A general summary of Clears and Clearing as of March 1, 1959 is of interest to all Dianeticists and Scientologists.

I have a great deal of data now that has not been generally released and indeed was never before known here on Earth.

I want to take up here with great rapidity the processes from bottom to top that we have so far found and that have been effective, and some additional data in running them.

The figures are in, the checks have been made. And here’s what I have found: The first Clears I made in 1947 that were stable were in reality Theta Clears, not Mest Clears. Had I had more finance and the data I collected between 1947 and 1959 I would have known that.

And first is the process Dynamic Straightwire. The way to do a survey on Dynamic Straightwire is this: you ask the person to describe the dynamics from one to eight. We don’t care about them being sequitur — change them round if you wish.

They were made by gradually raising their confrontingness of mental image pictures.

Now, you ask a person to describe each one of these dynamics. You are watching an E-Meter for a change in pattern. Therefore you must carefully isolate the pattern, before you can tell whether or not the pattern has changed on the E-Meter needle reading. But, more important than that, you are looking for a dynamic the preclear makes mistakes about while he is trying to describe it, a dynamic he cannot describe, or a dynamic he won’t even approach and is very leary of, and his statement is confirmed by the E-Meter reading. In other words, you’ve got the statement of the preclear in this particular analysis being stacked up against the E-Meter reading all the way through in an analysis or diagnosis for Dynamic Straightwire.

When I found in 1950 that other auditors could not achieve this, I made it my thorough business to:

All right. We go all the way through, asking for a terminal on these dynamics and we finally get a repeat. We will ask him for terminals on these dynamics, and we will get the same dynamic to read again. Now the basic rule which sorts this out is: Any dynamic which doesn’t clear by two-way comm has to be run. Simple as that. Any dynamic which doesn’t clear by two-way comm has to be run.

1. Study all phenomena related to clearing;

So, if you have two or three dynamics jammed up, you can hope that two of them will clear up, leaving you with the remaining dynamic.

But this is not the complete criteria of what you run. There is another stable datum. Don’t run a terminal that is totally unreal to the preclear. Another stable datum, which comes on top of it, is: never run a terminal that is sensible. Never. If a terminal belongs on the dynamic, you can almost say you’ll get nowhere running it. So you’re looking for terminals that the preclear gives you for a dynamic which don’t belong on the dynamic at all.

Now, if that terminal is real to the preclear, you will get a tremendous change in the case. If that terminal is totally unreal to the preclear and if it does belong on the dynamic, why, you’re not going to get any change on the case, so why run it? Might as well run some other process.

I said we needed a better bridge. Well, we’ve built several.

So, we have several conditions by which the diagnosis on Dynamic Straightwire works. I’ve done enough of these now and run enough of them, isolated enough of them and gotten conditions of change on enough of them, to realize that every time you changed a case you had (1) a person who couldn’t describe the dynamic accurately, or who made mistakes while trying to describe it, (2) a person who gave you a non sequitur or erroneous terminal for that dynamic — the terminal was fairly real to the preclear, although it didn’t belong there — and (3) you ran that, and it opened up track like mad.

Within the last fifteen months the data and findings have avalanched.

What have you got here? You have a terrific identification. You are trying to undo identification that is lying right on the top. Well, this tells you, then, that it is neither a long process nor an invariable process. Given enough skill, you could undoubtedly find one of these on every case — given enough skill. But it is limited by auditor skill. Furthermore, it gives auditors a chance to “chop up” preclears and it gives auditors a chance to write some script, so this one has liability. And auditors have been writing script like mad. We had one particular case where the preclear couldn’t say any terminal on the seventh dynamic, so promptly the auditor jumps in and takes the nearest related thing to the seventh dynamic, the thetan, he could get. This was A Head, and he ran A Head, and the preclear had nothing to do with it, and they wondered why the case didn’t advance.

Once there was a breakthrough by other auditors using standard technology to a state of release some years ago, I knew we were winning but some didn’t see it.

Now, you have auditors who are letting the preclear choose. In other words, there are auditors who actually believe that a preclear is permitted power of choice in an auditing session. And this is the biggest bug I have found existing at this instant on this ACC. That one’s a blinker. They are probably not telling you this, that they think a preclear has power of choice. They don’t know this: that it has to be nutty if you are going to run it — if it makes sense, why run it? They are looking for a wrongness in the preclear and they believe that the preclear knows all about his own case and could straighten it out all by himself. And that the auditor is an unnecessary adjunct. Now there are several people on this ACC who believe this and this is a great compliment to their faith in human nature, but it’s certainly of no value in an auditor. The preclear has no power of choice at all. The one the preclear would never choose is the one you run.

