The Lectures of 1957

May 1957

Communications Course TRs Lectures

13 lectures

In the middle weeks of May 1957, working from the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C., L. Ron Hubbard recorded a short series of instructional lectures on a subject he had only just brought to workable form: the Training Routines of the Communication Course. The recordings in this series, delivered on the 15th, 16th and 30th of May 1957, capture the original TRs being taught by their author at the moment of their creation — weeks before they were issued in writing, and months before they reached the broad field. The same material was later gathered for release under the title Dear Alice, after the drill in which a student takes a line from Alice in Wonderland and delivers it to a coach as a communication entirely his own, freshly intended, until it genuinely arrives.

The lectures belong to one of the most consequential stretches in the development of training. Across the 16th and 17th Advanced Clinical Courses that spring, both conducted in Washington, Hubbard had concluded that the results of auditing rested less on the particular process being run than on the auditor's ability to hold a session at all — to be there, to deliver a command with full intention, to duplicate, to acknowledge, and to keep a cycle of communication in progress with a live preclear. Dummy auditing, drilled without a preclear, was his answer on the 17th ACC, and the CCHs — Control, Communication and Havingness — were the processes it served. The Communication Course TRs distilled all of this into a gradient of drills any student could be put through, and within weeks of these lectures they were fixed in published form in the HCO Bulletin of 11 June 1957, Training and CCH Processes. By July they stood at the center of the Freedom Congress and the 18th ACC, where the Upper Indoctrination TRs followed.

The series opens on 15 May with Hubbard teaching the routines in their original sequence: the Dear Alice drill itself, in which a borrowed line must become the student's own communication; acknowledgment, drilled until it actually ends a cycle of communication rather than merely punctuating it; the duplicative question, asked newly each time as though never asked before; and the handling of whatever a preclear may originate. A companion lecture the same day carries the gradient past words into the fifth step of dummy auditing, hand mimicry, where control of motion joins control of communication and points directly toward the CCHs. On 16 May he turns to the background of Procedure CCH — why control, communication and havingness answer the case, and what the drills are preparing an auditor to deliver. The closing lecture of 30 May takes up the outline of a course and its purpose, addressing training itself: what a course exists to produce and what a student ought to be able to do upon completing one.

These are working lectures rather than congress addresses, and the register is that of the course room rather than the platform — informal, exact, and concerned throughout with doingness. A listener hears the communication formula treated not as theory but as something to be drilled to certainty, and hears the reasoning that placed communication at the root of all auditing skill. Few bodies of material in the subject have had a longer reach: the drills taught here became the spine of auditor training and of every Communication Course delivered since, and a student today doing TRs is walking a path laid down in these very recordings. The archive presents the series in thirteen recordings drawn from the disc edition of the lectures, spanning 15 through 30 May 1957.

July–August 1957

18th American Advanced Clinical Course Part 2

22 lectures

On 8 July 1957, only days after the close of the Freedom Congress, L. Ron Hubbard opened the 18th American Advanced Clinical Course in Washington, D.C. The course convened in a four-story building at the corner of R and 19th Streets NW and ran for six weeks, with more than sixty-five auditors in the course room — practitioners who had come not only from across the United States but from as far away as South Africa and New Zealand. The Congress had just given the broad public its first look at the Training Routines and the Upper Indoctrination drills; the 18th ACC was where that new training technology was put to the proof, drilled daily on professional auditors under Hubbard's direct instruction.

The summer of 1957 marks a decisive point in the development of the subject. Out of the research lines of the preceding Advanced Clinical Courses had come Control, Communication and Havingness — the CCH processes — together with Tone 40 auditing and the recognition that confront, the willingness to face anything as it is, underlies both case gain and auditor skill. What remained was to forge auditors who could deliver these procedures with exactness, and it was on this course that the patterns of training were settled. Hubbard regarded the 18th ACC as the point at which training itself became a finished technology, and the drilling perfected in this course room became the foundation of the professional TRs that have formed the spine of auditor training ever since.

The lectures open on 15 July with Scientology and Effective Knowledge, in which Hubbard places looking above thinking as the road to certainty and sets confront at the center of everything that follows. From there he builds up the working anatomy of a session: the theory and definition of auditing, the relation of the CCH processes to the ARC triangle, the five categories into which cases resolve, control as the backbone of every auditing command, and the distinct disciplines of formal, informal and Tone 40 auditing. Scales receive close attention — the Effect Scale and the Scale of Withhold among them — as do the questions of what Scientology itself is addressed to and why the stability of the subject can be relied upon.

