WHAT CLEARING IS
A lecture given on 20 April 1963

Hiya. Thank you. Thank you.
Female voice: Three cheers for Ron. Hip‑hip.
Audience: Hooray!
Female voice: Hip‑hip.
Audience: Hooray!
Female voice: Hip‑hip.
Audience: Hooray!
That did it! Now I ‑know I'm in England.
Well now look, Mary Sue has been working very, very hard to make an OT out of me and been working at it and working at it and she didn't make the grade. I wanted to get OT today so I could give you some nice weather. And I just didn't make it, I'm sorry. I only got thirteen banks back and got stuck, you know.
Well, I'm really awfully glad to see you here. I been waiting quite a while to give you some of the announcements 1 want to give you in this congress. Quite a few years, actually. You've been over as many jumps, most of you, about this stuff as I have. So congratulations for lasting it through.
This congress actually celebrates quite a few things. We have received congratulations and wishes for a very good congress here from various organizations and I didn't bring all of the telegrams but they're all with you.
Now the news, the news that comes through is highly practical clearing. Highly practical clearing. And that is the news.
Now, if you think this is just another one of Ron keeping up the hope factor on you, why, ask the students down here in Z Unit. And a few weeks ago these were about the saddest people you ever saw. You know? I mean, Z Unit, that's the final clearing unit here on the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, and these were sad people. They‑you know, "He says it's supposed to go this way, you know," and they'd sit there sneeringly, you know, trying to reason all this thing out‑putting in time, putting in time in the auditing session just because they were supposed to, you know, and pc ARC breaking and blowing and so forth and the auditing Supervisor spending most of his time on the road between Saint Hill and London recovering students that were blowing, you know.
Very grim, you know. See them outside‑I will say this, I will say this. They might have been snarling at their Instructors, but when they'd see me, why they'd give me a cheery hello. I appreciate that.
But they were slugging along and you know, the hope factor had completely worn out. Clearing? Well, they'd probably never make it. Probably nobody else would either. Maybe we ought to go into "Subub" you know? Very grim. Very grim.
Maybe this Buddhistic method‑maybe this Buddhistic method of sitting there regarding your navel for twenty years, maybe that'd work better than sweating over an E‑Meter that never found a reliable item, you see.
And then‑then something happened. Then something happened. We have had something that stood somewhat in our way and that was, we have been too little evaluative. And a preclear working through clearing, all the way through clearing today, just can't‑just can't find his way around, that's all. He just can't do it.
The ability to confront is proportional to the amount of charge that has been taken off the bank, not proportional to the amount of confronting done on the bank. You might or might not understand what I mean by that. But it means that the charge of aberration on a person is so great that when it comes to the exact things which prevent him from being Clear, when it comes to those exact things, he can't see.
You could drill him all you wanted to, you could educate him all you wanted to, you could let him list actually, as one fellow did, I think eighty‑seven pages and so forth, and he still wouldn't put down the item you've got to have.
So I had to break a time‑honored thing, had to break the Auditor's Code, slightly. It's still not all right to evaluate for the pc and tell him what's wrong with him and all‑that sort of thing. I had to break the Auditor's Code slightly and tell the pc what he should be looking for. And the moment I started that, it worked. And a little more important than that, to me and you eventually, it made it necessary to have the exact pattern of the bank. And boy, are you lucky. You're just lucky, that's all! I mean, if the pattern was varied from person to person and from aberrative reactive mind to reactive mind‑if human beings were each superindividualized on this single point‑oh, well, I don't know how many thousand hours it would take to clear somebody. It would just be absolute agony. And you're just lucky. It's all the same.
It's all the same. Bank to bank, person to person, it doesn't matter what goal you get, it doesn't matter what person you grab ahold of because I've sampled enough of them. There‑we've got a couple of students on the course here that aren't human and they all work on these principles. And that made you very lucky.
If you had any idea of the amount of agony involved in getting what is called a reliable item wrong way to‑listed wrong way to, the pc feeling like he's being crushed, everything descending on him, hydraulic presses moving in from every side and the poor auditor sitting there saying, "Oh‑oh‑oh what am I doing to this poor pc?" you know. And the pc's groaning and he's getting flatter and flatter, you know, and his face is turning blacker and blacker and he's going down further and further, and finally there's a tremendous ARC break and he gets sick and everything goes to pieces and that's that. Well, we've left that day behind us.
It's not just clearing that I am announcing, but very easy clearing. Because we've got the pattern of the bank. I went back 216 trillion years. After not clearing the first eight banks at all but just taking the charge off the goal, putting my head back on, and eventually we got the basic pattern. And the basic pattern is terribly simple. And now we find the truth of the matter: English is an inadequate language.
You know, of all the things I expected to find, that wasn't one of them, you know. I thought, "Well, we of the Anglo‑Saxon race dominating Earth, have, of course, the best possible language." And it's got holes in it. It has concepts that cannot be easily expressed. So your pc occasionally gives you something that sounds like absolute gobbledygook and it's not in a foreign tongue, it's in English‑but you'd swear it was. I'll give you an example: Here is a relia‑they aren't all like this, fortunately, they're all "no water" or a "cat whisker" or "catch catfish," you see. They're all very simple, in the most part, except in the top of the bank, the very part which prevented people from getting Clear. And there you find such words on a goal that contains "capitalism" you find a word there "capitaltivity." And the pc cognites like mad, you see. And you sit there and you say ...
