In 1952, L. Ron Hubbard moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he opened his office and established the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International.
In September, he traveled to England and established the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International in London. In late November, L. Ron Hubbard returned to the United States. In Philadelphia, he delivered a 62 lecture Doctorate Course in Scientology over the course of 18 days. Known as the Philadelphia Doctorate Course Lectures, these lectures provided an extensive analysis of human behavior.
After that, he traveled back to England, where he began planning for a research trip across Europe.
In addition to delivering 190 lectures on subjects including emotional tones, communication, and creativity, L. Ron Hubbard wrote of his further research on man’s spiritual potential in four new books including Self Analysis in Dianetics—a Handbook of Dianetic Theory, Scientology: 88, Scientology 8-80, and Scientology 8-8008.
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Technical Bulletins
Technical Bulletins for 1952 can be found at this link in chronological order here on the site in PDF format and are downloadable. - (Under construction and usable)
LECTURES
Summary Course Lectures - Wichita: March - April 1952
By early 1952, Mr. Hubbard’s investigations had led him to an altogether new view of human history. This trail of discovery began in the summer following the release of Dianetics, sparked by auditors’ reports that preclears were contacting incidents which could only be explained in terms of past lives.
“The further one investigated,” he wrote, “the more one came to understand that here, in this creature Homo sapiens, were entirely too many unknowns.”
Through the ensuing twenty months, L. Ron Hubbard carefully investigated those unknowns, corroborating his own research findings with information supplied by auditors in the field. Of paramount importance in this investigation was the development and use of the first E-Meter, enabling him to uncover and map long-hidden incidents and, in turn, leading to the startling discovery that life force, or theta, had its own time track, independent of a body and extending back millions of years. Moreover, as he also discovered, certain incidents on this theta line were common to all cases.
In consequence, a new and revolutionary picture of Man emerged, not as a limited flesh-and-bone animal, but as an immortal being whose roots stretched back to the very beginning of time. As Mr. Hubbard said at the time, “Finding out where Man came from, finding out where he is going, finding out why he knows what he knows and what he’s trying to do is, of course, the greatest adventure that Man can have.”
A Western Union telegram received at the Wichita, Kansas, Foundation offices gave no hint of that adventure to come. “Am giving a series of lectures,” it simply stated, “as the Professional Course tapes, beginning Mar 3. This series to cover the whole of Dianetics as it exists to date.” But the gathered students knew they were moving into new territory when L. Ron Hubbard began the first lecture with six words that would change the world forever: “This is a course in Scientology.”
Thus began the first course ever given on this brand-new subject. And, in the more than twenty lectures that comprise this series, he not only described Scientology, its vast scope and where it was headed, he detailed whole track discoveries, exploring in depth one particular incident common to all beings—an incident diabolical enough to extinguish OT abilities and degrade a race of powerful thetans. He called it Facsimile One.
By course’s end, what lay before the graduates were wide-open horizons. The lie of “one life” had been vanquished. As Mr. Hubbard said, “It’s like taking a condemned man out of a cell and saying, ‘There’s sunlight!’”
Summary Course Lectures Transcripts -
(In Production as of March 24th, 2023)
Scientology - Milestone One: HCL-1
Outline of Therapy: HCL-2
Technique 80 Lectures: May 1952
The year was 1952 and he moved from Wichita, Kansas, to Phoenix, Arizona, opening the first Office of L. Ron Hubbard. There, on the edge of the desert at the base of Camelback Mountain, he began the first instruction of Scientology at what was to be the center of Scientology activities for many years. Here was the nucleus of what would become the first worldwide organization, The Hubbard Association of Scientologists.
The month was May and Mr. Hubbard had just completed his research with the first E-Meter, isolating and detailing the key incidents and implants on the whole track. And so came the need for and development of an auditing technique far in advance of previous procedures only addressing the current life.
He released his discoveries in what were quite literally open-air lectures, given nightly amid the orange groves, providing the most highly advanced procedure to date: Technique 80.
Rather than looking through all the tangle and confusion in the preclear’s bank, L. Ron Hubbard had discovered a new approach: “Technique 80 is the practice of beingness on each dynamic successively, and the practice of beingness on a dynamic until you can be that whole dynamic.”
Technique 88 Lectures: June 1952
The place was Phoenix, Arizona. There, in the shadow of Camelback Mountain, L. Ron Hubbard was concluding his two-year investigation into past lives. This phenomenon had reared its head before the ink was dry on the first copies of Dianetics, it accelerated with the development of Advanced Procedure and became a focal point with the release of Handbook for Preclears.
