The Lectures of 1950

August 1950

The Los Angeles Lecture Series - August 1950

2 lectures

By the summer of 1950, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, published that May, had grown from a book into a national movement, and L. Ron Hubbard was in nearly constant demand — instructing the first auditors at the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and traveling coast to coast to address the groups springing up around the book. At the beginning of August 1950 he arrived in Los Angeles, where enthusiasm for Dianetics ran as high as anywhere in the country. On August 10 he made his first public appearance in the city, speaking to an audience of thousands at the Shrine Auditorium, and in those same weeks a Los Angeles branch of the Foundation established itself at the Casa, the former governor's mansion at South Hoover Street and Adams Boulevard, where its lecture hall filled morning after morning.

Through the remainder of August, Hubbard lectured at the new Foundation almost daily, training the first generation of West Coast auditors in person. The tape record of that month amounts to a complete professional curriculum delivered as it was being refined: the anatomy of the engram; the analytical mind, the reactive mind and the file clerk; affinity, reality and communication and their bearing on a case; straightwire; the steps of Standard Procedure, from preclear inventory through opening the case to running engrams; action phrases — holders, bouncers, denyers — and the assessment of different types of cases. The transcripts of these Los Angeles lectures, spanning August 10 through September 8, 1950, were later collected in Volume 3 of the Research & Discovery Series, the running record of the research line. They stand between the June lectures at Elizabeth and the celebrated Oakland demonstrations of September and the November Professional Course in Los Angeles, and they are among the earliest recordings of Hubbard lecturing that survive at all.

The two lectures preserved in this archive come from the closing days of that August run, and both turn from the mechanics of auditing to the application of Dianetics in the wider world. Preventive Dianetics, delivered August 30, 1950, takes up the branch of the subject concerned with keeping engrams from being implanted in the first place: the discipline of silence around the injured and the unconscious, the care owed to expectant mothers and the ill, and what a society that understood the engram could do to lower the burden of aberration before any auditing was ever needed — a development of the theme Hubbard had opened in Book One itself. Medical Dianetics, delivered the following day, August 31, examines the relationship of the engram to psychosomatic illness and to recovery, and the surviving recording carries demonstration material in which the handling is shown rather than merely described.

What the listener encounters across these recordings is Hubbard teaching Book One Dianetics in its first summer, only weeks after publication, in the plain working vocabulary of 1950 — engram, preclear, auditor, file clerk, Standard Procedure — before the Axioms, before theta, before the subject broadened into Scientology. The sound is that of a research line moving at full speed: a lecturer addressing rooms of students who would shortly be auditing the public of Los Angeles, on the two questions that pressed hardest once the book was in a million hands — how to prevent aberration, and what Dianetics had to say to medicine. The archive holds two lectures from this series; they preserve the close of a remarkable month in which professional Dianetics took root on the West Coast.

September 1950

Oakland Public Lecture Series

14 lectures

L. Ron Hubbard delivered the Oakland Public Lectures at the Oakland Municipal Auditorium in the last week of September 1950, opening on Saturday the 23rd before a capacity audience numbering in the thousands and continuing through the 29th. He had traveled north by train from Los Angeles at the invitation of one of the largest Dianetics groups in Northern California — one of the hundreds of groups that had sprung up in the four months since Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was published in May 1950 and rose onto the national bestseller lists. The engagement belongs to the first great wave of the Dianetics boom, when Hubbard was crossing the country to speak to audiences of new readers who wanted instruction on the subject from its founder.

The series occupies a singular position in the recorded legacy. These are among the earliest surviving recordings of Hubbard lecturing on Dianetics — the opening address has been presented by its later publishers as the first recorded spoken word on the subject — and the demonstrations he gave on the Oakland stage are generally held to be the only recordings of Hubbard personally auditing Book One procedure before an audience. The lectures therefore preserve Dianetics exactly as it stood in its first season: the reactive mind, engrams and secondaries, the dynamics and the state of Clear, presented before the developments of 1951 and the emergence of Scientology, and addressed not to professional students but to the general public that had taken up the book.

