The Lectures of 1951

May–June 1951

The Science of Survival Lectures

4 lectures

In the late spring of 1951, with the manuscript of Science of Survival just completed, L. Ron Hubbard began lecturing on its contents to the professional course students gathered at the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation at 211 Douglas Avenue in Wichita, Kansas. The opening lecture, "Theta-MEST Theory," was delivered on 21 May 1951 to a lecture hall filled to capacity, and the series continued through June, reaching its culmination at the First Annual Conference of Hubbard Dianetic Auditors, held in Wichita that same month — the occasion on which Science of Survival itself was first issued to attendees. The Science of Survival Lectures are thus the spoken companion to the book, given at the very moment of its release; four lectures of the series are preserved in this archive.

The historical setting matters to what one hears. A year had passed since Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and the intervening research — much of it carried out in early 1951 — had moved well beyond the engram and the reactive mind into the question of what life itself is. The answer Hubbard presented in Wichita was the Theta-MEST theory: the proposition that the living force, theta, is a thing apart from the physical universe of matter, energy, space and time, and that aberration is the record of their turbulent collision. From this single theory derived the expanded Tone Scale and the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation, the backbone of Science of Survival. In retrospect these lectures stand at the hinge between Dianetics as a therapy of the mind and the wider inquiry into the nature of the life static that would shortly become Scientology.

Across the lectures Hubbard lays out the theory and its consequences in greater compass than the book's pages allow. He takes up the interaction of theta and MEST as the source of all aberration; the distinction between free theta and entheta, and how their ratio in a preclear fixes his position on the Tone Scale; the columns of the Chart of Human Evaluation and their use in predicting the conduct, ethics, persistence and survival potential of any human being from a single known characteristic; and the bearing of the theory on the dynamics and on groups as well as individuals. On the processing side, the material reflects the decisive shift of this period toward Validation Processing — addressing and strengthening the analytical, theta side of the preclear's existence rather than running entheta directly — together with the practical question of how an auditor raises a case up the scale.

For the listener, the series offers something the printed text cannot: Hubbard working through the Chart's foundations aloud, in the weeks the book reached its first readers, before an audience of practicing auditors who would carry the techniques into use. The delivery is that of a researcher reporting fresh results — building the theory from first principles, illustrating the tone levels from life, and demonstrating how evaluation of a human being follows from theory rather than opinion. As the earliest extended spoken record of the Theta-MEST theory and the Chart of Human Evaluation, these lectures remain a primary document of the 1951 Wichita period and an essential adjunct to the study of Science of Survival itself.

August 1951

Special Course in Human Evaluation

10 lectures

In August 1951, opening on the 13th of the month, L. Ron Hubbard delivered the Special Course in Human Evaluation at the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation in Wichita, Kansas. The occasion was unusual in the early history of the subject: seated alongside Foundation students were businessmen, industrialists and civic figures of Wichita — people with no background in auditing who had come to hear what Dianetics could tell them about judging, predicting and working with their fellow human beings. Across ten lectures, Hubbard addressed that audience directly, presenting the discoveries of the preceding year not as clinical procedure but as a working technology of life.

The course belongs to one of the most productive stretches in the development of Dianetics. In the spring of 1951 Hubbard had relocated to Wichita, and in the early months of that year he completed the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation — the chart plotting human emotion, behavior and reaction column by column against the Tone Scale. Its companion text, Science of Survival, reached print in hardcover that same season. Where the book set out the full anatomy of theta and its entrapment in the physical universe, this course was its first sustained public application: a demonstration that the chart could be read by anyone, on anyone, and that the behavior of an individual or a group at a given tone level is knowable rather than guessable.

The subjects move on a deliberate gradient. Hubbard begins with the purpose of human evaluation itself, then lays in the dynamics of existence and their interaction across all eight, the nature of the life force and its conquest of the physical universe, and the question of what actually constitutes personality. From there the lectures take up the Tone Scale in earnest — the relationship of motion to emotion, treated across two consecutive talks and extended into motion as it appears on the scale — before closing with the ARC triangle, the interdependence of affinity, reality and communication that underlies agreement and cooperation in any group.

