When we look at Buddhism, we don't wonder that a great change took place in the operating climate of Man, which it certainly did. Rome went under just 800 years later. Now that's fast, because their whole philosophy shattered. The philosophy of every state operating on force alone and every barbaric society that Buddhism touched – shattered. The first one to go by the boards was, however, India itself. India at that time was a savage and barbaric area, as was China. Japan is still characterized very impolitely by the Chinese, and the civilization of Japan by Buddhism took place almost in modern times. It was completed by America. So there they meet very closely.

But now, moving forward on the time track over all of these ages, we discover that it took an awfully long time for the Veda to walk forward and emerge as a new knowledge called the Dhyana. And it took quite a little while for the work of Buddha to move out of Asia. But we see the work of Asia itself – not the work of Buddha necessarily – moving out into the Near East.

I'm giving you a lecture now on Scientology, its general background, as it might be known to man. Scientology is of course a word which you might say is Anglocized. We know what science means. We know that science means truth or wisdom, and we know what ology means. Anybody knows that, that means study. But this does not mean the study of science. This means the study of wisdom, which is about as close as you can get, as a straight definition, unless you said "wisdomology". Or unless you said Scientology is wisdom. And you said that what you were practicing was wisdom. If you said this clearly that would make a more definite point than saying you were practicing Scientology. But in the essence of the word, it is not talking about science, it's just that the western world recognizes in the word science something close to a truth.

Now there were trade routes that had existed since time immemorial. Man has no real trace of his own roadways, but the trade routes were quite wide open from very, very early times. We find the Phoenician, for instance, trading very neatly and very nicely up around Great Britain and sailing out through the Pillars of Hercules. And I was just last year standing on the edge of a Phoenician ruin which was advertised as a Roman ruin but wasn't a Roman ruin. It had its inscription in cuneiform, which was a Phoenician script. And this was 1,000

Now we have the derivation of Scientology being scio, which means knowingness in the fullest sense of the word. And that is the reason why this Scientology was put together. It's the most emphatic word that existed in western languages, romance languages, which includes of course Latin, one of the roots of English. And it's a very emphatic statement of know. It's knowingness in the fullest sense of the word. It's not otherwise qualified.

B.C. a Phoenician ship then demonstrated at least ten thousand years of sea-faring technology. It was a very complex ship. And Phoenicia spread its empire out through Europe and just from where and what and why, we have no real trace, but Phoenicia is very well within our own teachings, our own history. Well, it was a thousand years after the Phoenicians that we first began, in the western world, to actually alert to a higher level of civilization. For some time, the Hebrew in the Middle East had been worshipping in a certain direction, along certain lines, and they had as one of their sacred books of Job, and many other of their sacred works were immediately derivable from similar sources. And into this society, apparently, other teachings suddenly entered. Their holy work, known to us as the Old Testament, leans very heavily on the background of philosophy we have been looking at, but it has a rather barbaric flavor, with all due respect to the holy book. It was a long way from home.

Now you notice it isn't science-tology. It might have been better stated as scio-tology, but again that is not close enough to English. So we use a word which is fairly easy to say, which is simply Scientology.

And we discover the civilized aspect of that religion which we know of in the western world as Christianity, taking place of course at the year 1. Now we find that that's of no importance to us except that everybody who writes a date out is talking about the man we're talking about, when he puts down A.D. and when he puts down B.C. We are dating our very calendar from this incident I am discussing here.

You notice here that for a long while we have not used the word Dianetics, not because Dianetics does not belong to the HAS, it does. One hundred percent. It is a mental therapy, and says so in its own title. It says, "Dianetics." The derivation of that word was dianous, with an English engineering twist on it, etics. Which mean no more and no less than through mind. Well in view of the fact that the western world thinks of mind as something that mental cases have and other things, we weren't particularly interested in continuing to concentrate upon this thing called mind, although mind is a perfectly useful word. But look at this. Through mind.

