And this is the twenty-seventh of January 1958 — I should say AD 8.

You know why we say "AD 8," don't you? That's "After Dianetics," in case you're a little slow this morning.

Now, you're on a clearing project. An old auditor, outside, just said to me, he said, "Congratulations, for getting it up to where somebody else could do it." So I'll take your congratulations, too. Thank you.

Now, in this lecture series I have been answering questions of one kind or another that were put to me, but I haven't been answering them specifically off of the pile, here. I could do one of two things: I could give you a series of talks concerning just how you clear somebody or I could simply answer these questions. Which would you like?

Audience: Series. Clear somebody.

You would rather have that? Well, all right. Till the end of this week, then, I will just put it in on a one-two-three basis. Okay?

Audience: Yes.

All right. Then this would be the first one, the first of the series. And it would be, obviously: What you're trying to clear.

We already know about the parts of man. Some of us don't know this too well in that we think there's something else. Parts of man are covered in Scientology: Fundamentals of Thought. But let's cover them, now, in terms of spheres of familiarity. I've already said something about this, but when I say a sphere of familiarity I mean that class of material, data or concern that the preclear must be able to view. Now, when we say "Clear" we mean nothing interposed. Nothing interposed is a better classification than saying, "Well, he just ain't."

I'll give you a wonderful example of this "He just ain't." Would you like a nice example of "He just ain't"? You can probably make yourself or your preclear quite ill by running this. It is the one thing that you can do. Now, obviously this would be the point on the gradient scale where you would start: You would start at this point on the gradient scale, obviously — joke.

The one thing a thetan can keep from going away is nothing. You never saw the ease with which a thetan can put up a nothing in front of him and keep it from going away; a nothing behind him and keep it from going away; a nothing above him and keep it from going away; a nothing below him, a nothing to the right, a nothing to the left, and keep these things from going away. It's the one thing he can do beautifully.

Now, a thetan thinks of himself in terms of somethingness for his own peace of somethingness. He'd rather think of himself as being something than being nothing.

Now, there are two ways we can make a something: One is by mass and the other is by significance. Now, in this particular civilization at this time, "nothing" is normally significant in the derogatory sense: "You're nothing, you're nobody," you get the idea? "Oh, that's nothing," meaning "unimportant." In other words, a nothingness is a contempt or a derogatory. This, as much as anything else, makes him avoid this particular significance.

But what thing can he communicate with most ably? The first Axiom tells us, and the communication formula added to it tells us that he could best communicate with a nothingness.

And so when a nothingness in a society is contempt — for instance, nobody in this society at this time is writing any paean of praise to poverty. That's an interesting thing, because do you know that that makes this society singular? There's only one other society that was totally lacking for long periods of time in prophets of nothingness, and that was the Roman society. Well, now, this society, at this time, has nobody saying, "Hurrah, hurrah, let's be a tramp, let's have nothing," you know? Nobody is saying, "Well, three cheers, let's go nowhere," see? And, yet, do you know that nearly every other society in the history of the world has had these prophets?

The French do remarkably well at this. The Chinese have an old proverb that I think I've told you before, if you hadn't heard it from other sources, about the fellow who — Emperor, had a sick daughter, and he was told by a sage that she could be cured by being covered with the shirt of a happy man. And though the messengers ride north and south and east and west and they search everywhere and the time goes on, and they all keep reporting back saying they couldn't find a happy man. Till one day a lathered messenger comes in and he says he has found a happy man. And the Emperor says, "Wonderful, wonderful! Then she can be cured." And the courier looks very, very sad about it, and when a little bit pressed, why, he says, "Well, I found a happy man, but he didn't have a shirt."

Now, these are complimentary nothingnesses, you see? That's the prophet of nothingness — would tell such stories. The thing to do is to give up everything you have, and you'll be all set.

