How Optimum Is a "Clear"?
The Aberree
May 1954
Volume 1, Number 2 Published at Enid, Oklahoma, U.S.A.
How Optimum Is a "Clear"?
ONE OF THE most abused, maligned, and misunderstood words in the language of Dianetics and Scientology is the word "clear".
In L. Ron Hubbard's first book, "DIANETICS, the Modern Science of Mental Health", a "clear" was described as a person "without psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, and repressions", and "high above the current norm" in intelligence. A steady improvement in perceptics also could be expected.
Almost immediately, the word itself began to manifest the entire gamut of human aberration. It became both a beacon of desire and the "sour grapes" of unattainability. For the latter, the word took on magnitudes that would have given a "clear" the attributes of the highest of the gods.
The "clear" (Mr. Hubbard said) --even though he wore glasses an inch thick--might expect to start showing marked improvement in his eyesight, often changing glasses four or five times during therapy. The exaggerationists, glossing over the gradient of expected improvement, immediately assigned to the "clear" superlative vision. To wear glasses was to place one low on the Tone Scale (a hypothetical chart predicting what might be expected of an individual under any given circumstance.) Many, fearing that their visual deficiency would be self-invalidating, tortured and squinted and strained in stubborn misery, "knowing" that in time even small print would be no harder to read than was that big sign across the street with the dancing, foggy letters. Sometimes, in the privacy of their rooms, they'd sneak out their "cheaters", but though they could read better, the "overt act" against Dianetics was a new "lock" on their guilt chain.
The moment a hen-pecked husband found himself driven to the necessity of sassing his wife, he "knew" by the exhilaration of redeemed self-respect that, at last, he was
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