He established early in his research that past life incidents had to be addressed. When they were ignored, the preclear bogged. When they were taken up, gains were swift and dramatic. Whether one “believed” in past lives or not, it was impossible to argue with results in processing.
Crucial to Mr. Hubbard’s exploration of this realm was his development of the first E-Meter. With it, long-buried incidents and hidden charge could not only be brought to light, but checked and cross-checked in scores of preclears. In just that way, he began charting the incidents common to all cases, establishing the principal incidents to be found in every human being.
In early 1952, L. Ron Hubbard published the results of this research in a new book, What to Audit, now known as Scientology: A History of Man. Its opening words revealed a new processing regimen, Technique 88, specifically designed to locate and audit the thetan, the “I” of the individual.
In June, auditors from across America gathered for a summer session of lectures at the 22-acre Hubbard College, then located on Indian School Road in Phoenix. There, in an outdoor theater built for that purpose, Mr. Hubbard delivered the legendary Technique 88 lectures.
What followed was an adventure far beyond anything those auditors had ever imagined.
To further assist auditors in their own explorations of this new territory, he provided them with compass and map: two companion publications to A History of Man. One was Electropsychometric Auditing, the first manual on the use of the E-Meter. The second was the Individual Track Map, to chart the incidents run on a case.
For the first time, Man could close the long chapter of past entrapment and chart his course to freedom.
Here, then, are L. Ron Hubbard’s lectures on the whole track of Man’s history.
Standard Procedure for Theta Clearing Lectures: October 1952
London Professional Course Lectures (Command of Theta): November 1952
In the fall of 1952, L. Ron Hubbard was deep into an intense and sustained exploration of the nature, abilities and potentials of the human spirit.
The discoveries were astounding. Drawing on all tools of research including the technologies of twentieth-century science, Mr. Hubbard had moved far beyond anything even conceived of by past investigators, not only identifying the actual energy of life itself, but precisely measuring the electronics of human thought. In England to establish Britain’s first professional school, he detailed these breakthroughs in a series of evening lectures, available today as Source of Life Energy.
Yet so rapid was the pace of his research at this crucial period that even as he gave those lectures, he was already advancing into a new phase of discovery, one that expanded and further clarified all previous developments. And in one pivotal statement to students enrolled on a new Professional Course in London in November, he explained why, for the first time, the material transcended even the scope of survival:
“We suddenly step outside of a continuous existence along a span of time. We have something else, something new and that would be beingness, which wouldn’t have any relationship to the span of time called the MEST universe, but would have something to do with spans of time but not necessarily. Beingness could exist independent of a span of time.”
What followed was a journey of adventure, step by step and breakthrough by breakthrough, into a wholly new and uncharted realm. Encompassing everything from Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health to Scientology 8-80, here was an introduction to the universe of theta itself. And whereas these revelations crossed a new frontier of discovery, they also formed the prelude to all L. Ron Hubbard would unveil the following month in the Philadelphia Doctorate Course. Indeed, he was concurrently at work on a new book, Scientology 8-8008, whose aim embodied the central theme of all he taught during these London lectures: to reduce the importance and seriousness of the MEST universe and its authority and to increase the ability to build and create a universe of one’s own.
Here, then, is the moment that defines a permanent shift in orientation in life from MEST to theta and to the threshold of OT. Containing the technology that bridges from Scientology 8-80 to Scientology 8-8008, these lectures not only provide a comprehensive introduction to the universe of one’s own true beingness, they contain Mr. Hubbard’s first full exploration of Cause:
“Don’t lose sight of how high that elevation is. No god has ever been defined at that elevation. They have defined a god as being capable of making this universe. Somebody has occasionally thought maybe he made many universes. But nobody ever broke this down to a point of where he also imparted his ability to do this to everything he made and so defined, in terms of God, the human soul.”
Philadelphia Doctorate Course: December 1952 - January 1953
In his landmark 1951 book Science of Survival, L. Ron Hubbard postulated a life force, which he designated by the Greek letter theta, as a type of energy different from the physical universe of matter, energy, space and time, or MEST. Following this, he began intensive research into the exact nature and potentials of this life force, not through belief or faith, but through strict scientific induction. Mr. Hubbard said of this search:
“We are studying the soul or spirit. We are studying it as itself. We are not trying to use this study to enhance some other study or belief.”
