Golden era productions

25

A LECTURE GIVEN ON 10 FEBRUARY 1958

How are you today?

Audience: Fine. Okay. Good.

What'll we do today?

Audience: (various responses)

You want a lecture, or you want questions?

Audience: Lecture.

Okay. So be it.

We have not covered several aspects of clearing, and one of the first aspects is the conduct of an end product.

What's the conduct of Clear? Well, this is a very broad subject, and one that I think you'll be speculating about for some time. And I probably have the only meager stable data there are on it, so far.

First characteristic is positiveness. Characteristic of Clear. In other words, positiveness: You get yeses and noes.

Let's look at the base of a motor. We trace down in vain to discover any other (below the level of postulate)—but any other electrical phenomenon that generates current, except the base of the motor, the ability to hold two terminals apart and to cause a discharge between those two terminals. In other words, to hold something fixed in space. In other words, to be cause over constant location.

This characteristic actually gives you, way down deep in mest, electrical power. The only thing that permits power to develop, you might say, electrically, is the base of the motor. Two terminals are held apart by the base of the motor and by their being firmly held, and by other influences trying to unhold them, you do get electrical current and power. Quite interesting.

But it goes back to this: postulate. The fixedness, the postulated fixedness of a terminal. If a person cannot postulate a fixedness, you might say, and make it stick, he had difficulty with other electrical phenomena. And you get a preclear drilling on this Hold It Still, and you get the resultant outbursts of energy and electrical phenomena and so forth which make up communications systems which permit somebody to be in communication. And you border somewhere in the vicinity of what they used to call a magnetic personality. Quite interesting that they say magnetic personality, isn't it? Actually does have something to do with electrical phenomena.

The ability to hold something still, to keep something fixed and in position. And we assign to this constancy, the ability to carry on, that sort of thing.

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Now, a Clear might or might not continue in one spot unmoving forever. He himself does not feel so fixed, and he himself is capable of fixing things. See, cause has gone over to the other side of the picture.

Now, I notice some of you think this is a big mystery. Could you look at Scientology 8-80 again? I have no desire to go over this. But coordinate Scientology 8-80 against the ability to hold something still, to fix something in a position, and you'll see that the basic electrical phenomena of the universe is pursuant to that. So that you can expect, amongst other things, no great energy difficulties—no difficulties with ridges or something of that sort of thing. Much more important, no difficulties with exhaustion and so on. You see that these things are, to some degree, electrical phenomena.

The engram bank and the reactive mind are obsessive, unknowing energy manifestations for which the person is taking no responsibility. When he starts to take responsibility for energy and when he is himself able to create energy, then we discover that an individual without a reactive mind is not being subjected to a tremendous number of electrical impulses of one kind or another.

Cybernetics, by the way, of many, many lost years ago, by a fellow by the name of Norbert Wiener up at MIT who is almost psychotically violent on the subject of Dianetics—Wiener traced the fact that there were energy flows up and down the neurons of the nervous system; that there was current running there. As a matter of fact, a nerve impulse runs at about ten feet— something on this sort of thing—per second. It's pretty slow. I've forgotten exactly what the figure is, but it's something in that vicinity. And you get—in the nerves of the body you get a run and a return. In other words, you get the thing going both ways. His great discovery was the fact that there was current coming back, I think, more or less—that's the—was the case, the gist of the thing. And he discovered that there was current (this is a very old discovery, by the way), but discovered there was current, and then the current came back. And however complicated this system got, being an engineer he assigned all sensory activity to these nerve impulses which were electrical flows. You got that?

Well, it's very interesting. If you had to depend upon nerve impulses traveling (and, again, I'm not certain of this figure) ten feet per second, you couldn't have a reaction time adequate to drive an automobile. That would not work. As a matter of fact, the dinosaur went extinct simply because somebody—the brontosaurus, I think, was the prime example of this. He could be bitten in the tail and he wouldn't find out about it for fifteen or twenty seconds—nerve impulse took too long to go from the tail to the brain. Do you see that? As a matter of fact, he developed a second brain in the tail.

