The word Scientology is one which you might say is anglicized. It comes from the Latin SCIO and the Greek Logos, with Scio the most emphatic statement of Know we had in the western world. And ology (from logos) of course means "study of".

SCIO is "knowing in the fullest sense of the word" and the western world recognizes in it and in the word science something close to a truth.

This is not "science-tology" – and it is not "scio-tology", simply because that is not close enough to English.

So we use a word which is fairly easy to say, which is simply Scientology.

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.

For quite some time we have not used the word Dianetics, but certainly not because Dianetics does not belong to Scientology. It does, one hundred per cent. It is the subject of the mind and says so. It says Dia-Netics from Dia Nous (with an engineering twist on it – "etics") and DIA NOUS means no more and no less than through mind.

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.

Of course the western world thinks of mind as something that mental cases have, something of that kind, and we weren't particularly interested in continuing to concentrate upon this thing called mind, although mind is a perfectly useful word.

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.

In Scientology we are not going "through mind", we are talking about knowledge. Dianetics was a study of the mind, there's no doubt about that, and there is no doubt about it that it is a very legitimate ancestor of Scientology, but Scientology is a thing of considerable amplitude, where Dianetics in comparison was a very narrow thing indeed. And Dianetics belongs, in a sense, in the world of psychology, and Scientology does not belong in the world of psychology and is not "an advanced psychology" and cannot be defined in the framework of psychology. Psychology is an anglicized word, not today true to its original meaning.

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.

Psychology is composited from psyche and ology, and psyche is mind or soul, but leading psychological texts begin very, very carefully by saying that today the word does not refer to the mind or to the soul. To quote one, it "has to be studied by its own history", since it no longer refers to the soul, or even to the mind. So we don't know what psychology refers to today. It simply got lost. And so we have to step out and take a word which actually means what we mean, which is a study of knowingness, a study of wisdom. We have to take the word Scientology because that is what we are doing.

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.

Now philosophically, there is a word called epistemology, and epistemology is quite separate from ontology, another word in the same category. In philosophy matter is considered to be separate. The physical universe is considered one direction thought another direction and so it goes. The available words do not encompass enough.

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.

Thus we are already looking at a cloudy vocabulary when we look at the field of western philosophy. In fact, nowhere in the west can we find any qualifications for a study which assumes to reach the highest possible level of knowledge which can be attained by Man or Life. We find nowhere in the western world a word or a tradition which will embrace Scientology. This makes some difficulty for an auditor *Auditor: trained Scientologist. Auditor means "one who listens" and is a person who applies Scientology auditing technology to individuals for their betterment when he is trying to communicate to people in the society around him, since they want to know what Scientology is, and then he speaks to them, in the west, without this tradition.

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.

They assume that the word psychology embraces all sorts of eccentricities found in mental behaviour. They assume this so they could not possibly understand how anything related to thought could be said to exceed or not be the same as psychology, and they are left in the dilemma of non-recognition. You have just not communicated in the west when you have said "we study wisdom". You see, if you just said that, they would say, Oh yes, that's all very well, I did that in third grade.

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, in view of the fact that you go out of communication, in a society which has no standard of communication on the subject about which you are talking, it is necessary to resort to various shifts in trying to describe what you are doing. You have to find the background which actually leads to an understanding of your subject.

Now 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.

There would be many ways in which this could be accomplished, but let's take up something that is quite important to us and is not limited by any ignorance that we discover in western civilization. Let us take up what amounts to probably ten thousand years of study on the part of Man of the identity of God or gods, the possibility of truth, the inner track mystery of all mysteries. In other words, the mystery of life itself. We find that for ten thousand years, which figure, by the way does not agree today with certain historians (but then they don't know much of the data I am referring to) man has been on this track. We find that the material which is extant even in western civilization and in Asia, has gathered to itself an enormous verbiage, you might say. There are somewhere between – and I think it would be adventurous to state an exact number – 125,000 and 150,000 books which comprise the Vedic and Buddhist libraries. Now that's a lot of books. Here is a tremendous amount of data.

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.

One could say, if all this data is in existence, then why doesn't the western world know more about it? And we have to go back and take a brief look at what happened about ten thousand years ago, and of course, that's rather cloudy too, but let's put it into the field of anthropology rather than in to the field of history. And we discover that perhaps much earlier than ten thousand years ago, there was a division of peoples here on earth, and the division point was evidently the Ural Mountains. This is material that was given to me by a Professor of Ethnology at Princeton University.

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.

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

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?

The people who went into the steppes, into the Gobi, into China, India, and into the various islands, were faced by an enormous chain of deserts. They were faced by privations of great magnitude, and they developed a philosophy of enduring. That was the keynote because that was what their environment demanded of them; they had to endure. And so we find these races colored in a certain way so as to thwart the onslaught of sun and snow. We find them without natural protection in their environment and therefore we find them able to survive long after those who went in the opposite direction.

