Anyone engaging upon a delineation of the histories of Dianetics and Scientology organizations is apt to go in for organizational names, organizational places, numbers of members, the general legal upsets attendant to any new type of organization on Earth and other matters which are not even important.
The history of organizations in Dianetics and Scientology is a history of people. It is the history of a number of people finding their feet, finding their initiative and finding their way of life. It could be said that the history of these organizations parallels the history of case levels. The more we know the better we get. The better we get, the better we organize.
In 1950 I said that the subject would go as well as it worked. I have no reason to alter that view. I have concentrated, therefore, on the skills and methods of training better auditors rather than upon stacks of legal papers. Many people in the field would have us believe that the legal papers were important. They would have us believe that the levels of service offered by the organizations were important, even more important than the progress of the science itself. These people may have their opinion; however, my belief uttered in 1950 is the one which has won.
For today I am announcing to you that we have won organizationally.
The organizational structure of Dianetics and Scientology today is a simple one. There are three main central organizations. These are the Founding Church at 1812 19th Street, N. W. of Washington, D.C. ; the HASI in the United States and in London at Brunswick House, 83 Palace Gardens Terrace, London W. 8; and the HDRF which can be contacted through Box 242 in Silver Spring, Maryland, U.S. A. To all intents and purposes these break down to be the HASI in LONDON and the FOUNDING CHURCH in WASHINGTON, D.C. These train auditors, audit preclears, and sell books, as well as do research and control the worldwide network of Dianetics and Scientology. Autonomous but dependent upon these organizations, there are several HASI offices throughout the world and there are several Churches of Scientology directly connected to the Founding Church. Then there are a large number of organizations, autonomous in operation but dependent upon the central organizations for their authority, such as the Churches in California run by John McCormick (San Diego) and others, all of them grouped under the Church of Scientology of California operated by Dr. Farber in Los Angeles. This Church, in turn, is chartered and franchised by the Church in Washington. There are operations and organizations autonomous but dependent upon the central organization on every continent of Earth. Offices such as that maintained by Margaret Scholtz in South Africa are halfway between an independent organization and a HASI office. It would not be possible here to list all the organizations such as McCormick’s for it would require a considerable amount of space.
Another type of organization is the group. Official groups of the HASI and official congregations of the various churches exist in very large numbers in the United States and Great Britain and elsewhere through the world. To charter a group one only needs to write the HASI. Exactly how many groups there are and exactly how many people are contained in these groups is not at this time a matter of complete record, but the number of groups and people is enormous. There were people scattered around the world of whom the organization would never have heard had it not invented and released the Associate Membership. We are hard put at this moment to get manufactured enough “ ‘S’-and-Double-Triangle” Badges to supply the avalanche of requests for them. Evidently many of the people in these groups, while sharing the expenses of the group, had never before communicated with the central organization. It is doubtful if there was any restraint in their doing so but they conceived that their communication line through their local auditor and group secretary and president was completely adequate, and so it very probably has been.
There are now more auditors in active practice throughout the world than there are psychoanalysts, a dying breed. These auditors have more preclears than the psychoanalysts have patients, but the comparison is not entirely possible since psychoanalytic patients are normally in need of mental “therapy” and are patients in fact whereas the clientele of auditors is for the most part composed of people interested in becoming more intelligent and more able.
Now you may believe that all has been told about organizations when the existing state and numerousness of them has been reviewed. Nothing could be further from the fact.
For the survival of the subject itself it is vitally necessary to carry forward and maintain central organizations not only in Washington and London, but wherever auditors are trained to be auditors. We have proven this over and over and over again. The further the subjects Dianetics and Scientology go from source, the less workable they become. In the libraries and files of the central organizations of Washington, D.C. and London are thousands of reels of tape, tens of thousands of case records, millions of words of careful notes, all of the books on the subject and all the results of 25 years of work. More important than these in Washington, D.C. and London there are people who have been in continuous contact with these organizations, so that no point of their evolution is overlooked or missed and nothing learned about training or practice has been forgotten. No single auditor practicing somewhere away from this vast library and this enormous collection of records could hope to keep an equivalent technology. Yet that technology is available to him and must continue to be available from the central organizations.
