How are you?
Audience: Good. Fine.
Well, we have here the first lecture of the 19th ACC, and the coverage includes an E-Meter.
Your material in this ACC is very interesting material, that I assure you. There's no material actually in this ACC that's been thoroughly and fully covered before. And a lot of you are going to sit there in this ACC and you're going to say, "Oh yes, I've heard that, I've heard that." Well, listen, listen twice, will you? Because you haven't heard these things. You only think you have.
The way it works is this: a three-quarter truth will very often pass for a full truth. And when you hear the three-quarter truth, why, that tells you, "Well, that's fine, now I know what this is all about." And then somebody tells you the full truth and you say, "Well, I've heard that before." And that is exactly what's going to happen here as I cover this material. You're going to say, "Oh yes, yes, that's right, I know that — old Creative Processing. Yes, I know that — years old." The thing you will have missed is the slight precision of the definition, which has now become a very set definition.
Actually, the project of clearing has not been an actual physical fact in the hands of other auditors than myself for more than five weeks. Now, there must have been something that made this sweeping difference, since no technique we are now using was totally unknown. We knew three-quarters of the technique, don't you see? That makes it all sound like it's old hat. But it was the missing quarter and a few of the interesting little odds and ends of definitions — "unimportant," of course, "that's just theory" — that made it possible for clearing to occur rather easily after all these seven years of hard struggle.
Therefore, this is a very fortunate ACC because for the next four weeks it is going to get some subjective reality on this, and there are some here that are going to come out the other end Clear.
The first thing we had to have before we could embrace a final goal on a sweeping front — that is to say, we could say lots of people can do this — in fact, was training. We had to get training pretty well nailed down.
Well, all we had to do to get training nailed down was to nail down the entire subject of education. This is rather simple. But we had to find out exactly what education was and why it was and why we adventured upon it. Now, I'm not going to try to give you the precision definition of education because I haven't worked it out for a book which will be published on education sometime this year, giving the axioms of education and so forth. But the basic definition of education, paraphrased, would be something like this, just something like this, you understand — any one of you could take the thing I'm about to give you and phrase it better — it's just this: Education would be the act or system of relaying an idea, an art or a skill or a datum from one being to another for the understanding and free use on the part of the other — of the other. Do you see that? It'd be the understanding and free use.
Education does not consist of relaying an art, a skill, an idea or a datum from one being to another so that the other will never afterwards be able to change his mind concerning it, so he'll never afterwards be able to think with it and will never afterwards be able to free himself of it.
Now, a scientist recently called us in some hysteria — we get a lot of this sort of thing here in Washington — from the Bureau of Standards saying he had just picked up a manuscript of a book by some professor who was laying down the law concerning education to the United States government. And this professor said, rather startlingly, that education should consist of a duress and a vigor sufficient so that the student would never afterwards be able to think otherwise or depart from the teachings of his professor. That book is either on the market or will be shortly and is a very authoritative work. Very, very authoritative.
Now, it's all very well this chap at the Bureau of Standards, this scientist was justifiably worried. But he needn't have worried too much because we'll be there firstest with the mostest. And anybody who thinks that, of course, couldn't write so there will be no popularity of the work, that's assured.
The point is, here, that education embraces this idea of freedom of use and understanding of the art, the skill, the idea. It is not given to a student so that he will never afterwards be able to move out of it, you see? It's never given to him in this wise. It can't be because he is not able to think with it.
Well, now, we've always had this as a principle in Scientology, but what changed? What changed here?
Well, what changed is, is how far we dared go in the direction of making an auditor. How far did we dare go in beating him over the head, hypnotizing him, threatening him with duress, the lead boot, the knout, the sjambok in order to make an auditor out of him.
Well, we found we could go quite a ways. Because we found out something else about education. This something else blew up the whole background of conditioning. The whole idea of psychological conditioning blew up. There is no such thing. This is quite amazing. There is something that looks very like conditioning, which isn't.