The principles known as Buddhism included those of course of love thy neighbor, abstain from the use of force. These principles appeared in Asia Minor at the beginning of our own date, and I am not, by the way, discounting even vaguely the work of Christ, or Christ himself.

In Scientology we're not going through mind. We're talking about knowledge. So Dianetics was a mental therapy. There is no doubt about that. And there is no doubt about it that it is a very legitimate ancestor of Scientology. But Scientology is a thing of considerable amplitude. Where Dianetics was a very narrow thing indeed. And Dianetics belonged in the world of psychology. And Scientology does not belong in the world of psychology, and is not an advanced psychology, and cannot be defined in the framework of psychology. Psychology is an Anglocized word, not necessarily its root words, because today we find that psychology is composited from psyche and ology. And psyche is mind or soul, but leading psychological texts begin very, very carefully by saying that today the word does not refer to the mind, or to the soul. To quote one, "It has to be studied by its own history, since it no longer refers to the soul, nor even to the mind." So we don't know that psychology refers to. It simply got lost. And so we have to step out and take a word which actually means what it means, which is a study of knowingness, a study of wisdom. We have to take that word because that is what we are doing.

Traditionally Christ is supposed to have studied in India. One doesn't hear of him until he is thirty years of age, and he was a carpenter and so on – one hears of a lot of things, but we also hear this persistent legend that he had studied in India. Well, this would, of course, be a very acceptable datum, in view of the fact that the basic philosophy about which he was talking was a philosophy which had been extant in India, at this time, for about 500 years.

Now philosophically there is a word called epistemology. But epistemology is quite separate from ontology, another word in the same category as epistemology. Matter is considered to be separate in philosophy. Matter is considered one direction, thought in another direction, and so on. In other words, we are already looking at a cloudy vocabulary when we look at the field of western philosophy. In fact, nowhere in the west can we find any qualifications for a study which assumes to reach the highest possible level of knowledge which can be attained by man or life.

Little less than 500 years. It was about that time that it moved out of that area, having taken over, by that time, two thirds of the earth's populace, but we don't quite recognize our Europe, if we think of it as a thriving culture. It was not a culture.

We find nowhere in the western world a word, or a tradition, which will embrace Scientology, which makes a difficulty for an auditor when he is trying to communicate to people in the society around him, since they want to know what Scientology is, and then he speaks to them without this tradition. They assume that the word psychology embraces all sorts of eccentricities found in mental behavior. They assume this, so they could not possibly understand how anything could be said to exceed or not be the same as psychology. And they are left in the dilemma of non-recognition. You have not communicated when you have said, "We study wisdom." You see, if you just said that they would say, "Oh yes, that's very well. I did that in the third grade."

Even twelve or thirteen hundred years after Christ a mighty conqueror stopped abruptly at the borders of Europe because he was leaving all areas of civilization and he saw no slightest gain in attacking an area where everyone was cloaked in fur loin-cloths. That was Tamerlane – Timur i Leng.

Now in view of the fact that you go out of communication in a society which has no standard of communication on the subject about which you are talking, it is therefore necessary to resort to various shifts in trying to describe what you are doing. You have to find the background which actually leads to an understanding of your subject. Now there have been many ways that this could be accomplished. But before we worry about that too much, let's take up something that is quite important to us, and is not limited by any ignorance that we discover in western civilization.

Now when we look at the Middle Eastern picture we find ourselves looking at the rise of a philosophy which, however interpreted, however since utilized, is nevertheless a thoroughly interesting philosophy. You have told a preclear, I'm sure, to get his attention off those energy flows and to get some space. And when he could tolerate that, he then could change his considerations.

