Thank you.

We got a congress yet?

Audience: Yes!

Good. Have you got a congress yet?

Audience: Yes!

Good. Are you here?

Audience: Yes!

Good. Are you here?

Audience: Yes!

Well, good. Thank you.

We have here some material to be covered in this particular lecture that I think all of you will find of great interest. And that material — let us start right out here in high gear — has to do with a thing called a Clear. You've heard about this for seven years and it has a considerable history.

Clear. What is a Clear? Well, I refer you to the first book, a chapter titled "The Clear," because we have not, at this moment, exceeded it one single bit in its terms there or escaped it or quibbled with its definitions or done anything else with it. And that, in itself, is a little modest piece of success -is to turn up here with something that auditors can do. The first Clears were made totally by myself and the effort wasn't duplicated very often.

And we had this subject being one of the most questionable subjects of Dianetics: What is a Clear? Well, I'm not going to give you ad infinitum, the Book One definition, but I will describe one to you, in quite real terms. A Clear is somebody without psychoses or neuroses; no held-down fives, in the parlance of Book One. An adding machine is crazy if you have one of its figures held down, and if you held down five in every addition, the addition would be wrong. If you held down five in every multiplication of a multiplication machine, the answer would of course be wrong. Every subtraction would be wrong, every division would be wrong, if one of those figures was always held down, no matter what else happened. That's what happens in the human mind.

Something is held down. "Republicans are all bad." No matter what other data is entered on the machine, "Republicans are all bad" is entered into the computation. And even though some of us might agree with the fact that Republicans leave a lot to be desired, we do not add them into every single computation we make, fortunately. But a held-down five does. That's, right there, added in, subtracted, multiplied, divided. Every time any work is put on the thinking machine, the figure five is held down: "Republicans are all bad."

We say, "Well, I think I'll eat some supper" We add this up on the machine and it comes out, "All Republicans are bad because I'm going to eat some supper" "I would have more supper to eat if Republicans weren't so bad," might be reasonable, but it really doesn't belong in every computation that's on the machine. Do you see that clearly?

All right. This analogy, the held-down five, actually comes from I think Harvard or MIT or some such place; I've forgotten the grade school it was developed in. But they had a big machine — they had a big machine, and the machine was crazy. Any time you fed data to it — a machine comparable to the UNIVAC, ENIAC or Atomic Energy Commission — other machines — and every time you put a problem into the machine, the machine gave a crazy answer. Every time. And they started tracing through the machine and they finally found a drop of solder had fallen across two leads so that no matter what problem you put on the machine, the figure five was entered into the result. Do you understand that?

Now, the mind has this peculiarity, that if you keep adding a single datum, no matter what the problem is, it's crazy. So that we get something that looks like this: We get a person, let's just envision a bank here as a series of mental image pictures. Here's some mental image pictures, one kind or another, and the pc says, "Well, I think I will go to supper." His going to supper's modified by these two pictures, or one picture, or six hundred, see? He says, "I think I will tell her I love her," and his decision is modified by these two mental image pictures. They're always there.

Now, modern Euro-Russian psychology didn't know very much about these mental image pictures. Knew something about eidetic recall; it said morons and small children often recall things by seeing pictures of them. This comes under the heading of obnosis; these fellows couldn't observe very well.

Truth of the matter is, if you ask any citizen on the street to close his eyes and look, ask him what he's looking at — you will get one of these answers: Nothing, blackness, an invisibility, or a picture. And the more numerous answer will be "picture." Now, if you were to persist in asking this question, "What are you looking at?" the fellow who says "nothing" at first would then say "blackness" or "a bunch of rockets" or he would say a lot of things, but he'd stop saying "nothing."

A fellow who sees invisibility, of course, anything he sees is invisible, and he takes a little more doing. The fellow who sees only blackness actually has something wrong with him. The fellow who sees an invisibility has something wrong with him. The fellow who sees nothing has something wrong with him. This is factual; if you graph these people on APAs and so forth you will find that's the case.

The bulk of the people you'll ask this question of will tell you they are looking at a picture. The crazier ones will tell you that they are always looking at the same picture: Mother beating Father, or something. They always have this picture. It's always there and visible.

The ones that are much crazier than that can't see the picture at all but it's all there and in full effect on 'em. They've got a screen between themselves and the picture and some kind of a black field here, and the picture modifies everything they do. That doesn't mean everybody that has a black field is being modified, but it does mean that this picture is present and is exerting its influence on the individual. And we get this analogy of a held-down five.