Now, the physiological mental practitioner — I don't know how he can be a mental practitioner if he's a physiological one, but he manages it — he has called himself a psychologist. But he can't, of course, legally — he sure won't after we get through with him — because that means spirit. But he believed that physiologically there was some little wiggle-whumph in the brain that stored up some kind of an action — reaction stimulus-response mechanism, and all you had to do was pile experiences on top of experiences in this stimulus-response rattrap and finally it would be the rattrap running the guy, not the guy running life. And this was his idea of conditioning.
Well, following it through to a reductio ad absurdum, if an individual fell off a horse often enough, he would be able to ride a horse. He didn't see anything odd in this because, obviously, punishment had to accompany the act, don't you see? If he believed the reactive stimulus-response mechanism was necessary, then he believed that anything you learned to do must have punishment connected with it. Otherwise it couldn't have been reactive. There must be duress, then, in anything anyone learned. So one couldn't ride a horse unless he kept falling off of a horse. Do you see? You get the idea?
Male voice: Yeah, I do.
At no time, then, could one learn anything from the book unless the book regularly bit him. Now, this was what was understood by conditioning. It was the installing of a response for a given stimuli. I think that even uses the word of this dodo. It was an installing a response for a given stimuli.
The Germans, by the way, used to train troops with this idea. Wonderful troops, there is no doubt about it. They have now lost two great wars. Everybody overlooks this fact about them losing the war, you see. This "great troops."
Of course British troops — British troops have a certain amount of duress pushed in their direction with their training. But I don't believe the British intellect is that easily overwhelmed.
The American troops have practically no duress connected with their training and they seem to learn pretty well, pretty fast.
But neither one of these two were trained on a stimulus-response mechanism, and the two of them together more or less have mopped up the Germans twice. Do you see? I mean that's one of these wonderful things that happen in the practical universe that reverses all of the beautiful best-laid plans of your theoretician. All right.
If the whole German army was trained on a stimulus-response basis, if lots of duress had to accompany it and if the basic idea of the training was that he would never be able to do anything else — which it was — when you said, "Squads east," to a German squad, it, of course, went east and kept on going east until it adopted kismet. They couldn't do anything else.
The truth of the matter, however, is that battles are not organized activities. Before the battle you have an organized activity, but after — during and after, you don't have organization. It's a very funny thing, chaos is the antithesis of organization. And battles are chaos, and organization is, of course, order. And men who behave perfectly, men who obey the shore patrol, troops that are always on time, always have a pass before they leave the post, always turn themselves back in before their leave is up — what beautiful soldiers and sailors these are. They are models, they're gorgeous. Only, you don't want them around in a fight.
Well, these people have been punished into perfect obedience, some duress or another, so they'd never depart from the pattern. Duress, fear of punishment, fear, more fear, threat. "You'll get court-martialed," "You'll go to the brig," "You'll do this," "You'll do that," holds them then in some groove of behavior. And when chaos is enjoined the groove of behavior disappears and a helter-skelter, out of pace, not planned, all upside-down activity then takes place. You can send men up on a ship to general quarters time after time after time, and you've always had Jones, Smith and Reeves on number one gun. And Jones, Smith and Reeves always ran number one gun every drill you ever drilled. But just before the battle was engaged, personnel officer took Jones and Reeves away from you. You usually are engaging not on the perfect plan at all but some patch-up. And if you have robbed your people of flexibility, then they can never hit in the pinches. You get that? Because they're a stimulus-response mechanism now.
But the funny part of it is, if they are a stimulus-response mechanism, they have not been trained, they have been untrained.
Now, I'll give you this fantastic thing. Here's the only thing you can do for a thetan: You can give him confidence and familiarity. And in doing this you unlearn for him his fear. And the only thing that keeps a thetan from knowing a subject totally is his withdrawal from it, his fear of it, his now-I'm-supposed-to-not-know-this. In other words, you take this being who has total knowingness, who has done a nice trick of not-know, and now we stack up and add up a number of factors concerning his life. All we have to do is reapproach total know.
