Certificates of Dianetics and Scientology (7ACC 540730)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 30 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Want to talk to you about the certificates of Dianetics, Scientology and affiliated organizations—the reason for these certificates, what they consist of, what they back up.
At this time, the HASI and organizations with which it has affiliations of one sort or another—other corporations—are the only corporations of Dianetics and Scientology which have the right to grant certificates as corporations, as such. If you read carefully into the corporation articles of various corporations, you'll find out that we are not specifically empowered here and not specifically empowered there and usually when those powers are missing, why, the action cannot be taken.
And these have not been granted the specific right by states to grant certifications in vocational certificates and that sort of thing. This is a specific right. And the certificates of Dianetics and Scientology, up until very recently, included only one proviso: anyone who founds a subject and is the acknowledged authority in that subject, has the right to train and certify people in that subject.
This is not a matter of any other thing than English common law. It is not otherwise covered than merely custom and it is mentioned as custom here and there throughout law. The certificates which were issued by Sigmund Freud, for instance, were as valid as they were signed by Sigmund Freud. And the Institute of Psychoanalysis and so forth never did have—that is, the original one, way back when—never did have the right to issue certificates. They existed and had validity solely by the right of Freud's signature on them.
Now, as we look back across the track of Dianetics and Scientology, no corporation at any time was ever empowered to issue a certificate and all such certificates were valid simply by the fact they had my signature on them, which is a matter of custom with the society and nothing to be remarked about particularly.
For instance—by the way, on that which is very—something very, very amusing—I don't know if you're aware of that, but there is no valid certificate today anywhere in the world on the subject of psychiatry—no valid certificate. There's no acceptable certificate of any kind on this subject. Psychiatry exists as a sort of a name that racks around amongst certain people who have been trained as medical doctors.
And any medical doctor at any time can certainly just say, "I'm a psychiatrist," and he is—that's all, because it's included in medicine, rightly or wrongly.
Psychiatry, however, did have some certificates and those people today who have those certificates—there are just a very small number of them left. Most of them have died off. They did have certificates which authorized them at the practice of the field of the mind. And those certificates were signed by Sigmund Freud. All right.
As we go back over the track we find no corporation in Dianetics or Scientology had any state right to issue any certificate of any kind whatsoever. So, no certificate has validity because of the top line of that certificate. I will just make this clear, so that you, in working with people in the field, have been trained formally and so forth and recognize the certificate. That's all.
The top line has no legal validity. Whether it was the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation of New Jersey or California or whether or not it was Hubbard College or the Office of L. Ron Hubbard—there have been these names across the top of old certificates —whether it was the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation of Kansas or the Hubbard Professional College, these are just names. These are corporate entities, most of these, and they had the right to conduct business and they conducted business as corporations. This doesn't question their right as corporations.
But it certainly does emphasize this one fact—that they had no right to issue certificates beyond that of a signature at the bottom. And the certificate is as valid, then, as it is signed at the bottom and that's that.
So these old certificates, as you see them kicking around, have that validity.
Now, the first certificate that was issued of any kind whatsoever was the Hubbard Dianetic Auditor certificate. Now this was in the field of Dianetics, which is a mental science. Dianetics is a mental science. Dianetics means "through mind." And when it was obvious to me that one, the field of research in life did not lead "through mind," when you started to get up into its way-upper ranks and when it became equally obvious to me that no matter how much you led it "through mind," you would never do more than produce a fairly good Homo sapiens, I dropped Dianetics as fast as I had introduced it as a name.
Dianetics was something which was introduced into the science of Scientology. This seems to be curious to people. They think of Dianetics as coming first and then we had Scientology. This is not true. Scientology was as close as I could estimate to the study of knowing how to know and I certainly was not going to use the word epistemology, because that did not include ontology nor cosmology and so was not an embracive word, but knowing how to know seemed to me to embrace all these other words, so I was left with no other choice than to coin a word or to use a foreign word which already had a tremendous number of connotations. So I coined this word Scientology and Scientology was coined as a word very, very early. It appears first in the manuscript, "Excalibur," 1938. And this was objected to as a nonpopular word by various people and so on and they didn't seem to love this word desperately. They had the idea that what we had to be was very acceptable to the public. They were kind of inverted.
And so in view of the fact that we had—were using, actually, this as a mental science now and included a great many parts of Scientology in Dianetics which really didn't belong there—in view of that fact, we still introduced a word there—Dianetics—which meant a mental therapy, which meant "through mind," and which validated the whole idea of brain. And you'll discover if you'll read Issue 28-G of the Journal of Scientology, a reprint of a 1947 book, Scientology: A New Science, that we speak of brain throughout this.
