False Light

A counterfeit isn't made of lies. It's made of true sentences, addressed to the wrong one.

September 11, 2026

A traveller on a stony night path holding a lantern high; its glare lights the few feet of ground in front and washes out everything past it, while a clouded moon hangs overhead and the lamps of a hill town burn unnoticed in the distance
Whoever holds the lantern decides what stays dark.

I. The Banquet

There is a banquet in a book.

A king has called his whole court into one room, lit by globes that give off their own light. The food arrives with no one carrying it, course after course, in dishes that vanish when the course is done, and at the end a goblet appears at each guest's right hand. Nobody there knows why they have been called. The king knows: he has called them to say goodbye, and he hasn't told them. Then a Presence becomes visible in front of him and speaks to the room and to the whole empire at once.

You give little attention and still less adoration to your "Source" — the Supreme, the Mighty, the Radiant, the Majestic, the Infinite Cause of all that is.

And this:

You thank each other for favors — the things of the senses and form that are so ephemeral — that pass from one to another and then are no more — but why, Oh why! do you forget the — "Source" — of all Life, all Love, all Intelligence, all Power?

And this:

It is you, the little personal self — who are unjust to Life — you who are unfair — you who create the misery of earth.

And, a little later, this: Love is not an activity of the mind … It asks — nothing — for Itself.1

The book is Unveiled Mysteries, published in 1934 under the name Godfré Ray King, which was the pen name of a man called Guy Ballard, and it is the founding text of the movement that called itself the "I AM" Activity — the ascended masters of Theosophy crossed with the indwelling I AM of New Thought.2 If you left a church and went looking, you may well have met this book's children without knowing whose they were: the decrees, the violet flame, the shelf of books about drawing what you want toward you by the quality of your thought. The Secret runs on the same engine.3 If you were moved by pages like these, I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't have been.

There is very little in those four passages I'd argue with.

II. What's True in It

The Source. There is one, and everything we thank each other for came from it, and the failure to notice this is not a small failure. Paul said it in a clause: when they knew God, they glorified [Them] not as God, neither were thankful.45

The enemy. It is you, the little personal self. No devil in the sentence, no rival power, nobody to blame but the one being addressed. I've argued exactly that in The Kingdom That Isn't and again in The Mask Comes Off Last — that the only adversary I've actually met is a self with something to hold.6

Love. It asks — nothing — for Itself … It takes no cognizance of what has been given in the past. That's Paul again, from the chapter read at weddings: seeketh not her own … thinketh no evil, where the word under thinketh is a bookkeeper's word, and the sentence says love keeps no ledger.7 The speech also says that obedience begins as calm, peace, and kindliness in the feelings, which is as good a description of the first day of obedience as I know, and that there is no such thing as the supernatural — which I think is true of the world, and is not the same claim as a God who is a law.8

So this isn't a text you can catch by its vocabulary. And that is exactly what Paul told the Corinthians to expect.

And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.9

The sermon on that verse goes to disguise: a costume to see through. Paul doesn't say the adversary comes as darkness pretending to be light. He says light. Ignatius of Loyola read the verse the way it's written: the mark of the evil spirit is to begin by suggesting thoughts suited to a devout soul and to end by suggesting his own.10 Not a lie at the door. True sentences first. A false light is a light: you can read by it, or no one would follow it.

Which means the test has to be somewhere other than the words.

III. Whom It Is Talking To

The test of a light is not what it says about God. It is whom it is talking to.

The speech's imperatives go to one party. Arouse yourselves … Awake from your lethargy … Then, once the warning is done and the teaching starts, the register settles into instruction: you are privileged to qualify it — as you please — at the command of your own free will; and, of the affirmation, that by it the student raises his outer self into the full acceptance of its Truth.11 The party instructed is named again and again: the outer self, the student, the individual, the personal self. The I AM is named constantly. The personality is the one put at the controls of it.