Well, if we aid and abet holding off from the object that he is to be trained in — punishment — we aid and abet and dramatize the not-know factor. And if we turn around and make him familiar — just that, no more — familiar with the object, we're putting him closer to truth, which is total know.
And conditioning works only when this familiarity factor is increased, when the person's fear of the object is erased by continued and increasing familiarity with it. Becomes more and more familiar with it, he becomes less and less afraid of it, which is to say, when he becomes more and more familiar with it, he becomes less and less not-know about it. And there's something very remarkable has taken place: You have simply put him into a position to know what he knew already.
And the punishment has, on a stimulus-response basis, substituted for his knowing the subject an additional fear of the subject and a new pattern with regard to it. So he will never, then, learn anything else. Because you've established his not-know with regard to the subject. You've said, " If you don't learn this, I'm going to beat you." Well, beating is a not-knowingness. He's diffident about it. He's afraid he'll find out all about life and then he won't even be able to live it. He's got some very interesting ideas concerning the fact of what would happen to him if he became all-knowing, all-seeing, all-doing. He thinks that he'd just go all to pieces. He approaches this with some fear. Evidently the most terrible thing that could happen to a thetan is that he would become so familiar with the game he'd be totally out of a game.
All right, so much for stimulus-response. All stimulus-response ever did, if it ever existed, was to aid and abet not-knowingness. And all you had to do was to get somebody to not-know his subject a little better with threat of punishment and so forth, and you established a stimulus-response mechanism where he wouldn't ever confront the subject, where he'd back up from the subject, where he'd never look at the subject.
And if you wanted an individual to drive a car thoroughly, I'm afraid you would never have to tell him how to shift the gears, you would never have to tell him where the engine switch is or anything else. Now, this has not been done because we didn't have anybody more aboriginal than a US senator or something like this. That's all the aborigines we had, and they unfortunately have some acquaintance with the subject of an automobile, and we would have to actually go very far afield to establish this completely. We would need someone adult and not unintelligent already, you see, not in bad shape, who had just never seen or heard of an automobile, to run this test.
Now, you'd have to set this one up somehow or another artificially to get around these limitations, but it would work this way: The high probability is that by having him touch and withdraw from an automobile and having him observe the activity of the automobile, without ever a word of explanation about an automobile and without a moment's coaching on the subject directly to him, you would make a driver out of somebody who had never before seen or heard of one. You see this? All you had to do was make him become familiar with the automobile.
It then didn't consist of the data, did it? It then didn't consist of the data about the automobile; it consisted of his increased familiarity with the automobile. When you taught him something, you erased something; you didn't install something new. And that's the other datum we've learned in education. Terribly important datum: when you teach somebody something, you erase something; you do not install something new. That's rather a fabulous thing when you look it over. The only thing you erase is his fear. You erase his unfamiliarity. Very amusing when you look it over. It may take some time to do it. And one person is more not-know than others and, you might say, more afraid than others, more withdrawn than others. So therefore, it would take one person longer than another to learn something.
Now, when we deal with the upper strata of the mind, we can experience it and we can confront it and we can face it. But mine has been a more difficult task, if you will pardon me, and that was the communicating of it. Do you know that no language existed here seven years ago concerning the mind? A bunch of Latin words that were expected to rattle around in somebody's cranium concerning his cranium, and this was all supposed to explain everything. But there were not adequate terms to describe the actual phenomena. There was not even a language.
The task of maintaining a simple language which would at once speak has been a very interesting one, and that it's been accomplished is quite evident, and semantically it's probably quite a triumph all by itself. But the point is the communication of the information required, then, more than an observation. It required a verbal understanding and an articulation. Oh, how much better you have to know a subject in order to describe it than to do it. You run into fellows all the time, and he says, "Oh, I can paint, but how I do it I don't know." Well, I could process people years ago but how I did it I didn't know. It was very interesting. The bulk of the activity in the field of education has merely been familiarizing people with the idea that something could be done about it by familiarizing themselves with the various parts of the mind and body.
