TWELVE
Coming off the Mountain
We sometimes view our path as including two major journeys—ascent and descent—a journey toward enlightenment and a journey toward becoming a complete human being. The journey of ascent is a matter of realizing one dimension after another, all the way to the absolute dimension The path of descent is actually a matter of integrating our lives into our realization.
A. H. ALMAAS, RUNAWAY REALIZATION
What are we that we are capable of such deep excursions into the universe? Who designed this exquisite creature capable of navigating these extreme swings of consciousness? Shattering our earthly identity, our awareness expands until we become a different kind of being for eight hours at a time. A being who can do things “we” could never do, know things “we” could never know. A being who breathes time, who dances in the stratosphere of planetary consciousness, who dissolves into the One that cradles all.
And just when we have reached our furthest expansion, the second miracle happens. Consciousness slowly contracts, restoring us gently to our normal shape and size. The doors we had flung open close one by one as we say our good-byes. In the waning hours, we make mental notes to help us remember every kiss, every secret exchanged, every nuance of life unfiltered by space and time. We linger in the rumpled sheets where fierce passion showed us what more is possible, what needs doing, what lies ahead. Basking in the afterglow, we tuck it all away for tomorrow’s dawn in this extraordinary and mysterious life.
I think we are still in the early stages of understanding how entering these extreme states of consciousness is affecting us. We are only beginning to learn how to absorb the possibilities they unleash. As long as our sessions stay close to the shoreline of the known world, uncovering the pains of our past, we have therapeutic models for how to work with them. Travel a bit further out to experience the intelligence running through all existence or the continuity of life after death, and still we have spiritual models for absorbing these blessings. But when our journeys take us great distances from the known world, when we enter the truly deep waters of the cosmos, how are these adventures being integrated by us then? What does “integration” even mean in this context?
How does a finite being exquisitely tuned to the conditions of space-time digest our forays into the Infinite? How does a time-bound being absorb excursions into Deep Time? What is the residual impact of merging with all of existence after we have returned to being just one among many? How does our day-to-day self manage such extreme fluctuations of the membrane of consciousness, not once or twice but forty, fifty, sixty times? I am asking more questions than I have answers for. My life has become a living experiment in these matters with the outcome still being determined.
Shortly after my journey ended, Spirit said to me in my morning meditation, “Twenty years in, twenty years out,” meaning that it would take twenty years for me to absorb my twenty-year journey. At the time, I took comfort in this and thought to myself, “Sounds about right.” Now that I’m drawing close to this twenty-year mark, however, I’m beginning to think that this estimate was far too optimistic. It feels like it will take more than one lifetime for me to fully digest all the experiences I’ve been given, that they have changed not just my present life but the entire trajectory of my Soul’s evolution.
In this chapter, I will not offer any summary reflections on my journey or its implications. The sessions speak for themselves, and any attempt to compress them into a conclusion would fall short. Instead, I would like to share some challenges I faced coming off the psychedelic mountain and say something about where this journey has brought me today. Before I do, however, I need to speak to an event that took place in my personal life shortly after my journey ended.
Within a year of stopping my sessions, Carol and I decided to end our marriage. Just when my psychedelic journey had come to a peaceful conclusion and Dark Night, Early Dawn was about to be published, stresses that had been present in our relationship for years reached a critical point and ended our long partnership. We had been married for twenty-four years. A divorce is a very personal and private matter. I bring mine into this story only because it is impossible to discuss these post-session years without at least mentioning it.
My divorce changed the entire landscape of my life, but in all my sessions I never saw it coming. In the early sessions when I had experienced my life as a completed whole, this important turning point had been kept hidden from me. In all the years I spent exploring Deep Time, this significant piece of my personal future was never shown me, even in my last session. Why was this? Did the medicine fail me? Was the failing mine, was I off my true course in life? I don’t think either of these was the case. I don’t believe that the intelligence I experienced in my sessions could possibly have “missed” such an important event in my life, especially since it had analyzed Carol’s and my relationship several times through the years. If my sessions didn’t show me our separation, I believe there was a reason for this silence.