Now let me give you some sort of an idea what these organizations do and why they exist. In developing Dianetics and Scientology over the last 25 years a great deal of the basic work was lost because there was no central depository for its materials. There is one whole textbook written in 1938 entirely missing now. There are several hundred case records of the earliest work done that are missing. Because we have organization this no longer occurs. More important than this the central organizations are testing ground and repository of collected opinions of auditors. For example, in December I noticed that the Clinical gains in the Hubbard Guidance Centers in London and in Washington, all of which are carefully recorded and tabulated (so carefully recorded and tabulated that the activity would be the envy of any vast university psychology department any place in the world), showed a lessening improvement in preclears for the same number of hours of auditing. It took me from December until late February to reach at and discover what we had suddenly dropped. With the assistance of Dr. Julia Lewis in Washington and her staff auditors and Dr. Ann Walker in London and her staff auditors, I was able at length to isolate from the continuingly submitted records the one factor which had been omitted and which made a lessening of case gains occur. This factor was havingness. Once located we immediately applied ourselves to every possible means of handling havingness. I at length isolated MEST universe havingness as being the single advancing factor in these cases, and this was borne out by these staffs. Now I have gone further than that, but that is a story of research not of organization.
It has been discovered that we are developing technologies of training and codifying material at a continuingly rapid rate, but we can now completely guarantee to any student or old auditor coming in to either of the central organizations that ( I ) his case failures will thereafter cease to occur and that (2) his own case will come under his control. Every time we take an auditor in from the field and put him on staff we have to work him over, no matter how good he was in the first place. Within the central organizations at this time Scientology is a subject so workable and so well understood by staff that a manner of confidence exists never before known. Now it is the job of the central organizations to push this know-how out into the field and extend it as far as the last auditor and preclear that we contact through this chain.
The early history of organizations may be of interest.
At first, to keep an organization running, starting with the first organization, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in New Jersey, one LRH had to work himself half to death at the rate of about twenty hours a day, even buying desks and hiring typists. That was not because one LRH was the senior member of the Board of Directors. He was not, which added to his burdens. Not in actual control of the organization, putting out nearly all of the energy to keep them running, I discovered that we didn’t have an organization. We had some chaps signed up under a legal directive from the government specifying who was supposed to occupy certain positions and carry forward certain responsibilities. We even had a general (ha!) manager, the best that we could procure from the business world. Later on we even had all the talent of Kansas Oil. We had hot and cold running secretaries, accountants so confused as to be in great demand by Internal Revenue, and the very finest of printers and editors that money could buy, but we didn’t have an organization. Why? Because the entire concentration on advance was unfortunately heavy in my own hands. I have had these people say that we ought to forget any new materials of any kind, that we should not advance at all, we should simply (as a millionaire once involved in these organizations once put it) “make the money.” These people did not compose an organization. They did not have truth or sincerity in them. They were “Man, Issue 1950,” a thing which, by and large, wasn’t so hot as a mechanical contraption.
On the staffs of these organizations there were some sincere and very worthwhile people. These people tried hard. These people worked hard. These people tried to carry out the goals of Dianetics and, later, Scientology. We owe these people a very great deal. They were operating in the main as individuals, trying to wear half-a-dozen hats each and trying to help me get a show on the road, and gradually I stopped working twenty hours a day and only worked sixteen hours a day and a great deal of my activity passed into the hands of these very worthwhile people on staff. But we were not yet an organization. We were a group with a common goal and there are great differences between organizations and groups with common goals. Because we had a legal name which could be bandied, harassed and raised the devil with in courts, everyone believed that we had an organization. We didn’t. We had me working hard and a few guys, God bless them, working like mad, and we had a lot of “business” people riding the gravy train and banking needed funds to their own names in Florida. We were swamped!
To give you some idea of the enormity of the task we confronted, we had, for the first time in the history of man, sailed out and along a completely new line of approach in the field of life and religion without any background and with darned little support. We were learning as we went. No other organization on the face of the earth has the shape which the organizations of Dianetics and Scientology were to attain eventually. Therefore, we had to learn the know-how of organization before we could have one.
