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.

Continuing on religious and knowledge background of Scientology. When we look at Buddhism we don't wonder that a great change took place in the operating climate of man, because it certainly did. Rome went under just eight hundred years later. Now that's fast, for the time that it was going, because their whole philosophy shattered. The philosophy of every state operating on force alone, and every barbaric society that Buddhism touched shattered.

Only a small amount of the material has been translated.

The first one to go by the boards was however India itself. India at that time was a very, very savage, barbaric area. So was China. Japan is still characterized very, very impolitely by the Chinese, and the civilization of Japan by Buddhism is almost in modern times. The civilization of Japan was completed by America, so there they meet very closely.

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.

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 we find him; and I was by the way last year standing on the edge of a Phoenician ruin, which was advertised as a Roman ruin, but it wasn't a Roman ruin because it had its inscription in cuneiform, which was a Phoenician script. And this was one thousand BC. One thousand BC.

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 in one thousand BC a Phoenician ship demonstrated at least ten thousand years of seafaring 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 was, is very well within our own teachings, our own history, and so on.

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.

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 the Book of Job, and many other of their sacred works were immediately derivable from similar sources. And into this society apparently other teachings suddenly occurred. Their holy work known to us as the Old Testament is leaning very, very heavily on what I just talked to you about. With the exception that it has a rather barbaric flavor. All due respect to the holy book, it was a long way from home. A long way from home. 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, what is it? The year 30 AD, which I think we date, no, no, earlier than that. The year 1. Now we find that, that's of no importance to us, except that everybody who writes a date out here is talking about the man we're talking about. When he puts down AD, and when he puts down BC, we are dating our very calendar from this incident I am discussing here.

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.

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 dates. And I'm not, by the way now, discounting even vaguely the work of Christ or Christ himself, or anything like that. Traditionally Christ is supposed to have studied in India. This is traditional. One doesn't hear of him until he's thirty years of age. And he was a carpenter, and so on. One hears a lot of things. But he also hears this persistent legend that he had studied in India. Well this would of course be a very, very acceptable fact 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 five hundred years. A little less than five hundred years. So it was about 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, 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.

One thousand years after Christ, better than that. Twelve, thirteen hundred years after Christ a mighty conqueror stopped on 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 loincloths. That was Tamerlane, Timouri Lang.

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.

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 very, very interesting philosophy. You have told your preclears I am sure, to stop running those flows, and to get some space, and so he could tolerate that. And then change his considerations. 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 into a public practice such as turn the other cheek, or whether we use it for theta clearing, the emancipation of a soul, we certainly are looking at the same fact. We are looking at the words of Gautama Buddha, however we wish to interpret this.

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 the parables which are discovered today in the New Testament are earlier discovered, the same parables. Elsewhere in many places, one of them, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which predates the New Testament considerably.

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.

Now we are talking about love thy neighbor. We're talking about be civilized. We're talking about use no force. But at the same time, 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.

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 Hebrew definition of messiah is one who brings wisdom, a teacher, in other words. 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. He's certainly not the Hebrew god, the god the christians worship. He looks more like that one talked about in the Veda. He looks much more like it.

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.

And we come on down to, from there, and we find that we are talking about a meeting place, a sort of a melting pot of religious practices, stemming from various wisdoms. But the highest amongst those wisdoms is apparently the Veda and the teachings of Guatama Buddha. The parables coming from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and from various other places were probably not original with the Egyptian Book of the Dead, so it's just not true that the parables of Christ necessarily came from Egypt, since 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 mostly in the New Testament.

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 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. 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 thirty-five hundred 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?

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.

Now 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 we find the Buddhist principles of brotherly love and compassion then appearing two thousand years ago.

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 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, I mean, it is very clouded. But these churches themselves recognize as their original source, the New Testament. And the New Testament contains, aside from a few court records and a few legends, all that we know of this particular transition. 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 found this church and that church having to pick up and adopt customs in order to gain any entrance into these new areas. And we discover, we discover today the worship of the winter solstice in our Christmas. That is German, and that is also other barbaric societies. Almost every barbarism that's ever existed has worshipped the departure and return of the sun, in the northern hemisphere. And we find this incorporated into

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.

Christianity. And over there we find that incorporated into Christianity, and over somewhere else we find this one. 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. We are again, however, working with wisdom.

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.

What wisdom? The wisdom of knowing how to know oneself to resolve the mystery of life. 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 became the hope, 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. 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. Now the christian impact wiped out this other cult. But that's because they were just alike. And one couldn't distinguish one from the other, and the Christians won.