Key to his research was finding a way to quantitatively measure mental and spiritual phenomena, which only became possible with his development of the first electropsychometer, or E-Meter, an instrument sensitive enough to detect minute fluctuations in resistance caused by mental image pictures. Armed with this research tool, he began to track that most elusive of entities, the spirit of Man. He later noted:
“As soon as this instrument was turned loose on the problem, the problem ceased to exist. By adding up and checking probabilities on scores of persons, the character, extent and content of the whole track were mapped.”
This research revealed that both the age and the potentials of the spirit had been vastly underestimated—as had the complexity and viciousness of the incidents which had aberrated and trapped the being in a body. With whole track recall stretching back into trillions of years, the number of aberrative incidents to be run stretched into the multibillions. Attempting to address these with Dianetics engram running would be a daunting task. So Ron began looking at the problem from a different angle: why do such facsimiles stick to a spiritual being in the first place? Could the isolated parts of Man—spirit, mind, body—be pried apart from each other?
Testing revealed that the separation of the spirit from the body was a surprisingly simple process. It could be accomplished, in about 50 percent of the cases, with the precise command to “Be three feet back of your head.”
With this, in one pivotal moment, L. Ron Hubbard isolated the human spirit, not as an entity or force separate from the individual, not as a “soul” that one “sent to heaven,” but as the personality and beingness which actually is the individual and is aware of being aware. This theta being, or thetan, he found, is immortal and is possessed of capabilities well in excess of those hitherto predicted for Man.
By exteriorizing the thetan from the body, the long-sought goal of religion—spiritual existence independent of the body—had been accomplished, rationally and systematically.
This exterior state, however, proved to be unstable, as the factors that aberrated the being were still there to trap him. At the London Lectures (Source of Life Energy) in November 1952, L. Ron Hubbard told students,
“You’ve been in that state many times and you didn’t know enough to go on in that state. You didn’t think it was possible to. You thought you had to have a body. You thought you had to have this. In other words, this whole thing was booby-trapped.”
What was needed was a thetan who knew enough to handle the problems of the MEST universe, knew enough about universes to handle and protect his own and who knew enough of the track and what happens in the MEST universe so that it could not happen to him again.
In sum, an Operating Thetan.
Bridging from Homo sapiens to the state of Operating Thetan, or OT, required a firm foundation of knowledge—both of one’s own spiritual abilities and the anatomy of entrapment.
Accordingly, in late 1952, Mr. Hubbard began preparations for a comprehensive course, commencing in Philadelphia on 1 December 1952.
In his letter to the Hubbard Foundation of Philadelphia, he committed himself to an extensive lecturing schedule to cover the breadth and scope of this material, up to 5 lectures a day for a total of 45 lecture and demonstration hours. In fact, he would well exceed even this, giving a total of 62 lectures over an 18-day period, with 14 supplemental lectures given the following January in London.
As the textbook for the course, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Scientology 8-8008. The numbers in the title encapsulated his goal:
“The original definition of Scientology 8-8008 was the attainment of infinity (8) by the reduction of the apparent infinity (8) and power of the MEST universe to a zero (0) for himself, and the increase of the apparent zero (0) of one’s own universe to an infinity (8) for oneself. …It can be seen that infinity stood upright makes the number eight. Thus, Scientology 8-8008 is not just another number, but serves to fix into the mind of the individual a route by which he can rehabilitate himself, his abilities, his ethics and his goals.”
Knowing that the information he was about to deliver would need to be disseminated from Philadelphia to the rest of the world, rapidly and without abridgement or alteration, he also arranged for the lectures to be professionally recorded. One of the Philadelphia Foundation students was also a recording engineer for RCA and provided then-state-of-the-art recorders and microphones to make what would be the first-ever high-fidelity tapes of his lectures.
It all culminated on December 1, 1952, when Mr. Hubbard arrived in Philadelphia, the first manuscript copy of Scientology 8-8008 in hand. The thirty-eight selected students eagerly crowded into the course room at the Foundation offices at 237 North 16th Street in downtown Philadelphia. As one student recalls, “None of us, even those who’d heard him lecture many times in Wichita and Phoenix, were prepared for the fantastic pyrotechnics of the evenings.”
In his opening address, L. Ron Hubbard told them:
“I don’t think this subject has ever been taught here on Earth before. There have been some wild subjects taught here…but no subject as wild as this.”