And then the main liability of clearing today is you can't pronounce some of them to read the question to the pc. I was so glad to get off of an RI the other night, a reliable item, and get onto the next one that I practically erased it off the line plot, you know. Let's see if I can remember what this thing was. It's the same goal ‑ "capitalistishness." Now if you can say that with no break in between, you're a linguist‑ "capitalistishness." I got pretty good at it. You try it.
The RI form in that particular place has to be "ishness" and that's all it can be. So it's got to be whatever the goal ending is "ishness." And Lord help these people that have a goal like "to skate up the side of the Empire State Building and dive into the local pool."
Where is the "ishness?" Is it after the pool? Does "skate" become "skut"?
But these problems are very easy ones. These problems are very‑very pleasant problems. The problem of seeing the pc just sort of disappear from sight‑ARC break, go out and tell all of your neighbors that you murder babies‑that problem was too much for us and we could never have survived it in actual fact.
So, we have the pattern and the students over in Z Unit walked around this thing, they walked around every quarter of it and they looked at it and sniffed at it suspiciously. And they said it's just some more hope factor. And a couple of them said, "Well, I don't think it's right for Ron to invade our banks this way and tell us what word should be there." And that was before they found their proper top oppterm, as it's called.
As soon as they did that, sniff‑sniff, top terminal, ss‑ss, second top oppterm, "Hey, hey." And then several auditors started getting worried. It was too easy.
So they started going back to the top oppterm. Did they have the right one? And so forth, and you know‑spend a couple of sessions, the pc getting blacker and blacker, you know, then he got back on the line again. Did it work? Was it this way? Was it that way? Did this fit in here? Did that go in there? And it did, so on. And not very long ago Mary Sue walked into the Z Unit down here and a pc, you know, in‑session ‑usually you can tell a pc who is in‑session, you know, because they don't look up when the Instructor comes in, you know. But in this particular case‑in this particular case, why the pc looked up and leaned over as Mary Sue came in the door, and says, "We got three RIs already." And the auditor turned around and beamed, you know, and he said, "Yeah, we got three RIs. Yeah."
And these characters couldn't be tied down with an anchor right now, I think.
Now you don't have to take my word for it, ask them. They're around. You'll see them. They're the ones that are smiling in spite of the weather.
But it got easy. It got easy. And how did it get easy? Well, because there is a standard pattern‑there is a standard pattern to the reactive mind. It is so standard as to absolutely stagger you. You won't believe it yourself We have the meter that will do the job, we have the auditor techniques that make it possible for it to happen and our main thing right now is developing methods to find RIs faster.
Well, you don't have to find them faster, you've already got them. The problem is, is how do you write that fast?
That's right. That is. That is.
And breakfast this morning, Mary Sue and I were going over this, I'd dreamed it up that you could take a platen‑and we were discussing how we would do this ‑ and you could take a platen and put it over the line plot and on one side of it it gives you the question by which you treat‑with which you treat an opposition terminal and it has a hole in it, you know, in the platen; and on the other side on the same sheet there is the one that fits ‑the question that fits for a terminal, you see. And it's actually now streamlining down the wording. You could put a number in here and put a number over here on a list, and then do your list from that number. Like forty‑one, you see‑odd numbers would be opposition terminals ‑forty‑one. And then take what the pc says, and when you've got it, transfer it instantly right in the middle of this platen, you see.
And then ask that question and get the next one, you see, and that's forty‑two. And write "42" and list the three or four or five items that the pc gives you, get the right one there. Pick that up and put it into that platen and we possibly will be able to get it up to an RI a minute. That's what we're looking for: an RI a minute.
Now, two RIs a week was what the Z Unit was shooting for. That was fifteen hours. And I kept pushing them along and pushing them along and making them get more interested in this and they got it down to a half‑hour or something like that. And Mary Sue was already leading considerably on this and she got it down to one every eighteen minutes, one every‑I think her last average was nine minutes, and now we're hoping to bring it down to one minute. Why? Why? That's‑the length of time it takes to clear is now not dependent upon the speed or the nonsense that you have to go through in terms of can the pc do this or can the pc do that, don't you see? The pc's sitting there with a line plot ending in front of his face.
He simply puts the next one down on the line, you know. He may have to word it two or three or four different ways, but when he gets it he knows he's got it.
So the speed of clearing depends on the length of time it takes to find a goal, plus the number of minutes it takes to find an RI. Now, why are we talking about this? And I'm in a high level of technical for some of you, I know, and you possibly won't find it terribly interesting, but it means the speed with which a man can achieve all the way up. Because first‑goal Clear, second-goal Clear, third‑goal Clear, these are meaningless terms. There are about twenty or thirty banks back there. And in thirteen banks you have 650 items.
Now if you found an item‑well figure it out yourself‑you found an item every ten minutes, it would take you 150 hours. And if you found an item every minute it would take you fifteen hours. Speed of advance, don't you see?
Because here's the news: you can't stop short of OT. You can't stop.
Yes! You can find a person's first goal. Yes! He feels wonderful. Yes! Everything is fine. Yes! He's better than ever he was before. But you've already got him in the next bank. He's not any longer‑he's no longer interested in this goal "to shoot sparrows." See, he's no longer interested in that goal. That's dead. That's gone. That's no longer part of his life. He's now interested in that‑this goal "to preserve wheat," see? This is the one, you know. And he sits there and he talks to you about preserving wheat and preserving wheat and you say, "Well, how about this ‑how about this goal 'to shoot sparrows,' you know? This‑this goal 'to shoot sparrows.' Now, on that goal has anything been suppressed'."
