Darkness is not a practice. It is the removal of the practice that has never stopped: the relentless work of visual surveillance that began the moment you opened your eyes and has not ceased since. The traumatized nervous system operates on threat detection. It scans. It processes. It analyses faces, doorways, shadows, peripheral movements. This scanning requires visual input to sustain itself. Darkness removes the substrate. When there is nothing to see, the hypervigilant system loses its object. What remains is not nothing. What remains is the body's own presence, finally perceptible without the roar of visual processing drowning it out.
This is the teaching that cannot be learned any other way. Cold confronts. Dark receives. Cold activates. Dark rests. Cold says: you can meet intensity and survive. Dark says something different. Dark says: you can stop scanning, and nothing will eat you. The predator you have been watching for your entire life does not exist. You can stop looking. You can stop now.
The architecture of visual dominance
The visual system consumes approximately twenty percent of the brain's total metabolic energy, more than any other sensory modality. Ten billion bits of information arrive at the retina each second; six million bits travel through the optic nerve; only one hundred bits per second reach conscious awareness. The visual cortex does not merely receive information. It constructs reality. Every waking moment, it assembles a model of the world from fragmentary data, filling gaps, predicting threats, parsing faces for danger signals. This is not perception. This is work. This is metabolic expenditure measured in glucose and oxygen and ATP.
In the traumatized nervous system, this work intensifies. The citadel of defensive architecture (physical, energetic, cognitive, emotional, relational) requires continuous reconnaissance. The sentinel cannot rest. The watchtower must be staffed. The visual system becomes the primary instrument of the protective self, scanning not just the environment but faces, expressions, micro-movements of other bodies that might indicate withdrawal, disapproval, danger. This is why trauma survivors report exhaustion that seems disproportionate to their activities. They are working constantly. The work happens in the visual cortex. The work never stops.
Darkness dissolves the outer wall of the citadel. Without visual input to process, the hypervigilant system loses its object. The sentinel has nothing to watch. The watchtower goes dark. The metabolic resources consumed by visual threat detection become available for other purposes: repair, integration, the work of completion that was interrupted when the original injury occurred. The body finally has energy to spend on itself.
The pineal gland awakens
Deep in the center of the brain, behind the third ventricle and between the two hemispheres, sits a structure the size of a grain of rice. The pineal gland. Descartes called it the seat of the soul. He was closer than he knew.
The pineal gland manufactures melatonin through a synthesis pathway that begins with tryptophan, the same amino acid that produces serotonin. In the presence of darkness, norepinephrine released from sympathetic nerve terminals activates receptors on pinealocytes, the cells that comprise ninety-five percent of the gland. The enzyme AANAT catalyzes the rate-limiting step. Melatonin flows into the bloodstream and cerebrospinal fluid, reaching every tissue in the body within minutes. The hormone is amphiphilic; it crosses all barriers. It penetrates the mitochondria of every cell.
Light halts this process instantly. The suprachiasmatic nucleus, receiving information from specialized retinal cells, sends an inhibitory signal through the paraventricular nucleus. The sympathetic release stops. Melatonin production ceases. This is why the pineal gland earned its other name: the gland of darkness. It speaks only when light is silent.
What melatonin does exceeds any single hormone. It is simultaneously a chronobiotic (synchronizing circadian rhythms) and a powerful antioxidant, scavenging free radicals more effectively than vitamin C or vitamin E. It protects mitochondria from electron leakage, increases ATP production, prevents cellular apoptosis. It upregulates superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase, the body's own repair enzymes. Pineal melatonin comprises less than five percent of total body production; the rest is manufactured locally in mitochondria throughout the organism, handling cellular repair that has nothing to do with sleep. But pineal melatonin is the signal. Pineal melatonin tells the body that night has arrived, that the time for repair has come, that the vigilance can cease.
Modern humans suppress this signal routinely. Melatonin production drops by fifty percent at exposure to just 24.6 lux: the light from a dim lamp, a bathroom nightlight, a phone screen at minimum brightness. The smartphone held six inches from the face delivers forty to fifty lux directly to the retina. The average American bedroom is lit at sixty to one hundred fifty lux through the night. The gland of darkness has been silenced for over a century, and we have called the consequences by other names: insomnia, depression, cancer, metabolic syndrome, the diseases of civilization.
