The Lectures of 1975

October 1975

New HAS Course 1975

5 lectures

The New HAS Course is a five-part set of recorded instruction dated 22 October 1975 and issued under the tape code 7510C22, HAS AMT-1 through AMT-5, with each reel slated as re-recorded in the audio unit of the Publications Organization in Copenhagen, Denmark. The HAS of the title is the Hubbard Apprentice Scientologist Course — the basic Communication Course that had long stood as the public's first step into Scientology — and this set is a complete taped delivery of that course's theory. It should be understood for what it is: these are not platform lectures by L. Ron Hubbard. The recordings announce at the outset that their material is taken from his books and talks, and they are scripted, narrated course tapes prepared from his writings on communication, issued under his 1975 copyright.

The substance, however, is pure Hubbard fundamentals. The course rests on the communication formula he codified in the mid-1950s — cause, distance, effect, with intention, attention and duplication — and on the training routines, the TRs, that grew out of auditor training in the same period and became the backbone of the Communication Course. By 1975 these drills were being delivered to new students in orgs and missions worldwide, and this set represents an effort of that moment: a compact, portable rendering of the course theory on tape, with each part closing by sending the student directly to the course supervisor to do the drill just studied.

The five parts follow the TRs in sequence. The opening talk, the longest of the set at roughly thirteen minutes, introduces the subject of communication itself — the one-way and two-way communication cycle, worked through with pen-and-paper exercises the listener performs as the tape plays — and then takes up confronting, the ability to face a person or situation comfortably, as the foundation of TR-0. The four shorter parts that follow treat one drill apiece: intention and getting a communication across for TR-1, acknowledgement and the completion of a communication cycle for TR-2, getting your question answered for TR-3, and handling originations for TR-4. Taken together the set runs about thirty-five minutes, a deliberate economy that kept the student's time on the drills themselves rather than in the lecture chair.

The set occupies an unusual corner of the archive. It appears in no current official lecture catalog, and the surviving copies trace to a small number of original three-and-a-quarter-inch reels that bear the marks of production masters or demonstration submissions — some carrying fragments of unrelated material, including a cut section of a Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lecture in Hubbard's own voice, beneath the newer recording. The collector documentation accompanying these copies notes that the tape boxes were marked 21 October against the announcer's date of the 22nd, and that no checksheet matching a "New HAS Course" has been located among the issues of the period, leaving open the question of whether this taped edition of the Communication Course was ever broadly released. What remains is a clean, complete and historically interesting artifact: the basic course in communication as the subject presented it to the raw public at mid-decade, with the comm formula and TRs 0 to 4 laid out on a gradient a brand-new student could walk through in an afternoon.