We found, at long length, that we could be this awfully simple — and it seemed just too simple for words, but this simple — that the four parts you had to know about in order to know about everything else, the four subjects that had to be covered in order to know all the subjects to be covered, were very easily announced, but nobody had ever announced them before. And now when you announce them the truth is so true, and it is so casual, that nobody ever says, "Gee-whiz, that was quite a bright observation." They say, "Yes, of course." You don't get any credit when you do your job too well. That's why soldiers always come back from battles with a couple of holes in them or staggering or with rips in their uniform.
Now, the four parts of the universe and the mind and so on, the four parts of existence with which an auditor had to be very familiar before he could do anything, had to be established. And these were pretty well known but they then had to be articulated, and then one had to educate somebody in them. All these were different steps. And the four parts, of course, as you know, are just the physical universe, the body (the whole subject of a body or bodies), the mental image picture and its attendant monkey-business machinery and the viewpoints you use to see the mental image picture and all that sort of thing. But mainly the mental image picture in its formation was this other thing called the mind. That's three of them, you see: the physical universe, the body, the mental image picture and its combinations, and this thing called a thetan, the spirit.
Well, each one of those not only had to be isolated but had to be seen as one of the four major subjects. And it had to be established so that there were no other major subjects to observe so that two things could happen: so that these could be discussed and talked about in such a way that people could become familiar with them, and thus education could occur on this subject. You understand that? You had to have these four things; you had to establish there weren't any more than these four; you had to establish that all of these four did exist and were to some degree a little bit different than the other three, each one; you had to have an articulation of these things, an understanding of them, and then you had to have some kind of a formulated idea such as the rules and laws of education, what did it consist of, in order to relay the idea to somebody else so that he then could do something with these things. And we find out that after we'd relayed them he could become familiar with them. Do you understand? That's the only thing that had to happen.
Stated that way and made that ghastly and gruesomely simple, you say, "Well, why have we been straining at this?" Well, you might ask the same question of the last ten thousand years of man: Why has he been straining at this? It's all very well to say he liked the game and he had to have one, but I think the game has been running him, he hasn't been running the game.
So in order to do anything with this subject it had to be communicable. It wasn't enough for one person to observe this, not articulate it and do something with it, not understand it and be able to verbalize it even to himself. It had to be verbalized, these things had to be separated, they had to be communicated and other people had to be able to see them well enough so that they could become familiar with these subjects.
Well, why was it necessary for anybody to point out to anybody else that these were the subjects and these were the things to observe? Well, I don't know. I don't know why it was necessary. But I will tell you this: it obviously was, because nobody's done it.
On the contrary, they have used this whole subject as a sort of a trap. They have said, "Well, now, let's see, what can we get out of this? We know a little fragment of this, now what pitch can we put on it to really get somebody loused up?" That was true of the Tibetan lama. That was true, unfortunately, of most of the churches been organized back through the millennia. A little piece of truth was uncovered and then somebody jumped on it and said, "How can I make a quick buck?" It's very interesting.
There's nothing wrong at all with making a quick buck, but the way to make a really quick buck is to play it straight. This is so surprising in this universe that it takes everything by storm. You don't have to put a curve on this sort of thing, but more important, you don't have to profit from it. It's something that probably hasn't occurred to man in many generations. The whole idea of profit is the idea of stimulus-response mechanisms. Reactivity, reactivity, profit. Practically the same thing. Perfectly all right to make some money, but don't make money because you did something. Why not just make money? It's an interesting idea trying to disassociate the idea of making money from doing something in order to make money. But I don't know why the two should be associated, unless you want another game called reasons. Reasons are much more delicious than many other things to man.
Man always has reasons to punish. It's quite amusing. If you look over this reason picture, you get into a tremendous morass. When that door slams on your finger and you ask it for the reason it did it, it doesn't say a thing because it didn't have a reason. So it lacks a reason for smashing your finger, so you look at yourself and you say, "I must have had a reason. Why?"
Well, the funny part of it is you can have a reason. You actually, reactively, can get yourself smashed up all over the place. But I don't know that this is the source of every punishment meted out by the physical universe, nor do I know that the physical universe is punishing. I think it is merely acting and reacting. You see? It's not a punishment mechanism. But man is so sold on the idea of punishment that he goes to tremendous lengths to explain to somebody why he's going to hit him.