These lectures also mark an early and significant step toward Third Dynamic technology. Having codified the principles of group survival, Hubbard here shows that the same evaluation an auditor makes of a preclear's case can be made of an associate, an employee or an organization, and that group ARC is as real and as workable a quantity as the ARC of an individual. The question running through the series — whom can one trust, depend upon, and build with — is answered not by intuition but by observation against a calibrated scale.

For the listener, the series offers some of the most accessible material of the 1951 period. Because the audience included laymen, Hubbard builds each concept from the ground up, with the directness and humor characteristic of his Wichita lectures, making the course both a natural companion to the study of Science of Survival and a self-contained education in reading human beings as they actually are.

October 1951

Foundation Auditors Congress

6 lectures

The six lectures collected here were delivered by L. Ron Hubbard in October 1951 at the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation in Wichita, Kansas. A word on the title is owed to the listener: "Foundation Auditors Congress" is the name under which these tapes have long circulated in field archives, but it is a collector's label rather than an official one — the great Scientology Congresses would not begin until 1954. What the recordings actually preserve is something rarer: course-room instruction to the Foundation's own auditors, drawn from the Professional Course lectures of mid-October and the Foundation Auditor's Course conducted in the final week of that month.

The autumn of 1951 stands among the most consequential research periods of the Wichita year. Science of Survival had been published that summer with its Chart of Human Evaluation. In the second week of October, Hubbard convened a conference of auditors at which he presented the Logics and the Axioms, and in November Advanced Procedure and Axioms went to press, carrying Effort Processing and the full anatomy of the service facsimile into the hands of the field. These lectures fall in the weeks between conference and book — the interval in which the new material was taught, demonstrated and tested before the auditors who would have to make it work in session. Doctrinally, the moment marks a deliberate turn in the subject: away from treating the preclear as the effect of his engrams and toward restoring him to cause, on the recognition that a being is aberrated finally by his own postulates and consent, so that auditing must address self-determinism itself. It is the ground on which Dianetics began its passage into Scientology.

The subjects follow that line. The two lectures of 15 October take up Effort Processing in its relation to ARC — the running of effort and counter-effort as the route to the facsimiles underlying somatics — with the second of the pair surviving only in incomplete form. The lecture of 24 October examines self-determinism as it operates across the dynamics, the second dynamic among them. On 25 October comes the chronic somatic and the service facsimile: the account, given its definitive statement in this period, of why an illness or disability persists — because the preclear is using it, to be right, to make others wrong, to evade responsibility he has elected to refuse. The closing pair of 26 October ranges widest. The Evolution of Man According to Theta Facsimiles applies the theta-MEST theory to the whole evolutionary line, tracing the facsimile record a being carries forward from the earliest organisms; How to Talk About Dianetics turns outward, a practical talk on presenting the subject to a world that had not yet heard of it on its own terms.

What the listener encounters across these recordings is working instruction rather than public address — Hubbard speaking to practicing auditors in the Wichita Foundation's own rooms, with the informality and technical directness that setting allowed. Heard alongside Advanced Procedure and Axioms, the set documents the Axiom-era technical program at the point of delivery, weeks before it reached print. The material of this research period is represented in the Church's modern chronological releases under the title Thought, Emotion and Effort; the present collection preserves the form in which these particular October lectures came down through the field archives, and with it a candid view of one of the pivotal months in the development of the subject.

October–December 1951

October Midwest Conference - Thought Emotion and Effort

23 lectures

In the autumn of 1951 the working center of the Dianetics movement was the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation in Wichita, Kansas, and it was there, beginning on 8 October 1951, that L. Ron Hubbard convened a special conference of auditors — more than fifty of them, gathered from across the United States — to brief the field on the most far-reaching research developments since the publication of Science of Survival earlier that year. The lectures collected in this series belong to that gathering, known as the October Midwest Conference, and to the Professional Course that followed at the Foundation through November and December, whose lectures were afterward published under the title Thought, Emotion and Effort. Together they form a single Wichita corpus, and the twenty-three recordings preserved in this archive span it from the conference's opening day through the close of the course.

