Refund and Reparation

This is the famous bridge mentioned at the end of Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health.

It is now complete and is functioning. The being enters it from somewhere in the minus regions as a Beginning Scientologist and moves on up. At about Grade 11 he has definitely reached Homo novis. He becomes a RELEASE somewhere between II and V. And he becomes CLEAR at the top of VI. The state of Operating Thetan is attained above VI and is a Grade VII.

For man to have this at all is quite remarkable. He never had it before since we find him improving but still, on the average well below -4.

By following this chart one can make RELEASE and then CLEAR.

I began search into the back track of mankind some years ago. There was no actual knowledge of it in existence. There were numberless superstitions, countless guesses, as many theories in favour of one thing as in favour of another. People believed, some of them, that man had lived before. They had no proof. Others believed that Man was born innocent and died and went to a place called Hell. Most believed that when you had lived once, that was all, fellow.

Such a number of conflicting theories must have truth in them. It became my business to discover, against considerable odds, that truth.

In the first place, there was something wrong with man. An animal such as a cat, even a reptile, a lizard, had habit patterns which carried him through his early days. Not man. Why not? As usual, a lot of vagueness answered this. The very schools of ‘thought’ that said man was just another animal bogged utterly on why it was that babies, the young of this very intelligent animal, are much more stupid than kittens. That was only one thing wrong with man that wasn’t explained.

The further one investigated, the more one came to understand that here, in this creature Homo sapiens, were entirely too many unknowns. People who suddenly, out of no observable training, begin to speak foreign tongues, men who ‘seem to remember having been here before,’ strange yearnings in people for various parts of the country or the world or the stars of which they have no actual knowledge, such things are routine puzzles.

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Who is the preclear? He is the theta being.

How does one really de-aberrate and clear a preclear? By clearing the theta being.

By running genetic entity incidents, by cleaning up present life, by running “past deaths,” the auditor can get rid of psychosomatics by the bale for the preclear. The auditor can practically rebuild the body. He can clarify thought by taking away pains restimulated by thinking. He can do a thousand marvels never before possible here on Earth—or anywhere else for that matter.

But when he has done all these things, often at great labour, what does he have? He has a composite being, good enough to be called Homo novis—a theta-animated MEST body possessed of new and desirable attributes. That doesn’t mean he has the preclear cleared. That doesn’t mean that he has located the preclear for the preclear and restored an ultimate self-determinism. It means the auditor has done well. The auditor has made what we are calling a MEST clear, a good, sane, rational MEST being about a skyscraper higher than Homo sapiens. But in that Homo sapiens is a pretty horrible thing to be, this isn’t good enough, not nearly good enough.

This Homo novis is limited in his self-determinism by all the economic and social restrictions of an aberrated society. He is not free of food, clothing or shelter. He dies when you get him too cold, he perishes when the oxygen content drops too low. He is living in a tolerance band which keeps him cramped to the face of one second-rate planet in a tenth-rate system, prey to all the ill will that blows. Is this being free or self-determined? Maybe he is good enough to overlord his fellows into a security for himself never before possible. But that is his only real route towards security. He must fight and command for his three squares, he must use police protection in order to keep himself free of bullet holes and bumper marks. Compared to a Homo sapiens, Homo novis is very high and godlike. Compared to a truly self-determined being, Homo novis is an ant ready to die under anybody’s mis-step.

This universe is a rough universe. It is a terrible and deadly universe. Only the strong survive it, only the ruthless can own it. Given one weak spot a being cannot long endure it for this universe will search it out and enlarge it and fester and probe it until that weak spot is a festering wound so large that the being is engulfed by his own sores.

Fighting this battle for survival, and fight it he must, a being in the MEST universe cannot seem to afford decency or charity or ethics; he cannot afford any weakness, any mercy. The moment he does he is lost—for he is surrounded by chilled, coarse rock and molten energy which, no matter the state of aberration of his social surroundings, will engulf him instantly that he ceases to obey the very least laws of MEST.

This is a universe of force. It is not a universe of reason. Brutal, unthinking, without decency or mercy, MEST force awaits with punishment any being with any weakness. The possession of a MEST body is a liability for through that body the being can be given pain, can be regimented by the routine demands of eating and care from harm until at the very, very highest he can be but a puppet dancing to the spin of some unthinking planet under the strong glare of a remote and careless sun. Under these conditions a being burdened with care and liability of a body, made uncertain by an unknowingness, bows to strange and non-existent gods, resorts to terrible make-shifts in lieu of justice, cringes before the mightier bomb, the sharper blade.

You have examined an engram. A standard engram is simply the collision of the body with the MEST universe with sufficient impact to produce the confusion of attention known as "unconsciousness."

Should you care to make a test, just run “care of the body” as a total therapy. You will discover that by running out the postulates of a preclear about his body and its care and his injunctions and insistences to others that they care for their bodies, you can produce soaring changes in tone. An entire book can be written concerning this therapy. An entire book has been written about it—the first in Dianetics. This therapy could be styled, “The efforts of a theta being to reconcile the frailty of a MEST body with the ethics of a theta being.” They do not reconcile, these two. Schopenhauer, Zeno and names without number in philosophy have been trying to make this reconciliation for aeons. One says, “Defeat it all and die, for only by dying can you defeat it.” Another says, “You can’t win, therefore the only victory is in refusing to try to win.”

Christianity and a million other -anities have struggled with this problem and the result is a potpourri of answers, none of which reconcile the problem. You have a soul—it goes off somewhere, you don’t know about it. You are a soul, you don’t know about it.