Set that next to the man who had every right to say the opposite and said this instead. I can of Mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge … because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent Me.12 Without Me ye can do nothing.13 Same word, nothing. Opposite subject. In one, the self is told what a self can do with the God within. In the other, the self is told what it cannot do without Them.

I've argued in Secondhand that a word from God can't be verified by handing the word to someone with better credentials, and in The Mask Comes Off Last that what can be heard in a voice is not whose it is but whether there is a self in it. This speech is those two essays inverted. The self is not merely in the voice here: it is the addressee, the beneficiary, and the one told that its own inner thoughts cannot be wrong.14 A self given standing. That is what a false light does that a plain lie can't. It doesn't deceive the separate self. It deputizes it.

One more witness, and an unexpected one: this book was examined by a court. The United States tried the Ballards for using the mail to defraud, and in 1944 the Supreme Court had to decide what a jury could be asked. Justice Douglas, for the Court:

Heresy trials are foreign to our Constitution. Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.15

So a jury could weigh whether the Ballards sincerely believed it, and could never weigh whether it was true. I think the Court was right. But notice what it leaves. Truth is untriable; sincerity is triable and is not the test either, because the danger Ignatius describes is a sincere light, bent by degrees in a soul that meant well the whole way down. Justice Jackson, dissenting, would have dismissed the indictment rather than try to separate what is believed from what is believable.16 Two questions off the table, then, and the one that's left is not a question a court can ask. Whom is it talking to.

The light in that banquet hall is real. It is shining on the wrong one.

IV. What It Offers

You can also tell a light by what it offers, and this one is not shy.

In the master's own words, the instruction exists for the manifesting of one's own inherent dominion over the things of the sense world. Its end is Perfection, Mastery, and Dominion over all things on earth — including the conscious control of — all — natural forces. It promises Eternal Youth, kept permanently by those individuals — who are strong enough to shut out discord, and gold, drawn in any quantity he desires by one who has understood the law.17

I've been on that mountain before, in The Kingdom That Isn't. The devil taketh Him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and saith unto Him, All these things will I give Thee. And the answer: Get thee hence.18 The offer on the mountain is this book's offer.

The book knows about the temptation; it lists it. Mastery depends on three things: acknowledging your own God Self, perfect calmness of feeling, and third, that one must be passed — all — temptation of misusing power.19 Whether the student must be past all temptation or must have passed it as a test, the structure is the same: clear this, and the power is yours to keep.

He didn't pass the exam. He refused the thing offered, and get thee hence is not a counteroffer. The reason He gives is worth the whole essay: not I might misuse it, but Thou shalt worship the LORD thy God, and [Them] only shalt thou serve. The question was never competence. It was whom you serve — which is to say, whom the offer is talking to. When the power later worked in His friends' hands He didn't congratulate them: Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.20 The joy is moved off the power and onto belonging to Someone. The oldest version of the offer is ye shall be as gods,21 which I took up in The Knowledge of Good and Evil; it, too, was true as far as it went.

Then look at the heaven it builds. The goblet is granted to those at the banquet, as a reward for their faith and loyalty22 — beside a Father who [make Their] sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and [send] rain on the just and on the unjust.23 A foreign prince is coming, the master tells the court, and the recognition of your mistake will be futile. Nothing can avail.24 — beside When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran.25 The promised city is ringed with an invincible belt of electronic force — through which it is impossible for anything uninvited to pass26 — beside And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day.27

A reward for loyalty; a mistake that can't be undone; a heaven with a wall. There's a word that never appears in the speech, and by now you can guess it. Grace. It occurs four times in the whole book, and every one of them is about how a body moves. What the speech has instead is Law — its God is Law, Principle, Energy, Substance, a thing with a right use. That is the deepest tell, because it explains the promises. A God you use is a resource. A God you can say not My will to is a Someone. The speech has no one in it to surrender to, which is why its surrender language never costs the self anything: you can acknowledge your own God Self all day and never once be asked to get out of the chair.

