The Sufi Years
19/06/09 15:22
The Coombe Springs community was asked to read ‘The Sufis’ by Idries Shah, as preparation for the new wave of teaching. The frontispiece of the book quotes the 12th century Sufi Sanai, saying that mankind is asleep, and that man is wrapping his net around himself, and that “ A lion (the man of the Way) bursts his cage asunder.” That’s what we wanted to do, so we inferred that switching from Gurdjieff disciplines to whatever Shah offered would progress our aspirations. Our teacher Bennett’s handover of our community to Shah in 1966 seemed to endorse this view.
I feel it’s impertinent of me to comment on Shah, but I want to tell my story, and he was a big part of that. In hindsight, I see that Shah’s position straddled two conflicting stools: that of the orientalist researching, editing and recording the history, techniques and exemplars of an Islamic mystical tradition, and that of the author/exponent who attracted wannabe followers of that tradition, like us. I learned much later that Shah had been both secretary and biographer of the famous occultist Gerald Gardner, who had more or less recreated the Wicca religion, so I suspect Shah was well trained in handling the problem. There is no doubt that Shah’s publications introduced Sufi materials to an exponentially wider audience in the West, nor that some of the books he published under other names were aimed at developing his own status as a Sufi exponent, thereby increasing book sales. This ruse is decried by many, but I do not know of anyone who has assessed the impacts of these materials on individual lives. The question is, what would have become of their lives if they had not become involved in this endeavor? The question is unanswerable. It’s like asking someone what would have happened to them if they had not been Catholic.
The legend of Shah is that he was given the task of adapting and disseminating Sufi mysticism into Western culture. What rules or restrictions would be relevant to this task? If ‘mankind is asleep’, wrapped in a net of conditioning, why should those who are not comply with the ethical standards of this delusory condition? Eddie Campbell, the author who was commissioned by Shah to write ‘The People of the Secret’ under the pseudonym Ernest Scott, reports that when Shah read the manuscript in 1985 he commented that it seemed fine, but that he would have to see what ‘the grey beards’ thought of it. Eddie did not ask who the grey beards were, because everyone in the group accepted that Shah was the front man for an anonymous hierarchy. As such, Shah’s much criticized technique of publishing self-promotional books under his own pseudonyms may be viewed as fair play.
40 years after my involvement with this movement, I contacted everyone I could who were there around us in those days, and none had burst their cage asunder, so far as I could tell. But how, having not achieved ‘certainty’, can I recognise those who have? On such conundrums run all organisations purporting to foster spiritual development.
Long after the dissolution of the Bennett community and the subsequent Shah groups, I found that most ex-adherents have picked up their lives and carried on in ordinary ways; some have continued in contact with the vestiges of the teaching, or switched to a similar influence. Some, however, have adopted the position which Bennett and Shah took on: that of the teacher/exemplar. Having contacted some of such leaders, my opinion is that they also have not burst their cages asunder, but have simply become professionally involved with the ever-renewed wish of successive generations of young people to do so. For a glimpse of this particular labyrinthine section of the esoteric self development field, see http://www.duversity.org/institute_2.htm
In 1966, when the Coombe Springs handover happened, Islam did not carry the stigma it carries today, and the era of the late 60s-70s, when a variety of Eastern cults began to appear in the West, was just beginning. So we had nothing with which to compare our situation. Nowadays we have 50 years of Western ‘guruism’ as reference.
With Bennett’s support the board of directors agreed to pass control of the Coombe Springs estate to Shah. I’m a little wooly about the sequence of following events, but will report them as I remember them.
We were all asked to move out of Coombe Springs. There was no consultation or help offered. We were just asked to move out by a particular date. It may seem odd that no communal meetings were held to discuss where each of us would move, and no groups of residents got together to discuss the situation, but that was the way of the Work. Personal experiences of the Work and the workings of the community were never discussed. The draconian eviction was accepted by most as part of the mysterious process of our further individual ascendance on The Path. That was the implicitly accepted pattern: that seemingly careless impositions were a test justified by some unknown higher purpose.