Today we live in a vast cult called “Worship the body”. Medical doctors, school teachers, parents, traffic officers, the whole society unites into this war-cry, “Care for the body.” This stems from the ignorance that the body is all that one has, that he will have just one body, that his total devotion is the care of that body.

A body is a vegetable. It is not even a sentient vegetable for it lacks perception in the whole theta range. Like any vegetable it grows from seed and has habit patterns which help it survive. And, like any vegetable, one way or another, it gets used by others.

Early theta beings saw MEST bodies acting and being as though they were self-motivated. This was a curiosity. The early theta being did not know that these MEST bodies depended wholly for their wits under the guidance of a decayed theta being. The bodies looked like entities of considerable force and skill. The theta beingness of them was hidden and unapparent. Thus even theta beings have been fooled by MEST bodies.

A MEST body, whether it belongs to the race of man or the race of ants is yet but an animated vegetable. Given a theta being to guide it, it becomes part of a composite such as Homo sapiens: here we have a theta being, decayed into unknowingness, devoted to the care of a MEST body. The “I” of this body, the actual volition of it, all its wits and skills are theta things derived from the guidance of a theta being. By itself the body would live, walk around, react, sleep, kill, and direct an existence no better than that of a field mouse or a zombie. Put a theta being over it and it becomes possessed of ethics and morals and direction and goals and the ability to reason; it becomes this strange thing called Homo sapiens, a being above animals and yet an animal.

Give this MEST body a psychotic theta being and you get a sort of Frankenstein’s monster. Give this MEST body a nearly unconscious theta being and you get a zombie.

The body is a carbon-oxygen engine which runs at 98.6° F. The theta being is the engineer running this engine in a Homo sapiens. There is already an entity running this engine, the GE, but there is here only a total devotion to avoiding pain, seeking survival factors of the meanest sort, begetting new MEST bodies. Every cell in that body has its own theta, the GE is theta. A theta being is something else entirely.

In the first place, the theta being came into being without the need of a MEST body, without the need of motors. It is close to a perpetual motion picture machine in that it can create energy and impulses. It thinks without facsimiles, it can act without experience, it can know simply by being. When we have talked of optimum performance in Dianetics or Scientology, we have talked about the actual top level capabilities of the theta being, not the capabilities of the MEST being. Early work in Dianetics treats of the composite called Homo sapiens and treats that composite for what it is, an identity of several parts which act in greater or less coordination. You can go right on treating this composite being as a unit, you can go right on treating him and getting results for which you will be praised. But you must know that you are not treating the actual identity when you treat the MEST body—you are furthering a composite and actually you are subscribing to the International Cult called “Care of the Body.”

You can, at your own choice, go on living with and processing this composite known as Homo sapiens and create Homo novis. You can use Dianetics to make hitherto impossible strides. But be advised that in this choice you are living with paradoxes which no philosopher in all the ages ever reconciled—the injustice of death, the depravity of human beings as in Plato, the penalty of assisting another, the impossibility of having good ARC and survival too, the liability of being kind and merciful and every “unanswerable” religious paradox known. You, by persisting in yesterday’s reality are persisting then in problems which have never been resolved with the factors accepted. You are demanding of a MEST-theta composite that he be self determined when every zephyr from a hard universe contains death for him and can turn him like a top; you are demanding that he be “careful” when his only salvation is to be carefree, you are saddling him with all the unanswered riddles of an aberrated life in an aberrated world. And you are condemning a preclear to the dwindling spiral— for the theta being as part of the composite decays fast and soon dies forever in the rigid apathy of MEST.

Thus this data is given you. In lieu of this data the only thing which could be given man is the answering salute to the gladiators—they who are about to die.

As an auditor, the choice is yours to make—the paradoxes or the answer. I would not give you this data unless it can be demonstrated on any preclear with ease. And I would not give it to you unless you needed it.

Here it is.

Take Dianetics. Dianetics can be chopped "to save time." First feeble flutter of an F/N, no cognition, no VGIs, auditor barking "Did it erase? Did it erase?" Final result, no real gain. There goes the subject. Half an hour to run the chain, no extra thirty seconds for the real F/N, the cognition the VGIs.

So one wastes a result for the sake of saved time.

It is a symptom of the age that there is no time. But "omitted time" is a basic insanity.

That a body lives only about 70 years puts an awful limit on Man.

Man's empires endure at most only about 300 years if that.

Seventy years is not enough time to make a real career and 300 years is not enough time to even groove in a civil service.

Man pays for it with poor lives and rotten governments. But it doesn't take 70 years or 300 years to process a pc. A year maybe up to homo novis. A few years to OT. Even traveling it casually slow.

Twenty-five hours to repair someone's life and 50 to 100 hours to get him up to no somatics with Dianetics is pretty satisfactorily fast.

What does this take? A week to repair. Two to four weeks for full Dianetics. At 25 hours a week. That's very little.

And it's enough to tell him to get trained so he can have all he wants.

When speed is the consideration, not results, you get a very cheap camera or car. And you can expect it to fall apart very soon. You also get a cheap reputation.

We are in the Leica and Cadillac and Rolls Royce product class without trying.

We've learned all this the hard way. So let's not let it go unheeded.

The place to handle the situation is with C/Sing.

And to gain the cooperation of C/Ses to make results real results by insisting that speed is the fast road to poverty in the long run.

If the C/S burden is too heavy, start pushing training. Then you'll get help.

So OT was the state of beingness.

Release 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.

Release is not a gradient up to OT. Release 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.