The Lectures of 1963

April 1963

Professional Auditors Congress

2 lectures

On Saturday afternoon, 20 April 1963, L. Ron Hubbard stepped aside from the daily round of the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course to address a special gathering of professional auditors together with students then on course at the Academy of Scientology in London — the tape record places the occasion at Saint Hill itself. The two talks he gave that day, preserved here as the Professional Auditor's Congress Lectures, stand apart from the Briefing Course proper, and they form a brief, late echo of the congress tradition, which had closed the previous September with the Clearing Success Congress in Washington, DC. By the spring of 1963 the era of the great public congresses was over; what remained was this kind of working address, delivered not to the broad public but to the practitioners on whom the clearing program now depended.

The moment was one of the most intensive research periods of the entire Saint Hill era. Through the winter of 1962-63 Hubbard had been taking preclears into the goals problem mass with Routine 2-12, and by February and March the Briefing Course lectures were devoted almost wholly to Routine 3M — the finding of a preclear's goals, the assembly of line plots, the anatomy of the GPM itself. In the days immediately surrounding this gathering he was lecturing the course on the top of the GPM, on directive listing, on goals and the finding of goals. Clearing, announced as an accomplished fact at the 1958 Clearing Congress and refined repeatedly since, was being restated from the ground up: the state of Clear was now understood in terms of the goals problem mass, and the route to it ran through the exact discovery of what the being had postulated and opposed across its whole track.

The two lectures bring that restatement to a professional audience. In What Clearing Is, Hubbard takes up the question his title names — what the condition of Clear actually consists of in light of that spring's research, and what an auditor is in fact resolving when he moves a preclear toward it. Basic Purpose, delivered under the original title Clearing, returns to a theme he had opened at the final congress seven months earlier, where he traced the engrams and masses of a case to the alteration of a being's basic purpose — the deflection of what the being originally set out to do. Here that datum comes back to the people who would apply it in session, at a moment when the technology for reaching so deep into a case was advancing week by week.

What a listener encounters is something rarer than either a congress lecture or a course lecture: an address pitched between the two, carrying the broad sweep of the congress platform alongside the technical candor Hubbard reserved for trained auditors. The pair was later folded into the renumbered Briefing Course tape lineup as lectures 286a and 286b, though they were never part of the course as delivered. This archive presents them under their own designation, as the compact, self-contained event they were — two talks on a single Saturday afternoon, given to the auditors and students of London at the height of the GPM years.