I argued in The Distance That Love Needs that separation is the wall, and in The Fountain and the Cistern that a fountain can't be owned, only gone to; a technique for drawing the water toward you is a cistern with a pump. This light ends in a walled city with an accounting at the door.

V. What Came Of It

Ninety years is long enough to see what a book does.

Two things met in this one, and neither was Ballard's. The masters came from Theosophy; the engine — a thought impressed on a universal substance brings the corresponding thing into being — came from New Thought. What was his was the marriage, dictated to a named man by someone who was not in the room.

It would be easy to say that what came after descends from Ballard. It doesn't. The books name their own sources and neither names him. Ask and It Is Given says in its third chapter that Jerry and Esther Hicks met the phrase you are the creator of your own reality in the Seth books of Jane Roberts.28 Rhonda Byrne credits a book from 1910, and the words the banquet speech uses for its mechanism were in print in 1906, in Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, before Ballard published a word.29

That is the more disturbing fact, not the lesser one: a doctrine handed from teacher to student can be traced, and this is a shape that keeps being found, by people with no traceable line back to Ballard, across a century.

Here is 1934: Thought is the only thing in the universe that can create vibration — and through vibration — you qualify this ever-flowing energy with whatever you desire to have manifest in your life and world.30 Seventy years on it is a book's promise — processes that will help you in achieving anything you desire31 — and two years after that, one line: You are a creator, and there is an easy process to create using the law of attraction.32 Read the party being addressed and it does not move: the outer self, told it is holding the controls of something universal, and handed the technique.

The 2006 book says the rest outright — You are God in a physical body. You are Spirit in the flesh. … You are the creator, and you are creating the creation of You on this planet33 — which is ye shall be as gods arriving as good news.

And one of its teachers gives the relation a picture. The Universe, he says, is the Genie from the lamp. Traditions have called it so many things — your holy guardian angel, your higher self. We can put any label on it, and you choose the one that works best for you … And the Genie always says one thing: "Your wish is my command!"34 The label is the reader's to pick and the answer is always the same. Set that beside the mountain. The kingdoms and the glory were offered there too, and the whole weight of the passage is in what came back — [Them] only shalt thou serve. The Genie is that offer with the refusal deleted, and with the parties reversed: not a servant given a Master, but a master given a servant, and told to name it whatever they like.

Which is why the word grace does not occur once in either later book. There is nobody in any of them to receive it from. I refused the acquiring in Nothing to Get — the moment getting enters, the thing closes — and this is the same refusal wearing three coats. The reader who left a frightened church for this did not walk from a false thing into a true one; they walked from a God who was watching them to a God who was waiting for their instructions, which is a shorter distance than it looks. The love they found on the way was real. I'm telling them what was being spoken to.

VI. The One That Predicted It

I'm not standing outside this.

What these essays stand on is not a system. It's a seventeenth-century lay brother who cooked for a Carmelite house in Paris and considered God always as with me, often as in me,35 and it's a satsang in Santa Monica where I sang words I didn't understand to a God the people around me loved, and felt something I had no name for, and it was real, and it is still real.36 Both of those are addressed to a Someone. Neither hands the outer self anything to wield.

But take the book on the shelf beside Ballard's. Joseph Benner's The Impersonal Life, from 1914, dictated in the first person by the indwelling I AM.37 Same lineage as Unveiled Mysteries. Same vocabulary. Twenty years before it was printed. If the test were vocabulary, the book that saw Ballard coming would fail it.

And Benner knew. Here is the I AM of his book, on the subject of masters:

That any being, either in human or spirit form, that presents himself to your consciousness and claims to be a Master, or whom your mind assumes to be a Master, is nothing more nor less than a personality, the same as yours, and therefore is not Divine … despite the many wonderful "truths" he may utter.38

And a few pages on, he gives the true Self a name: your Impersonal Self, an Angel of Light, the One True Master, within.39 Paul's phrase, claimed for the real thing, in the same breath as the warning about the counterfeit. Years before a man on a mountain met Saint Germain.