Let us take up probably ten thousand years of study on the part of man, of the identity of god or gods, the possibility of truth, the inner track mystery of all mysteries. In other words, the mystery of life itself, and we find that for ten thousand years, which figure by the way does not agree today with certain historians, but then they don't know much of the data I am talking to you about. But for about ten thousand years that we know of, man has been on this track. We find that the material which is extant, even in western civilization, and in Asia, has gathered to itself an enormous verbiage, you might say. There's somewhere between, and I think it would be adventurous to state an exact number, but there's somewhere between a hundred and twenty-five thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand books which have been written, and which comprise the Veda and Buddhist libraries. Now that's a lot of books. Of course some of them are very, very short, but here is a tremendous amount of data.

Do you suppose for a moment that a preclear can actually get anywhere if he continues to use force? Well whether we try to put this in to a public practice, such as turn the other cheek, or use it for Theta Clearing – the emancipation of exteriorization of a soul – we are certainly looking at the same fact. And we are looking at the words of Gautama Buddha, however we wish to interpret this.

Now if all this data is in existence, then why doesn't the western world know more about this data? We have to go back and take a little look at what happened about ten thousand years ago. Of course that's rather cloudy, too. You could probably straight wire it, but let's put it into the field of anthropology, rather into the field of study or history. And we discover that perhaps much earlier than ten thousand years ago there was a division of peoples here on Earth. The division point was evidently the Ural Mountains. I am talking to you now from material given to me by the professor of ethnology at Princeton University, where I studied. And I have no more data than he gave me, and have no further qualification than this, except the man was an expert in his own field. And what he said seemed quite reasonable to me, and so I am saying it to you.

Now the parables which are discovered today in the New Testament are earlier discovered, the same parables, elsewhere in many places. One of them was the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which predates the New Testament considerably. This is love thy neighbor. This is in effect be civilized. And it is abandon the use of force.

There was evidently a split of races somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains. Evidently part of the population which is now in the northern hemisphere went east, and part of it went west. The borning spot of the human race has been variously disputed, but if we don't worry about the borning spot, we just say that is more or less what occurred at that time, that there was a sharp division. And that part of the northern hemisphere's peoples went east, and part of them went west. We discover that a singular difference of personality occurred, which is, in the northern hemisphere, the most observable difference.

But at the same time, we are talking straight out of the mouth of Moses, so we evidently are at a crossroads of two philosophies, but these two philosophies are both the philosophies of wisdom.

The people who went into the Steppes, into the Gobi, into China, India and into the various islands were evidently faced by an enormous chain of deserts. They were faced by privations of great magnitude. And they developed a philosophy of enduring. That was the keynote, because that was what their environment demanded of them. They had to endure. And so we find these races colored in a certain way so as to thwart the onslaught of sun and snow. We find them without protection naturally in their environment, and therefore we find them able to survive long after those who went in the opposite direction. This is a peculiarity. A Chinese, for instance, float on a raft off the Cape Horn during the war, had been on the raft for eighty days without food and water, and was picked up off the raft and wondered why they bundled him in blankets. And as soon as he could manage it; he had been on a British vessel which had been torpedoed; as soon as he could manage it he threw off the blankets, and went up and reported to the cook shack, and went to work. He had been a cook on a vessel which had been torpedoed. Eighty days without food and water, awash on a raft in the South Pacific. In other words, he had learned how to endure.

Now the Hebrew definition of Messiah is One Who Brings Wisdom – a teacher.

And so it is. Their colorations, their customs and so on, are different from ours just to the degree that they can survive in tremendously arduous surroundings. And the surroundings of those lands is arduous. It is a very arduous land indeed. They are; those races that are there are able to endure. And if you said anything about them, this is certainly a clear statement. They also are tremendously practical. Their practicality is such as to stagger a white man. The explanations that they will suddenly and innocently voice to a query are always of such sweeping simplicity that they leave a white man standing there staring, with a slack jaw.

Messiah is from "messenger", but he is somebody with information and Moses was such a one. And then Christ became such a one. He was a bringer of information. He never announced his sources. He spoke of them as coming from God. But they might just as well have come from the god talked about in the Hymn to the Dawn Child, who, by the way, is rather hard to distinguish from gods talked about later on. The god the Christians worshipped is certainly not the Hebrew god. He looks much more like that one talked about in the Veda.