I think that my sessions did not let me see my divorce because there are some decisions we must make on our own at the level of the incarnate self if we are to confront specific challenges embedded in our life script. These hard choices have to be made without the help of outside guidance if we are to truly internalize the lessons before us and make them part of our earthly wisdom. Without going into the details, I believe that the decision to end my marriage represented such a learning for me. I think that the awareness of my divorce was kept from me in order to allow me to come to this learning in my own way and in my own time. I was not given outside counsel because this was something I had to do by myself in order to reverse a deeply embedded karmic pattern in my personal history.
I want to say clearly that my psychedelic work was not the source of the problems that led to Carol’s and my separation. Carol supported my psychedelic practice in these last ten years as I supported her Vajrayana practice, and this mutual support was a given in our partnership. If anything, my sessions deepened our marriage and extended its life. I also don’t think there is any special significance in the fact that we separated shortly after I stopped my sessions. The things that pulled us apart simply came to a head at this time.
I won’t say more about my divorce except that it was extremely painful for my family. The critical week when things were coming to a head, a powerful thunderstorm tore through our neighborhood and ripped a large healthy tree in our backyard in half. Two days later, a second storm came through and tore another huge branch off the same tree. This is what our separation felt like, like being ripped down the center.
It took a long time for me to find my footing in this new landscape and to help my children find theirs, but as time went on things slowly got better. When we separated, Carol wanted to move to Santa Fe to be closer to Tara Mandala, so we moved our family center there and I visited as often as I could. One by one, our children graduated from college and made their way into the world. In time we both remarried, and our family circle expanded. Carol continued her Buddhist training and later completed her three-year solitary retreat under the supervision of her teacher, Tulku Sang Ngag Rinpoche. I published Dark Night, Early Dawn, which brought me to the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, where I worked for two years as director of transformative learning, meeting many dedicated people in the consciousness community. After that I returned to Ohio to resume my academic life, and Christina Hardy, whom I met at the California Institute of Integral Studies, came with me. Three years later, we were married. Life has moved on. Each time our new family gathers for special events and holidays, we add a new chapter to our story.
The Deep Sadness
Overall, I think I did a good job of integrating my sessions as I went along. I recorded them faithfully, spent many hours pondering their meaning, followed the personal guidance they gave me, and tried to incorporate their teachings into my life. Because of this, I thought that stopping my sessions would be a fairly straightforward process. I thought that I could simply step away and would be nourished by the many gifts I had been given in these twenty years. It turns out that this was only half right. I learned that integrating an entire journey is different from integrating individual sessions. Because I had pressed my journey as long and hard as I did, coming off the psychedelic mountain turned out to be a challenging undertaking in its own right. In this respect, my personal story is a cautionary tale. It is not simply a story of the hero’s journey told by Joseph Campbell where the hero returns triumphant with gifts to share. It is partly this, but it is also the story of an explorer wounded by the sheer beauty of what he found and then wounded again by having to keep his journey hidden for so long.
After stopping my sessions, it took about five years for my subtle energy system to calm down and find its new equilibrium. The quantity of energy flowing through my body slowly subsided, and as it did I became more comfortable living in my skin again. During this cooling off period, I began to notice that the synchronicities with my students that I described in The Living Classroom were happening less frequently, underscoring the role that sheer energy plays in accessing these ever-present fields of information. During the peak years, I had sometimes felt like a lightning rod, triggering insights and openings around me over which I had little control. Now I found that I had to cooperate with this process for these connections to manifest. The lightning still strikes and arrows still hit unseen targets, but today it has become a subtler dance.
The more important transition took place at a deeper level. As the years passed, I found myself entering a deep sadness. The divorce brought its own sadness, of course, but this was something deeper. There was joy in my life, especially the joy of my children and my relationship with Christina, but my enthusiasm for life itself was fading. I began to feel marooned, separated from my Beloved by the very conditions of my existence. Once you have known the joy of becoming Light, of dissolving into the crystalline body of the Divine, life on Earth can begin to feel dried up. Eventually, I reached a point where I realized I was just waiting to die. I was doing my work, taking care of my family, and giving my lectures, but in my heart of hearts I was waiting to die so that I could return to my Beloved. I was suffering from the loss of communion with the Divine.
