Bridge Between Scientology and Civilization (7ACC 540720)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 20 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Continuing now the information and discussion of the long background of Scientology.
You might wonder how it came about that Scientology arose in a period of a few years. Actually, a quarter of a century is the apparent amount of study on it as a subject. It might seem to you to be completely incredible that this much information would suddenly arise completely independent of source-other source. And yet, any man would be capable of doing such a thing if he simply concentrated on it and if he looked instead of figuring about the whole thing.
But Scientology didn't arise spontaneously. It was very well backed up by an enormous amount of information.
When I was quite young, I had the opportunity of looking over Eastern cultures and barbaric cultures and I had a great many friends who were very, very interested in the field of the soul, the mind-friends of all colors, shapes, sizes, creeds and professions.
The main thing which came home to me when I was very young, in Asia and various places, was that although these people apparently knew something, I could not conceive that they were using it. Here was the Western idea of rendering a punch and getting in there and getting something done and must arrive and so forth, up against the timelessness of the
East. How one man could simply sit still and think, or not think, for a half a century-and I have seen some men who have done this in the East-was incomprehensible to me.
The thing to do was to act. That was my philosophy. As much material as might have leaked into my ears, we had considerable of it utterly rejected. If these people were so bright, if these people were so intelligent, why didn't they have better sewer systems? The philosophy of a progressive land grown up on the philosophy that if you could hit hard enough, suddenly enough, you ate-up against the philosophy of a land where if you sat long enough and could endure enough, sooner or later, something would walk by and maybe you could eat and that was all right.
Now, as we look over these two philosophies, we see that a young American indoctrinated into speed, action, dash, certainly couldn't put up very much with meditation. So it looked to me, when I was very young, that they were taking the long way at it, if they were going at anything at all.
I was not too sure of this. And even today I am not too sure of this because I have seen people get into the figure-figure-figure category and be utterly incapable of progressing beyond that point. They simply start chewing up data. And then they maul it around and they think it around and they figure and they figure and they figure.
Yet, at the same time, in Asia, I saw a great many and have seen a great many things which you would call miracles. And I could not put these things from my mind. I have seen such things as eight matches floating in a bowl of water being made to drill by an individual who simply looked at them. He actually looked at these eight matches floating in a bowl and would rack them up, just by looking at them, so that they made an orderly line, one line; and then make them all turn sideways so that they looked like a picket fence; and then make them form something that looked like a star-intriguing, to say the least. A parlor trick, fakirism, yet it was very impressive.
I have seen the Indian rope trick done, complete, and as a matter of fact, can do it. It's a very simple matter. It merely depends upon your ability to utterly hypnotize your audience. I have not hypnotized an audience for many years, the last one being the staff of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC. And that's factually true. I did. I hypnotized the whole staff-mostly because they didn't know what I was talking about and I wanted them on my side. So I simply told them that Dianetics was a very fine thing and that they should go and sin no more.
But here in the East we find a tradition of wisdom and it was that thing more than anything else which came through to me when I was quite young-a tradition of wisdom, the freedom to think-the freedom to be an individual, to be as eccentric as one pleases and to lie down and die if it struck one as that was the thing to do.
In Coal Hill, just outside Peking, I have seen a coolie sitting on the edge of an open hole, just sitting there and waiting for the groundskeeper to push him in when he was dead. He goes up, he gives to the groundskeeper three coppers, he sits down on the edge of a hole and he wills himself to die. And the groundskeeper will, of course, push him into the hole and push the hole in after him, after this has occurred. What a strange world-a world incomprehensible to a young American-that somebody would simply get tired of life and decide to die.
I have seen men lying on the street, starving to death. I've seen them receive a broken leg in an accident and simply sit there-just sit there-and no passerby felt even vaguely called upon to do a thing about it. A weird and peculiar country to my frame of reference: You should help people and you should do this and you should do that-but freedom to think, freedom to be and freedom to become anything was predominant. It wasn't complete carelessness as I first supposed. It was a tradition of intellectual freedom.
Now, I was quite accustomed to thinking in terms of, oh, rituals and Zen Buddhism and talking about the possibilities of this or that in hereafters and Nirvanas and so on. This was all quite common and ordinary to me. And I came back to America. This was a great shock. It's probably something I never should have done. I probably should have stayed abroad and, as a matter of fact, until I was thirty I used to think about it periodically and curse myself in every language I could curse in. I know a lot of curses in a lot of
languages. And it seemed to me the most idiotic thing I had ever done was return to the Western world. Mostly because there was no intellectual freedom.
I ran into this head-on. I never went to high school-took the New York Regents and entered directly into engineering school. And when I arrived-why I was taking engineering is another story-but when I arrived in the engineering school, I was stunned to discover that no one cared whether I thought or not. And it was inconceivable to me that an education could be carried forward anywhere by simply the relay of data.
