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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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The Riddle of Humanity
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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The Riddle of Humanity
Schmidt Number: S-3253
On-line since: 29th July, 2002
Dornach, 3 September 1916
The particular details of the things we discussed yesterday are
complicated and difficult to follow. But we can nevertheless come to
some general conclusions by reviewing the picture they form as a
whole. No doubt you have already concluded that the twelve senses with
which we have become acquainted are not formed solely in accordance
with the principles of regular evolutionary progress. The ahrimanic
and luciferic principles have also participated in their development.
From this we can see that it is necessary to be much more objective
about these luciferic and ahrimanic elements than is frequently the
case, for the simple reason that they have played such a decisive role
in the formation of the collective human constitution. Now, we should
remind ourselves that Lucifer and Ahriman only create hindrances for
human development when they are displaced and appear where they are
not supposed to appear. So it is also easy to imagine that when, as we
saw yesterday, the ahrimanic principle influences the upper end of the
series of the senses, and the luciferic principle influences the lower
end, they are not acting legitimately and in accordance with the
evolutionary roles allotted to them. And various human aberrations
then arise as a consequence. The aberrations must be possible, as
otherwise a human being could not determine his path in the cosmos
through the use of his own free will. Finding the right path for our
development depends precisely upon learning to maintain our
sovereignty against the ahrimanic and luciferic influences. It depends
on constant struggle to maintain our balance between these two powers,
so it is inevitable that the things that only the power of Lucifer and
Ahriman can give us, also make it possible for us to go astray.
Many things would be clarified by a further elucidation of truths such
as those that were sketched yesterday, for they contain the key to
countless riddles of life which confront present-day humanity. But it
is not possible at present to speak about these consequences, even
though they follow from entirely objective, spiritual-scientific
considerations — not even in our circles. What we want to discuss
now are the life forces, the impulses of life which we have described
as a kind of internal planetary system. We can view the seven life
processes just as we have viewed the twelve regions of the senses.
Breathing, warming, nourishment, secretion, maintenance, growth,
reproduction — those are the seven life processes which make up
the inner human planetary system and which contrast with the inner
zodiac formed by the twelve senses. But luciferic and ahrimanic
influences have distorted these seven life impulses — just as
they have distorted the zodiac system of the twelve senses — to
produce something other than would have been produced if evolution had
proceeded along its rightful course. Again we can say that the
outermost three life processes, those which have more to do with
bringing a person into relation with the outer world, are subject to
ahrimanic influence; and the life impulses that have more to do with
the internal life process are subject to luciferic influence. Only in
the middle is there a kind of balance — in excretion, which tends
of itself, because of its natural structure, to remain in balance.
Breathing involves something that can be described as follows: We do
not breathe as we would breathe if only regular, progressive,
divine-spiritual impulses were active in the breath — the
impulses mentioned at the beginning of the Old Testament; more than
the power of Jehovah is active in our breathing. For, during the
Atlantean period, ahrimanic forces caused our breathing system to be
modified and these modifications now affect the way we breathe. Thus,
we not only breathe, we consume our organism. And we experience this
consumption as a kind of feeling of well-being. It is a fact that,
during the course of our life between birth and death, we use our
breathing process more energetically than was intended. The
consumption of our life forces is very closely connected to this
ahrimanic influence. One can say, broadly speaking, that if it were
not for this ahrimanic influence we would not inhale as much oxygen in
a given period of time, and the consumption of our organism associated
with the process of ageing would not be as intense as it now is —
I mean ageing in the sense that it involves something that can be seen
and not just the passage of years. This is related in many ways to
ahrimanic influences on the process of breathing.
Because of ahrimanic influences in our organism, things are burnt up
more quickly than a regular evolution would dictate: consumption is a
kind of incineration. We actually burn ourselves up.
Through ahrimanic influence, nourishment includes the forming of
deposits, so that our nourishment is not merely processed, but is also
stored away in our organism as virtually foreign matter. The most
familiar process involved here is the production and storage of fat.