The opening evening is introductory. Hubbard recounts the long trail of research that led him to Dianetics, the questions about why Man acts as he does that set the investigation in motion, and surveys what the technology can accomplish. From the 26th the series turns to practice: he takes up the Auditor's Code and the reasons each of its points exists, walks through Standard Procedure and its chart, and lays out the different types of cases an auditor encounters and how each is to be approached. The later evenings address how to resolve a stalled case, the running of engrams and secondaries, and such working tools of the period as guk and freewheeling, with live demonstrations of auditing procedure interleaved among the talks.

A listener meets Hubbard here in an unusually direct register — a lecturer working a large popular hall in the first months of national attention, mixing technical instruction with the candor and humor of a man speaking to households then auditing one another out of the book at kitchen tables. The week moves on a deliberate gradient, from orientation for the newcomer who has not yet read past the first chapters to concrete coaching for the co-auditor in mid-case, so the series functions both as a portrait of the 1950 moment and as practical Book One instruction.

Transcripts of these lectures were later published in the Research and Discovery Series, and portions of the series have circulated at various times — ten lectures on a withdrawn cassette set of the early 1980s, and four lectures with the demonstration in later official releases. The fourteen recordings gathered in this archive present the Oakland engagement at fuller length, spanning the whole week from the opening address of September 23 through the closing lectures of September 29. From Oakland, Hubbard continued on to public lectures in Kansas City before returning to the Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey — but it is the Oakland week that has remained the most celebrated public statement of Dianetics in its original form.

1950

Dianetics Professional Course

17 lectures

In November 1950, six months after the publication of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health had carried the subject across the United States, L. Ron Hubbard gathered auditors in Los Angeles for a new Professional Course. He had spent that half year in nearly constant motion, lecturing coast to coast to the first generation of Dianeticists while the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation took shape around the demand. The Los Angeles Professional Course marked the point at which he stopped traveling long enough to deliver, to a body of working auditors, the next stratum of discovery beneath the engram and its anatomy.

The central subject of the course is the ARC Triangle — affinity, reality and communication, and the manner in which each rises and falls with the others. Hubbard himself later pointed to these lectures as containing the fullest account of the triangle he ever gave. Here the listener encounters ARC not as a formula to be memorized but as it first emerged: a description of the component parts of understanding itself, worked out before the assembled students with its consequences traced into every corner of processing. The triangle is examined against the dynamics, and the tone scales of affinity, of reality and of communication are laid out individually, giving the auditor a way of reading a preclear's position on the scale from the way he holds to his agreements, the quality of his communication, and the emotion he can express.

Around that center, the course delivers a remarkable series of firsts. Hubbard presents the Spectrum of Logic — a gradient scale admitting an infinity of positions between right and wrong — replacing two-valued thinking with the infinity-valued logic that would soon be codified in the Logics. He takes up the Auditor's Code and shows that its provisions are not etiquette but applications of ARC, the conditions under which a session can occur at all. And he introduces the Accessibility Chart, an early instrument for classifying a case and selecting how to approach it, foreshadowing the work on human evaluation that would culminate the following year in Science of Survival. Taken together, the material shows Dianetics in the act of widening from a therapy addressed to engrams into a general theory of life, thought and association.

The lectures occupy an unusual place in the history of the materials. Within months of their delivery, detailed notes taken at the course were assembled and published, at Hubbard's instruction, as the book Notes on the Lectures of L. Ron Hubbard, so that the data would be available for training auditors. For more than fifty years those published notes were all that survived, the original recordings being presumed lost. The tapes were eventually located and restored, returning the spoken lectures themselves to students for the first time since the original Los Angeles course.

What a listener encounters across the series is Hubbard at the close of the first year of Dianetics, addressing professionals rather than the public: theory delivered alongside its immediate application to the preclear in front of the auditor, questions of accessibility and case entry handled with the directness of a working researcher, and the first sustained statement of principles — ARC above all — that would remain foundational through the whole later development of Scientology. For the student tracing the chronology of the subject, the Dianetics Professional Course stands as the bridge between the engram-running of 1950 and the tone scale and theta-mest theory of 1951.