If one never invited anybody to think and never permitted any allowance for thought, how possibly could one ever become educated? I had an entirely different definition for education than those who were doing educating. And I wrote a theme on this subject. I had heard that the longest sentence in the English language was two hundred and eighty-nine words, so I wrote a five-hundred-word sentence which merely said this. And when you go on that long with only one "and" and one "but" and no semicolons, it begins to build up a considerable velocity. And I said that a man was not permitted to think in the Western world and that this would inhibit any culture arising from universities.
And, having said that, I was called up by the dean-if you please-the dean of English of that university. (Out of the Engineering Department, one should be so honored!) And he told me that unless I would write an entirely different theme expressing entirely different sentiments, I would be expelled from the university. That was very strong.
And I wrote him another sentence. I wrote him another sentence. It did not controvert what I had said before, but it was written in irony and so no one received the message that was in it.
Well, I didn't really realize, even then, that there was a constriction on intellectual freedom in the West until years later when I'd become a writer. This same dean, now retired, saw my name on the newsstands and the bookstores and he finally looked up my address and he wrote me a letter and told me that there was a little thing which he had meant to tell me for many, many years: He still had my theme. And he said at the time, in his position, it would have been impossible for him to have done anything else, but he considered it an excellent piece of thinking and of literature and he had preserved it-Dean William Allen Wilbur.
Good heavens! How could a man who is virtually in charge of a university actually bow to this sort of regimentation? I couldn't conceive of it. And that kindled a spark of revolt in me. It was a very bad thing to happen to a young man who was, at best, receiving back his own country with considerable questions.
You got up in the morning, there was no boy there to hand you polished shoes. When you went outside and said, "Good morning" to somebody, he didn't answer politely, "Good morning. How are you?" or anything like that. He said, "What's good about it?" I had been known uniformly as "Mr. Hubbard," very politely, and now I was known as "Red" or "Hubbard." Fascinating world I was living in.
And so, in the engineering laboratory I conceived that there might be something of 13 interest in the field of the human mind. Now, part of this had been kindled off by a good friend of mine, Commander Thompson of the Navy, who was one of the personal students of Sigmund Freud. And he had taught me something about psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was received by me as just another method of thinking about things, but with it came this message: that a man was free to think about thinking.
In the engineering laboratories, I wanted to find the smallest particle of energy. And that was of great, great deal of interest to me because I had heard of mind essence of the Bodhis. I had heard of many things. I'd been taught in various schools that, as far as energy was concerned, it wasn't. And I wanted to find if there was a bridge piece of energy-a tiny, tiny particle which would span this difference between observable energy and not observable energy. And I started to look for it. And of course, the place to look would be in the human mind, wouldn't it?
So I conducted a series of experiments and discovered immediately that no one can remember more than three months' worth if thought is memory, if these energy particles of thought are infinitely small. The amount of memory storage in the mind is negligible if you consider the mind the brain. The protein molecules-there are, I think, ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of neurons in the body-something on that order. Anyway, it's a large number. And if each one of these had a great many, you know, punched holes in them and if you stored, in each one of these punched holes, a thousand memories, you would still not have enough actual perception to recall back over a period of three months.
I proved this conclusively and mathematically. I wrote a paper on it and turned it in to Doctor White who was in charge at that time of Saint Elizabeth's and who was a very good friend of mine. And that paper I heard from next, as emanating from Austria in 1937, proving conclusively that we think with protein molecules. Something had happened to the paper in the meantime, but, as far as I was concerned-we had actually proven, as far as I was concerned, that we had to look elsewhere for the answer to the mind.
Something was wrong with the mind. Well, that somethingness was evidently energy. There was something about energy. People were using energy but people didn't have to use energy.
And I went on and got the all-time championship low grades for that university in nuclear physics. The only reason they ever let me go on from class to class, since I never was really in the classes to amount to anything, was the fact that the assistant dean of the engineering school was a good friend of mine-I taught him how to fly And he knew that I was never going to practice engineering and so would never disgrace the school. And that was what he'd tell me.
The mathematics department and I were always at each other's throats and I spent most of my time in the university fooling around. I'd go over to the psychology department or I'd go someplace else and do something.
And of course, at that time, I was supporting myself with my writing. And the only thing I actually knew how to do in order to stack up a great many dollars in bank accounts in the Western society was simply you wrote something and you sent it to a book publisher or a magazine and you received back a check. And this seemed to me to be a rather gentlemanly activity.
And in view of the fact that I only had to work at it about three days a week, three hours a day, to produce a hundred thousand words a month, I was not exactly, you might say, overburdened and overlabored with this. You have to write pretty fast in order to do that. But in the main, you have to write certainly, you know, with great certainty, since you never have time to copy it. It isn't that you don't like to duplicate, it's just that it's not efficient. You write it, you never read it, you send it off. You never hear of it again, except somebody comes up to you two or three years later when it's being published and circulated and says, "That's fine."
