t was an age of magic, when magic hung heavy in the air. The trees breathed their song to birds that told tales of power. Enchanted glens held secrets that the proper word would call forth gold to shimmer out of nothing. Magic was everywhere. And I was there. Immersed in the scintillating splinters of creation that I called real.
At first it was just a rustle in the distance. Trees shifting their feet and leaves breathing forth precious aire. Then the clip-clop as the horses wound their cobblestone way up out of old Vienna. Soon out of the myst one, then another, carriages appeared; the guests were coming! Doctors, Physicists, Mystics, Artists—Wizards all. Here to finish their book, and perhaps start another. To eat and drink and feast, and
toast to adventures past won, and to adventures on the other side of tomorrow.
Inside the castle Sir Mortimer of the Cups, long appointed by the gods, scurried about in readiness. Although the grand feasts were many, he knew this one was special, and the harbinger of many, many more. “Something in the aire tonight,” he hummed to himself. Perfection in the physical he deemed impossible, but nevertheless, to that he always strove.
The hall had been decked out in forest green, and the smell of juniper was intoxicating. Everyone had worked most diligently in preparation for the Great Feast. From the guests in their quiet studies and laboratories, probing into the secrets of life, to the poets and magicians ever searching for the muse, to those Quantum Cooks who were making kitchen things happen that had no precursor or successor. A blink-in of genius to delight the senses and spur great conversation.
For that, conversation, was the main dish in the main hall for the evening. And as carved in the stone archway of the great hall:
Great Minds talk about Ideas
Average minds talk about Events
Small minds talk about People.
But there would be no gossip about people this night. Everyone was looking forward to the interchange of ideas: new theories, new realizations, new emotions, and who knows!—maybe even a new addiction! Whichever way it went, tonight there would be conversation that was itself a force of nature:
Morphic Fields will be shaken
Cosmic Plenums unfolded
And Realities holographically crackling
Across Time and Space.
It seemed that everyone arrived at once.
The question really is what is God doing to make a universe? That is the trick, and that’s the trick that physicists try to find an answer to, and my interest has always been in magic as a way of approaching what I thought to be a pretty miraculous thing. Mainly, why are we here? What’s going on? Even as a kid, I used to ask myself those questions. So what I’ve discovered, in answering the question of how this trick is done, this trick we call the universe is done, is to find that mind or consciousness cannot be disentangled from matter. That matter and mind are much more intimately linked than was ever thought before.
—Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.
At one moment Sir Mortimer was futzing over something in the corner, and in the next, everyone was everywhere. Fred Alan Wolf,1 looking more and more like Dr. Quantum every day, was staring at a painting on the wall, pondering where it was a portal to. Mark Vicente strode into the grand hallway having covered the entire house. “You know, I could live here!”
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1 Okay, this is a story. And we’re taking some liberties with the real people we’ve come to know and love. The later quotes are real. But we’re nearly done, and it’s time to celebrate! And enjoy “a tale told by a madman.”
Masaru Emoto and his beautiful wife had just come in from somewhere on the other side of the globe, but had found time in their relentless schedule to dine and laugh and create for a night. Suddenly, a shout went up.
All eyes looked upward just in time to see Gordy, holding his and Betsy’s baby Elorathea in his arms, launch himself (and her) on a mad slide down that long curving banister. It was quite a thrill for everyone, especially since Gordy was wearing his new leather kilt. He landed with a perfect two-point landing, on those feet that had conquered the firewalk, and so would never taste hot coals ever again.
And there was Betsy Chasse. Somehow the invisible hand and creator behind so so much of what went on, and ever a lover of costumes, she was dressed in some indescribable way, reminiscent of something no one could quite remember. Whether she continually changed through the night, or “just shifted,” was a topic that outlived the gala ball.
As the traveling coats were gathered up and put away, the guests drifted into the salon. Comfortable couches were all about as the travelers sank in to pause and refresh themselves and prepare for the feasts to come. A delightful Mozart sonata drifted in from the music room, then ended.
Whereupon CHOAS erupted. Unbeknownst to the rest of the guests, Masaru had, like he had at the Water and Peace Festival in Tokyo, talked Ervin Laszlo into playing a little piece on the pianoforte. The “little piece” was a Bartok Romanian dance. A piece that forever bordered on chaos and mayhem, and at the moment when it seemed all hell would break loose, somehow out of it emerged a thread, a melody, that took the listener to the next precipice of insanity. Or as Dr. Laszlo would put it—a moment of bifurcation.