"Well, yes. Lots has been suppressed on that. Well, now about wheat..."
All right. As soon as you got him all out of that area about wheat, everything is fine and so forth, goal finding is nothing inside the bank. Absolutely nothing. I mean, I've got this taped. All you do is do a final oppose list and it gives you the next goal. Bang! Just like that. All right. Now you go through it on that pattern, you get to the end of that bank, you do your next final oppose list, you've got your next goal. Do you understand?
Oh, yes, you've got to keep them cleared up; oh, yes, you've got to do this and that; yes, you've got to brush it all up ‑but will the pc let you? That's the question.
There is no stopping, no immediate direct stopping, short of.
Now, that's technical information. So what is this thing called Clear? So what is this thing? What does it amount to in the final analysis? Well, if you realize that under this term "Clear" comes the heading of every hope man has ever had and every effort he has ever made to attain freedom, every concept he has had that people are in trouble, every concept he's had that he is sick, that he doesn't like where he is, that he doesn't like what he's doing, that he cannot exist or survive in his present environment‑all of those things, one right after the other, are lined up against clearing. All of those thing's.
What in essence‑what in essence was some messiah selling way back on the track? I don't care how far back. What was he selling? He was selling being Clear‑being clear of Earth. He was selling being happy, not being aberrated, not being upset, not being worried, not being trapped. He had to invent a new trap called heaven in order to accomplish this where you sat endlessly strumming on a harp, and so forth, and I'm not against people having heaven. People say that I'm antireligious. No, I'm not antireligious, I'm pro‑religious. I'm against people who are antireligious because this dream about strumming the harp, you see, for eternity, doesn't appeal to me. I have an RI which didn't get well discharged called "conventional music."
Anyway, the facts of the case are that you are dealing with a commodity, you professional auditors and students, you are dealing actually with a commodity which is as old as man is‑in fact older. You're dealing with his hopes to be free or to be happy.
Now whatever bank he is in, whatever goals or purposes he may have, these things are dominated by these other things. In spite of the fact that he's postulated himself a goal to go to jail, he in actual fact wants to be free. Man wants to be free, wants to be happy. What are the common denominators of man's hopes? Well, these are it.
Now, those that are totally overwhelmed will only hope for those things which are in their reactive minds. They themselves have no further volition as individuals. They are totally dictated‑to, totally dominated people. And you see these chaps around.
Now, of course, the worst thing that can happen to a spirit is to become totally enmeshed in the physical universe so that every time he touches something he can't get off of it, and every time he is in something he can't walk out of that and so forth. So naturally you'd expect the blokes around who are causing the most uproar about the human spirit and getting Clear will be scientists, because these poor fellows have been shoved by their educational pattern just deep into the physical universe as you possibly can get‑they're around, so on‑"I wonder if ergs go twitch or if they go twatch. What is happening with these ergs?" and so forth and they get closer and closer to this, you know, and they eventually think, "Well, there is no such thing as freedom, there is just me standing here watching this electric bang, you know."
And they tend to turn around and say, "Well, you can't be free." That there is no individual. And you know, you think this is something new. You think this is something new.
I was back on the track 196 trillion years on the pattern, and what do I find there? What do I find there? The complete concept‑the complete concept that man was evolved from mud and there is no spirit. I mean, they really worked at it for a long time.
But even those fellows are in the same category as the atheist. If you ever want to have a fine religious argument talk to an atheist because if there is any man who believes in God it's an atheist. You'll hear old priests and so forth tell you this. Give me an atheist any day rather than a lukewarm believer.
These fellows, of course, must be admitting the existence of God in order to contest him with that violence and valid‑you see. I mean, he'll say, "He doesn't exist," you know. And that's all they do, you know, they keep going around, "He doesn't exist," you know, and ...
Well, the atheist of our times of course is the scientist or the fellow who is in there with his scalpel making copy for TV programs.
He is worried about health, he's worried about care of the body, he's worried about these things. He is so immersed into the idea of the physicalness of things, that he cannot even conceive of the nonphysical things. He can't conceive of a nonphysical existence and if you think about it for a moment, that‑you present it to somebody and say, "Think of a nonphysical existence." And the guy will think, "Let's see, being in the country and not having anything to do, that's‑no, that's country." And he'll work at it and he'll work at it, see? But to others of you with more confront on the line and less bowed down by all this, why, it becomes very simple. You can conceive of a nonphysical existence.
Well, you ask a scientist who is‑or a doctor of medicine or something like this, to conceive of a nonphysical existence and he can't make the grade.
So what are we doing? We must be healing. Or we must be doing something to the body. Or we must be doing this or we must be doing that. And one poor auditor over in Virginia was actually‑they never sentenced him, by the way, the judge kind of looked kind of shamed and forgot about the whole case. And I think it was years ago and I don't think they've ever called him back to court. But they proved conclusively that he was guilty by grabbing off some people he had cured of things. And they said he must be healing because he has been curing people.
"Well," you say, "that proves itself and it proved itself to the court and everything," but this auditor wasn't trying to heal anything. In other words, by getting a person a little less immersed into the physicalness of things and by getting a person up so that he could look around and find there was something else about it all, why, people got well. And naturally this made Scientology a healing science. Well, it is. It is. But these chaps who are terribly immersed in the physicalness of it all will be the only people who give you any argument. They're the people who argue with you about Scientology and about clearing. They're the people that clearing can't be defined to.
So you try to downgrade what clearing is and that sort of thing and you try to make it so that they can comprehend it and you'll find yourself eventually getting into healing.