My wife Beverley and baby son and I moved to a flat in Kingston upon Thames, and I continued my daily work at an ad agency. My wife became increasingly disturbed as, over the next few months, no communication was received from either Bennett or Shah. My wife confessed to pacing up and down the floor during the day in a state of anxiety and confusion. I now see that she was on the verge of a breakdown due to the effects of the dissolution. From being members of a highly structured community we were suddenly alone in Limbo. During this time we were visited by only one other community member, a senior ‘movements’ teacher and secretary to Mr Bennett, who had been an authority at Coombe. We were shocked to see that our friend’s hitherto steely poise and confidence had been stripped away. It was like meeting her for the first time. I still had the balancing factor of my job, but she and my wife were seriously destabilised.
Then Mr Bennett and his wife Elizabeth telephoned us to arrange a meeting at our flat. They asked us to move back into the now deserted Coombe Springs estate to act as caretakers, awaiting the arrival of the Shah family who were going to take up residence there. Instantly recovering, my wife organised the move, and we were soon living rent-free in the charming ‘Stable Block’ adjacent to the ‘Big House’. It was very strange having the whole place to ourselves, but we rejoiced at being chosen for the task.
Looking back at the young couple who were us from a distance of 42 years, I see that we had no idea that we were caught up in the tangled and turbulent history of Eastern mysticism’s diffusion into the West that dated back to 1864:
I came home from work one day to find that the Shah family had moved in; not into the Big House as I had expected, but into the ‘Gatehouse’, which the Bennett family had occupied. My wife had already introduced herself, so I went down to do the same, and was welcomed by Shah and his wife Kashvi in the friendliest fashion. I was shaking with nerves, and Shah attempted to put me at my ease by mimicking my condition and laughing about it. It didn’t help. On finding out that I was an artist, he immediately produced an old book which featured an old drawing of Rumi as a frontispiece, and asked me if I could do a copy of it. That copy became the jacket illustration of Shah’s book ‘The Way of the Sufi’, and the beginning of many years acting as a freelance designer for Shah’s Octagon Press, and also for his mainstream publisher Jonathan Cape. Also through Shah, I came into contact with other followers in various industries who employed my writing and design skills, and thus was able to operate a freelance design business for more than 20 years. Thank you, Shah.
Once established at Coombe, Shah announced that he would receive any ex-residents in his home and would answer all questions they may wish to present. I do not know how many accepted the offer, but I remember a meeting of all the now scattered Coombe Springs community held in the large study house called the ‘Jami’. 72 ex-residents were all seated round on the ‘dance floor’ at night, and Shah was sitting in a chair overlooking us. I remember that Shah said it didn’t matter what he said, and that he might as well stand on his head and yodle. But he answered questions from the floor, most of which were about how Sufi thought aligned with Gurdjieff’s teachings. I thought these questions to be petty, and was impressed with Shah’s demeanor, which seemed a breath of fresh modern air compared to Mr Bennett’s semi-Victorian patriarchal manner. I asked Shah if he was born into the Work. He dipped his head into his hand before replying yes, he was born into the Work. To me, that dip of the head meant that I’d asked a penetrating question, but perhaps it was just Shah summoning more patience for silly nonsense.
Soon after, Shah decided to throw a party. Charming strangers appeared at Coombe to organise the festivities. They remodeled large windows in the Big House to allow for the 500 guests’ circulation; they constructed architecturally and geophysically precise models of the entire estate; they erected many pavilions on the lawns. It was a feat impossible for the old Coombe Springs community, and indeed we were impressed by the sophistication of Shah’s followers, who included award-winning authors, academics, psychologists, architects and film animators. It was to be a three-day party on a fancy dress theme based on Shah’s Mullah Nasruddin books. There were jugglers and belly dancers and a genuine Afghan band. I constructed a mask, modeled and painted to be an exact copy of my own face. It was not a success, and I quickly abandoned it as too spooky. Shah indicated this to me by turning away with a sweep of his cloak. Somehow we heard that Shah was throwing the party to exorcise the accumulated history of the Coombe estate. If true, the exorcism failed. Shortly after the party’s end, we heard that Shah had sold the estate to property developers. We were asked to move out again.