And then there was silence.
Many of the guests had not known that Ervin Laszlo’s first career was as a concert pianist, and as a teen he had traveled the world playing with all the major symphonies. (It was even rumored that Bela Bartok’s own piano somehow came to live in Dr. Laszlo’s study.)
Wizards all, that dose of bifurcative madness blasted everyone out of their reveries and into the grand feasting hall. But this was no ordinary feasting hall, just as these were no ordinary wizards.2 Instead of a long table stretching across the room, it seemed that someone had taken that long table and wrapped it round into a donut. After a brief discussion it was decided that “Magicians of the Donut” wouldn’t really work, and everyone opted for something a bit Arthurian: “Wizards of the Round Table.”
The wisdom of the mystics, it seems, has predicted for centuries what neurology now shows to be true. An absolute unitary being, self blends into other, mind and matter are one and the same.
—Andrew Newberg, M.D.
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2 Is there such a thing as an “ordinary” wizard?
As the gathering sat down, the three filmmakers glanced amongst themselves. Being the “hosts,” it was their place to make the first toast of the evening. Who would be first stirred to eloquence? It didn’t matter. Like an invisible hand reaching down and yanking him off his chair, Mark Vicente was up! He had something he had been wanting to say to the assembled guests for quite some time:
“I have been fortunate to have met truly great minds over the last few years. The knowledge and ideas I have learned from you and others have expanded my worldview enormously. Without all of you, I could not have done this. I give tribute to all it took for those who came before us who allow you to take their knowledge and build on it. The world is indeed a better place because of all of your efforts.
“Knowing what I know the amount of data I ignore—99%—I will do everything I can to learn new ideas with the most open-minded perspective I can muster. If there is so much that I don’t know, I now understand that it would be foolish to insist on anything just because I want it to be a certain way. I want to see beyond my self-enforced blindness to look into the void of potential and ask the Great Questions:
“What am I in relation to the reality I see in front of me? How do I see what I do not know? How do I get out of my own way? If I am constructing the universe as I know it, what holds it together despite my emotional psychosis? What would it be like to not be invested in any one perspective but have the freedom to explore all perspectives?
“And, how would I develop the skill to stop presupposing? The answer for this to me is the making of a great mind.
“Thank you for helping me to rediscover the curiosity of a child and the tenacious critical analysis of a scientist.”
And he paused. Mark, Betsy and Will looked at each other. It was a long, soulful look. It had been a trying, twisted road. Years ago, they had first encountered those sitting around the table. And asked questions and gotten answers. Some of which were not what they expected. They had been challenged; they had been befuddled; they had to go back and reexamine their prejudices and beliefs. [Will and Betsy rose to join Mark.] And those wonderful people sitting around the table had never criticized or denigrated the three filmmakers in their quest. It had always been about finding what is real, the truth, and enjoining in the discovery. What, what(!) a grand gathering.
Everybody stood up. It’s like they already heard Mark’s last words:
“To you, companions on the journey, and to knowledge!”
With a grand shout of “So Be It!” the goblets were joined, the bread was broken, and the feast began.
t was perfection itself. The food, the tales of power, the camaraderie. Sir Mortimer was everywhere, making sure the timing, the placement, the temperature of the seemingly never-ending array of dishes was just where it should be when it should be. It is rare indeed for an assembly such as this to have the time and leisure to enjoy a sumptuous meal and each other’s company. Glancing over at Mark, Jeffrey Satinover said:
“I learned that if you want to really explore the most interesting questions in life, you are going to end up being wrong a lot, and there are going to be some people who are going to be right when you’re wrong, and so you have to be willing to learn from that. Sometimes you’re going to be right, and so you have to learn also how to be gracious when you’re right if you want other people to listen to you.
“If you want to explore the world of what’s really interesting, you have to just be accustomed to being confused and uncertain and allowing for the fact that there’s so much that’s mysterious, not using the exact nuance of the phrase ‘being in the mystery’ that Fred Alan Wolf uses, but sort of a more mundane use of the phrase that we all are so stupid really compared to how much there is out there that’s mysterious that you have to have that kind of childlike sense of exploring the unknown.”