You say, "Well, if you're cleared you don't have a sore spine." And the fellow says, "Well, that's good. That's good. See? That's fine." He understands that. He can't conceive of not having a spine. See, he thinks this would be terrible. He thinks this would be awful. He can't conceive of having a comfortable spine that he doesn't have to be in contact with, you see? All he can conceive of is a sore spine. In other words, his attention is so riveted on his difficulties that Scientology redefines itself down into what you do for his difficulties. Do you see that? See? He hasn't any breadth of view to see anything else.
So you get clearing defined as an adding machine term. You say, well there's the held‑down five. You know the old example. You say, "This machine has something stuck in it and every time you try to solve a problem on this computer, the mind, why, it adds five or it multiplies the thing by five. And by multiplying these things by five, of course, you get nothing but wrong answers, wrong answers, wrong answers. Now, if you go into it and take up this piece of solder or correct this fault, it will then give you correct answers. And that is clearing." And the guy will say, "Gosh, you know. That‑that's right. That's right." Clearing, then, is staying inside of the necessity to use a computer. Clearing is having to have a mind that figures things out for you in good working condition without its fives held down by a stray piece of solder. You get the complicated definitions you get into?
And that's why you will always see a tremendous number of definitions of clearing. But man, in essence, in the final essence on the full track has always looked at this. Can he be happy? Does he have to be trapped? Can he be free? Does he have to be where he is? Does he have to walk on this treadmill of life? Does he have to grind along the way he's going now?
And he's always had a little spark that said, "No. No." He always has kept with him some tiny little shadow of feeling that it might not necessarily be so, it might not necessarily be impossible to achieve freedom or to be happy. He's always kept this with him.
And he's expressed this in various ways. He's expressed it via religion. He's expressed it in‑well, even in psychoanalysis. He has expressed it in all manner of odd practices here and there. All of these various humanitarian efforts of some kind or another hinge over slightly into clearing.
Now, how do you get somebody into some sort of shape? How do you get somebody squared around? Well, what are you trying to square around? You've got a limited view on the part of the person you're talking to and that person's attention is fixated on the problems which he has right now! Those are the important problems. The second you shift his attention by clearing up those problems, his attention goes on to another set of problems which gave psychology a total defeatism and it said it was no good trying to do anything for anybody because if you cured up one thing they got something else wrong with them.
They didn't realize that they were walking a chain from this wrongness to that wrongness to that wrongness. If they cleared up each one in turn, they would eventually have come to the end of the road. And there wouldn't have been any more wrongnesses to clean up.
Any of you as auditors who have ever run a process like "Tell me a problem, tell me a problem, tell me a problem, tell me a problem," know that sooner or later you run to sort of an end of chain. And the fellow looks around and he says, "Well, I feel much better about my problems." See, you've gotten this chain of lineups. And you've directed his attention to this one, to this one. But something else was happening: you were as‑ising these problems. You were actually clearing.
Now, anybody here could simply sit down and ask somebody, "Tell me your problem." And when they said it, don't try to do anything about it, say, "Thank you very much. Tell me your problem." See? "Tell me your problem. Thank you. Tell me your problem." Just that much discipline, and the next thing you know they'd have walked through a whole chain of problems and the person wouldn't be so worried. He wouldn't have all these problems. I think that's quite interesting. Because that, you see, is clearing. What are you doing? You're clearing a chain‑little chain of problems.
All right. Now let's magnify this a little bit further and let's take this individual and do Book One clearing. He's had a great many traumatic experiences. And he's fallen downstairs and bumped his head and done this and done that and the funny part of it is you can run each one of these things out as a mental image picture or an engram. You can run each one out. You can take every time he fell downstairs and bumped his head. And you could run him through that experience of bumping his head and what do you know, you can feel it again.
This is, by the way, what gets psychiatrists. This really fascinates them. Oh, this upsets them about Dianetics and Scientology. But it really doesn't upset them; they become terribly intrigued. You can reexperience pain. Hey. And you can show them on a meter. You can pinch a psychiatrist‑ and go ahead, pinch hard‑and show him that when you pinched him it made the meter go flick. And then say, "Return to the moment I pinched you," and run him through the pinch. And he'll see a meter go flick again. And he can see the registry of his own being pinched. And then he says, "There is such a thing as a psychic trauma. Freud was right." So he goes studies Freud.
Every physical experience, every misemotional experience a person has been through, is in itself a sort of trap where he has been impinged upon the physical universe or his associates to such a degree that he cannot get free from that point.
You have an automobile accident; the fellow's still stuck in the automobile accident. All right. You run the engram of the automobile accident. What have you done? You have cleared an automobile accident.
Now, what we have actually done is walk up this gradient scale: "Tell me a problem," the engram, we've walked further into other things and finally have found the personalities a person has formed for himself and we can run them out now at one a minute. Easiest auditing you ever did. You don't have to go through them; you don't have to check them; you don't have to do anything with them. It's just if they reacted on the meter and you can oppose them and you've got your proper meter blowdown, if the signs were there that was it, and boom.
And what do these things amount to? Look, in the top present time area of a person's reactive mind you will find in a matter of four or five of these reliable items‑just that many: no great number‑you will find all of his hidden standards, all of the things by which he judges everything by. You know, does Scientology work? All right. He'll be sitting there saying, "Does Scientology work? Does Scientol‑" He's not being processed. He's saying, "Does Scientology work? Does Scientology work? Well, that auditing command made the pain in my ear a little more intense."
