The Lectures of 1964

1964

STUDY TAPES

10 lectures

The Study Tapes are the lectures in which L. Ron Hubbard first set out a workable technology of study. He delivered them in 1964 at Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex, principally to students of the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, the advanced auditor training program he personally conducted from 1961 to 1966. Though given as part of the Briefing Course curriculum, these talks were soon recognized as a body of material in their own right; they were later gathered and issued under the title The Study Tapes and became the backbone of the Student Hat, the course every Scientology student does before academy training.

The summer of 1964 found Hubbard three years into the Briefing Course, lecturing several times a week while codifying the grades of auditing and the classification of auditors. With hundreds of students from around the world passing through Saint Hill, the question of why some students moved swiftly through materials while others stalled, glibly parroted, or blew became impossible to ignore. Hubbard turned his research directly onto the activity of study itself, and what emerged was something education had never had: an actual technology of how to learn, applicable to any subject. The lectures of this series are the record of that breakthrough as it happened, delivered to the very students whose progress prompted it.

Across the series Hubbard isolates the barriers to study and their precise physiological signatures, the phenomena that betray each one before the student himself knows anything is wrong. Absence of mass, the skipped gradient, and above all the misunderstood word are anatomized here, the last identified as the hidden mechanism behind the blow, the glib student, and the practitioner who can recite theory yet cannot apply it. He takes up gradients and nomenclature, the assimilation of data, and the evaluation of information, stressing throughout the student's own power of choice over what he studies, the difference between being taught and actually coming to know, and the gulf between education as the fixing of data and study undertaken for application. The contrast with the educational machinery of the day, schooling that produces examination-passers rather than doers, runs as a steady theme.

The documented lectures of the series span 18 June to 22 September 1964 and include Studying: Introduction, Studying: Data Assimilation, A Summary of Study, Study: Gradients and Nomenclature, Study: Evaluation of Information, Study and Education, and A Review of Study. The ten lectures preserved in this archive belong to this 1964 body of work. The register is that of the Saint Hill classroom: direct, frequently humorous, and unguarded, with asides on life at the Manor and on the parallel lines of research then in progress, so that the listener encounters not only the principles but the working atmosphere in which they were found.

Few bodies of LRH material have had wider consequence. From these lectures came the Student Hat, word clearing in its many methods, and the study drills that underpin all subsequent Scientology training, where standard application depends on the student truly understanding what he reads. Through Applied Scholastics the same fundamentals were carried into secular schooling across many countries, and Hubbard himself would later rank study technology as the primary bridge between Scientology and the society around it. For the student of the materials, this series is the source: the moment the subject of study itself was brought under the same scrutiny Hubbard had applied to the mind, and made into a discipline that could be taught, checked, and used.