In other words, this picture, and it is just a picture, no more than that, like modern advertising or anything else, it's always there. You think — you say, "I have a small headache." If modern advertising had its way, your small headache would immediately make you think of Bufferin, and they buy pictures for billboards and they dramatize this thing. And they draw pictures for billboards and pictures on the TV and pictures everywhere encouraging you to think of Bufferin every time you have a headache. The only trouble is there're several other advertising firms that want you to think of Anacin, aspirin and other compounds. So the net result is that when a person has a headache, he thinks of confusion.

Now, when this fellow here that we're looking at has several pictures, one right after the other, and they're all stacked up, no matter what he does he sees the whole conglomeration, he's got that many held-down fives. And you have here a picture of a person who isn't a Clear.

Now, where do we get this term "Clear"? It's off the button on an adding machine that says "clear." That's the very, very, very esoteric source of the word; the extremely mystic and romantic source of the word. If you look on most adding machines, there's a little button over here and it says "clear" on it. What's that mean? It means something very, very elementary: It's simply when you press the button, the picture on the adding machine, if it's in good shape, turns from this over to simply the guy. In other words, the held-down fives would all clear. A Clear can clear his thinkingness, and his thinkingness is clear. It is cleared of these mental image pictures. Now, there isn't anything else in the mind but mental image pictures. I hate to have to say this, but that's the truth. The mind is composed of various assortments of mental image pictures accompanied by postulates saying they will do so-and-so and such-and-such and combine in such-and-such a way. Of course, there are those of us who have run into machinery in the mind, big machines of one character or another. These machines are, again, simply influencing devices.

Now, whether you say that all there is in the mind is the picture, we still have this question — well do you consider this machinery that handles the pictures part of the pictures? I'm afraid that you'd have to, to some degree.

But an elementary look at this — and I've shown you this trick at other congresses — I'll show you again in the hopes that you will use this on groups.

Works like this: What is the mind? Well, what is this thing called the mind? Well, there're only a few factors with which we are dealing. The first factor is the material universe, and if you look around you I think you will find the material universe. If you feel around you, even close up, you will sense something of the material universe. Now, why don't you do that; why don't you just look around and see the material universe.

All right. Now, that has to do with the material universe. Ordinarily, this is covered by the sciences of physics and chemistry. They're not covering them so well these days, but they're doing all right.

I got a frantic wire the other day from a scientific congress that was occurring in, I think, Boston, no, pardon me, Boston, [accented] and they wanted to know if I had any proof I could offer that thought created matter. They'd suddenly stumbled onto some mathematical proof of this one way or the other, and they wanted to know if I had any proof of this at all, and I sent 'em back a wire telling 'em that, yes, we'd had somebody mock up large mock-ups and stuff 'em into his body and increase his weight thirty pounds in a few weeks and then, by getting the reverse flow, to reduce his weight back again. We've actually made that experiment. That's quite an experiment to make, by the way, because it takes a devilish lot of auditing and the fellow has to be awfully good at solid facsimiles and mock-ups and things of that character before you can perform the series.

But we have done it, taking thought alone, without increasing somebody's diet, and increasing his weight and decreasing it. So, I sent 'em this data and I got back a highly enthusiastic wire saying that my data, as sent to them, had been of great assistance, so I hope they were all edified. That's all I've heard about it.

But that's the material universe. Now, it's generally solid and it has spaces in it and small fragments of particles drift through it and various phenomena occur, all upon a rather standardized agreement. You have things like gravity and all that sort of thing. Those are the laws of the physical universe. Now, man understands these fairly well. He doesn't understand the source; he doesn't understand a lot of things about it. He's made the mistake of saying, "conservation of energy." It's rather interesting; I don't know that anybody has actually really carried out a proof of conservation of energy. In other words, you burn up a piece of paper and collected all its component parts, you have the same piece of paper again in terms of weight and mass, because I don't think it'd be possible to do that. To collect the heat, take the heat, the smoke, the ash, and recondense these things again. I know if I could burn a piece of paper and then recondense all the things released from the piece of paper, I'd consider myself, well, not a genius, but pretty good.

I don't know if they've ever done this, but it's nevertheless an accepted fact; and it is the foundation on which the material universe is built — conservation of energy — in the scientific mind. His stable datum for physics, chemistry and so forth is conservation of energy. Always is here, always was here, never went no place, ain't never been no place, never will cease, ain't not begun. You get the sort of an idea? I state it grammatically like that so that you will get the degree of respect I feel for it.

