once you integrate that principle into your life, business, personal relationships and the spiritual domain all become one.''

Another example of business-oriented behavior modification technique has been
developed by the Pacific Institute, a private educational corporation in Seattle, which, until a few years ago, marketed its curriculum as ''New Age Thinking.'' Jack Fitterer, president, says now that the institute has no affiliation with the New Age movement. Its ''Investment in Excellence'' training series, however, employs much of the same rhetoric, encouraging the belief that through interior visualization and mantra-like
''affirmations'' they can not only change their own behavior patterns but also influence others.

Fitterer says that more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies have purchased
training tapes from Pacific Institute. In Colorado, the Investment in Excellence
program has been utilized at the Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business
Machines and elsewhere, including a Rockwell International plant near Boulder that manufactures triggers for nuclear bombs. Former Governor Lamm, who describes
himself as a ''cynic,'' put his cabinet through the course at a retreat in the Rockies and later recommended it for use by all state employees.

Thus far, the bitterest opposition to the New Age movement has come from conservative Christians, who believe that New Age thinking is ultimately Satanic. ''We are making a statement here in the Lord's behalf,'' declared the Rev. Maurice Gordon,
towering over a handful of parishioners who had drawn themselves up against the
yellow-brick wall of Boulder's United Pentecostal Church on a recent evening.

Patches of snow lay on the foothills of the Rockies, beyond the blocks of ranch-style
houses around the church. A crowd of New Agers had gathered in counterprotest. Gordon brandished a paperback copy of ''Out on a Limb,'' by Shirley MacLaine. ''This
represents the bulk of the people who are now entering the occult,'' he shouted. Next
he picked ''The Modern Witch's Spellbook,'' by Sarah L. Morrison. ''This one tells you
how to maim, kill and seduce.''

Gordon dropped each book into a barbecue grill smouldering beside him. At his feet, a heap of books on witchcraft, meditation, Eastern mysticism and pagan belief awaited the flames. ''All of it is evil from beginning to end,'' roared Gordon.

But he was barely audible over the protests of the hostile crowd. Gusts of smoke rolled
up into the moonlight, obscuring a hand-lettered sign on the church wall that proclaimed: ''Satan's Spell Is Broken!''

Less doctrinaire critics maintain that the New Age philosophies undermine rational
decision-making. ''New Age thinking is like a computer virus, a glitch that undermines
the entire system,'' says Raschke. ''It breaks down and reconstructs cultural values and the norms of rationality, and, in general, it promotes totalistic thinking and encourages an ethos that runs against the grain of democracy.

'' ''Most New Agers are well-intentioned inheritors of the American utopian tradition,'' says John Andrews of the Independence Institute. ''At the bottom of New Age philosophy, however, there is a lack of seriousness about human limitations, the reality of evil and the lessons of history. The idea, for example, that human nature can be remade and that people can live together in utopian harmony is quaint but dangerous, because it makes you vulnerable to the cynical behavior of leaders who know how to take advantage of the naive.

'' ''New Agers typically view themselves as operating on a 'higher' spiritual plane than other people and believe that the whole traditional dichotomy between right and wrong is merely the product of a degenerated aspect of life,'' says Kevin Garvey, a Pennsylvania-based analyst of the New Age movement who has counseled many former members of cults.

If man is God, Garvey adds, then any act is potentially a sacrament, any idea potentially sacred. ''Totalitarianism,'' as Barbara Marx Hubbard quaintly puts it, ''is premature holism.'' Hubbard, a frequent participant in New Age forums around the country, is sufficiently well connected in the political realm to have received more than 200 delegate signatures on petitions to put her name in nomination for the Vice Presidency at the 1984 Democratic Convention.

She and other New Agers see the world as a cosmically interlocking system in which moral action mainly means working to dissolve the boundaries that divide man from God, from nature and from other human beings. ''The consciousness that says that we as individuals or societies are separate is outmoded, and will be selected out of the evolution process,'' she asserts.

New Agers imbued with a vision of global unity have been especially active in citizen diplomacy with the Soviet Union. Hubbard, among others, enlisted 100 Russian
representatives for a ''Soviet-American Citizens' Summit'' last February in Washington. The Russian delegates attended a joint meditation under the auspices of the Pentagon Meditation Club, a group of 15 Department of Defense employees who, through meditation, hope to place a ''spiritual aura'' of peace around the planet.

Federal education officials have charged that a model curriculum produced by the
University of Denver's Center for Teaching International Relations virtually
institutionalizes the New Age view of the world by declining to draw distinctions
between different political systems, or among nations in general. ''Whether we
recognize it or not, all of us are engaged in either resisting or creating a new world
order,'' begins the 300-page ''World Citizen Curriculum,'' which endorses the I Ching and recommends out-of-body experience as a way of visualizing a world without national boundaries. Hundreds of copies have been sold to schools and individual teachers nationwide.

