Motoring across Europe to Barcelona, L. Ron Hubbard followed World War II invasion routes to study the effects the devastation had on populations. He also researched European university systems.
L. Ron Hubbard returned to Phoenix, where he released breakthroughs that enabled individuals to explore their past and improve their reactions toward life. During this period, Mr. Hubbard also researched the basics of organization and developed principles that any group could use to survive and prosper.
He delivered 232 lectures and wrote two more books by the end of 1953.
It was the spring of 1953 and having returned to London from Philadelphia, Mr. Hubbard was soon extending special invitations announcing a new Professional Course.
It was an astonishing announcement for more than a few reasons. 1952 had already seen an unrelenting wave of breakthroughs and new technology. Beginning with the first course on Scientology, it had already advanced to the whole track, electronics of human thought and the very anatomy of theta and Operating Thetan. In point of fact—and if only to emphasize the new plateau that had been reached—was L. Ron Hubbard’s legendary Philadelphia Doctorate Course of December/January 1952/1953.
Yet if that course did, indeed, embrace the vast scope of the very essence of life itself, it also opened the gate to something even greater: The Factors: Summation of the Considerations and Examinations of the Human Spirit and Material Universe. Here was far more than merely the “next level of advance.” he had brought the entire subject to such a level of precision and cohesion that his 30 statement summation was no less than monumental, providing the very laws of the theta universe which are, quite literally, Universal Truth. Moreover, that truth could not only be known, it could be experienced.
While as for the power of that universal solvent, Mr. Hubbard further describes how, with admiration alone, one could make MEST disappear and, theoretically, even make the universe go boom—to say nothing of one’s own case. And that is why the lectures he was about to deliver were something virtually nobody could have expected: a postgraduate to the very Doctorate Course, the course of YOU.
Then, too, came the expansion of Scientology 8-8008, not only amplifying what the book already contained, but providing no less than eight new chapters—The Factors, Universes, Behavior of Universes, Terminals, Logic, Assist Processing, Communication and new technology of Certainty Processing.
A letter from L. Ron Hubbard told how the technology had reached miracle level: “I can break a really rough case in 20 or 25 hours at the outside—change it utterly—and I can change a chronic somatic in half an hour. I can make kids walk in a few minutes who were crippled.” Mr. Hubbard had not only solved human aberration and psychosomatic illness, he had demonstrated the true nature of every individual as a spiritual being. Having discovered the full potentialities of a being at Operating Thetan in the Philadelphia Doctorate Course, Scientology 8-8008 and The Factors, he now set about to codify auditing techniques, write texts and train auditors. Nearly 400 delegates gathered in Philadelphia, where Mr. Hubbard told them a tool now existed to construct a new civilization. Hence, he emphasized organizational action and cooperation, enumerating functions a Scientologist should advance in society and which—through action—answer the question, “What is a Scientologist?” Here is a Congress that simultaneously spans L. Ron Hubbard research from the exteriorization techniques of SOP 8 and provides a means to bring a humane civilization to Man.
No matter the heights L. Ron Hubbard had scaled in discovering the laws of the theta universe and the potentials of OT, his next step was to be even more momentous. For with the inauguration of the Advanced Clinical Courses (ACCs), he specifically aimed at developing processes and training auditors to achieve those potentials in everybeing. And on the 1st American ACC, those results stemmed from Mr. Hubbard’s watershed discoveries on exteriorization and its relation to rehabilitating a being to native state. As he told student auditors: “Exteriorization shouldn’t be put down in your book as a process. It’s not a process. It is a natural condition which we’re restoring to a preclear.” Here is not only its theory and mechanics, but its accomplishment through the seven steps of Standard Operating Procedure 8 (SOP 8). Mr. Hubbard opened a clinic right on the premises and throughout the ACC—and under his direct supervision—ACC students audited preclears ranging from those with no knowledge of Scientology to those who were “impossible” cases. Auditor demand for L. Ron Hubbard’s personal instruction continued to grow. His response? No less than eight ACCs would follow in the next 12 months, culminating in the route to exterior OT ability.
Lecturing morning, afternoon and evening, supervising ACC co‑audits in between, L. Ron Hubbard traced lack of successful auditor performance to lack of understanding of the basic definitionsof Dianetics and Scientology. Whereas that breakthrough would change the shape of training, another would do the same as regards auditing. Calling it “the finest thing that a thetan can do,” he detailed its application in “The Granting of Beingness,” a lecture which became required study at all ACCs. Yet an even bigger story attended the 2nd American ACC, comprising the foundation of entrance to allcases: “SOP 8‑C is first used step by step, from Step I on, until the person to whom it is addressed knows he is back of his head and no longer in the body.” Obtaining for the preclear the knowledge that he is a creative energy‑production unit, SOP 8‑C demonstrated his purposes and abilities. Its multitude of breakthroughs included Opening Procedure of SOP 8‑C, providing the key to unlock the entrance to every case: the willingness to receive directions and, hence, free oneself through auditing. Indeed, Opening Procedure generated results of such magnitude L. Ron Hubbard decided to devote his efforts to full‑time training of auditors.
