RELEASES AND CLEARS
A lecture given on 16 August 1966

Well, this is—what’s the date?
Audience: It’s the sixteenth August AD 16.
So everything is moving up. You know, I think they told me there were about 240 students on the Clearing Course? There are 240 Clears moving right straight on up the line. And I’m—I have a bit of a problem. I have a bit of a problem with my own clearing. I had 24 Clears who were screaming for their OT course and I had to put together the first part of the OT course and I slipped. And at the middle of a session and so forth, why, my TA went to 3 and the needle went loose and then of course I started moving up to check up the bank to find out if anything was there so that I could get started on the OT course and what you did with the bank and there it went. But I will try and get this condition remedied so that I can go out to Qual and go backwards and get checked out.
Thank you.
I lead a terrible life, actually. I was an umpteenth stage Release with a completely floating needle one night, two or three years ago—about a Grade VI or something like that, and I had time—just time to drink a Coca-Cola before Mary Sue came back and started the overrun. I was a VI Stage Release for one Coca-Cola. What a terrible life. But people get to walking on your heels, you know, and you push along.
Well anyway, I’m going to give you a lecture today about Releases and Clears. Because the probability is, is maybe nobody’s heard it yet. You see? Because we found out that there were some people in the HGC that didn’t know that. So if there were some people in the HGC that didn’t know it, Lord forbid, why I imagine there’s a person or two on the Saint Hill course that doesn’t know it. I think that has a probability. And in view of the fact that this data is highly modern data, very, very modernized as data, it probably is to some slight degree new data.
We have a very bad problem, as you know, with the subject of releasing. And it is a problem of overrun. And it has gone on for many, many, many years. It’s gone on for so long that it practically obliterated all the results of Dianetics and Scientology. And is the direct course of people walking around and saying Dianetics and Scientology doesn’t work. Do you follow? It’s that serious an error. So it just held us up endlessly. And there were certain phenomena which existed that one was not totally familiar with. Now I wasn’t totally familiar with it because I wasn’t familiar with the entire extent of the bank, how much this bank was, how big this bank is, and so forth. And I know that the Queen’s Counselor down in Melbourne, where they’ve just had a bad fire—don’t imagine that will be their last bad fire.
The Queen’s Counselor down there said he couldn’t accept the idea of past lives because it meant he wouldn’t go to heaven. I got news for anything—any man that dishonest, just thinking about heaven is making a mistake.
So you run into such phenomena—we knew about those—but how far back did it go? What was the total extent of it? In the early days we knew nothing about things like implantation. There was tremendous quantities of data that was unknown and it was very easy to make this mistake.
Now we’re not in bad company in making this mistake because about 2500 years ago exactly on this same line of research, the identical mistake was made. The identical mistake was made by Gautama Siddhartha Buddha, no less. And he did not appreciate the existence of a bank at all. And that work does not take into account that there is such a thing as the mind or the bank. That’s what’s missing out of that larry of work.
Now there was another blunder made 10,000 years ago along the line of philosophic research. And there was a chap called Dharma and he was a monk, legendary and so forth. And oddly enough his name today means ”fate.” In the more esoteric Eastern philosophies and so on, they speak of somebody’s dharma. And it gets perverted into karma and so forth. But he is so legendary that his name now means something else. But I think you can still find it recorded. And the mistake there was believing that you had to—you want to know how I know so much about this, well, I’ll tell you some day. The mistake there was believing that you didn’t have to do anything but become wise. All you had to do was become wise and you would instantly become nine feet tall. Do you see?
Now it’s from Dharma that you get the tradition which most philosophers follow which is that, if you became wise you would become free. Now, there’s almost—anybody there is around is grooved in to that basic philosophy. That is part of the woof and warp (rug terms, that’s how you fix up a rug, don’t want to give you any misunderstood words). The—it’s in the woof and warp of the entire culture, that you become wise, you become free. And that’s been going on for 10,000 years on this planet. Started by Dharma.
Now that work has been totally assimilated. Now that one can exteriorize and that exteriorization brings about freedom, is the premise of Gautama Siddhartha Buddha and that’s only 2500 years ago. They’ve got 7500 years yet to go before they assimilate that into the culture the way the philosophy of Dharma was.
Which means, you poor bloke, that you’ve got about 10,000 less sixteen years to go before Scientology is totally assimilated as the basic thing called philosophy or culture, see. So don’t feel that you’re going to catch up to this very rapidly if it took Dharma 10,000 years to get the point across that if you become wise you became free. And if people still don’t know about exteriorization 2500 years after the most popular and most numerous religion on the planet, Buddhism. You’ve got 7500 years to go, so sit it out, you know? We’re slightly ahead of our time.
In other zones of the universe the existence of the mind was known. And in the—I hate to have to bring these data out because lawyers, when they listen to these tapes, in order to condemn us you see, say, of course this is terrible to say things like this, but I just hate to be on a withhold all the time.
Anyway, in other parts of the universe in the Galactic Confederation they have a psychotherapy which consists of a recognition of the fact that at a moment of fatal accident to a thetan a picture was made. They know that that is, but they don’t really think it is a picture. They think it is a location. And they take a picture of the location where he was injured and communicate to him in his unconscious state by snapping together a thing that looks like a movie clapboard. You see, they take this picture of the location and then they slap this movie clapboard in front of it, and the thetan is supposed to do something to—by shock or something—to his concept of that location as an injurious location, and so, in some way, blow the consequences of his injury.
That is a—that is a therapy, by the way, that is administered to the releases in that society which go as OTs, OT releases. And now that is their psychotherapy. And that comes as close to anything we’re doing as anything else I know of in the universe. Of course there are many things could go on in the universe that I don’t know anything about. There’s lots of things that could happen that one wouldn’t have any trace of; naturally.