The state explains all over the place and takes years and years of precautions with some fellow just to tell him why they're going to put him in a gas chamber. Why don't they just put somebody in a gas chamber? It's startlingly direct, isn't it? The state obviously wants to put somebody in a gas chamber; they have learned that putting people in gas chambers does not cut down the murder rate, yet they still put people in gas chambers, you see? So from this we must merely — can assume that the state wants to put people in gas chambers. You see? I mean it's a very simple, elementary subject. So why don't they just put people in gas chambers? They feel this urge coming on, they put somebody in the gas chamber, turn on the gas. Why expend all of these reasons and these ideas and so forth?
Well, that's one of the things man does best. He does a tremendous job of this, of fancying up and complicating every subject he puts his fingers on. And adding reasons to punishment is, of course, just another one of these fancy-up efforts. Gilding the lily and other cliches.
This whole idea of taking a simplicity and using it as a simplicity is, to man, a near impossibility. That's one of the reasons why this has to be well communicated.
And the funny part of it is the "only's" are more important in this subject than the subject described. Because barriers and limitations which actually exist have been sighted and described. Limitations have been described which exist.
Now, I've said there are four things: the mest universe, the body, the mental image picture and the thetan. These were the four things that had to be discussed, relayed by these processes of education, don't you see, and then confronted and familiarized with in a student, you see? These were the four things a student had to become familiar with.
Well, it's almost as important as this isolation to say, "There are only four things." See, that only gets very important there. See, there aren't five things. See, there are four. See, only, there are only four. Why do you interject that "only"?
Well, you know this: Already by experience it has been demonstrated that this exists here — that people who have confronted just these four things have obtained a finite and definite goal that also can be described and is apparently desirable. In other words, just by the use of these four things this sort of thing has been accomplished. A fifth thing didn't enter into the business of making a Clear. See, we didn't have to have a fifth thing. We only needed the four things.
Well, the reason why this has to be stressed is because after you've looked at the four things and become familiar with them you will find the other things you thought were also there either disappear or become part of the four, and that there were additional beings or additional spirits that you could confront, but after all, that was just the subject of the thetan, see. So it didn't matter how many dynamics you increased. Even if you walked up to God and shook him by the right hand, you see, you still were in this realm of a thetan. He doesn't exceed the definition of thetan. You get the idea?
And when you walked into somebody's mind, you expect to see bogies and haunts and all kinds of bric-a-brac, but they all reduce down fortunately to pictures. Guys can get awful good at pictures. They get awful good, they get awful convincing, but they're still pictures. Don't you see?
And an individual, then, adds reason to pictures. And can add reason and ideas and complications to such a degree that after a while he comes up with the fact that the brain is doing it. This is evidently what he did. He knew pictures. Once upon a time, about 1500 a.d., he knew a lot about Dianetics. You go back into the old books of faculty psychology, they called it, and it had to do with mental image pictures, sensing, perception, the storage of perceptions and so forth. And they didn't do anything with these things but they were pretty well described in psychology textbooks of about fifteen, sixteen hundred. An amazing thing. They called it "faculty psychology," the psychology of the faculties. And they knew quite a bit about this. And then this all dropped out of sight, and somebody eventually picked up physiology.
Well, he was off on another subject: the body. It's another world. It's another universe all by itself. It actually doesn't have to have a thing to do with these pictures. See, a body is something, it is a thing. Now, who mocked it up, where mocked it up and all that sort of thing, well, that's wonderfully adventurous but, for god's sakes, before we undertake that adventure let's look at a body. That's a brand-new thought — it would be to a medico or even to a priest. His first thought would be, where did it come from? Where did it come from? Hell? Is it here?
