Well, I'm glad to see you people today. How are you doing?

Audience: Okay. Fine.

Ah, you're doing all right. Couple here — couple here are wondering how they ever got on the cause side of auditing.

I'll tell you something that's quite remarkable, you know? The person who is preclear first has a tendency to be more subjective about it all. And for a short time, when he starts to audit, he is quite likely to continue to be subjective. And in the processes you are doing, subjectivity is the first manifestation, so it's accentuated in this particular unit more than it ordinarily would be.

Now, you are not, you know, processing somebody to find out how to do it. There were some people that were still doing that Monday, and they still had an idea of learning how to do it. But this is not a drill. This is not a drill. The auditor is supposed to be doing it and he is making a Clear. This is not a drill. Reading a book last night about submarine service — very interesting — got me all restimulated. This is not a drill.

Well, today, I'd like to talk to you about Clears — third lecture on the subject of clearing people. I'd like to talk to you first about the history of it.

Of course, as you may or may not know, I spent quite a bit of time in the Orient when I was a kid. And very young men are quite impressionable, are quite easy to work with, and they'll buy almost anything that has enough impressiveness and so forth. And I spent the first year or so at this, buying almost everything, absorbing the thousand smells of the East and making friends, for the most part, with white people at that time. And later on I began to slip from grace in the eyes of the white people and I began to make friends with the native peoples. Of course, I don't think you could really call a Chinese a native — he is too deeply rooted for that.

But it was a white man that alerted me to this sort of thing. His name was Major Ian Macbean of the British Secret Service.

In those days the conduct of the American tourist was so flagrant, so reprehensible — he was dragged exclusively out of Keokuk and Des Moines — that, one went easy in the Orient about being an American. I mean that. The American always had a hard run in the Orient. And about the first thing I picked up from Major Macbean was a very fine British accent.

He was a graduate of several universities. He was a very learned man — a rather splendid fellow. At that time he was in his early thirties, but he actually looked like he was in his fifties. Because he was a good scholar and because he knew his business about the Orient, the War Office early in World War I, had sent him to Gallipoli, naturally — that being about as far from his talents as they could get.

He had a twin brother. And if I remember rightly he was a lieutenant at fifteen or sixteen, and he was a captain at seventeen, by line of casualty. They just grabbed these people out of school, you know, and threw them into uniform. He was a good officer. His twin brother had been killed, and he himself had been all but crippled with a bayonet in his guts at Gallipoli. They put barbwire under water there, and when the landing craft tried to land their troops, it was very embarrassing. They didn't get our later techniques.

But anyway, this man, by reason of having been an invalid for a long time and so forth, had increased and doubled and returned to his studies, you might say, and here he was, if I remember rightly, he really was in charge of British Secret Service in the vicinity of North China — in that area. He was a very, very fine man — none better. He probably passed to his reward long since — picked up another mock-up that he's probably being careful doesn't get sent to another Gallipoli.

But this fellow was, evidently, essentially very lonely. None of the whites out there shared any interest or enthusiasm in what they term "the native customs," and that these native customs had more historical background than any white custom that was around, seemed to miss them. It's like you're shoved a book when you're in grammar school, and this book says it's a history of the world. And you find yourself reading about the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and the French and then your own country. And where are you? You've read the history of the world? Well, the teachers in this day and age seem to think you have. Truth of the matter is, civilizations existed, flourished and died much fancier than anything we had a thousand years ago, and we pay no attention to it.

If we would merely include the Persian civilization, we would have a few of our more flagrant sources for some of our customs and activities. For instance, I think the Persian civilization even gives us such intimate things as Satan. That's the most intimate god known to the white man, I think. He never really finds out about the other one.

And we would have to look very strongly at China to get any kind of a realistic background of our methods of warfare and our cookery. It's quite remarkable. You look over the cookery of Italy even at this time and you're looking at basic Chinese cookery as brought back by Marco Polo. It's quite interesting — noodles, spaghetti, you know? Quite remarkable.

But anyway, here was this tremendously ancient civilization founded on civilizations they still had trace of that were now dead. And it seemed to be a long look, and it was a very interesting one. And through Macbean I made the acquaintance of many men who were extremely — well, you might say, expert in the lore of Asia in general and particularly in the world of mysticism, occultism, so forth.