But knowledge has a tendency to get around and you’ll find out that if one being in one quarter of the universe is advancing along some certain premise why, you will find out that it tends to advance in other parts of the universe. I don’t know—but I don’t think Scientology will be contained very long on this planet. I don’t think it will be contained on this planet even this decade, see? It’ll be that—that swift.
So anyway, these were new thoughts particularly for this very backward and barbaric planet. They—if you don’t think things were barbarous you should have had something to do (and maybe you did) with India of 10,000 years ago. There was no slightest vestige of civilization. It was really wild and howling amongst the wogs as they leaped up and down, you know. And to get a point across that if you became wise you somehow became a bit superior—that was a hard one to do. So that was a terrific advance. It’s almost like trying to teach animals or something, you know? You can’t even talk their language.
So that was a big jump. And eventually, practically everybody on the planet agrees with that. We have now some fantastic percentage of the taxation of this planet (we—that’s what’s left over from military appropriations) is devoted to education. The scarcity of universities here in England now is represented by the fact that one university which can accept 850 students this next term has 10,000 applications. And it is a college of which I have never heard. So you can imagine what some of the more popular ones have in terms of numbers.
Well, there’s this terrific demand for education or self-improvement. Now that—you might not look at it first, you see, because it seems so banal, so commonplace to you. But the fact that man at this time is actually willing to invest time, effort and money in the subject of making people wiser so as to make them freer is a great testimony to this fellow Dharma. Took him 10,000 years to get one point across.
All right. That was almost the totality of it. There were other ramifications such as one could get free enough to ascend to a very superior station, you know, like heaven or something, you know? There was connotation with regard to that, but that wasn’t directly attributable to Dharma but by fellows who interpreted him afterwards. He knew—you knew that you could become a free individual. In other words, there was a freedom, which was attainable. But no technology at all.
Now 7500 years after that Gautama Siddhartha Buddha discovered exteriorization, and of course the term ”Buddha” comes from the bodhi tree since it was under a bodhi tree that he first exteriorized. Now he thought you exteriorized by becoming wise, following in the pattern of Dharma. Now that religion has gone now into the majority of the areas of Asia and did itself really civilize three-quarters of Asia.
That wasn’t much information but he introduced several ideas along with it. And one was, that you should be civilized. A shocker, nobody ever heard of that before, you see, just be polite and so forth, you know? Very novel ideas.
Well, man has not yet accepted the idea that he should be polite, but he’s getting there. In some areas of the world they have overdone it a bit. So as they cut each other’s livers out they say, ”I withhold my foul breath from your face,” you see?
So, this action of exteriorization was not in actual fact doable to any great degree. The lama—the lamaists came along afterwards and tried to develop some sort of a technology and an explanation for all of this and so forth, and you get squirrel Buddhism which is Lamaism. That’s right, that’s all it is. And what Buddha didn’t cook up they thought they could. And of course they were moving into a zone where there was plenty to be found out. But the big strike had been made by Buddha, which is that somebody can exteriorize.
Now of course we are then gainers to the degree that there is some longevity to the idea of the soul, that there is such a thing as a soul. This has some longevity, a lot of people accept this. Where it goes, what it does, what it consists of, they haven’t a clue. But that there is something called a soul which goes someplace has actually dominated Greek, Roman thought for a very long period of time now, it’s about 2000 years or something like that. It also dominates various portions of Africa and the Middle East under another prophet’s name and so on. But it is the same—the same channel of thought that there is such a thing called a soul.
Socrates is the primary originator of this in this—he’s the primary forwarder of the idea in our present philosophic history. He said there was such a thing as a demon, and so forth. You see, if you’re not in Greece you’d never know the story of Socrates. You only get told the story of Socrates in Greece, you don’t read it out of philosophic textbooks. Quite interesting because there’s a sort of a verbal tradition, vocal tradition, in Greece concerning Socrates which never gets into the philosophic textbooks. So of course the thing which I have added is that a philosopher should know something about life. That’s so novel that it has practically never been done before.
Now, Socrates was holding forth for the existence of a personal being, or as we would say, thetan. And the religious ah, bigots, ah, bums, ah, tramp—ah, the religious hierarchy, excuse me, I was looking for that word! Having an awful time there—they disagreed with this. And they disagreed with this so thoroughly that they slipped him the hemlock. And he was so henpecked at home that they couldn’t even get him to escape from jail. He went ahead and drank the hemlock just to make them good and guilty. And he made them guilty, man, they still preserve his jail.
But then some time later, sometime later the Nicene Creed was developed which we now have in the form of the Dead Sea Scrolls and which was then put forward about a hundred years after its original development by Jesus of Nazareth. Now he—this church is having an awful embarrassing time with that. But I don’t see why they should have an embarrassing time of it. So the guy was a powerhouse and he had a philosophy which had already kicking around and so forth, that was pretty good.
But they have to acknowledge the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, don’t you see? And they date one hundred years before Christ and they contain the New Testament. You didn’t know about that? There are some pocketbooks out on it and you should read them, it’s very funny. And the Arabs get ahold of these things, there are lots of them, they find them all over the place now if they know where to look. And the Arabs get hold of them because they can get something like five pounds for a little centimeter square scrap of one of these scrolls. They tear ‘em all up!
And then some high muckymuck, some super-sultan potentate-God-help-us, he figured out he was going to make a real—real grab out of it, so he, by force and other means, managed to collect a tremendous collection of these bits. And he unfortunately let them be copied photographically and so he was never able to sell his collection. He’s still got it.
But these Dead Sea Scrolls are a terrific embarrassment to the Christian church at this particular time. I don’t see why they should be. But they are. And all of this is simply the advance of Buddhism as an idea into Western culture. And it’s easily traceable. There’s even the tradition of Christ having studied in the East, you know. Where did he disappear to for thirty years or whatever it was? You know, there’s a lot of these traditions. And this doesn’t make less out of some fellow who went through all that, you know? But it was pushing wisdom into the West. And the West has been very; very hard to push wisdom into.