With Scientologists in the western United States clamoring for a Congress in their own locales, L. Ron Hubbard convened a “Western Congress” in Phoenix, Arizona. What particularly set this Congress apart was how he imparted the data on his latest breakthroughs, for as reported in the Journal of Scientology, “presentation of technical material was kept to an absolute minimum, L. Ron Hubbard presenting the majority of the important technique and procedure in the form of processes upon the group.” In this way, he provided a model for delegates to group process people in their own communities, with the concentration on Standard Operating Procedure 8-C (SOP 8-C) and Self Analysis lists. Here, too, was Mr. Hubbard’s introduction of the new audio meter (later known as a “beep meter”), the most advanced meter to date, not only featuring a probe that could register pain spots on a human being but providing the means to demonstrate that a being can create an energy current in another being. In sum, here was a Congress packed with technical data, expanding the ranks of trained Scientologists who carried these breakthroughs to a broader public and, thereby, generating a healthy crop of new field groups.
The series recorded in 1953
March–April 1953
The Factors Lectures
18 lectures
In the spring of 1953, having concluded the Philadelphia Doctorate Course in January and returned to England, L. Ron Hubbard convened a new professional course in London. The eighteen lectures gathered here are the record of that London Spring Professional Course, delivered from late March through late April 1953, opening with a survey of the road traveled to that point — a review of Dianetics, Scientology and what he then termed Para-Dianetics — before moving into the new material that would mark the season as a turning point in the subject.
The occasion at the heart of the series is the completion of The Factors, dated 23 April 1953 and presented to the assembled students within a day of its writing. In thirty numbered statements, The Factors summarize the considerations and examinations of the human spirit and the material universe undertaken across the preceding three decades, tracing existence from the assumption of a viewpoint, through the creation of dimension points and space, to the formation and interplay of universes — one's own, those of others, and the physical universe of common agreement. Hubbard offered the summation as a gift to Man, and it has stood since alongside the Axioms among the foundational statements of Scientology, later joined to the expanded edition of Scientology 8-8008.
The lectures themselves carry the working subtitle by which the series is known: Admiration and the Renaissance of Beingness. Here Hubbard takes up admiration as the universal solvent — the particle that resolves the persistence of matter, energy, space and time — and examines why what is admired tends to vanish and what is not admired endures. From this follows the renaissance of beingness of the title: the rehabilitation of the preclear's ability to be, to create, and to occupy or relinquish viewpoints at will. Across the series the student encounters the behavior of universes, terminals, logic, communication, assist processing and Certainty Processing, together with the exteriorization techniques and case-level considerations of the Standard Operating Procedure line then in development, which would shortly issue as SOP 8.
Historically, the series occupies the bridge between two great plateaus of the early fifties. Behind it lies the Doctorate Course of Philadelphia, with its full anatomy of the theta being and creative processing; ahead lie the Advanced Clinical Courses that would begin in Camden that autumn. The London spring of 1953 is the moment at which the philosophic summation of the subject — the laws of the theta universe stated in plain sequence — was set down and immediately put to work in auditing. Hubbard regarded the material as postgraduate to the Doctorate Course itself, addressing nothing less than the riddle of creation.
For the listener, these eighteen lectures offer The Factors not as a text to be memorized but as a body of truth unfolded by its author in the very week of its completion — each statement opened up, illustrated against case behavior, and tied to the practical business of returning to the preclear his own capacity for beingness. They reward close study by anyone working with the Axioms, Scientology 8-8008, or the exteriorization procedures of the period, and they preserve the immediacy of a season in which the theoretical foundations of Scientology reached their summary form.
September–October 1953
The International Congress of Dianeticists and Scientologists
12 lectures
In the closing days of September 1953, having just returned to America from his research quarters in England, L. Ron Hubbard convened the first congress ever held in the history of Dianetics and Scientology. From September 30 through October 4, 1953, several hundred delegates gathered at the Broadwood Hotel in Philadelphia for the First International Congress of Dianeticists and Scientologists — an assembly that established the congress itself as an institution, the pattern for every congress that would follow through the next decade.
The moment was a hinge point in the chronology of the subject. Three years had passed since the publication of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and only months since the extraordinary run of work that produced the Philadelphia Doctorate Course, Scientology 8-8008 and The Factors. With the theory of the thetan and the creation of universes now on record, the task at hand was codification and delivery — and it was at this congress that exteriorization techniques received their first broad-scale announcement to the field at large, in the form of Standard Operating Procedure 8. Days after the congress closed, Hubbard would carry the same line of development into the first Advanced Clinical Course at Camden, New Jersey.