Now the races which went in the opposite direction from the Urals evidently went into a country which had a heavy forestation. It had a great deal of game. And the philosophy of the western world became that of striking a hard blow. If you could strike a blow of great magnitude, hard enough and fast enough, you could kill game and so you could live. Because of the vegetation, and because of many other factors, they did not particularly need coloration. Their own customs did not need to be as thoroughly practical, and they were able to dispose of their lives much more easily, you might say, since food was plentiful, as it was not in Asia. And we discover the western philosophy building up on the behavior pattern of striking a hard blow. Get in there quick, hit hard, your game drops, and you eat. And beyond that, not very much thought or practicality.

And we come on down from there and we find that we are talking about a meeting place, a sort of melting pot of religious practices stemming from various wisdoms, but the highest amongst those wisdoms is apparently the Veda and the teachings of Gautama Buddha.

Now however the truth of this may be, here certainly is something which is said to have preceded a period of ten thousand years ago. It might or might not have truth, we care nothing about that, but it is a very fast explanation of this. And we discover immediately, as we look at these two worlds, that one of these worlds having to endure, being faced with enormous privation, would of course develop a certain patience and an ability to philosophize. An ability to think. It would take a long time for anyone to think all the way through something. And a man who is merely accustomed to striking a hard blow is not likely to think all the way through something.

The parables coming from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and from various other places, were probably not original with the Book of the Dead, so it would not be true that the parables of Christ necessarily came from Egypt, while we know full well that Moses escaped from Egypt, and that the Jewish peoples stem their history from their freedom from bondage in Egypt – not all of their history, but the history which they speak of most in the New Testament.

When we are up against philosophy we are, fortunately or unfortunately, up against an Asian tradition. This is a tradition which is not necessarily that of colored peoples or strangers. This by the way would come as a great shock to people in the western world to discover that in India the ruling caste is quite as white as any Norseman. This would be of great interest to them, and is something which comes as rather a shock to an individual throughout that area. Well they have, because they have a tradition of enduring, they have preserved records. Therefore we do not know what went on in North America. We can only guess. We do not know what went on in South America. There are a few ruins kicking around, but beyond this we don't know very much. We get down into the Mediterranean basin and we discover that there was a certain traffic with Asia, and therefore there is quite a bit known about the Mediterranean basin. This philosophy of endurance and so forth came through into the Middle East. Very poorly, but it was to be found there. The records of Europe we can hold in tremendous question. They do not know where or when they had ice ages. They actually cannot trace from one millennia to the next who was where and owned what. Every now and then they have to write a history, so everybody sits down, gets in a good state of agreement, and writes a history, to such an extent that Voltaire dubbed history a Mississippi of lies.

Now here we have a great teacher in Moses. We have other Messiahs, and we then arrive with Christ, and the words of Christ were a lesson in compassion and they set a very fine example to the western world, compared to what the western world was doing at that moment.

Now where the western world is concerned, we have records which go back probably, written records we say, on Earth thirty-five hundred years. Well this may or may not be true. But certainly the schools in the western world teach us that we can go back that far with written records. And they go back to Isis. I think; I've forgotten what particular reign, Egyptian dynasty. And they have found records in that particular area, and they hold these up as being very old. But be very careful, be very, very careful that you do not leave the western world, if you are looking for early records. Be very careful about that.

What were they doing at that time? They were killing men for amusement. They were feeding men to wild beasts for amusement. In the middle reign of Claudius, we find 3,500 men being turned loose, four abreast, divided half and half across a bridge of boats, slaughtering each other for the amusement of the patricians. How long can a society stand up when it is worshipping force to this degree? However these teachings were interpreted, the vein of truth was still here: that an exclusive reliance upon force will bring about a decay and a decadence which is unimaginably terrible. And that was the truth which came through. And so we find the Buddhist principles of brotherly love and compassion, then, appearing in the west 2,000 years ago.

