… The Congress here in Washington is a rather special event. One of the reasons why I came East to give this Congress and why I was very happy to be able to do so has to do with the development of information of sufficient importance, as I believe you will see at this Congress’ end, to warrant telling as many important people as possible about it.

The things which have been happening in Scientology by reason of research and development, have removed Scientology entirely from any classification as a psychotherapy. The facts behind Scientology today are that it is doing things which nothing has ever done before. One of the things which I am very pleased to announce immediately is that we have seldom failed in recent months to raise the intelligence quotient of any individual undergoing twenty-five hours of processing at least ten points. And for those who have undergone as much as seventy-five hours of processing we have raised it as much as thirty-five points and we consider twenty-five points routine. This is something that has never happened before, and therefore it is an important thing that we take a look at this. According to psychology this is an impossibility, completely impossible, and therefore I want to tell you why it is impossible in the field of psychology.

Dianetics, our earliest beginning, was a mechanistic science, very mechanistic, but very precise. Without Dianetics we could not have proceeded, but we had Dianetics and we did proceed. All Dianetics was, was a very exact analytical approach to problems of the mind and in Dianetics we were closely allied, of course, to psychotherapy. We couldn’t help but be, because all of the data upon which we were depending, all of the procedures through which we were going were, one way or another, related to psychotherapy. But when we moved out of this mechanistic approach, back in 1952, it was necessary to distinguish the fact that we had moved out of a mechanical approach. We were no longer considering Man a robot. We were no longer considering Man something which you wound up, and set him on the track of life, and he ran for a number of years and ran down. We no longer considered Man was doing this thing or was doing this kind of thing. We graduated from that. We recognized that Man was basically a machine only as far as his body went, that Man was, otherwise, a spiritual entity which had no finite survival. It had, this entity, an infinite survival. One of the basics, you understand, of Dianetics was survival. The basic principle of existence is survival and that is only true for the body. A spirit cannot help but survive whether in heaven or in hell or on earth or in a theta trap. That is the saddest thing to most people. It is so sad that they very well like to forget. They say, “Well, I am going to live a number of years and then I am going to die. And that will be the end of me and you should all feel sorry for me and send flowers.” This is an interesting game, but it is not true. If he thinks of this at all in the Western hemisphere he ordinarily thinks of it in this wise: “I am going to live a number of years and then I will go to my reward. And I hope it won’t be what I deserve.”

Now this is another game. This is not to frown in any way upon the principles and beliefs of other religions, but it is nevertheless demonstrable, too accurately demonstrable, that an individual is not finished with the game once his body dies. We are on a much higher level in Scientology than the Western religions have been, but we are not on a higher level in Scientology except in our technologies, except in the exactness of our understanding, than those great religious leaders of India who kept the spirit, the spiritual side of life alive for thousands of years against all materialistic ingression. And when we consider that a great deal of what we now know with great exactness was already known and lost thousands of years ago, we begin to see that we are not dealing with something new when we deal with Scientology. It is not something new. What we are doing with this data IS new. The way this material is organized is new. The technologies with which we can bring about a new state of being in Man are new, but the basic idea, the basic hope of Man, as it appears today in Scientology, is thousands of years old. If we call Scientology a religion we are calling it a religion out of a much deeper well than the last two thousand years.

This Congress is given here to signalize an accomplishment of material studied over a long, long period of time, over a quarter of a century, which is a long time to study anything. If you have ever sat and looked at anything for a quarter of a century, why you would know that was a long time to sit there and look. I would like to say that this Congress is here to honor the great spiritual leaders of the past – not of modern times, but of the past – since these people handed along enough tradition to make us aware of the fact that there was a spiritual side to Man. These great spiritual leaders have been hanged, reviled, misinterpreted, badly quoted, have not been at all comprehended, but nevertheless they are the hands through which a torch has been handed through the centuries so that we could culminate with a greater ability for Man and some hope for his future.

These great religious leaders, at least those I consider great religious leaders, begin with a monk, a legendary, mythical monk, whose name is probably not, but is said to be, Dharma. That word has meant wisdom ever since. Some many thousands of years ago in the highlands of India he handed out or handed on information which was taken up and carried forward by someone who might never have existed, just as they say Christ might never have existed, and that person was Krishna. And we go forward from there and we get to Lao-tse, who in his Tao again handed on knowledge and said there was a spiritual side to life.

But all of these people were saying something that was much more important than “There is a spiritual side to life.” They were saying, “There is hope. They can come to you and they can tell you that all is lost and that you are dead, you are trapped and there is not hope for you. They can come to you and say this, but this is not true. There is hope. You do go on living. This life is not all there is. There is some future life in which you can do better, succeed more worthily than you have.” That is all these men said. Whatever trappings have been hung upon their words, we don’t care. Whatever technology they had has certainly been lost. Nevertheless, they did hand on this message to Man; they said, “There is hope, you can be better, this life is not all there is and somehow or other it is all going to come out all right in the end.” Without that hope I do not think Man could have survived this far down the track.