And as the plates of steaming food were passed round the table, the stories kept rolling out . . .
I haven’t studied the miracle of changing water into wine. It sounds like a good one.
—John Hagelin, Ph.D.
From Candace Pert: “So my friend Deepak Chopra would tell this story how he was so excited about my work, and he went to India and he said to all the Rishis, ‘It’s unbelievable, this woman, it’s wonderful, she’s got the molecules, she’s got the gels, she’s got the receptors, she’s got the peptides, it’s unbelievable.’ The Rishis are like ‘what, what, what, what?’ ‘No, no, you don’t understand. She’s got the actual molecules of the emotion, there’s the endorphins and the peptide, the hormones and the receptors, it’s unbelievable.’ They’re all scratching their heads. He tries several more times. Finally, the oldest and the wisest Rishi sits up suddenly and he says, ‘I think I get it. She thinks these molecules are real.’”
To which everyone laughs and guffaws . . . Enlightened nerd-humor
. . . A rare treat indeed . . .
he meal was winding down. That night we could all say, as Ramtha often noted, “Tonight we dined like Kings and Queens.” After-dinner drinks, double-triple cappuccinos and lattes, pots of PG Tips were left on the table, along with sweet delights and cheeses.
As the last cook left, the ensemble settled into their chairs in preparation for the main event of the evening: writing the last chapter of the UnUnWizard’s HandBook Book. As they ruminated on what their closing verse would be, a deep sense of relaxation, almost of laziness crept through the aire.
Every single cell in our body is spying on our thoughts.
—Joe Dispenza
The center of the Round Table was open. A space of three or four long strides, so that the speaker, the one who “held the floor,” could walk and gesticulate as they put forth their ideas. And ideas were the main course of the evening. And yet the diners sat, no one venturing into the center to begin the final chapter. A pipe was lit here and there, and an occasional cigar, and still they sat, lost in a moment of eternity.
But time was in fact slipping through the hourglass, and much there was to do. A book to write, another to unwrite, conversation and laughter, and, of course, toasts . . .
Will rose with one in mind: “When we set out to make the movie, one of our goals was to make the people sitting around this table Heroes. Heroes to the world. When I look around the table, I see everyone has given years of their lives to, as the alchemists of old said, the Great Work. And it has not been without risk and ridicule from colleagues and society at large.
Usually in the supermarket, people say, “You were in that movie.” And I say, “Yup, I was.” And they say, “Wow.”
—Stuart Hameroff, M.D.
“I do not think that because someone can, with an aluminum pole, redirect a ball over a fence 300 feet away, that they are a Hero. I do not think that spouting someone else’s ideas in front of a camera makes one a Hero. Without the beings sitting here with us, and other explorers of the unseen, we would be in a stagnant, boring world, and not the magical one that we all love.”
He paused for a moment . . . “Oh God, I’m getting maudlin. What was in that wine? I don’t care! It’s the truth. TO THE HEROES!”
Still unaccustomed as they were to such effusive toasts, the guests smiled and toasted. One of the lost arts in the modern age is the Art of Toasts: “Cheers” being shorthand for “I have nothing to celebrate or dream for.” Intent rolled into the words rolled into the elixir soon rolled into the body and made intent real from the mind all the way through to matter. Minds linked together in that process make a very powerful magic indeed.
Is the observer going to be a meddling one who always meddles and tries to become the central part of the experience, or can the observer be a witness and let the experience unfold itself? Some traditions are very good at it. The Hopi Indians apparently don’t have a word for “I” or “we.” They emphasize the verb, the happening. They would say raining, loving. See what is happening? Ordinarily I make love to this person, right? But instead, if I say: Loving is taking place, then I’m only just witnessing. Loving is taking place; two people are involved. One me and one my significant other. And then what is happening is loving. There is no I, there is no it. It’s just loving. See the beauty of that transition?
—Amit Goswami, Ph.D.
“I have one.” It was Betsy. “To all the rest of the Heroes. To the people who take ideas and concepts and apply them to their lives. To those who thrive in the chaos and are living in the mystery and making known the unknown. I wish they were here with us!”