You see, if you don't at once admit this idea of hereness, there can never be any familiarity with it. There's going to be speculation about it. You see? So then one never really gains experience with a body, he just speculates about a body. See, he never looks at a body; he thinks about a body. In other words, he's using the world of the thetan and his ability to think, consider, observe, any one of these things, plus the world of the mind to retain and continue and make records of, to do something about this other — this other world called a body. But you've consulted these two worlds over here to look at this world called a body. And, of course, you never get around to looking at a body. You get so interested in thinking about a body that you never see a body. Therefore, you never study the subject of a body, don't you see?
Just like medicos. They get so interested in the grade they're going to get for dissecting the corpse, or they get so fascinated with the terrible task of memorizing long Latin lists of body parts in time for the examination, while they have a hangover, that they completely overlook the items which those names represent.
So, for people to be familiar at all with a body is rather remarkable. You would look for a rather simple person to have more command of a body than anyone else, if that is the case. But not even that is the case because the observation of a body is mostly done on an exterior, frontal-view basis. This is so flagrant that if you have somebody mock up the backs of bodies he practically flips. We never see the backs of bodies to amount to anything. Havingness on the backs of bodies is very bad.
As a result you can do some of the most remarkable things with Creative Processes using the backs of bodies. You see, it's fantastic. Oh yes, you want to produce an effect on somebody, have him back up against a wall; instead of running 8-C head-on, why, have him run 8-C back end to. Brother, you'll blow his head off! It's because of his terrible unfamiliarity with the back of a body.
Now, thetans do hang back of bodies and handle them and so forth. And for a while a thetan has a good havingness on the back of the body. But after that he's looking through a body at other bodies, and he's looking at their faces, he's looking at their fronts. And this is what he loves to look at and he thinks that's fine, and "That's all I want to look at," and he gets in, eventually, a havingness difficulty on the back of the body and he couldn't back out of one to save his life. Why?
Because he's got pictures mixed up with bodies. It's a different universe. He, again, isn't observing the body that is there. He is observing that in mix-up with, and confusion with, mental image pictures of bodies that were. He doesn't separate these things easily at all. He has them confused.
Now, as for the inside of bodies, nobody ever looks those things over. Every time you try to open up somebody's body, take a look, you know, with a knife, something like this; split his skull open with a battle-ax, something like this, they never say, "Go ahead, take a look." They never do. They call for the cops, or the thetan hits you with a zap or — very uncooperative. You almost never see the insides of bodies. Well, it's no wonder, then, that a thetan considers a body quite mysterious. Ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths percent of the body has never been observed by him. He's never looked in the brain. This is so much the case that anybody with a bellyache can merely be said to have never examined his own guts. Now, how is this — why is this?
Well, the individual is entering the problem through one of these four universes when he should be entering it through another. It's as simple as that.
So the differentiation of these four universes is necessary. The individual then doesn't substitute past pictures for present looking. See, he doesn't just get the mind confused with the body, for instance, or the mind confused with the physical universe. He doesn't confuse thinkingness with pictures. He's thinking all the time, thinking all the time, thinking all the time.
The Russian, evidently, does this to such a degree — he must be in terrible shape, the Russian. I mean I've known several Russians and they were very, very, very interesting people. No doubt about it. But, of course, these people were displaced persons, so this probably is not the run of the race or anything like that. But extreme cold or something does something to something because the Russian has some of the wildest ideas you ever had anything to do with. He thinks all thought stems from matter. Now, he didn't just think this with Lysenko and the rest of the boys; he's thought this for generations. Of course, most of the Russians, by the way, that you have run into probably aren't Russians. It's quite interesting. They call themselves Russians; they're probably Swedes who call themselves White Russians, who ran the country as long as it was barely civilized. And then in 1917 lost the game and have been — and had to get kicked out, you know. And then the Russians took back over again.
It's quite amazing in this year of 1958 to be looking at the tactics, the propaganda and the strategy, by the way, of the Tatars and the Golden Horde all over again as they existed in 1200, as they existed in 1300, as they existed in 500. Fantastic.