The eyes that do not form images
In 2002, researchers discovered a population of retinal cells that had been overlooked for a century of visual science. These cells, intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells or ipRGCs, comprise only one to two percent of all retinal ganglion cells. They do not form images. They do not see.
What they do is measure light for the circadian system.
Unlike rods and cones, which hyperpolarize in response to light and recover quickly, ipRGCs contain melanopsin, a photopigment that depolarizes the cell and continues signaling as long as light persists. Their response is slow to initiate, slow to adapt, and sustained for the duration of exposure. They are not interested in the cricket that moves across the visual field. They are interested in whether it is day or night.
Melanopsin peaks in sensitivity at 479 nanometers: blue light. This is not coincidence. The color of the sky. The wavelength most suppressed at sunset. The signal that distinguishes day from dusk from true night. When blue light enters the eye, melanopsin-containing cells fire continuously, sending signals through the retinohypothalamic tract directly to the suprachiasmatic nucleus. The master clock receives unambiguous information: it is day. Suppress melatonin. Maintain alertness. Keep scanning.
This is why screens are not merely distracting but physiologically disruptive. LED displays emit a sharp peak in exactly the wavelength melanopsin detects. Two hours of tablet reading suppresses melatonin by fifty-five percent and delays its onset by ninety minutes. The body cannot distinguish an iPad from the sun. Both register as day. Neither permits the darkness response to begin.
The ancestral signal was unambiguous. When the sun set, blue light disappeared from the environment. Fire is red-shifted. Candlelight peaks at yellow and orange. The eye could tell the difference. Melanopsin went silent. Melatonin flowed. The body knew with biochemical certainty that night had arrived.
True darkness restores this certainty. In the absence of light, melanopsin has nothing to detect. The retinohypothalamic tract falls silent. The suprachiasmatic nucleus releases its inhibition. The pineal gland awakens.
The sleep we have lost
Roger Ekirch spent sixteen years in historical archives before he understood what he was reading. References to "first sleep" and "second sleep" appeared across five centuries of European documents: court records, medical texts, prayer manuals, personal diaries. A 1560 French physician recommended that laborers conceive children "after the first sleep," when they would have more enjoyment. A seventeenth-century ballad: "At the wakening of your first sleep, you shall have a hot drink made." References in the Odyssey, in Virgil, in Thucydides.
Our ancestors slept in two phases separated by an hour or two of quiet wakefulness they called "the watch." First sleep began around nine or ten in the evening, two hours after sunset. After three or four hours of deep rest, sleepers woke naturally, not to disturbance but to an interval of contemplative awareness. They prayed. They interpreted dreams. They visited neighbours. They had sex. They lay in the dark doing nothing. Then second sleep arrived and carried them to dawn.
Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health reproduced this pattern experimentally. He exposed subjects to fourteen hours of darkness each night (approximating pre-industrial winter conditions) and let them sleep as much as they wanted. For the first several nights, they slept eleven hours, repaying accumulated debt. By the fourth week, their sleep had organized itself into two distinct periods of three to five hours each, separated by one to three hours of peaceful wakefulness. Melatonin secretion expanded to match the darkness window. Subjects reported feeling more rested than ever before in their lives.
The pattern perfectly matched Ekirch's historical findings. This was not learned behavior. This was ancient biology, expressing itself the moment the conditions allowed.
Kenneth Wright at the University of Colorado demonstrated the speed of recalibration. A single week of camping (exposure to natural light by day and only campfire by night) shifted melatonin onset by two hours. Just two days of camping achieved sixty-nine percent of this shift. The circadian system is not broken. It is waiting. It needs only the signal it evolved to receive.
The Industrial Revolution began erasing this signal before Edison. Gas lighting. Factory shifts. The economization of night. But Edison's practical incandescent bulb in 1879 completed the transformation. Within decades, true darkness became optional. Within a century, it became rare. Within a hundred and fifty years, eighty percent of humanity now lives under light-polluted skies. More than ninety-nine percent of Americans and Europeans have never seen the Milky Way from their homes. The darkness that shaped two hundred thousand years of human neurobiology has been erased from the species in three generations.
What happens when there is nothing to see
The contemplative traditions discovered what happens next.