Well, it was right at that point when the word was being changed over. I mean, we were using this word Dianetics at this point. Manuscript was originally written as Scientology: A New Science, and then I found out I was writing more and more about the brain, so the later and copyright issues of that particular book—small book, about thirty-five thousand words—came out under the copyright of Abnormal Dianetics. That's the first copyright on that book, by the way. That's the first copyright on the word Dianetics.
Earlier copyrights, dictionaries, have shortened the word dianoetics, which means something entirely different, to Dianetics here and there, but by what authority we do not know. Dianetics is a coined word—never intended to be anything else.
Now, it wasn't invented in the year 1700 or whatever it was. It just simply means—it's Greek for "through mind," brought up with a sort of an engineering twist on it: "-etics." So anyhow, as we look over this, we discover that we were dealing with a practitioner certificate in the field of the human mind—in the field of the brain, in other words. This is in close brother to psychology. And the Hubbard Dianetic Auditor certificate is a certificate for the practice of mental science. It was never intended to be anything else
but that in the field of mental science. That was the intention behind this certificate and what it was issued for and the original wording of those certificates, and by the way, say the treatment of the mind— just specifically, meaning—might as well say the treatment of the brain or the treatment of a computing machine.
Well now, your HDA certificate is the granddaddy of all certificates. Nobody tries to de-rate this certificate. People who are HDAs, the best of them you see, they're in Scientology. And they have those old certificates and they value them very highly. I have seen several of them around, very carefully framed and preserved and so on. Because they're certainly "only one" certificates. There will never be any more certificates like those.
Well now, the original HDA certificates were printed on a bond blank, the kind of a blank that is issued for stocks and bonds and so it has a beautiful orange engraved fringe all the way around it and a sunburst coming out from the middle of it, gold lines—very, very fancy certificate, believe me.
Doesn't matter how fancy the certificate was, I signed them down at the bottom and that was evidently what made them legal. All right.
Now we move on. The next form of that certificate— it continued as itself run right on through, up to the time when we changed its color. And the color of the certificate was shifted slightly—and that was Hubbard Dianetic Foundation certificates. They are slightly different. They're printed on a different bond, but the wording is similar and, again, it's the signature.
Now, those certificates are still around, are still valued and they are —up to a short time ago—were used interchangeably with HCA certificates. In other words, somebody who had an HDA was accorded the same rights by the HAS—not the HASI—was accorded the same rights by the HAS as somebody with an HCA certificate. You see, I mean, didn't matter whether a person was an HDA or an HCA. We had switched back into Scientology.
Now we discovered that as we went along, that these people required retraining. Many people sort of stuck on the track of chewing up energy and running out engrams and so forth. They were go od processes— better than Man had ever had before. So they stuck with it.
And they don't realize it to this day, but I was processing one not very long ago who was saying, "Well, this Scientology—I mean, I can't go for that. I mean... " So on. "And Dianetics, that's nice and solid and really had something there in Dianetics," and so on. "And that's why I go on auditing people with Dianetics." And so we started to run this as to why he couldn't pick up much faster processes.
You can run out anything in Dianetics with Scientology, believe me—and with speed. Make perfect duplicates of engrams if you don't believe me and the engrams go boom, boom, boom, boom! They're gone.
Well, this certainly is an advance. If we were still in the field of Dianetics, this would be greeted with the greatest cheers you ever saw and it ran through here the other day with only a minor explosion of enthusiasm—very minor.
But it was quite an advance. It would have solved the whole field of Dianetics, see, but we have gone past that.
And what was this fellow stuck in? He was stuck in successes. We are so accustomed to believe that people get stuck in failures that we often fail to realize that they get stuck twice as fast in successes.
Now, they were very successful. They achieved a big change right at that point. And if they achieved a big change at that point from a low state of not being able to do anything to a high state of really being able to do something or a low state of not being anything to a high state of really being something, you will discover that they conceived a motionlessness to exist right in between the two.
They will sometimes speak of this as the intervention of God or something—gave them a boost up, or they attribute their success suddenly to their mother or there's a motionlessness in there someplace between these two positions, you might say, in space. And this fellow is stuck tight in having solved the cases of preclear after preclear by running engrams and running birth and running prenatals and so forth.