The early monks of Christianity tried to push wisdom into these areas up here. And over there in Scandahoovia—Scandinavia—I didn’t mean to use it as a verb—and into Ireland, into these chilly northern climes. And they uniformly were spitted on stakes and chewed up and so forth. The monks would come in and they would say that they were going to cure them up with some relics and so forth. They were healers basically—and they moved in and they were going to help the community and so forth. And the answer was to skin them alive or some thing—other delicate process.
So, trying to push—well, the way paganism fought against the basic ideas of Christianity and so forth is a very gory chapter. And the way the Christians then fought against the non-Christians during the days of the Spanish Inquisition is also gory. But by that time they’d lost most of the philosophy. Man had a soul, it was over there, and it belonged to God and he was nothing. And they had things pretty well scrambled up. By the time Buddhism had been transported, in other words, from India through the Middle East to Greece, to Spain, to Scandinavia, to Ireland or the North Pole or something, it was almost an unrecognizable idea.
Now, just giving you the scouted background history of this thing. Now the most that was ever achieved by any of these was a type of Release. And since the beginning of the universe, so far as we know; there has never been anything but a Release. There has never been a Clear. There has never been a cleared anything. So that these are all forms of release.
Dharma is release by wisdom. Buddhism: that was release by exteriorization. Christianity: release by repentance and being good. And you have in actual fact then, the total background history—if you want to read about these chaps and know more about these chaps, in fact it might make good fun. But it’s those things which are there to understand in the light of what we’re doing today.
There are no more complexions or complexities than that to understand about these. I would be accused by any scholar of these works of considerable oversimplification but I could answer from the very interesting height of saying, yes, it took twenty years to make a bodhi but we can make one in about twenty seconds. And we can, at a far higher percentage.
It is so easy to do, it is totally neglected. We don’t even do it. There’s a point on this gradation scale somewhere which should contain thetan exterior or bodhi. He could be almost anyplace. But we, in actual sober fact, let it happen. If it’s going to happen we let it happen. And it could happen at Zero, I, II, III, IV, V, VI—it could happen in any of these areas. And that it almost immediately unhappens—does not then qualify it as a stable release. It isn’t a good lasting state.
As a matter of fact, after you’ve done it to somebody two or three times he becomes very anxious, he thinks you’re going to cost him his body or something of the sort. You can pop him out of his head and after you’ve done it two or three times he begins to tell you that he isn’t. And he wants nothing more really to do with this because he thinks you’re going to foul him up. And he becomes anxious about holding on to the body. People have a bad experience—after you’ve made somebody a Theta Release. You’ve just banged somebody out of their head. They’re no longer in their body, that’s all.
The psychiatrist looks on this with the greatest of askance because he occasionally in institutions finds as an inverse, or an inverted exteriorization: a fellow who cannot get into his body and is going frantic. And therefore he thinks anything in connection with exteriorization is insanity, but then of course he’s branding three-quarters of Asia insane. But then naturally he is insufficiently cultured to know anything about Asia, so—that would be it.
Now, this state of thetan exterior occurs. And it just occurs, and it can occur almost any time and anybody processing anybody sooner or later is going to get a thetan exterior on his hands. And what you do about it is shut up. You say: ”Well, that’s it” and you knock it off. It’s the same as a floating needle. It’s a visual manifestation which is different than what occurs with a floating needle. They’re not the same thing at all. But it’s something you do not go beyond. You don’t go beyond a floating needle on a pc on the meter, and you do not go beyond an exterior state. Don’t say one more command or order of that level on which you are working or whatever you are working on. Shut up! Because if you go on any distance at all you will walk him right straight back into his bank and he will be very cross and justifiably so. Because you’ve unreleased him.
Now after you’ve made one of these fellows, you will find out that within the hour, three days, a week he will have tangled up with more reality than he is prepared to confront in his somewhat tremulous uncleared state. He’s just a Release, you see. And he’s been asked to walk in this big broad world barefooted and he’s still got the anxiety and problem holding on to his body, he doesn’t know quite what to do about this. He’s afraid he’ll forget his body. On the past track it’s happened to him before many times. Because you see, it happens to him every time he dies and is associated in his mind with death. And he’s had unfortunate experiences when he could do it at will somewhere way back on the track, leaving his body in the inn to pop off and do something of the sort and then coming back and find out they’d buried the body. You see, and he’s lost his body and his possessions and so forth and he didn’t like that.
It has very sour connotations with it because he is not competent to cope with the state at all. He’s way in advance of himself. He’s in actual fact on a harmonic of OT. An OT could care for it. He can’t care for it down here when he is a Dianetic Release. And maybe not even that, you know?
And, I’ll give you an actual, typical experiences and so on. I’m not making nothing out of Buddha, this was a considerable advance, this was something very remarkable indeed. And, it must have been remarkable if Socrates copied it. And then it became traditional thereafter, which it did. You’ll find, by the way, there are some here and there, there are some primitive races who believe man has a soul. But, scattered pieces of stuff; it’s a piece of truth that isn’t easily camouflaged. But for it to actually be worked on or admitted or something could be done about it, something like that, in a culture, was quite new.
So Buddha, when he exteriorized people and when he brought about exteriorization, he brought it about through wisdom so the fellow had some kind of a philosophy at least to back him up. But as far as we’re concerned in Scientology, there is one little string of words that, you take almost any human being out here anyplace and set him down in a chair, get him in some quiet place and say this little string of words to him and it’s going to happen. In a large percentage of cases it’s going to happen. Sixty, seventy, eighty percent some such percentage. He’s going to exteriorize, man.
And a certain number of them are going to exteriorize, be total, total reality, looking around, you know? And a certain number of them are going to be totally real outside the second they come back inside they say it’s unreal and didn’t happen. Scared, see? And a certain percentage of them will go out and back in without knowing anything ever happened, except weirdly enough, a total change of personality takes place in front of your face. And you find this amongst the insane.