I suppose Dulles, however, knows all about that. World's most brilliant man, Dulles. President says so, must be true. I don't think he ever looks directly at anything, though, before he does something about it. I think he must go to a country and instead of looking at the country he talks to its officials. That's mixing up the fourth universe, you might say — the physical universe — with the thinkingness of it. Now, he probably doesn't look at the people, but he studies their reaction patterns. Instead of looking at the people directly, why, he examines what kind of pictures they've got. Get the idea? What they're thinking about, what their morale is, what their temper is, what their sympathies are. See? He never looks at the people. He never possibly could have looked at the people because he never would have proposed foreign aid for some of the countries he's proposed it for. He would have proposed the hiring of even psychiatrists or something. Because as he looks at the bodies of these people — these people are ill and these people are — malnutrition, they're sick people, most of them. They're in bad shape as bodies.
Now, it isn't — -you don't have to say, "Now, why are they in bad shape?" and get a big reason on it, you know? Just notice they don't walk well. Not even compared to what — they just don't walk well. You know a fellow who gropes over to the door isn't getting over to the door very easily. You don't have to ask why, you just notice he isn't getting to doors. Therefore, the observation of one of these universes is quite important.
Now, why is it important? Well, it's important, basically, for one reason: you get familiarity with it when you observe it and therefore cease to be afraid of it and therefore begin to know it and therefore can be cause over it.
And just a few weeks ago this was adequately articulated in the definition for Operating Thetan. And this definition became very important. And it isn't one of the definitions for Operating Thetan, don't you see? It's not an idea concerning Operating Thetan; it gives you the top condition of the first universe, which is to say the spiritual universe, you know? The idea of the spirit — that particular facet. Now, it tells where it has to sit in relationship to the rest of them, even for their existence and good.
And all of the other universes depended on this first universe. And this first universe was in good condition when it was in control of the other three universes. And that there wasn't anything else there to be in control of anything else except this first universe and its cousins and sisters and aunts and brothers and its storm gods and typhoon gods and Christian gods and Indian gods and so forth. You get the idea? Here was the whole class of these first ideas.
And that definition was just this: it was an Operating Thetan . . . You ought to get that carefully. It said it wrong in the congress program; it said, "A Clear is ..." No, no, no, no. An Operating Thetan is at cause over life (which is a combo word — it's one of these words which in itself violates the rule; life's a combination of all four universes — but that was just so it'd relay and communicate to other people), matter, energy, space and time.
Now, that was a very interesting thing, that an Operating Thetan was at cause over these things. An Operating Thetan was cause over these things. Well, that doesn't tell you yet what a Clear is. But it certainly tells you what an Operating Thetan is.
Now, if you wanted to be far more explicit than this, you would say an Operating Thetan is at cause over four universes. And those universes, of course, would be, just: idea of the universe of the spirit, universe of the mind, universe of the body and the universe of the material existence — material universe, physical universe. Well, boy, that is a state, man. You have just uttered a scientific definition of god. That's the first time we've had a scientific definition of god. Therefore, that becomes very meaningful. Not just facetiously — that becomes very meaningful. Because without going upstairs into higher flights of fancy you have defined a totality of supremacy beyond which you don't find totalities of supremacies.
And, oddly enough, the moment I got that top, the idea of Clear fell into line, you see. I mean, the doingness of Clear, how to communicate about a Clear and so forth fell into line with such extreme ease that I tend, a little bit, to make nothing out of it. Twenty-five hundred years man has been sweating toward this goal: Clear, mind essence, spiritual freedom.
Gautama Sakyamuni actually brought civilization to a much greater area of Earth than Europe and America, a civilization which was not in very much different condition than this one we find ourselves in right now. Everything sort of spun-in, materialistic and so on.
And this man described this state, called it the state of bodhi. It'd been known before that time. It was not original with him any more than Clear is original with me. The word Clear is. And his descriptions of it certainly were. But here was this fellow Gautama Sakyamuni, Siddhartha, Lord Buddha, known in this barbaric Western world as an image, and, actually, probably a better scientist than Oppenheimer. A little bit of difference between actuality and what people believe at some distance. He set up this idea of Clear, state of bodhi, and it enthralled men's minds for the ensuing twenty-five hundred years.
