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.

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

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.

Continuing with this lecture, we have then the earliest known material being the Veda. Very, very little actually has arrived in the western world of any of this work, either the Vedantic, Bodhistic, any of these works. Very, very little of them have been translated. There's as I said, between a hundred and twenty-five thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand sacred books. That would take somebody a long time to get through, so lord knows exactly what is in these books.

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.

But the Veda itself means simply knowingness or sacred lore. And don't think that that is otherwise than a synonym. Knowingness has always been considered sacred lore. It has never been otherwise than sacred lore. And it's only been in the western world, which is just growing up just now, where you had sacred lore hanging on so long as a superstition. But we will get into that in just a moment.

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.

Now the Veda, should you care to look it over, is best read of course in a literal translation from Sanskrit. And there are four major divisions of the Veda. They're all of them quite worth while, as much as you could pick up of them. And as I say, a great deal of our material in Scientology is discovered right back there. So this makes the earliest part of Scientology sacred lore.

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.

Alright, now 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 an Indian book, and it is quite ancient. It probably predates quite a bit that is called early Egyptian. And we discover that this book of Job contained in it simply the laborings, 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 on 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. That is something like your preclear who can only see with certainty a spot in the room, but not a spot out in the street. It would just be the distance tolerable.

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.

Actually we're looking at the Middle East as a relay point, and as we think of wisdom we have to think for the western world of the Middle East as a relay point. A relay point by the way, 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, you might say, 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. 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. Someone who is passionately devoted to practice, rather than wisdom; there are two different things here that embrace religion; would argue with you. But you're not interested in arguing on 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, which could be called with a very loose use of the word, a philosophy. So we could say there is religious philosophy and there is religious practice.

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 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 Saint Luke. If we think of the number of christian churches there are, and we look at this one book, Saint Luke, and realize that just this one book, Saint Luke was productive of Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, and here we go. We have this tremendous number of practices basic upon one wisdom. So let's get a very clear differentiation here when we talk about religious philosophy, and religious practice. And someone who comes to you and says, "So and so and 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 him to a halt by merely mentioning to him that he is talking about religious practice, and you are talking about religious philosophy.

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.

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

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 it was written by Lao Tse in approximately, oh I'd say probably about 530 or 529 BC. Something around that period. He wrote it just before he disappeared forever. And his birth and death dates are traditionalized as 604 born to 531 died, BC both cases. Now this is the next important milestone in the roadway of knowledge itself. And we have there the Tao.

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.

Now what was the Tao? It meant the way to solving the mystery which underlies all mysteries. This was the way to resolve the mystery of mysteries. It wasn't simply the way. The western world thinks of it as the way, and they don't know quite whether we're talking about the way of life of something like that, but 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 this man, when ordered to do so by the gatekeeper before the gatekeeper would let him leave the city. Lao Tse was a very obscure fellow, very little was 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. This book is a very short book. It's about, I don't know how many characters I've seen. I've seen it in Chinese, it must not be more than maybe five thousand, six thousand characters. A very short book, and he merely wrote down his philosophy on this, and gave it to the gatekeeper and disappeared. And he went out the gate. That was the last we ever hear of Lao Tse.

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.

But the pronunciations I'm giving you by the way are the pronunciations which I heard around me as a boy. They are not necessarily the proper western pronunciation, since we have agreed to mispronounce, and so has everyone agreed to mispronounce on ten thousand years of track.

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

Well, when we have this book, we begin to see that somebody is trying to go somewhere without going on something. We have the western world defining this as teaching conformity with the cosmic order, and teaching simplicity in social and political organization. Well this in essence was what it laid down. 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.

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 there's no reason to belabor this any further, but it would amaze you that this book is a very civilized piece of work. It would be the kind of civilized work which you would expect maybe to appear from very, very educated, extremely compassionate, pleasant people of a higher intellectual order than we're accustomed to reading. It is a very fine book. I mean, it's not; it's worded simple, it's sort of naive, and it tells you that you should be simple and economical, and should do this and that. And that is, by the way, about the only flaw there is in it from a Scientological point of view. That you must be economical. That one is a little off the groove. But the rest of the way, who knows but what if we took the Tao, just as written, and knowing what we know already about Scientology we simply set out to practice the Tao, I don't know but what we wouldn't get a theta clear. I'm not sure about this, but it actually 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 in order to get any consciousness of the beingness as things are. And it tells you that if you can do this then you'd know the whole answer and you'd be all set. And what do we do in Scientology?