In order to have a blackout of history and a blackout of knowledge, you would have to stay on this side of the Ural Mountains. You go across them, and you discover no such blackout. You discover a tradition of wisdom which reaches back about ten thousand years. And that is the oldest trace that we have. Now true enough, we don't necessarily have to recognize that there are written works any older than any anthropologist in the western world knows about. It does happen, however, that there is a set of hymns, which I would love to give you the favorite western figure which puts them after Egyptian. But it doesn't happen to be the case. They, as far as I can remember, it was about eighty-two hundred and twelve BC when these things were introduced into the societies of Earth.

Now Christianity spread like wildfire throughout Europe. But it was necessary to achieve a certain agreement, and in order to achieve that agreement, many of the practices which you know of today were incorporated into this worship. Basic and early Christianity is not recognizable today in many church practices. It's just not recognizable. It is very clouded.

They are hymns. And it would seem that if we spoke of hymns then these would contain then mostly modes or rites of worship, since they were religious. But that would only be our western interpretation of what is religious. These were religious hymns. But they are our earliest debt in Scientology. Our earliest debt, because the very early hymns contain much that we know today checks against what we have re-discovered, or what we have followed back to. And this material includes such a common thing as the cycle of action of the MEST universe, known to you in Scientology as the cycle of action. And this is contained in, I think, the Hymn to the Dawn Child. Variously captioned and translated by western translators, but always this information is there. Furthermore we find in that same set of hymns the theory of evolution brought forward a hundred years ago, or slightly less, by Charles Darwin. In fact, as we look at these hymns we discover almost any information you want to discover later, whether you call it science, or Christian Science, or what you want to do. Here is a tremendous body of knowledge. They are supposed to have come forward in spoken tradition, memorized, from generation to generation, and finally to have been set down. Now this is a western interpretation of what happened to them. I would not here to say whether this is true or false, but I can tell you that today these hymns are still in existence, but they are very hard to acquire in the western world. You have to find the specialized translations of them. And they are studied as curiosa more than anything else. But we do not know what sciences would suddenly open their doors should someone sit down and begin to study the Veda. We don't know what would happen. But it's a very strange thing that information seems to have leaked from that direction, into the Middle East, and into Europe rather constantly over the thousands of years.

But these churches themselves recognize as their original source the New Testament, which contains, aside from a few court records and a few legends, all that we know of this particular transition.

Man is fond of believing that yesterday's man was unable to walk, to travel, to move.

But here we have this information poorly interpreted, badly carried, through areas which did not know how to read and write, which is quite different from Asia. And we find this church and that church having to pick into and adopt customs in order to gain any entrance into these new areas. We discover today the worship of the Winter Solstice, in our Christmas.

We find however in our western libraries a book called The Travels of Marco Polo. And everyone is quite surprised that a white man was serving Kublai Kahn in that age. Well that was an unthinkably early age. But we discover that Tamerlane had in his court an Arabian known as Eban Batuta, who had just completed a series of books about his journeyings and travels throughout Europe and Africa and Asia. We don't discover that man had any great difficulty in getting around. That's the truth of the matter. He did not have a great deal of difficulty in getting around. He had as late as twelve hundred certainly, he had horses. And horses can go almost anyplace. He was able to make his way here and there across the surface of Earth, and naturally where you get this you get a transplantation of information.

That is German and that is also other barbaric societies. Almost every barbarism that ever existed has worshipped the departure and return of the sun in the northern hemisphere and we find this incorporated into Christianity, and over there we find something else incorporated into Christianity and each time a certain amount of superstition coming into the information line – until we don't know what was on the information line unless we go back to sources and trace it through clearly and purely.

