Lecture: Question and Answer Period: Goals Search (1961)

Of course, you get these ideas about what a Clear should be and they’re actually based on what you have been told a Clear should be. And that basing is back at five, four, three B.C. Gautama Siddhartha rewritten. And naturally, the way you would pin down a whole race would be to take them out of motion so that they made the ideal, a person who was in no motion of any kind whatsoever. That was the ideal. And now if somebody was going to feel good and be able and so on, you naturally would have to take him out of the category that absolutely mauled a complete race, see?

Psychologist today is cooperating in this. Don’t think that this is a stray datum that only a person in the field of theosophy or something would know. It isn’t. Psychology dramatizes this a hundred percent today. They even wrote in civil defense . . their additions for civil defense. The only condition under which they’re going to incarcerate somebody during a civil defense disaster is if the person is in motion. If they find a person going around trying to organize things, they are supposed to put him at once in an institution. I read this carefully. I got their definitions for it. I couldn’t believe it.

In other words, if anybody’s going to do anything about the disaster that just occurred at all, why he’s by definition . . not by any stretch of the imagination, you know, I mean not me making too much out of a definition.

“Well, yeah, yeah. Well, who’s supposed to do something then?” you say.

“Well, the civil defense workers, you see and the government workers are supposed to do something.”

And you say, “Well, what if they were all in the wrong building?”

“Oh, well, that’s a chance you’d have to take.”

Well, man, you can take that chance, but after this ruddy country’s blown off the face of the Earth by atomic bombs, I can tell you the first thing that will be apparent, is that it has no government. Now, what are you going to do? Well, you depend on the civil defense workers. Ah . . .

Of course, I’m not now talking about a field I don’t know anything about. I’m talking about a field I know a great deal about. And the only people . . the only time some order comes out of chaos is with . . some guys get together and decide to put it right. And they’ll be the guys on the ground, not the guys with the badges, you see? They’ve had nothing to do with that. And this is any time anything works or works out and so forth. It’s because the people are there who are trying to do something. And you get all of these areas where just the guys with the badges can operate and only the guy with the badge can operate and under no circumstances can anybody else operate and you have the present Arab situation.

You know, these Arabs who were driven out of Palestine and you know they’re there yet. you know? They’re just a mob. And they just won’t do anything and they won’t lift their finger and they’re just in complete apathy and there’s never been any recovery of that particular group of people. And they’ve evidently followed out some kind of a basis that if any one of them got up and said, “All right, the rest of you guys, now let’s go out here and carve up a few acres, and let’s raise some khatinkas,” or whatever they raise, “and cabbages.”

They apparently said, “Well, that man is being too active, you know. He’s trying to do something.” So doingness has been divorced from being Clear. I want to make that very, very, very clear there. It’s a booby trap, see. That’s the basic and primary booby trap of Buddhism. That’s the basic . . that if you’re in good shape, you’ll be sitting still. Mmm-mmm. If you’re in good shape, you can sit still.

I used to upset people no end by going out and sitting under a tree. And they’d say, “Where’s the book? What are you going to do?”

And I’d say, “Nothing.”

It’d drive them nuts, you know. Just sit there and do nothing for an hour or two. They’d go bezeeeh.

How could you possibly do that? Well, a person wouldn’t be able to do that.

At the same time, I’d get the same objections from a person, “You know, I think you’re working too hard. you know. Don’t you think you ought to take a rest? You know, you really ought to take a rest. I think you’re working much too hard.” Although you couldn’t confront somebody being totally motionless, they at the same time couldn’t confront somebody in motion. So they just couldn’t confront.

But that’s the basic tenet and one that we must be very careful of in Scientology that we don’t give this thing much credence because apparently every Clear we have made to date has all of a sudden gotten busy and that is without exception. They’ve gotten busy. And they don’t believe in being MEST. They’re very alive. And they get in people’s hair. People get upset about them, you know? And they sometimes have opinions that are not true but they have them just because they believe them. And they argue and they’re not necessarily totally a hundred percent right every five minutes, you know? They make mistakes, you know? But boy they sure make them on a grand scale. One has to give them 100 for trying. But they’re in motion and they do get things done. And a Homo sap alongside of a Clear looks like a snail crawling along the road, you know. That’s the way he looks to a Clear too, apparently. From their viewpoint, you know?¹

Notes