We moved out, and the bulldozers moved in. They flattened everything but the Spring House, which was protected because it was the source of Hampton Court’s drinking water during the reign of Henry VIII. We were cast back into the void, and waited there until we heard that Shah had reestablished in Langton Green, near Tunbridge Wells. We wrote to him, and he replied that we should connect to his new centre because he was going to start a community of “real work”. We immediately made arrangements to move to Tunbridge Wells. With my father-in-law’s help, we purchased a house, and began to attend the weekend meetings at Langton Green. Our second son was born at Tunbridge Wells hospital. He was a nine pound baby boy, and he came out and he turned from slate grey to pink and he opened his new eyes and he looked around the faces above him and lastly he squirmed around and looked up between his mother’s legs at her face. She said, “Hello, cuckoo!” And he smiled. The attending staff were stunned silent, but an elderly Matron said, “Well, there’s an OLD soul!”. When I reported this to Shah, he told me that his mother had had difficulties with his own birth, and that the doctor had told his father that things didn’t look good and that he should expect the worst. His father had then gone home to fetch a revolver, which he pointed at the doctor’s face, saying, “If my son dies, YOU die.” This was not the comment I had hoped for: I had hoped for a confirmation that our efforts in The Work had resulted in parentage of an ‘old soul’.
For many years we attended Langton Green community weekends, when 40-50 Institute for Cultural Research members, including surprisingly few ex-Coombe residents, were invited to help maintain the buildings and grounds, and to get together for dinner in the ‘Elephant in the Dark’ clubhouse on Saturday night. If Shah attended, these dinners followed a pattern: general conversation during the meal, after which the chatter suddenly diminished until Shah’s voice was the only one heard. In the most easy and natural way he redirected his talk to the room at large and held forth on whatever subject engaged his mind. Sometimes an eminent guest had been invited by Shah to sit next to him, and it was always interesting to watch their reaction when the magical lull happened. If he had found a new story, he sometimes told it, but this was rare, as was any direct reference to The Work. His audience was always rapt, and he was hardly ever interrupted with comment or questions from members. His wife Kashvi rarely attended. She did not like the atmosphere of restrained adulation, and when she did attend she made a point of ‘bringing the idol down to earth’ with loud comments such as, “I swear you’ve got through six packs of cigarettes today!” Non-aligned dinner guests sometimes found these dinner scenarios odd, but we all knew that they accorded with the Sufi maxim that the Work leader’s job was simply to be himself – an exemplar through whom what could be transmitted to each was transmitted.
Shah always disappointed woo-woo expectations, and often hilariously satirized Eastern gurus who happened to be in the news during his Saturday night ‘harangues’, as he called them. But, for the sake of truth, I must report the only occasion when I witnessed him behaving like most people expect a ‘guru’ to behave. I was in his study drawing a portrait of him for his publishers, and Shah was gazing out the window into the garden. He suddenly said, quietly,“Oh! There’s a sort of vision thing, I haven’t had one of these for ages.” Then he described what he was seeing. It was a scene from the life of an English late-Victorian or Edwardian family who had a house in the country. They were involved with the Spiritualist movement of the time, reading the books and practicing the seances, when all the time, unknown to them, a little gazebo house in their garden was being used as a meeting place for the disembodied people they hoped to contact. Then he related another ‘vision’. This one featured a young man dressed in a sheepskin waistcoat who had made a beautiful sculpture of an angel’s head. Then some barbarians appeared and smashed the head, leaving the young man to go sadly off to “live out the rest of his life, somewhere.” I asked him what these visions meant, and he implied that he didn’t know.
I wont go into the academic scandals and publishing duplicities with which Shah is associated. For those interested, these can be accessed by Googling his name. So far as I know, he never conducted or condoned group exercises at Langton Green such as we regularly practiced at Coombe Springs, even though he funded the construction in the Langton estate grounds of an octagonal study house based on a building in the Alhambra Palace, Granada. I heard that some groups were told to go out on Thursday nights and tell a stranger the story of Mushkil Gusha, and others were sent large white beads to keep on their persons at all times, but somehow we were never included in these projects. For us, his teaching vehicle was his books and his unique personal presence. He was the most extraordinary person I ever met: mercurial, funny, erudite, versatile, compassionate, detached, an unpindownable genius. Arising from the labyrinthine controversies surrounding his career we see his solid single-handed achievement of introducing the history, lore and unique flavour of Sufi thought to the broad audience of the West via his 15 million book sales. If readers of this memoir are interested, there are other accounts which can be found, and if any want answers to specific questions just hit ‘Contact me’ and I will reply.