The later lectures range across the phenomena an auditor meets in any case: the structure of the mind in its relation to the thetan and MEST, the anatomy of problems, death, the mechanism of sleep and surprise, laughter and its relation to ability, and the factors behind the handling of IQ. Practical concerns stand alongside them — the optimum twenty-five-hour intensive, the training of athletes, how to instruct a course — and the series closes on 16 August with The Future of Scientology, Hubbard's survey of where the subject stood and where it was headed. A question-and-answer period from the opening day preserves the give-and-take of the course room itself.

Across these twenty-two lectures, delivered between 15 July and 16 August 1957, the listener hears Hubbard not as a congress speaker addressing thousands but as an instructor working at close quarters with a professional course — answering questions, dismantling misconceptions, and demanding a standard of skill the subject had not previously asked of its practitioners. Though this collection carries an archival Part 2 designation, it comprises the complete lecture run of the course as preserved in this library, and it stands as the record of the moment auditor training assumed its modern form.

July 1957

The Freedom Congress lectures

16 lectures

The Freedom Congress convened at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. on the 4th of July, 1957, and ran through the 7th. L. Ron Hubbard named it deliberately: the Congress opened on America's Independence Day, and its theme was freedom — in particular, freedom from human confusion. It belongs to the heart of the Washington Congress era, when Scientologists from across the United States and abroad gathered twice yearly in the capital, then the seat of the Founding Church, to hear the latest research firsthand. The sixteen lectures preserved here comprise the complete Congress.

The historical moment was a pivotal one. Through the Advanced Clinical Courses of late 1956 and early 1957, Hubbard had developed the CCHs — the Control, Communication and Havingness processes — which were producing gains on cases that earlier techniques had not reached. But the CCHs carried a demand of their own: they required an auditor capable of delivering a command at Tone 40, with intention unburdened by hesitation or self-consciousness — a level of precision previously associated only with Clears and Operating Thetans. His answer was a new gradient of auditor training, the Upper Indoctrination Training Drills, and the Freedom Congress was their public debut. Hubbard described these drills as thirteen levels of skill which, thoroughly administered, could make what he termed a "synthetic Clear" of the auditor who mastered them, without in any way barring that auditor's own progress to Clear through auditing.

The lectures move from foundation to demonstration. Hubbard opens by surveying how Dianetics and Scientology had addressed the problem of the mind and what Scientology had answered in man's long search, then takes up the definition of control and the basic theory of the CCHs. From there he turns to training itself — the purpose and need of training drills, the levels of skill an auditor passes through — and then does something comparatively rare in the Congress record: he demonstrates. The listener hears Hubbard coaching the drills live before the assembled delegates, including High School Indoctrination, Tone 40 on an object and Tone 40 on a person, as well as demonstrations of the CCH steps themselves. Rounding out the Congress are lectures on the third dynamic and communication and on Child Scientology, along with group processing delivered directly to those in attendance.

The significance of these few days extended well beyond the Congress hall. On July 8, the day after the Congress closed, the 18th American Advanced Clinical Course opened in Washington, placing the Upper Indoctrination drills directly into the hands of professional auditors. The training routines introduced here — TRs 6 through 9 — became a permanent fixture of auditor training and remain so, making the Freedom Congress the point at which the drilling of control and intention entered the line-up of every Academy. For the student of the development of the subject, these lectures capture the moment when Hubbard resolved that auditing results would be guaranteed not only by better processes but by a trained, drilled, and certain auditor — and demonstrated in his own voice exactly what that certainty sounds like.

1957

London Congress on Nuclear Radiation and Health

20 lectures

In the spring of 1957, the question of nuclear radiation sat at the front of the public mind. The United States and the Soviet Union had each amassed thermonuclear arsenals, atmospheric testing filled the newspapers with talk of fallout, and no agency of government could tell the ordinary citizen what he might actually do about any of it. Into that atmosphere L. Ron Hubbard convened a congress in the capital of the British Commonwealth, opening at the Royal Empire Society Hall in London on 12 April 1957 and running through the 15th. Issued in full under the title London Congress on Nuclear Radiation, Control and Health, it took as its subject the one aspect of the atomic age that lay within reach of Scientology: the being himself, and his reaction to the threat.

