State of Clear
| State of Clear | |
|---|---|
| Author | David Mayo |
| Type of Article | Category:History of Scientology - Technical |
- This is taken verbatim from IVy 1, May 1991 -- original title "Clear".
In late 1978, the state of “dianetic clear” was announced. Within a few months two other “states of clear” were introduced: the state of “natural clear” and the state of “past life clear”.
This change had two immediate consequences:
1. The number of people attesting (correctly or falsely) to having attained the "state of clear” increased enormously.
2. During and after that period, there was a considerable amount of upset and confusion about the “state of clear”.
There were those who considered that a dianetic clear was not a “real clear” and that the only “real clear” was one who (like them ) had done the Clearing Course. Some felt that they had gone clear in their last lifetime. Some felt that dianetic clear explained why they had never been able to run dianetic auditing successfully. A large number of auditors, C/Ses, and others felt that there were a lot of people falsely attesting to the state of clear and either:
a. Felt unethical about letting the person attest, or
b.Tried to handle it and ended up involuntarily invalidating the pc. No matter how this was “handled” , it has persisted as a problem. So we can at least assume that there are aspects of it that haven’ t been taken into account and handled.
Let us examine more closely what happened in late 1978 and early 1979. LRH was being audited and concluded that one of the things wrong with his case was that he had been audited on dianetic auditing after he had attained the “state of clear” (which he at first thought had occurred in objective processing). He then issued a bulletin forbidding the running of dianetic auditing on clears and made various other technical and administrative changes.
He cancelled the state of “keyed out clear” by stating that it was the same state as “clear” . He changed the definition of “ clear” (and subsequently changed it several more times). He ordered that the folders of pcs (and the pcs themselves) who might have gone clear in orgs and missions be routed to Advanced Orgs. This action resulted in an emptying out of the orgs and missions and a flood of people arriving at the AOs.
At first, people were being declared clear regardless of what they thought they had gone clear on or when this had occurred. More importantly, they were being declared clear regardless of the state of case or condition they were in. In fact, one bulletin went so far as to advise that case and ethics trouble could be caused by a person having attained clear without having the state acknowledged. As a result, many persons who were declared clear were actually in very poor condition. This practice reflected badly on the “state of clear” and the workability of the tech. It caused a great deal of upset and confusion on the subject of clear.
At that time there was a shortage of instructions on how to handle dianetic clear technically and a general lack of data on the new subject of “dianetic clear". However persons accused of mishandling dianetic clear were handled with heaviy ethics. The “invalidation of clear" was named a Suppressive Act, while permitting someone to attest falsely was also a serious ethics offense.
A step in the procedure for handling these new clears was to establish the date when the person went clear. Sometimes the date so found would be before Scientology or even prior to the pc’s lifetime. When LRH heard that some persons considered that they had attained the “state of clear" in an earlier practice such as Buddhism, he became very upset. He stated that the idea that a person could go clear through any other means than Scientology was “suppressive". At a certain point, he also got upset at the fact that people were concluding that they had gone clear in Scientology auditing. So he specified that a person can validly go clear only in dianetic auditing. He handled the "earlier than this lifetime" clears by deciding that they either went clear in their last lifetime in dianetic auditing (presumably if they were young enough for this to be possible) or had attained a new state he dubbed “natural clear". His new theory was that some people had never been anything but clear. However, he refused, thereafter, to issue any further clarification of what he meant by this assertion.
Throughout this period, the definition of clear and/or dianetic clear kept changing — in the direction of dilution. Thus people came to expect less and less from the “state of clear", while the number of new clears (and thus new arrivals at AOs and Gross Income) steadily increased. None of the new definitions of “clear", and none of the new techniques for handling clears or programming them for further actions, really solved any of the problems caused by the advent of dianetic clear.
It is of interest that the definition of “clear" had already been changed several times between its first definition in DMSMH [1] and the time the idea of “clear" was put forth. In DMSMH, a clear was said to be 4.0 on the tone scale, with no aberrations (held down sevens), no psychoses, neuroses, nor psychosomatic illnesses. The clear was said to have eidetic recall and highly enhanced perceptions and creativity. Although this chappie didn’t have any OT powers, he was definitely quite a phenomenon!
