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The following first appeared in the private email list IVy-subscribers,
which was available to all those who subscribed to the
printed magazine, International Viewpoints.
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To have, or to have NOTs
by Phil Spickler (written to Frank Gordon)
8 Feb 1999

My dear Frank,

This is in reply to your request for a brief summary of New Era
Dianetics for OTs and some of the experiences I've had with it.

I think, in all fairness to your kind request, that I should mention
that Joe Harrington had said it was possible to download the complete
official NOTs pack from a website somewhere on the Internet.  I'm
sure that Joe would be pleased to let you know exactly how to do
this, should you ask him, and in this way you would have the whole
word from the horse's mouth, so to speak. (Please to forgive the
metaphor.)  On the other hand, it gives me great pleasure to share
the following with you; I hope that it won't lead you too far astray.

A Possible Basic

Historically, and already well-known to your esteemed self, engrams
and engram running was all about locating and doing something about
hidden influences.  The result of doing this made these influences
known, and it became possible to see the effect they were having on
human behavior and health, etc. etc. etc.  In  my opinion, the
history of both Dianetics and Scientology has always, if not
repeatedly, been the effort to find out about that which is hidden or
unknown so that relief from its effect on oneself could be achieved.
NOTs, I should say, in both theory and practice, has very much this
intention, and on a rather grand scale, I might add.

The subject matter of NOTs has to do with thetans, individually as
well as collectively, and all the states of being and/or conditions
they might be manifesting; the possibility of their locations in the
body, near the body, or at any distance from the body, the concern
being with the "why" of their attachment and what unwanted effect
they might be generating via the body or directly against that
elusive, somewhat difficult to define, quantity or quality known as
"you."  The condition of said thetans could range from fairly
conscious and communicative down to very dead, very inert, very solid
and very unresponsive.  What these individuals or groups might be
could literally be anything and everything imaginable, which is one
of the things that I have thought made NOTs a very interesting sort
of search.  The range of extremely unpleasant or negative
possibilities is very large, and can go a long way toward resolving
conditions that one might have never handled with early forms of
Dianetics.

NOTs can be audited quite nicely with the help of an E-meter, either
solo, or perhaps at first it's better to get a little under your belt
with the help of another auditor.  Contact and communication with
areas that are in difficulty, and that are having a non-optimum
effect on "you" and the body, is mainly done with a sharply-focused
telepathic beam, the idea being to handle a limited area at a time
and not restimulate much more than you have the time or inclination
to handle.  The most powerful and bottom-line tool that can be used
to help that which you run into, the great undercut of all
possibilities, is the use of acknowledgment, the intention being to
bring an individual thetan or group of thetans into live
communication and by helping said area to come into present time
through an understanding of when, who, what, and where they are, to
rapidly clear up misconceptions, leading to a freedom from the
reactive and unaware attachment that has been trapping this thetan or
group of thetans, thus allowing in one fell swoop for the
aforementioned to gain the freedom to leave whilst realizing their
own true nature as opposed to what they have been being, thus
generating a lovely end phenomenon which will be visible on the
E-meter and the full feeling of what happens when a thetan or group
of thetans goes Clear quite rapidly -- very, very, very good
indicators and tremendous sense of awareness and perception.

The enormous benefit that comes to you, the one called Frank Gordon,
is that you are handling the cases of others and clearing them and
getting a giant opportunity to see that all that stuff has never
really been you or your case (talk about straightening out
misownership!), and you're now simply handling, whenever you wish to,
the difficulties of others as they seem to affect you.

Experiences I've Had

This type of work gives one a tremendous opportunity to confront and
handle some of the most amazing and outrageous forms that theta might
inhabit and that one might confuse with oneself.  It gives one an
excellent chance to see that many of the ideas that we bandy about
and call our own really arise from uninspected hidden influences.
Many physical complaints, to a greater or lesser degree, can be
handled with NOTs, and just as Dianetics made some pretty
far-reaching claims for what it could do for a human being, I think
NOTs is the natural heir to such claims and then some.

If there is a downside to all this, and I'm not absolutely certain
there is, it would come under the heading of "too much of a good
thing."  When I was doing NOTs at Flag early in 1979, a 12+1/2 hour
intensive cost at least several thousand dollars, and the demand for
such auditing was very high, so you can imagine the large amounts of
money that were pouring in every week. This was before there was any
Solo NOTs, but the point I'm getting at is that people, when they had
giant wins, didn't necessarily stop and go off and do other things,
'cause the accent was on selling NOTs and getting people to do as
much as they could possibly afford to do, which didn't always have a
happy conclusion.  It was seen then as an unlimited activity; but as
we know from early Dianetics, for most folks it's a good idea to pull
the pin when they have a giant win and get on with the business of
life.

It's quite tempting to do a lot of NOTs, especially when you know how
to solo it, but as you have probably guessed from the nature of this
activity, there's really no end to the distances and lengths you
might go to, to encounter things that seem to be influencing your
existence in a way that you consider to be sub-optimum.  So you could
possibly end up trying to run out the 8 dynamics without checking out
the "I" that seems to keep finding things it needs to handle in order
to live better.

I shall say no more at this time about this, since I don't want to
cheat anyone out of finding their own realities and having their own
cognitions.  Maybe I should have entitled this piece "Groups and
Groupers". :-)

All the best to one and all -- Phil