Of the great body of work comprising the Veda, the Dhyantic and Buddhistic written tradition of ten thousand years, very, very little, actually, has arrived in the western world.

Only a small amount of the material has been translated.

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.

It would take someone a long time to get through the 125,000 to 150,000 volumes, and it has not been done, so that the totality of what is in those books is just not known.

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.

The Veda itself means simply Knowingness or sacred lore and do not think that that is otherwise than a synonym. Knowingness has always been considered sacred lore, has never been otherwise than sacred lore, and has only been present a relatively short time in the western world, which is just growing up now and beginning to come out of the level where sacred lore is equated with superstition.

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.

The Veda, should you care to look it over, is best read in a literal translation from the Sanskrit. And there are four major divisions of the Veda, all of them quite worth while. A great deal of our material in Scientology is discovered right back there. This makes the earliest part of Scientology sacred lore.

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 next written work, which is supposed to be the oldest written work, according to various friends of mine, is a book called The Book of Job. It is Indian and quite ancient. It probably predates what is called early Egyptian. And we discover that this Book of Job contained in it simply the laborings and sufferings and necessity for patience of one man faced with a somewhat capricious god. Now other such works, like the book of Job are scattered along the time track, and are known to us here in the western world as sacred works. They are thought to have come to us from the Middle East but that would be a very short look.

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.

Actually, we're looking, in the Middle East, at a relay point of wisdom, from India and from Africa into Europe. And as you see, it follows a trade route in both directions and so you have the roadways of the world crossing through the Middle East. So we would expect such things as the Book of Job to turn up in the Middle East as holy scripture. You would expect such things as the Book of the Dead of the Egyptians to turn up in the Middle East as part of the New Testament, and so on. There could be a great deal of argument about this.

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.

Someone who is passionately devoted to practice rather than wisdom (there are two different things here that embrace religion) would argue with you. But Scientology has no interest in arguing along that line because we can make this very, very clear differentiation right here and now. The word religion itself can embrace sacred lore, wisdom, knowingness of gods and souls and spirits, and could be called, with a very broad use of the word, a philosophy. So we could say there is religious philosophy, and there is religious practice. Now religious practice could take the identical source and by interpretation put it into effect and so create various churches, all dependent upon the identical source, such as St. Luke. If we think of the number of Christian churches there are and we look at one book of the New Testament and realize that just one book was productive of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, we find that a tremendous number of practices, can debase upon one wisdom.

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."

So let's get a very clear differentiation here between religious philosophy and religious practice. When someone comes to you and says so-and-so-and-so is actually the way you're supposed to worship God, you can very cleanly and very clearly and very suddenly bring this to a halt by merely mentioning to him that he is talking about religious practice and you are talking about religious philosophy.

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, just coming down the track in a little more orderly fashion, we get to the TaoTeh-King, which is known to us in the western world as Taoism. And we may have heard of this religious practice in China. Taoism, as currently practiced today may or may not ever have heard of the Tao-Teh-King. It may or may not ever have connected. But we are certainly talking about religious philosophy when we mention the Tao-Teh-King.

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.

It was written by Lao-Tzu in approximately 529 B.C., something around that period. He wrote it just before he disappeared forever. And his birth and death dates are traditionalized as 604 B.C., born, to 531 B.C., died. This is the next important milestone in the roadway of knowledge itself.

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 what was the Tao: it meant the way to solving the mystery which underlies all mysteries. It wasn't simply "the way", as the western world generally thinks of it. I would suppose this would only be the case if they were unfamiliar with the book itself. It is a book and it was written by a man named Lao-Tzu when he was ordered to do so by a gatekeeper.

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.

Lao-Tzu was a very obscure fellow. Very little is known about him. His main passion was obscurity and he started to leave town one day and the gatekeeper turned him around and told him he could not leave town until he went home and he wrote this book. It is a very short book. It must not be more than six thousand characters. He merely wrote down his philosophy and gave it to the gatekeeper and went out the gate and disappeared. That is the last we ever heard of Lao-Tzu.

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.

Well, when we have this book, we begin to see that here was somebody trying to go somewhere without going on something. We have the western world defining this work as "teaching conformity with a cosmic order" and "teaching simplicity in social and political organization". The Tao-Teh-King did do this and this would be a very finite goal for it, but this was actually not the Tao. The Tao simply said you can solve the mystery that lies behind all mysteries, and this more or less, would be the way you might go about it, but of course, what you're trying to solve, itself, does not possess the mechanics which you believe to be inherent to the other kinds of problems which you solve. It says that a man could seek his Taohood in various ways but he would have to practice and live in a certain way, in order to achieve Taohood.

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.

This is an amazingly civilized piece of work. It would be the kind of thing you would expect from a very, very educated, extremely compassionate, pleasant people of a higher intellectual order than we're accustomed to. It is a very fine book. It's sort of simple. It's sort of naive and it tells you that one should be simple and economical and it tells you what would be a wise way to handle things. That, by the way, is about the only flaw there is in it, from a Scientological point of view – that you must be economical.