The only thing I ever wrote seriously, you have never heard of. It was written in magazines, which are very expensive magazines that are supposed to be circulated amongst the intellectual houses of the country and so forth, and which pay you absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, I did write serious articles on various subjects through that period.
And at the end of-well, at the end of 1941, which closed a phase in my life, I believe I had received, at that time, over, I think, over 800 dollars from intellectual magazines over a period of about seven years of hard professional work. And I had received very, very close to two hundred thousand for fiction. There is something unreal about the Western world. Just giving you enough background on this so you won't have any strange idea about the development of Scientology.
Along about 1938, I had studied quite a bit and I had thought quite a bit about the mind. I made myself enough cash so that I could sit back for a short time and be very intensive on this subject. And I carried forward a series of biological experiments and discovered, oddly enough, that a cell can be taught on down its generations. Very crude biology-I'm a very, very poor laboratory man but I found out that you could teach cell A something, such as a puff of cigarette smoke contains nicotine and is deadly and will make you sick. And several generations later we have educated the cellular line to flee from steam, which contains no nicotine-fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Cellular memory: the cells could remember. This was enough for me. I started to add it up and I said, "What is the common denominator of existence?" And came up at that time with the Dynamic Principle of Existence as SURVIVE!
Well, however else it went together and whatever else I did about it, I wrote a book at that time, a book called "Excalibur," which you have never read, mostly because it is simply a dissertation of what might be, rather than a series of-well, it's a series of speculations more than anything else. And just recently we were scooping up some of the tag ends of speculations in that "Excalibur."
In other words, I drew the high mark-the high watermark of processing, therapy, speculation, philosophy-drew it very, very high in the form of speculation and then had absolutely no bridge to go between that and what was factually true in the society. What was observably true and what was speculatively true, there was no bridge between. It took a number of years to get a bridge in between those two facts.
This work was interrupted in 1941. During the '30s, I'd been on several expeditions and I had learned from various barbaric cultures that Man basically does not think in any other way than Man thinks. Just because he is thinking about one subject or another subject is no reason he is thinking differently. He will come to the same conclusion whether he is doing his work by nuclear physics, mathematics or doing his work by mumbo jumbo. What he does is get an answer and then he justifies it with some symbolic track. I was quite convinced of this and that Man was drawing a sort of an artificial bridge between his conclusions and his basic problems. He was evidently getting there by intuition and loudly promising everybody that he was getting there by logic. A very curious thing and I looked at this with some amusement.
And the war came along and I considered the war a great injustice for an excellent reason, that in 1936, in Forbes magazine and in other places, I had said we're going to go to war with Japan because Japan was the kind of a nation which was to commit suicide. That was their national trait. And if we stopped them too hard in their incursion across Asia, having already sent them upon that conquest in the days of Theodore Roosevelt-we started their conquest of Asia and then if we had stopped them, I knew that they would commit suicide.
And in 1941, I found myself in Washington so I sort of went into apathy about the whole thing and joined the armed services. The war hadn't begun yet and I was commissioned on June the 25th in Washington, DC as a lieutenant, junior grade. Now, the only reason I took a commission at that time is everybody said, "You wouldn't possibly be called into service," because I was engaged in rewriting some of the Hydrographic Office publications about the various coasts of America at that time. You don't take a man like that and send him out, suddenly, as an officer, in some capacity or another.
Well, I wouldn't have worried about it, one way or the other. December the 7th came around and there was a big war on every hand and, what do you know, they grabbed me and threw me into uniform in less time than you could snap your fingers. And I went to Asia. Well, that is, they sent me in that direction.
Well in 1945, April the 11th, I think, to be exact, when I was entered into the hospital at Oak Knoll-Hospital in Oakland-I conceived that I was going to have a lot of leisure time on my hands in the study of subjects in which I was quite interested. They had many endocrine projects running at that time.
So, during the ensuing many months up to February the 16th, 1946, while I was still in the service, I was at that hospital and I utilized all my spare time to study the endocrine system of the body. By taking off one collar tab I had adequate entrance to a very large hospital's library where no doctor knew any other doctor anyway.
I ruined some of their experiments simply by giving a good, solid psychoanalytic treatment to some of the people they had under test to find out whether or not testosterone would improve the eating and protein assimilation capacity of ex-prisoners of war taken out of Japanese camps. I would get ahold of the boy and knock out some of the blocks that kept him from assimilating the male hormone. You know, I'd get him over an allergy to sex (mentally) and he would take an enormous rise in his ability to absorb the drug.