There is another side of Benner, and a reader with both books open finds it in an afternoon: the reader has dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth through the power of thought, and the awakened state is the Throne of SELF.40 So the line is not power mentioned against power not mentioned. It's who gets told to sit down. In Benner the personality is made servant and subject; in the other book the student is trained to command. Same I AM. Opposite chair. Neither is where these essays stand: a book that tells the self to be still is better than one that tells it to command, and it is still a book about a Self.

And I can't make this a way of reading other people's books and leave it there. These essays are written with a machine, which I've said in the open from the start; a machine is a power, and a power can be addressed to the wrong one as easily as a teaching can. The criterion cuts me before it cuts Guy Ballard, and it should.

The last tell is an old one. Arouse yourselves … before it is too late! is how the speech opens, and once the teaching starts the urgency moves inside: Whatever discord the outer self allows to flash through the thought and feeling is — that — instant stamped upon the flesh of the physical body.41 Every stray feeling, on your face, instantly. A light that shines on the separate self has to keep that self afraid, because a frightened self keeps working the program. Whoever is there when the position is vacated wants nothing of you and is in no hurry. The banquet speech is in a hurry. It gives the king seven days.

The one who actually had the power did the other thing with it. But made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant.42 One text trains the self to ascend to its throne. The other describes the One who had the throne and got down.

A false light is still a light. You can't tell by looking, you can't tell by the words, and no court can tell you. What you can do is listen for whom it's talking to. That can't be done for you, and it can't be done once.

The globes are still lit in that room, the tables are still set, and a Presence is telling a whole court the truth about the Source. Nearly all of it is true. And the gates of the city it promises are about to close on everyone listening.

I've been in that room. The door isn't locked, and the One outside it isn't in a hurry.

Footnotes

  1. Unveiled Mysteries, ch. II (The Sahara Desert), the speech of the "Cosmic Master" at the banquet, pp. 25–27 of the Global Grey edition. The four passages are quoted as printed, including the book's dashes and capitals; the ellipsis in the fourth is mine. ↩

  2. Godfré Ray King [Guy W. Ballard], Unveiled Mysteries (Saint Germain Press, 1934). Page numbers are those of the Global Grey ebook edition (2025). The book is another tradition's text, and this essay quotes it exactly as printed: its dashes, its capitals, and its he for God are the book's own, and none of them is altered to this publication's conventions. Where the essay describes the banquet in its own words (the globes, the onyx tables, the goblets), the details are the book's, pp. 23–24. ↩

  3. The "I AM" Activity's decrees and the violet flame descend from Ballard directly; the Summit Lighthouse and the Church Universal and Triumphant are in the same line. The Secret (Rhonda Byrne, 2006) does not descend from Ballard, and the essay does not say it does; it shares the engine — the claim that directed thought and feeling draw the corresponding thing into manifestation — which is the New Thought inheritance both have in common. §VI is about that shared shape and is careful not to claim a pedigree it cannot show. ↩

  4. Romans 1:21 (KJV): Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Three verses later the consequence is stated as a letting-go, not a sentence: Wherefore God also gave them up (1:24). ↩

  5. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Deity pronouns are capitalized here and throughout, including inside quotations, and LORD is set in capitals wherever the word names God; the King James lowercases the pronouns and reserves LORD for the divine Name. Where the house pronoun is substituted rather than only recased, the substitution is bracketed and the note gives the King James as it stands. ↩

  6. The Mask Comes Off Last meets Ephesians 6:12 — the strongest two-powers text in Paul — at full strength, and it is not repeated here. ↩

  7. 1 Corinthians 13:4–5 (KJV): charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up … seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. The verb under thinketh is logizomai, to reckon or keep account — the word Paul uses elsewhere for the crediting of righteousness (Romans 4:3–8). Love does not keep the books. ↩

  8. Unveiled Mysteries, pp. 26–27: There is no such thing as a supernatural condition anywhere in the universe; Such obedience begins as calm, peace, and kindliness in the feelings. ↩