''From a moral standpoint, the curriculum seems to be saying that democracy is equal
to the lack of democracy, and that we have no right to criticize other cultures no
matter what they may be like,'' says Tom Tancredo, regional director of the Department of Education in Denver.
Increasingly vocal parents' groups claim that schools have become laboratories of
New Age experimentation. The Boulder Valley public schools offer in their ''lifelong
learning'' program not-for-credit classes for adults and children, a course in psychic channeling taught by ''a conscious voice channel who allows any entity of Light to speak through her'' and a ''Crystal Workshop'' that involves ''a 'hands on' introduction
to the healing energies of crystals and gemstones.''

In 1986, suburban Jefferson
County appointed Sylvia A. Falconer as chairman of its youth suicide prevention task force; she is a Unitarian-Universalist minister who lectures on modern witchcraft and ''future fantasies,'' and advocates the popular revival of pre-Christian goddess-worship.

Until education officials, catalyzed by irate parents, forced the resignation of the teacher who had supported it, a Denver high school hosted a computer bulletin board used by witchcraft enthusiasts affiliated with DAWN, the Denver Area Wiccan Network. At Boulder College, meanwhile, students may study ''psychology'' in such courses as
''Synchronicity and the I Ching,'' ''Transpersonal Dimensions of Astrology'' and ''Jung and Alchemy.''

Many Colorado schools, public and private, utilize practices adapted from Eastern
meditation under the rubrics of ''centering,'' ''stress reduction'' or ''guided visualization,'' usually with the aim of enhancing students' self-esteem and creativity, or presenting an alternative to alcohol and drugs. Tom Tancredo says that in the last three years he's received hundreds of complaints and queries from parents who worried that their children were being asked ''to undergo some kind of New Age technique'' in the classroom.

''A lot of teachers have not got the slightest idea of what they're doing,'' says Tancredo. ''How do you know you're dealing with 30 well-adjusted kids who'll respond in a salutary way?''

The anxiety generated in some conservative neighborhoods by both real and imagined
New Age abuses has, at least once, produced a modern version of a witch hunt. A year
ago, in suburban Denver, an Adams County jury found three parents liable for slander
and defamation of a 45-year-old teacher, Jan Cole, who had allegedly taught ''occult'' practices in her sixth-grade classroom. Two of the complainants are currently appealing the decision.

Cole, who says she is also a ''certified touch-for-health instructor,'' had taught students ''to use their hands to relieve headaches,'' practiced guided visualization before lessons and described to students her own firewalking experience. Though some
teachers insist that Cole's tribulations now make them hesitate before using ''innovative'' techniques, her official vindication suggests that most of the methods she practices will remain acceptable in Colorado classrooms.

''I had been doing these things for seven years with-out any complaints,'' says Cole. ''I never even knew they were controversial.''

Few New Age beliefs are really new. Many derive from 19th-century Theosophy and
Emersonian Transcendentalism, and more distantly from Gnosticism. But the mass
marketing of the mystical by groups like est and Lifespring, and by popular figures like Shirley MacLaine, has made once-esoteric experience easily and cheaply available to people in all walks of life.

Before the program ended in 1984, est alone had processed some 500,000 people worldwide. Lifespring has ''trained'' more than 250,000 individuals in five-day sessions that purport to ''further people in their highest aspirations'' and help them experience ''fulfillment in all areas of their lives.''

Jon Ruth, a 31-year-old Ph.D. candidate in physics at the University of Colorado, was an ardent member of Lifespring for a year, until he abandoned the group last summer
through a deprogramming organized by his parents.

In the spring of 1986, Ruth's academic advisor, who was a member of Lifespring, urged him to invest $400 in a training class. Among his fellow trainees were a nun, a psychiatrist and a county leader of the Democratic Party. ''I learned the idea that I was responsible for 'choosing' everything, whether it was bad vision, or cancer, or even my own parents,'' recalls Ruth. ''I came to believe that if I really concentrated on something, it would happen by magic.

They tell you, 'Be open to the possibilities.' I became open to crystals, which I thought were loony before. Then I went to a channeler and I thought, O.K., maybe there really is a spirit speaking through him. Basically, I went from action to inaction. If you can visualize the perfect world, why do anything about the world as it is?''

