May 1954[/B]]
Volume 1, Number 2 Published at Enid, Oklahoma, U.S.A.
How Optimum Is a "Clear"?
ONE OF THE most abused, maligned, and misunderstood words in the language of Dianetics and Scientology is the word "clear".
In L. Ron Hubbard's first book, "DIANETICS, the Modern Science of Mental Health", a "clear" was described as a person "without psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, and repressions", and "high above the current norm" in intelligence. A steady improvement in perceptics also could be expected.
Almost immediately, the word itself began to manifest the entire gamut of human aberration. It became both a beacon of desire and the "sour grapes" of unattainability. For the latter, the word took on magnitudes that would have given a "clear" the attributes of the highest of the gods.
The "clear" (Mr. Hubbard said) --even though he wore glasses an inch thick--might expect to start showing marked improvement in his eyesight, often changing glasses four or five times during therapy. The exaggerationists, glossing over the gradient of expected improvement, immediately assigned to the "clear" superlative vision. To wear glasses was to place one low on the Tone Scale (a hypothetical chart predicting what might be expected of an individual under any given circumstance.) Many, fearing that their visual deficiency would be self-invalidating, tortured and squinted and strained in stubborn misery, "knowing" that in time even small print would be no harder to read than was that big sign across the street with the dancing, foggy letters. Sometimes, in the privacy of their rooms, they'd sneak out their "cheaters", but though they could read better, the "overt act" against Dianetics was a new "lock" on their guilt chain.
The moment a hen-pecked husband found himself driven to the necessity of sassing his wife, he "knew" by the exhilaration of redeemed self-respect that, at last, he was
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a clear. The loafer who could look at a job without being tempted by the salary it paid could gloat to the friend from whom he borrowed coffee money that he was a self-determined clear. The bedfast individual who had made life miserable for his friends and family for years could, by taking the few necessary steps that returned circulation to his feet and legs, regain the wavering attention by announcing that he had processed himself into the state of clear. There even was a way to do it with mirrors.
These persons were rid of neither their compulsions nor neuroses. They are part of the great family of aberrees that would gladly throw themselves on a pile of burning faggots if they knew that the deed would obtain for them a few minutes of hungered-for attention.
In the three years since the first book, the word "clear" has been changed, altered, and even hyphenated. No longer is a clear someone who has turned off a headache, or "remembered" what Mamma said to Papa during his conception, or decided not to act like Grandpa just because he hid Grandpa's cane which made Grandpa fall down and break his scrawny neck. Even the ability to read the small type on the editorial page of The Daily Sunsation, or to hear the undertones of a symphony muffled behind the bleating of a tobacco auctioneer, do not guarantee the properties of a clear.
A MEST clear -- 1953 definition -- had no present day problems, and had cleared up all the occlusion of this lifetime. It was a big order -- but some, after only a few hours of processing (and that from auditors who were far from optimum themselves), announced boldly that they'd hit the jackpot; that, on this merry-go-rouhd of life, they'd found the gold ring.
You don't evaluate, you don't invalidate, but like Ernest, in "The Great Stone Face" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, many of us came hopefully to see, and having seen, sadly turned away. Instead of the miracle we'd expected, we found a person who, under other circumstances and in different environment, might have been expected to park a hand under the lapel of his coat and insist, with great certainty, that he was Napoleon Bonaparte.
With the transition from Dianetics to Scientology -- and the discovery that the thetan and the body could go their separate ways -- the "clear" became more of a variable. One who merely "gets out" is only a "release". A "theta clear" (Issue 24-G, Journal of Scientology) "is a relative, not an absolute term. It means that the person, this thought unit, is clear of his body, his engrams, his facsimiles, but can handle and safely control a body." In the Doctorate Course, the added ability of not being drawn back into the body if the body is hurt or injured is part of the definition.
There may be clears. There even may be lots of clears. It's even possible that some of those who say they're clears are clears. And maybe, to return to the analogy of Hawthorne's Ernest, those who look and turn sadly away are refusing to look upon themselves. We expect a miracle -- not seekers of lost gold mines, not a person in rags and dirt living off the charity of the unarrived, not a person who'll lie to escape blame, even as you and I.
Apparently, the accomplishment of optimum goals as yet is merely theoretical. Possibly, too many have become over-sold on the idea that it's "simple -- there's nothing to it", and a clever auditor can get results in a few minutes or a few hours. They're waiting for something to happen TO them -- with a minimum of work and study. Or, if they can afford it, they think they can take course after course, and like the rich youth of Saint Matthew, buy themselves into the Kingdom of Attainment.
There are goals above theta clear: cleared theta clear and operating thetan, but for the present, we'll settle for one person on the bottom of the ladder. Nor need they demonstrate the ability to levitate their car across a police-jammed intersection. In a nation becoming shackled by controls of church and state, and steeped in the belief that we must continually prepare to destroy another segment of the world in order to survive, there is much room for a clear to demonstrate his powers in these channels of government. Or in the educational system. Or the communications field.
Maybe it's the word itself that is jamming up the computing machine. When you "clear" a computer, you don't merely remove the implanted number that's giving you wrong totals, you reduce the entire sum to a starting point of zero. Maybe none of us ever will attain this hypothetical goal until we're ready and willing to erase the whole sum and quit trying to find one or two numbers that we think stand between us and it.
Mr. Hubbard has said himself that our goal is to be nothing -- and that's all we ever can become. Maybe that's why we never see a real, honest-to-God clear -- there's nothing there. As for the pseudotype (quoting from I Corinthians), "God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty".