For instance today, anyone who knows China discovers nothing very strange in Italian cookery. And you would not discover it very strange that Italian cookery suddenly came into being and took place shortly after the return of Marco Polo, and many other travellers who had been in the same area. Just because one wrote about it is no reason a lot of people weren't there. It is always a matter of astonishment to some member of the Explorer's Club to pick up all the information he needs about an area, which is new, wild, and completely unexplored, from the white man or the Chinese, particularly the Chinese, who has been living there for the last forty years. And yet, the explorer brings back the information and publishes it in journals, and makes it available to people. The information collected by that white man on the ground was probably merely told to his family when he got home, and it was not broadly broadcast. So we have to recognize that certain information is broadcast broadly, and some is merely carried around. And so there'd be two categories of spreading information around. Marco Polo and Eban Batuta happened to be writers. And like writers, they wrote. But that is no reason why they were the only people in motion during the last thirty-five hundred years.

Then we are again, however, working with wisdom. What wisdom? The wisdom of knowing how to know one's self to resolve the mystery of life.

So it is no wonder that we discover the various wisdoms of Egypt appearing as the earliest wisdoms of Greece. It is no wonder why we look into the christian bibles and find ourselves reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It's no wonder that we look into the middle of the romantic period of Europe and find that the Arabian Nights had just been translated, and discover that European literature did a complete revolution at that point.

And when this Christianity was interpreted and imported into Europe, there was considerable speculation and resurgence and an enormous amount of hope. The very same thing that the Buddhists hoped for (and this is what is very interesting) became the hope of the Christian world. Emancipation – from the body. The survival and immortality of the human soul.

Now I'm not stressing the fact that nothing has ever been thought up in Europe. Yes, yes, lot of things have been thought up in Europe. But Europe has made tremendous strides forward, immediately that its doors were opened to eastern information, because the eastern tradition is you can sit and think. And sometimes somebody in the western world is reminded of this. And when he's reminded of it, he is struck by the fact that he can sit down and think, too. And if we have been taught anything, it is the patience of the east which permitted itself to stop acting long enough to find out how and why. And it's that tradition alone to which we are most indebted to Asia.

And although there was a cult in Rome which had this idea, it itself had no great antiquity, and it had evidently stemmed over from Persia, which was closer yet. The Christian impact wiped out this other cult but that's because actually they were just alike and one couldn't distinguish one from the other and the Christians won.

But are we indebted to Asia? Is it to Asia at all, or is it merely to man on this planet who, breaking into two halves you might say, went east and went west. The common ancestors of man. All of us have the same potentials, but it happens that the information which has been collected over the years is available in Asia. It has not been preserved in the western world. Therefore we look to such things as the Veda. We look to such things as the Buddhist texts, to the Tao Te Ching, and other materials of this character from Asia to carry forward to us information of the past. Who knows but what these materials did not come out of Europe in the first place and go over to Asia? We could follow a very dubious track in all directions, but we do know as we sit here in the western world, that man has a tradition of wisdom which goes back about ten thousand years, which is very positively traceable. And we find Scientology's earliest, certainly known ancestor in the Veda.

Now we have this immortality, this hope of salvation, being expressed throughout Europe, and they expound it and they find it expedient to keep extending it, because they keep promising people that it was just about to occur, the day of judgment was just about to occur.

The Veda is a very, very interesting work, as I just told you. It is a study of the whereins and whereases, and who made it and why. It is a religion. It should not be confused as anything else but a religion. And the very word Veda simply means lookingness or knowingness. That is all it means. And that is all it has ever meant, lookingness, knowingness.

Now we can get this as a sort of barbaric interpretation of what Gautama Buddha was talking about, the emancipation of the soul from the cycle of births and deaths. And then we get the fact that there is going to be a day when somebody blows a horn and it's all going to occur.

