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.

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.

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.

Only a small amount of the material has been translated.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.