The Lectures of 1955

June 1955

Anatomy of the Spirit of Man

14 lectures

In the first days of June 1955, L. Ron Hubbard called Scientologists to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. for the Anatomy of the Spirit of Man Congress — the first International Congress to convene in the American capital. The occasion was itself historic: Hubbard had shifted his base of operations from Phoenix to Washington, where the Founding Church of Scientology was then being established. Across four days, June 3 through 6, he delivered the lectures gathered here, opening on the evening of June 3 with "The Hope of Man."

The congress stands at a pivot point in the development of the subject. Five years had passed since Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and the intervening research — through the Philadelphia Doctorate Course, the Phoenix years, the Axioms and the codification of exteriorization — had carried the work decisively from the anatomy of the mind to the anatomy of the spirit. At this congress Hubbard presented Scientology explicitly as a practical religion: a body of workable technology by which the aspirations voiced in earlier religions and philosophies, long held out as hopes, could be attained as results. He reviewed the history of his research and investigation, traced what past faiths had promised man, and reported case results attributed to processing addressed exclusively to the thetan rather than to the body or the reactive bank — alongside new findings on what self-determinism is composed of and on how an auditor could go about returning it to a preclear.

The lectures themselves range across the fundamentals of the subject as it stood in 1955. Hubbard takes up the composition of beingness — postulates, exteriorization and beingness itself — and the direction of truth in processing; the Tone Scale and the three primary buttons bearing on exteriorization; and the question of how to chart a preclear's case in terms of knowingness and unknowingness. In "The Descent of Man" he examines the long dwindling spiral by which a being comes to be what walks about in a body, and in "The Game Called Man" the consideration of livingness as a game, with its freedoms, barriers and purposes. A lecture on the Six Basic Steps reviews the fundamental auditing processes of the period and why a session that neglects them fails, while "The Mechanisms of Ownership in Living" extends the era's work on havingness and problems of ownership. The congress closes with an address on what Scientology was doing organizationally and its bearing on the control and direction of man.

Interleaved with the lectures, Hubbard ran Group Processing sessions on the congress delegates — including processing on meaningness — so the listener hears the technology of the period not merely described but delivered, in Hubbard's own session style, to the assembled audience. The complete congress comprised fifteen talks and group sessions; fourteen are preserved in this archive. Taken together they document the moment Scientology planted itself in Washington and declared its subject plainly: not the brain, not the body, but the spirit of man, its anatomy, and the means of its rehabilitation.

July–September 1955

Axiom of the Stable Datum

8 lectures

In the summer of 1955 the center of Scientology shifted from Phoenix to Washington, DC. On July 4 of that year L. Ron Hubbard established the Founding Church of Scientology on 19th Street near Embassy Row, and with it the Academy of Religious Arts and Sciences, the first Scientology Academy for the training of professional auditors. The lectures gathered under the title Axiom of the Stable Datum belong to the opening months of that Washington era: seven talks delivered to Academy students between July 11 and September 14, 1955, while Hubbard was simultaneously organizing the church that would coordinate a network of organizations spanning five continents.

The series opens on practical ground. In the two-part Seven Basic Steps of July 11, Hubbard surveys the auditing procedure of the day from end to end — this was the period of the basic processes consolidated after The Creation of Human Ability and Dianetics 55!, when two-way communication, the opening procedures and the remedy of havingness formed the working spine of a session. It is a craftsman's briefing on what an auditor actually does with a preclear, in what sequence, and why each step sits where it does.

From there the series turns to the discovery that gives it its name. In the lecture of August 23, Hubbard takes up Axiom 53 — that a stable datum is necessary to the alignment of data — and develops it as a key to the whole problem of aberration: a confusion persists only so long as no datum has been adopted around which its particles can align, and sanity itself rests on the stable datum jointly held. The companion lectures of late August carry the principle outward. The Auditor's Public considers whom the auditor's work actually reaches; Rugged Individualism traces the long descent by which a being trades knowingness for separateness; and Union Station, pairing a numbered process of the period with the crowds of the capital's rail terminal, takes auditing out of the session room and into public life.

The closing pair of lectures, from September 14, reaches the most fundamental material in the series. Hubbard examines the four postulates by which a thetan orders his own knowingness — not-know, know, forget and remember — and their direct application in processing, joined to a new reading of Axiom 36, the axiom of the lie. In The Unknown Datum he pursues the proposition that the native state of a being is one of complete knowingness, and that the ability to not-know at will stands senior to any amount of knowing about — a line of reasoning with immediate bearing on unconsciousness, occlusion and the mechanics of forgetting and remembering.

Taken together, these lectures form a hinge between the Phoenix research of 1954 that produced the Axioms and the doctrine of the confusion and the stable datum that Hubbard would shortly state in its most widely known form in The Problems of Work. The archive preserves the full series in eight recordings, the opening lecture having been kept in two parts.

1955

London Hubbard Professional Course - 4th (London ACC)

49 lectures

In the autumn of 1955, L. Ron Hubbard returned to England for the first time since the lectures of late 1952 that had led directly into the Philadelphia Doctorate Course. Three London Advanced Clinical Courses had already been run in his absence on recorded instruction, so the course he opened in London on 3 October 1955 carried the number four — yet it was the first ACC he ever taught in person on British soil. The lectures ran through 17 November, and within those same weeks, from 8 to 10 November, he delivered the London Hubbard Professional Course, a compressed intensive convened at the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International's new quarters at Brunswick House on Bayswater Road for auditors whose circumstances could not accommodate a six-week ACC. The archive presents this body of London lectures from October and November 1955 — forty-nine in all — under the combined heading.