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.

And so it is, their colorations, their customs, and so on, are different from ours just to the degree that they can survive in tremendously arduous surroundings, and the surroundings of those lands is arduous. They are, those races that are there, able to endure. And if you said anything about them, this is certainly a clear statement of fact.

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.

They also are tremendously practical. Their practicality is such as to stagger a westerner. The explanations that they will suddenly and innocently voice to a query are always of such sweeping simplicity that they leave a westerner standing there staring with a slack jaw.

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.

Now the races which went in the opposite direction from the Urals, evidently went in to a country which had a heavy forestation. It had a great deal of game and the philosophy of the western world became that of striking a hard blow. If you could strike a blow of great magnitude hard enough and fast enough you could kill game and so you could live. Because of the vegetation and because of many other factors, they did not particularly need coloration.

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.

Their own customs did not need to be as thoroughly practical and they were able to dispose of their lives much more easily, you might say, since food was plentiful, as it was not in Asia.

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?

And we discover western philosophy building up on the behavior pattern of striking a hard blow. Get in quick, hit hard, your game drops and you eat. And beyond that, not very much thought or practicality.

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.

However the truth of this may be, here certainly is something which is said to have preceded a period of 10,000 years ago. It might or might not have truth. But it is a very fast explanation of this – and we discover immediately, as we look at these two worlds, that one of these worlds, having to endure, being faced with enormous privation, would of course develop a certain patience and an ability to philosophize. An ability to think. It would take a long time for anyone to think all the way through something. And a man who is merely accustomed to striking a hard blow is not likely to think all the way through something. When we are up against philosophy, we are fortunately or unfortunately up against an Asian tradition.

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.

This is a tradition which is not necessarily that of colored peoples or strangers. This by the way, would come as a great shock to some people in the western world, to discover that in India the ruling caste is quite as white as any Norseman.

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.

Well, they have, because they have a tradition of enduring, preserved records. We do not know what went on in North America. We can only guess. We do not know what went on in South America. There are a few ruins kicking around but beyond, this we don't know very much. We get down in to the Mediterranean basin and we discover that there was a certain traffic with Asia and therefore there is quite a bit known about Asia in the Mediterranean basin.

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.

This philosophy of endurance came forward into the Middle East – very poorly, but it was to be found there. The records of Europe we can hold in tremendous question. They do not, for instance, know where or when they had ice ages. They actually cannot trace from one millennium to the next, who was where and owned what. Every now and then they have to write a history, so everybody gets in a good state of agreement and somebody writes a history – but so unreliable that Voltaire dubbed history A Mississippi of Lies. Now where the western world is concerned, we have records which go back – written records – supposedly 3,500 years. This may or may not be true but certainly the schools in the western world teach us that we can go back that far with written records. And in Egypt they go back to Isis, I think, which for the west is quite early. And they have found records in that particular area and they hold these up as being very old. But be very careful, be very, very careful that you do not leave the western world, if you are looking for early records. In order to have a blackout of history and a blackout of knowledge, you have to stay west of the Ural Mountains.

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.

East of the Urals you discover no such blackout. You discover a recorded tradition of wisdom which reaches back about 10,000 years. And that is the oldest trace that we have.

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 true enough we don't necessarily have to recognize that there are written works any older than any anthropologist in the western world knows about. It does happen, however, that there is a set of hymns which as I recall were introduced into the societies of earth in about 8212 B.C. (The favorite western figure puts it after Egyptian!) These are hymns, and it would seem that if we spoke of hymns then they would contain largely modes or rites of worship, since they are religious, but that would only be our western interpretation of what is religious. These were religious hymns and they are our earliest debt in Scientology. Our earliest debt, because the very early hymns contain much that we know today and which checks against what we have rediscovered, or what we have followed back to, and this material included such a common thing as the cycle of the physical universe, known to you in Scientology as the Cycle of Action (Cycle of Action: the creation, growth, conservation, decay and death or destruction of energy and matter in a space. Cycles of Action produce time.) And this is contained in "The Hymn to the Dawn Child", variously captioned and translated by western translators, but all this information is there.

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.

Furthermore, we find in that same set of hymns, the theory of evolution which was brought forward in the west only a hundred years ago, or slightly less, by Charles Darwin. In fact, as we look at these hymns, we discover almost any information you want to discover later. Whether you call it science or what you wish, here is a tremendous body of knowledge.

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.