I knew that others had gone through what I was going through, that I was not alone in this. I understood the dark night of the soul that mystics endure. I knew that people who have had deep near-death experiences sometimes feel a similar estrangement from life. While their family and friends rejoice at having them “back from the dead,” they quietly pine for the celestial beauty they touched but had to leave. Carl Jung experienced this alienation after his near-death experience in 1944. “Now I must go back to this drab world,” he wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. “Now comes the gray world with its boxes!”*66 I knew exactly what he meant.
Jung’s melancholy lasted six months, but mine grew deeper as the years continued. I had entered the Divine Expanse so many times, been taken so deeply into its beauty that my wound was particularly deep. This is not a wound that is easily understood by those who have not experienced it. How can you be wounded by having too much God? It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Surely more of God is always better. We want to believe that it is so, that something must have gone wrong elsewhere. But no, it was precisely this. I was heartsick at the loss of intimate communion with my Beloved, adrift in the knowledge that I would never know the joy of dissolving this completely into the Divine again until I died.
I had only myself to blame for my condition. Without calculating the cost, I had plunged myself repeatedly into the cosmic fire, begging for the experiences I had been given. In my meditation the universe said to me, “Self-inflicted wounds, my son. That’s all. Self-inflicted wounds.” It reassured me that things would work out. It also told me that there is the “dying of seeing” and the “dying of keeping.” I had done the dying of seeing in my sessions. Now it was time to do the dying of keeping.
I was in a strange condition. Everything I had learned on my psychedelic journey was now part of my being, giving me an inner calm and confidence in the innate wisdom of life. Because of my sessions, I could see the beauty and grandeur of our living universe. I saw human beings everywhere challenging themselves to become more, their former lives bubbling up inside the talents and foibles they took for granted. I knew their suffering would be healed in the bliss that follows each death and in their Soul’s unquenchable passion for continued self-transformation. I felt the pulse of our collective heart as we struggled with our past to give birth to our future self. I could see the genius of the Creative Intelligence manifesting everywhere around me, and yet I no longer wanted to be here.
I knew that the universe was my Beloved’s body, that it was impossible to ever step away from her. I knew that I was every moment immersed in her, that she was the root and flower of my existence. But this knowledge did not spare me the pain of being separated from the full intensity of her presence. I knew that there were great beings who were capable of living continuously in divine awareness, but I also knew this was beyond my present capacity. It would take lifetimes of spiritual practice for me to be able to abide continuously in the awareness I held most dear, and I could not even imagine what that would look like. How can one live day to day in that supremely luminous condition? I was not interested in a little enlightenment. I wanted to dissolve again into the crystalline radiance of Diamond Luminosity.
From time to time, I did light session work with psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca. These medicines helped me absorb the fields of knowledge and energy that now surrounded me because of my LSD work. They gave me contact with the universe that was lighter than my LSD sessions, but these too were temporary and did not satisfy my longing. In the end, I grew impatient with the coming and going of the temporary path.
As the years passed, I began to realize that I had to come to terms with my condition. Living one’s life waiting to die is not a good way to live, and I knew it was not the way this work was supposed to end. Everything about my life was screaming “failure to integrate,” but because I had taken so much care to integrate each session, it was not clear to me where my failure lay. Even so, I began to recognize that I must have made a mistake somewhere, and I turned to find it.
Despite my best efforts to stay grounded in my journey, despite all the spiritual practice I had done, all the reflection and writing, somewhere along the way I had lost a critical balance between transcendence and immanence, between going beyond the physical universe and living in it. Ironically, I had replicated within myself the very failing I had criticized in the religions of the Axial Age. I had become so enraptured with the world beyond space-time that I lost my footing inside space-time. I had pushed so deeply into the Great Expanse that I was suffering not from too much God, because all is God, but from too much transcendence.
What a delicate balancing act. A little transcendence is a good thing. It is healing, reassuring, and illuminating. It can remind us who and what we are. It can teach us what we are doing here and what “here” is. But if we drink too deeply from the well of transcendence, it can undermine our sense of belonging to the Earth, and this is an equally important truth. Most of the spiritual seekers I knew wanted more transcendence in their lives; I was recovering from too much transcendence. Deep transcendence is not something you can give back once you’ve known it. You can’t give back your experience of Divine Light. You must find a way to live with its beauty for the rest of your life.