As techniques de-rived from the New Age movement become more widely accepted,
more Americans throughout the country are likely to be affected, sometimes
unknowingly, by transformational values. The potential appeal of New Age philosophy
cannot be underestimated, for it speaks to genuine concerns about the nature of God
and man that many Americans apparently feel are inadequately addressed by more orthodox faiths. ''The New Age movement has already become a significant alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition,'' says Carl Raschke of the Institute for the Humanities.

New Age thinking poses as profound a challenge to secular humanism as it does to
conventional Christianity. By validating mystical and magical experience, it sows
corresponding doubt about the trustworthiness of rational thought. By denying the importance of the past as a basis for action, it has the capacity to separate the individual from both his own and society's history. New Age thinking further encourages the belief that what ''feels right'' is the best - perhaps the only - measure of human behavior. ''What we shall see,'' predicts Raschke, ''is the creation of a garden variety sociopathic personality which believes, like Raskolnikov, that 'everything is permitted.' ''

New Age idealism may find a still wider audience among children of the 60's who have grown disillusioned with yuppie materialism, New Deal liberalism and the conservative politics of the Reagan era. New Age philosophy mimics liberalism with its idiom of globalism, cooperation, tolerance and truth through self-understanding; it rejects as mere ''reformism,'' however, liberalism's traditional concern with social issues like
racial justice and equal opportunity. Indeed, New Age thinking generally regards such problems as a mere state of mind.

''The transformational movement produces individuals who elevate spiritual fable
higher than verifiable reality,'' says Kevin Garvey, the Pennsylvania counselor. ''In practical terms, it means that there will be more people who will have a hard time facing unwanted deductions and inconvenient facts.

If you have people like this running atomic reactors and airport control towers and negotiating everything from sewer bills to declarations of war, you're bound to have more mistakes and crises because they don't adhere to the criteria of objective reality.''

At the United Pentacostal Church in Boulder, a young woman wearing a beret pulled over her ears had joined 150 or so other city residents to protest Maurice Gordon's book burning. ''You work on yourself because there is nothing else,'' she said.

''Everything outside is corrupted.''

The young woman worked as a secretary for the Boulder County Department of Social
Services, she said, but was taking courses at Boulder College to qualify as a
caseworker. She also expected to become a spiritualist channeler. ''It's a natural
function,'' she said. On her lapel she wore a button that said ''100 percent optimist.''

Gordon's parishioners were framed in the church window, their faces contorted in
anguished prayer, like lurid masks in the fire's light.

''World history is over,'' said the young woman. ''This is the beginning of galactic
history.''


------------------
GOOD LUCK TO YOU ALL...
Sendin' love your way,
"your friend in spirit"

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yourfriendinspirit
Moderator

Posts: 2528
From: California, USA
Registered: Oct 2006

posted September 21, 2007 02:33 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for yourfriendinspirit     Edit/Delete Message
Hints:

#1 This Article Was Found In A Very Well Known Newspaper.
*added 9-21-07

#2 The Article Headline Contains The Name of A State.
*added 9-22-07

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Astralmuse
Knowflake

Posts: 210
From:
Registered: Sep 2007

posted September 22, 2007 09:43 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Astralmuse     Edit/Delete Message
"Colorado's Thriving Cults" was in the New York Times.

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yourfriendinspirit
Moderator

Posts: 2528
From: California, USA
Registered: Oct 2006

posted September 22, 2007 11:15 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for yourfriendinspirit     Edit/Delete Message
Bingo!
COLORADO'S THRIVING CULTS
FERGUS M. BORDEWICH, A NEW YORK-BASED WRITER, REPORTS FREQUENTLY ON CULTURAL AFFAIRS.
Published: May 1, 1988
New York Times
Now who the heck are you?
I see this is your very first post...

Well done, I'm impressed!

If you are in fact New to this site,
Hello and , I look forward to getting to know you.
If you are already a member under another name... Hello anyways!
Perhaps I already know you?


------------------
Sendin' love your way,
"your friend in spirit"

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Mirandee
Knowflake

Posts: 4812
From: South of the Thumb - Taurus, Pisces, Cancer
Registered: Sep 2004

posted September 23, 2007 12:28 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mirandee     Edit/Delete Message
Astralmuse


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Astralmuse
Knowflake

Posts: 210
From:
Registered: Sep 2007

posted September 23, 2007 04:00 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Astralmuse     Edit/Delete Message
Thanks for your welcomes, YFIS & Mirandee!

YFIS, I don't think we know each other already. ??? I live here in Colorado, so that article cracks me up. "Cults" - heh!

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SattvicMoon
Knowflake

Posts: 2282
From:
Registered: May 2007

posted September 23, 2007 04:03 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for SattvicMoon     Edit/Delete Message
Welcome to LindaLand, AstralMuse!

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