Now, it's quite interesting, it's quite interesting. This society doesn't believe in that, because it's probably what makes this society terribly sick. The one thing that a thetan can communicate with perfectly, of course, is nothing. It follows the duplication factor of the communication formula. Right?

Now, we get out of this, man's obsession to make nothing out of everything. It's odd that a thetan can become overwhelmed with his own identity. This is something like a cow being overwhelmed because it finds out it's a cow. It's the silliest thing you ever looked at in your life. Why this fellow should start to dramatize, unthinkingly, unknowingly and even unwillingly this section of the communication formula is fascinating. But a thetan does this.

And if he has a bad run of it, if he gets a lot of losses, he will then turn around and do the one thing he can do easily, which is communicate with nothing. And man's obsession for cutting everything to ribbons, for building atom bombs, for chopping everything up is basically just this: It is the first gradient scale on keeping from going away — the first step. He never goes below it. He never goes below it. See, he can always communicate with nothing. Now, that tells you a great deal about man's character.

And what are we trying to clear? We're trying to clear this thing that after a while can dramatize itself, as the lowest rung.

Well now, if we start out on a gradient scale of communicating with nothing, we get a no-body situation. No body would be the immediate result of the technique I gave you earlier, of putting nothing out in front of you and keeping it from going away and so forth. It would just cut the body to ribbons, and be nothing left of it at all.

You say, "Well, then, what about an auditor sitting there auditing somebody?" Ah! Notice that when we embarked upon Clear, the old man reached into the shot locker way back when and pulled out E-Meters again. Notice that?

Audience: Uh-huh. Yep.

Well, so you don't have a nothing there; you at least have a needle. You don't even have the nothingness of the other guy's facsimiles, don't you see? So you don't make the body, you might say — although the body never looks at anything — you don't make the body look at nothing. Therefore, there's no liability to it. Looking at a total nothingness is — can be counted upon to make somebody quite ill — conceiving a static and so forth.

Well, we do not say this is the condition of the thetan all the way up to the top of the spectrum. Somewhere he can begin to look at nothing.

When? Ah! When he is totally accustomed to looking at something. When he has turned the total of something off of an inversion. You get the idea? He must have gotten over his obsession to make nothing of everything before he can regard nothing. It's one of these things that is so fantastically elementary, so stupidly obvious that everybody could miss it.

You're actually going toward an ability to make nothing and something. But when that ability is stuck at simply making nothing, you have a sick person who will make a sick body, who will make others around him quite ill. We have a colloquialism in Scientology: "Well, he made nothing out of it." You know, "He made nothing out of everything." Well, we recognize this for what it is: it's an illness.

It's quite a trick for something that is basically, on a mass level, nothing, to make something. That's quite a trick. The oddest thing about it is that he should make something in the first place. Don't you see? That's sort of an oddity. But because I suppose it's harder to do, why, he does this. And after a while loses his ability to make something, and then falls into an obsession to make nothing.

Well now, I'm afraid that that thing which we are clearing may very often start into the activity of clearing simply in an effort to make nothing again. And you're going to find people, here and there, who are obsessively making nothing, to whom the goal of Clear is as clear as crystal. They know exactly what you're talking about: You're going to make nothing out of everything. Therefore, it's a very, very popular subject to one and all.

The first ability which has to be recovered, however, is making something. Now, you have to get a Clear to make something. You have to take the whole somethingness scale and turn it right side to and get it in good order before you can go on with the project of clearing anybody. It's quite remarkable. It's quite remarkable. It's a little trap all by itself: A person is trapped into getting better. He embarks upon the goal of becoming Clear out of an obsession to make nothing out of everything. And he is led forward by the auditor into making something after all and is brought up to an ability to make something. And then one day recovers, of course, his ability to make nothing, knowingly and not obsessively.

And when he is able to do this — make something or make nothing at will — we can say he is Clear. Because nothing — there is no interposition between his desire to bring about a something or a nothing condition and his doing it. The first thing a thetan recovers from is his obsession to make nothing. That is very, very easy to do.