What it is is actually a total apathy of defeat that says, "You can't do anything about it," and maybe some people can't, but I'd consider myself invalidated if that were the case. Anyway …

The material universe, then, is quite a subject and it lies out there and it's all full of elements and certain laws. And you could see that, so that's real interesting, but something that practically no scientists have ever done I'm going to ask you to do now: That's to locate your body. Now, if you — do you notice you have a body there?

Audience: Yeah.

Well, now, that body is an interesting thing; it's an interesting thing. It's an automaticity of one sort or another which carries on according to certain laws and so on and is composed, they say, of cells and so on. It enters into the field of biology, biophysics, medicine; these are the various fields that cover this body. I notice that they never mention art, but I have seen some bodies that I considered fairly good works of art. In fact, I've whistled at a few, and I think you girls have seen some young men that you considered works of art. So art enters into the body considerably, and also experience enters into the body. Well, a body is a mobile unit and it obeys certain laws.

Now, we had some idea of what was going on out here in the physical universe. Well, when we take the body, now we're not on solid ground at all. And the best we can say about it is, "You have a body." Well, just notice it and you'll agree with me. I've had people do this; the first time they ever noticed.

Now, the laws and rules that this goes along on are many and extensive, and we used to think they were very pertinent to Dianetics. They really aren't. What we were handling in Dianetics had an influence upon the body, and may have been very well some of the stuff of which a body was built, but we didn't have to worry as much about a body as we thought. The body really belongs in the field of pure creation or religion or medicine or library science, but it belongs somewhere. But the point is, you've got one, and you can experience the fact you have one. Is that right?

Audience: Yeah.

All right. So much for the body. We've knocked off, now, two parts of the problem with which we are concerned: The problem of the universe and life in it. Two elements here we've disposed of. We could count 'em. And this that I'm doing, by the way, was never done before Scientology; nobody ever said, "Well, there're this many elements and you have to study 'em in order to know about it."

All right. We got the material universe and we got a body now, okay? All right. Now, here's the third one: The mind. The mind consists of pictures, combinations of pictures, and they can be fixed or not fixed or they can be fleeting or they can be purely imagined or they can be copies of the physical universe. They can be all sorts of things. They can be hallucinatory pictures that never existed but you think they did, all sorts of combination, but the final result is that the mind consists of pictures; pictures in their action and interaction against each other. And the action of these two elements we have just named, the physical universe and the body, their action upon the pictures.

So, here's two elements and we get to this third one, the mind. All right. Can you get a picture of a cat? Do so. Get a picture of a cat. Got the cat?

Audience: Yeah.

All right. Good enough. Now, that, in some small form, is the mind. Now, if you didn't see a cat, you just saw some blackness or something like that, you probably still have the idea of the cats on the other side of the blackness. You've still got a picture of a cat. A lot of people have got very good cats, some of 'em got very bad cats, and some cats are behaving and some cats are misbehaving. But the point is, they're mental image pictures of cats, right?

Audience: Right.

Huh? All right. Now, you have the mind there in its simplest form and combination. Now, in Dianetics and Scientology we could show you some things to do with that picture of a cat which would astonish you. Put another cat in front of the cat you just mocked up; put two cats out there and hold them rigidly, facing each other.

You get an interaction between the cats?

All right. You get all sorts of weirdities of this character in the mind. But the mind basically is just this picture that I've asked you to put out there. Got it? This really is this sort of thing. Now, you can let go of the cat if you want. But if we had a picture of a cat here, one way or the other, and this cat was always here, we would say to ourselves — we would say to ourselves, "Well, I think I would eat dinner," and we'd have a slight, tiny, little feeling that we ought to say "meow." Or we'd say, "Well, I think I'd go to bed," and the thought would occur "after I put the cat out." "I think I'll go for a drive in the car; I hope no black cats cross my track." This cat, see. Always a cat, a cat, a cat, a cat, a cat. That's the held-down five, you get the idea?

Well, the mind enters this picture into thinkingness; you got that? Now, that is the thing we're talking about. It stores memory, it has lots of uses, but when it is a totally fixed, never banished, pc-not-aware-of-it-at-all picture of a cat, it actually enters a cat into the thinkingness of a person. So that's very elementary and it could be much more complicated than this, and has. But the basic element of the mind is this picture of a cat. We've disposed of three elements now: The material universe, the body, and the mind. What we mean by mind, when we say mind: Picture of a cat.

All right. Get the picture of the cat back, now, or put another one there. Got that picture of a cat again?

Audience: Yeah.