In 1985 we decided to move to Australia. We did not burst our cage asunder, and, like everyone else, we do not know what would have become of us if we had not done as we did. As at Coombe Springs, our concentration on the given ‘catechism’ produced occasional transient states which seemed to comply with those forecast in the literature. For me, however, the longest lasting of the states which developed during this time was lucid dreaming, which was not directly mentioned in Shah materials.
I feel it’s impertinent of me to comment on Shah, but I want to tell my story, and he was a big part of that. In hindsight, I see that Shah’s position straddled two conflicting stools: that of the orientalist researching, editing and recording the history, techniques and exemplars of an Islamic mystical tradition, and that of the author/exponent who attracted wannabe followers of that tradition, like us. I learned much later that Shah had been both secretary and biographer of the famous occultist Gerald Gardner, who had more or less recreated the Wicca religion, so I suspect Shah was well trained in handling the problem. There is no doubt that Shah’s publications introduced Sufi materials to an exponentially wider audience in the West, nor that some of the books he published under other names were aimed at developing his own status as a Sufi exponent, thereby increasing book sales. This ruse is decried by many, but I do not know of anyone who has assessed the impacts of these materials on individual lives. The question is, what would have become of their lives if they had not become involved in this endeavor? The question is unanswerable. It’s like asking someone what would have happened to them if they had not been Catholic.
The legend of Shah is that he was given the task of adapting and disseminating Sufi mysticism into Western culture. What rules or restrictions would be relevant to this task? If ‘mankind is asleep’, wrapped in a net of conditioning, why should those who are not comply with the ethical standards of this delusory condition? Eddie Campbell, the author who was commissioned by Shah to write ‘The People of the Secret’ under the pseudonym Ernest Scott, reports that when Shah read the manuscript in 1985 he commented that it seemed fine, but that he would have to see what ‘the grey beards’ thought of it. Eddie did not ask who the grey beards were, because everyone in the group accepted that Shah was the front man for an anonymous hierarchy. As such, Shah’s much criticized technique of publishing self-promotional books under his own pseudonyms may be viewed as fair play.
40 years after my involvement with this movement, I contacted everyone I could who were there around us in those days, and none had burst their cage asunder, so far as I could tell. But how, having not achieved ‘certainty’, can I recognise those who have? On such conundrums run all organisations purporting to foster spiritual development.
Long after the dissolution of the Bennett community and the subsequent Shah groups, I found that most ex-adherents have picked up their lives and carried on in ordinary ways; some have continued in contact with the vestiges of the teaching, or switched to a similar influence. Some, however, have adopted the position which Bennett and Shah took on: that of the teacher/exemplar. Having contacted some of such leaders, my opinion is that they also have not burst their cages asunder, but have simply become professionally involved with the ever-renewed wish of successive generations of young people to do so. For a glimpse of this particular labyrinthine section of the esoteric self development field, see http://www.duversity.org/institute_2.htm
In 1966, when the Coombe Springs handover happened, Islam did not carry the stigma it carries today, and the era of the late 60s-70s, when a variety of Eastern cults began to appear in the West, was just beginning. So we had nothing with which to compare our situation. Nowadays we have 50 years of Western ‘guruism’ as reference.
With Bennett’s support the board of directors agreed to pass control of the Coombe Springs estate to Shah. I’m a little wooly about the sequence of following events, but will report them as I remember them.
We were all asked to move out of Coombe Springs. There was no consultation or help offered. We were just asked to move out by a particular date. It may seem odd that no communal meetings were held to discuss where each of us would move, and no groups of residents got together to discuss the situation, but that was the way of the Work. Personal experiences of the Work and the workings of the community were never discussed. The draconian eviction was accepted by most as part of the mysterious process of our further individual ascendance on The Path. That was the implicitly accepted pattern: that seemingly careless impositions were a test justified by some unknown higher purpose.
My wife Beverley and baby son and I moved to a flat in Kingston upon Thames, and I continued my daily work at an ad agency. My wife became increasingly disturbed as, over the next few months, no communication was received from either Bennett or Shah. My wife confessed to pacing up and down the floor during the day in a state of anxiety and confusion. I now see that she was on the verge of a breakdown due to the effects of the dissolution. From being members of a highly structured community we were suddenly alone in Limbo. During this time we were visited by only one other community member, a senior ‘movements’ teacher and secretary to Mr Bennett, who had been an authority at Coombe. We were shocked to see that our friend’s hitherto steely poise and confidence had been stripped away. It was like meeting her for the first time. I still had the balancing factor of my job, but she and my wife were seriously destabilised.
