happy, âI just attested to Clear!â
âThatâs great!â I replied.
âHow about a big olâ hug?â Chick said. So I gave him a hug, and that is how we met. I knew how he felt because I had just achieved the state myself and understood how great it was.
Clear is a Scientology term with a lot of baggage because it was defined as several different things at different times. Also, it was defined as an absolute state, which contradicts one of the essential principles of Scientology, that âabsolutes are unobtainable.â But basically Clear means that one has, through Scientology, rid oneself of hang-ups that had prohibited one from being truly oneself. One has lost the mental mechanisms that compel one to react to things unthinkingly rather than responding to them rationally. It is not that the person becomes an unfeeling automaton. Quite the contrary. A Clear is much better able to feel all of life, the good, the bad and the ugly. The Clear is less closed off to the experiences of living.
Here is how I explain it to people: You have a problem with your hand, for example. It hurts all the time. The reason it hurts all the time is because three times a day you pick up a hammer and smash your hand with it. The goal of Scientology is not to get you to a point where you can hit yourself with the hammer and it doesnât hurt anymoreâthe idea is to bring a person up to the awareness of âHey, what the hell am I doing, hitting my hand with this hammer? No wonder it hurts all the time! Iâve been causing my own pain!â You throw the hammer away and that is the end of it. People, for the most part, make their own situations in life. Whatever condition you are in, youâve thought yourself into that situation. Napoleon Hill, one of the first personal success gurus, says it in six words: âYou become what you think about.â Long before that, Buddha said that we are the product of our thoughts. That is a central tenet of Scientology. Your father may have told you that you are no good, but he has been dead for 20 years; you are the one keeping the recording going.
At the end of the Clearing Course, I lay down to sleep one night and . . . the mental pictures and noise that had always been there when I closed my eyes were gone. Totally gone. I jumped out of bed. Wait a minute, I thought, where is the stream of pictures I used to get? They were gone. Inside, my head was totally still. It was unbelievable. But true!
Scientologists hold up L. Ron Hubbard as the originator, or source, of everything in Scientology. He himself credited many others, including Freud, as sources of inspiration. In nineteenth-century America something called the New Thought movement sprang up. Christian Science is probably the best-known surviving offshoot of the movement. Beginning in the 1880s and persisting well into the twentieth century, many books were published by the likes of Napoleon Hill, William Walker Atkinson, Charles F. Haanel, Prentice Mulford, Wallace Wattles, Perry Joseph Green, Frank Channing Haddock, Thomas Troward and, of course, Mary Baker Eddy. These writings are full of concepts that Hubbard incorporated into Scientology. Concepts like illness begins in the mind, that we are all spiritual beings and that âyou are what you think, not what you think you areâ are all found in writings of the day. New Age ideas, expressed, for example, in the law of attraction and the book The Secret, come directly from the New Thought movement. Anyone with even a rudimentary familiarity with Scientology can pick up any book from the period and find numerous parallels.
Hubbard advances the concept of the reactive mind in Dianetics, which was the precursor to Scientology. The New Thought writers called it the subconscious mind or the subjective mind, and they described it as a mind that never sleeps and records everything that you ever experience, exactly as Hubbard explained in his book
âThatâs great!â I replied.
âHow about a big olâ hug?â Chick said. So I gave him a hug, and that is how we met. I knew how he felt because I had just achieved the state myself and understood how great it was.
Clear is a Scientology term with a lot of baggage because it was defined as several different things at different times. Also, it was defined as an absolute state, which contradicts one of the essential principles of Scientology, that âabsolutes are unobtainable.â But basically Clear means that one has, through Scientology, rid oneself of hang-ups that had prohibited one from being truly oneself. One has lost the mental mechanisms that compel one to react to things unthinkingly rather than responding to them rationally. It is not that the person becomes an unfeeling automaton. Quite the contrary. A Clear is much better able to feel all of life, the good, the bad and the ugly. The Clear is less closed off to the experiences of living.
Here is how I explain it to people: You have a problem with your hand, for example. It hurts all the time. The reason it hurts all the time is because three times a day you pick up a hammer and smash your hand with it. The goal of Scientology is not to get you to a point where you can hit yourself with the hammer and it doesnât hurt anymoreâthe idea is to bring a person up to the awareness of âHey, what the hell am I doing, hitting my hand with this hammer? No wonder it hurts all the time! Iâve been causing my own pain!â You throw the hammer away and that is the end of it. People, for the most part, make their own situations in life. Whatever condition you are in, youâve thought yourself into that situation. Napoleon Hill, one of the first personal success gurus, says it in six words: âYou become what you think about.â Long before that, Buddha said that we are the product of our thoughts. That is a central tenet of Scientology. Your father may have told you that you are no good, but he has been dead for 20 years; you are the one keeping the recording going.
At the end of the Clearing Course, I lay down to sleep one night and . . . the mental pictures and noise that had always been there when I closed my eyes were gone. Totally gone. I jumped out of bed. Wait a minute, I thought, where is the stream of pictures I used to get? They were gone. Inside, my head was totally still. It was unbelievable. But true!
Scientologists hold up L. Ron Hubbard as the originator, or source, of everything in Scientology. He himself credited many others, including Freud, as sources of inspiration. In nineteenth-century America something called the New Thought movement sprang up. Christian Science is probably the best-known surviving offshoot of the movement. Beginning in the 1880s and persisting well into the twentieth century, many books were published by the likes of Napoleon Hill, William Walker Atkinson, Charles F. Haanel, Prentice Mulford, Wallace Wattles, Perry Joseph Green, Frank Channing Haddock, Thomas Troward and, of course, Mary Baker Eddy. These writings are full of concepts that Hubbard incorporated into Scientology. Concepts like illness begins in the mind, that we are all spiritual beings and that âyou are what you think, not what you think you areâ are all found in writings of the day. New Age ideas, expressed, for example, in the law of attraction and the book The Secret, come directly from the New Thought movement. Anyone with even a rudimentary familiarity with Scientology can pick up any book from the period and find numerous parallels.
Hubbard advances the concept of the reactive mind in Dianetics, which was the precursor to Scientology. The New Thought writers called it the subconscious mind or the subjective mind, and they described it as a mind that never sleeps and records everything that you ever experience, exactly as Hubbard explained in his book
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