In 1958, L. Ron Hubbard delivered 133 lectures including the Clearing Congress Lectures in July, in Washington, D.C. The first six of which were filmed on 16mm film in color.
In October, he sailed to London aboard the RMS Statedam. In England, he delivered 45 lectures while reorganizing local offices.
With this accomplished, he set sail back to Washington in early December aboard the Saxonia.
“We’re walking, right now, into a space‑opera age. And we are probably the only people that know anything about what Uncle Sammy and Uncle Khrushy face.” While Soviet leader Khrushchev rejoiced over the Russian satellite Sputnik and Russia’s newfound supremacy in the space race, L. Ron Hubbard convened a truly historic ACC. Following on the heels of “the most important Congress we have ever held”—the Ability Congress—the 19th American ACC opened with an account of whole track incidents implanted by space societies, the consequences for any preclear and the implications for civilization. An essential tool in the auditing solution was the E‑Meter, reintroduced due to electronic advances which made a new transistorized meter possible: the American Blue. Yet what made this ACC monumental was Clear Procedure, codification of all processes found most workable when applied by auditors. It consisted of an exact series of steps to obtain the state of Clear. And when those auditors created no less than fifteen Clears on the course itself, that was the crowning achievement—auditors other than Mr. Hubbard with the skill, know‑how and certainty to routinely clear others, laying the foundation for success in the only race that mattered—planetary clearing.
Invitations said it all—“We did it!” Here, then, is the state of Clear: its dimensions, freedoms and characteristics. Nowhere is it so thoroughly laid out. Defining a Clear in terms of “freedoms from, ” L. Ron Hubbard shows the progressive steps to move anyone toward this state, including the handling of present time problems and ARC breaks. It all culminates in a “magic button” with the power to open up any case, and summed up in one word: Help. As he describes, it handles “something like TNT”—that splits valences, exteriorizes preclears and puts people into session who were formerly not even vaguely auditable. Directly on the heels of Help as the “heart and soul of the upper dynamics,” comes the yardstick of judgment: how many dynamics does a person compute on instantly? While on the other side of the coin are the negative dynamics —the realm of psychiatrists and makers of the A-bomb. At which point Mr. Hubbard reveals how to bring a being to a state where he can remain at cause, no matter the level of violence in a world gone mad. Today, Clears exist by the tens of thousands in virtually every country of Earth. Here is the moment, immortalized forever, when the first was announced.
Having announced the fact of clearing at the Clearing Congress, L. Ron Hubbard now devoted the 20th American ACC to a comprehensive restatement of fundamentals. Telling students, “In every single advance of Dianetics or Scientology we have moved from being able to help the few to being able to help the many,” Mr. Hubbard taught how to clear the many. It began with the technology to evoke preclear participation—namely, in‑sessionness. With mishandled origins the largest cause of preclears going out of session, he detailed how to ensure they stay in session. And that was far from all, for here is a wealth of new material—an explanation of auditing the Rock, an incident at the core of the reactive mind, a description of the Atom, an engram preceding The Factors, and the presentation of crucial discoveries on meter phenomena. With auditors drilled till they knew their data cold, L. Ron Hubbard made the 20th ACC the standard for professional auditor training. While toward that goal of clearing the many, Scientology expansion mushroomed even as he embarked for England to announce the next advance in the name of broad clearing—one that harked back to the earliest days of Dianetics.
L. Ron Hubbard called it, “The single largest technical gain in eight years.” If he previewed the breakthrough at the London Clearing Congress, the great adventure of application began at the 5th London ACC. It all sprang from 1947 engram running, a technique he employed to make the first Clears, but which had defeated other auditors. But now with training drills in use and other auditors clearing people, Mr. Hubbard returned to those 1947 techniques “smoothed out, demonstrated and proved up in 1958.” Summated in a single embracive word—confronting—Scientology Engram Runningshattered whole track occlusions and brought to view in the preclear hidden patterns of experience, the experience necessary to resolve the case. Whereas Mr. Hubbard had found what he called the swift road to Clear, his final lecture tells of its value for training: “You know more now about anatomy of the mind than any other single group in Dianetics or Scientology has ever learned.” And for the crescendo, there was everything this ACC led to in the book, Have You Lived Before This Life? a watershed of planetary enlightenment on former lives and, hence, a spreading beacon of truth that each individual is a spiritual being.
The series recorded in 1958
July–August 1958
The 20th American Advanced Clinical Course
35 lectures
L. Ron Hubbard delivered the 20th American Advanced Clinical Course in Washington, DC, from 14 July to 15 August 1958, a run of thirty-five lectures given to professional auditors in intensive daily instruction. The timing was deliberate. Six months earlier, on the 19th American ACC, fifteen preclears had been brought to Clear in student auditing — proof that clearing was no longer the attainment of a few exceptional cases. That result was announced to Scientologists at large at the Clearing Congress of 4–6 July 1958, and barely a week after the Congress closed, Hubbard convened this course to answer the question the announcement raised: how to train auditors in numbers equal to clearing the many.
