The Lectures of 1961

January 1961

South African Anatomy Congress

6 lectures

On 21 January 1961, L. Ron Hubbard convened the South African Anatomy Congress in Johannesburg before an audience of more than five hundred — at that date the largest gathering of Scientologists ever assembled anywhere in the world. He had flown to South Africa directly from Washington, DC, where days earlier he had delivered the Anatomy of the Human Mind Congress, and he now brought that same material to Johannesburg recast for the South African scene. The occasion marked a high point of his intensive work on the continent: two days after the Congress closed, he would begin teaching the 3rd South African Advanced Clinical Course in the same city.

The Congress belongs to a distinct moment in the development of the subject. A decade after Dianetics, Hubbard's attention had turned to the problem of dissemination — not merely advancing the technology of auditing, but making its fundamentals so concrete and demonstrable that anyone could grasp them and pass them on. The vehicle for this was the Anatomy of the Human Mind Course, and across these six lectures Hubbard shows the course in action, presenting the basics of Dianetics and Scientology as demonstrable realities rather than abstractions: the time track, the cycle of action and start-change-stop, valences, and the anatomy of aberration itself. The underlying proposition is that Scientology had brought to the humanities the kind of predictability long reserved to the physical sciences, and that its simplicities could therefore be taught, shown, and verified by any person willing to look.

Alongside this demonstration of fundamentals, Hubbard presented the Pre-Havingness Scale — a chart laying out the levels of case from Inverted Interest at the bottom up to Interest at the top, oriented around the make-break point of a case. The scale was not an academic exercise: it became the working backbone of the 3rd South African ACC that opened in Johannesburg on 23 January, where auditors trained on assessment processes built upon it. Listeners thus encounter in these lectures the first public statement of material that would shape the auditing of the period immediately following.

The series closes with the lecture The Future of South Africa, in which Hubbard set out his estimation of the country's potential, declaring that the next great civilization on this planet would spring from Southern Africa with Scientology and its technology on its side, and proposing a program to raise the ability of every man, woman and child in the nation as rapidly as possible. Taken together, the six lectures offer both a working model of how the fundamentals of the subject can be communicated to anyone and a vivid record of Hubbard's plans for Africa at the opening of 1961 — the months just before the move to Saint Hill and the era of intensive research that followed.

January–February 1961

Joburg ACC - 3rd South African ACC

17 lectures

On 23 January 1961, in Johannesburg, South Africa, L. Ron Hubbard opened the 3rd South African Advanced Clinical Course — known to its students simply as the Joburg ACC, and published under the subtitle "The Road to Havingness." It convened immediately on the heels of the South African Anatomy Congress, the largest Scientology congress held anywhere to that date, at which Hubbard had announced an ambitious program to raise the ability of every man, woman and child in the nation. Where the Congress addressed the broad public, the ACC that followed was a working course room: a select body of auditors trained directly by Hubbard, day after day, through seventeen lectures spanning late January into February 1961.

The course occupies a singular place in the chronology. The Advanced Clinical Courses had run since 1953 as Hubbard's research line — intensive units in which he trained auditors on his newest developments while refining those developments against live cases in the course room. The Joburg ACC was the only one he ever delivered in South Africa, and it proved to be the last ACC he delivered anywhere. It therefore stands as the close of an era that stretched from Camden and Phoenix through Washington and London, and as the immediate threshold of what came next: within weeks of its completion, the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course opened at Saint Hill Manor in England, built directly on what this course had demonstrated.

The technical spine of the lectures is the Pre-Havingness Scale, a new assessment scale oriented to the make-break point of a case — the exact level at which a preclear can be reached and moved. Hubbard takes the student through the scale itself, the construction of auditing command formulas from it, and its relation to the existing Havingness and Confront scales, with companion material on machines and havingness, case behavior under processing, and case conditions. Around this core sit the practical fundamentals of the period: Presession 38, the revised Model Session, the HAS Co-audit and the E-Meter, and the differences between Dianetics and Scientology as they bore on a co-audit population. Broader lectures address what Hubbard called the Three Therapies of Earth — change, education and processing — along with mental healing and the anatomy of sanity and insanity, organization lines, and dissemination, reflecting the national program announced at the Congress.

The course is best remembered, however, for what it culminated in: Goals and Goals Assessment. Armed with the Pre-Havingness Scale, the ACC's auditors cracked the toughest cases on the course within four weeks, and out of that work emerged the assessment of the preclear's own goal as the route to the basic structure of the reactive mind. Hubbard regarded the development as historic, and the record bears him out — an HCO Information Letter issued the following month announced that Standard Operating Procedure Goals had shown it could make Releases or Clears of the cases on this ACC, and called auditors from around the world to Saint Hill to learn it under his supervision.

Across these seventeen lectures, then, the listener encounters a hinge point in the subject's development: the auditing fundamentals of 1961 taught with the precision of a course room under Hubbard's direct instruction, the Pre-Havingness Scale worked out in full, and the first emergence of the goals research that would define the Saint Hill years and the modern Bridge. It is at once the final Advanced Clinical Course and the opening chapter of the route to Clear as it came to be travelled.