The process of getting fat has to be explained here by referring to
its ahrimanic side. Of course it also has its luciferic side, but that
is a different matter. So storage, the possibility of accumulating
food we have eaten so that it remains with us and is stored in our
organism as virtually foreign matter, can also be traced to ahrimanic
influences: consumption, combustion and storage.
Secretion is, in a sense, a special case; it is an exception.
Maintenance has undergone luciferic influences. All forces are
modified by our inner process of maintenance, and the result of this
is very similar to the process of storage. All our predispositions
towards cyst-formation, towards becoming ossified and sclerotic,
belong in this category. We harden our organism during the course of
our life. This happens through luciferic influences and is connected
with luciferic interventions. Until these processes of hardening
exceed a certain degree and manifest as sclerosis and other symptoms
of illness, we experience them as a kind of underlying feeling of
organic well-being. We only cease to experience it as a feeling of
well-being when matters go beyond a certain point; then it becomes an
illness-as sclerosis, as glaucoma, or some other, similar illness.
The process of growth has also suffered from luciferic influences.
Without these, a person's growth would be a continuous process between
birth and death. Without luciferic influences there would be no
particular discontinuities in the process of human growth. But the
luciferic influence manifests itself immediately and powerfully during
the first stages of growth. There it turns the process of growth into
a process of maturation. Maturation, sexual maturation, is a luciferic
modification of straightforward processes of growth. Everything that
is associated with it shows that this discontinuity is not in
accordance with the original evolutionary disposition, which would
lead to a continuous process of growth. Everything that is connected
with the sexual maturation of a man or woman, all the various
modifications right down to the change of voice, are connected with
this luciferic influence.
Luciferic influences have turned reproduction into procreation, into
the possibility of external, physical propagation. In accordance with
the original, progressive, divine-spiritual powers, a human being
should only be able to reproduce himself. And we must reproduce
ourselves continuously, must we not? In order for us to grow, an inner
process of reproduction must take place, new parts must constantly be
forming. It is due to luciferic influences that external reproduction
has been added to this. As you know, this latter luciferic influence
on growth and reproduction, in particular, is also described in very
clear terms in the Bible. One only has to turn to the Bible. There you
will find powerful, titanic pictures which truly show the very things
I have been describing.
So you see that we are dealing, once again, with a collaboration
between Lucifer and Ahriman.
1 Breathing — Consumption
Ahrimanic 2 Warming — Combustion
3 Nourishing — Conservation
4 Secretion
5 Maintaining — Sclerosis
Luciferic 6 Growing — Maturation
7 Reproducing — Procreation
Surveying what has been said about the twelve zones of the senses and
the seven life processes — about the human being's inner zodiac
and inner planetary system — you will have to confess that
knowledge that is capable of bringing such things to light must be
pursued differently from what is usually called knowledge today.
Today's knowing, today's knowledge, only touches the outermost surface
of things, so to speak. But we must achieve ideas and concepts that
are capable of reaching to the threshold of the spiritual world. One
does not have to be in the spiritual world, all one has to do is to
try, through spiritual science, to formulate ideas which are truly
appropriate to the threshold of the spiritual world. Then one will
feel how this leads to a knowing and a knowledge that is much more
active and inwardly intense, and that is actually capable of
penetrating to what is active within a being — in the present
case, to what is active within the human being himself. It is not
enough to station ourselves opposite the cosmos as mere observers,
content to watch how its outer surface affects us; to a certain extent
we must participate in the cosmos. One must participate in the forces
at work within a being, in what lives and weaves within it. Spiritual
science does not only lead us to further knowledge, it leads us to a
different kind of knowing. As a typical contemporary anatomist or
physiologist it will be impossible for you to distinguish what is
ahrimanic in the process of breathing from what is, so to speak,
regular, since all of these naturally occur at the same time and it is
necessary to slip into the very process of breathing and experience
it. Then one does indeed experience the interplay of both forces, of
both impulses. This manner of submerging oneself in the world is one
of the things that our present age has lost, especially in our
present-day sciences, where it has been lost many times over. As I
have often pointed out, it is so easy to believe that this active,
inwardly engaged manner of knowing either never existed, or that it
has long since been lost to humanity — this way of knowing which
submerges in the being of things and leads one beneath the surface to
the real forces. But that is not so. Actually, it was not even so very
long ago that men lost it. You only have to go back a little way in
the course of the centuries. You will discover this inwardly active
knowing persisted into times not long past.