And so we can look back across a certain span of time, across a great many minds, and into a great many places where man has been able to sit still long enough to think, through this oldest record and find where it joins up with the present, and to what we in Scientology are rightly indebted. For to say that out of whole cloth, and with no background, that a westerner such as myself should suddenly develop all you need to know to do the thing they were trying to do, is an incredible and an unbelievable and an untrue statement. Had the information of the Veda not been available to me, if I had not had a very sharp cognizance of earlier information on this whole track, and if at the same time I had never been trained in an American university which gave me a background of science, there could not have been enough understanding of the western world to apply anything eastern to. And we would have simply had the eastern world again. But the western world has to hit with a punch. It has to produce an effect. It has to get there. Nobody urged Asia to get there. You could sit on a mountaintop for a thousand years and it was perfectly alright with everybody in the whole neighborhood. They'd pick you up for vagrancy in the west.

We don't know what barbarism that superstition came from, but we have that superstition today in our society. The Day of judgment.

So we combined the collective wisdom of all those ages with a sufficient impatience and urgency, a sufficiency of scientific methodology, and I think by the way that Gautama Sakyamuni probably had a better command of scientific methodology than any of your chairs of science in western universities. We have to depend though upon this scientific methodology and mathematics, and so forth, to catalyze and bring to a head the ambition of ten thousand years of thinking men. And if I have added anything to this at all, it has simply been the urgency necessary to arrive, which was fairly well lacking in the eastern world.

At first, Hell was only the fact that Rome was going to disappear in a sea of lava – and everyone wanted to see Rome die. And that recruited people left and right. They promised them that Rome was going to disappear in a sea of molten lava. And they tried to prove it in Nero's reign, by burning the place down. Well, they didn't have a great deal of success doing it. Rome went on surviving and was finally taken over entirely and has since been the orientation point of Christianity.

A thousand years or so after Christ they started to try to take back the actual birth place of Christ in Jerusalem, and there's been a considerable argument going on about it, back and forth, ever since.

But the orientation point was placed at the only stable point, because that was the part of the world to which all roads led, and that became the dissemination point of all this information. But Rome split off and went back to Constantinople and we had then the Constantinople branch of this church and it, however, received its biggest blow when Russia suddenly turned completely atheist. We don't hear too much of that church any more.

But we still hear a great deal in the western world of this church at Rome. It is still there.

The use of Christianity was to produce a certain civilized state and many people would blacken Christianity by saying it reduced people down to a very low level indeed. This is not true. It took an entire world of slaves and it made free men out of them. This in itself was quite a gain. It took a world which worshipped exclusively force and matter and made it recognize that sooner or later one would have to turn to the fact that he had a soul.

Now, remember that Christianity in its basic wisdoms is still available to us in the New Testament, and that this, no matter how it has come through the line, is quickly and swiftly traceable back to the Veda. We have a consistent track here. The same message is coming through. The Christian god is actually much better characterized in the Vedic Hymns than in any subsequent publication, including the Old Testament. The Old Testament doesn't make nearly as good a statement of what the Christians think of as God as does the Veda.

We have the loss of the trade routes somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 A.D. Now, there was an enormous period of non-communication there. What had happened was Genghis Khan, the various hordes which had been trying to pour out of Russia had cut the trade routes time and time again, and the amount of unrest in the area, and the taking of Baghdad and Jerusalem by such people. Of course, it kept these routes cut. You couldn't travel safely between these two worlds. And we find that communication doesn't open up again, not really, until some time in the 17th century.

In the middle of the 17th century, we find certain eastern practices beginning to show up in France, and there are many books being published saying you could do this and you could do that and you'd achieve something more closely related to religious philosophy than Europe was accustomed to.

Now, quite incidentally, during this period, a navigator who should have taken more lessons but fortunately didn't, by the name of Christopher Columbus, discovered America. He was simply trying to get to Asia, because everybody knew everybody in Asia knew everything and had everything and so you had to get to Asia. And he ran into America, fortunately, because he miscomputed the size of the earth so grossly that he would have perished out in the endless oceans if there hadn't been a continent there to receive him.

