The year of 1959 was a busy one for L. Ron Hubbard. He defined the duties in various Scientology churches and delivered 16 lectures on auditing refinements in Washington, DC.
In March, he began negotiations to purchase Saint Hill Manor in Sussex, England which, would be his home for the next seven years.
In May, with negotiations completed, L. Ron Hubbard moved his residence to the 55-acre estate. The worldwide headquarters of Scientology was then moved to Saint Hill shortly after.
During this time, Mr. Hubbard began another line of research involving different orders of life. In his Saint Hill greenhouses, he conducted horticultural experiments that brought about significant increases in plant growth. His discoveries were written published in international horticultural magazines and received extensive coverage in daily newspapers.
After the first E-Meter designed and built to his exact specifications was produced, he began an around-the-world trip on 16 October. He traveled to Greece, India, Melbourne, Hawaii, San Francisco, and New York before arriving back at Saint Hill in the first week of December.
While in Melbourne, he delivered 38 lectures. While in the United States, he wrote and issued an organizing board for American Scientology Churches, which showed what functions were done, the order in which they should be done, and who was responsible for getting them done.
Upon his return to England, L. Ron Hubbard appeared on BBC television to discuss his horticultural experiments. Shortly afterward, he traveled to Washington, DC.
In all, he gave 102 lectures during this year and produced the groundbreaking Scientology Axioms and Logics.
Here is the Congress which provided the final chapter on all development to date and the beginning of an entirely new era! For with all the discoveries the past year had brought—in terms of clearing—they had now culminated in a breakthrough for planetary expansion. First, L. Ron Hubbard reveals the single reactive postulate at the core of planetary apathy, “there is nothing I can do about it.” Yet that postulate doesn’t stand a chance—not with what he next discovered. Stemming from the pervasive datum, “the confusionsaren’t and order is,” came the discovery of the senior ability of a thetan. In fact, once a being reaches the top of the scale, it’s the onlything they can do. It’s a datum that provides the answer of how an individual can consecutively and continuously bring wider order that spreads like a wave over the world. And that’s the substance of why Mr. Hubbard began this Congress where they usually ended: The Future of Scientology. For by the final, and now legendary lecture, he had provided the means to attain that rarest of qualities, yet one inherent in every Scientologist, and required for a new civilization: Leadership.
At the Success Congress, L. Ron Hubbard revealed discoveries about the senior ability of a thetan to bring order and, hence, provide leadership. None embody those qualities more than the auditor—and thus the 21st American ACC signaled a new phase. Vastly expanding the reach of a single professional auditor, Mr. Hubbard taught the breakthrough of Muzzled Auditing—cracking the barriers posed by the inexperience of co‑auditing teams and permitting anyone to engage in clearing under professional supervision. And with Confront and Training Drills (TRs) as the first vital step, he released coaching technology to cut through all confusions. Then, detailing the application in Muzzled Auditing of specific processes—Selected Person Overts, General Overts, Not‑Is Straightwire and ARC Break Straightwire—he told auditors, “By running these processes on an individual and getting an individual to run these processes, we wind up with an auditor with judgment, with intelligence, with the ability to reach and with his obsessive not‑is gone—which permits him to grant a little beingness.” Here, then, are the technical and administrative solutions to put entire populations in session, laying the groundwork for what L. Ron Hubbard next revealed—an actual formula to accomplish a Cleared Earth.
An experiment that riveted the world: Eighteen-foot tomato plants and cucumbers the size of watermelons made global headlines. But what those newspapers knew wasn’t even half of the epic saga surrounding L. Ron Hubbard’s greenhouse plant experiments, and a breakthrough concerning life itself: how the fundamental postulates of survive and succumb interplay in life and result in the game called “victim.” In the wake of that breakthrough came further discoveries revealing the basic reasons for a being’s postulates of self-destruction, and their solution—Communication Processes sweeping the track clean of core aberrations. Moreover, here’s where application took on a fully massive dimension with the announcement of a new type of auditing enabling one auditor to handle hundreds, or even thousands of preclears at a time. It’s the means to broad scale clearing and planetary salvation. And yet, no matter the magnitude of these developments, standing behind them was something far greater. For here is the historic Congress where Mr. Hubbard first announced the acquisition of the most famous address in Scientology: Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex, England.