So the end of the session, yes, he had some gains. He knew Scientology might possibly work because the pain in his ear became more intense. That was his total frame of reference. He realized that‑on auditor's reports‑that your pc is sitting there comparing everything that is happening toward the hidden standard he must have.
"What would have to happen for you to know that Scientology worked?" That is one of the most amazing questions you've ever asked anybody, and I'm sure you've asked them that. What would have to happen? And he'll give you some wild hidden standard. "Well, this‑this feeling of heart palpitation I have would have to stop." And if you checked back you'd find out every time he was ever audited, to find out whether or not he had done the auditing command, he consulted his heart palpitation. It told him whether or not Scientology was valid.
Now, I don't care for the opinion of a heart palpitation and to that degree, why, we've been driven on forward because pcs are that way and they act that way so there must be more to it. There must be more to them.
Well all right, heart palpitation tells him whether or not Scientology works. Now, what's his chronic present time problem? By that I mean what's he worry about all the ‑time? What does he worry about all the time? Well actually, he doesn't know. But he will have something like "mother" or he will have something like "boss" or he will have something like "the terrible state of the London underground." And this is just worry, worry, worry, worry and all contained in this top hamper of RIs.
Well, that's interesting, because we've suddenly put our fingers on two almost unsolvable problems for the auditor. The auditor has had these problems walking at his side every time he ever audited a pc. He says to this pc‑he says to this pc, "From where could you communicate to the back of your head?" And the pc says, "Yes, there." What has the pc done? He hasn't just elected a spot there. He's asked his heart palpitation where he should be located to communicate to the back of his head. Some weird mechanism has gone on by which he consulted something in himself to find out if there was any rightness to anything he was doing.
How has this boy been living his life? Should he take the new job? Well, no. Why? Well, when he thinks about taking the new job he gets worse heart palpitation. Should he eat an ice cream cone? Yes. Why? Well, when he thinks about an ice cream cone it doesn't increase his heart palpitation. These is his total standards of correctness. Do you see?
He feels a chill coming over him. And he does the things which don't turn on the chill‑get the mechanism‑and doesn't do the things which turn on the chill. And this is the way he's living his life. Why.? Because his life is a miserable life and he doesn't want to have anything to do with it. Yet this is the sort of life he's living. But you, as the auditor, have this person in the auditing chair and you are saying, "Have you made any of your gains in this session?" And the person exteriorizes from the heart palpitation just to this degree: was the heart palpitation better or worse during the session? If it was better, he'll say, "Yes, I made lots of gains in the session." If it was a little bit worse he will say, "No, I didn't make any gains in the session." And you haven't asked a human being whether or not Scientology gave him any gains in that session. You've asked a heart palpitation.
I consider this quite interesting when you figure out how hard you work.
So therefore, it actually calls for technology which gives a total defeat to these mechanisms. Now, you cure up this person‑this person comes in with a chronic present time problem. He's worried about his marital affairs and he comes in and you give him some auditing, and so forth, and you have to work like mad to clear up this situation. And the funny part of it is, you can clear up his heart palpitation. The funny part of it is, you can clear up his chronic present time problems, and so forth, with older Scientology technology. But you could also miss. And it could also come back on you in the form of the pc saying, well, he got along fine for two years but now all of a sudden, just because he's got a new mistress, his wife is complaining. And you say ...
In other words, if you continued to deal in auditing with the tiny little things, the person's attention simply goes on to other little tiny things that are also wrong and you have an absolute endless concatenation of tiny little things which just never seemed to clear up and you just have endless processing and so forth.
Well therefore, clearing is a relative term.
At what level do you clear? Well, we have understood clearing at the level of Book One. Fine. Still valid. Still valid. That's about the equivalent of a first‑goal Clear with this slight exception: In view of the fact you have him in his reactive mind and are going on to the next goal, you actually don't get much of an opportunity ‑to turn on his sonic and visio and so forth. He's too interested in the next bank. You could, of course, haul off with forte main and give him a Prepcheck of that first goal and straighten it all out and you could undoubtedly come close to attaining the exact requirements of a first‑goal Clear.
His chronic present time problems, that's gone. His hidden standards are gone. He can think on the track. His education is more available to him. All of these various things are factual. But he's got another bank. And he's got another bank. He hasn't got an infinity of banks. They are fantastically long. They consider‑the various aspects of existence are considered in terms of trillions. One of these banks‑it's trillions‑which is quite interesting.
When you get a bank, present time‑let us say this is this lifetime, you see? Just this little span here. Have you any idea as an auditor how many problems he has in one lifetime? How many engrams he has in one lifetime? How many times he's fallen down how many steps on how many stairs in one lifetime? How many worries and upsets and various considerations he's had in one lifetime? You've got an idea of that, haven't you. It's a large number.
Well, this lifetime, if we drew a line here representing the number of ages which an individual has actually come up through and‑there are some liabilities to whole track clearing and one of them is the fact that you‑slapping the idea of past lives and everything else gets slapped right at the person. Best thing to do is say nothing about them, just go on and audit the pc. He comes up after a while and he, "I think that uh‑something very disturbing about this. It seems to me like this‑this item we've just found here, this item we've just found 'to‑to fly spaceships'‑ it's 'spaceship pilot,' it‑it's quite a while ago. Is that all right?"
You don't have to tell him a word about it. You don't have to operate as any salesmanship. Anyway ...