All right. Now, we ask you the sixty-four dollar question: What's looking at it? All right. You are, hmm? Well, now we have to do with thought and a thetan, and that's it. Four elements. The thing that's looking at the cat; the cat; the body and the physical universe. Those are the four elements of study, because the thing that is looking at it can also think. It doesn't need any assistance, we have found; it can create. It doesn't need any assistance in creating. It can register, it can remember, it can forget, it can forecast, it can do all sorts of things. But you could experience it right now just on the basis that it can see a cat because you can see a cat; you got the idea?

Now, what is this thing? Well, the first thing we know about it is it isn't a thing. Because it could handle or create masses, meanings and mobilities, it isn't a mass, a meaning or a mobility, unless you mock it up that you call yourself Joe or Ann. You could mock up an identity that goes along with you, but this youness which looks at the cat, which influences the body, which lives in the physical universe, is the total scope of our study. Socrates would die of no work. And Aristotle would have died of horror. Herbert Spencer would've had to have taken up something else, and Spinoza, oh, yes, Spinoza.

Spinoza would've had a few things to say about this. He said, "You have neglected one thing, and that is the creator of all this." And I would've said to Spinoza, if we'd been on speaking terms, I would've said, "If you can find anywhere in this picture of the thing that looks at the cat, the cat, the body that surrounds all this, and the physical universe (the walls), if you can find anything else in here to experience that these elements cannot experience, I will accept whatever you have to offer as an addition. But so far, you have offered an idea, a creator. That's an idea. And this is capable of ideas, so therefore, we don't have any proof." And Spinoza would've had a fit. Or he would've said I was an heretic and had me burned at the stake.

Anyway, the point is that our sphere of interest does not have to include any factor we cannot experience. Now, we say, very well. Well, our destiny may be guided by gods, demons, devils and everything else. Sure, there are gods, demons, devils; nobody ever said there weren't. You run into 'em every once in a while, but that's in the realm of experience. Wake up in the middle of the night and have a demon breathing down your neck, why, you know what a demon is. Particularly after you've had too much to drink.

The point I'm making here is we — it is not vital that we include the factor of a creator; see, it's not vital that we include this in this experience computation.

Now, you can go out further than that if you wish to and believe in one. But why do you have to believe in one? Now, listen, you don't believe in this stage up here; it's here. You get the idea; there is no solidity of belief in this other thing. Now, I'm not saying there is one or there isn't one, and I'm not even speaking from my viewpoint on this. I'm merely saying that these four elements of the thing that looked at the cat, the cat, the body and the physical universe take in that which we take in and work with. And, get this, we have not found any further elements necessary to the solution of the finite human problem.

Now, that is quite remarkable. No other elements have been necessary than these elements, or elements of this kind or class, to the solution of the finite human problems. Well, that doesn't necessarily solve everything of all time; it doesn't tell us a lot of answers to various things. But as far as we're concerned, it goes as far as we need to go to attain this thing called a Clear.

To say that we don't need to know a great deal about the creator, the supreme being, or lots of other things to get the problem into workable form is actually quite a milestone, because you'll find that early philosophy was totally involved with trying to guess the identity of something they could not sense, feel, measure, experience, and they lost themselves entirely in this morass of speculation and religious argument — ecclesiastical commotion. They finally started burning each other at the stake because they couldn't get an agreement on the subject, and when man starts burning himself because he can't agree with something of this sort, why, I'd consider he was a bit adrift, wouldn't you?

I don't say that it's dangerous ground to speculate in it, but you don't have to. Now, you can go ahead and have God and all the rest of it; nobody's arguing with this at all. Not even trying to say, "You must not," but neither saying, "You must." Big difference there.

There is an organization, I think they have a place over — called — I've forgotten the name of the place; it's someplace in Italy, I think. And it tells people they must. And any time you solve things with telling people, "If you don't believe, we are going to get you excommunicated," you don't have a science folks, you have a hoax. If a man cannot be persuaded by the reasonability of a thing, it ain't. As far as he's concerned, it isn't. So, why bother?

Now, you can show people this: The material universe, they've got a body, they've got a picture of a cat and they look at the picture of the cat. It's the first time they've ever seen the four elements. Of course, you've seen all this trick before, but these four elements laid out in that nice parade and we say, "Well, those are the things we need necessary to handle this particular problem of human beingness or human livingness, and we need no further elements than this."

Now, it's necessary to know that in order to keep looking in the spheres I've just outlined for all the other things we think might be there but can't be sure about, and we'll find each one of them falls into a class.