But mysticism/occultism isn't our source. Our source, actually, is magic. Magic is something that, today, is performed on a stage with prestidigitation. But magic actually has a much more vivid and noble history than a stage magician. It is quite remarkable that the magician attempts directly to use spirits to perform his will. And that is his basic modus operandi. That is his goal in practicing magic.

And thus we find in the days of Kublai Khan, in North China, a corps of magicians who were employed to blow up storms to obfuscate the enemy, who were employed even in such mundane affairs as serving dinner. And they would conjure wine bottles through the air — they would fly through the air and pour a drink and fly back onto the sideboards, you see? The magician was not really germane or native, you might say, to China; he was an imported article, but he certainly flourished in China. And Kublai Khan's corps of magicians had continued in continuous line on down to the empress dowager that we cooked up a reason to knock off back in the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of this century. That's right. The British insisted on selling opium; she said no. And she said no a little too forcefully.

She had a young son who had a troop of acrobats come in and demonstrate to her that — to show you how low magic had fallen to this time — a troop of acrobats come in and demonstrate before the empress dowager that they could not be hit or slashed with steel. These acrobats were called Boxers. And they would slash at each other in very intricate patterns with very, very sharp weapons and not hit each other at all. Somehow or other they'd miraculously escape unscathed from these rather savage skirmishes, and the empress dowager was very impressed.

By the way, I was given the treat of watching a troop of Boxers (probably the last surviving troop of Boxers in the Forbidden City of the late twenties) actually go through their paces. And it had my breath very held — believe me. Scimitars and battle-axes and swords of various kinds flourishing through the air with such velocity and intricacy that you became certain the sword, last time, had passed immediately through the man's body.

And the empress dowager watching this show was convinced, and so was persuaded to declare war on the white legations which were in China at that time. Quite an interesting piece of chicanery — a far cry from Kublai Khan's magicians. She was persuaded by her son, then, that his troops could not be touched by the bullets of Her Majesty's marines or our marines. And they were very badly disabused of it. Nevertheless, that resulted in the deposing of the empress dowager, and the long line of magicians in China fell into entire disuse and decay. That was the end of that.

And the last of them was used as an intelligence agent by Major Macbean. Whatever his name was, it was a very, very fancy name — I couldn't remember it and I never put it down anyplace — he was known as Mayo. Mayo is actually colloquial for merely "good." And the old man was certainly good. He was, at the time I knew him, eighty-seven years old and he was as agile as a rubber doll. He was quite remarkable. But he was used as an intelligence agent. I have no doubt but what he used to go home into the apartment, throw the mock-up on the bed and look around and see what was going on, write his reports and collect his silver.

But this old fellow was the last surviving magician of the line that came in with Kublai Khan. Now, lord knows how long that line had been before that. And he supported himself — besides his Mex dollars from the British — he supported himself with displays of magic (merely prestidigitation, no more than that). And I made his acquaintance, and we became very good friends.

The old man could do some of the more remarkable things, such as do a front somersault and plant a pottery urn on the floor; do a back somersault and have a small tree; do a front somersault and have a full-grown orange tree with oranges on it. They would just appear, flip, flip, flip. And, then, do one more flip and a bowl of fish would appear on the floor with the fish swimming around merrily. Now, he carried all of these things under his gown, and by a series of hooks would detach one item and attach the item he picked up to his belt, and throw his skirt down and cover them. It's quite remarkable. The old man was getting old. There was an occasion when he was giving a show and he did not get his skirt back down, and there was his belt with several things appended to it. But this old man knew his business. He knew his business.

And Macbean was rather interested to find out that a friendship had grown up between the old man and myself. And he didn't go into it very far — being a very wise man — but he said, "You know," he said, "Ron," he said, "you keep going this road very far," he said, "and you're liable to run into something you won't understand." He could always make these gorgeous understatements.

Well, there — Mayo made it clear to me that there was really magic — real magic — and then the kind he was showing the public. And through these good offices I, later on, found myself up in the Western Hills. Somebody, one day, challenged my ordination. You know, they said, "You've given yourself an ordination." No, I'm afraid my basic ordination is much older than most ordinations in the Christian church.