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 if we took the Tao just as written, and knowing what we know in Scientology, simply set out to practice the Tao, I don't know but what we wouldn't get a Theta Clear. (Theta Clear: An individual who, as a being, is certain of his identity apart from that of the body, and who habitually operates the body from outside, or exteriorized.) Actually the Tao is merely a set of directions on how you would go down this way which itself has no path and no distance. In other words it teaches you that you had better get out of space and get away from objects if you're going to achieve any consciousness of beingness, or to know things as they are, and it tells you that if you could do this then you'd know the whole answer and you'd be all set. And this is exactly what we are doing in Scientology.

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.

Tao means Knowingness. That is again a literal translation. In other words, it's an ancestor to Scientology, the study of "knowing how to know". The Tao is the way to knowing how to know but it isn't said that way – it's inverted. It's said, This is the way to achieve the mystery which lies back of all mysteries. Now, however crude this might seem to someone who has specialized in the Tao, that's really all we need to know about it, except this one thing: there is a principle known as Wu-Wei which is odd because it goes right in with the Tao, which also means the way, and you are probably vaguely familiar with a practice known as Judo, or Ju-jitsu. Wu-Wei is a principle which crudely applies to action more or less in that fashion. We find that this principle is non-assertion or non-compulsion, and that is right there in the Tao: self-determinism. You let them use their self-determinism. (A little later on with Judo, you find that if you let a man be self-determined enough, you can lick him every time, but this is outside the scope, actually, of the Tao.) That's an interesting thing to find sitting there as one of the practices which emanated from the Tao-Teh-King.

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.

Well, it must have been that there were a lot of very, very clever people on Earth at that time because we find in the lifetime of Lao-Tzu one called Confucius, of whom you have heard so much, but unfortunately Confucius evidently never wrote a single word. Confucius is reported by those who were around him – his disciples. And he took most of his material from, or gave credit to, some ancient Chinese works, and one of them if I remember rightly, is the Book of the Winds. And these are very, very ancient and I have seen some fragmentary translations of them. Of course Confucius himself was the great apostle of conservatism, and as such, has ever since been the very model philosopher to have in a government. He is worshipped in this century by many many levels in China and you could buy his statue with great ease throughout North China.

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.

Now the amount of superstition which has grown up around Confucius is considerable but we had in both Lao-Tzu and Confucius two people who never otherwise than pretended to be human beings who were simply pointing out a way of life. Now Confucius is of no great interest to us because he was codifying conduct most of the time, and the great philosopher of that day, if less known, was Lao-Tzu.

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.

We come then into the main period of the Dhyana. The Dhyana has, as a background, almost as legendary a distance as the Veda, appearing in India in its mythological period, legendary in its basics. Dharma was the name of a legendary Hindu sage whose many progenies were the personification of virtue and religious rites, and we have the word Dharma almost interchangeable with the word Dhyana. But whatever you use there, you're using a word which means Knowingness. Dhyana again means Knowingness and Lookingness. The Veda, the Tao, the Dharma, all mean Knowingness. This is what they are, and these are all religious works, and this is the religion of about two thirds of the population of earth. It is a tremendous body of people that we're talking about here. We erroneously know about it as and call it Buddhism in the western world and it has very little to do with Buddha. The Dhyana is what the Buddhists talk about and is their background.

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.

We first find this Buddha called actually Bohdi, and a Bohdi is one who has attained intellectual and ethical perfection by human means. This probably would be a Dianetic Release (Dianetic Release: One who in Dianetic auditing has attained good case gains, stability and can enjoy life more. Such a person is "Keyed out" or in other words released from the stimulus-response mechanisms of the reactive mind) or something of this level. Another level has been mentioned to me – Arhat, with which I am not particularly familiar, said to be more comparable to our idea of Theta Clear.

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

There were many Bohdis, or Buddhas. And the greatest of these was a fellow by the name of Gautama Sakyamuni and he lived between 563 and 483 B.C. I won't go so far as to say he'd ever read the Tao-Teh-King because there is absolutely no evidence to that effect at all, except that they certainly were riding on the same pathway. So much so that when Taoism turned into Buddhism later on they never abandoned the Tao. Taoist principles became Chinese Buddhist principles, in very large measure. And what we have just talked about in terms of knowing the way to Knowingness is very, very closely associated here with Buddha or Lord Buddha, or Gautama Buddha, or the Blessed One, or the Enlightened one. He is looked upon, and according to my belief in the line, erroneously, as the founder of the Dhyana.

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.

I think that this was in existence for quite a long time before he came along, but that he pumped life into it, he gave it codification, he straightened it up and made it run on the right track and it has kept running in that direction ever since, he did such a thoroughly good job. He was such an excellent scientific philosopher, and he himself was so persuasive and so penetrative in his work, that nobody has ever managed to pry apart Dhyana and Gautama Buddha. This identification is such a very close one that even in areas that have no understanding whatsoever of the principles laid down by Gautama Buddha, we find him sitting there as an idol, which would have been a very, very amusing thing to Buddha, because he, like Lao-Tzu, never said that he was otherwise than a human being.

