In the year 1962, L. Ron Hubbard continued to deliver the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course to students from all over the world at Saint Hill on an almost daily basis.
In the first week of September, Mr. Hubbard took a short break from delivering the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lectures and traveled to Washington, D.C., to offer an eight-lecture congress over three days.
With the delivery of 252 lectures in 1962, it would prove to be the largest body of lectures in one calendar year for the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.
As a fitting finale to the Scientology Congresses, L. Ron Hubbard’s last came right from the topmost level. It was the breakthrough that would lead to the development of the Clearing Course, the Grade Chart and the Organizing Board. It was a discovery that embracive, that basic—because it is Basic Purpose. As he reveals, “Every engram we have explored, every piece of black mass, every ridge, every white-burning fire, every everything that went on in the mind comes about because of a change or alteration in a person’s Basic Purpose.” And that’s just the beginning of what Mr. Hubbard discovered, for when you hear his lecture, Basic Purpose, you’ll have a whole new understanding of what “Know Thyself” really means. Yet beyond all this discovery was generating, in terms of faster clearing in greater numbers, there’s another reason this was called the Clearing Success Congress. For if you’ve ever wondered how it all fits together—the technology, the organizations, the combined force of Scientologists, the answers are all here. From the landmark lecture on the pivotal role of Scientology Organizations in driving planetary clearing, Your Scientology Orgs and What They Do for You, to his exact program on how to make it a reality—World Clearing and You. Here, then, is L. Ron Hubbard’s final Congress and the road map to a Cleared Planet.
The series recorded in 1962
September 1962
Clearing Success Congress
8 lectures
L. Ron Hubbard delivered the Clearing Success Congress in Washington, D.C., in the first week of September 1962, giving eight lectures across three days at the Mayflower Hotel. To hold it he stepped away briefly from the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, then running at full intensity at Saint Hill Manor in England, and crossed the Atlantic aboard the Queen Elizabeth for the occasion. The gathering drew the largest attendance of any congress to date, and it proved to be the last of the line — the closing event in the series of congresses that had punctuated the development of Dianetics and Scientology since the early 1950s.
The congress sits at the midpoint of the Briefing Course era, the most concentrated research period of Hubbard's career; 1962 produced more recorded lectures than any other calendar year of his life. At Saint Hill his attention was fixed on the anatomy of the reactive mind itself — the goals a being has pursued and opposed across the whole track, and the exact auditing procedures by which they could be located and discharged. The Clearing Success Congress carried those research-room findings directly to the broad public. Where earlier congresses had announced new processes or new programs, this one reported on the structure underlying aberration as such, and on what its discovery meant for the long-pursued goal of Clear.
At the center of the series stands the Goals Problem Mass. Hubbard opens with a presentation of the GPM and then delivers the principle he placed beneath it all in the lecture Basic Purpose: every engram, ridge and mental mass ever addressed in auditing, he tells the audience, comes into being through the alteration of a being's basic purpose. Surrounding lectures take up the point at which a preclear actually begins to go Clear, the healing effects of preparatory auditing and the Suppress button, and the Problems Intensive with its mechanics and buttons. The material did not stay on the platform: the program included a live demonstration, and an attendee received intensive auditing between lectures toward the finding of a goal before the congress closed.
The final pair of lectures turns from the individual case to the third dynamic. In World Clearing and You, Hubbard lays out his program for clearing on a planetary scale, and in Your Scientology Organizations and What They Do for You he places the organization at the center of that program — the stable terminal through which the technology reaches a world. His parting emphasis was on unity, that Scientologists would have to pull together to accomplish the job. The implications matured quickly: within a few years the lines drawn at this congress had taken form as the Clearing Course, the Classification and Gradation Chart and the Organizing Board.
A listener today encounters Hubbard addressing the largest congress audience ever assembled, at the height of his research momentum, summing up a decade of congresses while pointing past them. The GPM, basic purpose and Problems Intensive material here parallels the technical lectures of the same months at Saint Hill, delivered on a public gradient and tied to the larger purpose it served. As the final congress, Clearing Success closes one era in the chronology of Dianetics and Scientology and opens the next — the era of the Grade Chart and the standardized route to Clear.
Hearing these lectures
The 1962 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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