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The following first appeared in the private email list IVy-subscribers,
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On a clear day, or, Why I am not a spiritual being, Part 2
by Phil Spickler
23 Nov 1999


Greetings to those who give and receive,
       Another round of thanks to Judith Methven for kicking off and helping
to maintain what I consider to be a scintillating discussion on the topic of
clearing, which continues to generate very interesting posts from a number of
sources.  I'd like to personally thank everyone that's contributed to the
discussion -- it's really kept my interest, and has stimulated some further
thoughts, which brings me to that which follows.

       My very good friend and close companion pointed out to me        that
one of the things that interfered with the 1950 promise of Clear was that the
analogy between the human mind and, say, the mechanical mind of a calculator,
or even the far more sophisticated "mind" of today's fanciest computers,
breaks down at a certain point, namely, you really can press the "Clear"
button on a calculator and clear everything out of it so that nothing will
influence the next set of computations that you enter into it, and if you
want to leave it at that point it will stay clear until the machine falls
into pieces and then dust.  This is not true of the human mind, which once
"cleared" will not necessarily stay clear, but may once again seem to come
under the influence of more "stuck 7's" than you ever deemed possible.

       There's a couple of things about the human body-mind that may have a
lot to do with the impossibility of a permanent state of Clear: for one, the
body itself is a stimulus/response organism, and its stimulus/response nature
is a vital necessity if it is to survive, for if it were to stop and reason
all its responses and activities, that which became the human race never
would have survived long enough to have reached the point of creating
mechanical "minds."

      Secondly, to the degree that one subscribes to the notion of evolution,
the human body is in and of itself essentially a rather well-put-together
group of engrams that contain all the memories of all the efforts and
counter-efforts that resulted in continuing survival.  And so, as Ron pointed
out in one of his lighter moments, if you were to succeed in running out all
the body's engrams in their historic sense, you would end up with no-body;
and I don't think anybody wants that as an auditing result.

       One further thing is that, if there were ever a time machine or a
clock, it's the human body; and in association with these bodies, a very,
very strong sense of time is developed as a good or bad habit.

       That being said, it seems to me that in the years that followed 1950
and concerning the state of Clear, Ron kept coming back to the notion of
"stuck 7's" or hidden influences that were adversely affecting the perfect
workings of the mind and coming up with all kinds of deranged solutions to
survival on many of the dynamics.  Eventually, he seemed to think he'd found
the granddaddy of secret or hidden influences when OT Section III was
announced to the world, with its famous Wall of Fire, around 1967 I believe.

       And so here we had the hidden influence of lots of really messed-up
thetans who had been driven so far around the bend (non-technical talk) that
they were little else other than individual and mushed-up groups hanging
around and in human bodies and causing the generation of all of mankind's
woes.  And once again we were at clearing by getting rid of something (some
call that negative gain), and at the same time this form of clearing allowed
for the possibility of helping vast numbers of other souls who were in
terrible trouble to become free and clear themselves.

       This of course, like engram running in 1950 and 1951, entered, for
most people, into an endless phase.  This occurred in the '50's when people
refused to settle for a giant win engram-running and came back for more and
more and more, usually with a disastrous result.  And of course many people
who worked on OT Section III in Scientology did work in that area, on and
off, for years.  Thus it was called "Endless OT III," and was pretty
disastrous.

       Now to continue the story, I think it was around 1979 that Ron became
seriously physically ill, and David Mayo, a Sea Organization Case Supervisor
who had risen to the post of Case Supervisor for the world, was called to
Ron's bedside to see if Ron's life could be saved with auditing.  Well,
between the two of them they evolved a procedure that pretty well fixed up
Mr. Hubbard, and the procedure came to be called New Era Dianetics for
Operating Thetans -- in its short form it came to be called simply "NOTS."


         Anyway, here we are once again full circle, back to Dianetics, still
looking for the "stuck 7's," the hidden influences that make individuals and
their dynamics engage in sub- or non-optimum solutions to problems relating
to survival or existence.  NOTS is the granddaddy of all procedures
concerning entities, valences, spirits, things that can go "boomp" in the
night, and all the other names that ancients and moderns might give to such
influences; and once again the notion of a "real" Clear was being promoted,
even though in the arbitrary of the Grade Chart it came to be called an OT
Section.

       Now the beauty of NOTS, in my opinion and in my experience, was that
it completely threw open the notion of all the possibilities that might be
found and discovered for those who were willing and able to confront
entities, and unlike the subject matter of OT III, did nothing to limit these
possibilities.  It diminished the notion, thankfully, that OT III was the
real centerpiece of Scientology and that it explained everything about Earth
and its inhabitants.  By 1980, folks who were coming up the Grade Chart were
only allowed to do OT III to a win, and shortly thereafter they were whisked
along to do NOTS.  I don't know in present time, 1999, what's going on with
these matters in the Church, but speaking of occurrences  around 1980, I
definitely witnessed some big clearing possibilities taking place.

       Once again, the expectations of many were that if you reached the
point of NOTS completion, this glorified state would last for gosh knows how
long.  It is interesting to note that that was not the case, and that endless
address to the subject matter of NOTS,  providing you could afford it, would
not give you the coveted certificate of "Clear Forever."

        However, NOTS procedure in the hands of those that know it and can
use it well can and does routinely produce spectacular results in a very
short time, and is one of the fastest clean-up procedures for old-timers that
I have ever seen in action.  It also, for me, fulfills one of my favorite
Buddhist notions, which is the great quest towards finding out who or what
you are not.  This is quite different from the Western tradition, which has
always been concerned with finding out what you are or who you are; but as
long as what you are not remains senior to what you are, it will continue to
be a more valuable avenue in the direction of that which cannot be described
with words.

        So yes, NOTS, like Book I Dianetics, is very much concerned with
handling mis-identification, which in early Dianetics was referred to as the
A=A=A, where you have all kinds of different things that seem to be the same
thing or are grouped into being thought of as all one.  That formulation Ron
extracted from the subject of General Semantics, the work of Count Alfred
Korzybski who wrote it up in a book circa 1937 called _Science of Sanity_.

       Anyhow, engram running was a wonderful chance to take a look at how
confused and mis-identified things could get during an experience of pain,
unconsciousness, and often heavy impact.  NOTS auditing and technique does
that and even more in terms of clearing up mis-identifications and
misconceptions, and does wonders as a 7th dynamic procedure for freeing theta.

       All along the way in this amazing procedure you may run into the
question, "What sort of a beingness would I have to be in order to have what
I'm dealing with as my case?"  If you succeed in answering that question, you
will not need to do any more NOTS auditing, but you may not like it, because
it ends the game of having a case to get rid of and makes notions such as
Clear and OT assume their proper place in the relative gradients of states to
be found as part of Time or Existence.  And as they used to say back in the
1920's on the police radio, "Calling all cars!  Calling all cars!  Be on the
lookout for a nothingness . . .  That is all."

       All the best, and good luck --
         Phil
P.S.  Before I forget -- this concludes all I wish to say about OT, and I
hope answers the question Why I am not a spiritual being.
P.P.S.  If you want to know a lot more about what OT is really all about,
make contact with one who is an OT, namely Alan C. Walter.