The Advanced Clinical Courses had served since late 1953 as the research line of the subject itself — weeks-long courses in which selected auditors trained under Hubbard's direct supervision while he tested and refined procedures against live cases in an on-site clinic. The 20th American ACC stands at a particular turn in that lineage. Rather than introducing a new direction of research, Hubbard devoted it to a thorough restatement of the fundamentals of auditing in light of everything the preceding years had established, with the stated aim of making the course the standard for professional auditor training. The series carries the subtitle The First Postulate, after one of its central themes: the first postulate as the mechanism by which any creation holds its power — the creation of the reactive mind included — and not-knowingness as the common denominator underlying every uncleared case.
Across the lectures Hubbard takes up the anatomy of the case as it was then understood. Entire lectures address the Rock, the core of the reactive mind, and the procedures for finding and handling it; others take up the Atom, an engram common to all thetans, predating even the Factors. He examines five buttons central to aberration — change, problems, help, create and responsibility — material that bears directly on what later became the Expanded Lower Grades, where many of the processes of this period remain in use. Alongside the theory runs a sustained emphasis on the session itself: in-sessionness, the preclear's participation and interest, and the finding that mishandled origins are the principal reason a preclear goes out of session.
The course is also a landmark in the development of E-Meter technology. It contains the first description of the rock slam and an account of the origin of the Stage Four needle, together with drilling on the production and reading of needle actions — instruction that pushed metering from an adjunct of auditing toward a precision instrument of case analysis. Lectures on the goals of auditing, the role and interest of the auditor, the monitoring of case progress, and the place of education in the making of an Operating Thetan round out the curriculum.
What the listener encounters across these thirty-five lectures is Hubbard as course instructor at a moment of consolidation: the exuberance of the Clearing Congress translated into the exacting, repeatable craft an auditor must command before clearing can be done broadly. The series closes on 15 August 1958 with a summary lecture drawing the five weeks together, and it remains one of the fullest records of how the fundamentals of auditing were taught at the threshold of the clearing era.
October–November 1958
5th London Advanced Clinical Course - Volume II
28 lectures
On 27 October 1958, in the auditorium at 7 Fitzroy Street, London, L. Ron Hubbard opened the 5th London Advanced Clinical Course before seventy-two student auditors — the largest ACC enrollment to that date, with students arriving from Australia, Germany, Greece, Israel, Morocco, Southern Rhodesia and beyond. The course ran five weeks, into late November, and followed directly on the London Clearing Congress held earlier that month, where Hubbard had announced what he regarded as the most significant technical advance in eight years: Scientology engram running. The Congress carried the announcement; this ACC carried the application, with Hubbard training the assembled auditors day by day in its precise delivery.
The historical moment is a striking one. Nineteen fifty-eight was the year of clearing — the year Hubbard turned the full weight of Scientology back upon the original target of Dianetics research. The engram running of 1947 had produced Clears, but unevenly, because the auditor of that era lacked the tools to do it with certainty. By 1958 those tools existed: the Axioms, a decade of refinement in auditor discipline, an exact theory of confront, and the E-Meter, here including a newly built British transistorized model put into use during the course itself. The thesis of the 5th London ACC is that the techniques of 1947, taken up again with the Scientology of 1958, could be made to work uniformly in the hands of any well-trained auditor — and the lectures show Hubbard proving that proposition in front of a working classroom.
Across the series Hubbard takes up the anatomy of the reactive mind piece by piece: the definition and behavior of locks, the types of mental image pictures a preclear may present, and interest as the common denominator running through engrams. He instructs in the E-Meter at length — its history, its reads, the detection of engrams and the dating of incidents on the track — and in the session discipline this style of auditing demands, including the origins of muzzled auditing. Underlying all of it is the principle that the auditor's task is to find what the preclear can confront and improve that ability, raising the preclear's tolerance for his own track gradiently rather than forcing him into what he cannot face.
What the course uncovered reached well past technique. As preclears ran engrams under these procedures, the track opened onto whole track phenomena — past-life incidents, and even the recovery of languages spoken on the past track. The case histories gathered from this ACC became the basis of the book Have You Lived Before This Life?, making the 5th London ACC a landmark in the documentation of past-life recall within Dianetics and Scientology.
The full course comprises some forty lectures in its published form; this archive presents it in volumes, and Volume II holds twenty-eight lectures continuing and concluding the course. The listener encounters Hubbard in his fullest role as instructor — lecturing to auditors in the room who would be in session that same week — so the material moves constantly between theory and the practical questions of live auditing: what the meter is doing, what the preclear's pictures mean, where the incident sits on the track, and how the session is to be run so the preclear wins.
1958
The Clearing Congress Lectures
9 lectures
Over the Fourth of July weekend of 1958 — July 4 through 6 — L. Ron Hubbard delivered the nine lectures of the Clearing Congress in the West Ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. The announcement the congress existed to make was, by the measure of the subject itself, the most consequential since 1950: Clear, the goal set out in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, was now being attained broadly. For eight years the state had remained more promise than production, a bottleneck that broke in December 1957 when a Clear was first made by an auditor other than Hubbard himself. By the summer of 1958 trained auditors were clearing preclears as a matter of practice, and the congress put the accomplished result before its delegates — Hubbard presenting bracelets to Clears in the audience — ahead of any theory about it.