Now, if you understand that your preclear most of the time in the early part of clearing is working on the basis of making nothing out of everything, you will understand why you have to work hard on keeping it from going away, which is to say continuing a mock-up or a mass. It's an ability he has lost, and he has fallen back onto making nothing out of everything.

Now, you'll find somebody puts up a mental image picture, a mock-up, he puts up a mock-up and discovers that it goes away at once. As a matter of fact, it sometimes goes away so fast, so rapidly that he doesn't even know it's there and he will tell you that he didn't put it there. That's very, very funny because there is always, for a split instant, a mock-up. In other words, there's no such thing as a totally blank field. Get the idea? There's always a mock-up there. It flits so fast that it is not observed by him. His make-nothing-of-it impulses have taken care of it before it could bloom. He's torn his mock-up up and thrown it away, on automatic, before the mock-up could take place.

Now, we get a case below this, oddly enough, that can only make something and can never make anything disappear — never make anything disappear. Then you'll find this case on a total automatic: obsessive copy of the physical universe and so forth. Well, this case doesn't put it up for a different reason and doesn't have a mock-up: If he put it up, it would go on forever. And this would be a terrible thing because, obviously, what he should do is to make nothing out of everything. But he can't make nothing out of it; therefore, he is not going to put it up. But in this particular case — in this particular case, he will also get an impulse toward a somethingness, which somehow or another he must conquer.

And we get lack of mock-ups, then, from two sources: an obsessive somethingness cut off, an obsessive nothingness not cut off.

Now, this whole contest of life is a something versus a nothing, a nothing versus a something. Continuance, forever-survival, is an effort to overcome, once and for all, the obsessions of nothingness. Fellow puts up something to last forever.

One can say the dream of Egypt was eternity: They wrapped up their dead to last forever, they built pyramids to last forever, they wrote a religion to last forever, and it darn near has. Every time I pick up, in a museum or someplace, an early Roman madonna, why, I am never surprised to turn it over and find out on its base, erased and obscured, the Egyptian ideographs for Isis. Oh, I'm not saying that Christianity was formed totally out of Egyptian; they had it from many sources. Anyway . . .

The dream of Egypt was eternity. And those people were so beaten down they could hardly struggle out of anywhere.

Now, you'll find almost any girl or any guy can have an Egyptian set of facsimiles restimulated like mad. Why? Because Egypt's dream was eternity. And most every life that was lived in Egypt was lived in the direction of having it live forever.

Now, those people had totally lost their ability to make nothing out of anything. They've lost their creativeness. They've lost their faith in any such activity. And so if they did manage to create something, if they did have something, then it had to last always because nobody would ever make another one.

Now, you go up to the north of Egypt there, up across a few steppes and plains and some mountains and so forth, and you get into an area where nothingness is the thing. That's Russia — pronounced "Rossia." These people are heavy-weighted on the other side and have been for a very, very, very long time. They cannot come into an area, by their own history, without chopping it all up. Russian idea of a good battle is to knock down the army and then level the city. It was very interesting, the "Rossians" who came in and were messing up the Roman Empire in the vicinity of the Danube and so on, had several flourishing cities there under the sword, and they very carefully leveled them until a pony could be ridden across them at full gallop without stumbling. Now, that was their criteria of a conquest. It's quite amazing. Almost totally the reverse.

I'm not condemning Russia simply because there is a current situation with regard to Russia. I'll clue you: You've had a current situation with regard to Russia for the last twenty-eight hundred years — always been a current situation. Should get tired of it after a while.