And so Mr. Hubbard proceeded to lay out, in detail, the results of his research into the nature, abilities, potentials and capacities of the thetan.
The scope of the material was vast, encompassing the entire range of human and spiritual activity. He described in detail the relationship of a thetan to a body and exactly how a body is controlled and run by a thetan using energy flows and motor controls. But even more fundamental, he explained why a thetan has a body in the first place and how, step by step, the spirit got attracted to, interested in and finally dependent on a body.
In lecture after lecture, he detailed the thetan’s relationship to the material universe of matter, energy, space and time while further revealing a gradient scale of beingness, from the lowest state of being completely in agreement with and controlled by the MEST universe, to the highest states where a being creates his own universe.
By the end of the course, Mr. Hubbard had delivered a total of 62 lectures, each lecture an hour in duration, with a total of 54 accompanying charts, hand drawn during the course of these lectures. The following month, another 14 supplementary lectures were delivered in London, making 76 lectures and comprising a monumental body of knowledge on the full potentials of a thetan.
The Philadelphia Doctorate Course and its text, Scientology 8-8008, stand today as the largest single body of work on the identity, character and potentials of the spirit of Man ever assembled. L. Ron Hubbard was to devote the next thirty-four years to the full development of The Bridge to Total Freedom, providing the step-by-step route anyone could travel to achieve their full spiritual potentials described in this course—Operating Thetan.
THE PHILADELPHIA DOCTORATE COURSE LECTURES - 1952 - Lecture Dates
Opening Lecture - What Is To Be Done In Course
2 E-Meter Demo
3 Creative Processing - Demo of E-Meter Auditing
4 Locks, Secondaries, Engrams - How To Handle Them
5 The Gradient Scale Of Handling Space, Energy, And Objects
6 The “Q” - Highest Level Of Knowledge
7 A Thetan Creates By Postulates - Q-2
8 The Track Of The Thetan/GE - Space/Time
9 Anatomy Of Processing - Energy, Phenomena/Sensation
10 Specific Parts Of Self Determinism, Spacation
11 Spacation - Energy Particles And Time
12 Spacation - Locating Space, Time
13 Spacation - Anchor Points
14 The Logic’s - Methods Of Thinking
15 The Logic’s - Infinity Valued Logic
16 Cycles Of Action
17 The Tone Scale - Moving PC Up The Scale
18 Conditions Of Space, Time, Energy
19 Axioms And Logic’s - Further Data
20 Formative State Of Scientology - Definition Of Logic
21 ARC/Cycles - Theory And Automaticity
22 More On Automaticities
23 ARC, Force, Be/Do/Have
24 What’s Wrong With This Universe - A Working Package For Auditor
25 Flows - Reverse Vector Of Physical Universe
26 Flows - Characteristics Of
27 Flows - The Part Force Bears In Clearing
28 Flows - The Part Force Bears In Clearing
29 Flows - Patterns Of Energy
30 Flows - Rate Of Change, Relative Size, Anchor Points
31 Flows - Basic Agreement And Prove It!
32 Flows, Dispersal’s, And Ridges
33 Anatomy Of The Genetic Entity
34 8-8008. Understanding The Phenomena
35 The DEI Scale
36 Structure/Function - Selective Variation Of
37 Chart Of Attitudes - Rising Scale Processing
38 Rising Scale Processing
39 Game Processing
40 Games/Goals
41 SOP Issue 3 - Postulates, Creative Processing
42 Standard Operating Procedure
43 On Auditing - How To Succeed/Fail/Assess
44 SOP Assessment (Continued)
45 Development Of Scientology - Characteristics of a Living Science
46 Goal Rehabilitation Of Thetan, Case Step 1
47 SOP - Issue 5
48 SOP - Spacation
49 SOP - Spacation (Continued)
50 SOP - Spacation Step 3, Flow Processing
51 SOP - Issue 5
52 Memory (Not Human Memory)
53 Memory And Automaticity
54 Summary To Date - Handling Step 1 And Demo
55 Demonstration Of Step 1 (Continued)
56 Discussion Of Demo Above - Agreement With Flows
57 Continued Demonstration Step 4
58 About The “Press” Tone Level - Psychometry
59 Chart Of Havingness
60 How To Talk About Scientology
61 How To Talk to Friends About Scientology
62 Your Own Case - To You the Student