All of this came crashing into me in the years after I stopped my sessions. As long as I was returning periodically to this deeper reality, the depth of my imbalance had not fully registered. I had been protected from it, buffered from it by the steady rhythm of my return. It was only after I stopped my sessions that the full brunt of my imbalance hit me. It was only then that I realized how transcendentally overextended I had become, despite my best intentions.
I think it’s safe to say that the trials I’m describing don’t show up in therapeutic protocols where the psychedelic is gentler, like psilocybin, or the sessions fewer. There is a self-limiting quality when we use these medicines in ways that leave the frame of our earthly life more intact. It is when the stronger psychedelics are used with greater daring that this particular challenge emerges. The joy of plunging deep into the Divine is also the pain of plunging deep, a pain born not of failure but of success.
It took me about ten years to get fully grounded in life again. I did so by grabbing my life firmly, partly by action and partly by sheer commitment. I tempered my memories of transcendence by embracing the immanent Divine more deeply. I made a conscious choice to live where I was, as I was. I renewed my meditation practice—not to change what will happen to me when I die, for that victory is won, nor to try to reach these distant shores in this lifetime. I practice to sing to my Beloved, to become a better vessel of her creation in my remaining years on this Earth.
I don’t know whether I would have made it completely off the mountain were it not for Christina’s love. A journeyer herself, she understood the challenge I was facing. She held me in the years of sadness, believed in me when I doubted myself, and soothed me when wholeness seemed so far away. I owe her more than I can repay. A lover of the Earth and daughter of the stars, she never tires of mapping the variety the Infinite pours into each of our lives, uncovering the potent destinies hidden in our astrological charts.
As part of my descent, I had to confront an overattachment to marijuana that I had developed during these years. By softening my boundaries, marijuana allowed me to float a little above the Earth and not come completely off the mountain. It eased my heartache, but it did not solve the deeper problem. I had to break my attachment to it and allow myself to become fully consolidated inside my physical body if the Divine I had experienced in my sessions was ever going to fully awaken inside my life. So I did.
Integrating the transcendent Divine and the immanent Divine is a work still in progress for me. The longing to return has not disappeared, but it has become manageable. If the cost of having had these experiences is being haunted by their beauty for the rest of my life, better this than not to have had them at all, for that would be an unthinkable loss. That would be to wander in the shadows filled with questions and doubts.
The Sickness of Silence
This brings me to the second challenge I faced coming off the mountain. Part of my sadness was caused not by separating from divine communion but by not being allowed to speak about this communion to others, by living in the silence imposed on me by my psychedelic-phobic culture. The burden of this silence weighed on my entire journey, but it became particularly difficult as the journey was nearing its end and after its conclusion.
When I began my unsanctioned experiment, I knew that the price of this undertaking would be my silence, and I paid this price willingly because it was the only way I could do this work. But I did not appreciate then how oppressive this silence would become or its deeper cost. I did not foresee the harm I would be doing myself by splitting myself in half in this way. When you divide yourself to live in your culture, when you can say this to one but not to another, you make compromises on the outside of your life that begin to work their way into your insides. Chronic holding back creates cracks with uncertain consequences. In the end, the secrecy that made it possible for me to do this work also made it impossible for me to fully integrate it into my life.
In traditional cultures, when someone returns from a vision quest, the first thing they do is share their vision with the elders of their community. They do this, first, to receive their counsel on what the vision means and, second, because their vision does not belong to them alone. Deep visions are not private matters. They are not meant solely for our personal edification. In deep visions, the universe is speaking to us and to our community. We are the carrier of the vision, the first of its many recipients. How different this is from the world I lived in.
Because of my culture’s restrictive laws around psychedelics, I could not bring my visionary experiences back into my world. I integrated my sessions as best I could, but my integration, like the work itself, was private and surreptitious. Though I kept myself whole in my personal life, I was not allowed to be whole in my public life, and if you are not whole in your public life, can you ever be truly whole? How can transcendence and immanence find their proper balance in such compromised circumstances?