Then Mr Bennett and his wife Elizabeth telephoned us to arrange a meeting at our flat. They asked us to move back into the now deserted Coombe Springs estate to act as caretakers, awaiting the arrival of the Shah family who were going to take up residence there. Instantly recovering, my wife organised the move, and we were soon living rent-free in the charming ‘Stable Block’ adjacent to the ‘Big House’. It was very strange having the whole place to ourselves, but we rejoiced at being chosen for the task.
Looking back at the young couple who were us from a distance of 42 years, I see that we had no idea that we were caught up in the tangled and turbulent history of Eastern mysticism’s diffusion into the West that dated back to 1864:
I came home from work one day to find that the Shah family had moved in; not into the Big House as I had expected, but into the ‘Gatehouse’, which the Bennett family had occupied. My wife had already introduced herself, so I went down to do the same, and was welcomed by Shah and his wife Kashvi in the friendliest fashion. I was shaking with nerves, and Shah attempted to put me at my ease by mimicking my condition and laughing about it. It didn’t help. On finding out that I was an artist, he immediately produced an old book which featured an old drawing of Rumi as a frontispiece, and asked me if I could do a copy of it. That copy became the jacket illustration of Shah’s book ‘The Way of the Sufi’, and the beginning of many years acting as a freelance designer for Shah’s Octagon Press, and also for his mainstream publisher Jonathan Cape. Also through Shah, I came into contact with other followers in various industries who employed my writing and design skills, and thus was able to operate a freelance design business for more than 20 years. Thank you, Shah.
Once established at Coombe, Shah announced that he would receive any ex-residents in his home and would answer all questions they may wish to present. I do not know how many accepted the offer, but I remember a meeting of all the now scattered Coombe Springs community held in the large study house called the ‘Jami’. 72 ex-residents were all seated round on the ‘dance floor’ at night, and Shah was sitting in a chair overlooking us. I remember that Shah said it didn’t matter what he said, and that he might as well stand on his head and yodle. But he answered questions from the floor, most of which were about how Sufi thought aligned with Gurdjieff’s teachings. I thought these questions to be petty, and was impressed with Shah’s demeanor, which seemed a breath of fresh modern air compared to Mr Bennett’s semi-Victorian patriarchal manner. I asked Shah if he was born into the Work. He dipped his head into his hand before replying yes, he was born into the Work. To me, that dip of the head meant that I’d asked a penetrating question, but perhaps it was just Shah summoning more patience for silly nonsense.
Soon after, Shah decided to throw a party. Charming strangers appeared at Coombe to organise the festivities. They remodeled large windows in the Big House to allow for the 500 guests’ circulation; they constructed architecturally and geophysically precise models of the entire estate; they erected many pavilions on the lawns. It was a feat impossible for the old Coombe Springs community, and indeed we were impressed by the sophistication of Shah’s followers, who included award-winning authors, academics, psychologists, architects and film animators. It was to be a three-day party on a fancy dress theme based on Shah’s Mullah Nasruddin books. There were jugglers and belly dancers and a genuine Afghan band. I constructed a mask, modeled and painted to be an exact copy of my own face. It was not a success, and I quickly abandoned it as too spooky. Shah indicated this to me by turning away with a sweep of his cloak. Somehow we heard that Shah was throwing the party to exorcise the accumulated history of the Coombe estate. If true, the exorcism failed. Shortly after the party’s end, we heard that Shah had sold the estate to property developers. We were asked to move out again.
We moved out, and the bulldozers moved in. They flattened everything but the Spring House, which was protected because it was the source of Hampton Court’s drinking water during the reign of Henry VIII. We were cast back into the void, and waited there until we heard that Shah had reestablished in Langton Green, near Tunbridge Wells. We wrote to him, and he replied that we should connect to his new centre because he was going to start a community of “real work”. We immediately made arrangements to move to Tunbridge Wells. With my father-in-law’s help, we purchased a house, and began to attend the weekend meetings at Langton Green. Our second son was born at Tunbridge Wells hospital. He was a nine pound baby boy, and he came out and he turned from slate grey to pink and he opened his new eyes and he looked around the faces above him and lastly he squirmed around and looked up between his mother’s legs at her face. She said, “Hello, cuckoo!” And he smiled. The attending staff were stunned silent, but an elderly Matron said, “Well, there’s an OLD soul!”. When I reported this to Shah, he told me that his mother had had difficulties with his own birth, and that the doctor had told his father that things didn’t look good and that he should expect the worst. His father had then gone home to fetch a revolver, which he pointed at the doctor’s face, saying, “If my son dies, YOU die.” This was not the comment I had hoped for: I had hoped for a confirmation that our efforts in The Work had resulted in parentage of an ‘old soul’.