There was so much about the insane the psychiatrist could have known about and could know about today if he’d care to listen. I have—I’ve had an insane person sitting in front of me—not a psychiatrist, necessarily—I’ve had an insane person sitting in front of me and I’ve said the magic words. Had the person go totally sane, backed out there to several feet back of their head; totally sane, able to reason, solve their problem, set it all up, all squared around, very happy to talk to me about it, totally rational. And then back in: insane. But not quite as crazy. This is remarkable.
Well, there is one notable Scientologist in New York who said it over the air to several million people one time. I often wondered what really happened when he did that. That program since then has been very friendly to Scientology, it’s an all—night program, ”Long John.”
But, here is a piece of technology which simply forces what is going to happen naturally sooner or later. And you don’t have to know trick ways to exteriorize somebody, you see. I’ll give you the magic words, you might as well put them on tape, put it on record someplace or another. It’s ”Try not to be three feet back of your head.” Man is on such an inversion on the subject that he goes clang!
Now, the road of philosophy has been very, very difficult and it has taken a long time for a basic philosophic idea to manifest itself in the society in which it has been expressed. What’s particularly notable about Buddhism is that it was such clear-cut truth that he advanced, that it spread like wildfire within his lifetime. And in the few succeeding lifetimes, a very short period of time, he had almost, well he had about three-quarters of Asia right there—bang!
For instance, he brought the first civil—his people brought the first civilization to Japan. And those were within living memory of Buddha. And that is an awful long ways for that—modes of travel of that day from Northern India. Japan is quite a far cry. They brought the first shreds of culture to Japan. They brought writing and to this day the Japanese use Chinese writing pronounced with a Japanese vocabulary.
And that was brought to them by the first Buddhist monks who came there. But those fellows were very industrious and they got it fast. But they had moved from a state of ”man is meat” to ”he is a spiritual being” and they had manifestations of this, and they had a rather powerful leader and there it went.
Now this is and can be considered only, a sort of a state of release through wisdom, because they didn’t have any command to tell anybody to back out of his head. The fellow would simply become wise and they find out that when he became wise enough he would exteriorize, they hoped. They had a lot of failures along this line. It’s very difficult to do this because it’s booby—trapped by the bank.
Now in one fell swoop with no pause for breath, we have capitalized upon the idea that a man who is improved becomes free. We have brought about a twenty-year effort to exteriorize down to a point where it can be done in about twenty seconds. We have found what prevented the efforts of Dharma from being perfect, we have found the totality of what barriered Buddhism. Here we are in a society which in actual fact is only bolstered in its culture by Dharma and Buddha, with the problem wrapped up.
Now don’t be amazed that you’re having trouble carrying the word. Don’t be amazed at all because the fate of missionaries and so forth carrying the word that there is a—man is a spiritual being and that sort of thing, has been rather grim. But notice that the missionary was many vias departed from the truth. Notice this. Notice that he had some bank connected with his action, very thoroughly. It wasn’t very clean truth. It’s not a condemnation of Christianity. Anybody Clear knows what I am talking about. They went around—they went around telling people they had to do this and do that and the other thing and they were using bank words.
Now these chaps didn’t have a sufficiently pure version of it to do more than take over the society. That is about the limitation of it. They have civilized it to a very, very marked extent. They’ve done a terrific job of it and so on. But to bring a society up that is no more cultured than this one—and as far as man’s treatment of man is concerned, this culture is about as high as a cat fight. It is a scientific barbarism, I assure you.
Now the reason they didn’t get any further than that is they were a little bit too far from the truth. There were too many vias, you see? There was the via of Buddhism to Socrates, to Christianity, to organized Christianity, to the various arguments of Christianity to—you see? And they were weak to that degree. Now compare this, compare this with the Buddhist spread within living memory, three-quarters of Asia. Very fast. But he was close to home on the subject of Dharma. You see, he was capitalizing on Dharma, that wisdom would make you free.
This carries with it some interesting implications. It carries with it the implication that there is a possibility to be free. You see that itself is a terribly hard thing to teach men. But Asia knew it. Asia already had then a spiritualism and a religious background. And he capitalized on that and three—quarters of it—zoom, bang! Three—quarters of Asia. That’s on exteriorization, which is an incidental, but the final result of, Scientology.
Now perhaps the speech in which all this was given was a little more flowery, perhaps there was wisdom, perhaps a lot of things. But the truth of the general situation is that no matter how information is conveyed, if it is conveyed at all and it is truth it will take root.
So I don’t look for you to go for the next 10,000 years before Scientology bites, you see, I don’t look for you to have to wait that long. I would say that the largest scope possible one could imagine for this particular society and so on, basing it on other things and not giving anybody any pats on the back including me, the absolute outside will be something on the order of half a century.
You see if Buddhism could go that far in that span of—short span of time, on the limited result producible by Buddhism and the rather barbaric atmosphere in which Buddhism was spread—was actually a little more barbaric than the atmosphere in which we exist today. And I would say that if you take a half a century to get Scientology around, you’re really slow, man. You notice I said ”you.”
Now, what are you then attempting and what are you achieving with a being? You’re capitalizing, in the first place—as you first address this being—you’re capitalizing on the past—indoctrination and belief of the being. That’s important for you to recognize. Because you will very often get a terrible shock that in your inability to communicate any part of Scientology, recognize what you’re communicating up against.
It was like—it was like a Scientologist we had down in Central Africa. The government was engaging on some groundnut program or something of the sort—there’s—some of their wisdom. But they were teaching soil erosion to the African. A Scientologist went in on the project. They were in despair. They couldn’t teach the African to, you know, prevent his soil from eroding. They thought that was—terrible. And a Scientologist went in on it and he found out what they weren’t teaching him, they weren’t teaching him the basic fact that soil should be preserved.
As soon as they started utilizing that as an idea, why then the program made some progress. Well, you’re going to walk into people who have not heard the teaching of Dharma. Now of course you’re going to walk into everybody you meet practically and they never heard of Dharma. But somehow or other, the wisdom of Dharma has not come up through the line. You run into them every once in awhile.