He was a very wise man – he discovered among other things a variation of the compass – but he failed. It was up to the Portuguese to continue around the bottom of the Cape of Good Hope and open the lanes to Europe and as soon as we get them open, we first find all of this information flooding in, information suddenly starting to appear, parts of the Veda starting to appear, various practices of Buddhism, Zen-Buddhism, other things start to crop up in Europe and right along with this, we begin to get such things as The Arabian Nights and in the middle of the 18th century, we get what you might call a renaissance of literature, the birth of the novel and so forth, coincident with the introduction of The Arabian Nights into France. A fascinating flood of information came in at about that time and the culture had already, during the Renaissance, picked up considerably, but the Renaissance was right in there with Marco Polo and we find some other interesting routes were open during that time.

People had managed to get through. This is no attempt to tell you that everything was invented by Asia, but Asia had a tradition of information. They had kept their records, which was not true of the western world, and so the information was there and you might say it was a depository of knowledge which might just as well have originated in the western world, gone to Asia, been put on file and come back again. I don't care how you would trace this one way or the other, but we still find that it was the repository of all the wisdom there was in the world at that time. And it has more or less continued so.

Philosophers, from the early Greeks on forward, made the first division in wisdom: they said there is wisdom about the soul, and there is wisdom about the physical universe, and there is some speculation about life. And this is the tradition of the Greek philosopher and it has come forward to us as represented in people like Kant, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche – interesting material, and oddly enough those writings are coincident with new releases of Asian information in Europe. If you had ever convinced Schopenhauer he was writing nothing but sacred lore he probably would have committed suicide, but he never wrote anything else.

Now where did we get this artificial breakdown? We got it right there in the Middle East. The Greek came forward, went through Rome, and the philosophic scholarly consecutive line has come to us through barbarisms. What we call science today came to us from a barbarism, Greece, which civilized itself. It's largely an independent shoot of information.

Now the western world specialized in this, and never made enough advance in the humanities with it to bother about. So that today it would gladly – just to fill another test tube full of guck – it would very, very happily blow all of Man off the face of the earth. It is completely divorced from the humanities.

Where we come to the humanities and where we have to do anything for the humanities or with the humanities, we go straight back, all the way back, as far as we can go, to the Veda, and the come on forward and as long as we're on that track, we're on a track which means better men.

And when we go on the other track, we're talking about dead men. We're talking about dead men in an arena. We're talking about dead men on battlefields. We're talking about dead men in cities under atomic bombs. That is the tradition of barbarism. The only thing that has let the western world survive at all was an entirely different track which went back to the sacred lore of 10,000 years ago.

Scientology, then, today, could not possibly be characterized as a science the way the western world understands science. Scientology carries forward a tradition of wisdom which concerns itself about the soul and the solution of mysteries of life. It has not deviated.

The only reason why I would suddenly come up and do something like this in a western culture is a very simple one. I studied in my earliest years, and the first thing I was exposed to in this life, was a rough tough frontier society. Montana. There was nothing tougher than Montana, either in terms of weather or in terms of people. And from there I went over to the completely soft Far East and heaved a long sigh of relief and found out what it meant to be in part of a civilization and the shock was so great to me that I was very deeply impressed.

And so, although I was a young American, I did pay attention. I had many, many friends in the western hills of China, friends elsewhere, friends in India, and I was willing to listen. I was also willing to be very suspicious and I was willing to be very distrustful but I was never willing to completely turn aside from the fact that there was some possible solution to the riddle of where man came from.

Any work that I am doing or have done, and that any Scientologist is doing, has a tremendously long and interesting background. We are delving with and working with the oldest civilized factors known to Man. Anything else is Johnny-come-lately. Scientology is a religion in the very oldest and fullest sense. Anybody who would dare try to make religion in to solely a religious practice and not a religious wisdom would be neglecting the very background of Christianity. Wisdom has no great tradition in the western world.

But if we are very industrious, it will be up to us to make one.