The years from 1950 to 1966 may have been frustrating for
persons who had long followed Hubbard in the quest for clear, but,
during this period, the movement developed a complex structure of
other statuses to distribute among members. One kind of status was
professional, which designated various levels of skill and training in
performing the therapy. By 1954, these went as high as a doctor of
Scientology, or D.Scn. degree (Hubbard, 1968a:12). Since then, the number of
levels of auditor has steadily increased, each empowered to perform
therapy on preclears and clears of different statuses. Of course,
these auditors have a stake in maintaining conviction in their own
successes. Their training is time-consuming and expensive. The honor
they receive is partly dependent on their clients' satisfaction.
Another kind of status invented was that of release. When Hubbard had to confront the fact that his first clears were not very clear, he redefined their status as Dianetics release, a condition of superior improvement, but not yet clear. Hubbard developed literally hundreds of mental exercises and therapy routines, each supposed to deal with a problem of the human mind identified by the ever-growing ideology of the cult. As the years passed, levels of release proliferated, until, in 1970, there were five basic release statuses, listed here from the lowest (grade 0) to highest (grade IV): communications release, problems release, relief release, freedom release, and ability release (a sixth release grade is awarded in the midst of the clearing process). Below these levels is the mass of newcomers, active in various introductory classes, the main effect of which is to create social bonds linking the neophytes and incorporating them in the social structure of preclears, who stand in the release hierarchy (see Chapter 14).
Many of the lower level therapeutic procedures seem well designed to train the preclear in compliance to the role demands of clear. Perhaps the most important attribute acquired is a confident acceptance of impossible ideas with a consequent willingness to make statements that outsiders would find incredible. At the very beginning, in the so-called Alice Games of the Communication Course, preclears are made to recite wild sentences from Alice in Wonderland as if they were their own confident statements about reality. Later, in Dianetics and Scientology auditing, they will come to "recall" traumatic experiences in the womb, as their mother tried to abort them, and to relive the adventures of previous incarnations centuries ago (Hubbard, 1950b, 1958). On the one hand, preclears are trained to express their emotions through the radical ideology of the cult, and, on the other, numerous exercises reward them for inhibiting spontaneous expressions of feeling. In one of the most basic, TR-0, they must sit immobile and unresponding for up to two hours, regardless of what stimuli are bombarding them.
After as much as a year or more of work at the lower levels, a preclear is probably heavily committed, having invested time, money, and emotion in the clearing process. To abandon the quest at grade IV release, when clear is supposedly within reach, would be to lose a great investment that could be preserved at little apparent extra cost. Although they originally may have been invented to mollify impatient preclears while they awaited Hubbard's discovery of real clears, the release grades now serve to commit Scientologists to extreme exertions to achieve clear and give them psychological momentum in its direction.
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