The Lectures of 1960

January–December 1960

Anatomy of the Human Mind congress

6 lectures

L. Ron Hubbard rang in the new decade from the lecture platform. Over the New Year's weekend of December 31, 1960 and January 1, 1961, Scientologists gathered at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. for the Anatomy of the Human Mind Congress, one of the twice-yearly congress events at which Hubbard traditionally announced his latest advances to auditors, preclears and newcomers alike. The timing was deliberate: 1960 had closed with a string of developments — most notably the Presession Processes — that Hubbard credited with finally moving cases that had stalled under earlier procedures, and the congress marked his decision to turn that technical confidence outward, toward the broad public.

The occasion of the congress was the announcement of the Anatomy of the Human Mind Course, a public-level course built on the fundamentals of Dianetics a decade after the publication of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Its premise, argued at length across these lectures, is that the parts and phenomena of the mind are not matters of speculation but demonstrable realities — that some twenty "Things" of Dianetics and Scientology, among them the cycle of action, the time track, mental image pictures, havingness, the present time problem, and confusion and the stable datum, can be shown in the physical universe as plainly as any laboratory result. The congress itself made the point theatrically, with onstage demonstrations employing bubbling test tubes, plastic skulls, puppets, brains and open flame to give mass to what earlier studies of the mind had left as abstraction.

The published program comprises five talks. The Genus of Dianetics and Scientology traces the origins and development of the subject from Hubbard's own account; The Things of Scientology presents the demonstrable anatomy of the mind that the new course would teach; The Whole Answer to the Problems of the Mind takes up what the accumulated technology now made possible for any case; and the closing pair, The Field of Scientology and Scientology Organizations, address the community of Scientologists itself — the relationship of field auditors, groups and central organizations, and the part each was to play in the expansion Hubbard now declared was to go, in his phrase from the platform, all the way.

Historically, the series sits at a hinge point. Behind it lay the congress era of the 1950s and the long research line running from Book One through the upper-level work of the late fifties; immediately ahead lay Saint Hill and the Briefing Course years, in which technical refinement and worldwide organization would dominate. Heard in that light, these lectures capture Hubbard at the moment he judged the technology adequate to its purpose and shifted his attention to delivering it to the world at large — framing Dianetics and Scientology not as a private study for initiates but as a demonstrable account of the human mind that any person could be shown, item by item. For the listener, the result is among the most accessible of the congresses: an orientation to the whole subject, its anatomy, its field and its organizations, delivered with the showmanship of a New Year's celebration and the seriousness of a founder taking stock of ten years' work.

January 1960

State of Man Congress

9 lectures

L. Ron Hubbard opened the 1960s from the platform of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., delivering the nine lectures of the State of Man Congress over the New Year's weekend of January 1 through 3, 1960. The timing was itself a statement. The preceding decade had carried Dianetics and Scientology from the publication of Book One through the codification of the Axioms to a workable route to Clear, and 1959 had closed with the acquisition of Saint Hill Manor and a consolidating tour of the orgs of the world. The congress that greeted the new decade was, by every contemporary account, the moment the subject's horizon widened: Hubbard told the assembled delegates that he had arrived with the means of clearing a being not on the first dynamic alone but on all eight, and with that declaration the goal of the coming decade — Operating Thetan — came into view.

The technical heart of the congress is responsibility, and the mechanism through which a being forfeits it: the overt act and the withhold. Across these lectures Hubbard lays out the anatomy of decline not as something done to a thetan from without, but as a contraction the being performs upon himself — he commits a transgression against a dynamic, withholds it, and then withdraws from the zone of life where the transgression lies, surrendering cause over it piece by piece. The dwindling spiral of beingness and havingness thus acquires a precise engine, and with it a precise reversal: recover the being's willingness to take responsibility across the dynamics, address the overts and withholds that pinned him out of his zones of control, and the slide runs the other way. It is this body of material that made the congress a watershed, and its influence runs forward through the whole of 1960s auditing.

The lectures of the first day establish the framework. Following the Opening Lecture's survey of where the subject stood at the turn of the decade, Responsibility and Overts and Withholds — two of the most widely studied talks in the entire congress canon — set out the doctrine in full. The second and third days then carry the mechanism outward across the dynamics and inward to the individual case. Why People Don't Like You traces overts and withholds into the texture of ordinary human relations, showing how transgression and concealment, not the conduct of others, lie beneath antagonism and estrangement. Marriage applies the same anatomy to the second dynamic. Zones of Control and Responsibility of Governments extends it to the third and fourth, examining groups and nations with the same tools used on the single preclear — a scope few congresses before it had attempted.

The closing lectures bring the material to the listener's own chair. Create and Confront connects the new doctrine to the fundamentals of confront and cause, and Your Case addresses the delegate directly on what these discoveries mean for his own progress up from where he sits. The series also preserves a Group Auditing Session from the second day, so the listener hears the processing of the period not merely described but delivered live to the congress floor — a fixture of the congress format and a window onto auditing practice as it stood in early 1960.