Consider the life process. To begin with, it forms the whole out of
which we are composed — indeed, we are constituted by this life
process. But it is really an inner planetary system composed of seven
interacting impulses. As I said before — just remember what we
have been considering this week — if one wants to have real
knowledge, one must accustom oneself to some paradoxes.
I said that what occurs in a human being, and what today's
materialistic Darwinism is trying to discover in the human being, will
not provide an explanation for what happens in man. Rather will it
explain the macrocosm, the universe. And the reverse is also true: the
explanation for what is within the human being will be found in the
large-scale astronomical processes of the external world. To do so,
however, it is necessary to submerge in the world processes and live
within them. One cannot merely gaze at the world process from outside.
How Sun, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and so on, travel across the heavens is
something that can be observed superficially, from the surface. But in
order to experience the effect they have as they pursue their course
through the cosmos, it is necessary to participate in the
differentiated forces which emanate from them. In other words, one
must livingly experience the differentiated forces that are at work in
the universe. A distinctive force radiates from each planet.
But if you can entertain the thought that what exists within us is
explained by what is to be found in the universe, you are not far
removed from a further thought, one that is quite correct: a really
living acquaintance with the powers that reside in the planets makes
human life understandable. The spiritual science of the present seeks
to understand human life on the basis of what the universe tells us
about it. Such knowledge once existed. It is not necessary to go very
far back into the Middle Ages to discover some extraordinary sayings
that found their way into print. Nowadays, either they are not
understood, or they are explained superficially. But these sayings
show that there was a living understanding of these matters just a few
centuries ago, even though it was an atavistic understanding:
(see Note 32)
O Sun, of this world thou king,
All thy race fair Luna doth sustain
And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage,
Though all in vain lacking Venus' patronage.
As chosen man Mars sets his face,
Sustained for you is Jupiter's grace
That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.
There you have one of these sayings, one that points to the inner,
living being of the planets. It refers to the forces that are revealed
when the regions of the planets are not just considered externally and
superficially. This saying expresses the powers that live in the whole
of the planetary system, but it expresses them so as to show how they
manifest in the human sphere.
What do such sayings express? Here is a paraphrase of what is
expressed: Between birth and death we live here in a physical body.
This depends, by and large, on forces the Sun gives to the Earth. But
other forces are also necessary to the existence of humankind. Man
needs to do more than just manifest his completed form through the
forces of the Sun. Humanity must be able to procreate and maintain
itself and, for this, forces that emanate from the Moon are required:
All thy race fair Luna doth sustain
Furthermore, the forces that emanate from Sun and Moon are united by
Mercurial impulses:
And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage
And so the whole process already begins to become more spiritual. Our
physical being — the very fact that we possess a human form
— is dependent on the Sun. Thus, the Sun, taken as a physical
being, is the king of this world. The Sun also exists spiritually for
us, but only because the Christ has descended from the Sun to the
Earth. But, taken in the first place as a physical body, it is the Sun
that makes it possible for us to live as physical men on the Earth.
All thy race fair Luna doth sustain
makes the transition to the spiritual. It goes still further in that
direction with:
And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage
Though all in vain lacking Venus' patronage
which is saying that the Venus impulses must radiate through the whole
and warm it through, as it were, until it glows. The Venus impulse, in
its turn, needs support. It needs to be connected with forces that
originate in Mars. What issues from Jupiter is even more spiritual,
but in a physical sense: ‘Jupiter's grace’. And only through
the constant influence of the Saturn forces can a man finally make his
appearance as a member of the human race. This oldest of the powers
now works from the outermost periphery; it works from out of the
realms of soul and spirit, enabling them to wholly penetrate the
physical human constitution. Through the agency of Saturn we are not
mere flesh and blood; rather are we flesh and blood that is warmed by
the soul and spirit streaming through it. The most ancient of the
powers in us, the power of Saturn, ‘old and grey’, enables
the soul to be manifested in us:
That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.