With auditor training courses standardized, clearing technology in broad use and a central dissemination center now established at Saint Hill, L. Ron Hubbard embarked on a round-the-world tour to now ensure the stability of all Scientology organizations. But that tour was only a small steppingstone towards a far grander destination he’d set his sights upon: Operating Thetan. And that’s why his first stop was Australia as the necessary base in the Southern Hemisphere, far away from the potential fallout of East and West warmongers. Here, then, is his message to Australian Scientologists on a responsibility they hold to this day as a last safe harbor. Here, too, is his deeply personal story of how he first forged a bond with Australia when serving as a US Naval Officer through the Second World War. But while that was, of course, present-life history, it became fully whole track as Mr. Hubbard next made his first public announcement of Recent Developments on OT. And drawing from the whole tangled history of thetans, he reveals the mechanism of how deep-seated aberration reverses the cycle-of-action in a being—moving one from “create” to “destroy.” Moreover, he had found the answer and it was summed up in a single word: Responsibility. It was a breakthrough that would open the gateway to OT, and here is where it first began.
The series recorded in 1959
January 1959
Success Congress
6 lectures
In the opening days of January 1959, L. Ron Hubbard convened the Success Congress at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. The moment was a deliberate hinge in the chronology of the subject: the Clearing Congress of July 1958 had announced clearing as an attainable, demonstrable reality, and the months that followed had been spent refining the route in advanced courses on both sides of the Atlantic. Hubbard presented this congress to the assembled delegates as the closing chapter on every development to that date and the doorway to an entirely new era — a framing borne out by the year that followed, in which he would deliver more than a hundred lectures and acquire Saint Hill Manor as the new center of his research.
The technical news he brought to Washington reached all the way back to the foundation of the subject. The engram had been the centerpiece of Dianetics in 1950, yet engram running as a route had long since been set aside in favor of other approaches. Now, with eight years of Scientology research behind it — the discoveries concerning theta, beingness, havingness and the structure of the reactive mind — Hubbard announced that the loop had closed: clearing could be accomplished on anyone by engram running. He rated this the most significant technical advance in those eight years, and it gives the congress its character as both a culmination and a fresh beginning.
Yet the Success Congress is not solely a technical event. Across its six lectures, three lines of development converge into one picture: the subject of Scientology itself, the training of auditors — including the newly introduced Extension Course, which extended instruction beyond the walls of the academies — and the administrative know-how on which the survival of organizations depends. Within that third line Hubbard laid out his anatomy of confusion and order, resting on the observation that a confusion is only apparent while order is actual, and identified the bringing of order into any sphere as a senior ability of a thetan.
That thread culminates in the lecture on Leadership, the best-remembered address of the congress. In it Hubbard connected the capacity to create order with the capacity to lead, and applied the principle directly to the responsibility Scientologists carried for the civilization around them. He judged the lecture consequential enough that copies were made at once and dispatched to auditors everywhere — an unusual measure that signals how central he considered its content to the work then beginning.
A listener moving through the series encounters a survey of where Dianetics and Scientology stood at the start of 1959: the state of clearing technology and the return of engram running to the auditor's repertoire, the broadening machinery of training, the mechanics of confusion and order, and the statement on leadership toward which the whole congress builds. Heard in sequence, the six lectures form the bridge between the clearing announcements of 1958 and the expansive program of 1959 — the year in which Hubbard set out to make clearing not an isolated achievement but a broad and organized reality.
April–May 1959
Special Hubbard Professional Auditors Course - Part 1
26 lectures
In the spring of 1959, L. Ron Hubbard stood before the students of London and personally delivered the Special Hubbard Professional Auditors Course, a sustained series of lectures given between April 6 and May 1 of that year. The course was conceived as the spoken curriculum for professional auditor training — a complete restatement of the subject, from its philosophic underpinnings to the exact conduct of a session, taught by its founder in person and recorded so that academies elsewhere could train auditors to the same standard. The present collection is the first of two installments in which this archive carries the course, comprising twenty-six recordings drawn from the opening span of the series.
The moment matters. Hubbard had closed the 21st American Advanced Clinical Course in Washington, D.C. at the start of 1959 and returned to England; the 6th London ACC would follow within weeks of this course's end, and before the year was out he would take up residence at Saint Hill Manor in Sussex. The Special HPA Course thus belongs to the hinge between the Washington years and the Saint Hill era. Nearly a decade on from Book One, with the E-Meter restored to the center of practice and the HAS Co-audit bringing auditing to new public on a broad scale, Hubbard chose this juncture to walk professional students back through the entire structure of Dianetics and Scientology from its foundations upward — a deliberate return to first principles rather than an announcement of new technique.