The Chinese, by the way, were the only ones who ever really conquered Russia. They conquered the early Huns. The real Huns never got into the Roman Empire. Just some of the lesser tribes who had been licked by the real Huns were what conquered the Roman Empire. It's quite interesting. The Chinese conquered the real ones. And they sat up there above the north border of China for many, many years. And about the time they were singing Christmas carols down in Bethlehem, these Huns had — well, Russians, whatever you want to call them — Huns, all mixed up. The Huns got to be Germans in World War I; the truth of the matter is they're "Rossians." And they sat up there on the north border and they'd make forays down into China — periodic forays. They could not hold anything, they could not build anything, they could not construct anything stone on stone. The only thing they could do was haul around a felt yurt in the back of a wagon, you know? And yet they would rush down into China and destroy some cities and grab some loot, and then go back up, retire above the north of China.

Eventually they built a great wall in order to restrain their continual forays. But a Chinese army about the year one, about the time of Julius Caesar, of a hundred and twenty-five thousand men, moved in on them. They had carefully capitalized — they had carefully capitalized on the obsessions of the Hun. They had carefully sent him tribute silk.

To this day you can still find in a — a very rare piece of cloth somewhere in one of the antique shops and so forth, and it'll have a big circle on it about four or five inches in diameter. It'll be the stamp of Imperial China; it's tribute silk — that is the tribute stamp. And that is the type of silk, with that stamp on it, that was sent north of the Great Wall — which became the Great Wall — to the Huns. Beautiful maidens, ivory pipes, beautiful saddles, harness, anything and everything the Chinese could think of that amounted to something was shipped north of that wall to the Huns. Tribute.

And the fool Huns considered it their due. But the thing they did, and the only thing they could do in their racial pattern, was to make nothings. And these things were so beautiful and elegant, they didn't make nothing out of them. This went on for about a century. And they got so weak and so whipped, and their basic postulates were so overridden, about a hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-man Chinese army went north of the wall, and although it lost all but thirty-five thousand men, licked the Huns hands down and made the Huns move west.

And that was the beginning of the migrations. Because as the Huns moved west, deeper into Russia, the weaker tribes of Russia moved out. And it was these weaker tribes who were driven across the Danube and so on, and which conquered the Roman Empire. This was the beginning, by the way, of the exodus from Russia by these tribes, and the end of the Roman Empire. It's quite interesting. That influences you directly. Our culture and civilization is very much based on this particular incident.

These people could only make nothing. You see? They could only make nothing. They were crazy, they were imbalanced.

The Egyptian, on the other hand, could only make something. He was crazy, he was imbalanced.

Now, there's no great praise for somebody who makes nothing or makes something. But please, let him make both. The ability to do just one of these things is, itself, aberration.

So clearing could be very badly misunderstood. You could think of it as making nothing of everything. You could think of it very easily this way. But it is only valid and only worthwhile where the ability to make something and the ability to make nothing are both recovered. And please note, then, in all clearing techniques both of these things are done. Both of these things are done.

But the oddity about it is this: that you do not have to specialize on making nothingness. You don't have to specialize on it. Because an individual who can no longer vanquish one of his own mock-ups has lost in the realm of somethingness rather than nothingness. The individual is not, then, up against a proposition as he thinks, of being unable to make nothing. He is no longer able to make something. He has put somethingness on automatic, and his somethingnesses are being made, he feels, from elsewhere. He gets into all sorts of traps. He says, "A man called God built this universe. I had nothing to do with it." Boy, how irresponsible can you get! You mean he had nothing to do with it at all? Oh, that I doubt. I doubt that. But he's put the somethingness of the material universe, then, totally out of his own area, see? A rather fatal action which leaves him only one thing he can do with it, and that's make nothing of it.

He retains his ability, don't you see, to make nothing, and disavows his ability to make something with regard to the material universe. And then he wonders, one day, why he feels so trapped in it.

To make something — to make nothing. Now, between an individual's ability, between himself and the somethingness which he could create or the nothingness which he could make, a great many things become interposed. Things stand between these things.

Here's a very obvious one: "Johnny, don't touch anything in this room — you will break it!" The funniest one of these I saw was a cartoon, many years ago, of a little boy, all of about three, and he's standing alongside one of these big Mallet locomotives which is towering above him. And his mother is diving down on him, saying, "Johnny, come away from that at once, before you break something."