For our soul-spiritual nature is physically expressed by the colour of
our skin. And all the colours are actually contained in this colour.
That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.
These stiff, clumsy old verses preserve an ancient wisdom. Such wisdom
once existed; it has been lost in our present-day superficiality and
now we must try to find it again. From the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries onward, as the fourth post-Atlantean period came to an end,
the stream of this old atavistic wisdom also ran dry. It was replaced
by purely physical wisdom, which stays on the surface of things
instead of entering into them. Through spiritual science we must once
more seek a wisdom that enters into the nature of things. Once people
spoke as we spoke yesterday and today, attempting to characterise the
twelve zones of our senses and the seven impulses of life, the seven
life-movements, and to show how they participate in the spiritual
forces that rule the cosmos. A lost wisdom will thus begin to
re-emerge; but, as this lost wisdom emerges it must be grasped in full
consciousness, not as it was grasped during the period of these
verses, when men were not fully conscious. The people who knew these
old verses had learned them from old traditions. And if you had asked
those who really felt the power of these verses within themselves how
they had come by this knowledge, they would have said, ‘It is
true that we know this verse, “O Sun, of this world thou king,
all thy race fair Luna doth sustain ...” and that if you
understand it, you understand the human life processes. But we have no
idea how one comes to understand such things.’ That is how they
would have answered you.
In ancient times spiritual beings taught such things. This came about
through a process that was not fully conscious. The divine
inspirations that descended to Earth from the spiritual world were
written down in verses. The concepts and ideas of the verses preserved
an ancient wisdom. This is also the reason why the loss of
understanding for the spirituality of speech ran parallel to the
process by which wisdom and knowledge were materialised. If we could
go back to the truly historical period of the eighth, ninth and tenth
centuries — not to that fable convenue that passes for
history these days — we would find that people knew that speech
is related to processes in the spiritual world. They did not express
it in the way we have just expressed it, especially not in Europe.
They did not say that the ability to speak is the result of a process
that diverges from the progressive direction of evolution and is
subject to ahrimanic and luciferic influences. But they had a
subconscious feeling for it, knowing that human beings do not really
have the right to possess speech as it is ordinarily used. Speech had
to be ennobled before high spiritual truths could be compressed into
holy verses. And the verses were regarded as holy. That is precisely
why the truths were formulated in such verses. I have chosen a
clumsily shaped verse, one that could still have been found in the
late afterglow of the fourth post-Atlantean period. Nevertheless, the
verse is shaped so that its very clumsiness lends it a certain festive
air. The ahrimanic influences were paralysed, so to speak, by what was
poured into the mould of such verses. The feeling of holiness which
these verses conveyed countered ahrimanic influences with a feeling
which paralysed them. Thus there is a balance. The ahrimanic that
comes from without was held in balance from within by a feeling, a
feeling of holiness. This led to the extraordinary attitudes toward
speech that were held in ancient times, attitudes which have been lost
entirely because they had to make way for an external relationship
with speech and the spirit of speech.
The heralds of modern materialism appeared a short time after the
beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In earlier times, speech
had been regarded as a kind of gesture, a gesture that pointed to
reality but is not in itself real. I have frequently attempted to
clarify what this actually means. If one says, ‘dog’ or
‘wolf’ or ‘lamb’, one is using a linguistic
expression. Contemporary speech theorists are unable to come to terms
with these expressions because they believe that they do not refer to
anything. For when we encounter one four-footed creature we call it a
dog, and if some other four-footed creature of the same kind comes
along, we also call it a dog. The word designates them both as dogs;
the word ‘dog’ is applied to one dog and to all. People of
today experience a split: words seem to hang in thin air. They no
longer see the spirit in things — for them, the spirit is a
non-entity — so that the things signified by the words have also
become non-entities. I made this clear when I said that people claim
words are merely names — that ‘lamb’ and
‘wolf’ are nothing but words. But if one pens up a wolf and
feeds it with nothing but mutton — in other words, with matter
from sheep — until all of its original matter has been exchanged,
one can prove for oneself that these are not merely words, merely
names. For now none of the original matter would be present in the
wolf. But has the wolf become a thorough-going lamb? Certainly not!