Tibetan Buddhist practitioners enter sealed chambers called yangti retreats. No light enters. No light is permitted. The retreats last from three days to forty-nine days, sometimes longer. Ayu Khandro and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche are said to have practiced for years. The purpose is preparation for death. The darkness simulates the bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth, where consciousness must navigate without external reference.
What practitioners report follows a predictable sequence. The first days bring excessive sleep as melatonin floods the system. Dreams become vivid, often indistinguishable from waking. By the third day, phosphenes appear: sparks, geometric patterns, scintillating grids arising from spontaneous activity in retinal ganglion cells deprived of stimulation. By day five, more complex imagery emerges. Practitioners describe "cartoon-like technicolor movies," "360-degree immersion in purple or turquoise landscapes," visions of "flying boats filled with kittens wearing hats" and "huge stone-like faces staring." The disturbing material surfaces too, figures from horror films, dark shadows approaching, the face of fear given visual form.
The tradition teaches practitioners not to engage the visions but to observe them arise and pass. What generates the imagery is not external. It is the mind's own projections, rendered visible in the absence of competing visual input. The traumatized material stored in the nervous system (the incomplete gestalts, the unprocessed terrors) finds expression when the hypervigilant scanning finally stops. The content that was always present, masked by the constant work of visual surveillance, reveals itself in the dark.
By the second and third week, practitioners describe inner light. "I literally see myself being inside my own heart, which became huge and is shining with an incredibly bright blinding white light, exactly like a diamond." "Huge beams of white light shooting out of my heart or my head, bright red light coming from the navel, glistening gold or purple light filling the whole room." The darkness becomes luminous. The inner light that was always present, obscured by external illumination, makes itself known.
This is the bidirectional teaching. Darkness is not done to the body. It is the removal of something, the cessation of bombardment. When external visual input stops, internal visual phenomena emerge: phosphenes, hypnagogic imagery, the subtle luminosity of consciousness itself. The meeting between outer darkness and inner light. The traditions call it rigpa, pure awareness recognizing itself. Neuroscience calls it visual cortex hyperexcitability compensating for absent input. Both descriptions point to the same phenomenon: when you stop looking out, you begin seeing in.
The visual cortex does not rest easily
The brain resists silence. Deprived of visual input, the visual cortex does not simply deactivate. It becomes hyperactive, generating content internally. fMRI studies show enhanced BOLD signals in V1, primary visual cortex, after just sixty minutes of light deprivation. The brain is designed to see. When there is nothing external to see, it creates something internal.
This is the neurological basis of what prisoners in dark cells have called the "Prisoner's Cinema": vivid, colorful light patterns and complex imagery emerging from complete darkness. The same phenomenon appears in pilots, truck drivers on long night hauls, and astronauts. Max Knoll identified fifteen distinct geometric patterns that appear consistently across subjects: spirals, lattices, tunnels, honeycomb structures. These "form constants" show up in Paleolithic cave art, in the geometric motifs of cultures worldwide. The visual system generates these patterns spontaneously. They are not learned. They are architecture.
The phenomenology follows predictable stages. First, flickering hues and points of light. Then geometric patterns: radial lines, nested curves, cobwebs, filigrees. Then figurative content: faces, animals, landscapes. Finally, full narrative sequences, "cinematic" experiences that feel autonomous and immersive. The progression takes hours in darkness, days in extended retreat. The brain, finding no external world to model, begins modeling its own contents.
What this means for trauma is significant. The hypervigilant visual system, deprived of external objects to scan, turns its attention inward. The material that was always present (stored in body, held in the defensive architecture, frozen in uncompleted defensive responses) becomes perceptible when the noise of visual processing quiets. This is not hallucination in the psychiatric sense. It is the emergence of content that was always there, finally visible against the backdrop of visual silence.
The dissolution of the outer wall
The citadel has five domains. Physical: the armored body, the held breath, the tension that never releases. Energetic: the compressed vitality, the fatigue that serves as protection. Cognitive: the hyperanalytic mind, the endless rehearsal of danger scenarios. Emotional: the flattened affect, the inaccessible grief, the rage held at bay. Relational: the impossible intimacy, the inability to be seen without watching in return.