But the point is that I not only ran into something I didn't understand, but something I was darn sure, I figured, I'd better find out about. If this sort of thing was going on, on this planet at this time, and if everybody was being totally stupid about it, then there must be two worlds in progress — at least. And one world didn't understand the other world.

Later on, in India and other places, I was convinced of two things. One, that the Asiatic magician, seer, the wise man and the holy man, that these were all very, very wise and had a great deal of information. I came to that conclusion. But the other conclusion I came to was that it wasn't doing them a bit of good — came to that conclusion very broadly — that they were intensely impractical. Therefore, their great wisdom had never been integrated. Whatever it was, we could say today it has not — it was not integrated with livingness. And when a man sought this trail, he parted from this life — that we could say.

The nonsense of the Indian rope trick — I've often offered students to show them the Indian rope trick if they would chip in. So far none of them have been willing to pay for it, and I've never shown it to them. But such things as the Indian rope trick done on mass hypnosis, such things as the inurement to pain where an individual can lie on a bed of spikes, such things as being able to make objects levitate without visible means of support, all very wonderful — no doubt about it at all. But they could not conceive that it had anything to do with living.

Well, I very far from became an expert in all these lines; I merely probably came to know more about them than other white men ever had, but that wasn't very much, you know? But I came to that basic conclusion: that no matter what they knew or how much they knew about it, it wasn't doing them a bit of good. It had not been integrated with the business of living or getting on in the world.

Here we had basically two paths. Over here, you studied, you disciplined yourself, you worked very arduously, you tried for an ascension of yourself over matter. That was on one route. It took you a long time. You worked very hard at it. And over on this other route, you lived. There was nothing in between, nothing in between. Livingness had nothing to do with the skills of the higher mental planes.

And I was an intensely practical young man — disgustingly so. I told Mayo one time, I said, "That's very nice. But I can't see that it has any use." The philosophy of these people (he had shown me something or other) and the philosophy of these people is best expressed with the amazement he turned on me: "To use this?" he said. It was a brand-new thought to really use this in some fashion. "Yes, but," he said, "who said that things had to be usable? Who said they had to be practical? Who said they had to have any connection with anything?" And, of course, I realize, coming out the other end now, that he was totally right. There's no reason why things have to have a reason. But he believed this to the exclusion of the fact that when he began to entertain people with magic, he put on a belt with small hooks and hung pots and urns and orange trees and fish bowls and wedding cakes on them, you know?

Now, I'll let you in on something: he could do it without the belt! The remarkableness of the man is manifest in just one physical item: he was eighty-seven years old and he could do standing front flips and standing back flips without the use of his hands — very, very, very agile. And yet, when he began to use something, he used something that was pure chicanery. But when he began to talk of ancient wisdom, why, he talked of things that were marvelous and beyond, at least, my understanding — not totally.

He probably put up with me for various reasons. And the wise men I ran into probably put up with me for various reasons. Because I assure you I was a very bumptious young man. I saw no reason to sit still until your legs were warped just to get someplace and do something.

Occasionally one of these old fellows, in a temple or someplace or another, would take a look at me and begin to serve me tea and cakes with considerable reverence and awe, and so forth, and I suppose that was just some buildup that Mayo sent on in advance. But they had me earmarked. They had me earmarked, long ago. All right.

Now, these people — these people are supposed to possess considerable powers. But my conclusion was that they couldn't use them. And if I couldn't use something, I didn't want it. My havingness was not down to a point of where I could leave a beautiful vase parked upon a shelf and just know that I had had it. Just to know I had it was not enough. To keep some bric-a-brac in a vault someplace and just be satisfied to know that I had it in a vault someplace, I'm afraid that wasn't my idea of havingness. A much more active — perhaps if lower toned — idea of havingness is to be able to use it, and not be so much in awe of it that you could not handle it. I imagine there are people that have one of Napoleon's false teeth or something that they never dare get it out and touch it. It's just too valuable, you know? Something has been in the family for years and nobody has ever wrapped his hands around it. It's just there and it itself becomes a tradition even though it is an object.