Release is the first state one attains on the way up. It is low and crude but it is. It means that state one doesn’t skid any more in. In short, release means a bettered state from which one doesn’t slip. A case stops getting worse and begins to get better, no matter how slowly. Old ARC Straightwire is the original process that created a Release (see Self Analysis, last page).

An example: We had a preclear here who gave three terminals on the fifth dynamic. One of these was a mountain. So the preclear was given the power of choice as to which one to run and, of course, came up with a cat. So they sat there running cats. Well, a cat happens to be right for the fifth dynamic, so why straighten it out? The process is aimed at straightening out something. Obviously, the mountain was wrong. The preclear was totally stuck on the idea that there was a mountain in on this.

Release as a state is, in actuality, the first thing a pc is trying for. It’s a gain to find level ground so that he doesn’t from there on get worse. He’s stable now, he won’t keep slipping, if he attains the state of release.

We found a mountain on the eighth dynamic in another case that hasn’t been running. This case had been running metal on the sixth dynamic. So what? Metal belongs on the sixth dynamic — why run it? Get the idea? But this auditor had found a mountain on the eighth dynamic and ignored it. Of course, everybody knows God is a mountain — that’s obvious ....

I found the second goal a couple of years ago. I managed to develop drills and skills that would make a person able to audit. The simplest form of this now is called “muzzled auditing” and makes supervised co-auditing possible on a very wide scale, thus achieving goal three above.

Now, this was the one to hit. And where you find these people out of session it is because nobody has trailed down a nutty dynamic. When they’re out of session on Dynamic Straightwire, they’re not interested in it at all, they are just not running an identification. They’re running something reasonable, and at once the biggest liability of auditors is that they are reasonable and that they write script and write in reasonable reasons for it all. And they’re trying to audit unreasonability out of people-and these two things just don’t go together at all.

The first great breakthrough came in Winter of 1957-58 with Mest Clearing.

The next process up the line is Selected Person Overts. Select a terminal who is real to the preclear and, as you undercut the process, it comes closer and closer to present time. The person chosen has to be closer and closer to present time the more you try to go downscale on the process. But the person must be real, that’s a criteria in there. And the next thing about it is, you must flatten off several of these people. And the basic reason for this is to prepare an individual to own up to some responsibility for his own actions. Unless he can assume some responsibility for his own actions, he won’t do anything in an auditing session, so this is the one that cures.

Mest Clearing is shortcut clearing. By keying out engrams, one becomes free of them.

The auditing command for Selected Person Overts is “Recall a time you did something to (the selected person’s name).” But that is undercut by the auditing command “Think of something you did to“ or “Think of something you have done to .” Now, the reason you say “Think” is because these people are very chary of owning up to anything or accepting any responsibility out in broad daylight in front of God and everybody, so you run “Think” and you’ve got a lot of people who are having a rougher time who won’t own up to their own lives and who can’t take responsibility for them on the third dynamic, but can take responsibility for them on the first dynamic. And this is the dynamic selection. So “Think” undercuts “Recall. “

This was achieved in a very large number of cases.

The next one — General Overts — is much less effective when it has not already been undercut by Selected Person Overts. The individual just goes on and on with sweetness and light. The auditing command for General Overts is “Recall a time when you did something to somebody.” Now there are other phrases and so forth which could be used for this sort of process, but here we are interested mainly in people. We are not very interested in MEST and the remaining four dynamics. They’d splatter all over the place. That’s why it’s “to somebody.” If you said “something,” you would get the remaining four, so there is an alternate command in here if you wanted to run the other four dynamics. You would say, “Recall a time when you did something to something.”

Now, the next one up the line from this is Not-Is Straightwire: “Recall a time when you implied something was unimportant.” And this, we find, is best run on an alternate basis with the next auditing command, “Recall a time when somebody else thought something was important.” These two commands are alternated, one after the other, and you get these cases that are in a jam.

What happens to a Mest Clear sometimes? What makes the state unstable?

This is the direct cure of notisness; and where you have a case that is running a bad not-is, a process can evidently be invalidated or not-ised when the individual is out of session, or overnight. This is what Not-Is Straightwire cures. These are the people on whom a process works once, and never works again. These people are not-ising so badly that they can’t duplicate — and not-is, of course, is a mechanism to prevent duplication. So you cure, not duplicate. And the cure for it is Not-Is Straightwire.

A Mest Clear, according to several reports even from those given bracelets (ofwhich they should still be proud), starts acting like a Theta Clear and can’t make it. It’s a lose. He falls back.

In short, a Mest Clear can postulate. And he postulates himself into trouble. He can still key in engrams. His postulates operate powerfully on his bank, evidently, and there he goes.

A Mest Clear has not been through a total confrontingness. He arrived by what was a shortcut. His regained ability to postulate operates unexpectedly. He puts himself into things he hadn’t confronted yet. He doesn’t confront them. And there he goes.