Now, an individual is forbidden spheres. Do you see that? He is forbidden certain spheres. Now, here he's forbidden a sphere, a living room, in terms of nothingness. Do you see that? Now, he's out camping or something of the sort, and he and his friends are going to tear up the woods one way or the other — not to make nothing, but to make something. Maybe they're going to dam up the stream that they should leave alone, and maybe they're going to build a hut that they shouldn't have anything to do with, you know, and so on. So here's an area where they're forbidden a somethingness.

And so you find the checkerboard pattern of anyone's life. It consists of areas where he is forbidden nothings and areas where he's forbidden somethings. And he himself has lost all control of this. And having lost all control of it he is, then, incapable of communicating with it. If you're forbidden in the zone of something and forbidden in the zone of nothing, then you're forbidden totally in the zone of communication.

Now, within your own reality you know what happens to somebody when he's totally pulled off communication: Under no circumstances must he look at that wall.

It reminds me of Medusa's head that appeared on the shield. You remember the shield? If anybody who looked at Medusa's head and so forth, would get all sorts of pains and aches . . . I've forgotten. I looked once and made nothing out of it and I've forgotten ever since. And somebody came along and looked at the head with his shield — and he looked on a via. And even looking on a via was able to look, and he didn't fly to pieces and turn to stone — a few other things that were supposed to happen to him.

Now, this is quite interesting, but here was a mythical zone of noncommunication. Well, you couldn't make nothing out of Medusa's head and you couldn't make something out of Medusa's head, right? So if you couldn't make nothing, you couldn't make something, you couldn't communicate, and if you did happen to look at it... Ah, we get the primary — the primary operation that can be worked upon a thetan.

The primary operation that can be worked upon a thetan is to believe something dreadful will happen if he communicates! Do you understand that? This prevents him from making something and making nothing. And the answer to his interference is, of course, don't communicate at all. And so we get nearly everything based on just one thing: the superstition that something dreadful will happen if you communicate. Do you see that?

Now, a thetan, all by himself — no mass, no wavelength — would have to sit up day and night to figure out some way to be harmed. He can go straight through a buzz saw.

I used to run Route One, and used to have a — I had a buzz saw located somewhere down in the Carolinas. It used to be happily sawing up timber all the time. And until I found truck tires on the Camden bridge as just as good, I used to use this buzz saw: "Go on, get on the teeth of the buzz saw and ride."

The guy would say, "Hrump. Oh, no, no, no!"

"Go on. Go on. Well, get in toward the hub and just touch it once. Put a beam on it." In a gingerly fashion he'd eventually get over here and ride on the teeth of a buzz saw, see? Didn't hurt him any. If he had a little mass connected with him, he said it'd tickle.

Now, somebody else could get on a tire going across the Camden bridge, a truck tire, and just ride on the tread of the tire, see, bang, bang, bang, and be hit every couple of milliseconds. Pretty rigorous, but it doesn't hurt a thetan.

So he has to have — in order to work this operation on somebody else, he has to have a great deal of superstition. He has to believe in no communication.

Well, he proves it to himself. If you put a body, as they used to do in the comic strips — fellow with the long black mustache, and in more modern times, Fearless Fosdick, used to throw somebody into the teeth of a buzz saw, you know, or threaten to — if you put a body on a truck tire it certainly wouldn't last very long. See, he's proven it to himself that he cannot communicate — we mustn't have a total proximity, in other words, between these two things, a body and a truck tire.

Well, he so easily associates himself with a body that he says, "7 cannot communicate with a truck tire," or "7 cannot communicate with a buzz saw," which is a lie. And we get this primary interposition, you see, between the thetan and the state of Clear. And the primary interposition is "mustn't communicate" — the primary one. And the end product of communication is something and nothing. So once you get him to communicate with something, then he is concerned with either make something out of it or make nothing out of it. And he'll figure one or the other of these is bad, and sometimes both.