The Clearing Congress also occupies a singular position in the lecture record: it is the only congress ever filmed. Professional crews shot six of the nine lectures in 16-millimeter color, the first motion pictures ever made of Hubbard lecturing, while the three closing lectures survive in sound alone. The present series carries the audio of all nine lectures — the complete congress as the Washington audience heard it.
The opening lectures take up the state itself. In The Fact of Clearing, The Factors of Clearing and The Freedoms of Clear, Hubbard establishes that clearing has passed from aspiration to accomplished fact, surveys the factors a clearing auditor must be able to command — the thetan, the mind, the body and the universes in which they operate — and defines Clear not as a list of acquired powers but as a set of freedoms, foremost among them freedom from one's own reactive mind.
From there the congress turns to practice. Prerequisites to Auditing isolates what must be handled before any process can bite — the present time problem and the ARC break — while the two Clear Procedure lectures, on CCH 0 and Help and on Creativeness, walk through the route to Clear as then codified: the establishment of genuine help between auditor and preclear, and the rehabilitation of the preclear's ability to create and discard his own mental creations, which the procedure of the period placed at the center of clearing. It is here that Hubbard identifies help as the single button capable of opening cases that no other approach had reached, with consequences running from the resolution of valence difficulties to exteriorization.
The closing lectures of the final day — The Goal of Auditing, The Magic Button and Violence — widen the view from procedure to purpose. Hubbard examines what auditing is ultimately for, takes up help again on its own terms across the dynamics, offers the number of dynamics on which a being can compute at once as a working yardstick of sanity and judgment, and considers how a being may remain at cause in a world that traffics heavily in force rather than be driven into effect by it. Heard together, the nine lectures catch Dianetics and Scientology at the moment their central promise was first being kept at scale — the same period that produced the first E-Meter built to Hubbard's own design and the codification of auditor training into drills — and they record the congress widely regarded as setting the course of everything that followed, an announcement Hubbard carried on to London before the year was out.
1958
Washington Staff Talk Lectures
2 lectures
The Washington Staff Talk Lectures preserve two recorded addresses L. Ron Hubbard gave to the staff of the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C. — the organization he had established at 1812 19th Street NW in 1955, and which served through the latter 1950s as the worldwide center of Scientology training, processing and administration. Both talks were directed to the registrars, the staff members who interviewed the arriving public and placed them onto auditing and training. The first, Promotion and Registration, was delivered on 16 December 1958; the second, R-Factor — Talk to Registrar, followed on 2 February 1959. They are not congress addresses or course lectures but working talks, spoken inside the organization to the people responsible for keeping its lines flowing.
The weeks these two recordings bracket were among the most consequential in the development of the subject. Hubbard had spent 1958 moving between Washington and London at the height of the clearing era: the Clearing Congress at the Shoreham Hotel that July — the first of his lectures ever captured on film — the Nineteenth and Twentieth American Advanced Clinical Courses refining clearing technology, and then, in London that October, the London Clearing Congress, where he announced Scientology engram running as a technical advance surpassing anything of the preceding eight years, followed by the Fifth London ACC. Back in Washington in December, he gave the first of these staff talks; in the first days of January 1959 came the Success Congress at the Shoreham, and on 5 January the Twenty-First American ACC opened at the organization's quarters at 19th and R Streets, running into mid-February. The second staff talk falls squarely within that course period.
The talks belong to the organizational thread of that moment as much as to its technical one. At the Success Congress, Hubbard placed organizational know-how alongside clearing itself as a frontier of the subject's development, and the administrative issues of these same months repeatedly took up promotion, book administration and the registrar's materials. The Washington Staff Talks are that codification in its original spoken form: the founder of the subject addressing the registrars of his own organization directly, applying the fundamentals of Scientology itself — communication, reality, agreement — to the practical question of how a person moves from first contact with the subject onto actual service.
As the titles indicate, the first talk takes up promotion and registration as one continuous flow, from the promotional actions that bring a person to the organization through the registration interview that places him on lines. The second turns on the R-factor — the reality factor, the principle that a person must be given sufficient reality on what is to be done before action is taken — applied here to the registrar's exchange with a prospective preclear or student. Across the two recordings the listener encounters Hubbard in a register the congress lectures rarely show: the executive of the Founding Church speaking plainly to his staff about their hats, at the very moment the organizational pattern of Scientology was being worked out in practice.
A note on provenance: this is a small archival series rather than a formally published set. The two talks do not appear among the congress and Advanced Clinical Course volumes issued by the publishing houses, and they have long circulated in field archives under the Washington Staff Talk designation, identified by their tape date codes, 5812C16 and 5902C02. The library presents them as recorded — a candid view of the Founding Church at work at the turn of 1959.
Hearing these lectures
The 1958 recordings are held in the AOGP Lecture Library, which opens with an AOGP membership. Full catalogue access begins at the Foundation tier; Inner Circle adds downloadable lectures and transcripts. Membership starts with a free 14-day trial.
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