Well, when I finally came back to America — forced back to America, practically at a pistol point (a wonder my father didn't add a squad of marines to it — the amount of squall I put up.) I came back and I went to school. My scholastic record is — it's not just a mistake, it's a cataclysm. I had all the virtues of being a very, very quick study and all the liabilities of not wanting to waste my time in class. And between these two, I used to make my dean and other people very unhappy.

Mathematics department called me in one time and informed me that I had just performed the amazing feat of having flunked every subject in their department in that semester. They said that had never happened before. So I took them up on it, and I made them promise to give me an examination and give me the grade of my examination, if they would, please. And with great security, they did so. But I went home and I read the textbooks very fast and went back the next morning and got a hundred on their exams. Whew!

But, that was a very unhappy period to me because I found myself in an entirely unreal world — a world quite as unreal as the world of the supernatural, the magical. A world where everything was convincedly mest; where matter, energy, space and time, alone, occupied any interest point at all. I found myself in a world where a man might as well know the answer just by knowing the answer but went through a bunch of mathematical manipulations to attain it which always seemed to me rather odd. If you know the problem, you certainly don't need much via to find the answer. And yet I found a whole cult of worship in the world of mathematics; they all but burned joss before the altar of their scrap paper. They would do the most remarkable things just to put something in mathematical terms. And they could never get it through their heads that they had the answer in its form in the first place before they could phrase it.

That shortsightedness was such a blind spot to me — on their part — that I'm afraid I didn't respect them. I saw them as wild-eyed, and if you please, as stupid, as irrational, if you please, as fixed, as psychotic as any madman I had ever seen in the Western Hills spinning on his heel for the good of some particular deity.

Now, because these men are not seen against any other scene, we do not realize that their "dedication" is a fanaticism. There is no more dangerous fanaticism in the world today than the fanaticism of science, which puts a subject above a man. That is very, very dangerous fanaticism. "In the name of science . . ." they used to say in the horror pictures. You see Bela Lugosi in the Murders of the Rue Morgue, working for science. It didn't matter how many young girls got knocked off, he was working for science. Oddly enough, even though they made fun of it way back when, that is the dedication of science. It doesn't matter how many people go by the boards as long as the subject, the equation, stays in the air.

Now, the Asiatic says it doesn't matter how many men or women or children go by the boards so long as the deity, the principle, the secret password stays in the air.

I don't think there's very much difference between these two, except this: one is in the direction of spirit, the other is in the direction of the physical. They're equally fanatic.

Somebody steps up to me and says, "We're going to give you an opportunity to get shot off in the next rocket and we're not going to make any preservations for you to get back."

I would say, "Oh, you're going to give me this opportunity, eh? Well, that's very, very white of you. I, however, feel that I must decline."

He would undoubtedly tell me, "Well, you'll do it in the name of science." That's very interesting. Why not in the name of Yahweh, you see? Why not in the name of many other things? But the truth of the matter is, the only thing live around there is he and me. Get the idea?

So, here were two very extreme viewpoints. I had found fault with one — the earlier one — because it had no practical application. On the contrary, people would fight if you tried to apply it practically. A fellow could excite dust devils and blind people, and yet I have seen them permit a whole monastery to be searched from top to bottom and robbed by itinerant soldiers. I said to the prior one time when this had happened — I wasn't there — and I said to him, "Why didn't you whip up a couple of dust devils?"

He looked at me rather sourly and he said, "That would have been sacrilegious." In other words, it had gotten too valuable to use, you understand?

Now, similarly, you will see a day — you will see a day when quantum mechanics will not be used because it's too sacred. A whole nation going by the boards, but nobody will use an atomic warhead because it's too sacred. The sacredness merely means that there isn't enough of it, you have to safeguard it and you have to protect it.

Well, in this rather meandering story I have given you here, you should be able to grasp the fact that I was given the opportunity to see that there were two worlds. And I saw, additionally, that those two worlds were not separate. I saw that every scientist was walking around as a spiritual being, unable to grasp the fact; and that every spiritual man was walking around as a material being and was unable to grasp the fact. And the common denominator of it is that they were unable to grasp the fact.

So, I embarked upon the rather perilous adventure over a long period of years of grasping the fact if I could. And the horrible forecast of Major Macbean came true. I ran into something I did not understand.