Naturally it was very easy to upset such an “organization” by simply upsetting the man whose name was on everything. Therefore all sorts of crazy things happened. I was sued for divorce by women I wasn’t married to; my sanity was pronounced upon by people who had never seen me or read my works. Some people in the “organization” (the “business” people) were very loud on the subject of me, but those who were loudest will have been found to have been most interested in their own personal remunerations. We didn’t have an organization. Organizationally we had a chaos. Why? Because we had to invent an organization before we could have one. We actually had to create people before we had people who could run organizations, and this, I believe, is one of the most difficult feats ever attempted in any field, but we did it.
The first person to give me any really active help in the field of research was a girl trained in science at the university, and that was Mary Sue Hubbard. We covered and reviewed the entirety of whole track phenomena and exteriorization phenomena between 1952 and 1954. In the fall of 1952 more actual assistance in England was given me. From there on it became more obvious that we had more and more able people on every hand. My own work hours were lessening. There were more people pitching in and actually doing the job they were supposed to do. We were beginning to have something that looked like an organization.
Now you understand that it doesn’t matter what is written in the legal records of a city, state or country; an organization is not something settled by a sheaf of papers. Organizations are composed of people. Even governments forget this one and so drift down into chaos. An organization is something which has its own spirit. It is composed of people or living beings who are governed by certain rules and purposes and who know how to do their jobs. That is an organization and when any of those factors are neglected it becomes a “thing” even though it still has a name and legal standing.
Thus the years wore on. The evolution was a simple one. I knew what I was doing and where I was going, but I was just one guy. Then one by one others stepped up and put their shoulders against the wheel and began to shove effectively. At first their efforts were scattered and sometimes even opposing, but the efforts were sincere. These few were then joined by others and these others gradually worked themselves out of their enturbulence and ceased to oppose and began to give effective assistance, and all the while what we today call our organization was learning its own rules, codes and know-hows. It was gathering under itself a group spirit. At first it began to appear that any time a person left his post, the post was unfillable, but little by little, the organization itself began to recover the ability to create people who could fill its posts, thus freeing key personnel for higher jobs.
Then there was another aspect to organization. This was the aspect of finance. First only my own encouragement and letters and writings brought any real finance into what we were calling organization, and even up to 1955 this state continued. To be solvent organizations had to stage various stunts and special offers. There was never a moment when one could relax on the financial state of Dianetics and Scientology. Much had to be done. There was very little with which to do it and very early in the game there were those who took its funds for themselves. But this condition would not continue forever.
Now I will tell you about another organization, so-called, and call it directly by name, the Ford Foundation. This group was founded and formed in the same year that the first book Dianetics was issued, 1950. In the six years following, this group, having had at its disposal in any single year more funds than have been available to all the people in Dianetics and Scientology combined from any source whatsoever, has yet not advanced any real distance in a realization of its goals. This organization was supposed to study and found a scientific understanding of Man. Its goal was almost identical with the goal of the first Foundation in Dianetics. Six years later we find that this organization has spent hundreds of times as much money as the central organizations of Dianetics and Scientology and has yet to discover any single slightest advance in Man’s knowledge of Man. Evidently a collection of desks involved in shuffling research papers which didn’t mean anything in the first place, the Ford Foundation apparently has squandered the money needed so desperately by those of us who were actually sincere about where we were going and what we were doing.
The Ford Foundation, after six years of shuffling, has only one valuable paper in its entire files of which I have any knowledge. That paper is a report given by one of its own men who officially attended an HAS Hubbard Certified Auditor Course in Phoenix, Arizona, and who said on paper and officially to the Ford Foundation that in Scientology now existed all that they ever hoped to accomplish in the Ford Foundation. Yet here are these millions of dollars avalanching out in the expenditures from the Ford Foundation without any hope or promise of any kind for a betterment of Man.