The series belongs to the period immediately following the Phoenix and Washington years, in which auditing had been codified into the Six Basic Processes and set down in The Creation of Human Ability and Dianetics 55!. In London, Hubbard carried that codification a stage further, developing the Six Basic Processes into the Six Levels of Processing, organized around what he identified as the hinge on which all case gain turns: the preclear's power of choice. The Six Levels, taken up level by level — rudiments, locational and not-know processes, decisional processing, Opening Procedure by Duplication, the remedy of communication scarcity, and the remedy of havingness with spotting spots in space — were shortly issued to Academies internationally as the standard processing lineup of the day, which is why the Professional Course intensive was recorded and exported rather than confined to the students in the room.

His declared aim for the course was the making of genuinely expert auditors, and accordingly he began not with advanced technique but with what comes before any technique: the rudiments of a session. Across the early lectures a listener encounters the establishing of the auditor, the establishing and continuing of a session, the communication bridge between processes, smoothness of auditing, tolerance of change in preclears, and the handling of a preclear who has fallen out of session — the procedural bedrock on which every later process depends. Lectures on how to audit, the training of an auditor, and how to build a practice extend this professional instruction beyond the session itself.

Alongside the practical curriculum runs a substantial body of new theory. From Axiom 36 came processes to rehabilitate the preclear's ability to not-know and thereby unmake the First Postulate — the decision by which a thetan departed from native state — material heard here in lectures such as Native State and Postulates 1, 2, 3 and 4 and First and Second Postulates in Living. The doctrine of the confusion and the stable datum receives extended treatment, applied to the resolution of present time problems, to engrams, to the study of science, and to the conduct of living generally, anticipating the place it would soon hold in The Problems of Work. The course also takes up exteriorization and interiorization, the anatomy of terminals, data of comparable magnitude, base time and the time continuum, randomity and automaticity, affinity, reality and communication, and a two-part resume of Creative Processing that consolidates the earlier research line.

Heard in sequence, the lectures trace a complete Advanced Clinical Course from its opening fundamentals to its closing review, ending with Hubbard's own summation in The Most Important Items of the 4th London ACC and an end-of-course lecture. Interleaved with the technical material are broader addresses on the antiquity of auditing and the role of the Scientologist in the society around him. The course generated enough momentum in England that the HASI expanded into larger quarters before it was done, and for the student of the mid-1950s materials the series captures a distinct moment: the exteriorization research of the Philadelphia and Phoenix years being settled into a disciplined, teachable practice of auditing, with the power of choice placed at its center.

1955

Professional Course Lectures/Postulates and Live Communication

11 lectures

Between 14 March and 14 May 1955, in the closing months of his Phoenix years, L. Ron Hubbard delivered a weekly course of lectures to the trained auditors and staff of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International enrolled on a new professional course at the Hubbard Professional College in Phoenix, Arizona. The moment was a pivotal one in the chronology of the subject. Dianetics 55! had just appeared at the Unification Congress of December 1954, drawing Dianetics and Scientology together around communication as the common denominator of all case gain, and within months Hubbard would shift his base of operations to Washington, D.C., where the Founding Church of Scientology would soon be established. The lectures gathered here, known as Postulates and Live Communication and issued under the subtitle Why You Can Audit, stand as his last sustained course of professional instruction delivered in Phoenix, and they address the question beneath every session ever run: why auditing produces change at all.

The answer Hubbard set before this course is Axiom 51 — the principle that postulates and live communication, not being part of the mechanics of matter, energy, space and time and standing senior to them, can accomplish change in those mechanics without generating further persistence. From this single datum the entire workability of auditing follows: communication directed at mass disintegrates it, where force directed at mass only confirms it. It is in these lectures that one finds Hubbard's characterization of communication as "the universal solvent," and the series as a whole is an extended demonstration of that solvent applied across the full panorama of cases an auditor meets in practice.

The course opens with the mechanics of the occluded case and the "only one" computation, the condition of the being who has elected himself sole cause and thereby cut his lines to the world. Two lectures then take up Axiom 51 directly — first its anatomy, then its operation in session — before Hubbard re-examines the Six Basic Processes in the light of the new axiom, showing why each of those deceptively simple procedures works on the level of postulates and live communication rather than on the level of mass. From there the series moves through the service facsimile, thinkingness, ownership processing and meaningness, and closes with a fresh treatment of the Tone Scale as an index of a being's ability to communicate. The official release comprises nine lectures; this archive presents the series across eleven recordings, with the longer lectures divided into parts.

What a listener encounters is Hubbard as working instructor rather than congress speaker: a weekly address to practicing auditors, each lecture refining theory into procedure for the cases then on their lines. Taken together, the series forms the bridge between the axiomatic codification of the Phoenix era and the communication-centered auditing that would dominate 1955 and 1956. For the student tracing how the Axioms became a deliverable technology — how a philosophical statement about postulates and communication became the reason a preclear sitting across from an auditor improves — this course is where that connection is made explicit.