  9. 2 Corinthians 11:14 (KJV). The verses around it: For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness (11:13–15). Paul's word is metaschēmatizetai, to change one's outward form. ↩

  10. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, Second Week, rule 4 (§332), in the translation of Louis J. Puhl, S.J. (Newman Press, 1951): "It is a mark of the evil spirit to assume the appearance of an angel of light. He begins by suggesting thoughts that are suited to a devout soul, and ends by suggesting his own." Discussed at more length in The Mask Comes Off Last. Paul's warning to the Colossians is in the same key: a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility (Colossians 2:23, KJV; cf. 2:18, a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels). ↩

  11. Unveiled Mysteries, pp. 29–31; the two imperatives quoted first are p. 25. ↩

  12. John 5:30 (KJV), abridged; the whole verse reads I can of Mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and My judgment is just; because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent Me. Cf. 5:19, The Son can do nothing of Himself, and 14:10, where the works are the Father's, done through Him. Pronouns recased. ↩

  13. John 15:5 (KJV). ↩

  14. Unveiled Mysteries, p. 29: Real Intelligence … does not and — cannot — think wrong thoughts. Wrong thoughts come only from impressions made upon the intellect by the world — outside — of the individual. If individuals would discriminate between their — own thoughts — that is thoughts from within their own God Flame — and the suggestions, thrown off by other people's intellects … ↩

  15. United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78, 86–87 (1944), Douglas, J., for the Court. The respondents were indicted for using the mails to defraud by promoting the "I Am" movement; the trial judge withheld the truth of the religious representations from the jury and submitted only whether the defendants honestly believed them; the Court of Appeals reversed; the Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals, holding the truth of the beliefs could not be submitted. The case was remanded, and the convictions were later set aside on an unrelated ground concerning the composition of the jury (329 U.S. 187 (1946)). ↩

  16. 322 U.S. at 92–95, Jackson, J., dissenting: "I do not see how we can separate an issue as to what is believed from considerations as to what is believable"; "the price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish"; "I would dismiss the indictment and have done with this business of judicially examining other people's faiths." Jackson's rubbish is his word for the constitutional cost, not my word for the book. ↩

  17. Unveiled Mysteries, pp. 28–30 (dominion, mastery, natural forces, eternal youth); p. 22 (gold: the individual may draw any quantity he desires to himself by the use of that — Law). ↩

  18. Matthew 4:8–10 (KJV). The reply quotes Deuteronomy 6:13. The King James reads and him only shalt thou serve; the bracket marks the substitution. ↩

  19. Unveiled Mysteries, p. 30: In the attainment of Mastery or Adeptship — the conscious control of all force and manipulation of substance are dependent first — upon the acknowledgment of your own individual God Self; second, upon perfect calmness of feeling — under all circumstances; and third, one must be passed — all — temptation of misusing power. ↩

  20. Luke 10:17–20 (KJV). The Kingdom That Isn't reads the same four verses as the hinge of its argument; here they are used only for the shape of the refusal. ↩

  21. Genesis 3:5 (KJV). ↩

  22. Unveiled Mysteries, p. 24. ↩

  23. Matthew 5:45 (KJV). The King James reads for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust; the brackets mark the substitutions. ↩

  24. Unveiled Mysteries, p. 27. ↩

  25. Luke 15:20 (KJV). ↩

  26. Unveiled Mysteries, p. 28. ↩

  27. Revelation 21:25 (KJV). And 22:17: whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. ↩

  28. Esther and Jerry Hicks, Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires (Hay House, 2004), chapter 3, whose title is You Do Create Your Own Reality: "Not so very long ago, our friends Jerry and Esther were introduced to this phrase: 'You are the creator of your own reality.' (They had discovered the Seth books by Jane Roberts.)" Esther Hicks began speaking for Abraham, which she describes as a non-physical collective consciousness, in 1985; Jane Roberts had been publishing the Seth material since 1963. Hicks appeared in and narrated the original 2006 release of The Secret, and her footage was removed from the later Extended Edition after a falling-out with Byrne, published accounts of the reason differing. This essay makes no claim about what she believes. That is the question Ballard settled as unaskable, and it is not this essay's test either. ↩