And I'll clue you: they didn't get there. Because we've already practiced with his techniques and, whereas, all due respect, he undoubtedly could do this — he didn't relay it. The factor of education, how you did it, had not been studied. So it just remained a happy dream. Mind essence, the state of bodhi. Tibetan — Tibetan tried to invent systems of doing this. Undoubtedly here and there somebody popped out of his head. But I know more about that, probably, than most of the fellows that are writing about it here in the Western world. And to my knowledge it's — a fellow reached a state of refinement with regard to this and he could do many remarkable things, but he himself was not free. That was usually the goal attained by the Tibetan — Tibetan Lamaism and so forth. They were the squirrels of Buddhism. And they didn't actually attain a goal where the spirit was free; they attained a certain degree of facility with the other universes I have just enumerated. And this passed for the state of bodhi.
Well, I will clue you: You have to have total familiarity with all four universes before you would attain a total bodhi. Got it? But if you attained a total bodhi — this was never described — you would be God, which is not desirable. So then, a state of limited bodhi and a state of total bodhi become describable and take up our interest. What are these things?
Well, this state of Clear as described in Book One without any further ramifications is probably a higher state of bodhi than Siddhartha envisioned. You get the idea? It was very — it's a very specific state. It's a relatively limited state, however, with regard to being boss over the whole cockeyed universe and only what you say goes and so forth. That's a different thing, you see. But it'd be just an ability to exist as mind essence, to have the concept of mind essence and so forth.
Now, we have the techniques to do that today. We have the techniques. They're rather easy, they're simple. But more important, they're communicable.
1112
20 JANUARY 1958
And how you get there is relatively easily described. And it can be described by an Instructor with a club in his hand without any fear that he will establish a state where the student will never do otherwise than what he is told. All the Instructor is doing is adding enough duress to give the student familiarity. He's driving the student toward familiarity, not away from it. He's saying, "Look at it, look at it, look at it." That's all a Scientology Instructor says. He says, "Confront him," he says, "do it, do it, do it."
In all other subjects you get an entirely different point of view. You say, "Now, if you don't memorize all these columns over here and if you don't get all this data over here and if you don't get eighteen themes in and you don't get this in and you don't get that and pass your final examination and get all squared around, we're going to flunk you. And then you will never be able — we're going to prevent you from becoming an engineer." Get the idea? Their whole goal is to prevent, unless the person avoids the subject.
Now, a Scientology Instructor is doing an entirely different thing. He's saying, "Get in there and pitch, get in there and pitch, get in there and pitch." He says, "Look at it, look at it, front up to it, front up — all right, so you're throwing up, so what. Front up to it." They do, too. Particularly these ACC Instructors. They're rough.
But the state of Clear — the state of Clear was not a very complicated state, unless you wanted to do it swiftly. If you wanted to do it swiftly, then you had to have the mechanics of taking apart these four universes. Something new. You didn't just let the guy sit there and look at them for the next twenty years the way a Tibetan would advise. You told the fellow to look at them — well, you didn't do this so you needed techniques which split them all apart and which literally tore them into four pieces and left you with four universes to get familiar with. And left getting familiar with to the guy to do on his own time. Now, that is the way we are reaching the state of Clear.
So this was actually something more than merely letting the fellow observe and think and so forth. We took him apart and let him put himself back together again.
We don't say that a Clear is together at all. A Clear is in a position to observe. "Go now and be blind no more." That's what we mean, really, by a state of Clear amongst ourselves.
But certain definite mechanical things have to be described in order to do this. Certain definite mechanical activities have to be undergone. But first and foremost, people have to be able to confront the specialized task of auditing. And the techniques for that were learned the hard way. And you've just been through two weeks of learning them. And you are now more or less ready to start.
So, therefore, we are going to begin as a unit this particular thing called clearing to give you familiarity with the techniques themselves. And more important, to get you into a state where you can observe for yourself and approach that as nearly as we can. And in this I think we will have a great deal of success.
Thank you.