”Well, what do you want to teach the people for?” There’s one zone where there’s a horrible revolution going on right at the moment, it’s not a battle, it’s just an underground cat fight going on in the middle of South America. Where the ricos in that immediate area who have been used to hiring the peasants for nothing and letting them live and die like pigs, you see, that these ricos have been walked in on sideways by the philosophy of Dharma. And it came from someplace and the peasants all of a sudden have got the idea that they ought to become educated so they could become free.
And all hell is breaking loose because the ricos are trying to keep them from learning anything now and their economy is all going to pot, and they’re going through the entire convulsion that old Yea-and-Nay Plantagenet went through in his days and so forth when the monks would get around and make certain people into clerks and this was not really thought well of amongst the feudal barony.
God knows what would happen if, and it sure as hell happened and fast, the philosophy of Dharma got to them and there sat King John signing his name on the Magna Carta. That is direct—direct dissemination of that information. It’s interesting, it’s—that one piece of philosophy: You become educated, you’ll become free. The church had come in here, they had educated people to read and write. They had introduced manuscripts—you couldn’t say they had introduced books—and they’d been chipping around at the edges here for some time. And all of a sudden, why, not only had people become more educated but people became free.
We have an example of it, a horrible backfire of this in 1936 in the Spanish Revolution. Now the Spanish Revolution was really begun by the philosophy of Dharma. You say, oh heavens, how you can possibly connect those up? Very easy. The paperback was imported into Spain in the decade previous to that revolution for the first time. And cheap literature and the translations of the works of all the great French and English writers had occurred in Spain. And up to that time there was the ricos and the pobres, the rich and the poor, and there wasn’t any other strata of society.
And as soon as the poor started assimilating and were able actually to buy books out of their pay, you see before—never before could they do this, before sometime in the twenties. And they could actually buy books. And they started reading Balzac and they started reading Spinoza and—and where were these fellows, you know? And they said: ”We know something, we should now become free.” They instantly: boom! And that was mostly because they had considerable resistance to their freedom. That’s the philosophy of Dharma, see? That’s a—that’s a fact. You notice that it is a fact? Well, that was Dharma’s discovery.
Now, where you are going to fail is that somebody doesn’t know soil should be preserved. They don’t know that wisdom sets anybody free and of course when you’re dealing with a somewhat fascistic governmental hierarchy, the last thing in the world they want is a free people or an educated people. And when you see education being skimped and frowned upon and so forth then you know what type of a government you’re dealing with. It’s a government which has not yet reached the state where it has heard of Dharma. Or it’s suspicious, having maybe heard of it, it’s a suspicious that the phenomenon will occur and people will become freer. They don’t want anything to do with this. They don’t want anything to do with the philosophy and they are suppressive to the philosophy of Dharma, that people should become wise and therefore can become free.
Now, you’re just cutting in too high. Now you’re talking, in the main here in the West, to a Christian people who have heard of the soul but unfortunately it is an owned commodity that one should not play with. And when they speak of ”their soul” they are not speaking of themselves. And therefore there’s a bit of counter-philosophy to the situation. But these are the points you have to solve. They are stunned at the idea that somebody could exteriorize, so they are really not up to Buddha. They have gone past Dharma but have not arrived at Buddha, and it is to those people that you are teaching Scientology.
So you have to be careful not to go in over their heads. Now fortunately, fortunately they do agree with the gradation scale of Release. And when you talk to them about exteriorization, you’re actually talking to them about something that doesn’t make any sense to them on the subject of OT. Now you mustn’t talk to them about OT.
Now you can talk to them about Clear. They understand Clear, although they don’t know anything about Clear. That’s a very peculiar thing. But they understand that a fellow does not have barriers to his thinking. They understand that and they think that would be great. So all you have to do is teach them that man shouldn’t have barriers to his freedom in the form of his mind and that technology exists to move him up from that.
But do you know there are so many undercuts to that that you could teach him, many undercuts. And the first one actually, it isn’t factual that Dianetics is the first undercut, the public will accept Dianetics, but it’s a relatively enlightened public that would accept Dianetics. Dianetic processing actually belongs below Zero. And the old Dianetic co-auditor type rating and the Hubbard Dianetic Auditor actually belong below the—what we now call a Hubbard Recognized Scientologist. And the degree is by the way, being revived just for that purpose. But you’re already talking at a very enlightened level.
The levels of Scientology will be more easily assimilated by the public at large if we speak of Grade 0 as a recognition—ah, pardon me—a communication process, a communication, a Communication Release. Just to put that a little more distinct. They can get the idea that it’d be perfectly all right to have somebody communicate better. Now that’s easily expressed. And he’s released from an inability to communicate.
Now they immediately want you to apply that to stammerers and backwards children and people who can’t talk and so forth, and this gives you some difficulty because they themselves are standing there, about as tongue-tied with noncommunication as they can get, telling you that would be fine for backward children and stammerers or something. And you’re not quite up to that, don’t you see. A man could communicate more freely.
Now our next level here, Level I, they could understand that man does better if he doesn’t have problems, perhaps they could understand that. And so you could go on up the line and there’s a high probability there of the—of making a communication or a connection with the situation. Comprehension, trying to get people to comprehend what you’re talking about. But I stress to you again the fact that wisdom brought about freedom is the basic idea on this chain. Now do you see what I am getting at? Now that releases a man from imprisonment by ignorance. And that is your first form of Release.
You teach a person that if he learns something he would be freer. And when he has learned that he is then released from the idea that he can’t know. So that is really your earliest stage of release. And I would thoroughly advise your trying to argue with people on the basis of the first premise which is that of Dharma and which is the direct and immediate ancestor of Scientology. You see? There’s your fundamental.
