What is a state of “Clear” and “OT”

Content:

- THE TRADITION OF technology
- CLEARING
- THE STATE OF CLEAR
- THE STATE OF OPERATING THETAN
- THE TRADITIONAL CONCEPT
- FOLLOWING TRADITION
- THE ULTIMATE STATE
- CLEAR DIFFERS FROM OT
- THE LEVELS TO OT
- Gradients of Various States

THE TRADITION OF technology

Once upon a time preclears were full of mysteries and unknowns. Once, to resolve a case, it was necessary to have a crystal ball, a clean record with the Archangel Michael and a lot of luck.

Fourteen active years and tens of thousands of pc’s (preclears) have changed all that.

During this past summer, when I had completed the Routine 6 (pc’s own goals) research, I was able to review all the levels and stages a pc or an auditor (a Scientology practitioner) has to go through.

What emerged, in getting this material into understandable form, was that people had, in general, confused Clearing and Operating Thetans (OTs).

CLEARING

Many had tried to deify Clears and had rarely understood “OT”

Clears and clearing are actually fully explained in the first published article on Dianetics (Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science), and in Book One (Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health). Clear is the name of a button on an adding machine. When you push it, all the hidden answers in the machine clear and the machine can be used for a proper computation. So long as the button is not pressed, the machine adds all old answers to all new efforts to compute, and wrong answers result.

People who have old, fixed answers reacting when they try to think, get wrong answers when they try to solve their current problems. Such old answers are not cleared. Rollo is still solving the tantrums of his mother who has been dead for years. Marybelle is still running away from the tramp who attacked her when she was 10 years old. So Rollo stays home as the solution to the women of the world. And Marybelle runs madly about as a solution to all the uncouth men she sees. Their friends think they’re a bit odd. Their doctors prescribe pills. And we clear the old senseless answers which won’t let them get more sensible answers. As adding machines, or any kind of calculator, they would be junked. They give wrong answers to life because they already have a hidden answer in their cog wheels.

They are not cleared.

Well, really that’s all a clear is. Clears are beings who have been cleared of wrong answers or useless answers which keep them from living or thinking.

THE STATE OF CLEAR

Now the state of being cleared was what confused the issue. People wanted to know what they’d be like if they were cleared. A good question. Data accumulated, but not as fast as the questions. The people, cleared, would be better, feel better, act better, be more moral, etc. All that is a matter of record.

But the craving for an Absolute caused everyone to put the state called “OT” in place of the condition of “being cleared”. “Absolutes,” in our axioms, “are unobtainable.”

THE STATE OF OPERATING THETAN

Operating Thetan is a state of beingness. It is a being “at cause over matter, energy, space, time, form and life.” Operating comes from “able to operate without dependency on things” and Thetan is the Greek letter Theta (theta), which the Greeks used to represent “thought” or perhaps “spirit”, to which an “n” is added to make a new noun in the modern style used to create words in engineering. It is also “thetan” or “theta to the nth degree”, meaning unlimited or vast.

THE TRADITIONAL CONCEPT

In brief, a Thetan is an individual spirit or soul or life unit or fifty other things all adding up to the traditional concept of man’s spiritual nature or beingness. More radical, recent thought departed into adventurous by-paths and announced, contrary to more conservative philosophy and usual acceptance, that Man was an animal made up of a brain and bones and possessing no soul. This may have made the originators of this quaint Russo-German school feel less guilty for what they did to men in wars and science. But it takes more than a Marxist psychologist to change every man’s basic philosophy forever; and 99.99% of Earth’s people, at least, still believe they have souls or are souls. Only the philosophically illiterate and the agitators for the recent, radical schools of psychology suppose they have made inroads in man’s belief that he has or is a soul. Only those who seek to enslave Man would try to “sell” the idea of a “soulless man”.

The rest of us, and we comprise, remember, 99.99% of the population of the planet, still hold to the concept that we are spirits or spiritual beings and that we go elsewhere when we “die”.

Only men who have quite a thirst for revenge would want others to totally die.

FOLLOWING TRADITION

Remaining with more traditional philosophy and working with what seemed more reasonable, I was able to demonstrate in 1952 the actual existence of this thing called a spirit (the experiments of “Exteriorization”). But wishing to avoid “spiritualism” or even “soul”, because both had such bulky histories as words, I coined the word thetan, derived as above; and Scientologists ever since have been quite happy with it.

I should have called it the more traditional Greek word “psyche”, perhaps; but at that time I saw no virtue in being confused with “psychologists” who explain in their own texts that they don’t know what their own name means, as they don’t know what a “psyche” is and don’t believe there is one, which rather upsets their title to the word they use for themselves.

But anyway, for better or worse, I used “thetan”.

THE ULTIMATE STATE

It soon became quite visible that the spiritual condition could be improved, and an ultimate attainment of “cause over matter, energy, space, time, form and life” was possible.

Now this was the ultimate state. Operating Thetan: A theoretically attainable transcendence over death and the travails of mortal existence. It was a dream. A bold dream. But not a new dream. Like everything else we have in Scientology, it is based on traditional philosophy. The thinking then of every great civilization up to this century, not only would have grasped the meaning of this, but were themselves seeking to attain it. Name a great name in historical philosophy. All right. He was trying to attain OT by means of exploration of Life, Thought, Man or the Reason of Things.

Only in the last few decades has the dream been challenged by a radical few. That they teach in universities is only a comment that today’s universities aren’t the halls of enlightenment they were. Ah well, they can all be improved. And it would take more than these rebellious few to smash one of Man’s great dreams – the dream of freedom of spirit, the dream of freedom of self, the dream of ascending above base matter.

CLEAR DIFFERS FROM OT

So OT was the state of beingness.

Clear was a gradient condition. (A gradual bettering.)

During studies of the past year, all this disentangled and became understood, and for the first time was easy to express.

Clear is not a gradient up to OT Clear is a gradient up to Homo Novis only. Homo (Man) Novis (new). This is a desirable improvement. Very desirable for anyone.

An entirely new thing has to be done to make an Operating Thetan.

But one had to know how to make one to find out about one. And Routine 6, the process that makes an OT, starts, really, at Homo Novis. Certainly Routine 6 runs best on a Homo Novis. The proof is that those Scientologists who have been pretty well cleared don’t have any trouble at all with Routine 6; and those who haven’t been cleared, and particularly those who have had few gains in processing, have a pretty awful time of it with Routine 6. They get a bit along with it, but it’s like watching a pygmy wrestle with an elephant.

Thus, although we have Routine 6, my task has been to bring preclears up to clear and then to send them onward to OT

THE LEVELS TO OT

This is done – and very doable it is – by moving the being up to a few basic wins with ordinary processing (up to Level III) and then moving the preclear up to clear (Level IV) and then going for OT, which is Level VI (V being skipped, but left in place because it contains a known type of technology, not needed, but necessary to know the existence of). To stretch a point, one is really clearing from Level I to Level IV; but clearing, now that I’ve had a chance to refine it, is itself a process that takes skill and ability both to run and receive. And one has to get the being up to doing that. So a being who can do that is a “Release”, which reaches up to Level II.

These stages, as expressed in “Levels”, are all quite real and are getting very precise (see Chart of Gradients). Fourteen years of work developed a lot of know-how. And it all fell into its rightful place when one got to where one could stand high and inspect the ground below. One needed Routine 6 and the practical attainability of OT to see where one was with the fellow who just walked in off the street. How did one get such a fellow from the coal pit to the mountain top? That was the problem.

Gradients of Various States