For many years we attended Langton Green community weekends, when 40-50 Institute for Cultural Research members, including surprisingly few ex-Coombe residents, were invited to help maintain the buildings and grounds, and to get together for dinner in the ‘Elephant in the Dark’ clubhouse on Saturday night. If Shah attended, these dinners followed a pattern: general conversation during the meal, after which the chatter suddenly diminished until Shah’s voice was the only one heard. In the most easy and natural way he redirected his talk to the room at large and held forth on whatever subject engaged his mind. Sometimes an eminent guest had been invited by Shah to sit next to him, and it was always interesting to watch their reaction when the magical lull happened. If he had found a new story, he sometimes told it, but this was rare, as was any direct reference to The Work. His audience was always rapt, and he was hardly ever interrupted with comment or questions from members. His wife Kashvi rarely attended. She did not like the atmosphere of restrained adulation, and when she did attend she made a point of ‘bringing the idol down to earth’ with loud comments such as, “I swear you’ve got through six packs of cigarettes today!” Non-aligned dinner guests sometimes found these dinner scenarios odd, but we all knew that they accorded with the Sufi maxim that the Work leader’s job was simply to be himself – an exemplar through whom what could be transmitted to each was transmitted.
Shah always disappointed woo-woo expectations, and often hilariously satirized Eastern gurus who happened to be in the news during his Saturday night ‘harangues’, as he called them. But, for the sake of truth, I must report the only occasion when I witnessed him behaving like most people expect a ‘guru’ to behave. I was in his study drawing a portrait of him for his publishers, and Shah was gazing out the window into the garden. He suddenly said, quietly,“Oh! There’s a sort of vision thing, I haven’t had one of these for ages.” Then he described what he was seeing. It was a scene from the life of an English late-Victorian or Edwardian family who had a house in the country. They were involved with the Spiritualist movement of the time, reading the books and practicing the seances, when all the time, unknown to them, a little gazebo house in their garden was being used as a meeting place for the disembodied people they hoped to contact. Then he related another ‘vision’. This one featured a young man dressed in a sheepskin waistcoat who had made a beautiful sculpture of an angel’s head. Then some barbarians appeared and smashed the head, leaving the young man to go sadly off to “live out the rest of his life, somewhere.” I asked him what these visions meant, and he implied that he didn’t know.
I wont go into the academic scandals and publishing duplicities with which Shah is associated. For those interested, these can be accessed by Googling his name. So far as I know, he never conducted or condoned group exercises at Langton Green such as we regularly practiced at Coombe Springs, even though he funded the construction in the Langton estate grounds of an octagonal study house based on a building in the Alhambra Palace, Granada. I heard that some groups were told to go out on Thursday nights and tell a stranger the story of Mushkil Gusha, and others were sent large white beads to keep on their persons at all times, but somehow we were never included in these projects. For us, his teaching vehicle was his books and his unique personal presence. He was the most extraordinary person I ever met: mercurial, funny, erudite, versatile, compassionate, detached, an unpindownable genius. Arising from the labyrinthine controversies surrounding his career we see his solid single-handed achievement of introducing the history, lore and unique flavour of Sufi thought to the broad audience of the West via his 15 million book sales. If readers of this memoir are interested, there are other accounts which can be found, and if any want answers to specific questions just hit ‘Contact me’ and I will reply.
In 1985 we decided to move to Australia. We did not burst our cage asunder, and, like everyone else, we do not know what would have become of us if we had not done as we did. As at Coombe Springs, our concentration on the given ‘catechism’ produced occasional transient states which seemed to comply with those forecast in the literature. For me, however, the longest lasting of the states which developed during this time was lucid dreaming, which was not directly mentioned in Shah materials.