Now, these interpositions between the being and, you might say, his own creations are the only things which deters him from making sensible decisions, from being able to enjoy life, to have a game, play a game or do anything. The interposition: there's something between him and life. He has to be careful, he has to be restrained. At no time must he fully live.

Thetans teach each other the philosophy of restraint. They say some writer didn't write well because he wrote with insufficient restraint. They say some dancer was too abandoned — insufficient restraint. They say that man cannot live without artificial threats and restraints. In other words, we get the whole priesthood of restraint, when the fact of the matter is there's only one thing that permits you to fail. There's only one way you can fail — just one route to failure, actually — and that is "not to communicate enough." That doesn't even say restraint, does it?

I had a fellow explain to me once very, very carefully about his dog. It was up in Alaska, he was feeling very sad, and we were consoling ourselves and trying to get warm with some Hudson Bay 135 proof rum, which we were drinking like water because it was very cold. And he was telling me about his dog — - malamute. Of course, a malamute is insensible to almost anything. And he said, "I beat him, and I beat him, and I beat him, and he just won't mind, and he just won't do anything and he's just no good at all." He says, "He's wearing me out."

Well, it's all right to tell this fellow, "Well, you shouldn't have beaten him at all. You shouldn't have started on this line." But it wouldn't be very acceptable to him because the final answer is this: If you knew that you couldn't beat him enough, why did you start beating him in the first place?

Now, that's the whole morality of beating: If you're going to start beating somebody, be sure you can beat them enough. Otherwise, leave it alone. Because you'll decide after a while that you can't beat hard enough, and you'll decide, therefore, you have failed — that failure is your lot. If you could just have kept it up, just a little bit longer, if you could have done it a little more forcefully, you felt you could have won. But you didn't. Therefore, you failed. Now, that is actually a much more common source of failure, and is a much more general source of failure, than restraining yourself. Do you see that?

As far as the overt act-motivator phenomena is concerned, talking about this as we talk about Clear is a waste of time. Overt act — motivator phenomena is a dramatization of Newton's law of interaction: For every action there's an equal contrary reaction. You reach over here and you move something, it resists slightly, therefore, you have a feeling like you should — the feeling that you were protested against. Do you understand? You felt you were protested against.

You take a four-gauge shotgun and fire it, and you'll feel that you were protested against. And you might get this all mixed up with the duck that got in the road of the shot. And as he falls, you are jolted and shaken considerably.

Now, where our world of — where our world of action and interaction takes place, we have innumerable games. And nearly all of these games are based on a morality: You shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that, you shouldn't do something else. If you do this, then that will happen to you. You see? It's a game of consequences, it's a game of action and interaction. Every time you make a forward motion, you get some motion that kicks back at you. Do you see that? All right.

When you get these interactions of one sort or another, you feel you are being protested against, and you feel there are things you shouldn't do. And eventually, you get very moral about the whole thing and feel you were being punished for doing what you were doing. And you get all mixed up in this idea that for every forward motion you make there will be an equal kickback. And this gets down to that.

And now I'm giving you the mechanic — the mechanic of why this interposition of no communication gets so widespread. You see, you say, "no communication or a reserved communication in the direction of making something and making nothing . . ." you see? A reserved communication, a flinch, a holdback — and after a while you begin to believe in interaction or that there's a protest for your communication. Do you understand that? So if there's a protest for your communication, then you never communicate. And then you never find out whether or not you do turn to stone when you gaze on Medusa's head. If you just push against something, you'll feel it pushing back against you.

Actually, the truth of the matter is that no communication is anything but itself. There is never a back-flow communication from any communication. That is another communication. You see that? If you see that with considerable clarity, then you don't set up all of the blows you get in the jaw as your own cause.