Accept Scientology? He couldn't move up his own time track off of his own successes. And we tried to demonstrate to him that he could get much better successes much faster with Scientology and it was necessary to go back and by Spotting Spots in Space, actually rip out of him bodily his successes in Dianetics. And at that moment, he could accept Scientology. It was quite interesting. Scientology could solve the successes achieved in Dianetics. That's pretty good. [laughter]
Well, the next certificates up the line, as they were issued, were Hubbard Certified Auditor. Because we'd changed over to Scientology and we're using Scientology now thoroughly, why, we no longer wish to call somebody a Hubbard Dianetic Auditor. This was nothing against Dianetic Auditors; they have their certificates, their certificates are perfectly valid for the practice of Dianetics.
But now we were practicing something which had a broader expanse and so we used the word Hubbard Certified Auditor. You might be curious as to how we got this Hubbard Dianetic Auditor and Hubbard Certified Auditor and got Hubbard all over the place here. This is what is amusing—is an amusing little side play here. The auditors in California—while I was in Elizabeth—you'll think this is one of these political mock-ups, you know, of, "Well, I really am unworthy to accept the nomination," you know, after the guy has been around paying everybody a hundred bucks apiece in order to get his name in lights. But that isn't one of these kind of stories. The auditors in staff—auditors of California—got together and had a big powwow as to what they were supposed to be called. And they were merely asked this question—and this was how the HDA came into being—they were asked this question: "Now, what do you want to call yourselves?"
And they beat around for a long time and they chewed and they argued and so forth. And I was in Elizabeth, see, clear across the continent. And they argued for a long . time and a telegram came in to the staff auditors of Elizabeth. Both of them had staff organizations, you see, which operated as total businesses, greatly to the worry of the would-be capitalists who sat around there. They didn't believe in all this democracy taking place.
And these—staff organization in Elizabeth received this telegram which advised them that the people in California had decided to called themselves Hubbard Dianetic Auditors. And they urged this upon the staff at Elizabeth.
Well, this was thrown into staff meeting in Elizabeth and they simply ratified it. And then somebody came around to me and he said, "Well, what do you know?"
And I said, "What do you know?" I says, "Well, you can just turn it around backwards and send it back to California. That's what you can do with that. We will call them auditors, all right. We will call them almost anything, but when it comes to using my name without any consent from me, this is something else."
Well, I was not successful in doing a thing about this. They call themselves Hubbard Dianetic Auditors. That's fine. That's fine, as far as they were concerned and that better be fine where I was concerned. I was trying to be a dictator and fascistic and so forth, in the face of democracy at work.
And by the way, I was accused of that this morning, in a high rage by a member of the staff of being—trying to be a dictator in saying that the staff, all the staff, had to have processing all next week and so forth. This person happens to have been absent from the last staff meeting. And there were about three, four staff members absent from the last staff meeting and they didn't get this and so on. So they come around and blame me. Well, that's all right. I'd just as soon be cause. I can be the effect of anything.
Anyway, we got this phrase, Hubbard Dianetic Auditor, and when we started to shift over, I tried to get it shifted into simply Bachelor of Scientology. And we issued Bachelors of Scientology to every HDA and HCA who would simply turn in some case histories on his work.
And no other charge or upset as far as I remember about it. There might have been some small fee on it, but it certainly couldn't have been very much. And this appeared to me to be a very superior certificate—I mean, fine certificate like that and beautifully printed and everything and so on. I was trying to get people squared around on this.
And we issued, over a period of one year with that offer in existence, one Bachelor of Scientology degree. One! And the moment that was issued we got immediate wires from two associates and from two or three people in the field, saying that this was not the right thing to do, that we had better do something else and do it fast because this was not an acceptable certificate. And the associates had been on the verge of enrolling people and had told them that they would become Bachelors of Scientology and it became a completely unacceptable certificate.
So we had to institute Hubbard Certified Auditor. Hubbard Certified Auditor. That was fine. Everybody was real happy with this one. That was swell. Now they were very comfortable with that whole thing. So HCA has come right straight on along the line and came along the line until it got to England.
Now, in England the slang for being "crazy" is being "certified." And so we couldn't have this degree over there and we had a powwow as to what we should call these people in England. I was perfectly willing to call them Bachelors of Scientology again and so on. And so we finally called them Hubbard Professional Auditors. [laughter]
Now, here was an amusing side play and, by the way, there aren't just HPAs in England. Every now and then a certificate will be erroneously made up—they issue an HCA over there for America. It says Hubbard Association of Scientologists, London, England—Hubbard
Certified Auditor—and it's a white certificate, it's a very nice looking certificate, very plain one. And they send those over to HCAs over here who are trained and certified in American schools. They're just made up in London, that's all, because we got a good certificate setup over there, but they send them over. And every once in a while they will send one over—Hubbard Professional Auditor—to somebody in America, so there are HPAs in America, too, here and there—simply by error.