They are supposed to have come forward in spoken tradition, memorized, from generation to generation, and finally to have been set down. Now this is a western interpretation of what happened to them. I would not care to say how exactly correct this is but I can tell you that today these hymns are still in existence. They are very hard to acquire in the western world.

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.

You have to find the specialized translations of them and they are studied as curiosa more than anything else, but we do not know what sciences would suddenly open their doors should someone sit down and begin to study the Veda. We don't know what would happen. But information seems to have leaked from that direction into the Middle East and into Europe rather constantly over the thousands of years.

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.

Man is fond of believing that yesterday's man was unable to walk, to travel, to move. We find, however, that as late as 1200 B.C. certainly, he had horses, and horses can go almost anywhere. He was able to make his way here and there across the surface of Earth and naturally when you get this, you get a transplantation of information. For instance, today anyone who knows China discovers nothing very strange in Italian cookery. And he would not discover it very strange that Italian cookery suddenly came into being shortly after the return of Marco Polo and many other travelers who had been in the same area. Just because one person wrote about it, is no reason a lot of people weren't there. It is always a matter of astonishment to some member of the Explorer's Club to go in and pick up all the information he needs about an area which is new, wild and "completely unexplored", from a white man or a Chinese – particularly the Chinese – who has been living there for the last forty years. And the explorer brings back the information and publishes it in journals and makes it available to people. The information collected by that white man or Chinese on the ground, collected by that white man or Chinese on the ground, would probably only be told to his family when he got home and not particularly broadcast at all. So we have to recognize that certain information is broadcast broadly and some is merely carried around. Marco Polo and ibn-Batuta happened to be writers, and like writers, they wrote, but that is no reason to assume they were the only people in motion during the last 3,500 years.

Thus it is no wonder that we discovered the various wisdoms of Egypt appearing as the earliest wisdoms of Greece. It is no wonder why we look into the Christian bibles and find ourselves reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It is no wonder that we look into the middle of the Romantic period of Europe and find that the Arabian Nights had just been translated and discover that European literature did a complete revolution at that point. We're not stressing that nothing has ever been thought up in Europe – but Europe has made tremendous strides forward, immediately that its doors were opened to Eastern information.

Because the Eastern tradition says that you can sit and think, and sometimes somebody in the western world is reminded of this, and when he is reminded of it, he is struck by the fact that he can sit down and think too.

And if we have been taught anything, it is the patience of the East which permitted itself to stop acting long enough to find out how and why.

And it's that tradition alone for which we are most indebted to Asia.

But are we indebted to Asia? Is it to Asia at all, or is it merely to man on this planet, who, breaking into two halves, you might say, went east and went west – the common ancestors of Man. All of us have the same potentials, but it happens that the information which has been collected over the years is available in Asia. It has not been preserved in the Western world. Therefore, we look to such things as the Veda. We look to such things as the Buddhist text, to the Tao-Teh-King and other materials of this character from Asia, to carry forward to us information of the past. Who knows but what these materials did not come out of Europe in the first place and go over to Asia. We could follow very dubious tracks in all directions, but we do know as we sit here in the western world, that man has a tradition of wisdom which goes back about 10,000 years, which is very positively traceable. And we find Scientology's earliest certainly known ancestor in the Veda. The Veda is a very interesting work. It is a study of the whereins and whereases and who made it and why.

It is a religion. It should not be confused as anything else but a religion. And the very word Veda simply means: Lookingness or Knowingness. That is all it means. That is all it has ever meant. And so, we can look back across a certain span of time, across a great many minds and into a great many places where man has been able to sit still long enough to think, through this oldest record, and find where it joins up with the present and to what we, in Scientology, are rightly indebted. For to say that out of whole cloth and with no background, a Westerner such as myself should suddenly develop all you need to know to do the things they were trying to do, is an incredible and an unbelievable and an untrue statement. Had the information of the Veda not been available to me, if I had not had a very sharp cognizance of earlier information on this whole track, and if at the same time, I had never been trained in an American university, which gave me a background of science, there could not have been enough understanding of the western world to apply anything Eastern to and we would have simply had the Eastern world again. But the western world has to hit with a punch. It has to produce an effect. It has to get there. Nobody urged Asia to get there. You could sit on a mountain top for a thousand years and it was perfectly all right with everybody in the whole neighborhood. In the west, they pick you up for vagrancy. So, we combine the collective wisdom of all those ages with a sufficient impatience and urgency, a sufficiency of scientific methodology. I think, by the way, that Gautama Sakyamuni probably had a better command of scientific methodology than any of your Chairs of Science in western universities. We had to depend, though, upon scientific methodology and mathematics to catalyze and bring to a head the ambition of 10,000 years of thinking men.

And if I have added anything to this at all, it has simply been the urgency necessary to arrive, which was fairly well lacking in the Eastern world.