Darkness dissolves the outer wall of the citadel, the physical-visual boundary between self and world. Without visual input, the scanning stops. Without scanning, the chronic tension that maintains surveillance can finally release. The metabolic energy consumed by visual threat detection (twenty percent of the brain's total budget) becomes available for other purposes.
Watch what happens in extended darkness. The body begins to soften. Breath deepens. Proprioceptive awareness increases as visual dominance recedes. Practitioners report hearing their own heartbeat, their blood flowing, their eyelids blinking. The internal signals that were drowned by visual noise become audible, perceptible, primary. This is not merely relaxation. This is reallocation. The resources that sustained hypervigilance are being repurposed.
The relational wall shifts too. Darkness removes the possibility of visual surveillance between people. In dark retreat, practitioners cannot see their teachers, their guides, their companions. They cannot read faces. They cannot scan for rejection. They must receive without watching. This is unbearable for the hypervigilant system, and precisely what it needs. The armor developed against being seen while seeing begins to dissolve when seeing is removed from the equation.
Float tanks reproduce this effect in compressed form. Suspended in body-temperature salt water in absolute darkness, the nervous system receives no gravitational signals, no thermal gradients, no visual input. Studies show reduced activity in the default mode network, the brain regions associated with self-referential thinking, rumination, the endless narrative of self. Blood pressure drops within fifteen minutes. The amygdala quiets. For survivors of trauma, this is not merely pleasant. It is revelatory. The scanning can stop. The body can release. The armor can soften. Nothing terrible happens when vigilance ceases.
What Edison stole
Consider what we have lost.
Two hundred thousand years of human evolution occurred in a world where night meant darkness. Not dim light. Not the soft glow of screens. True darkness, the kind where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, where the only illumination is starlight and the occasional moon. The pineal gland evolved in this absolute darkness. Melatonin rhythms calibrated to the complete absence of light for eight to fourteen hours every night. The visual cortex rested, genuinely rested, for half of every day.
Fire provided some light, but firelight is dim: a single candle produces roughly one lux at a meter's distance, one percent of typical modern indoor lighting. And firelight is red-shifted. It does not activate melanopsin. It does not suppress melatonin. Our ancestors could sit around fires for thousands of years without disrupting their circadian biology. The fire was not the problem.
Edison's practical incandescent bulb in 1879 changed everything. By 1882, the first commercial power station lit lower Manhattan. Within decades, electric light was standard in Western cities. The night could be conquered. The productive day could extend indefinitely. Shift work became possible, then normalized. Twenty percent of the modern workforce operates on schedules their circadian systems cannot accommodate.
The health consequences cascade through every system. Night shift workers show twenty to thirty percent higher rates of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. Exposure to light at night increases depression risk by thirty percent, independent of all other factors. Breast cancer risk rises twelve to seventeen percent in populations with high artificial light exposure, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer now classifies night shift work as a Group 2A carcinogen, probably carcinogenic to humans. The mechanism is clear: melatonin suppression removes antioxidant protection, allows oxidative damage to accumulate, and disrupts the hormonal cascades that regulate cell division.
We have medicalized the consequences and named them diseases. Insomnia. Depression. Cancer. Metabolic syndrome. These are not primarily diseases. They are the body's response to the removal of a teacher that shaped two hundred millennia of its biology. The teacher has been gone for only a hundred and fifty years, six generations. The body has not forgotten. The body is waiting.
The Dark Night was never about suffering
John of the Cross wrote from a prison cell in Toledo, nine months of captivity by his own Carmelite brothers who opposed his reforms. The poem that emerged, Dark Night of the Soul, has been catastrophically misread for four centuries. Modern usage treats "dark night" as a synonym for depression, for spiritual crisis, for suffering that must be endured.
John meant something almost opposite.
The darkness in his theology is not God's absence but God's overwhelming presence. "The more clear and evident divine things are," he writes, "the more dark and hidden they are to the soul naturally." Ordinary perception cannot apprehend what is infinitely beyond it. The light that blinds and the darkness that conceals are the same phenomenon experienced from different sides. The dark night is not punishment. It is intimacy too intense for the perceptual systems that normally mediate experience.