So long as he doesn’t use his large power to postulate unwisely, a Mest Clear stays clear. If he does, he’s no longer clear. (Bob Ross, by the way, first mentioned this to me and further reports and observations bore it out.)

Very well — there is a state called Mest Clear. It is a shortcut that is sometimes the long way around and sometimes isn’t stable.

However, a Mest Clear, even skidded, is better off than any Release.

Because of this liability (and because of later gains I made on Theta Clearing) no HGC is now even trying for Mest Clear. It’s all Theta Clearing now. And if it’s all right with you we’ll use the word Clear to mean hereafter a Theta Clear and if we mean Mest Clear we’ll say so.

The Mest Clear, then, still has a malady — the ability to postulate his engrams into heavy play.

Pursuing clearing further in 1958 I developed by early February 1959 the Confrontingness Scale of Reality. This, I find just this week, on a specific test, is also a parallel to the Responsibility Scale.Roughly, the Confrontingness Scale of Reality goes this way from top to bottom:

• No need to Experience a Reality

Knowing this we see how a case behaves as we raise confrontingness on Mental Image Pictures. The person is out of valence below “Elsewhere” and not even on the right track below “Screen” (the old “Wide-Open Case”).

This was a lot of data to collide with. But being aware of the phenomenon of Mest Clear and having developed repetitive command engram running for the 5th London, I had to square around for Goal Three with techniques to run low reality for the 21st American and so found the Confrontingness Reality Scale.

All this made quite a difference in viewpoint. Things that were very vague in 1947 became very obvious to me.

A Theta Clear, then, can be defined as a person who is at cause over his own reactive bank and can create and uncreate it at will. Less accurately he is a person who is willing to experience.

Operating Thetan would be the same as always — the individual at Cause over Matter, Energy, Space, Time, Life and Form.

Theta Clear is stable. Therefore I’m not letting the HGC try for any lower state. In any event Theta Clearing is faster than Mest Clearing but not, of course, faster than Releasing. The maximum time to release a raving lunatic seems to be about 600 hours of CCH 1, 2, 3 and 4 — work, however, that we don’t do.

The maximum time to release a non-insane person by CCH 1, 2, 3 and 4 is probably around 350 hours. And sometimes this route has to be taken as in a non- consent case or a child or a very low reality case or a case that can’t or won’t talk. (CCH 1, 2, 3 and 4 on such low cases is not always successful by reason of auditing skill differences.)

The maximum time to attain a Release on a fairly low reality case is about 175 hours — usually less, using present skills or even ARC Straightwire, Fall 1951.

The maximum time to theta clear somebody from beginning to end has not been determined fully for all cases by a long ways, but early data indicates that a case with high beginning reality could make it in 75 hours of HGC auditing. As all cases addressed so far in the HGC have responded steadily (under auditing done by 21st ACC graduates) on the Reality Scale, we could assume they will all go through to Theta Clear. Some cases (one with a recent severe accident) require evidently four weeks to get up to what you and I would call responsibility and reality on these new processes — but even then the four weeks were all win and all gain. (The auditing was done by a DScn who did not attend the 21st and was only verbally coached.)

Hazarding a guess, I would say we are sooner than 500 hours on Theta Clearing from beginning to end on average cases.

So all goals listed above — examining clearing, auditor training, and broad-scale co-auditing and clearing — are a reality now, just a dozen years from my first incredulous creation of a Clear to general clearing to a stable state. Of course the first goal of examining all aspects of clearing won’t be over for another twenty years but it’s still been dented. And you’ll soon have that pleasure too, subjective or objective, on the subject of Theta Clearing.

It’s a dozen years back to 1947. It’s nine years back to Book One. But it’s only twenty-nine years back to 1931 when I first began to work at George Washington University on the subject of the mind and life. (It’s only fair to tell you that I’d already abandoned physical healing as a road in 1871 after a medical career, the only fruit of which now extant is what the medicos call Endocrinology, so that path is a little longer than we’d let on to the public.)

I’m pretty excited about all this — and comfortable. There were times when people got to jumping around so in the public prints that I figured straight jackets for reporters and Commies were more vital in our logistics than clearing. But it never entered my head to quit, not even when Time magazine divorced me from a woman I wasn’t even married to. (Invented inverted 2nd Dynamics always make more news to Luce* people than a world well and free.)

We can now do these things:

1. Theta clear people.

In short, we’ve definitely won. And it won’t be long before everybody knows it. If you knew what fifty people well released by HAS co-auditing could do for Scientology in one town, you’d know we had it made.

Well, you’ll know even better subjectively soon enough.

And that’s clearing.

[*Henry R. Luce (1898-1967) was the co-founder, editor and publisher of Time magazine.]