But anyway, the point here is that we have tried, one way or the other, to find out what is agreeable as a name and that seems to be the most agreeable of certified ratings. And it is.
Trying to change people who were H DAs, however, over into HCAs has never been tremendously successful. There are many, many HDAs out through the field who are practicing their own version of Scientology who are qualified solely to practice Dianetics—says so right on their certificates. And they don't realize that there's anything wrong with this. They feel that they are perfectly at liberty to do this. The actual truth of the matter is, all they've got to do is give the HASI the certificate number of their HDA and they will receive a certificate in Scientology if they can give sufficient evidence that they have acquaintance with it. Now, that's pretty fair. But nobody takes advantage of it. They just go on being HDAs. That's the oldest rating in the field. That makes them be very upstage about late-dated certificates. They're old-timers. They know techniques that Johnny-come-latelies never heard of and is a high superiority range in all directions.
Now, the Bachelor of Scientology degree has become more popular—that is to say, people find it very acceptable—particularly since it means that a person is eligible for a Doctor of Scientology.
Now, the next acceptable degree is—to the public at large—is a Doctor of Scientology and that's very, very acceptable to them. Fine. But a Doctor of Scientology who is not an HCA or an HDA and so forth is liable to be looked at with question. We have received letters, if you please, saying, "This person has a certificate which says he's a Doctor" (this is on Clinical Course people), "He claims to have a certificate as a Doctor, but he doesn't seem to ever have been in the work very long and I wanted to see a Hubbard Dianetic Auditor," and so forth and so on. "Would you please tell us if this person really is a Hubbard Dianetic Auditor?" and so on.
So we'd say, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he's a Hubbard Certified Auditor." And well, that was just as good, so they were perfectly happy about that. But that's the public talking.
Well, a Doctor of Scientology is quite acceptable as a degree and the BScn is simply the first Step up toward Doctor. Nobody could have a DScn who does not have a BScn. I mean, that's—no argument there.
And the BScn was set up as the next grade up. The way it was set up originally and has continued to be—it's the next grade up from HCA. Now, we have very, very few cases where we ever have to straighten this out, but occasionally somebody will go to school where he is eligible for a BScn when he doesn't have a proper HCA.
Well, it's necessary for him to get a proper HCA before he can be issued a BScn, just to stay in the certification lineup. Otherwise it comes up sooner or later a question about his certificates. So all the HAS does, it'll issue to such a person, of course, his HCA. And all they do is charge him the fee necessary to make up a certificate and carry him on the list. All right.
The DScn is, oddly enough, a prerequisite for several other degrees in other corporations. Unless a person is entitled to a DScn, the HASI will not recommend him to the Church of American Science, the issuer of the seminary degree of Doctor of Divinity.
A person has to have gone through an Advanced Clinical Course, in other words, to be eligible for a DD. That is for the excellent reason that these people are actually better qualified in the field of religion and the spirit than any DD ever has been in the history of America or any other place for that matter. They are really qualified in the field of, you should say, religion, you see? So they're quite capable of this.
Now, how about an H DA, an HCA and so on. These are good degrees. But has this person a full grasp of theory back of this thing and so forth? Well, he probably is a good practitioner, you see? But we don't know.
The other thing is, is that this degree of a DD must never be degraded into a diploma-mill type of degree and so forth. We consider that people are really qualified for these degrees when they're given.
There are a couple of Advanced Clinical Course graduates who were qualified for DScns who were refused their DDS. It was just another corporation. The HASI can recommend, you see, but it's up to another corporation entirely to take that up. That's a nonprofit corporation, the Church.
Now, we come to this point. We find that the people in Scientology, then, are somewhat like the combat troops of the US—the combat troops of the US that show up in Europe or the Middle East or something like this—and here's somebody else been in the war a lot longer, been through a lot more battles and so forth and he hasn't got any ribbons. This fellow has just been sitting behind a desk in Washington and he's got a chestful. The most decorated troops in the world are American troops. They are decorated, but thoroughly. I myself had twenty-one medals and palms before I got through with that war. You can't walk when you got that much. You're wearing them in pie plates.
And the most decorated troops in the world—well, the most decorated practitioners in the world, the most decorated philosophers in the world [laughter], the most decorated people in the world from the standpoint of certificates are people in Scientology.