A Clear, then, is a person who can have a universe — this would be the ultimate definition — around him, you see, and have a body. No more than this; not a good universe or a clear perception of it or anything else; that was never said with regard to a Clear. Nothing said about really the condition of the body beyond this, that he had no psychosomatic illnesses. In other words, mentally caused illnesses; these were gone. No other condition of body; he wasn't — he didn't grow horns or wings or something of the sort. He had a body. And now, the important thing about the Clear: He could have a picture of a cat or not have a picture of a cat, but if he had the picture of a cat, according to our later observations here, he would have to mock it up, but it would be a good picture of a cat; you've got the idea? He doesn't have any residual automatic pictures. He's Clear. In other words, there are no pictures that jump up and modify his thinking. He has taken the responsibility for his own thinkingness. He does his own thinkingness, and this isn't done with anything but him.

Now, he could modify his thinkingness if he wants to, but he doesn't have to. He can resort to pictures to tell him what to think, but this is kind of odd because he knows everything that he could make a picture of; anyhow, if he's no longer holding on to pictures. So he could do this sort of thing. He could say, "I wonder what I read in that textbook," mock up a picture of the textbook and read the textbook. But of course this is funny because the truth of the matter is he read the textbook and something about him persuaded him that he had better forget the textbook. And that thing was a picture. He had a picture that told him it was better to forget the textbook than to remember it.

Well, a Clear, in our very modern definition here, would have to a marked degree the power to forget and remember at will, but that is not included in the basic definition. A Clear is simply then a thetan who can have but need not have pictures and who knows that he's mocking them up, who doesn't then, therefore, have neuroses, psychoses or psychosomatic illnesses, which would be illnesses caused by pictures. Do you understand that? It becomes a terribly elementary thing. It doesn't even mean he's outside his head. That's a special kind of Clear; that's a Theta Clear. There're two types of Clears that've been discussed in the past. One is MEST Clear, the other is Theta Clear. Theta Clear is outside of his head and a MEST Clear is still in his head.

But here's the main thing; here's the main thing that you'd associate with this definition, is the individual doesn't have obsessive data fed in all the time by mental image pictures that he is aware of but not aware of; you get the idea? His own thought patterns are not modified by pictures of experience, and that is a Clear.

Now, how do you create a Clear? Well, boy, that's so easy today. To think how hard we worked, how we slaved to create Clears, and how many techniques and processes we've gone through on this Project Clear. We even sort of went into apathy about it about 1954, and I don't think you've heard much mention of it until all of a sudden I brightly and alertly and suddenly sat up and said, "Project Clear, let's go!" It was without — it was a change of pace, that's for sure.

This one we didn't need. We didn't need to say anything more about Clear. Everybody was getting along perfectly happy; they'd forgotten it, forgiven it. They'd forgiven me for getting the idea, which I think was darn nice of 'em, by the way. But I hadn't forgotten, and I'd been lying in wait, stealthily. Waiting, waiting for a moment to pounce.

Now, truth of the matter is, Scientology has never bloomed and blossomed with a brass-band approach since 1952, 53; just never has. Fifty-three was when it was really in swing. Simply because I never let it. Now, this is an interesting confession to make, right here in front of you and God and everybody. But, boy, I had a curb bit on that thing that tight, and I'll tell you why: Because a sudden and sweeping popularity of this subject, such as Dianetics experienced, would have interrupted, as Dianetics did, the sedate and even course of investigation and compilation of data and the discovery of what really made things tick. And if Scientology had ever been let out of hand so that all of a sudden there were brass bands going on at every corner, selfishly I can tell you I wouldn't have gotten my work done.

That's about what it amounts to. Because I knew approximately where we were going, and I knew we weren't there. I knew that we were better off than man had ever been off on the subject of the mind; we knew more, we were doing more things, we were more able, we were learning all the time new things, we were progressing regularly and well; but we weren't there. We just weren't there. I couldn't give you and rattle off to you in 30 seconds a definition of exactly where a person was going. I could've said, "Well, he's a Clear," but that was not an action definition. That is a state, not the way to get there. That was the location in space, not the road map of how to arrive.

Imagine me, I was sitting back here all this time, drawing this road map like mad; we already knew — there, see? Working like mad to finish a road map. Well, if Scientology had ever started to boom beyond control so that it would've overflooded every boundary and border of orderly progress, I'm afraid I would've been the first one to sit down and scream, and said, "No! Let's not be foolish here. Let's have a few things in the bag."