If this was the line which represented the whole track, I could not make a mark with this pencil or a dot tiny enough to represent one lifetime. Now that's the magnitude of your problem. I just couldn't make a tiny enough mark to go up against seventy years versus trillions. It's too ‑too microscopic.
Now, one of these‑if this was the whole track, a GPM‑a Goals Problem Mass, part of the reactive mind‑is about so. They tend to get longer. Yet you can use‑one of these sections here actually represents one of these GPMs and they are a very finite number. They're a very small number. I don't know exactly what the number is, just‑I'm just giving you an educated guess. They vary from person to person. But the educated guess would be‑and don't hold me to this later on‑but twenty‑two, twenty‑five, something like that. I consider that quite interesting. Very few of these. Well, you get back into the whole mechanism of human beingness and human livingness and you get back into all of the aspects of personality and all that sort of thing. And to conquer all these things at one fell swoop and to deliver into man's hands in one fell swoop‑bang‑the idea that he can accomplish the goal of every religion, of all of his own desires to survive and to be happy and to be free, and these things can be delivered into his hands in something like‑well, let's be reasonable ‑three hundred hours plus the time necessary to find the first goal.
That would be the most reasonable esti‑and that's an estimate I would make today based on auditing of two weeks ago. But not on this week's auditing. I wouldn't base it on this because that's just a little bit faster. But nevertheless, you get into some amounts of difficulties. Trouble in running one of these things is if you make a mistake early on in it and then go halfway through it‑you know twenty‑five reliable items later‑you have to go back to RI one and correct the mistake and then refind the same items. But you've got to refind every one of them in sequence down to where you finally had gotten to. It's a self‑punishing mechanism. You've got to be accurate. If you're not accurate you've got to go all the way back to the beginning and go all the way through to that item again.
Well, this amounts to what? This amounts to an absolutely overwhelming, incredible, completely unbelievable, unacceptable announcement. Because I'm not announcing that you can clear somebody in three hundred hours plus the time necessary to find the first goal. That's not what I'm telling you, see? I'm not announcing that. Probably, following these exact techniques, it might take you upwards to twenty‑five hours to make a first‑goal Clear if you had the first goal. That's twenty‑five hours actual auditing time if you were very expert and didn't run into any hard luck‑plus the time necessary to find the first goal, you'd have a first‑goal Clear. It's getting in under the heading of, with an expert auditor, a twenty‑five‑hour HGC intensive makes one first-goal Clear, plus the length of time necessary to find the first goal.
Now, that is the bug and I'll talk to you about that later this afternoon. Finding that first goal it takes no time‑takes about two and a half hours to do a source list and null it to find the second goal. See, that's nothing. That's all there. Once you've got him in the middle of the hurricane, why, it's very easy to find the additional clouds. But when he's standing without knowing there even is a hurricane, it's very hard to find the first one. And that's a highly variable figure. And I've been working on that like mad and I've got it condensed down quite a bit, but it is the variable figure on how long it takes to clear.
No. We're not actually‑I'm not actually telling you this about clearing. I'm talking to you about OT. And this is an OT congress and it's just sort of‑I don't even think the students on the course are aware of the fact that they are not involved in clearing. They're involved in OTing. We've got‑you see why clearing is a relative statement? Any time you've run a Problems Intensive on somebody you've cleared him‑of what? You've cleared him of some problems. Any time that you have run any other type of auditing activity on the individual, you have cleared him of something, you see? Viewed from that standpoint we can finally walk up to the noun: a Clear.
Now what do we mean by a Clear? Well, just take it arbitrarily as the Book One definition. Just take Book One as it describes a Clear. We'll call that a Clear. Then there's a Clear above this: there's clear of a body. We call that a Theta Clear. But there are actually two kinds of Clears. And this is what I had better talk to you about.
You can key out a Clear. Now, there are two ways‑there are two ways to handle a man and a river. One, get him far enough away from the river so he isn't getting wet, and the other one is to let him swim the thing so he can get familiar with it and so he doesn't have to worry about rivers.
Every Clear we have made up to this year‑and we have made Clears every one has been a Keyed‑Out Clear. The techniques we had simply removed him from the immediate proximity of the bank. And when that needle went free he was in fine shape and he was very happy and he might be that way for three months and he might be that way for three years and some I made Lord knows how long ago may still be clear as a bell.
But that's a Keyed‑Out Clear. That is pulling the individual out of the entrapment but leaving him with it there floating in the distance somewhere in his bank. Very worthwhile state. If we couldn't do anything else we could do that.
And that's why you haven't heard too much from me from clearing because we could have made‑you know I haven't been going around saying so‑and‑so and so‑and‑so about clearing‑ because we could have made at any time Keyed‑Out Clears and I could have worked or researched in that direction. But I knew there was a river to swim: What keyed these fellows in? What did they come up against? What was this huge black thing that they would sometimes run into? What were these black fives? What was all this sort of thing? And I knew there was something there.
Now, not only found out what was there, but found out what it was composed of and how to get rid of it and how to get through it and how to get across it and so forth. That has all been discovered.
So, we have the actual stable state of first‑goal Clear. He'll never get that first bank back. Don't worry about that. That's gone.
How about the next bank, though? He's worried about that now. Well, the mystic had what they call the abyss. The Buddhist had certain things about all this. But the abyss was very interesting. We had a plateau, a low plateau, and then there was a higher plateau where man could be happy or more cheerful or more able, freer and so forth, where he could attain his various ambitions. And lying between these two plateaus was a deep chasm, an enormous chasm, bottomlessly deep. And the trick was to get across that chasm without dropping into the abyss.