1961

Clean Hands Congress

9 lectures

Over the New Year's weekend of 30 December 1961 through 1 January 1962, L. Ron Hubbard addressed Scientologists gathered at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, for the Clean Hands Congress — his first congress in a full year, and one whose nine lectures carried the weight of everything that year had produced. The twelve months since his previous appearance before a congress audience had been spent largely at Saint Hill Manor in England, where the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course had opened in the spring of 1961 and where a sustained period of research had reshaped the practice of auditing itself. The Congress was, in effect, Hubbard's public accounting of that year to the field, delivered at the turn into 1962.

The title named the central discovery. By the close of 1961 it had become plain that the withhold — the undisclosed harmful act — operated as a brake on every level of processing and on the life of the individual outside the auditing room as well, pulling down havingness, cutting reach, and fixing the preclear in unwanted conditions of beingness. "Clean hands," then, meant a being from whom the withholds had actually been pulled, and the lectures take up why this matters so much to case gain and how it had at last become genuinely attainable. What made it attainable was the E-Meter: 1961 had seen the instrument rebuilt to Hubbard's own specifications as a precision tool, its reads codified, and its use drilled into auditors with a rigor that had not existed before. Hubbard tells the Congress directly that the whole enterprise of clearing now rested on this meter, since only the meter could verify that the hands were in fact clean rather than merely claimed to be.

The Congress also carried an announcement of a different order: the Goals Problem Mass. Out of the goals research conducted on the Briefing Course had come the identification of an accumulation of mental mass and energy built up around a being's own goals across the whole track — a mass of staggering age and density that, in Hubbard's account, explained why cases had resisted resolution for so long and why earlier approaches had only gone so far. These remain the only lectures on the Goals Problem Mass ever delivered to a public audience; every other treatment of the subject was given to the advanced students of the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course. For the congress delegate of 1962, and for the listener today, that gives these recordings a singular standing in the lecture canon.

Across the nine lectures the listener encounters Hubbard at a hinge point in the chronology of Dianetics and Scientology: the era of the early congresses giving way to the era of Saint Hill, with standardized auditor training, the drilled use of the meter, and the developments that would shortly issue in the classification and gradation structure of the Bridge. The subjects range through the mechanics of the withhold and its handling, the expansion of havingness, the state of auditor training and the new discipline being demanded of it, and the prospects the new technology opened for the year ahead. The tone throughout is that of a researcher returning from the laboratory with results — direct, unsparing about past shortcomings, and confident that with the meter, the security of clean hands, and the Goals Problem Mass identified, the route forward stood on firmer ground than it ever had.

1961

The Saint Hill Special Briefing Course

436 lectures

On 7 May 1961, L. Ron Hubbard stood before a small body of auditors at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, Sussex, and opened what would become the most extensive lecture undertaking of his career — beginning, fittingly, with a talk and demonstration on the E-Meter. The Saint Hill Special Briefing Course ran from that day until 13 December 1966, five and a half years of near-continuous instruction comprising well over four hundred lectures. This collection presents the consolidated full course, more than 430 recordings spanning the entire 1961–1966 run, the single largest lecture series in all of Dianetics and Scientology.

The Briefing Course occupies a unique position in the chronology of the subject. Hubbard had taken up residence at Saint Hill in 1959, and by 1961 auditors from every continent were arriving in Sussex to train under him directly. What they received was not a course in a finished subject but a running brief on research in progress: discoveries were frequently announced from the lecture platform within days of being made, tested in the course's own auditing, and refined in subsequent lectures. The result, heard in sequence, is a chronological record of the period in which the Bridge itself took shape — Hubbard later characterized these years as a succession of breakthroughs, each a milestone in the understanding of life.

The early lectures take up the instrument and the session: precision E-Meter reading, security checking, the assessment of goals, and the Routine 3 line of research that led to the identification of the Goals Problem Mass — alongside the anatomy of problems, withholds, ARC breaks and havingness that became the standing equipment of every auditor. By 1963 the course had moved deep into the structure of the time track, engram running by chains, and the handling of GPMs and implant materials, while returning again and again to the fundamentals of basic auditing — the communication cycle and the discipline of the session — on which all results were found to depend. The summer of 1964 brought the lectures on study, the barriers to it and their resolution, which were later gathered into the Student Hat and carried onto virtually every training course thereafter.

The final years of the course coincide with the great codification of the mid-sixties. The 1965 and 1966 lectures accompany the release of the Classification, Gradation and Awareness Chart, the lower grades of release, Power processing, the ethics and organizational technology, and the research into suppression and the potential trouble source that produced the PTS/SP materials. Across these years the Briefing Course was the room in which the route to Clear and the first announcements of the OT levels reached the field. Hubbard closed the course in December 1966 with the Scientology Definitions lectures, surveying the completed structure of the subject and defining Scientology itself from the vantage point the research had finally attained.

A complete study of these lectures and their accompanying materials has, since that era, constituted the Class VI auditor — the Briefing Course graduate, trained chronologically through the whole development of the subject rather than through any abridgment of it. The listener encounters Hubbard at his most sustained and most extemporaneous: technical exposition, philosophic range, session demonstrations and the day-to-day texture of a research line being worked out loud before the students who would carry it into practice. No other body of recordings documents the construction of the Bridge so completely, and many of the most familiar lectures elsewhere in the training line-up — from the study tapes to the PTS/SP materials — were first delivered here.