And with that everyone suddenly looked up from their goblets. Around the room. A thought quickly passed amongst them: They are here . . .
For if thought is real like the table before them is real, like the goblet in hand is real, and if thought moves outside of time and space, and if like-minded thoughts link up, entangle, that means that everyone whose mind is focused on that grand feasting hall is in the grand feasting hall. If in your mind you see the hall and everyone sitting therein, in that space—there you are also. The candles suddenly flicker as more guests pour in.
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
—Matthew 18:20
And time matters not. Years and years from that very moment, minds would whip back across time and join the Round Table discussion.
And who’s to say who called who. Did the Round Table bring in beings for the discussion, or did the beings create the intent that the Round Table filled? Egos always want to be first, but in entanglement there is only happening. There’s no difference; it’s all the same impulse, producing both chickens and eggs.
Glancing around the room, JZ Knight, who sees things of a subtle nature, chuckled: “Oh my, it’s getting pretty crowded in here. All these quantum mustard seeds. It’s good there’s lots of dimensions.”
It was becoming a Grand, Grand Feast. And if the theories and the experiments were true, it was a feast that would go on and on. Ever evolving as more and more spirits popped in.
ith the thrill of a grand assembly, the gathered Magicians set about their task in earnest. Knowing that their verses would ripple out over time and space, they choose their words carefully, each vibration carefully intuned to the idea put forth. Since there were no Muggles about, the question of how to get inside the Round Table was no longer a priority, as they all simply blinked in and out. Except for Stuart Hameroff, looking like he just descended with the hordes from the steppes of Russia, who leapt up on the table, then down into the center in the arc of a perfect jump shot. He began:
“I think the next step is to try to explain how the quantum world can relate to our consciousness and to spirituality because I think that’s the future in which science and particularly quantum physics and relativity come together with human consciousness, subconsciousness and spirituality. Whether a scientific explanation for spirituality is a good thing will depend on whom you ask. And I think if we explain everything, that will probably be bad, but I don’t think there’s much danger of that because all we’re doing is peeling off layers of an onion that goes way, way down!”
As if to make the point, the moment he voiced the word “down,” the floor seemed to suck Stuart away, and then he was back in his seat. Betsy had a twinkle in her eye:
“Okay, what is quantum cooking?”
A cluster of “probable, possible, superpositional” answers hung in the shared mind-space. Who would collapse it?
Betsy didn’t give them time. Her costume shimmered, and suddenly she was a hawk, with a mask of hawk feathers and dazzling eyes. Hawk eyes looking for answers to her favorite question: “Why should I care abut quantum? Does it answer the Great Questions?”
Before anyone could respond, Dr. Wolf had already pounced: “Quantum physics is a starting question to the answer to all the Great Questions. It’s a good place to begin. It’s only the beginning. It’s only the last hundred years that we even began to question that maybe we were barking up the wrong tree, asking the wrong questions, seeing the world as ‘out there,’ separate from the subjective experience of the ‘in here’ world.
“Quantum physics begs that question. It says, wait a minute. There’s a deeper connection going on here. I would say that what quantum physics is to the twentieth century, whatever is going to be the new bridging of science and spirituality will be to the twenty-first century.”
He paused for a moment, then whirled around, addressing the entire room, seen and unseen. His eyes twinkled very brightly . . .
“The universe is random to a very, very large extent. And it’s an important reason that the universe be random, to a very large extent. Randomness is the blessing, not the curse, of the universe. It allows something new to appear. What if everything were ordered and structured? We would all be robots, and we would not be able to think new thoughts.
“With randomness comes wackiness, and comes dance, and comes theater, and comes beauty—with it comes all the wonderful things of life. Because chance really makes life beautiful. Luck is a lady.”
And everyone looked about them: “Yes, life is beautiful.” They were all here to make it more beautiful, more wonderful. To take toads and remind them that they are Wizards, each and every one of them. To un-toad the toads. To reverse centuries of ignorance when humanity was kept in the dark. No more. A great shift had taken place, and secret knowledge was pouring forth, into books, seminars and the arts. The “Invisible College” was hidden no longer. The cave in Tibet had become the high-speed laptop. Information could no longer be kept from inquiring minds. It was magic of a different order for a different age.