Across the lectures, Hubbard opens with a survey of the history and development of Dianetics and Scientology and a statement of the problem to be solved, then takes up processing and its goals and the question of which processes are most favorable for the preclear at hand. The technical spine of the congress is SOP 8 itself, taken up step by step — from the steps addressing the readily exteriorized case down through those for the occluded and difficult one — together with Short 8 delivered as group processing, Six Steps to Better Beingness, the handling of rough cases, and processing addressed to wasting and to effort.
What gives these lectures their particular character is the maxim Hubbard placed at the center of them: don't think — look. Processing, he told the delegates, could now be summed in the simple act of direct observation, the complexities of a case falling away before the preclear's own ability to look, to pervade space and to extend anchor points. In keeping with that principle, Hubbard kept theoretical presentation to a minimum and instead ran much of the technical material as live group processing on the assembled delegates, so that the recordings preserve demonstration alongside instruction. Threaded through the technical program is a second theme: the place of the Scientologist in society. Hubbard answered the question of what a Scientologist is in terms of functions and action, telling the delegates that a tool now existed with which a new civilization could be built, and that the work remaining was not invention but application.
The archive preserves twelve lectures of the congress; published editions of the series have counted its lectures variously, from thirteen to fifteen depending on the release. For the listener, the series offers the rare experience of the subject's first great public gathering — Dianetics' past surveyed, the Scientology of theta and beingness newly codified, and an audience of working auditors processed by Hubbard himself from the congress platform.
1953
1st American Advanced Clinical Course
206 lectures
On October 6, 1953, in a set of offices on the upper floors of 726 Cooper Street in Camden, New Jersey, L. Ron Hubbard opened what had been announced as a Special Course in Advanced Technique and what history would record as the 1st American Advanced Clinical Course. Twelve auditors, selected by Hubbard himself from applicants around the world, gathered for six weeks of intensive instruction running through mid-November 1953 — the beginning of the Advanced Clinical Course line that would dominate the research and training of the next several years.
The moment matters. The Philadelphia Doctorate Course was less than a year behind him, The Factors had been issued that spring, and the framework of Scientology 8-8008 had reoriented the entire subject toward the rehabilitation of the thetan's own abilities rather than the mere erasure of aberration. By the autumn of 1953 the central research question was exteriorization, and this course is where Hubbard took that question up at full depth with a working group of professionals. His position, stated plainly across these lectures, was that exteriorization is not properly a process at all but a natural condition — something being restored to the preclear, not manufactured in him.
Across the series Hubbard lays out the theory and mechanics underlying that restoration: how a being creates space, the function of anchor points in holding that space, why a thetan comes to be fixed in and identified with a body, and pervasion as a mode by which a being knows. The practical spine of the course is Standard Operating Procedure 8, taken up step by step, with extended attention to the relative merits of subjective and objective processing and to the handling of the case that does not easily exteriorize. The Axioms and the considerations of beingness, space and havingness that had emerged through 1953 are worked here as live research tools rather than settled doctrine.
The format itself was new. Alongside the lectures Hubbard ran an on-site clinic in the Camden offices, where the students audited preclears under his direct supervision — some of them entirely new to the subject, others cases long regarded as impossible. The results of that auditing fed straight back into the next day's instruction, so the listener encounters something quite different from a congress address: a researcher working at close range with a dozen colleagues, refining procedure against actual cases day by day, in an informal and densely technical register.
The course's consequence was immediate. Its success set the pattern for eight Advanced Clinical Courses delivered over the following twelve months — first in Camden, then in Phoenix, more than five hundred lectures in all — the sustained research line through which the route to stable exterior ability was developed. These recordings, portions of which earlier circulated under the title Exteriorization and the Phenomena of Space, stand as the opening chapter of that effort and as one of the fullest records of Hubbard teaching working auditors at the frontier of the subject as it existed in late 1953.
1953
2nd Advanced Clinical Course
108 lectures
In the closing weeks of 1953, L. Ron Hubbard delivered the 2nd American Advanced Clinical Course at 507 Market Street in Camden, New Jersey, lecturing from 17 November through 22 December. The course convened a mere four days after the first ACC class had graduated, and demand from field auditors had already outgrown the hand-picked, twelve-student format of that original unit; the new and larger Camden quarters were taken expressly to meet it. The regimen was unrelenting: Hubbard lectured daily, and between lectures the students went straight into auditing in the clinic maintained on the premises, working under his direct supervision and applying the procedures he had just set out from the platform.