This is not really a criticism of the Ford Foundation — it is only a statement of how such foundations operate. Wonderfully financed, beautifully sponsored, perfectly connected with all the powers that be, yet they are not organizations. Probably the type of organization which is handsomely endowed to study certain things is robbed at the outset of its purposes, since the man who wanted the thing done was the man who gave some money to some others. These others wanted the money. Is that enough comment? In other words one of these tenets of organizational cohesion was violated before ink was dried upon the endowment. For example, there is an organization in California (where else?) which was endowed by some millionaire who wanted all possible evidence corroborating spiritual phenomena. The man to whom these funds were entrusted has used them from that day forward to actively disprove the activities and findings of Rhine and has attacked all investigators as charlatans and has not added one single thing to the knowledge of spiritual phenomena, but has balked all those who would. So maybe we were fortunate in not being a superlatively well-endowed group. We have had to fight our way and that fightingness has given us the independence which we now discover in our midst. We owe no man anything.
Far-flung members of our organization often ask themselves (if they think about it at all) what they are buying with their book purchases or their courses or their processing. For one thing they are buying the least costly and most important job of research which has ever been done on this planet. The real reason that central organizations process people for a fee and train people for a fee is to disseminate the capabilities and abilities of Scientology, but the secondary reason which becomes primary in the central organizations is to buy organization itself and to advance the science. The reason that we object to “squirrels,” people like the Communist Association of Dianetic Auditors in California, is because they do not pay their way. We find their papers full of the materials which were hard won by myself and the central organizations and yet we have nothing but debits on our records to show that they passed our way. These people have as their major fault no cognizance of effort. These people also have given us ample experience of financial irresponsibility. People such as our best known “squirrels” are perfectly willing to snatch our hard won materials and misuse them, but they are not willing to support the effort which brought these materials into being. In other words, their existence is parasitic. Completely aside from the perversion of materials, this is what we have against them. Fortunately they number one in thousands; their lies, stupidities, vilifications are all a statement that they are unwilling to pay for what they use. They are cheap. The rest of us paid our way and we have won.
What have your dollars bought? What have your pounds bought? In Washington, D.C. , in London, in Australia, in New Zealand and in South Africa and in South America, they have bought the know-how of organization and the know-how of the mind. They have bought knowledge which Man never before possessed and which Man therefore considers priceless. There is no way one could put a financial value on the information which we hold in our hands today. Yet that information has been purchased for less money than is spent on secretarial help in any given year by the Ford Foundation. By all calculations this information should have cost billions of dollars. It has not cost that because some of us were willing to work as hard as we worked in order to achieve it and are selfless enough to give it not at its market value, but only at the desire of men to know and to be helped.
Organizationally we have won.
What have we won? We have won independence and initiative as organizations Let me tell you what has just happened. This is important in Scientology. It is more important than a few of us getting clearer than we are. For six months the HASI in London and the Founding Church in Washington, D.C. have existed on their own efforts, have accumulated their own finance without any especial help or stunt. For the heads of the 1956 organizations are assisted and helped by many, but they are no longer helped on an individual basis. They are helped on an organizational basis. This is a very important thing.
For six months the HASI in London and the Founding Church in Washington,
D.C. have been self-supporting, with little or no assistance from stunts. They are doing this because they themselves are giving service. They are training better auditors than anyone before thought possible. They are getting more results in their intensives than anyone could have found real two or three years ago. What these two organizations are doing, if done in a department of a major university in the United Kingdom or the United States, would cause headlines. You would find people streaming from every other university of the world to find out just exactly how they were doing this incredible thing of raising intelligence and changing and increasing the abilities of Man. But this could never have happened in a university since it required independent thought and action with no compromise with vested interest.
These organizations are, then, today, organizations. They are organizations because they are giving service. They are giving service to the people. They are giving service to their membership. They are giving service to themselves and they are financially responsible as themselves without any special stunts or actions rather than routine activities.
I hope you realize that this is the news that it is.
So this is the history of the organizations of Dianetics and Scientology. It is a history of a bunch of people working like the devil with the work of one man and then increasing that knowledge and information and then finally beginning to pull together as a team and at last existing as organizations, powerful, strong and calm. I am proud of them and their people.