Now, we are not dealing in Scientology with a compromise between these two schools. I found out that the data in both schools was relatively unusable. All it might serve to do was simply point out the existence of the schools. Therefore, any search undertaken had to be undertaken quite freshly. And after I got out of — I was not expelled from the university; I simply left of my own accord. The — well, as a matter of fact I was very well liked at the university, right here in town but not by my professors.

And I began to see that there was more that could be done in life — and something else. I graduated into the midst of a depression. I found out that I could write fiction. I supported any research or investigation which I did simply with the writing of fiction — made a pretty good job of it, too. I used to make about a thousand dollars a month, had a good show of it.

But it wasn't until 1938 that I could put my finger on anything. And at that time I had a common denominator. I didn't realize it then — I realize it now — that it was the common denominator of mest and the common denominator of a spirit. So, it was the common denominator of these two worlds. And that was simply: survive. They were both surviving.

And anything, even today, that comes down to practical use and that does produce a result breaks down to this basic idea: The dynamic principle of existence is survive. We have not, at this moment, avoided it one iota. As a matter of fact, I became quite pleased a few weeks ago to find out that our Clear Procedure checks very thoroughly against "The dynamic principle of existence is survive." There was a common denominator. Maybe there are other things, but I don't know that they were that pervasive or that common or that continuous. But, certainly, "survive" was continuous. Both of these universes had, then, this as a common denominator.

The odd part of it is, is it was what was wrong with both of them. They were surviving, and you couldn't do anything about it — very remarkable. So, as we look over the world of survival, we find out that the survival to a scientist is anything which apparently goes on forever and on which he can lay his hands. That is survival and that is the thing which he worships. And to the person who is working over here in the field of the spirit, anything spiritual which goes on and becomes very old and which he cannot lay his hands on is worshiped. Both of them wind up in an attitude of worship.

And in 1938 I decided that man deserved a breakthrough on the idea of worship. I see no reason to worship anything, anywhere — highly iconoclastic. But I don't see any reason why any subject of investigation should wind up in the world of worship — quite remarkable. I mean, why should it? Why not just understand it? Anything one starts to worship is something he can't understand. So, therefore, the dynamic principle of existence, when it came into being, came along with this little maxim (at the time I didn't think it was more than a maxim): If one could understand everything, nothing could touch him. In other words, being secure or safe depended upon understanding. Understanding seemed to be the one denominator of human action that could be undertaken with no liability. Trying to understand very probably could wind up with a liability, but understanding couldn't. And this came up at the same time as the dynamic principle of existence — very, very remarkable — understanding.

Now, man had made a fetish out of knowingness and unknowingness, as in Herbert Spencer's work. But knowing, understanding are really two different things. And when we look over this world of knowing — when we look over this broad world of knowing, we're evidently merely researching data or identifications of some sort or another. And to it we have to add no spiritual quality at all. You know it, you see? Well, that's not the same as understand it. Understand infers a rationalization of two data. There are two data involved in an understanding rather than one. It is knowing how two data can live together, knowing what relationship exists amongst data, knowing where what is, and why. We actually took off at that time in the field, if you please, of epistemology — the study of pure knowledge. Wow! More asinine things have been said about pure knowledge than about any other item. There's more unknowing incomprehensibility in textbooks on the subject of knowledge than anyplace else. A philosopher seems, in the past, to have been dedicated to the idea that to write about knowingness one must be unutterably incomprehensible.

The Critique of Pure Reason — oh no! I mean, how — the only reason it could go on being translated and published and published and published on up to the present time, would just be one reason only: somebody hopes that somebody, sooner or later, will be able to read the whole thing and understand what it's about. The man, then, turns around and writes himself another book. In The Critique of Pure Reason, he explains conclusively that man is sustained by an innate moral sense, and then writes another book and tells you how he gets paid for it; and infers that he has it because he gets paid for it. I think that Immanuel Kant couldn't. They called him the Great Chinaman of Königsberg, but he would have driven even a complicated Chinese daffy. I don't recommend your reading this book, unless you want to see how bad it can get. Man's innate moral sense that he would have in any wise — that is always native and with him at all times, and then he writes another book and says the reason he's got it is to get — he gets paid for it. He didn't even make sense with himself. This is in the field of epistemology.