The early lectures build the philosophic frame. Beingness and communication open the course, followed by universes, the dynamics, the scales, and states of being — the gradient by which a thetan descends into, or rises out of, condition. From there Hubbard takes up the anatomy and mechanisms of the mind, the overt act–motivator sequence, and what can actually be done with a mind when its reality is plotted on a scale. Two lectures are given over to the Codes, including the Code of a Scientologist, and two more to the Logics and the Axioms — the bedrock agreements and self-evident truths from which every process is derived.
The course then turns from philosophy to the auditor's craft. Hubbard surveys the types of auditing then in use and the types of cases an auditor will meet, and proceeds through assessment, present time, and the use of the E-Meter in locating engrams — the metering discipline that defined late-1950s practice. Lectures on the theory of processes and on processes themselves give the rationale beneath technique, while the closing span of the course addresses specialized auditing, the processing of children, mistakes in auditing style, the HAS Co-audit, the electronic phenomena of the mind, and confrontingness, before an end-of-course lecture sends the students out to practice.
What the listener encounters across these recordings is Hubbard as instructor in a working course room: the whole of the subject as it stood in 1959, compressed, ordered, and aimed squarely at application. For the student of the materials, the series offers something the congress lectures of the same period do not — not the public announcement of results, but the professional transmission of fundamentals, delivered at the threshold of Saint Hill by the man who developed them.
July 1959
Theta Clear Congress
6 lectures
L. Ron Hubbard convened the Theta Clear Congress at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the Independence Day weekend of 1959, opening on the 4th of July. The six lectures of this congress caught the subject at one of its genuine turning points, for it was here that Hubbard told a congress audience for the first time that he had acquired Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, Sussex — the estate that would shortly become his home, his research base and the center of gravity of Scientology training for the decade that followed. The announcement marked the close of the Washington years as the hub of his research and the opening of the Saint Hill era, and the lectures carry the sense of a subject being handed a much larger future.
The congress belongs to a year of intensive refinement. Through 1959 Hubbard was lecturing steadily in Washington on the precision of auditing itself — the prerequisites of a session, present time problems, the handling of the preclear as a being rather than a case — and the Theta Clear Congress gathers the fruits of that work for the broad membership. Its central line of research concerns the two postulates that underlie all behavior: survive and succumb. Hubbard traces how a being who has postulated survival comes, point by point, to postulate his own defeat, and how the condition of being a victim is manufactured and held in place. From this anatomy of self-destruction he derives its remedy — communication processes aimed directly at the core aberrations involved, rather than at their endless symptoms.
The second axis of the congress is scale. Hubbard presents the procedural developments that made auditing deliverable far beyond the one auditor, one preclear session: muzzled auditing, the strictly disciplined co-audit style by which minimally trained students could run standard processes on one another without deviation, and the supervisory pattern by which a single trained auditor could direct the sessions of hundreds or even thousands of preclears simultaneously. For an audience that had been told a year earlier that Clear was attainable, this was the answer to the obvious next question — how an entire public, not a fortunate few, was to reach it. The congress is in that sense an early and explicit statement of broad-scale clearing as the operating target of the subject.
Rounding out the program, Hubbard reports on his experimental work with plant life — greenhouse research that produced tomato plants of extraordinary height and cucumbers of improbable size, results that found their way into the international press. Whimsical as the headlines were, the experiments served his serious inquiry into life force as such: theta as a quantity present wherever life is, not a property peculiar to man. Across the six lectures the listener encounters Hubbard in transition — consolidating the auditing fundamentals of the late Washington period, demonstrating that clearing could be industrialized without being degraded, and pointing the whole subject toward the manor in Sussex where its next chapter would be written.
November 1959
First Melbourne ACC Responsibility and the State of OT Part 2
32 lectures
In early November 1959, L. Ron Hubbard left England for Australia, arriving in Melbourne on the 5th of the month to address a Congress of Australian and New Zealand Scientologists on the responsibility they bore for the subject in their part of the world. When the Congress closed, he remained in the city to deliver the 1st Melbourne Advanced Clinical Course, which opened on 9 November 1959 at 157 Spring Street, the headquarters of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International in Australia, before a hand-picked body of some forty auditors drawn from both Australia and New Zealand. Across the following weeks he lectured to them daily, and the recordings of that course form the material gathered here.