It is also significant that the attributes of a clear, as described in DMSMH, were never actually attained, although in reading DMSMH, one might be led to believe that they were. When people started attesting to clear, the definition was watered down to the vague generality “at cause over mental MEST as regards the first dynamic". This definition can mean many different things to many different people. Anyone is at least somewhat causative over his own mind. So anyone can find an interpretation of this definition of “clear" that he can attest to. The states of “MEST Clear", “Theta Clear", “Cleared Theta Clear", “Clearing Course Clear", “Clear-OT” , and, finally, “Dianetic Clear", and "Word Clear" were equally absolutistic when first stated, but when people started attesting to them, the definition of each, or the criterion for allowing a pc to attest to each, was similarly watered down. This sequence has been repeated over and over throughout the history of Scientology.
LRH correctly stated that absolutes are unattainable. And the notion of “clear" Ls an absolute. It’s like the notion of “clean" or “pure". When is water pure? When it has only one part per million of arsenic and rat poop? Nowhere in the universe is there water which is 100% pure. To obtain complete Clarity would require a complete as-isness of any universe the thetan was in and a return to complete native state. Everyone does have a reactive mind — his own reactive mind. That’s why one flies ruds and goes E/S and gets off BPC on anyone regardless of their point on the grade chart. The mechanics of the reactive mind continue to exist all the way up.
“Clears" have always had trouble explaining why they still act reactively at times, or a lot of the time, and why they still have problems in life and in getting along with people. The amount of mileage you can get from the notion of a "cleared cannibal" [2] is very limited. Even a cleared cannibal, if he were really clear, would get along wonderfully in life, never manifest mis-emotion, and love all his fellow beings, even as he was having their bodies for dinner!
The idea of “harmonics of clear" is quite accurate. The main reason why LRH blew up at the idea of “harmonics of clear", as expressed in the HCOB I wrote, was, as he told me, that this idea tended to leave him open to the charge that the claims he had made in DMSMH and elsewhere concerning the “state of clear” were fraudulent.
The truth appears to be that there are various stages of release, at each one of which you are clear-er than you were. A person experiencing the glee of insanity is clearer than someone who is just completely unconscious. It was PR and marketing considerations that led Hubbard to decide that certain people were “clear" at a certain point, and that they therefore had no reactive mind. However this assertion is a lie, and a very destructive one, one that denies case gain to a great many people and provides a too-convenient rabbit button for pc’s, auditors and C/S's who are having trouble with the pc’s case. The claim that case and ethics problems can be caused by being clear was:
1. Absurd on the face of it.
2. A declaration of open rabbitting season.
Trying to define “clear” is difficult because it is being done over a lie. We either have to restore the meaning of clear to its original absolute meaning (which means that there aren’t any clears in existence), or we have to say that what people have attested to as clear is actually only a state of release or reduction.
We can say that the purpose of auditing is to clear aberrations and that if all aberrations were cleared, a “state of clear” would be attained. The concept of “clear” is useful as an ultimate goal, like the goal of perfect happiness or of perfect anything. It is a direction in which to continue to progress. It is not an attainable state (at least given our present level of technology).
Another part of the problem is that the states of release and clear are only subjective. Asking an aberrated person to decide when he feels or thinks that he is no longer aberrated, is asking for a delusory “cognition" from the start. At one time [ca. 1959. Ed.], LRH postulated that the state of clear could be objectively proven by the presence of a “ free or floating needle” and a T A position of 2.0 (Female) or 3.0 (Male). But this was an unverified guess that did not stand the test of time.
Perhaps what we have been calling “clear” is “no longer chronically affected by engrams" or “engrams no longer in chronic restimulation." As such, the state would be more accurately described as a state of release or as a state of reduction. In other words, it would mean that the majority of a person’s aberrations had gone into abeyance.
Regardless of what the state is named, the recognition that a person can continue to become clear-er, restores hope and makes progress possible again.
- This was originally issued by: The International Society of Independents, 431 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA as: UPDATE SERIES 4 on January 1st, 1987 [Ed. Note 2015 – address out of date]
- ^ The book, Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health, 1950, by L. Ron Hubbard.
- ^ Editorial note 2015: the idea of cleared cannibal was prevalent at the time when all this confusion about clears occurred. The Tech Dictionary refers to Science of Survival and is as follows: CLEARED CANNIBAL, the individual without engram seeks survival along all of the dynamics in accordance with his breadth of understanding. This does not mean that a Zulu who has been cleared of all his engrams would not continue to eat missionaries if he were a cannibal by education; but it does mean that he would be as rational as possible about eating missionaries; further, it would be easier to re-educate him about eating missionaries if he were a Clear. (SOS, P. 110)