Now of course you couldn’t tell a fellow named Smitty that he ought to teach all of his Africans population anything because he would instantly sense something would be very wrong with all this, and he would start to feel very hunted. He would be—feel hunted in the extreme. And so we find in that country there is no free education anywhere—anywhere. It is all very expensive. There is one little school, it has two hundred and some children in it, most of them Africans and it’s taught by an American named Howitz down there and they’ve even had him up before the high court for daring to teach Africans for nothing, you see. So they dimly feel that there might be such an idea that wisdom makes one free. But if that idea exists they’re agin [against] it, do you see? They don’t want anything to do with that idea, not even the idea of it.
So that is your first level of Release that is meaningful to you. Now of course there is a lower level of Release that if you’re going to work with animals or something like that, you’re going to find out that there’s a lower level of Release. It is simply getting the idea it’s a sort of a lower harmonic of a Communication Release; it is simply getting the idea that one animal could in actual fact express an idea to another animal. And I dare say you’re going to find some races at some time or another someplace who do not yet have that idea. So that would be a lower level of Release. But it isn’t common now so I’m neglecting it.
Now you have to know you’re in something before you can get out of it and that is the main difficulty in communicating levels of Release. That’s—it’s very interesting, I mean you do, you have to know you’re in something before you can get out of it. And people are not aware of the mind. They see another bloke, they don’t see any mind. The psychiatrist goes scratching his ribs up to the person and cuts out a big section of his skull and sees a brain. So he says there is no such thing as a mind. He does, he says this—bang! Because all he can see is a brain. Well, the brain is just a neural shock absorber; it has very little to do with thinking. The number of maps I have seen of the various things which are found in various parts of the brain are only amusing by their numerousness, because they’re all different.
The way the research was done originally was silly. They took wounded soldiers who had lost certain portions of their faculties or expressions and so on, and found out where the head wound was and then, you know, one case at a time, just one case for each thing, you see? If they were shot in the left side of the head then they would say, well, speech is contained in the left side of the brain, you see, because the fellow was wounded there and he couldn’t talk. I know a lot of fellows who’ve simply been kicked in the pants that can’t talk.
Now your basic sweeping agreement, then, is something the society has already accepted. And that is that a person can become a Release or become more free or become released from some of his travail on the idea of becoming wiser. Now that’s why you find philosophy is such an agreeable statement to people, when you try to—try to tell them about Scientology as a philosophy. Because you’re simply telling them of the philosophy of Dharma.
Now your next level of Release that was acceptable to the world at large—that man is a spiritual being. Now that is in decay. That has been known and has been suppressed, and has been suppressed since 1879, Professor Wundt, Leipzig, Germany. I always like to remember the man’s name. Man was an animal and he was nothing but an animal and therefore it was all right to kill him, maim him, shoot him, do anything you possibly could to him because he was ”Nyaa, no good,” see? Now this is something like some of the Christian philosophy that was advanced in the second or third century A.D., that man was conceived in evil and was evil so it was perfectly all right to kill him, maim him, harm him, do anything you wanted to. Do you see these things as justifications? Justifications for overts, no more than that.
So you have the entire, what is laughingly called ”field of philosophy”—it is a field too, out there in the rain, man. You have what is laughingly called a field of philosophy embracing now uniformly, the idea that they’re dealing with rats or something. Well, they’re not going to make very much progress and they could get themselves into one awful bloody revolution. I’m not using that as a swear word, I mean a bleeding revolution. They could, they could be cut down in the streets, man. Because the Christian has not yet found out that the psychologist is an atheist. And there is atheism being taught right in the colleges and there’s a bunch of bigoted Christians going to find out about that someday and they’re going to get mad. Fortunately for psych—for psychology it is such an inarticulate subject that it hasn’t made itself sufficiently plain to be understood that it’s an atheistic subject.
But if your psychologist were ever to succeed he would have to come closer to the truth than the brain is all that is there, and a man is dead forever. Because it’s very unpopular, very unpopular. But suppressives would like it, and so psychology, psychiatry and things like that tend to be supported by governments rather than by the populace. The populace think anything is better. They think psychology is silly. But governments employ it. So you see suppressives employ these nontruthful subjects or subjects which prevent philosophic advances, or subjects which prevent releasing.
So your actual—you’d be surprised how far you could go just doing this—you actually could move in to the whole subject on the subject convincing somebody that man was a spiritual being. See, he’s already halfway agreed with it. ”Well, you’re a Christian, aren’t you?”
”Oh yes, yes, yes.” You know he knows better than to say he’s not a Christian. He gets an auto-da-fé.
Well, you find even in Christianity—you know the whole subject of reincarnation was barred very recently by the Roman Catholic Church—very recently. Only in the last few hundred years. They carried reincarnation right along with them, pockety-pock. They said the guy who hadn’t been good enough had to come back and live it all over again. And somehow or another they dropped that, they had an edict of Scrantes? Or something, I don’t know, some stupid edict by which they abolished wisdom.
Now, therefore that man is a spiritual being and not an animal—you could become very involved with as an argument—but if somebody bought the idea, if somebody bought the idea that he was a spiritual being rather than an animal, you have then got a state of Release. He’s released from an untruth that could trap him. Now very possibly—very possibly, this is where you could use exteriorization, but I do not advise it. What’s useful at this point is Dianetics. Because a person goes rapidly back, but it’s a little bit ahead of itself; don’t you see? There isn’t a perfect answer to this.
Ah, a guy goes back and only runs so many engrams and there he is sitting on the parapets of the castle, you know, watching the enemy march across the plain. And he says, what am I doing here, this is obviously me. And he makes it up out of his own head that he must be an immortal being because he has lived before quite obviously. Dianetics will bring people up to that point. But, this is a release from this lifetime. A person is released from the very narrow span of just one lifetime. And that is a terrific release because the death of—the terrible consequences of death fall away, he stands around and laughs as the funerals go by, you know.