There is more to the ‘wolf’ than just matter. Materialistic
views really are so foolish that it is very easy to disprove them. For
observations such as I have just described really do quite
effortlessly knock materialism out of the ring. It ceases to be
possible to come to terms with words, however, when one is no longer
able to consider what the wolfness of the wolf is, and the lambness of
the lamb.
Nevertheless, the initial task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch was
to develop materialism. To a certain extent, it was necessary for
materialism to be introduced. Therefore, this fifth post-Atlantean
epoch requires one to really wrestle with the inauguration of
materialism — or, better said, the initiation of the world into
materialism and into materialistic thinking, feeling and experiencing.
That had to come from two sides. In the first place, people had to be
convinced that the salvation of humanity lay in materialism and in
treating the world as nothing but matter — naturally, it was only
salvation for the materialistic streams of the fifth post-Atlantean
epoch, but it always was presented as being universal. In the times
when people still remembered these old verses, the world was not
treated as if it were nothing but matter. In those times, as is
expressed in such verses, it was still possible to experience oneself
as participating in the living reality radiating from the whole life
of the planetary system. And such verses can be understood. But in
order to do so, humanity must acquire something it has not had before:
it must be able to deal with the external, mechanical, materialistic
world in order to discover the next, central task of the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch. For, from the present time onward, spiritual
science must begin to play a role in this epoch. But, as you will be
able to judge from the resistance which it encounters, it will not
establish its validity quickly and will only realise its full
significance during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. That is how things
stand. For everything materialistic will continue to be a source of
essential opposition during the whole of the fifth post-Atlantean
epoch. That is one aspect.
Another aspect is the way in which speech is misunderstood. Words are
treated as if they have nothing to do with reality unless they
directly refer to properties perceivable by the senses, and nothing
else. At some time mankind had to be faced with this. Mankind had at
some time to confront the assertion, ‘There are words in your
language that have nothing to do with reality; in past times one
thought they had, but this was the result of superstitions and
unfounded preconceptions. In truth, it is necessary for you to free
yourselves from the content of words, for words refer to idols.’
Thus did Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, introduce the misunderstanding of
speech into our newly-arrived, fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Under the
direction of the spiritual world, he began to drive out mankind's old
feeling that language can contain the spirit. He referred to all
substantial concepts and all universal concepts as idols. And he
distinguished various categories of idols, for he went about his work
very thoroughly.
Firstly, he said, there are certain words that have simply arisen out
of people's need to live together. Men believe that these words
designate something real. These words are idols of the clan, of the
people, idols of the tribe. Then, once men start to understand the
world, they attempt to mix an erroneous spirituality into their way of
seeing things. The knowledge mankind obtains arises as though in a
cave; but to the extent that he hauls the external world into this
cave, man creates words for what he would like to know. These words
also refer to something unreal. They are the idols of the cave:
idola specis. There are still other kinds of idols —
words, that is — that designate non-existent entities. These
arise out of the fact that men are not just gathered together into
races or peoples by virtue of their blood relationships, but because
they also form associations in order to manage one thing and another
— and, indeed, more and more is being managed, so that ultimately
everything will be managed.
Soon a person will not be able to walk
about in the world without having a doctor on his left side and a
policeman on his right to see that he is thoroughly
‘managed’. Is that not so? Bacon says that other unreal
entities, along with the words that express them, have arisen because
of this. These unreal entities stem from our living together in the
market-place; they are the idols of the market-place: idola
fori. Then, there are yet other idols which arise when science
creates mere names. Naturally, there are frightfully many of this
kind. For if you were to set all our lecture cycles before Bacon, with
all they contain about spiritual matters, all the words referring to
spiritual things would be idols of this kind. These are the idols that
Bacon believes to be the most dangerous, for one feels especially
protected by them, believing that they contain real knowledge: these
are the idola theatri. This theatre is an inner one where
mankind creates a spectacle of concepts for itself. The concepts are
no more real than are the characters on the stage of a theatre. All
the idols expressed in words are of these four kinds.