The congress arrived at the close of an extraordinarily concentrated stretch of research and instruction. Barely three months earlier, over the last days of December 1956, Hubbard had addressed the Anti-Radiation Congress in Washington, D.C.; in the interval between the two congresses he delivered some eighty-three lectures and personally instructed two Advanced Clinical Courses for auditors. The London congress thus carried to a public audience the technical harvest of that winter's work, and it did so in a nation then standing at the edge of its own entry into the hydrogen-weapons race.

At the heart of the program stand Hubbard's lectures on radiation itself. His position ran against the grain of the era's official reassurances and its tabloid terrors alike: the physical force of radiation was real enough, but the deeper damage was done in the field of the mind — in fear, in hysteria, in the restimulative power of an invisible and omnipresent threat. The handling, therefore, belonged not to civil defense but to processing, to the raising of a being's tone and his ability to confront. These radiation lectures drew attention well beyond the congress hall; Members of Parliament requested transcriptions of them, and they became the basis of the book All About Radiation, published that same year.

The congress also marked a technical milestone whose consequences reached far past the atomic question: the introduction of Control, Communication and Havingness — CCH — a triad Hubbard ranked in importance alongside Affinity, Reality and Communication. Where ARC had given the auditor the components of understanding, CCH gave him the means of reaching any case, however inaccessible, and of bringing a preclear's attention and ability under his own command. The CCH processes that grew from this foundation would reshape auditing procedure and auditor training through 1957 and beyond, and they give the congress its permanent place in the technical chronology quite apart from its occasion.

Across the four days, the listener encounters Hubbard addressing a public audience at the height of atomic anxiety, moving between the broadest questions of planetary survival and the precise anatomy of control, communication and havingness as they apply to a single preclear in a single session. The series stands as a bridge in the congress line between the Washington Anti-Radiation Congress of December 1956 and the developments of mid-1957, and as a document of the moment when Scientology answered the largest fear of its day by returning the matter to the only terrain where it could be resolved: the knowingness and self-determinism of the individual.

1957

The Ability Congress lectures

9 lectures

L. Ron Hubbard convened the Ability Congress at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., opening on 29 December 1957 before one of the largest audiences a Scientology congress had yet drawn. The timing was pointed. Less than three months earlier the Soviet Union had placed Sputnik in orbit, and the Western world was absorbed in anxious debate over machinery, missiles and the survival of civilization. Hubbard met the moment first with humor — the congress opened with a mock satellite launch on stage — and then in earnest, arguing that the road to planetary survival ran not through hardware but through the restoration of individual ability and responsibility. He told the assembled auditors and Scientologists that this congress mattered more than any held before it, and that they would date their futures from it.

The nine lectures cap what had been an exceptionally productive year of research. Through 1957, in the Advanced Clinical Courses conducted from Washington, Hubbard had developed and refined the training drills and the CCH processes — tools intended to make auditing results uniform and to reach cases that earlier techniques had passed by. The Ability Congress carried those advances to the broad field and set them within a much larger frame: the procedures by which Clear could now be approached, and a formal statement of what was meant by Operating Thetan.

Two technical threads run through the series. The first is a discovery Hubbard ranked among the most consequential of his research to that date: the source of mental image pictures — what they actually are, who is making them, and what that answer means for the resolution of any case. The second is the anatomy of control, resolved into its component parts of start, change and stop, a cycle whose mastery he shows bearing on auditing, on training, and on the conduct of life and organizations alike. Around these he takes up Clear Procedure as it then stood, the state of training in the field, and the responsibilities of the auditor in a subject that was, as he put it, no longer researching its way forward but moving with certainty.

What most distinguishes the Ability Congress from its predecessors, however, is its sustained attention to the Third Dynamic. Hubbard advances the proposition that group aberration is, at root, the accumulated irresponsibility of the individuals who compose the group — and, conversely, that a sane group can only be built from individuals each capable of standing alone, joined by communication rather than dependence. From this analysis he develops a practical program for the survival of Scientology organizations and, beyond them, for a civilization founded on ability rather than fear: an answer, in his framing, to the ideologies and armaments then dividing the world.

For the listener, the series catches the subject at a hinge point. It stands directly between the technical consolidation of 1957 and the clearing announcements of 1958; within months Hubbard would return to the same Shoreham Hotel for the Clearing Congress and the declaration that Clears were being made. Heard in sequence, the nine lectures register both the confidence of that approach and the breadth of the ambition behind it — auditing technique, auditor training, group sanity and the fate of nations treated as a single, continuous problem of ability.