Now, the physical body has a bunch of subsystems — subbrains. And these things come, apparently, at the various points of where you would expect thinkingness to be—at the crook of the elbow, at the wrist, so forth. And some workmen will tell you their hands figure it all out. Well, it's some kind of a—automaticity on a brain order which occurs in the wrist, and it actually is a thinkingness of one kind or another. Except if he got it on total automatic, he'd be in trouble. If he used these suborders, he would be in as much trouble as you would expect in a system which would only flow at some very, very low rate. Do you see that—that this system, the neuron system, is not adequate to drive fast cars, to fly jet planes, to go to the moon with or anything else? It's totally an inadequate system.

CONDUCT OF CLEAR

You cannot use a slow communication system to handle fast objects. So you have to be able to postulate an action without regard to space or mass or conduit. In other words, in order to do anything effectively and swiftly, you have to bypass this system. It's interesting, isn't it? Here we have this beautifully set up thing that the psychiatrists are chopping up and studying and so forth, and we find out that to do anything you have to bypass the system.

You look at the speed of an impulse and how long it would take an execution acknowledgment to get back to you if you were using totally a neuron system, and we find out that you certainly had better stick to kiddie cars if you're doing that.

Well, the truth of the matter is that a Homo sap becomes more and more accustomed to using this very pat communication system. And the more he uses it, the more stupid he gets. Probably the finest example of something that uses a communication system almost exclusively is a giant sloth. Boy, that's slow. Boy, that's slow.

You could only afford to drive a big Cadillac on highways if your communications were that slow. I think most of the people that drive these Cadillacs do have slow systems. Yeah, well, if you ever find yourself in a roadblock, look up ahead for the Cadillac, and you'll usually find it. A car that can go faster than all the rest, and it's busy going slower.

Then we see that as a person aberrates, he falls back, more or less, into agreement with the laws of energy, the laws of lines and particle flows. In other words, he's gone thoroughly into agreement with all of these odds and ends of electrical phenomena, don't you see? He falls back from that, from this "hold a position in order to get energy." So his entrance point is a fixed position, and then you will have energy.

He goes into further and further agreement and at last finds himself in the field of effort. And he does everything by effort. There is nothing bad about this. There are probably lots of boxers who are still working in the field of effort. Most heavyweights box almost totally in the level of effort and counter-effort. They do not box at all in the level of postulates. You'd have to leave that to the flyweights. They're fast enough; they have to be fast.

But you wait for the—in vain for these heavyweights to really box. Actually they stand up. They pick their fist up off the canvas. They say, "Now I am going to hit you." They send the fist traveling through space. They get their body arranged very carefully back of the fist. They give it the maximum momentum. And fortunately for them, the other boxer has said—he is picking his fist up off the canvas—"I observe this." It's quite amazing. Watch these boys. You watch a pair of heavyweights and you watch a pair of flyweights, and the heavyweights, apparently, by comparison are in dreadfully slow motion. They look like they would jump off the canvas and float on down to another position.

The only reason I advance this as an example is to give you an idea— although the flyweight probably isn't doing it either—the idea between postulating motion, bypassing a comm system and at the same time executing an action; contrasting that with setting up a system where you pull a trigger here and you get a flow there, and it goes over there and this thing over here does that, and then some other thing happens. Got that? You're beholding a world of vias when you behold any one of these systems of any kind. It's a world of vias.

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So that one of the things a Clear does is tend to bypass comm systems — communication systems. And he goes on upstairs toward OT, he does bypass them, very thoroughly. He can jump at any point of a communication system and put a postulate into any stage of a communication system. A Clear only tends to do this.

Now, one of the things that makes him un-Clear is occasional surprise until he gets used to this sort of thing. So you could dream up a lot of drills to condition and orient a Clear in his state. Now, that sounds very interesting, doesn't it? You make a Clear by processing, and you say, "Well then, he's Clear." Well actually, there's a tremendous number of drills that you could put together which would then accustom him to being there so that he would arrive without surprise. This would only be in the direction of guaranteeing his stability.