Now, I'll let you in on something else. This is heresy; this is heresy of the first order. Punishment, the theory of punishment and all punishments are entirely inventions. The whole idea of punishment and the rationale connected with punishment is false. It is not native to this universe, it is simply invented. It's an invented thing. One has to work overnight, week after week and month after month, to figure out rationales of punishment, figure out why he is punished.

Now, a thetan gets so bad off after a while that when he runs into a doorjamb he will then spend a great deal of time figuring out why he was being punished, and by whom. But it's his invention. And this is the whole subject of reasonability. This is the whole subject of being reasonable. One rationalizes and adds reason to punishment. Don't you understand that?

Without any intervention by yourself, somebody, at this moment, could have dug a hole outside the front door. You walk out the front door, you fall in the hole. You bark your shins, you knock your forehead against the hole's edge, you bang yourself up something frightful. Well, that's certainly pain, isn't it? But the funny part of it is, it's not punishment. There is no reason for it at all.

So we get the basic significance of Clear. The basic significance is: there can be reasons, or not.

Now, the basic something — nothingness rationale comes out of this thing about reasons. You have to be able to accept no reason at all. Do you understand that? When you can accept no reason at all, then the overt act-motivator sequence can become just what it is, which is a mechanical push-pull. And the outflow need not at all influence the inflow. Do you see this?

And that punishment can exist or need not exist. In other words, here's something and nothing in the field of punishment.

Now, the first postulate a thetan has to make in order to get very, very aberrated, the first postulate he has to make is this: that there's something harmful about life. Now, he can make other postulates that finally get him down to this, and there's other gradient scales by which he enters into this trap. But it is both the first and the last formidable postulate. And that is there is something harmful about life — the business of livingness can contain a consequence. He has to make up his mind to this before anything can harm him. He has to decide he can be killed before he can be killed. He has to decide he can be burned before he can be burned.

One of the most remarkable things, once you follow it down philosophically, one of the most remarkable things you will ever encounter: There is no injury preceded by this. But once one has made up his mind, goodly or badly, that he can be hurt, he can then be hurt; he can then hurt.

Now, if one decides he should be punished, then the next time he barks his shins he has a reason for it, doesn't he? He has been punished. And so we get this idea of a collective, threatening, overwhelming and awe-inspiring Yahweh. The people who talked about Yahweh, I'm afraid, had never met him. If any of you had been Yahweh, I'm sure you would have been very upset at being so maligned. But we get collective world consciousness and all sorts of odd offshoots on this one basis: You decide that you can be hurt. You decide you should be punished. You get hurt. You decide you have been punished. This is totally irrational. There's no reason for this at all.

And yet, it is the consequence of restrained communication. " I must not communicate with that" will wind up, sooner or later, in you deciding that you can be hurt. You see that?

Now, when you ask somebody to handle an airplane, touch it and touch it and touch it and touch it and touch it, touch a wing, touch a strut, touch the stick, touch an instrument, touch the tail, touch the undercarriage, you see, you're actually running out, eventually, his idea that he can be hurt. Do you follow me?

His fear of being hurt, which depends upon his first postulate in the first place, is what restrains him from being competent in flying the airplane. But being incompetent in flying the airplane is the only thing that could hurt him about the airplane. Because if he was competent, he could handle the airplane in any situation it got into. And if he was really competent, then he would know where the wire was missing and that the cylinders weren't being filled with pistons properly. You get the idea? So his unwillingness to touch the airplane is what hurts him. You get this? He has to decide that he can be smacked by an airplane before an airplane can smack him. Do you get this?

Now, you can see this as totally true of a thetan without a body. Now, if you try to make sense in terms of a thetan with a body, we have the additional liability that we have innumerable postulates collected on the track which summate up to this point. So he's decided he could be hurt by so many vehicles, and he's proven it to himself so often, that he eventually becomes, again, superstitious — leaves it all up to chance and says, "If I am lucky."

You can have luck anytime you want to have luck. Just postulate you're going to have some luck. Say, "Well I haven't been lucky for a long time, haven't won any grand prizes or anything; I guess I'll win some grand prizes."