The series belongs to the great research surge that ran through 1953 — the year of the Factors and of the breakthroughs on exteriorization, following hard upon Scientology 8-8008 and the Philadelphia Doctorate Course of the December before, and carried forward in the London lectures of that spring. The Advanced Clinical Courses had been instituted only weeks earlier as the proving ground on which procedures were tested against live cases and refined until any properly trained auditor could apply them. History placed this particular course at a hinge point: during these same December weeks, in this same city, the first church corporations of Scientology were filed in Camden. The 2nd ACC thus stands at the moment Scientology passed from a research line carried largely in Hubbard's own hands into a subject organized for transmission to others.
The course opens on a discovery about training itself. Examining why auditors in the field failed where the procedures should have succeeded, Hubbard traced the failures to an incomplete grasp of the basic definitions of Dianetics and Scientology, and so the early lectures return again and again to first principles, beginning with the question of what a thetan actually is. From that foundation the series rises to the lecture long regarded as its summit, The Granting of Beingness, in which Hubbard examined the willingness to let others be as the highest of a thetan's capabilities; the lecture was made required study on every Advanced Clinical Course that followed.
The principal technical codification of the course is Standard Operating Procedure 8-C, worked out and refined step by step before the students. SOP 8-C addressed the case from the top down, its stated aim to bring the preclear to certainty that he is not a body but a spiritual being — in the language of the procedure itself, a creative energy-production unit — and it took up directly the barriers Hubbard had found standing in the way of stable exteriorization, among them the being's want of space of his own. Its Opening Procedure proved the decisive instrument: a way into any case, however difficult, that began by securing the preclear's willingness to follow the directions of an auditor, so that he might be freed through auditing rather than fight it.
The results obtained with Opening Procedure persuaded Hubbard that auditing had become something that could genuinely be taught, and on the strength of them he resolved to give his efforts to the full-time training of auditors, a decision from which the long line of subsequent ACCs in Phoenix, Washington and London descends. The listener encounters in these recordings the day-by-day record of that turn: definitions clarified in the morning and tested in session by evening, procedures revised in the light of student auditing, and the steady working out of the theme the series came to be titled for, the rehabilitation of the human spirit, restoring to the being his self-determinism, his beingness, and his capacity to grant beingness to others.
1953
2nd International Congress of Dianeticsts and Scientologists - Western Congress
26 lectures
In the closing days of December 1953, L. Ron Hubbard convened a congress at the Little Theater in Phoenix, Arizona — formally the Second International Congress of Dianeticists and Scientologists, and carried in the catalogs ever since as the Western Congress. The gathering grew directly out of the First International Congress, held in Philadelphia that autumn, after which Dianeticists and Scientologists across the western United States pressed for a congress within reach of their own communities. Hubbard chose Phoenix deliberately: the city held a particular claim on the subject's history as home of the original Hubbard Association of Scientologists, founded there in 1952, and it would shortly become the center of gravity for the Advanced Clinical Courses of 1954.
The congress closed out a watershed year. Through 1953 Hubbard's research had moved decisively to the rehabilitation of the being himself — exteriorization, the handling of anchor points and the making of space, and the discipline of direct observation he had pressed home in Philadelphia. By December that line of development had been codified into Standard Operating Procedure 8-C, and it is SOP 8-C, together with the processing lists of Self Analysis, that stands at the center of these lectures. The Western Congress thus sits at the hinge between the exteriorization research of 1953 and the intensive Phoenix period that followed, with the 3rd American Advanced Clinical Course opening on its heels.
What distinguishes this congress from nearly every other is its method of delivery. Rather than expounding the new procedures from the lectern, Hubbard kept formal exposition to a minimum and ran the techniques live on the assembled delegates, so that the greater part of the technical material arrives as Group Processing administered to the congress floor. The intention was practical: each attendee was to leave not merely informed about SOP 8-C but having experienced it, equipped with a working model for delivering group sessions in his own city. The plan bore fruit — recordings of these sessions were played at field gatherings across the country, producing case gain at a distance and seeding a generation of new field groups.
A new instrument also made its first appearance before the delegates here: the audio meter, which attendees would afterward remember as the beep meter. Hubbard put it through its paces on stage — its probe locating painful areas on the body, and, in the demonstration that drew the most attention, registering an energy current generated by one being in the body of another. For an audience following that year's research into the thetan's creation of energy and effects, the exhibit carried evidence of an unusually concrete kind.
Across the twenty-six recordings preserved in this archive, the listener encounters both sides of that design: Hubbard's addresses framing the state of the subject at the end of 1953, and the Group Processing sessions themselves, delivered to an audience of auditors and preclears alike. Taken together they preserve an unusually direct record of Scientology as it was actually practiced at that moment — not theory about beingness and havingness, but the procedures of the period run exactly as Hubbard ran them, on the people in the room.
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