These things we have to have. We have to know how to train an auditor. We have to be able to take anybody, even a psychologist — . You think that's a joke, but anybody that's been in the Academy knows that it's a horrible fact. He has been untrained as a Scientologist so that we have to really bring him back up to a human being and then train him. But we had to have things that would train even him, otherwise we'd throw away the bulk of the people interested in the mind in the United States. That would've been a hell of a loss, wouldn't it have.

Of course, there're a lot of us say, "No loss at all." But we needed to know how to train people. Well, we didn't have that until 56 — middle of 56 started to really get our teeth into it and get going well. But we were still learning like mad in the middle of 57. We're still learning, but the pressure is off. I mean, we know that, worst comes to worst on almost any point, we've got five or six different answers that we can throw into the breech. You know, if anything goes entirely wrong, or something like that, with a student, we can do something.

Here's the interesting thing, then. If we couldn't train a Scientologist to audit and audit well and successfully along the line, then it wouldn't matter what he knew. What he knew would've been a dead loss.

Now, we had to train in such a way that we didn't make a little martinet that went through a certain number of answers. We had to train him in the fundamentals that he was built with, his own fundamentals of beingness so as to expand that beingness and ability; and if we could do that, we had an auditor who could think, who could learn and who could operate.

All right. Well, we've got the mechanics of that pretty well straightened out, but how about an organization, huh? You think I was gonna sit in there forever with these big piles of — I'm a martyr! Most people are martyred after they've done something, you see, but I've been martyred here for years by piles of paper that high, paper, paper, paper. Dispatches, letters, reports.

Somebody comes in — used to come into the office to see me and I'd part the papers like this and look out of the peephole at him, and so on. On business matters, if you please, on any kind of activity that you could name except research, I never minded research papers; that was my job. But business, you know, buying desks and nonsense of this character. Ah, we didn't have organization down, not even vaguely.

Now, you look at this Washington organization now; if you were to go over to London and look at London, and London's just had a little recent upheaval. We changed Association Secretaries, which always causes randomity of some sort, but you'd find a pretty smooth-running organization sitting over there in London right this minute, and I haven't been there for a year. You get the idea? Almost a year; I was back there in April, a little while. But I haven't been there to work at it since October of 1956, and it's running just fine, fine. It's doing its job; everybody's doing his job well.

Well, why is this a triumph? You say, "Well, General Motors's been doin' it for years! General Electric, Prudential Insurance, they all got it licked!" Listen: None of those jokers could've licked a Scientology organization. Now, you think that is a funny statement, but it happens to be a very true one, because their organizations look like about three kids' blocks piled in a row compared to a Scientology organization. Scientology organization is about the most complicated thing you ever had anything to do with. It is so complicated that only a good auditor survives long on staff. It's complicated.

I'm not trying to impress you with the fact, but we run about 15 businesses at once, and practically anybody in the organization has got to sort of pitch the answers straight up.

Now, how do you run such a thing? What is the pattern on which it operates? You probably aren't convinced, but in most organizations, the post of shipping clerk is supposed to be a very lowly post; and the shipping clerk walks over and he picks up an invoice, looks at it, reads the number off of it and goes over here, takes the item off the shelf; brings it down here, wraps it, puts it through a postage meter and goes out to mail. He goes over here and he takes his inventory books and he sees he's short on this many items and he orders 'em. And his job's done.

He doesn't manufacture the books, or see to their manufacture, or have anything to do with that. He certainly doesn't manufacture tapes. He certainly doesn't buy all sorts of commodities of one sort or another, and he certainly doesn't keep check on people's memberships. He doesn't double in brass in a dozen other capacities like a Scientology Shipping Clerk does. And it isn't because we are simply organizing it sloppily. Actually, it's about the neatest-looking shipping department you ever had anything to do with. But it's just got so many things that happen in the shipping department, for lack of any other place to have them happen, that the guy's gotta be a confounded raving genius to run the joint, just the shipping clerk. So it has to really have a pattern.

Now, hardly anybody here is without business experience of one kind or another. You know that a hospital is very easy to run. Well, you know, a hospital's hard to run, okay. But what's it consist of? Well, it consists of some doctors and some nurses and some rooms and you put people in, you have administration cards and a filing system and you have a laboratory, vestments, and it all goes on these routes and it's — . Boy, if we only had to run just a hospital. Gee, wouldn't that be lovely? If there was no more activity involved in the organization than the hospital -. A hospital-type organization would compare to the HGC, and the HGC has almost as much administration as a hospital. And if it blew up any in size so that we were getting 40 or 50 preclears a week, it'd be far more complicated than a hospital, because patients in a hospital are not permitted to have opinions.

