Lecture: The Fact of Clearing
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1958, 4 July
Document title: The Fact of Clearing
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Clearing Congress
Location: Washington, DC
Document ID: 5807C04A
Description: Hubbard says Christianity is based exclusively on appealing to the Christ spirit of man. Compares this to the application of a repetitive Scientology process that appeals to the basic self, soul or being of the person. Identifies the Christ spirit with "basic man."
Well I think there are certain things that you can appeal to in men, definitely certain things that you can appeal to in men which make them more or less revert to their basic selves. They take off their coats, in other words. That’s a very thin principle; it has occasionally worked, and there’s one religion which is based exclusively on that principle. That if you can reach the soul or being of a person, just p-panng. When he becomes well, you’ve got it made. That religion, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them or not, it’s called Christianity (chuckle). All you have to do is appeal to, as some of their various organizations have said, the Christ spirit of man. Oh, I don’t know about the Christ spirit, but if you appeal to the basic man, why you get somewhere.1 And sometimes you have to appeal, and appeal, and appeal, and appeal (laughing) and after you’ve duplicated the auditing question enough times, you’ve gotten there. Quite amusing. Quite amusing to look over, look over the number of struggles we have had to find out the few things we have to know.
But I suppose when you’re climbing over barricades why you’re liable to get your clothes covered with creosote now and then, and when you’re smashing down jungle plants, you’re certainly going to get splattered with a little chlorophyl. And you carry it a long for a little while until you take a bath, and you say, “what do you know, I’ve gone all the way through this jungle and there’s just one little piece of stuff here”. “That’s the only piece of stuff and we went through eight miles of jungle and swamp and so forth, and we find only this little piece of stuff” – Duplication, duplication, gee (chuckle) – you know – and then you promptly forget about the eight miles of swamp and jungle and so forth. You promptly forget all about that. Then you say to someone else, you see they haven’t been through it, you come up to them and say to them, “Hey, look at this – duplication”, and they say “Yeah, what about it!”, you say “well, see all those eight miles of swamp, they’re not true, they’re not true”. They say, “they’re not?” They’re in over their heads in quicksand. “Someone’s lying to me – you say duplication is important but I say MUD is” and so we get the birth of science – mud (chuckle).
Now, wherever we look in a society as it struggles along it picks up arbitraries with which to bolster up a hidden ideal that is never expressed. We get these arbitraries piling up, piling up – laws, customs. Everybody forgets what they’re supposed to prevent and at last we have this mass which simply has one common denominator – prevent. And when you have a person totally prevented, you have a human being. But what would you really have if you had somebody who was totally prevented. You’d have somebody who couldn’t help and who couldn’t reach out on the rest of the dynamics and so couldn’t have a civilization because you couldn’t have a third dynamic, – could you? That’s as easy as this. In other words, this system of preventing everything in order to bring out a good civilization succeeds in killing the thing it was supposed to bring out, – right? So, there must be another way and a better way, and that way we have today in Scientology.
Hubbard, L. R. (1958, 4 July). The Fact of Clearing. Clearing Congress, (5807C04A). Lecture conducted from Washington, DC.
Notes
- Basic man or basic personality is the Clear. (Ref. DMSMH). ↩