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 Tao means knowingness. That is the literal translation of the word, if you want to translate it that way. In other words it's an ancestor to the word Scientology, just as such. Scientology is also a study of how to know. It's the science 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 said it is the way to achieve the mystery which lies back of all mysteries.

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.

Now however crude this might seem to somebody who was 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. Now it could be called Wu-wai, but I've heard it mostly Wu-way, which is odd because it goes right in with the Tao, which also means the way. Alright, it's Wu-Wei. Now as you are probably vaguely familiar with a practice known as judo or jiu jitsu, this is a principle which crudely applies to action more or less in that fashion. But let's take a look at this and let's find out that it's 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 they found out that if you let a man be self determined enough you could lick him every time. Well, that was outside the scope, actually, of the Tao. But that's an interesting fact to find sitting there as one of the practices which emanated from the Tao. That's the Tao Teh King. You would call it probably normally Tao Teh King. I don't know why they spell it with a T, I've never heard it called anything but Tao.

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.

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 Tse 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, he took most of his material, or gave credit to some ancient Chinese works, and one of them if I remember rightly; oh they have very poetic names. What are they? One of them I think is the Book of the Winds. And these are very, very ancient. And I have seen some fragmentary translations of them. Well of course Confucius himself was the great apostle of conservatism. And as such has ever since been the very, very model philosopher to have in a government. He is worshipped today by many, many levels in China. You can buy his statue with great ease. And with great ease. In fact you have to beat people off with a club who are trying to sell you statues of Confucius throughout north China.

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.

Now the amount of superstition which has grown up around Confucius is considerable, but we have in both Lao Tse 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. He is not of any great interest to us because Confucius was codifying conduct most of the time. And the great philosopher of that day, if less known, was Lao Tse.

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.

Alright we come into the main period of the Dhyana, or Dhyana. Now the Dhyana has as a background almost as legendary a distance as the Veda. It is something which comes up in India, in its mythological period. It's legendary in its basics. Dharma was the name of a legendary Hindu sage whose many progenies were the personification of virtue and religious rites. Dharma. He's a mythological figure, and we have the word Dharma almost interchangeable with the word Dhyana, as Dharma is Dharma. But whatever you use there, you're using a word which means knowingness. That's what that word means. Dhyana, that's knowingness. It means knowingness, it means lookingness and so forth. In other words we are again on pounding down the line, and there's just no, no liberal interpretation of mind, you see, that has called the Veda, the Tao, the Dharma knowingness. I mean, this is what they go in for. And these are all religious works. This is the religion we're talking about now we're moving in to the religion of about two-thirds of the population of Earth. It is a tremendous body of people that we're talking about when we start to talk about this. This is the biggest religion on Earth today, and we erroneously know about it and call it Buddhism in the western world. And it has very little to do with Buddhism, I mean Buddha, as I will tell you in a moment, that's something else. What we're talking about there is the Dhyana. The Dhyana is what the Buddhists talk about. That's their background. Alright?

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.

We first find this word called; this Buddha actually is Bodhi. And a Bodhi is one who has attained intellectual and ethical perfection by human means. That's a Bodhi. Well that probably would be a Dianetic release or something of this level. Now there is another level that was mentioned to me, Arhat, with which I am not particular familiar, but it's said to be more comparable to our idea of theta clear. But Bodhi, that's a very interesting word. There were many Bodhis, Buddhas, you might say. And the greatest of these was a fellow by the name of Gautama Sakuamuni. And he lived between 563 and 483 BC. Now I won't go so far as to say he'd ever read the Tao Teh King. I won't go so far as to say that, 'cause there's absolutely no evidence to that effect at all, except that they certainly were writing on the same pathway. So much so that when the Taoists turned into Buddhism later on, they never abandoned the Tao. And Taoist principles became Chinese Buddhist principles to a 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. We call him Buddha. It would be Lord Buddha or Gautama Buddha, or the blessed one or the enlightened one, or almost anything. But he is looked upon, and this according to my belief in the line, erroneously actually, as the founder of the Dhyana.

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.

I think that this was in existence for quite a long time before he came along, but he pumped life into it. He gave it codification, he straightened it up, and made it run on the right track. And it's 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 is an identification, which is a very close one. And 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 never said that he was otherwise than a human being. He never pretended to be anything other than a human being, like Lao Tse.