We have all the administration and so forth, in the final analysis, in embryonic form, in the HGC; but that's running right alongside of the Academy, which has all the administration that any school has to have. Now, you just start adding this up. A research department, a testing department, a this department, a that department; and the first thing you know, you're looking at one of the most complicated businesses. And we didn't find out until recently, until we had it licked, that it was one of the most complicated businesses that anybody ever looked at; and that was why, whenever we have brought in a good businessman from the outside, the guy has just sunk. He's just gone down, and there was a little bubble on top of the water with the words "glug" coming out of it.

He actually has — we've had some very good ones, and they've really just gone by the boards: They just couldn't face it.

So we thought that we were being complicated and peculiar. We thought that we were being odd, you see; we just thought that we didn't know our business. And we worked and worked and worked to get some sort of organizational form that'd function, and when we finally got the whole thing organized, we found out that we were running one of the most complicated businesses in existence. Man, it's complicated and if we hadn't had that complication licked and if we had gone and experienced a tremendous wave of popularity, we would've gone down with the most resounding crash you had ever heard of. We couldn't have stood the traffic. In other words, we had to have the organizations organized in such a way that everybody had means of handling things.

Now, people in the organizations have hats. A man can actually be relieved off of a post and take over another post, and somebody can take over his post without causing very much randomity. In other words, it's pretty smooth — smooth-looking picture now; it's easy to handle.

But it was a complicated business and we didn't even know it. We were running more darn separate functions and finding each function necessary. Why? Because we're an embryonic civilization. We don't look at things or do things the way the civilization around us is looking at things and doing things. So therefore we have to take unto ourselves those functions which cannot be performed for us, and these are legion.

So, what do we have here? What do we have here? A tremendous number of technologies that had nothing to do with research and investigation had to be developed before we could get anywhere. Now, all of these or the major ones have been developed and patterns exist for their continuance, so only now it is safe to do something in the form of research and investigation and say, "Well, here we are." See, it's only necessary to be up to snuff so that we don't have any huge backlog of research to do; tremendous numbers of unsolved problems that we will suddenly confront and go appetite over tin cup with in the middle of a tremendous popularity. It would be fatal to get a tremendous popularity and find out that nine-tenths of the people of the United States had lopsided epicenters. We may have only collected the people who didn't have lopsided epicenters. Maybe you're the only people in the world that don't have lopsided epicenters, see? You can actually get into some peculiar ones.

Now, you think that's funny. I didn't know anybody in the whole world had a black field. The total innocence with which I engaged upon Dianetic processing. I actually handled a tremendous number of cases, from 47 to 49, lots of cases, cases, cases, cases and nobody ever walked up that had a black field or an invisible field. They all had a field. They could all see pictures. And some of 'em were afraid of their pictures and some pictures were dim and some pictures were sharp; so I simply educated them to have good pictures, audited 'em and found out later on that I simply gave them tremendous confidence with regard to their pictures, the pictures blew and they didn't have pictures anymore and I had Clears!

And then, the spring of 1950 — sounds incredible, but that's why I say, you may be the only people in the world that don't have lopsided epicenters. Spring of 1950 we got practically nothing but dub-ins and black fields. Hmm.

We had one fellow that — we'd keep asking him to — what he was looking at and tell him to get a picture of something or a picture of something else, and he kept saying, "Yes," and he said, "Yes" for a week and then we finally found out we were talking to a circuit and he hadn't seen a picture yet. So of course he hadn't had any alleviation — nothing had been erased.

Imagine. Well, if we had in the future a possibility of this sort of thing occurring to us, if we hadn't taken care of such random factors well in advance, then we would not be at liberty to be very popular. Do you see that? We could get a sudden sweep, and we weren't up to it with research, we'd never covered it; we could get wiped out, see?

So, every time you engaged in a tremendous popularity of the subject, you were also flirting with the destruction of the subject, as long as it wasn't well formed. Do you get the idea? Just like building castles in sand, till you get a little mortar mixed up in 'em so they set right, why, don't let any waves near 'em.

Now, where do we suddenly ease off? Well, it's sort of like watching a continued picture, you know: You finally get to the place where you came in. And that place is of course this magic word "Clear." You came in with Clear, I hope you don't go out with one.

Now, here — here we have attained this rather easily. I run a fantastic risk, by the way, with any of this material, and so do you. You're liable to go along for years being the people who know all about it; but what you've finally turned out is sufficiently simple that people turn around and look at you and say, "Oh, is that all you know!" We're not in that position yet, believe me.