Of course, his great contribution was something else. And it laid directly across our paths. And you've heard me make snide comments about Immanuel Kant before; if you've never read him, you won't know why. But, actually, the man laid a proposition across our track, across the track of man and across the track of understanding, the like of which nobody had ever run into before. Now, I won't pretend to be an expert in the field of philosophy. A definition of a philosopher, in the modern university, is one who has read the philosophers. My definition is: it's one who can philosophize. I leave it to you which is most useful to a society.

This thing called transcendental logic — oh no! You say, "How could anything like this lie across our paths?" Well, do you know that when you try to talk to somebody in a university, you're talking across this unstable fixation which I'm talking about right this minute? He believes, if you please, that there is a body of data which exists above all other data, which is unknowable, will never be reached by you or him or anybody else — what a defeatism! Look — look, it's an utterly impossible proposition. But it has been rammed down the throats of every Bachelor of Arts that ever came near a course in philosophy. You see that? He says a body of data transcends all knowledge in some fashion — that there's some big stuff up here someplace that you're never going to have anything to do with, ever. And its definition is: that nobody could have anything to do with it. It transcends understanding.

Well, I settled that in Dianetics: Evolution of a Science. Remember that? It says if you can — if you'll never reach it by any route, it certainly can never reach you, so to hell with it. That, as far as I was concerned, wound up Kant.

But, the jungle through which I had to machete my way was tremendous. It was both a spiritual jungle that said it took a hundred and ninety-nine years of sitting in a contemplative attitude and then never doing anything with it. One of the basic laws of this spiritual world was idiotic; it says you can only be trusted — you could only obtain power when you can be trusted with power. Therefore, you have to prove you're totally weak before anybody gives you any strength — what a gorgeous thing. They're waiting for somebody to hand them some strength, huh? — by showing they can be trusted with it.

Strength doesn't come from anyplace except the fellow. I'm probably stirring up some old banks here. Nobody is going to give you power because you can be trusted with it. If you've got power — real power — you can be trusted with it. That we had to find out, too. So, there's that idiocy, you see, going on and on and on.

The field of philosophy and understanding is totally jammed, saying nobody could ever understand any part of it. And we get into this gorgeous thing of Spencer's knowable and unknowable. It's a gorgeous potpourri. Here, again, is a world of the unknowable.

Well, to get around these scholars more than anything else, in Book One you will find that the world of knowledge is divided into the knowable and unknowable, and you can skip the unknowable. That actually doesn't come out flat-footed and give you the whole story, but it merely says — actually infers — that if you can't know it, it can never know you, so skip it.

I didn't say it didn't exist, and the Great Chinaman of Königsberg was probably the greatest liar of all time. What a swindle to invent a body of knowledge you will never know about. He infers it can affect you totally. Man, I guess he certainly ended cycle on philosophy. As a matter of fact, there have been no really great philosophers since Kant. That threw them all into apathy.

Now, there was another fixation which confronted us, and that was the fact of "knowledge for its own sake was good enough." Now, this had begun to enter the world of the material as well as the world of the spiritual. Knowledge for its own sake was good enough. You didn't have to do anything with it. It didn't have to be true. You just apathetically sit there and look at it.

Out of this same philosophy we got the chap who took an observation and found the eighth planet. He published the fact. Everybody scoffed at him — boo, jeered. The guy — I've forgotten who it was — but he, some very popular philosopher of the day, had just written a book proving that "because seven was a perfect number, there could only be seven planets." And the world of knowledge accepted the philosopher and paid no attention to the observation made by this historic astronomer. They didn't even go out and look because it had been conclusively proven by logic that there couldn't be eight planets. And that the man had seen one had no bearing on it at all. We had the whole field of authoritarianism, then, in our teeth.

What is authoritarianism? It's, "Because — because I say so, it is true; don't look." That's its byword. Now, it constitutes a major breakthrough to cancel out one of the bugbears of philosophy, to break through the various cordons of resistance such as this thing: "The authority says this is the case. Therefore, it is the case. Don't look. The motto there could be "Obey; don't look." And obviously we needed another approach — not the authoritarian approach.