This, actually, is older than Buddhism. The Buddhist not only fell into the abyss but deified it! That's nirvana.
You would laugh if it weren't so sad. Imagine this fellow trying, by meditation, by being silent, by being good, by never causing anything, by this, by that, by fantastic practices, imagine his final goal: He can get into the GPM without an auditor. No map! Nothing.
You read the Buddhistic descriptions of nirvana after you've been through a GPM‑you take a look at those and you'll say, "Hey, those characters are talking about a GPM. They're talking about these personalities and they're talking about this and they're talking about that and how it's all this way and how it's all that way and. . . " And you look at a Buddhist picture sometimes‑it's not accurate for an auditing map but you want‑clip one out of a book sometime if the pc wants to know what his GPM looks like, just take Buddhist nirvana and say, "Well, there, that's it." Camels and horses and little men sitting around. Man, a total reward.
Now there‑there is the illusion of the abyss. In other words, you can get well if you don't fall in. And this was the message of the mystic. And that's a perfectly accurate message and is perfectly true today.
You had to go through, however, you had to go through and across and over this chasm. And that chasm still exists and what is it? Well, it's the reactive bank and it's a certain number of items and we know exactly what it is and it hurts like the dickens and it knocks your head on and off again and on again. And the pc sits there and he goes, "Huch!" And you say, "What's the matter?" And he says, "Oh‑oh, I just got a nice somatic," you know? He gets plenty of somatics going through this thing. Well, inexpert auditing could drop him into the middle of the abyss. Partial knowledge of this thing could drop him into the middle of the abyss. An inability to handle the pc could drop him into the abyss, don't you see?
So, the mystic's ancient, ancient illusion is still with us. That's very good. I said at the end of Book One, I said, "For God's sakes build a better Bridge." Remember?
Well, we did. Been working ever since. And when you can run engrams‑ I don't know how long space one item covers, but it covers an awful long term in time ‑and when you can run all the engrams in half a thousand lifetimes by saying to the pc, "What opposes a catfish catcher?" And the pc looks and he says, "A‑a no catfish catcher." Tschsss! "What's that? Which way did that go? What's this?" The meter goes boom! Bang! Rocket read, blowdown and so forth. What have you just done? It's utterly fantastic. You've taken the central fixation which was with him for many lifetimes and on which he operated for many lifetimes and you've now vanquished the enemy and the person who thought that was an enemy. And you've unfixated his attention across those spans of lifetimes in just that flash‑two minutes. That's why I tell you the thing's incredible. Absolutely incredible. It's unbelievable. Don't try to believe it, do it.
No, funny part of it is, that if we went down to a Mohammedan church‑a mosque‑left our slippers outside and told the girl auditors they couldn't come in‑women don't have any souls in Mohammedanism: no thetans, they're thetanless bodies walking about‑and we went in and we talked to the muezzin or whoever it is, and we said, "Hey, you know, you can clear people."
"Oh, yes, yes," he'd say, "just spread your prayer rug and bend to the East five times a day, wash your hands regularly, follow the Koran and you got it made."
You say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's‑that's right. That's‑thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Now, what I said was, you probably didn't hear me‑we can clear people."
Well, he'd say, "Yeah? What's that?"
You'd say, "Well, we've found that some of your people haven't gone to heaven. They're still around, earthbound. They don't take off."
He'd call in some wise men and they'd consult about it and after a while he'd come out and he'd say to us, "How can we get our hands on them, not going to heaven this way‑the way they're supposed to?" you see. And giving them a total defeat.
You'd say, "Well, you have to clear them."
"Well, how do you do that?"
"Well," you say, "you get an auditor and an E‑Meter and you do this and you do that."
And he'd say, "Well, I don't know. That's pretty heretical. That's pretty horrible. And besides, this idea of these people still being around, yes, we can appreciate that. We can appreciate that. And they shouldn't be. They should have gone to heaven or they should have gone‑at least had the good graces to go to hell," or wherever it is Mohammedans go. And then he'd have thought, "This is a rival activity. They've got their own private heaven they're trying to ship people to and they're trying to ship some of our people to their heaven," and he would have understood it then totally in the framework of Mohammedanism. And then we would have had long and involved arguments.
The funny part of it is, if we'd talked to Mohammed, he'd say, "Is that so? Oh, really? Ho‑ho! Hey, what do you know!"
And you'd say, "Yeah, yeah, you know, man isn't his body. And just like you said, you know, he goes out of his head and so forth."
And by the way, it was a great shock that the radio listening population of New York had just a few weeks ago, you know‑you know that Thomas' wife exteriorized. a professor (he ‑part of the New York organization) over the radio. One of the more popular radio programs. And he told this professor‑the way I get the story, rather fragmentarily‑to be‑try not to be three feet back of his head and the guy was three feet back of his head and what did that do to his materialism. And that was done before, it's estimated, about a million New Yorkers. Must have been quite a shock, but everybody who heard that got a different interpretation on it because they interpret it in their own variety of trap, don't you see?
But there somebody can go outside of his head. You could show Mohammed how you actually could exteriorize, and so forth, and he would have thought this was pretty interesting.
We could have talked to Buddha‑we could have talked to Buddha with the greatest of ease. Now, Buddha was the first boy to bring this up and popularize it here on Earth. He probably got it from about ten thousand years ago. The monk Dharma had certain things about it and they were talking about clearing, and Buddha‑if you talk to a Buddhist, talk to him about not clearing but becoming bodhi and he'll say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, if you don't cause anything. .." You know there's where the bank is really stuck; where the individual has said he will cause nothing. Why, if you want to find a nice big black lump in a bank, find where the individual decided never to cause anything or to be very wise and to oppose nothing. He'd be stuck right in nirvana.