Taken together, the nine lectures form a hinge between two eras: behind them, the decade that proved Clear attainable; ahead of them, the decade that would pursue the cleared being on every dynamic. The State of Man Congress remains among the most renowned of all the congress series, and these recordings catch Hubbard at the exact moment the road was extended — the point at which responsibility, overts and withholds entered the technology as fundamentals, and the state of Operating Thetan was set as the destination.

June–August 1960

The London Congress on Dissemination

7 lectures

In the summer of 1960, L. Ron Hubbard delivered a connected run of seven lectures in London that together form this series, published as the London Congress on Dissemination & Help and the London Open Evening Lectures. The first four talks were given as open evening lectures at the Empire Rooms on Tottenham Court Road across late June and early July — gatherings to which Scientologists were encouraged to bring friends and members of the public entirely new to the subject. The series then culminated on 7 August 1960, when Hubbard convened the congress proper at the Royal Commonwealth Society Hall, addressing the assembled Scientologists on the auditing technology that had emerged from the same line of research.

The moment was a significant one in the chronology of the subject. A year earlier Hubbard had acquired Saint Hill Manor in Sussex and established it as the center of research and worldwide dissemination, and in the months since, the movement had grown at a remarkable rate. The question Hubbard took up in London was twofold: how Scientology could genuinely be carried to a public that had never heard of it, and why so many of the people it reached could not at first be helped. His answer to both questions turned out to be the same body of discovery — four factors he named the Deadly Quartet: Help, Control, Communication and Interest. Where these were absent from a session, lasting case gain was improbable; and chief among them stood Help, for the person whose every past effort to help or be helped had ended in failure no longer believed help was possible at all, and so stood below any real interest in his own case.

The evening lectures develop these themes on a public gradient. Hubbard distinguishes Scientology from the speculative philosophies and mental sciences that preceded it, takes up confront as a basic ability underlying sanity and competence, and examines help itself — its anatomy, its failures, and its place as the point on which a being's willingness to reach back into life turns. Because the same four factors operate just as surely outside the auditing room as within it, these talks double as a practical demonstration of dissemination: the handling of people in life, done with an understanding of help, control, communication and interest, is itself the means by which the subject spreads, and produces gain in those it touches even before formal auditing begins.

The three congress lectures of 7 August then deliver the technical harvest of this research: Presessioning. Here Hubbard presents the processes run before the session proper, designed to bring a preclear up to the point where he knows help is possible and is interested in receiving it — the precondition for any auditing to bite. He relates presessioning to the broader goal of clearing and works through the adjustment of the cycle of action within presessioning itself. Across the seven lectures the listener thus follows a single arc, from a public examination of why human beings fail one another to the precise procedures by which an auditor undoes that failure — material that would shape auditing procedure and the approach to the raw public through the period that followed.

August–September 1960

The First Saint Hill Advanced Clinical Course

25 lectures

In August 1960, the year after acquiring Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, Sussex, and making it his home and the center of his research, L. Ron Hubbard convened the only Advanced Clinical Course ever delivered on its grounds. The course had first been announced as the 7th London ACC, but the venue was changed to Saint Hill late in its promotion; it opened on 8 August 1960, immediately following the London Congress on Dissemination and Help, and continued into September. It proved to be the final Advanced Clinical Course held in England, and its twenty-five lectures preserve the period Hubbard characterized as the jet age of Scientology.

The Advanced Clinical Courses had begun in Camden, New Jersey, in October 1953 as intensive professional courses on which Hubbard personally trained experienced auditors while carrying his research forward, each course serving at once as classroom and laboratory and leaving a week-by-week record of technical development. By 1960 that line had passed through Phoenix, Washington, London and Melbourne. At Saint Hill it reached the estate where, within months, the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course would take up residence, which places these lectures at the hinge between the ACC era of the 1950s and the Saint Hill years that followed.

At the center of the course stands Hubbard's discovery, earlier in 1960, of four elements without which no auditing session occurs at all: Help, Control, Communication and Interest. Known among the students at Saint Hill as the Deadly Quartet, these four gave the term in session an exact technical meaning for the first time, and from them Hubbard developed presessioning, the procedures by which an auditor brings a preclear genuinely into session before any major process is undertaken. Much of the course is devoted to the working machinery of that advance: havingness and confront processes, of which some twenty of each were developed and tested during these very weeks; the selection of the correct havingness process for the individual preclear by meter response; and the regimen of a properly run session.

Woven through the practical instruction is the theoretical high point of the series, Theory 67, in which Hubbard takes up beingness and havingness on the Sixth and Seventh Dynamics and accounts for how a thetan comes to introvert into the physical universe. Surrounding it are lectures on auditor presence and altitude, the requirements of the professional auditor, why auditing works, the importance of the E-Meter, assessment and tone arm action, Security Checking, the handling of insanity, and the auditor's place within organizational programs.

Across the twenty-five lectures the listener encounters Hubbard addressing the assembled auditors at close quarters, moving freely between fresh research findings and an exacting restatement of fundamentals. He presented the course as an ACC for every auditor, grounded in the presence, certainty and help on which all case gain rests, and aimed at results obtainable from the very start of the Bridge. The archive holds the complete series.