The 1st Melbourne ACC stands at a turning point in the chronology of Dianetics and Scientology. The Advanced Clinical Courses and Congresses of the late 1950s had been devoted above all to clearing — to the procedures by which an auditor could bring a preclear to the state of Clear. In Melbourne, Hubbard turned the subject's attention back to the further goal that had stood since the era of Scientology 8-8008: the state of Operating Thetan. He told the assembled auditors that the course marked the opening of a new era for Scientology, and the reason was a research breakthrough he had brought with him — the isolation of the primary barrier lying across the route to OT, and the means of dissolving it. That barrier was the matter of responsibility, and the technology he set forth for its recovery was the handling of overts and withholds.
The lectures accordingly take up responsibility as the central component of all case advance, tracing how a thetan descends from cause to effect and how that descent can be reversed. Hubbard examines the mechanics of valences and the shifting of valences along the road to OT, including the rule of the weak valence; the anatomy of individuation and its handling; the relationship of withholds to communication, to judgment, and to the curious apparency of "no bank" a preclear can present; the ability to make postulates without consequence; the role of bad experiences in a case; and the principal incidents on the whole track, the ridges they form, and their address in auditing — with attendant instruction on tone arm action and what it tells the auditor. Because this was a working Advanced Clinical Course rather than a public congress, the listener encounters the material as the students did: as day-by-day technical instruction, with the reasoning behind each development laid out and its application to the preclear in session made explicit.
The line of research opened in these lectures did not end in Melbourne. The technology of overts, withholds and responsibility that Hubbard codified before this small group of auditors passed almost immediately into the broad body of the subject, carried forward into the congress lectures of 1960 and into auditing practice from that point on, where it has remained fundamental ever since. The series title's designation of Part 2 reflects the archive's division of the course holdings into two installments rather than a separate series in its own right; the thirty-two recordings gathered under it belong to the single body of instruction Hubbard delivered at Melbourne in November 1959, published commercially as the 1st Melbourne ACC: Responsibility and the State of OT.
November 1959
The Melbourne Congress
6 lectures
In the first week of November 1959, L. Ron Hubbard left England — where he had taken up residence at the newly acquired Saint Hill Manor only months earlier — and flew by way of Calcutta to Australia, landing in Melbourne on 5 November. Two days later, on 7 November 1959, he opened his first and only Melbourne Congress at the Chevron Hotel before hundreds of Scientologists gathered from across Australia and New Zealand. The visit formed part of a wider journey to strengthen and align Scientology organizations then operating on four continents, and these six lectures remain the only congress Hubbard ever delivered on Australian soil.
The moment was a hinge in the chronology of the subject. The clearing procedures developed through 1958 and 1959 were producing Clears in organizations around the world, and the working question of research had shifted from whether Clear could be reached to what lay above it. It was at Melbourne that Hubbard gave his first public word of recent developments on that higher goal: a stably attainable state of Operating Thetan — a condition this universe had long imagined but had never possessed a workable route toward, and which his research line was now approaching.
The technical heart of the congress lies in two related discoveries. The first concerns the cycle-of-action: Hubbard traces the mechanism by which deep-seated aberration turns a being's create downward toward destroy, and locates the factor capable of reversing that decline in a single word — responsibility. The second is a body of material on valences he announced as wholly new: what a valence actually is, how a being comes to acquire one, what it costs the individual in individuation and lost beingness, and — most usefully for the auditor — fresh means of separating valences so that the actual person can be found and audited. Taken together, the two threads — responsibility and the recovery of the actual being — marked out the line his research would follow into the new decade.
Woven through the technical material is a charge to the audience itself. Hubbard spoke plainly of the strategic position of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere in an uncertain atomic age, of his particular pride in the Australian organization, and of the responsibility Australian Scientologists bore not merely for their own cases but for the world at large. The congress also served as the public gateway to a period of intensive training: on 9 November, at the HASI Australia headquarters at 157 Spring Street, he convened the 1st Melbourne Advanced Clinical Course — its theme, responsibility and the state of Operating Thetan — for some forty selected auditors from Australia and New Zealand, and by the time he departed he had delivered thirty-eight lectures in Melbourne altogether.
Across the six congress lectures the listener encounters Hubbard addressing a public audience at the close of the 1950s: surveying the state of the subject, opening the door on the road to Operating Thetan, and grounding both in the daily realities of cases, valences and a being's willingness to be responsible. As the record of the moment Scientology's stated horizon first moved beyond Clear — announced not in London or Washington but in Melbourne — the series holds a distinct place in the congress line.
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