What the conference attendees heard was nothing less than the codification of the subject. Across five days of lectures, Hubbard presented the newly formulated Logics and the Axioms of Dianetics — issued in print for the first time during the conference itself — working through the Axioms in sequence: the nature of statics and motions, the theory of epicenters, self-determinism, randomity and its relation to emotion, and the place of effort in the engram. Threaded through the doctrinal material is the technique then at the leading edge of practice, Effort Processing, with Hubbard summarizing its theory and demonstrating its application to the preclear's conclusions and postulates. For students of the chronology, these are the lectures in which Dianetics ceased to be a collection of discoveries and became an axiomatically ordered science.

The Professional Course lectures that complete the series carry that codification into the auditing chair. In November 1951 Hubbard published Advanced Procedure and Axioms, and the course was convened expressly to train auditors in its use — the Fifteen Acts, and the gradient of thought, emotion and effort that gives the series its name. Here the emphasis shifts decisively from the preclear as effect to the preclear as cause: Hubbard examines basic postulates and prime thought, cause and effect and their bearing on memory and responsibility, and the means by which an individual installs his own aberration by his own consent. The landmark of the course is his original and fullest anatomy of the service facsimile — the mechanism by which a being postulates his own illnesses, failures and disabilities and then holds them in place because they serve him — together with the procedures for taking such a case apart.

Historically, this material sits at the hinge between Dianetics and Scientology. The Axioms unveiled at the conference are the direct ancestors of the Axioms of Scientology, and the insistence throughout these lectures on self-determinism, on postulates senior to facsimiles, and on the route from effect back to cause announces the direction the research would take through 1952 and beyond. The listener encounters Hubbard at close quarters with an audience of practicing auditors — answering the questions of the people actually delivering the technology — at the moment the foundations of the subject were being set down in their permanent form.

December 1951

Second Annual Conference of Hubbard Dianetic Auditors - Life Continuum Lectures

11 lectures

In the closing days of December 1951, L. Ron Hubbard convened the Second Annual Conference of Hubbard Dianetic Auditors in Wichita, Kansas. So many auditors answered the call that the gathering outgrew the quarters of the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation itself, and the sessions were moved to the Crystal Room of Wichita's Shirkmere Hotel, where attendees from across the country assembled between Christmas and the New Year. The conference opened on December 27 and ran through the end of the year, and the lectures Hubbard delivered to it have come to be known collectively as the Life Continuum lectures.

The conference capped the most concentrated year of research in the Dianetics era. Nineteen fifty-one had already produced Science of Survival and the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation, a succession of lecture series at Wichita, and, in November, Advanced Procedure and Axioms. The textbook of the conference was its newly published companion, Handbook for Preclears — a manual of self-processing built around the Hubbard Chart of Attitudes — and these lectures furnish the theory standing behind its steps, including the use of the Chart of Attitudes to locate the level at which a case can be entered on a workable gradient.

At the center of the series stands the discovery for which it is named: the life continuum, the mechanism by which an individual takes up and carries forward the life of another who has died, departed or failed — most particularly someone he himself had failed to help — manifesting that person's attitudes, mannerisms and infirmities as though they were his own. Hubbard lays out the theory of this phenomenon, its place in the resolution of cases that had resisted earlier techniques, and its handling through effort processing, the principal auditing method of the Advanced Procedure and Axioms period.

Across the eleven recordings the listener follows the full sweep of the conference: an opening survey of results under the title Miracles in Dianetics; an examination of counter-emotion; the Chart of Attitudes and the life continuum theory itself; the emotional curve; cause on all of the dynamics; the goal of processing and the ideal state of Man; a presentation of Handbook for Preclears; a two-part exposition of effort processing applied to the life continuum; and a closing lecture, Yes, No and Maybe, on decision in the anatomy of a case.

The series occupies a singular position in the chronology of the subject. The inquiry into cause, full responsibility and the carrying of other lives was already pressing past the frame of one body and one lifetime — what Hubbard would describe as a third echelon of research — and within months he would depart Wichita and announce Scientology. Heard in sequence, these lectures record the summit of Dianetics as a completed line of development and, at the same moment, the threshold of everything that followed.