Well, what would these drills be?

You see why you'd have the drills? Well, I'll give you a very good example: He starts to take a drink of milk and he feels the clammy waxiness of the milk bottle suddenly much better than having his hand on it.

Now, this might surprise him. If he got enough cold, clammy surprises, he would tend to pull back his communication system and fall within a more reasonable perimeter.

No reason for him to be upset to this degree every time he finds out that he can touch something extrasensorily. Now, when we say extrasensorily we do not mean Rhinesque doodle-dads. We mean without a sense-communication system. In other words he touches a wall over there without vias. This is probably what Rhine is looking for. We'll have to process the old boy sometime, give him a break.

But he's liable to surprises of this character. And if he gets enough surprises, and if he seems to himself to be enough out of gear, he could unstabilize. And then he could postulate a reduced ability because he'd think that it was more accommodating to him. Furthermore, he might get the idea that he was out of agreement, because other people aren't able to act this way.

Well, this is why state of Clear, rather than Operating Thetan, is the first practical goal in processing anybody—because he doesn't do these things as wildly as this: Operating Thetan looks at a vase, says, "Wonder how it would be if that blew up," and it blows up. Get the idea? He just flicker-flak— bang! Only he didn't "clearly intend to blow it up," but it blew up. You get the idea? So he's afraid of—he gets afraid, after a while, of doing something by mere thinkingness, and then throws himself back on effort because he considers that he might be irresponsible. Well now, he is—he's in a state where he doesn't quite trust what he can do because he doesn't know the limit of what he can do, and he might still have some feeling of power.

Now, these, then, are not absolute states. In other words, a Clear is processed up to a certain series of tests, but to settle out and stabilize at that level requires livingness. An OT might go up to a certain step, you see, and then have to level out at that step, and the leveling out would require livingness.

Now, that livingness could be approximated by processing. And a whole series of steps to assist a Clear—now, not a preclear—but a whole series of steps could assist a Clear in the interest of his stability.

And what would these steps be? These steps, primarily, would be leveled in the direction of familiarity with the physical universe. And without giving him any loses, give him a bunch of easy contacts. He's sitting in one chair—

CONDUCT OF CLEAR

look at a chair on the other side of the room and you say, "Feel the texture of that chair. You know, without getting up, feel the texture of that chair. You get the idea?" And little drills of this character. Communication drills with his immediate environment, you know? "Outside, feel the mushiness of that person's brain." Get the idea? And any other odds and ends of phenomena or sources of shock or wonder that he might immediately and directly run into. This is all in the direction of maintaining a stability.

Now, we have some old drills of this character, way back when. One of them was a pain test: You kept threatening the fellow's body while he was exteriorized. On a gradient scale, you threatened the body and gave it little sensations that built up to actual pain, until at last you could actually haul off and kick the body hard and he would never yo-yo back toward it. In other words, you were getting him over body protection. That was just a gradient scale of pain. It has to do with Thetan Exterior more than it does have to do with Clear, doesn't it?

But the funny part of it is, it is also applicable to Clear. Only we don't tell him to not come back in. We just ask him not to flinch, and we tap him on the knee. And we ask him, "Did you flinch?"

"No."

It's nonsense—of course he hasn't flinched. So we tap him on the—we tell him not to flinch and we tap him on the shoulder, and ask him if he did, see?

And he says, "No, nope." He didn't.

And then we take our fist and pound on his fingers and we say, "Did you flinch?"

"No," he says, "I didn't flinch."

And we start stepping on his toes and jabbing him a little bit. We get out a dull pin.

Funny part of it is, you can build him right upstairs in the matter, maybe only a couple, three hours of processing, to a state the fakirs of India take ten or fifteen years to reach. It is not OT at all to be able to sink a pin into your body and pull it out. That isn't OT. It's just a not-flinch. What are you doing with that much automaticity, that every time something touches you, you feel it? Now, isn't that a funny automaticity when you get to thinking about it? That's real funny, funny automaticity—real crazy.