Now, we still see around us — but most of us pay very little attention to it — we still see the world of authority. There are authoritarian subjects that totally depend on authority, not observation. Amongst these: social sciences, composed of sociology, psychology, several other things. It's the world of: "It's in the textbook, so it's true. Don't go find it out for yourself. Don't look at it."

Here we get the crime — you want to know how intimately this joins up — you get the crime of psychiatry. Whereas every day in a sanitarium they shock, oh, lord knows how many people — blow their brains out with high voltages, break their spines, kill every — I think they kill a person every twenty shocks or something on this order. It's sort of — they maim him every twenty shocks — I've forgotten what the exact datum is, but it's either kill or maim every twenty shocks.

And they know this doesn't do them any good. They will tell you so. But the world of authority has decreed it, and therefore, it is not up to you to do otherwise than to electric shock people or accept electric shocks. They could observe directly that it has never helped anyone and yet they do it.

A psychiatrist once told me, I could be arrested and thrown in jail if I did not follow the prescribed treatment in handling a psychotic case. But the prescribed treatment is killing them or injuring them and never making them well. Now, there's where the world of authority leads you. It leads you into total irrationality and psychosis. Authoritarianism is the invitation to madness.

And we are probably the first major breakthrough of this century on that particular subject. It has been broken through before. Many men have been burned at the stake for saying, "I have looked, and what you have said is not true."

And they say, "Well, here we go." They could even take a man like Galileo and imprison him.

Of course, they didn't get very far with Galileo. He — after they wound up, after the whole trial and hocus-pocus was all gone through, he said, "And still it turns."

Now, those breakthroughs all add up and probably give us our opportunity to make a breakthrough. But don't forget that we broke through in defiance of authority. And don't, therefore, ever set up an authority.

Now, once in a while you may get confused about this because I apparently am setting up an authority. No. I am simply setting up an exactness of observation. I say, "The data observed looked this way, and before you depart too far from it, these were the hard-won data. Now, after you've looked at these or after you have looked around their vicinity, why, go on and look elsewhere."

Now, we've been doing things in a very fast way, and therefore, it has made it necessary at times to say, "Do this," you see?

Well, man has been looking at random in the world of the mind, the world of the spirit and the physical universe for a very, very long time. And we didn't have time to look at random. We had a much better possible route. And that was the route of bringing people up to a point where they could look. Do you see that? And that, of course, would be the final breakout against authoritarianism. The final breakout would be to put a man in a position where he could observe.

Authoritarianism, arbitraries, are only accepted so long as no one is permitted to look, or so long as no one can look. And after you've been told not to look long enough and often enough, you get so where you can't look. So, our route was the accomplishment of an observation platform from which a man could observe, and from these observations make up his own mind. And that observation platform is what we call Clear.

Therefore, the state of Clear does not give you total knowingness. It could, but it depends to some slight degree upon the individual himself. The state in itself turned out to be totally worthwhile, which was a surprise. It tells me now that having gone through these — well, it's twenty-five years, I guess (something like that), of rather steady research. And the last seven (ten, really) — I've known about Clears for ten years. And I could never put my finger on the button or know just why it was that I could take somebody and by working with him some long number of hours achieve a result, and then another auditor couldn't do it. And I'd try to tell the other auditor how to do it, and then I'd have to articulate what I was doing and this would mess me up in what I was doing. Like you ask an actor to explain how he acts, and he all of a sudden falls on his face.

You had to articulate all this and then communicate it over here, and then you had to have the least — the method least subject to difficulties, you see? You had to have a better method in order to communicate the method. All of these things have been going on here for this last ten years. But all we have achieved — all we have achieved is a state which can be tested objectively and subjectively.

Now, the basic definition of Clear must be somebody without facsimiles. You'll find the only basic liability a person has is his facsimiles. And mental image pictures is the only liability he has because they hold overt act-motivator mechanisms. And every other phenomena we have ever discussed are all resident in pictures. So if he goes on having these pictures he doesn't want and can't think with, and they're out of control, then his whole past is shoved in his teeth. The mystic calls it karma — his karma. Well, his karma is just a , series of pictures, you see?