Still Betsy wondered: How do we make all this real? Ever a Sicilian, Joe Dispenza drained his goblet and set it down before responding:
So do our thoughts matter? Indeed they do. They are the constructs of reality. What is a thought? Well, a thought is a frozen moment of a stream of consciousness that the brain processes and puts into a package called a neuron and then is added to by associative memory. So then you have a thought and you say, “Does this thought have meaning and power?” It does, because a thought is actually a structure in which reality is patterned. It is the architecture of reality actually. So when you create your day, you are composing in it thought, and as you observe the thought, it becomes the form in which reality itself molds. So the adventures of the day are really based upon your thinking.
—Ramtha
“So what do we have to lose, as human beings, to live as if thought is the supreme premise to infecting reality, and observing reality the way we want it? What do we have to lose? I’m a scientist, and I’ve been trained scientifically. However, by the same means, it’s all great dinner conversation, unless we have the ability to apply it in some way, shape or form. Now that becomes the true science. That becomes the true religion.”
eanwhile, Will had pulled out the original UnWizard’s Handbook. A mighty tome, it had chapter after chapter extolling the virtues of shopping malls, sitcoms, gossiping about people, staying safe, having figured out that you have it all figured out, and that it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. At the end of every chapter was a “Don’t think about this . . . ” section. A list of things not to think about to lead a not-as-bad-as-it-could-be life. Especially prominent was the “Wizards Who Thought They Could Fly” chapter. It featured all those who had wondered out of the box, their comfort zone, and did not make a million dollars. That fit in well with the ever-present depowering question: “If you’re so hot, why aren’t you rich?”
It seemed for a moment that a foul smell crept across the room. Will slammed the flatulent book shut: “The first UnWizard rule is: Convince people that they are NOT magicians.”
Yes, rule number one. For in the truth of all matters, this limitation is the one that will surely stop all others. Aye! The self-imposed limitations are the hardest, well-nigh impossible to see, for the creator is in the creation, and by this all limitations are realized.
Will, well into his cups by then, suggested that the UnUnWizard’s book could simply have on every page: “Look, you’re a toad because you want to be a toad. Deal with it.” Miceal suggested that might be a bit strident, however short and sweet it was, and that perhaps a more reasoned approach would suffice:
“The greatest problem that people have is not accepting their wretchedness, their poverty-stricken condition, their lack, their inability, their powerlessness. The greatest problem we as a human race have is accepting our own greatness. We just do not want to do that. We run screaming from anybody who would suggest that we are all-powerful in ourselves. Therefore, we’re not able to manifest what it is we would wish to have.
If reality is my possibility of consciousness itself, then immediately comes the question of how can I change it? How can I make it better? How can I make it happier?
—Amit Goswami, Ph.D.
“If we could only accept who and what we are, and the real power that we have, then what we call the miraculous, which has shone forth in unfortunately all too few individuals in the past, that’ll become commonplace. And we would learn the new science of manifestation, which is to realize that we have always, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, been creating our own reality. There are no new powers to be learned. We already have them. What we need to change is the type of life that we are creating for ourselves.”
JZ Knight continued the thought:
“When a person says, do I create my reality? The answer is, but you already are creating it. Who you are is made up of the reality that you are currently. To change that would be to change one of those concepts of people, places, things, times and events. The idea of who you are with, where you live, what you look like, what you wear, who you talk to today, what you’re going to do tomorrow, you have all created this as fundamentally your reality, so everybody in your life is an aspect of yourself.
“We’re so busy being it. It’s like the fish in the ocean; somebody gives the idea to the fish that it’s a novel idea to ask for a drink of water. So the fish asks for a drink of water, and everybody starts laughing. Because the fish is in the water.
“So it’s sort of like saying, how do I create my own reality? Well, you are the reality; you’re already creating it. We only see what we are when we step out of it, and we look back at who we’ve been.”
t that conversations erupted around the table. It seemed that everyone was talking at once, for all the conversations were interrelated. Spirit related to matter related to consciousness related to creating related to intending. Emotions, neuronets, old paradigms, back to consciousness, observer, choices and change. And reality—the intermediary concept between everything—was itself defined by everything.