Now, you'd be going up toward OT if you ran one of these flinch drills— which is what we'd call them—on a basis of you take a spike, drive it through a guy's wrist, pull it out and find no hole. If you stuck a pin in a Clear, you'd expect to find a hole, but not an OT. Singular difference. There's one historical character I know wasn't an OT.

Now, from a standpoint of Clear, we're working with cause and effect without consequence. And that's practically the only—where we're working— cause and effect without consequence. An OT works cause and effect with or without agreement with any universe. It's entirely different. He didn't flinch and the Clear didn't flinch merely because something threatened the body. The OT not only did not flinch, but when the spike was pulled out, why, there was a wrist still there, intact. You get the idea?

Now, when we look over the attributes of Clear, we find this positiveness, and consequences then occupy the first zone of inspection— completely aside from any mechanical aspect—consequences. The individual doesn't always necessarily have consequences for every action. He is not trying to alter the consequences, particularly, but he does not necessarily have consequences.

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So this second characteristic is luck—what people would call luck. You don't necessarily have bad consequences for every action. When a person gets far enough down Tone Scale—when he gets far enough down Tone Scale, starts scraping bottom—every action has a bad consequence. First he fears it, and then he finally gets it. But taking an action without bad consequence would constitute the major part of what man understands as luck. Man doesn't understand luck anymore to be "a good thing happened." He understands it at this sphere of the game, as "a bad thing didn't happen." Vast difference.

Luck in Arabian times would have been, "He was in real luck. He walked out in the street and found a bag of gold dinars." And in modern times, "He walked out in the street and didn't drop through a manhole cover—what luck!"

Now, this quality of luck or quality of consequence—I don't care which you call it—would, at the Clear level, simply omit, necessarily, a whole bunch of bad consequences pursuant to an action. But at OT, he would have to postulate a series of good consequences, and they would probably occur. So luck drops out as a factor at OT. You couldn't any longer call it "luck" because luck is conditional. But luck is still conditional at Clear, and it is certainly not conditional at Homo sap.

It is a very interesting commodity. Whenever the fellow has to win a decent stake while playing vingt-et-un—blackjack—he loses his shirt. It's enough for him to postulate a good action to get a bad one. He goes on a flip. You see a lot of fellows in gambling, the more they need the money, the more they lose. You get luck reversals: The moment that he needed a good break he got a bad one, until after a while he thinks all he needs is bad breaks. If he just had enough bad breaks, he'd have it made. He could exteriorize and find another body, and he begins to work for bad breaks. And this is 2.0 down. He is uniformly working for bad breaks. He does not want any good breaks.

Well, now we've really left the zone of luck, from 2.0 down, and we're getting into something that looks very like postulation, except it isn't willing or knowing—things "just happen." Now, look at Homo sap when he says, "Well, you know how it is, things just happen!"

They do? Of course, he looks at the complicated network of life and being unable to trace responsibility for any action he has taken, he looks at every scene he sees minus one causation point—himself. He subtracts self from causation in any concatenation of incident. In other words, he can look at a football game that was just played, and he was a player. And he'll look over the game and he will assign cause to everything in the game—every player, the referees or anything else that was there—he'll assign cause to everything in the place except self.

And life starts looking pretty haphazard, let me assure you. Because the scenes you are looking at, or the scenes you do look at, have a large ingredient of self-cause in them for this—I mean, caused by yourself in them—because you are part of the scene you are looking at. This is very hard to phrase. It's just as though you always looked with blue beams and everybody else looked with red beams. The mere fact that you were looking at a bunch of red beams would probably inject a blue beam into their midst. Don't you see? And then if you say, "There's no blue beam there," and "I wonder where the blue beam came from," you'll get cause as it is experienced by most Homo saps. He looks at his zone of operations and he can see no self-cause in it anywhere: Self is not there. It's total irresponsibility.