And, at that time, these tests (which we won't go into particularly) demonstrated to me conclusively that structure did not monitor function, that function monitored structure. And I proved this over and over and over to my own satisfaction-mind over matter, not matter over mind.
The only reason I would have been confused about this in the first place is because this Western world had been confused about it since the days of the early Greeks-been very, very confused about it. So much so, that, today, if you ask a doctor how he's going to treat somebody or get somebody well, he will tell you what he is going to do: he's going to operate or he's going to administer a pill-whereas the answer to the situation lies in the mind.
Well, after that period in the hospital, I came out. I was badly disabled by the war and by 1948 I was back on my feet and hitting on at least all one cylinder. And I got into the swing of things, returned to writing and published Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health, which was expected to sell six thousand copies and was being very limited in its printing by its publisher. And half a million Americans read it. And after that, I didn't have to write to support my researches. I went on researching and, of course, the whole research picture catalyzed very rapidly.
In the ensuing five years leading up to now, a great deal of material has been accumulated. And the amount of knowledge which we have at this time is actually tremendous. I think offhand that there's probably more knowledge been accumulated in the last few years concerning the human mind than there's been accumulated in the last ten thousand-that's not a brag.
It's merely because one used everything that was known in those ten thousand years and he used everything that he could see and he used a world which had come up to the idea that we must be factual, not speculative; and we must prove everything we do and we must observe everything and make sure it's true. And above all, we must get an effect. We must hit that blow. We must arrive.
And having imbibed that lesson very, very well, I was very determined that we would bring this investigation up to a level where it was intensely workable-not by some savant, some soothsayer, some mummified relic sitting on top of a mountain getting cold in the snow, but by anybody who cared to use it. And that seemed to me to be an admirable goal.
This was the identical goal which was launched by the Vedic peoples, the identical goal of Gautama Buddha and is something toward which people have been studying and hoping (mostly hoping, in these last few centuries) in the field of Asia, in the entire field of Buddhism. They have prophesies, and so forth, about someone who might come into the Western world, and it is a very descriptive philosophy and prophesy, and so forth, about the whole thing-and make it possible to free one from the cycle of births and deaths in one lifetime.
Well, they could, of course, prophesy this with the greatest of ease. Because it was inevitable as knowledge accumulated, that, sooner or later, somebody would have enough leisure time to look over the problem thoroughly from one end to the other and take all of the recognizable truths that were already there and add to them to a point where this could be accomplished. This was inevitable that this would occur. If it hadn't occurred in this century, it would have occurred a few centuries hence.
There's only one slight thing that would have disturbed its occurrence and that is the atomic bomb. But I daresay, the atomic bomb will not find it possible to destroy all life on Earth and Man. I know, because Man has been busy one time or another trying to destroy me, I mean, not on a basis of where I wasn't shooting back-I was. But I found myself very unkillable and I found an awful lot of people around in the war awfully unkillable. And it just seems to me like Man is a survivor type and sooner or later he would have gotten through this one, too, and he would have come up with these answers somewhere along the track. Maybe not for another million years, maybe not for another ten years, but sooner or later this answer would have been produced, merely because it is the answer for which Man has been looking for ten thousand years.
Naturally, then, one exposed to the science of the Western world and the religious mysticism and the factualness of the Eastern world-mixing them together-would have recognized that there was a worthwhile goal to go toward. And having recognized it as a goal, certainly would have arrived, had he started upon it.
The main thing that we have uncovered today is the state of beingness which one actually has. Instead of speculations about does Man have a soul or doesn't Man, we had data. We know exactly what a thetan is, we know tremendous numbers of things with great accuracy. And furthermore, we also know that there aren't any more mysteries in terms of phenomena to know in the human mind or body. It's a very, very odd thing, but we have shaken most of them out.
On an examination of the whole track we have found practically every gadget life has been fond of using. And we find out that Man can be free and he is best off when he is free. And if we want to recover those periods of euphoria which individuals sometimes get, we would simply free an individual very, very thoroughly. A man can be free in one lifetime now, as far as he is concerned, as a soul. Now, that is interesting.
We are trying to make it apply to every person we process. This is a great difficulty, but we can do that, too. We could apply it with great ease to over half of the people we process. And remember, they only made a few Bodhis twenty-five hundred years ago-a very, very few. We have made more Theta Clears per month than there were Arhats made in all of the history of Buddhism. We're getting there.
All right. The entire field of knowledge, then, doesn't necessarily narrow down to this work, but it has made it possible for this work to be produced. I want you to understand that very clearly: that no necromancy has taken place. Life has been working for an awful long time-been working at it hard. And it's time at least somebody won at least partially on this particular goal line. And I think we have done so.
Thank you.
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19 JULY 1954
BRIDGE BETWEEN SCIENTOLOGY PAGE 2 7ACC-26 - 20.07.54 AND CIVILIZATION