I mean, I remember a long time ago I was—I had to pull off the road—I had to pull off the road down in Arizona to let a funeral go by. And boy, people’s eyes were streaming so that it looked like rain falling out behind that funeral. And boy, everybody was real sad. And I sat there and watched this, you know. And I just got through gauging on some researches into the immortal nature of man, you know. But it suddenly looked so silly to me that I sat there and laughed like a fool for about ten minutes. I couldn’t get the car going again, I didn’t dare drive. It just suddenly seemed so funny. All of this action with regard to this one thing, you see, such a production. And of course it was a very big funeral and a very sad one for a banker. Of course they—I knew he’d never get to heaven. I know he would be back there stirring it up again.
Anyhow, you, in that fashion would take people out of the one—lifetime idea. And that is your—a tremendous breakthrough that is available to you because it’s a release from the idea of one lifetime. There is a breakthrough for concentration which is quite acceptable to the society in which we exist.
Now people do know, fortunately, there is such a thing as a mind. They’ve been told there is such a thing as a mind and they haven’t been taught well enough to know the psychologist is defining the ”brain” as the mind. So you catch the philosophy which has been put forward to them that men have minds and things go wrong with their minds, that there are mental things about existence, and just redefine it before it takes root. You see? What they mean they’re putting forward this philosophy, is that people have brains which get their neurons crossed and you give them biochemical and electrostimuli of some kind or another or surgical stuff; why, you can do something with this brain mass, you see.
Well, you move in, just move in ahead of this and you say, ”The mind, well, yes, they’re speaking of mental image pictures.”
”What?”
”Well, have you ever had a picture?”
Now you see, A looking at B never sees B’s mind. So it doesn’t come through to him that B has a mind. See, if he’s very, very wog, why he thinks B only has a brain, see, that’s getting pretty wog. Now the only thing you have to put across is that because this fellow has a mind, that fellow has a mind. That’s just a different new observation. Now right on the heels of that will follow that he’s immortal. With a little Dianetic auditing he can’t help but find it out. Do you see? Now you’ve released him from the idea that man is matter. You’ve released him from the idea that he only has one life, and these are stages of Release.
Now when you’re teaching people realize that you are working in the field of releasing people. Realize that. That you can in actual fact, by talking to people, release them. But you start crawling up the line here very far and you’re going to run into far more mass—mental mass—than you can easily talk them out of. By the time you get to here, skip it. By the time you get to VI, it would be fatal to try to talk them out of it, and if you tried to talk them out at Class—well that’s, that’s not… All you’ve got to do is pass a despatch with VII materials on it through the lines and you have, ”Where’s Janie?” ”Oh, she’s in the hospital.” ”What happened to her?” ”She came down with appendicitis yesterday.” ”Well, what happened?” That’s right, I’m not kidding. I—there’s too much—too much horsepower.
Now, the funny part of it is, there’s technology up here that the Clear doesn’t notice. A lot of Clears go suddenly, ”What? What’s this?” Interest! But you should recognize that an ultimate in Release would be a Release from the universe. True. You say, who’s going to fool around with the things that makes the universe. Is somebody going to fool around with what’s making the universe, and so forth, somebody’s going to fool around? You’ll be glad to know that we have now got a policy letter out which forbids destructive actions—you see.
So you see you can very rapidly go outside of people’s head. What they did in Melbourne during that inquiry down there—this guy Peter Williams just cons—insisted on spinning people with past lives. He just—all he would talk about was—was Grade V stuff you see, all the way up the line and he’d let them get no subjective reality on it, and it spun them. That was what upset that whole thing. He wouldn’t follow any order I gave him. He’s had himself a ball.
Now, recognize then, that when we use the word ”release” we mean freeing. Now we can free somebody of an idea which enslaves him or entraps him.
And recognize that all traps are basically ideas. And if a man can be talked or persuaded out of a certain idea you have freed him to that extent. So the word release is best understood on the basis of freeing somebody from something.
Now as we progress from Grade 0 up—see, I’ve already shown you there are many grades of Release below zero. We are now getting extremely sophisticated when we get to Grade 0. This is a very sophisticated level of Release. We are actually starting to free him from his self-manufactured trap called a mind. And we’re starting to free him directly and intimately as a spiritual being. And we’re working on it right at that point just as surely as though we’re digging a ditch. And we release him from ideas that he can’t communicate and we make a Communications Release.
Now the funny part of it is, to do that we’ve got to actually pull him out of a little bit of mass that he is in that tells him he can’t communicate. Do you see? So from here on we’re not only pulling him out of ideas but we’re also starting to pull him out of his own mental mass. Now at this level, Class VII, we don’t pull him out of any more mental mass. We turn around and eat the tiger We eradicate mental mass. Erase it. Now that of course is again a form of Release that we call Clear; it means he’s cleared the being of his reactive mind.
But we note he’s still in the universe. He’s still associated with a body, he’s still in the universe and still this and still that. In other words, there are some grades of Release above this. But in actual fact that is such a triumphant level for a man to attain that you find not many people below it look any higher. It’s quite adequate, it’s big. It’s quite absolute—very nearly absolute.
Now when you see on this meter, this needle somewhere between 1.9 and 3.25, we will allow for the slight vagaries of your setting the trim knob, and you see this needle get floppy and it’s a little bit hard to set this for a moment—SHUT UP! Because you released him from something. Now of course you probably have to know why, to get him through Qual. That is really too bad.
But you would best do it from your auditing notes not from the pc. Now accidentally anywhere from the moment that the guy hears about the fact that wisdom will make him free on up to some idea that he is a spiritual being, on up through to a Grade 0 or a I or a II or somewhere up the line, the guy at any time may blow out of his skull. You may even find somebody that isn’t in one. He’s very surprised why other people are in their heads. Horrors! I’ve actually run into one or two.