  29. The two streams. The ascended masters, and ascension as a goal for a human being, come from Theosophy — Blavatsky from 1875 onward. The manifestation engine is New Thought's, and the phrase law of attraction is considerably older than Ballard: Andrew Jackson Davis used it in 1855, Prentice Mulford articulated it as a general principle in the 1880s, and William Walker Atkinson published Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World in 1906. Wallace Wattles's The Science of Getting Rich (1910) is the book Rhonda Byrne credits for The Secret. Standard reference accounts describe the "I AM" Activity as a major precursor of several New Age religions, and treat Ballard and Mark Prophet as the models for the later channelling of masters; none of them places Ballard in the law-of-attraction line, and neither does this essay. The claim here is about a form, not a pedigree. ↩

  30. Unveiled Mysteries, p. 29 — the sentence immediately following You are privileged to qualify it — as you please — at the command of your own free will through consciously directed thought and feeling. ↩

  31. Ask and It Is Given, the introduction. The ellipsis omits the end of that sentence, and why all of your power is in your now, and one more naming the book's Emotional Guidance System and vibrational set-point. Its Stream of Source Energy is the banquet speech's Source and God Energy at seventy years' remove, with no contact between them that anyone has shown — which is the paragraph's point and not a claim of descent. ↩

  32. Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (Atria / Beyond Words, 2006), in the chapter How to Use The Secret. Quoted from the author's own narration rather than from one of the teachers she quotes. ↩

  33. The Secret, in the closing chapter, again the author's own narration. The ellipsis omits four sentences of the same construction. ↩

  34. The Secret, How to Use The Secret. Here Byrne is quoting one of the teachers who appear in the film rather than writing in her own voice — a distinction worth keeping, since the two passages above are her own. The ellipsis omits but every tradition has told us there's something bigger than us. ↩

  35. Brother Lawrence (Nicholas Herman, c. 1605–1691), The Practice of the Presence of God, Second Letter, in the Epworth text reprinted by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library: "applying my mind carefully the rest of the day, and even in the midst of my business, to the presence of GOD, whom I considered always as with me, often as in me." Quoted as printed, small-capital GOD included. ↩

  36. The satsang — the word means the company of the true — is the one in Krishna Is Not Christ and The Hollow Flute. For the tradition's own account of what was in it, see the Bhagavad Gita's chapter of devotion, which the text's own colophon calls "the book of the religion of faith" — the one vowed to God is the one "living himself benign, Compassionate" (XII, in Sir Edwin Arnold's The Song Celestial, 1885; quoted as printed, the Gita keeping its own pronouns). ↩

  37. Joseph S. Benner, The Impersonal Life (1914; many editions). It is not what these essays stand on. ↩

  38. Benner, The Impersonal Life, the chapter on masters; the ellipsis omits as your human mind understands that term. Benner's he for the claimant is the ordinary pronoun for a hypothetical person in his prose and is left as printed. ↩

  39. Benner, The Impersonal Life, the same chapter, a few pages on: "this idea of a Master I brought to your mind's attention was only to lead you to and prepare you for this Idea of Me, your Impersonal Self, an Angel of Light, the One True Master, within." ↩

  40. Benner, The Impersonal Life: "You have now and always have had, thru this power of thinking, dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth"; and, of the awakened reader, "your true position as Master and King, One with Me, seated upon the Throne of SELF, compelling the personality to take its proper and natural place as servant and subject." The second sentence is also where the line drawn here comes from: it is the personality that is made subject. ↩

  41. Unveiled Mysteries, p. 29; the warning quoted just above it is p. 25. The seven days: p. 28, I will return in seven days to take you and your children into the — "City of Light." ↩

  42. Philippians 2:6–7 (KJV). Pronouns recased. ↩

Tagged Idolatry, Discernment, Other Traditions.

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