Anyhow, if we'd talked to Buddha about this, he would have said, "Hey, now. You mean we aren't going to have to sit and look at our navels for twenty years? You mean you sit on that side of that and you go out of your head and these various things and the cycle of birth and death then cease?" And boy, he would have been right with us, see? He would have been right with us.
The Buddhist today might regard us with a little more suspicion. But he'd understand this. What are we communicating to here on Earth? We are communicating to people who are fixated on things they don't want to be on. And clearing to them means becoming unfixated from those things they don't want to be fixated on. That's clearing. That's what it means to these people. What it means to us may be an entirely different, broader, wider thing; we sense the possibilities of this, we know where we're going; as we go along we get greater and greater realities on this‑there's hardly any of the old‑timers here who hasn't at one time or the other bunged somebody out of his head and had, momentarily, a Theta Clear on his hands.
And sometimes they'd bung somebody out of their head and he got stuck against the ceiling and they had a non‑Theta Clear. They've done all sorts of tricks with these things but these tricks are now all possible and feasible without anything else going on. We have moved so far ahead of anything that we were with that now we understand everything we know. And that's something that nobody else has done for a long while on this track.
And where we try to communicate clearing‑where we try to communicate clearing, where we try to put it across, we're going to be understood to the degree that the listener is fixated on certain problems that he himself has. And to that degree we will communicate what clearing is. We have the embarrassments ‑many embarrassments go forward with us. Many embarrassments. Whole track and past lives. That's very embarrassing because it makes it necessary for the individual to sort of say, "Well, you've lived before." And this can be contested.
So you don't, to clear somebody, even have to tell him he's lived before. You start running him. through the bank he finds it out ‑bang! You don't have to tell him anything about it. Don't broadly try to sell it because it's an incredible action. You've got plenty to say, you just say, "Well, we're going to clear you," the fellow understands what you mean, he understands perfectly. You're going to get him so that he doesn't have to ‑he doesn't have to have a ‑an itchy end of his nose. And that will be the frame of reference by which he understands it.
We don't have to talk about "you have lived before." But a great deal of knowing, a great deal of technology, a tremendous amount of knowledge comes into the hands of a person being cleared. It's fantastic‑ fantastic how much knowingness all of a sudden comes into his hands. He's‑his‑oh, golly! I remember in earlier clearing and so forth, an old lady sitting there telling the auditor‑telling the auditor how you commanded a space vessel. Dear old lady, got a little bonnet, ribbon on her chin. She'd gone into the session like a creeping mouse and she came out stamping down the steps in her space boots.
The point is, you don't have to educate them. You only have to start in clearing them. And actually the point of clearing may begin with, "Tell me a problem." And the guy gets cleared to some slight degree from the problems he is engrossed with or entangled with.
Now, what lies up beyond that becomes, as I've been telling you, incredible and unbelievable. It is incredible and unbelievable because you're telling man, all in one breath, everything that man or life has hoped for on the track, whether through religion or anything, has now been realized today.
He'll say, "You're mad!" No. He'll believe you if you say, "You know those problems you're worried about? Well, I could audit you out of them."
"How do you audit it out?"
"Well, we're going to find your goal."
"Oh, my goal! Hey! That's getting interesting!"
And when you've got the goal, "Now we're going to find your top oppterm."
"Oh, that's very interesting. Yes, it's a so‑and‑so," after you've told him what it is.
By the way, if it's wrong, it won't work on the meter. I mean, that's the big trick. It isn't‑it doesn't work because we say so. "And what's your top terminal? And what's that second oppterm and what's the second terminal? And what's that third oppterm and what's that third terminal?" If you got him down a few more and just left him there, he might not even suspect that there is some forty more he's got to find. All of his present time problems are gone, everything is gone, he'll be sailing up in the air.
You can even do this thing wrong. I've made the test as to whether or not it's safe. These various things you've been doing at a long reach can be done rapidly, but can they be done safely? Well, yes, yes. And I did make that test to make sure that you weren't going to knock somebody off in a sudden moment of enthusiasm one way or the other.
You can find wrong items, wrong goals, run wrong goals upside down, backwards, forwards, run a whole bank. You can actually run eight banks without finding any more in them than a half a dozen items in each bank leaving some forty‑some unfound items in the bank but discharging the goal. All of these things can be done wrong and the pc will still live. He will scream! He will say you have killed him. Just don't believe him because he's still alive. It is very painful. It is very upsetting. He goes into lassitudes. He begins to not care whether life goes on or not. He gets into weird mental states, but he will neither go mad nor kick the bucket. It's necessary for us to know that.
The toughest banks on the track are as old as life itself And I've run one through one of these things with everything upside down and backwards and I lived through it. And what do you know: the auditor did, too.
Anyway, I wanted to bring you up to date on clearing. I wanted to give you about where it set.
You're going to be asked lots of questions about clearing and I tried to give you in this lecture a vignette, an understanding between thee and me, what clearing is. What you tell people it is, is your own business. You can refer them to books, you can‑pamphlets, descriptions, anything else. That's fine. They want to know what clearing is, they are going to receive what clearing is to the extent of what they want to be cleared from out there in the street. So it's just up to you to tell them what you please to make it clear to them. And then know what clearing is, too.
Okay?
Thank you very much.
Thank you.