John describes two nights. The night of the senses: dryness, aridity, no consolation in spiritual or earthly things. The mind that was accustomed to scanning for rewards, for pleasures, for confirmation of its own worth, finds nothing to grasp. This is the dissolution of the cognitive wall of the citadel. The night of the spirit goes deeper: the intellect, memory, and will are purified. The soul "seems to perish and waste away," yet simultaneously experiences "a strong divine love." This is the dissolution of the emotional and relational walls, the deepest armor, the protection that preceded all others.
The night is not done to the soul. It is the removal of the false lights that prevented genuine seeing. Gregory of Nyssa, writing seven centuries earlier, described the same arc using Moses as his template. Moses encounters God first as light: the burning bush. But when he ascends Sinai to receive the tablets, he enters darkness. "Scripture teaches that religious knowledge comes at first to those who receive it as light. But as the mind progresses... it sees more clearly that God cannot be contemplated. This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing."
The contemplative traditions converge on this point across centuries and continents. Darkness is not the enemy of perception. Darkness is the precondition for perceiving what ordinary light obscures.
The cellular scale
Melatonin reaches every mitochondrion in the body. It is manufactured there locally and received there when released from the pineal gland. At the cellular scale, darkness initiates repair.
The mitochondria are the sites of oxidative phosphorylation, the process that generates ATP, the energy currency of all cellular work. This process inevitably produces reactive oxygen species, free radicals that damage membranes and DNA if left unchecked. Melatonin scavenges these radicals directly and upregulates the enzymes that neutralize them: superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase, catalase. It prevents electron leakage from the electron transport chain. It protects mitochondrial membranes from peroxidation. It promotes the SIRT3 pathway that enhances antioxidant activity.
In the absence of darkness, in the presence of continuous artificial light, melatonin is suppressed and this repair cascade is interrupted. The damage accumulates. The mitochondria become less efficient. The energy available for cellular work declines. This is one mechanism underlying the fatigue of chronic illness: the exhaustion that does not resolve with sleep, the energetic depletion that characterizes CPTSD, burnout, ME/CFS, and Long COVID alike.
Darkness is not merely rest for the nervous system. It is repair time for every cell. The teacher instructs at every scale.
The first hour and the second hour
What does it actually feel like to enter complete darkness?
The first hour, the mind races. This is predictable. The hypervigilant system, deprived of external objects to process, turns inward and finds nothing but its own turbulence. Thoughts multiply. Planning intensifies. The mind rehearses conversations, replays conflicts, anticipates dangers. This is not failure. This is the defensive architecture operating exactly as designed, attempting to maintain surveillance with the only objects available: its own productions.
The second hour, something shifts. The turbulence does not stop, but it begins to lose authority. The body, no longer required to support visual scanning, starts to soften. Breath deepens. The held places reveal themselves: tension in the jaw, the shoulders, the pelvic floor, the diaphragm. These tensions maintained the posture of vigilance. Without the visual imperative, they become unnecessary. Some practitioners describe this as the body melting, releasing, sinking into itself.
By the third hour, the visual phenomena begin. Phosphenes at first: sparks, dots, geometric patterns. The visual cortex, finding no external data, generates its own. This is disconcerting for some, fascinating for others. The patterns shift and evolve. What was random becomes structured. What was abstract becomes figurative.
In extended darkness (days rather than hours) the sequence deepens. Sleep becomes extensive, then normalizes. Dreams become vivid, sometimes indistinguishable from waking. The content stored in the nervous system begins to surface: unprocessed memories, unfelt emotions, the frozen material of incomplete defensive responses. This is not pleasant, necessarily. The traumatized practitioner may encounter the very images they have spent years avoiding. But in darkness, with nowhere to flee and nothing to scan, the encounter can finally complete itself.
The body holds what the mind could not process. In darkness, the body speaks.
What the intergenerational field carries
The family's relationship to night shapes the child before the child can speak.
What happens when the lights go out? Is the dark a punishment, sent to your room, isolated in blackness? Is it a danger, monsters that must be checked for, fears that must be soothed? Is it a presence to be avoided, nightlights in every room, screens glowing through the night, the darkness never permitted?
The family's fear transmits. The family's rest transmits. The child learns what night is for by watching what the parents do when night arrives. If the parents fear the dark, the child inherits the fear. If the parents remain vigilant through the night, the child learns that vigilance is necessary. The hypervigilant pattern does not require personal trauma to install. It can be absorbed from the field, from the unspoken assumptions about what happens when the lights go out.