Integration is not just a psychological process; it is also a social process. When you do deep psychedelic work in a culture that is hostile to psychedelics or even just naïve about them, you inevitably separate yourself from your friends and neighbors. Because it is not possible to share this important part of your life with them, your relationships grow thinner. You can enter into their world, but they cannot enter into yours. Even if they are open to the psychedelic conversation, unless they have been psychedelically initiated themselves, the discussion soon falters. It’s no one’s fault, but as a result of this invisible boundary, you become less authentic in their presence, less your full self. Again Carl Jung spoke for me when he wrote, “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”*67 Of the many things I had anticipated in undertaking this journey, the personal cost of this loneliness was the most unexpected.
I was not part of a psychedelic subculture in Ohio, and so my isolation deepened as my psychedelic practice deepened. I felt it in all my relationships, but it became particularly acute in my professional life. I am a natural-born teacher. Every bone in my body wants to learn new things and share this learning with others. And yet, at my university I had to keep silent about the most philosophically significant experiences of my life. To know firsthand the truths that psychedelic exploration can reveal but not be able to share them with my students and colleagues became increasingly painful to me. Because my journey lasted so many years and went so deep, I knew that to truly share its insights I would have to start at the beginning and take them in layer by layer, but this was simply not possible in my circumstances. In order to keep the job I loved, I had to postpone telling this story for so many years that it eventually made me sick inside. Living in a psychedelic closet is just as damaging to your soul as living in any other closet where you are forced to hide the truth of your being.
I walked a careful line at my university. I was able to teach courses on psychedelic research and this helped some, but I also had to keep a personal distance from the subject matter as I did. In my courses on psychology of religion and transpersonal studies, I lectured on Grof’s research, but I never let my students know that I was doing this work myself. In my Buddhism course, I discussed emptiness and nonduality with my students, drawing from my psychedelic experience to bring these concepts to life for them, but I never owned that experience. As a result, I did not own myself in my teaching. In fact, I repeatedly disowned myself, pretending to be something other than what I was.
At a university you teach your discipline, of course; you do not teach yourself. There is a line one doesn’t cross, and it’s a good line. If you bring too much of yourself into the classroom, it can quickly become burdensome to your students. It compromises the freedom they need to engage and digest new ideas. But to bring nothing of yourself can starve a course of relevance and grounding. It’s like teaching a course on poetry but never being allowed to say that you write poetry yourself, or a course on painting and pretending that you never pick up a paintbrush. There is a time and place for such sharing, but in my world there was never a time and never a place. Everything had to be done indirectly and covertly, never openly and honestly. Truth diluted in this way is truth compromised, and what honor is there in this?
The imperative to keep silent about what I had learned in my sessions became a battle that played itself out in my body. In my classes, students would sometimes ask me a question that I could speak to only because of my psychedelic experience, but for the same reason I could not say out loud what I knew. In response to their question, an answer would immediately rise in me, but I would have to check myself to keep the conversation within the bounds of “appropriate” discussion. This conflict was particularly difficult when I could see that their question was coming from a deep place in their life, that they were truly searching for an answer and the answer mattered. In these situations, I would sometimes lose control of my voice for a split second. I would experience a catch in my throat, an involuntary spasm that came out as a little bark. It was embarrassing. I had to apologize and make excuses. The tension between what I had the capacity to say and what I was allowed to say was strangling me.
Living within this silence was difficult, but I am not a victim in any of this. I take responsibility for the choices I made and, at a deeper level, for the circumstances of my life, and this introduces a new layer to the story. In the course of my self-exploration, I learned that I had brought a fear of speaking my truth into this life from other lifetimes. In these earlier incarnations, I had paid a severe price for speaking out against the religious and political authorities of the day. Speaking publicly or making art that challenged conventional faith had led to my torture and execution. In other lifetimes, I had surrendered my personal truth in order to survive and had lived a suffocating life as a result. My Soul carried these wounds into my present life. In this lifetime, being an unorthodox thinker in a conservative setting, gathering forbidden knowledge with illegal substances, and being a public lecturer with secrets he dare not share were all part of a karmic script designed to help me confront and heal these past wounds. So while this culturally enjoined silence was painful for me to navigate, it was also the crucible in which I have worked to regain my personal power. Not a loud power, but the steady power of holding one’s convictions in the face of strong opposition.