But, wait a minute. You've already made the postulates that you could be hurt!

Beware of awards. They are the first gate broken on the road in at you. You've decided an inflow could exist, where you were concerned. All right, there's nothing wrong with deciding an inflow could exist. But there's a great deal wrong with when you eventually decide that the inflow can be bad, and you have made the postulate that you can be hurt.

Now, until you get somebody to outflow again and inflow again, two-way comm with the airplane, or with life or with anything, you have these tremendous numbers of collected postulates about the harmfulness of it all, and this tremendous harm that can come to you if anything inflows toward you; the tremendous harm that can come to you if you outflow toward anything.

Psychosis is a must-reach-can't-reach, must-withdraw-can't-withdraw. And I have just described to you some of the things that enter into this final state. You say, "I will hurt," or "I will be hurt." "If I communicate, I will hurt." "If I am communicated with, I will be hurt." Eventually, develops into the physical must-reach-can't-reach, must-withdraw-can't-withdraw. And somebody goes crazy.

Clearing somebody does not consist of making nothing out of him and everything which he has. It consists only of this: of clearing his communication — outflow and inflow — of liability; clearing the idea of liability out of create or not-create. And I think that that is the total sphere.

Now, what he communicates with can be classified as I have classified it to you earlier. I've given you the four basic things that you can communicate with. You'll find somebody who is pretty nearly Clear can start to communicate with nothing with no liability, even though he is still in a body. Quite remarkable. But if he is not Clear and he starts to communicate with nothing, his body falls to pieces.

So we have the thetan universe, the universe of the mental image picture of the mind, the universe of body or bodies, the universe of the physical universe — the physical universe totally.

And a person must have a freedom of communication. And when we say Clear, we just would say, well, the clearing of the blocks of communication, the restraints of communication, clearing up the inflow-outflow liabilities, bringing him to a realization that he can communicate one way or the other. And we find as we do this that an individual's communication becomes freer and freer.

Now, there are two ways to perform this function. There's a long way and a short way. The long way we have in Objective Processes. And we have found that all of these things which debar him from communication are resident in his mind, and his mind is a curtain that lies between him and remaining universes. And to clear up the tangle in this mind, and to clear up the various postulates and so forth, that have been made, it is only necessary to address the mind and the sphere of the mind. And then we do get communication with the other three universes.

But what do we clear up in the mind?

Actually, we clear up the liability of restraint as a primary action, since this is the one thing that he is solidly hepped on; he is really — he is really ground into the dust on the subject of this. He doesn't think he can keep anything from going away. Well, let me assure you that you have to be able to position something before you can communicate with it. And we have the first criteria of communication. Now, he can communicate, no matter how shortly or longly, so long as it doesn't go any further away than he can communicate. So it is necessary for him to position something only to keep something from going away. He doesn't care how much closer it is to him, he can still communicate. So you have — merely have to restrain fartherness. Hence the total emphasis on Keep It from Going Away.

Now, in order to communicate with something, you should be able to hold it still. Do you see that? And as far as the next one is concerned, Make It More Solid, this is quite obvious, if you have ever tried to communicate with a gauze veil. It's a very good thing to have a good backdrop to communicate against, don't you see? Now, in view of the fact that he has been restrained, held still and made more solid consistently so somebody could communicate with him, and he has taken no responsibility for this fact at all, and disliked it mightily most of the time, you've got to get him to take over the automaticity of having been kept from going away, held still and made more solid. Therefore, merely by forming a more basic echelon of communication in mental image pictures and knocking apart these basic mental convictions: that if he speaks to anything, it'll vanish; that everything is going to be in motion if he moves toward it; that there is no backdrop for anything he says or does — merely by making him recover from those things alone and their stacked-up pictures in the mind, we get a Clear.

And the only thing that's really remarkable about having brought about this state of Clear, the only thing that's really remarkable is the fact that it has been done.

Thank you.