How can one define a word except by using words? Is it possible to understand a concept without other concepts? If that is true, how do we ever truly know? At this turn of the conversation, Betsy had her final toast:
“You know for me, it was all just philosophy, which I love, but only when I coupled that with practical experience did it light up my life.”
A sign of boredom is a sign to change. And what is it when we change our mind? We change where our observer sits in our brain. That begins to fire new neurons, which the rabbit hole is like a wormhole that loops us into a new neuronet in the brain.
—JZ Knight
Bingo!
The fabulous interchange of ideas that had lured everyone from the four corners had arrived. The world of human thought had been all about boundaries for ages: “What is mine; what is yours? This discipline does not talk about that. Don’t use the word entanglement—you don’t even know what it means.” But in the end, the narrow, narrow avenues of scientific, philosophical pursuit had run headlong into a box canyon. At the end of particles, you only found more particles. At the end of disease, you never found health, only disease.
The focus that had allowed Western civilization all its marvelous advances had cut it off from the world of magic. But as the night stretched past midnight, a sense unfolded that in some corner somewhere, something had been turned. The paths were coming back together. The grandeur of the dream to find the simplest explanation for the most widely observed phenomena was like an elixir—and in that moment an activity long thought gone, relegated to a bygone age, was rediscovered.
Conversation, inquiry among friends, glorious theories and ugly facts—this was a feast worth having. And they knew, everyone knew, that the ripples were going out out out into the world. Just as likely, it was the ripples coming in in in from the world that drew them together in the first place. The holographic universe repeated itself in miniature everywhere. And to a degree, these Magicians made a breakthrough so other Magicians everywhere would have that possibility. As goblets were raised in celebration of the triumph of the human spirit in one home, it would surely as the sun would rise, reverberate in homes and dwellings, inns and taverns everywhere. Such is the nature of reality. Such is the universe we find ourselves in.
ong since had the guests pushed away from the Round Table and gone to more comfortable surroundings. Some removed to the salon, to sit by the fire and tell stories. For all pilgrims on the way back home have harrowing tales of fright and power, and it was a joy for all to sit on the other side of them and laugh.
At times the smoke seemed to gather strangely, and other guests were seen in the haze. Certainly no one of this group seemed to mind. The word went out that it was just “old friends coming by for a peek.” The candles would flutter, and a wind would whip through, and the flames were taken to the brink of extinction, when suddenly the wind was gone. “A cheap parlor trick,” someone noted, whereupon his cigar ash fell into his lap. “Touché!” And no one laughed harder than the one with the ash. Such is the humor of Magicians.
The only way I will ever be great to myself is not what I do to my body, but what I do to my mind.
—Ramtha
One by one the gathering quietly dispersed. A few meandered upstairs where they had rooms for the night. Occasionally a car could be heard pulling up, a door opened and shut, and then silence. There was rumor of a Lamborghini.
One of the scientists decided to “stroll the old city until dawn,” after which he greeted the new day from atop the Eiffel Tower.
The last to leave was Dr. Wolf in his splendid carriage pulled by four horses.
It was afterward said that when the guests looked from their second-story bedrooms that the carriage looked more and more pumpkin-like as it went down the avenue. Smaller also with every step of the horses. There were initials carved into the back of the carriage: “F.A.W.” But an instant later, the initials seemed to be a grinning face, with light pouring out of the features. Someone heard a chuckle, then a pop, and they were gone.
And so it was that the first rewriting of the UnUnWizards HandBookBook came to an end. Ere the sun had fully risen, the guests had scattered to the four corners once again. Like the bards of olde, there was always the next town, the next adventure, the next “unknown,” crumpling under the impulse of . . . of . . .
“This life is but a page in an enormous book,” says Ramtha, “in which we will always be who we are. But always with the inherent needling of ambitious pursuit. A pursuit that takes us from the boring tedium of self-reflection, of self-hate, to self-creation of new dreams, models of thought that do not bridge the insane or the redemptiveness of failure, but new models of thought that we participate in with the zeal of ambitious energy.”
Yes, that’s it, ambitious pursuit. Making known . . .
And as I climbed the long staircase, blowing out candles as I went, I thought to myself, and to everyone else out there who was still listening: “Yes, magic is everywhere. Especially tonight. And every night. Ahh, what a night it’s been . . .”
And with that, we bid you all A most fond fond Adieu.
The End