But this whole business of Clear and clearing people and so on has been a dream of many years, and a nightmare of some of those years. Why people suddenly insisted on having totally held-down fives and nothing else, I wouldn't know. Past track: Oh, it was a terrible thing that happened in July of 1950; it was worse than spring of 1950; spring I just got all the black cases in the US; they all arrived the same day, I think. I never seen one before; I hadn't a clue — totally outside of any experience I had.

Actually, it wasn't till 55 I got this black case wrapped up. Wrapping it up's very easy: Have 'em mock up blackness in the blackness and shove it into the body. And even though he goes anaten, you keep on auditing him. Even though he goes unconscious, you keep giving the commands, he keeps doing it and eventually he remedies havingness of blackness. If this doesn't work, get some black objects and have him keep 'em from going away. It wasn't even anything to worry about!

The guy comes up with some thin little things that he says, "Yeah, I guess that's a picture." And after a while, why, he puts up a cat and he says "Dyah!" And you say, "What's the matter?"

"Hyoo!"

You say, "What's the matter?"

"Well, lllloo!"

And you say, "Tell me what is happening."

He says, "Well, a horrible monster just appeared in front of me!" He'd gotten his first picture; up till that time he was guessing.

Now, in the middle of 1950, this terrible thing called "past lives" suddenly showed up. From the first thing that happened — one of the first things that happened is the Foundation directors had a total blast-out on the whole subject because they wanted to pass a resolution forbidding anybody to mention them, investigate them, or look at them any further. I consider it very interesting. That was the beginning and the end of my participation in Foundations. That was an interesting thing for anybody — any board of directors of a (quote) "Research Foundation" to do, to forbid the investigation of a certain field. That was because it got over into the schools and got the students excited, 'cause everybody could get a past life, evidently, even when they couldn't get a present one.

This, by the way culminated — you might not ever have connected the things up, but this culminated really in Bridey Murphy that you heard so much about. And everybody was saying, "Why don't we get in on the Bridey Murphy bandwagon?" And I sat back and laughed very quietly, "Whose bandwagon was Bridey Murphy on?"

Now, here's the main thing about past lives, and we ran this in the London Express: It isn't getting people into 'em, it's getting them out of them! It isn't their rarity, it's their tremendous abundance; they're all over the place!

This fellow is sitting there looking at a picture of a revolutionary British soldier, you know; he's looking at this picture, he sees it quite often. Nobody ever asked this question because nobody knew about mental image pictures; everybody thought that nobody looked at anything, because this opinion was arrived at by people who were totally black fives. You see, we never got any psychologists in to amount to anything before the spring of 50, and a lot of these people are totally black.

All right. Now here we've got this person looking at the picture; there he is looking at the picture all the time. It never occurs to him that it's a picture he made of something and that it really happened, and what that he pronounces as hallucination, delusion or imagination is too often horribly factual.

Now, you start fishing around with this just a little bit, and he is rather amazed, the first time this picture has ever been joggled, to have the British soldier raise his tower musket and blow the preclear's silly head off! That's why he had it arrested just before the point, see? All you had to do as an auditor was move him a little further on the scene and boom!

Now, where we get a thing like all of a sudden past lives, why, today it would cause us no concern at all. We've been through all that, brother, have we been through all that. Any old-time auditor can tell you more about the past track and American history and Roman history and Grecian history and Chaldean and Babylonian history and history on a planet 200,000 years ago and what they do in space opera and how psychiatrists acted 8 billion years ago and so forth; and of course the society at large, being rather stupid, would sit there with its mouth open and say, "What are you talking about?" Heh, go away with stomachaches, bullet holes in their backs, spear … That's of course why they're saying, "What are you talking about?" They just don't like the sensation of that spear going straight on through.

Or the meteorites coming in through the windshield as you stand on the bridge. They don't like that, so they say, "What are you talking about? It's all unreal to me." And you say, if you were real mean, you'd-all-only have to say, "I'm talking about those meteorites coming straight on through the bridge shield."

And they'd say, "What do mean?"

"The meteorites coming in straight on through."

And the guy says — he'd say, "I don't know what you mean — only I now don't have a head."

Well, these pieces of randomness we are not likely to run into. We've got this pretty well taped; we know where we're going and we're at a good safe foundation in the field of search, and probably will spend most of our time now researching what's been searched.

Anyway, it's safe to go someplace with this idea of Clear, so in the next hour I'll tell you how to get there.

Thank you.