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The following first appeared in the private email list IVy-subscribers,
which is available to all those who subscribe to the
printed magazine, International Viewpoints.
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To have, or to have NOTs
by Phil Spickler (written to Frank Gordon)
8 Feb 1999

My dear Frank,

This is in reply to your request for a brief summary of New Era 
Dianetics for OTs and some of the experiences I've had with it.

I think, in all fairness to your kind request, that I should mention 
that Joe Harrington had said it was possible to download the complete 
official NOTs pack from a website somewhere on the Internet.  I'm 
sure that Joe would be pleased to let you know exactly how to do 
this, should you ask him, and in this way you would have the whole 
word from the horse's mouth, so to speak. (Please to forgive the 
metaphor.)  On the other hand, it gives me great pleasure to share 
the following with you; I hope that it won't lead you too far astray.

A Possible Basic

Historically, and already well-known to your esteemed self, engrams 
and engram running was all about locating and doing something about 
hidden influences.  The result of doing this made these influences 
known, and it became possible to see the effect they were having on 
human behavior and health, etc. etc. etc.  In  my opinion, the 
history of both Dianetics and Scientology has always, if not 
repeatedly, been the effort to find out about that which is hidden or 
unknown so that relief from its effect on oneself could be achieved. 
NOTs, I should say, in both theory and practice, has very much this 
intention, and on a rather grand scale, I might add.

The subject matter of NOTs has to do with thetans, individually as 
well as collectively, and all the states of being and/or conditions 
they might be manifesting; the possibility of their locations in the 
body, near the body, or at any distance from the body, the concern 
being with the "why" of their attachment and what unwanted effect 
they might be generating via the body or directly against that 
elusive, somewhat difficult to define, quantity or quality known as 
"you."  The condition of said thetans could range from fairly 
conscious and communicative down to very dead, very inert, very solid 
and very unresponsive.  What these individuals or groups might be 
could literally be anything and everything imaginable, which is one 
of the things that I have thought made NOTs a very interesting sort 
of search.  The range of extremely unpleasant or negative 
possibilities is very large, and can go a long way toward resolving 
conditions that one might have never handled with early forms of 
Dianetics.

NOTs can be audited quite nicely with the help of an E-meter, either 
solo, or perhaps at first it's better to get a little under your belt 
with the help of another auditor.  Contact and communication with 
areas that are in difficulty, and that are having a non-optimum 
effect on "you" and the body, is mainly done with a sharply-focused 
telepathic beam, the idea being to handle a limited area at a time 
and not restimulate much more than you have the time or inclination 
to handle.  The most powerful and bottom-line tool that can be used 
to help that which you run into, the great undercut of all 
possibilities, is the use of acknowledgment, the intention being to 
bring an individual thetan or group of thetans into live 
communication and by helping said area to come into present time 
through an understanding of when, who, what, and where they are, to 
rapidly clear up misconceptions, leading to a freedom from the 
reactive and unaware attachment that has been trapping this thetan or 
group of thetans, thus allowing in one fell swoop for the 
aforementioned to gain the freedom to leave whilst realizing their 
own true nature as opposed to what they have been being, thus 
generating a lovely end phenomenon which will be visible on the 
E-meter and the full feeling of what happens when a thetan or group 
of thetans goes Clear quite rapidly -- very, very, very good 
indicators and tremendous sense of awareness and perception.

The enormous benefit that comes to you, the one called Frank Gordon, 
is that you are handling the cases of others and clearing them and 
getting a giant opportunity to see that all that stuff has never 
really been you or your case (talk about straightening out 
misownership!), and you're now simply handling, whenever you wish to, 
the difficulties of others as they seem to affect you.

Experiences I've Had

This type of work gives one a tremendous opportunity to confront and 
handle some of the most amazing and outrageous forms that theta might 
inhabit and that one might confuse with oneself.  It gives one an 
excellent chance to see that many of the ideas that we bandy about 
and call our own really arise from uninspected hidden influences. 
Many physical complaints, to a greater or lesser degree, can be 
handled with NOTs, and just as Dianetics made some pretty 
far-reaching claims for what it could do for a human being, I think 
NOTs is the natural heir to such claims and then some.

If there is a downside to all this, and I'm not absolutely certain 
there is, it would come under the heading of "too much of a good 
thing."  When I was doing NOTs at Flag early in 1979, a 12+1/2 hour 
intensive cost at least several thousand dollars, and the demand for 
such auditing was very high, so you can imagine the large amounts of 
money that were pouring in every week. This was before there was any 
Solo NOTs, but the point I'm getting at is that people, when they had 
giant wins, didn't necessarily stop and go off and do other things, 
'cause the accent was on selling NOTs and getting people to do as 
much as they could possibly afford to do, which didn't always have a 
happy conclusion.  It was seen then as an unlimited activity; but as 
we know from early Dianetics, for most folks it's a good idea to pull 
the pin when they have a giant win and get on with the business of 
life.

It's quite tempting to do a lot of NOTs, especially when you know how 
to solo it, but as you have probably guessed from the nature of this 
activity, there's really no end to the distances and lengths you 
might go to, to encounter things that seem to be influencing your 
existence in a way that you consider to be sub-optimum.  So you could 
possibly end up trying to run out the 8 dynamics without checking out 
the "I" that seems to keep finding things it needs to handle in order 
to live better.

I shall say no more at this time about this, since I don't want to 
cheat anyone out of finding their own realities and having their own 
cognitions.  Maybe I should have entitled this piece "Groups and 
Groupers". :-)

All the best to one and all -- Phil