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 we have this immortality, this hope of salvation being expressed throughout Europe, and they expounded expedient[#bookmark7 1] 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. Now get this as a sort of a barbaric interpretation of what Gautama Buddha was talking about. The emancipation of the soul from the cycle of births and deaths. Now, he was talking about that, you see, and now we get the fact that there's going to be a day when somebody blows a horn. And it's all going to occur. We don't know what barbarism that superstition came from, but we have that superstition today in our society. The day of judgment. At first hell was only the fact that Rome was going to disappear in a sea of lava, and everyone wanted to see Rome die. And that recruited people left and right. They promised them that Rome was going to disappear in a sea of molten lava. And they tried to prove it in Nero's reign, by burning the place down. Well, they didn't have a great deal of success doing it. Rome went on surviving, and was finally taken over entirely, and has since been the orientation point of Christianity. A thousand years or so after Christ they started to try to take back the actual birthplace of Christ in Jerusalem, and there's been considerable argument going on about it back and forth ever since. But the orientation point was made the only stable point, because that was the, 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 anymore. But we still hear a great deal in the western world of this church at Rome. It is still there.

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 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. 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.

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.

1 Editor’s Note: According to the rendition of this text in THE PHOENIX LECTURES, this should read „they expound it and they find it expedient to been extending it, …

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.

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

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.

Alright, not to go over this forever, we have, we have the loss of the trade routes, somewhere in the vicinity of about a thousand AD. And land travel ceased. Land travel up to that time had been very, very good between Europe and Asia. You had Europe wearing silks and using Asian products, back and forth. It was a good route through there, but remember that this was very far from a barbarism they were crossing there in the Middle East. This included Caldea, what was left of Caldea, what was left of Babylon, which of course was Persia at that time. It included tremendous numbers of civilization. And these trade routes went right straight through, one to the other. It wasn't run as a straight route, it was run as a relay route. You see, the caravans would go just so far, and then they'd relay their packs, and they'd go just so far, and they'd relay. And they did all this not on any plan, but on a barter system. So you could get goods all the way through.

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.

Well those routes were closed and they weren't opened up again. No trade with Asia was opened up until Vasco Da Gama. Now there was an enormous period of noncommunication. A long period of non-communication there. The; what had happened is Genghis Kahn, the various hordes which had been trying to pour out of Russia had cut them time and time again, and the amount of unrest and so forth, the taking of Baghdad and Jerusalem by such people of course just kept these things cut. You couldn't travel safely between these two worlds. And we find that communication doesn't open up again there until sometime really in the seventeenth century. Oh, it opened up a little bit earlier, but not really open. And we find seventeenth century, 'til we find in the middle of the eighteenth century, pardon me, middle of the seventeenth century we find certain eastern practices beginning to show up in France. And about the middle of the seventeenth century there are many books being published, all about you could do this and you could do that, and you'd achieve something else. As a matter of fact, the doctrine of a chakra is an interesting one, because that talks about theta clearing. It talks all backwards and upside down, and so on. You had to clear yourself of seven entities, of which the thetan was the last one, and so forth. But we find this being published in France in the middle of the seventeenth century, having come through on these re-opened sea routes to Asia.

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).

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, 'cause 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'd 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.

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

Now, oh I speak, that is the opinion of the Explorer's Club, almost en masse, concerning Columbus. But a bunch of experts on exploration looked at that man's exploration and shook their heads. But he was a very wise man, he discovered a variation of the compass and various other things. 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 eighteenth century we get, 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 that came in 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.

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.

Well I'm not trying to tell 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. They'd kept their records. And so the information was there. And you might say it was a depository of knowledge which might 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.

"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 the philosophers, the early Greeks and so forth on forward, made the first division, the first division in wisdom. And they said, "There is wisdom about the soul and there is wisdom about the physical universe." And there's some speculation about life. And this is the tradition of the Greek philosopher. And that has come forward to us as represented by people like Kant, represented to us by people like Schopenhauer, Nietsche, so forth. Interesting, interesting material. And oddly enough, those writings are coincident with new releases of Asian information in Europe.

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.

If you had ever accused Schopenhauer, had you ever accused Schopenhauer of writing nothing but sacred lore he probably would have committed suicide. But, he never wrote anything else.

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.

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, priests, which civilized itself. It's an independent chute of information.

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.

Now the western world is specialized in this, and it has 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 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, and we're talking about dead men on battlefields, we're talking about dead men in cities under atomic bombs. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about barbarisms. And that is the tradition of barbarism. And the only thing that has let the western world survive all along this track was an entirely different track, that which went back to sacred lore ten thousand 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.

Scientology then today could not possibly be characterized, 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. And that is what it concerns itself with. It has really not deviated. The only reason why I would suddenly come up and do something like this in a western culture, a very simple reason. I studied, my earliest years, the first thing I was exposed to in this life was a rough, tough frontier society. Montana. And 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.

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

Now any work that I am doing or have done, and that you are doing, has a tremendously long and interesting background. You are delving with and working with the oldest civilized factors known to man. Anything else is Johnnie-come-lately. As far as Scientology being a religion is concerned, it has more right to be a religion than the Catholic church has. And could stand up and be proven in court to that effect. Anybody who would dare try to make religion into solely a religious practice would be neglecting the very background of Christianity.

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

Wisdom has no great tradition in the western world. But if we are very industrious, it will be up to us to make one. Thank you.