This is the intergenerational scale. The family that never truly rested, going back generations, produces the child who cannot rest. The repair deficit accumulates across time. The great-grandparents who worked night shifts, the grandparents who feared what might come in darkness, the parents who slept with screens glowing: each generation passes forward a nervous system increasingly unfamiliar with true dark, increasingly suspicious of what happens when surveillance ceases.
The teaching must be relearned in each generation. The body must remember what night is for.
The species at night
At the civilizational scale, we face a departure without precedent. For two hundred thousand years, every human being experienced true darkness every night. The circadian systems of all seven billion currently living humans were shaped by this darkness. The departure began so recently (six generations, an eyeblink in evolutionary time) that the body has had no chance to adapt. It will not adapt. The timescales required for genetic change are orders of magnitude longer than the age of the incandescent bulb.
We are conducting an uncontrolled experiment on the circadian biology of every human being alive. The results are appearing. Epidemic rates of sleep disorder, depression, anxiety. Rising rates of breast cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer. Metabolic syndrome affecting a third of the adult population. These are not separate diseases with separate causes. They are the same cause expressing through different systems. They are what happens when darkness is removed from a species that evolved in darkness.
Light pollution now reaches into the last wild places. Sea turtle hatchlings, oriented by starlight for sixty million years, crawl toward hotel parking lots and die by the thousands. Migratory birds, navigating by stellar patterns, circle illuminated towers until they collapse from exhaustion. The insects that form the base of terrestrial food webs, drawn to light sources they cannot escape, are declining at rates that suggest ecosystem collapse within decades.
We have not merely modified our own sleep. We have altered the night itself. The teacher that instructed all nocturnal life, that shaped half of all waking and sleeping, that provided the contrast against which day had meaning: this teacher is being erased from the planet.
The return to the dark
Darkness cannot be practiced. It can only be entered.
You do not generate darkness. You do not achieve it. You create the conditions (the sealed room, the removed screens, the blocked windows) and then darkness arrives on its own terms. This is why it is an immutable teacher. You cannot negotiate with it. You cannot modify its curriculum. You cannot ask for a different lesson. Darkness teaches what darkness teaches, and the only variable is whether you are present to receive.
The teaching is simple. The hypervigilant system requires something to scan. Remove the substrate and the scanning stops. When the scanning stops, the energy consumed by scanning becomes available for other purposes. The body repairs. The circadian system resets. The material held in the defensive architecture begins to surface and complete.
This is not a cure. It is a condition for cure. Darkness does not heal trauma directly. It removes one of the primary obstacles to healing: the endless expenditure of metabolic resources on visual threat detection. It provides the body what it evolved to receive: hours of genuine rest in which melatonin flows, mitochondria repair, and the nervous system finally has permission to stop working.
The traumatized person has been looking for danger since the original injury. The looking never stopped. It continues now, reading these words, scanning for threat, processing visual information, spending energy. This expenditure is not chosen. It is automatic. It is wired into the deepest layers of the defensive architecture.
Darkness does not ask the vigilance to stop. Darkness removes its object. Without something to see, the seeing stops on its own. What remains is the body that was always there, beneath the scanning, beneath the vigilance, beneath the architecture of protection that accumulated over years. The body that was waiting to rest.
The teacher is waiting. The teacher has been waiting for six generations, patient as the night itself. The body remembers what the mind has forgotten. The darkness remembers what civilization has erased.
All that is required is to turn off the lights.
Dark and Sun are the circadian pair. The next chapter describes the Sun's teaching: where Dark permits the visual system to rest, Sun provides the signal that calibrates when rest ends. Neither teacher works as powerfully alone. The body evolved to oscillate between them: morning light that sets the clock, evening darkness that permits the restoration. Modern life has flattened this oscillation. The body receives neither pole strongly: dim indoor light during the day, artificial light persisting into night. Restoring one pole helps. Restoring both transforms.
When there is nothing to see, the seeing stops. When the seeing stops, the body appears. When the body appears, the completion that was interrupted can finally occur. This is the teaching of darkness. It cannot be learned any other way.