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.

Now he didn't ever have any revelations from supernatural sources, there were no guardian angels sitting on his shoulders preaching to him, and so on, as in the case of Muhammet and some other prophets. Nobody was ever giving him the word. But he went around giving people the word, believe me. He walked from fifteen to twenty miles a day, and you could always find him in a new place talking to some new people. And he was a very, very compassionate, as a matter of fact the stories which are told about him with his compassion for life itself and his ability, you might say, to grant beingness, these were very great. Also other stories.

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.

They tried by the way, once upon a time, to discredit him by raping and murdering a woman in a grove, near which he was speaking. And tried to discredit him, but later on the ruffians who did it got drunk in a tavern and were apprehended, and appropriately disposed of. Some other various things occurred which are not very far out of line. He taught a chap, who then set up a school of his own, and who became violently incensed because Buddha continued to be successful, and he himself was not successful. So he had a large stone rolled down from a mountain while Buddha was walking on the road, and the stone accidentally split in half, and the two halves of it passed on either side of Buddha, and didn't hit him. And there was another incident about a roaring elephant who was mad, who was turned loose on Buddha, and he took one look at Buddha and calmed down. In other words, these however, don't, to us at least, border on the supernatural. I mean, a man could conceivably do something of this character if he had any ability to grant beingness whatsoever. Stopping an elephant in his tracks isn't very difficult. He never intended to be anything but a human being, and he was a teacher. Now, a tremendously interesting man.

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 we find however, some of the things that were written by Gautama , find them very significantly interesting to us. Very, very interesting to us, completely aside from Dhyana, could be literally translated as Indian for Scientology, if you wanted to say it backwards. And that is simply this. This was in Dharma Pada. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded upon our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts." Interesting, isn't it? The next line of, the next verse you might say is, "By one's self evil is done. By one's self one suffers, by one's self evil is left undone, by one's self one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to one's self, no one can purify another." Well it's just as you say, you can't grant beingness to the preclear and overawe him, you've got to have him working on self determinism or not at all, if you wanted 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 become well. And we know that by test. And we go here into the next verse, "You yourself must make an effort. The Buddhas are only preachers. The thoughtful who enter the way are freed from the bondage of sin." The thoughtful. Now the next one, "He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, he, 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. And the next verse, "By strenuousness, his strenuousness is the path of immortality, sloth the path of death. Those who are strenuous do not die, those that are slothful are as if dead already." Now this is some of the material from that. By the way, a little bit later on in his work, in a discourse with Wanananda, 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 parts of things such as space, making and breaking communication, and so forth. They're all just named, one right after the other there, 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 written? Because the truth of the matter is that abstaining from these things would mean that you had to get into a position where you could tolerate them before you could abstain them, and that is the main breaking point of all such teachings. Is, one did not recognize that one simply didn't 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's been interpreted, but understand, that was never the way it was said.

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.

Alright, the religion of Buddhism carried by its teachers brought civilization into the existing barbarisms as of that time, of India, China, Japan and the Near East, or about twothirds of the Earth's population. This was the first civilization they had had. For instance Japan, 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.

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 first broadcast of wisdom which resulted in very, very high cultures, the cultures which ensued from Buddhism were very easily recognizable 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 by becoming your own mind essence. And if you lived a fairly pure life, lacking in sensuousness and evil practices, in other words overt acts, why probably you could exteriorize and break, which they knew very well in those days, the endless chain of birth and death. You could break that endless chain.

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.

Now all this material, all this material up to this point was given to a world which was evidently clearly cognizant of the manifestation of exteriorization, and was cognizant that one was living consecutive lives. Twenty-five hundred years later you would expect a race to be plowed in far enough below that so they would no longer be conscious of consecutive lives, but only single ones. And the hope of Buddhism was to reach salvation in one life time. 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 forward over a great, great many years.

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

Now the material which was released at that time is cluttered with a great many 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 and get it into the clear, but much less than you would believe. It was wisdom. It was really wisdom. And is today the background of the religious practices, 'cause you don't, you don't think for a moment that a Buddhist in the western hills of China knows the various words of Gautama Sakuamuni. He doesn't. He has certain practices which he practices. The basic wisdom is thin. And with that as a background however, they have certain religious rites, and they follow these religious rites. So even in China, very close to India where this came forward, and it was sent directly into China from India, we have the immediate division from 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.

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.

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

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.