The reason for this is dual. One, they rate them. Let's not get away from that fact. They rate them. If you can solve all the problems of Sigmund Freud, you certainly are entitled to be certified as a Freudian analyst, aren't you? I mean, Freudian analysts all over the place can't do for people the same thing you can do and they're trying to do it and so forth. So you're certainly entitled to that, aren't you?
And the next thing of it is, is a Doctor of Divinity or an ordained minister and so forth—well, there isn't any minister around anyplace can do as much for his flock as you can do for somebody or a flock. You ever hear of any minister being able to stand up and give Group Processing and exteriorize five or six souls? He's up there shouting hellfire and brimstone trying to save souls.
Why, shucks, you can stand up there and say, "Locate the front wall." "Locate the back wall." "Find a spot in your foot and a spot in the right foot." And the next thing you know, you've actually saved in that meeting, five souls.
Well, what's this about, then? Why shouldn't you, with your ability, be in that particular department. Well, the question is—you are.
And now we take up the remainder of the things in which you are degreed and we find out that there is—there are two honorary degrees. Oh, there's a list of these degrees. And there's all kinds of degrees here. I mean, a fellow could just practically paper his wall with these degrees.
But you know something? Tell you something very peculiar; Aside from the fact that you're entitled to these degrees—and don't think you aren't. Just because the world had these subjects all divided up is why you have this many degrees, see, because you cover those subjects and don't think you don't. So, therefore, you have to be degreed in those subjects. There isn't any getting around that, isn't that right? If you know that subject, you certainly are entitled to that.
And the other thing is, that do you happen to know that a Scientologist has spent as much as a factor of five, more hours in the study of the human soul than a Doctor of Divinity? Happen to know that? Or a Bachelor of Divinity, certainly. He spent hours on it.
And as far as a psychology major is concerned, the average Scientologist in the study of the mind has left him so far in the dust that he wouldn't even get out of freshman class. You know how many hours he has actually spent in class, a fellow who is majoring in psychology? Well, he hasn't spent too many hours in class and when you add up the fact that you all spent an enormous amount of time studying this subject before you came near an HCA school and most of the people have been through an HDA or HCA school, then they've been through some kind of a refresher for a BScn and then they've been through a couple of other refresher courses, one way or the other. And they read an awful lot of literature in between and they did a lot of study and they did a lot of practice and then finally they get down the line and go through an Advanced Clinical Course Unit—my golly, you talk about a factor of five.
They say psychiatry—it has twelve years of training. They'd better not say how many hours of training psychiatry has in the mind because it doesn't add up to twelve years. It doesn't add up to a Scientologist's number of hours invested in this. There are four hundred and thirty-two instruction hours in an Advanced Clinical Course Unit and that's shaving it right down. That's cutting out all the periods—breaks and so forth. Four hundred and thirty-two hours in an Advanced Clinical Course Unit.
Well, you just add up the amount of study and practice which you've done in the field of the mind, add up the amount that a PhD has done in the field of the mind and you won't ever let one look down you. You'll say, "My gosh, fellow, when are you going to get out of kindergarten, get some training? You know, spend some time on it?"
Time is no criteria. Time is no criteria at all. It's the number of hours with this factor. the amount of understanding. What if we gave you training by having you memorize a medical dictionary here for four hundred and thirty-two hours? Supposing that was your training in the Advanced Clinical Course Unit? Your degrees represent accomplishment—what you can accomplish in this society as measured against that—that factor. You have as many degrees as you can accomplish. You're actually entitled to far more.
Now, when we see this clearly, we get over being touchy about this, But when John Q, Public walks in, he takes a look at your wall and he secs—perfectly blank wall. He's got a lot of trust in you. He has not!
It isn't how well you can process that he can size up. It's how well-padded that wall is, And that's a fact of the matter.
His confidence becomes inspired. It takes hours off of his processing. It keeps you from explaining a lot of things. It saves you a lot of embarrassments simply to have the proper certificates in the line.
You are perfectly qualified in the field of the ministry. Any one of you could go into a seminary and practically rock it to its very roots with what you know. It would just utterly paralyze the place. They might wind up trying to burn you as a witch. You'd make sure you were exteriorized before you let them do it. [laughter]
But you're entitled to these certificates and that's why they are given to you and there's actually no other reason.
CERTIFICATES OF DIANETICS AND SCIENTOLOGY
CERTIFICATES OF PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 2 7ACC-CONF - 30.07.54
DIANETICS AND SCIENTOLOGY