And learning to see through these idols is to provide the salvation of
human knowledge-this was inaugurated by Bacon of Verulam. The idols
must be understood, their idol-like character, their character of
unreality, must be recognised, so that we can at last turn our
attention towards reality. But if all these species of idols are
removed, nothing remains but the five senses. Everyone can prove this
for themselves. Notice has thereby been served on humanity of the
fifth post-Atlantean epoch: although we need the idols and the words
that express them as a kind of common currency, they are only seen in
the correct light when we recognise their character as idols, their
unreal character. We need them as currency for the tribe, or for
individual knowledge, or the market-place we share. We even need them
for scientific investigations, for the inner theatre. But only that
which the hands can grasp and the eyes can see is to be accepted as
real — only what can be investigated in the chemical laboratory,
in the experiments of the physicist, in the clinic. The important book
which gave Bacon of Verulam's doctrine of the idols to the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch inaugurated this way of looking at the world; it
is the classic source. And such a book shows us how the very thing
that, from a certain point of view, must be resisted, nevertheless can
make its appearance in the world in accordance with the rightful
cosmic plan. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch had to develop
materialism. Therefore the programme for materialism had to be
introduced from out of the spiritual world. And the first stage of the
programme of materialism is contained in the doctrine of the idols,
which did away with the old Aristotelian doctrine that words refer to
categories which have real significance.
Today, humanity is already very advanced along the course of regarding
anything that is not perceivable by the senses as idols. Bacon is the
great inaugurator of the science of idols. Why, then, should the
spiritual world not employ the same head that was intended to draw
mankind's attention to the idol-like character of speech, to introduce
also the practical details of what more or less appears to be a
materialistic paradise on earth? In any case, it was essential to
present it in a light that would seem paradisiacal to the
materialistic frame of mind that had to emerge in the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch. This age needed some corresponding practical
ideal. An age which had these views on language was bound to respond
to the idea or applying its mechanics to neighbouring spheres of the
heavens. Thus the ideals of the materialism of the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch are born from the same head that gave us the
doctrine of idols. One of the not-yet-fulfilled ideals that you can
find in Bacon is the idea of artificially-created weather. But that
will come! This ideal from Bacon's Nova Atlantis will also be
fulfilled. In Bacon we encounter for the first time the idea of
airships that can be guided, and the idea of boats that can submerge.
This far we already have progressed in the intervening time. For
Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, the great inaugurator, was also a practical
materialist, capable of conceiving of these practical mechanisms that
are appropriate to our fifth post-Atlantean period.
One can always discover impulses that are intruding, as though from
the substrata of the world, when one is trying to strike the
fundamental character of a particular period of time. Inventions for
controlling the weather, for sailing in the air, for sailing under the
sea, belong with those of the theory of idols. Those are ideas and
ideals that belong together, and so it is that they appear in the
fifth post-Atlantean epoch. These things must be judged objectively.
One needs to see clearly that words can be employed differently
without either viewing them as idols or by turning them into idols.
There is a plan behind human evolution. Gradually, according to plan,
various impulses appear in the course of evolution. Now that the
theory of idols and all that is contained in Nova Atlantis has
made its appearance, the last remnants of the great atavistic
spiritual theories, views and experiences have been extinguished. So
this ground must be recaptured by a newly-appearing spiritual science,
proceeding now in the full light of consciousness. During the fourth
Atlantean Epoch, someone formulated the ideas that introduced
materialism into the ancient Atlantean period. This is described in my
writings. Just as it was necessary, in the fourth epoch of Atlantis,
for the materialism of Atlantis to be formulated in the head of an old
Atlantean, so the fifth post-Atlantean epoch needed its Nova
Atlantis, which has a similar function for this epoch. These
things cannot be grasped unless they are considered in the light of
spiritual science. A person who can observe the fine details of
history will find these deeper connections. But today a foundation in
spiritual science is necessary. For ordinary history is just a
fable convenue; it only says what the various nations, races,
peoples and citizens want to hear. Real history has to be obtained
from the spiritual world.
Personalities like Lord Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, more or less set the
tone of an age. In the case of such persons, the biography is of much
less importance than what is revealed by their place in the entire
process of developing humanity.
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