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.

He didn't ever announce any revelations from supernatural sources, there were no guardian angels sitting on his shoulders preaching to him, as in the case of Mohammed and some other prophets. Nobody was ever giving him the word. But he went around giving what he had to people, he never intended to be anything but a human being, and he was a teacher. A tremendously interesting man. Now we find, however, some of the things that were written by Gautama, find them very significantly interesting to us, completely aside from Dhyana (which could be literally translated as "Indian for Scientology", if you wished to do that).

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.

We find in Dharma-Pada: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded upon our thoughts.

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.

It is made up of our thoughts." Interesting, isn't it? And: "By oneself evil is done. By oneself one suffers. By oneself evil is left undone. By oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself. No one can purify another." In other words, you can't just grant beingness to, and over-awe the preclear (Preclear: A person who through Scientology processing is finding out more about himself and life). It means you've got to have him there working on his own self-determinism or not at all – if you want to give that any kind of an interpretation. In other words, you've got to restore his ability to grant beingness, or he does not make gains, and we know that by test.

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.

"You yourself must make an effort. The Buddhas are only preachers. The thoughtful who enter the way are freed from the bondage of sin." "He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, who though young and strong, is full of sloth, whose will and thoughts are weak – that lazy and idle man will never find the way to enlightenment." The common denominator of psychosis and neurosis is the inability to work.

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.

And the next verse: "Strenuousness is the path of immortality, sloth the path of death. Those who are strenuous do not die; those who are slothful are as if dead already." This is some of that material, and by the way, a little bit later on in his work, in a discourse with one Ananda, we discover him announcing the fact that you have to abstain from the six pairs of things, in other words, twelve separate things, and we in Scientology would recognize them as the various fundamental parts of things such as space, making and breaking communication and so forth. They're all just named there one right after the other. But he said you had to abstain from them, and the main difficulty is of course the interpretation of exactly what he said. What did he say? What was actually written? Because the truth of the matter is, that successfully abstaining from these things would mean that you had to get into a position where you could tolerate them before you could abstain from them. And that is the main breaking point of all such teachings – that one did not recognize that one didn't simply negate against everything and then become pure, and the way it's been interpreted is: if you run away from all living, then you can live forever. That's the way it has been interpreted. But understand that was never the way it was said.

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.

The religion of Buddhism, carried by its teachers, brought civilization into the existing barbarisms, as of that time, of India, China, Japan, the Near East, or about two thirds of the earth's population. This was the first civilization they had had. For instance, Japan's written language, her ability to make lacquer, silk, almost any technology which she has today, was taught to her by Buddhist monks, who emigrated over to Japan from China – the first broadcast of wisdom, which resulted in very, very high cultures. Their cultures, which ensued from Buddhism, were very easily distinguishable from those superstitions which had existed heretofore. No light thing occurred there. It was just some people who had the idea that there was wisdom, and having that wisdom, you went out and told it to people and you told them that there was a way that you could find a salvation and that way was becoming your own mind essence. And if you lived a fairly pure life, lacking in sensuousness and evil practices, in other words, overt acts (Overt act: a harmful or contra-survival action), quite possibly you could break the endless chain of birth and death, which they knew very well in those days.

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.

And in other words you could accomplish an exteriorization (Exteriorization: The state of the thetan, the individual himself, being outside his body. When this is done, the person achieves a certainty that he is himself and not his body.) Now all this knowledge up to this point, was given to a world which was evidently clearly cognizant of the manifestation of exteriorization, and that one was living consecutive lives. Twenty-five hundred years later, you would expect a race to be ploughed in far enough below that level as to no longer be conscious of consecutive lives but only single ones, and so Man is. But to reach salvation in one lifetime – that was the hope of Buddhism. That hope, by various practices, was now and then, here and there, attained. But no set of precise practices ever came forward which immediately, predictably, produced a result. You understand that many of the practices would occasionally produce a result. But it was a religion which to that degree, had to go forward on hope – a hope which has extended over a span of a great, great many years.

The material which was released in that time is cluttered with irrelevancies. A great deal of it is buried. You have to be very selective, and you have to know Scientology, actually, to plow it out, get it into the clear, but much less than you might expect. It was wisdom, it was really wisdom and is today the background of the religious practices, but don't think for a moment that a Buddhist in the western hills of China knows the various words of Gautama Sakyamuni. He doesn't. He has certain practices which he practices. The basic wisdom is thinned. With that as a background they have certain religious rites and they follow these. So even in China, very close to India, where this came forward – and it was sent directly into China from India – we have that immediate division from the wisdom into the practice, and we have almost all of China in one fashion or another, bowing down to some form of Buddhism and a very little of the intellectual world knowing actually the real background of Buddhism.

But we have there a civilization where before Buddhism we didn't have one, which is quite important to us.

Now there, so far, is your track of wisdom, which merely brings us up to the beginning of two thousand years ago.