But all these misdemeanors are held there. And the girl ruins her beauty and the man ruins his strength with a clutch on these pictures, evidently. And basically a Clear was simply: Get rid of the liability of the pictures — in other words, get rid of the screen. And a person can then observe and know directly; he can communicate directly and he certainly can understand because his understanding is not impeded by a great many artificial arbitraries which have been carefully installed into him. He becomes free, then — free of what? Free of the liabilities of his own barriers.

But these barriers were resident somewhere, and that was probably the greatest discovery I ever made — is that the barriers were somewhere, that they existed somewhere, that they had mass, they had residence somewhere. In other words, they weren't just you making up your mind. Basically, we say, all you had to do was change your mind and you could have been Clear in the first place — there's nothing to it. I don't know. Why didn't you? Why didn't somebody do it? Well, that's because he was mocking up at the same time obsessively, and didn't know it, all manner of barriers against his changing his mind. Very complicated picture, isn't it?

So, it apparently looks like the fellow is doing it all to victimize himself, but it's out of his control. And you ask him, "Why don't you just stop it?" — and he can't. You know, it's a — you challenge a fellow for doing something that he cannot do otherwise than.

And, therefore, there was a screen between a person and his ability to observe. There was a screen between himself and the various things that he could observe. So anybody, then, could tell him lies. So anybody could lead him astray. So a whole life could go awry. So it could become psychotic and unlivable — in two universes, if you please, could become psychotic and unlivable — one, in this totally materialistic universe of science and the other, this totally unreal, impractical, too-sacred-to-use universe of the spirit.

And these two universes, alike, were unusable. Why? Because as he departed into them, he picked up liabilities concerning both which eventually barriered him and made it impossible for him to observe. He could no longer look. But who was blinding him? Well, actually, somebody else had, but he had a picture of it, so you could say, basically, he was. So all man became subject to authoritarianism no matter how cruel or arbitrary that authoritarianism was. No matter how impractical it was, he became a victim of any irrationality.

Therefore, the goal, the end product — of course, it was dreamed basically and very early, a wonderful dream — a man might be free. Man might be free of the concatenation, from generation to generation, of his errors. And that was a big dream in itself. For a long time I was afraid that his freedom would result in total inaction. I was afraid that if he went on acting in this universe, the liabilities would be such that he would simply become entrapped all over again. There are many things that could have gone wrong. There are many things that could be wrong with the state of Clear. I'm happy to tell you that these things aren't wrong with the state of Clear; but that it's just luck.

Now, all of this research adds up to just this fact: I don't believe that the mystic ever produced a Clear. I do not believe that the state of bodhi existed in more than one man. I do not believe that a createdness of a point of observation was ever done before. I really think we're brand-new.

To agree with people, populaces and so forth, we could go on and call this a state of bodhi; we could call it almost anything. But the truth of the matter is, I think we have something that is brand-new in this universe, which is a total freedom to observe and to play a game.

Total freedom to observe might be worthwhile all by itself. But the Asiatic taught me that if he observed totally, he did nothing about it. So, therefore, I do not think he observed. Watching a Clear in action, I find him perfectly able to undertake action and I do not find him acting like an Asiatic who has sat and contemplated his navel for the last fifty years.

Therefore, because I can test the state, because I know it clearly, because we have great certainty on it, we now know more about it than the men who were teaching me. That is for sure. Because we have the object itself that we can inspect, and that is very important. But more important than that, we can become, without dedicating several generations to a monastery, capable of observation ourselves.

So, therefore, I believe we have attained the first major breakthrough man has gotten in this universe for a very, very long while. It is almost totally accidental that it took place since it was accidental that my basic antecedents would take me into the Orient and then bring me face-to-face with Western engineering — wow! To confront the rather high, do-nothingness but very wise state of the Asiatic holy man and to actually partake of this, and to look at it with something like horror that people could be so idle and know so much and do so little; and to turn around on the other hand and confront the brutality of engineering, was probably too great a disparity on both hands. And out of a state of shock and an inability to reconcile them, I did what has been done here, and we have accomplished the breakthrough.

But, however it is, it took both. And in working with Clears, remember that it takes both the spiritual and the material to carry on; it takes both. And people who go on one road or the other get nowhere. And I think, however, that we haven't gotten nowhere; we've definitely gotten somewhere. And I think somewhere in the immediate future you will have a better viewpoint of this than all of my words could tell you.

Thank you very much.