Every time I have found the courage to take a stand on issues I believe in despite the resistance of my peers, life has rewarded me. My first book on reincarnation could have been a career killer for a young academic, but instead Lifecycles was translated into five languages and became a staple in my courses. Dark Night, Early Dawn posed a greater threat because there I began to own my psychedelic history, but it too has only rewarded me. In addition to bringing me to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, it brought me to the California Institute of Integral Studies where I became an adjunct faculty member in the department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. Teaching in this progressive setting allowed me to engage graduate students eager for the psychedelic conversation, many of whom were psychedelically initiated themselves. After I returned to Ohio, my university even gave me its Distinguished Professor Award for publishing Dark Night, Early Dawn—an indication, perhaps, that our overworked colleagues seldom actually read the books they are responsible for evaluating!
The opportunity to share with others what I have learned in my sessions has been the missing piece in my integration process. My deep sadness was caused not just by the loss of communion but also by having no community with whom to share my experiences and receive their experiences in return. Now that I am beyond the statute of limitations for my psychedelic “crimes,” owning this hidden side of my life has been part of my personal path to becoming whole upon the Earth once again.
Entering the Sweet Valley
This book will be published twenty years after I ended my journey. It has been a long road coming off the psychedelic mountain. Perhaps this is another indication that one should not do what I did. Perhaps the wiser course is always to open more gently, to take in less but keep more, to be patient with smaller steps into infinity. But I have made it down the mountain at last and have finally entered the sweet valley of my life.
An interviewer once asked me what was the most important thing I learned from all my sessions. Under the pressure of having to come up with an answer on the spot, I offered her a list and invited her to take her pick.
That the universe is the manifest body of a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and power, that we are all aspects of this Being, never separated from it for a moment, that we are growing ever more aware of this connection, that physical reality emerges out of Light and returns to Light continuously, that Light is our essential nature and our destiny, that all life moves as One, that reincarnation is true, that there is a deep logic and significance to the circumstances of our lives, that everything we do contributes to the evolution of the whole, that our awareness continues in an ocean of time and a sea of bliss when we die, that we are loved beyond measure and that humanity is driving towards an evolutionary breakthrough that will change us and life on this planet at the deepest level. (Bache 2017)
It takes time to integrate such experiences and make them truly one’s own. Time and sharing. In his beautiful book on near-death experiences, Consciousness Beyond Life, Pim van Lommel describes the challenges that people face as they attempt to integrate their experience of transcendence into their daily lives. There he writes, “The process of integration cannot get under way properly until the experience can be shared.”*68 This is true for deep psychedelic experience as well. In my case at least, there was a level of integration that took place before sharing my story with others and a deeper level that has opened as I have been writing this book.
As I have been working on LSD and the Mind of the Universe, my absorption of my psychedelic experiences has deepened in unexpected ways. They are beginning to live in me differently than before and I in them. It feels like my session memories have come together to form a greater living whole and that the inside and outside of my life are moving toward a new synthesis. There is a saying from the Navajo: “When you put a thing in order, and give it a name, and you are all in accord, it becomes.”†69 By telling my story, by giving it a name and owning my experience, something new has been set in motion. A new peace has settled over me. At first this peace eased my existential loneliness and made the loss of communion more bearable, but then it deepened further. As I was finishing the book and beginning to speak about it publicly, a new spiritual transparency began to open in my life. It sometimes feels as though the Beloved is not waiting for me to die but is coming for me here. Where this will lead, I don’t know. It is still unfolding, taking me to new places, but surely this is the work of integration—to own, internalize, and manifest your experiences as deeply as you can. To let them flow through you and shape your presence on this Earth.
By writing and speaking from my true center, I have finally entered the sweet valley where I can be my full and complete self, knowing what I know and what I don’t know, able to speak freely about what I’ve seen, with all my shortcomings and failings visible. For me, the sweet valley is a time of balancing—balancing my memories of dissolving into the mind and heart of the universe with standing on our rich Earth, balancing Deep Time with the present, balancing self and surround. Slowly, I am beginning to understand what Spirit meant by the dying of keeping. It is the repeated surrender to the Infinite here and now, moment by moment, in the ever-changing circumstances of my life. With patience and practice, it may one day be as the great Indian saint Śrī Ānandamayī Mā says:
Then comes a time
when the Beloved does not leave one anymore;
wherever one may go, He is ever by one’s side
and His presence constantly felt. . . .
Trees, flowers, the water, and the land,
everything is the Beloved, and only He.*70