You’ll actually run into this thing called an exteriorization. Now that is a relatively premature manifestation which will remain very unstable. Now most states of Release have a certain degree of stability and those which we have listed and those that I’m talking to you about have stability of a sort. Of a sort. The guy’s ideas get invalidated, he gets invalidated that he’s a spiritual being, somebody chops him up somehow or another, he gets suppressed, something like that, and he gets over the idea, and so on and he ceases to manifest as a Release. But wait a minute, he is actually not as bad off as he was before. A Release never unreleases to the same degree of Stygian dark that they were in before they got released.
Now this, then—this then is what we mean by Release. What we mean by Clear is an erasure of the mental mass which inhibits their thinking, postulating, and so on. You should see a Clear postulate on a meter; it’s very interesting. I’ve got a couple of Clears right now that are doing a little bit of fooling about with the first part of the OT course and they’ve skipped a couple of steps in the OT course and now they are finding various banks. It’s very interesting—it’s very interesting because they really have not discovered that they’re quite capable of postulating a bank. So after they postulated it they haven’t bothered to blow it. That’s very silly.
I received, almost hilarity, a report, two reports from two of them, and I obediently checked them out. It was quite obvious what they were. They have not realized they are very skilled people, they can make a bank.
Now this is what you are doing with human beings. These are the states you are attempting to achieve with a human being. These are the manifestations of having achieved it. The E-Meter in the early days I used: ”Ahh, no kidding! Hey!” And that would be a Release. And in the early days this was so good that a Dianetic Clear—we’re making them now, we’re making Dianetic Clears again. I’ve gotten two or three thank-you despatches and things like that. We’re making Dianetic Clears. But of course a Dianetic Clear is actually merely a Release and unfortunate, but they strangely enough have approximately the same manifestations that are described in Book One. And the way we started making them again is we stopped overauditing. Man was making his Releases too well. It’s something on the order of: you make a Release, this guy becomes—let me talk at—about it at a lower level. The guy got the idea completely, he’s got it now, ”Hey, you know, gee! That’s true! That if I knew more I would be freer. Gosh! That is right!” you know? And you start teaching him that if he knew more he would be freer.
Now at the moment he realized that and you had him on this meter his needle would have floated. And his needle would have floated quite handsomely. But if you’d continued to teach him, his needle would have ceased to float almost right away. Now what fools you is that a Release, a lower level releases—now let me get this mystery explained for you. A lower level Release is released at the level they’re released at. And there are higher levels of Release to be attained. And they don’t so much relapse as go into the sticky plaster of the next level that they are going to have to climb to get all the way out. Do you see?
So they in actual fact, in auditing very rapidly—unless you just suppress them by continuing to audit the same gain which they already have which is sort of an ARC break, not acknowledgment or so forth. But when they walk out of that session and come back in the next morning and they haven’t got a floating needle, realize they have simply moved up into the mass of the next strata they should be released in. They haven’t unreleased. You understand that? So don’t overrun them and don’t get worried that they fold up awful fast. As a matter of fact I’ve considered it sort of—sort of like the Indian, you know. He has several different types of pony. And you’ve noticed all the Indians’ horses along a hitch rack and these Indians’ horses will be tied with different knots of greater and greater complication until you finally get to a knot which is very complicated that’s tying up this one pony. Well, this one at the end—the other end, you see, he’s just a dunce because he can—he can’t even untie just dropping the reins across the hitch rack, you see? But this other one up at the other end, he’s such a clever pony that he can untie any kind of knot anybody could dream up so they have to tie the most complicated knots anybody ever heard of to get the pony to stand there, you see? And they call him an enterprising pony.
Now, if you have a Release who for some reason best known to man or beast, insists on staying there with a floating needle for days and days and weeks and months and if you were to pick him up a year from then and still find his needle floating, I would tell you you had a very unenterprising pony. He’s become smarter so he should become speculative at that point. Because it’s quite natural sequence—these sequences of Release. And if he was able to think or act, to look around at all of course, he would dive into the next level very promptly.
Now does this make the whole subject of Release seem a little clearer to you? I hope it does because the next audience I have to tell: ”When a needle floats and goes free you stop the process, and that is proper end phenomena for any conversation or any process anyplace up to Grade VI,” I’m going to collect a dollar piece from them. Be—watch it! Don’t be part of that audience. But that’s what barriered the way. Not knocking it off and not acknowledging the fact that such states existed.
Now in this lecture you could probably also find ways and means of dissemination, you could probably spot your errors of dissemination. I don’t say that there aren’t additional methods of dissemination, but I’m just pointing out those that have been startlingly successful and which in actual fact, are the dominant points of philosophy in our society today. Where they are lacking the society is barbarous and where they are present the society is advanced. Therefore you could fully expect a society to get very barbarous on psychology since it has yet to assimilate the principles of Buddhism. That tells you how backward any race is, is how far have they moved up that line.
Now, the other—the other thing that is interesting to note before I close is that Releases seem to want other people to be released and Clears want other people to be cleared and all of this is very heartening. If that fact—which is quite accidental—did not exist, and so forth, why the whole of the race would be hopelessly lost. And if man were not basically good it would be extremely dangerous to improve him. Improve his abilities, would be very dangerous. But he happens to be basically good. Anybody who tells you basically—man is basically evil, of course is fixing you up so that you then will be afraid to make somebody good.
Now you can have a great many qualms about clearing or releasing even, somebody who is a benighted villain. Should I release him? Well, don’t—don’t worry about his activities after he’s released because these will be better. His abilities will be better but so will the nature of his activities. Don’t worry about that, worry about it on the basis of, has he got a good enough statistic that I’m going to do him this much favor. And don’t release people to make them better for other people’s sake. It is something which is a reward, it is not something which has to be done. And that is why I always object to Dianetics and Scientology being used only on backwards children classes, because I think the geniuses in the class are really the ones who need it.
Now, therefore, I hope this will be of some small use to you when you find yourself sitting there looking at somebody and he has just asked you this embarrassing question: ”What is Scientology?” Maybe if you remember this lecture it will help you know where to chip in, at what moment and what to tell him about.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.