Another one of these great leaders, Gautama Buddha, who oddly enough never pretended to be a god, pretended to be nothing but what he was, a man inspired with the wisdom which he had gained and which he taught, and at one time one-third of this earth’s population knew of and was better for Gautama Buddha. In the Western world, if you walk up to a man casually and you say “Buddha,” he’ll say, “An Idol,” which was the furthest thing from Buddha’s thoughts – to be an idol. He would have laughed and probably did laugh after he exteriorized and came back and took a look around and saw everybody building temples, burning joss to Buddha. Nevertheless, this was not the attraction of the Buddhist; the attraction was again wisdom and hope. People poured out of China for centuries over tortuous and dangerous mountains, snow-filled passes to drop down into India just to come close to the area where Gautama Buddha had taught that there is hope and that the endless cycle of life and death does not have to continue, that an individual can be free even from this. Now that’s interesting, isn’t it? Yet, the ignorant deified him. But, due to him, a great deal of this work was handed on and an enormous amount of what we call religion in this Western hemisphere today was given to this Western hemisphere directly by Gautama Buddha. It was filtered through the Middle East. “Love thy neighbor” was one of the first lessons he taught and it is that lesson which we have received from the Middle East. But, what I am telling you is that these people handed on a torch of wisdom, of information, generation to generation. It was handed along geographical routes, and one of those geographical routes was the Middle East and one of the people who handed it on was a man named Moses. And again it was handed on to a man named Christ. And he handed it on, and even the Arab nations benefited from this through their own prophet, Muhammad. And these men I consider great spiritual leaders, because they gave to Man on down through the years the hope that life could go on, that there was a spiritual side to existence, that the business of barter and gain was not all there was to life. And today, sitting in a materialistic society, which almost vilifies anybody who speaks of the fact that you don’t die right away – when you’re dead, you’re dead and you’re dead, you see, you’re dead – and right on down to this time, we are indebted to these men.

Now the only reason we know anything about these men is the printing press. And the only reason we really know anything about what they have taught us is because here and there somebody set something down. But, today we came into possession of an enormous amount of information, magnificent information. The physical sciences. And although these ran off and pretended to be an end-all to themselves and completely divorced from spiritual existence, they nevertheless furnished a modus operandi by which we could analyze the teachings and understand them better. And out of the analysis and understanding we actually achieved a great deal.

Don’t think for a moment that when I put together Dianetics I was not completely aware of practically everything any one of these men said in his own district and on his own home ground. If I had not had that information we would never have had Dianetics. But, what did I, a Western engineer, do? I said, “Well, these men are too sold on the spiritual side of life, they’re overboard. Nothing practical. We want everything workable. We want wheels. We want cogwheels. We want a standard procedure by which we can take a look at somebody on a couch and say, “Zip, zip, rip!” I was persuaded into this to some degree by my engineering friends – to some degree.

I could not completely tolerate looking this picture in the face. And I dare say that there are some Scientologists who cannot tolerate looking this picture in the face directly, because it’s too much truth. They like a few more vias. If you look at something too straight it’s likely to look back. So, I said, “They’re too spiritual, they’re too unworkable. They themselves, the Eastern cults, religions, and so forth, are themselves in poverty. They cannot handle their own problems, therefore they do not have an answer, except, perhaps, that there is hope.” And I was wrong, I was wrong. The biggest mistake that I have made, and I have made mistakes, believe me, but the biggest mistake I have made was the day when I said, “All right, boys, we’ll call this a science. All right, we will agree that the Western hemisphere is not ready to accept anything spiritual or religious; all right, we will call it a science. And this science we will call Dianetics, which means ‘through mind. ’ “ And that was myself approving with society and I never should have approved. Why? Because, we went on a wide, a large via. We associated ourselves with psychotherapy, and that was not good. It’s not that there is anything wrong with psychotherapy; it’s that they already have a tremendous backlog of failures and so we failed to some degree ourselves. And it was only in 1952 that I recognized that we must be dealing with what we called right there in Dianetics the Awareness of Awareness unit. We must be dealing with an awareness of awareness unit which had tremendous survival power, because, by very scientific, unquestionable means I could track back the life of this awareness of awareness unit life after life after life. You and I or any scientist here in Washington government worthy of his name – I mean a scientist, now, not a psychotherapist; I mean a man who is educated into exact mathematics, who was educated into precise disciplined ways of thinking – and if such a man or any thousand of them cared to go over the back track of this research, they would have to come to the same conclusions. And these conclusions are that Man is actually a body run by an awareness of awareness unit which has infinite survival power – even though it can get into a great deal of trouble.

And so we have today a little turbulence which stems immediately from the fact that a lot of people are saying, “Dianetics was all right, but this Scientology, we don’t know. Dianetics was fine, I liked Dianetics. Dianetics had something, but Hubbard went crazy or something and he moved out of that and now we don’t have anything.” That’s right. They’ve got a handful of nothing called a Thetan. And that nothingness contains all the life there is and all the experience there is.

All right, we knew once upon a time that we had to raise people’s self-determinism. We knew that by raising their self-determinism we would have better people. Well, let me tell you something. If we do anything else but raise their self-determinism, if we do anything else but better their self-control of their environment as a spirit, we’ve failed – flatly. Remember, I have watched a long, long parade of cases. Thousands and thousands and thousands of cases, more case histories than have ever been examined by anyone in the field of psychotherapy, because believe me, we collect them. People are anxious to be processed, they are not anxious to be psychoanalyzed. In the few short years that Dianetics and Scientology have been alive we have processed more people than were ever processed in the sixty years of psychoanalysis. These are exact figures. But we were not in the business of psychoanalysis. Now, I can tell you that wherever we have neglected this factor of raising the self-determinism and ability of this awareness of awareness unit, wherever we have neglected, wherever we have stressed machine reaction, wherever we have attempted to heal the body at the sacrifice of the man, we have gotten a leg, maybe, that worked better, we’ve gotten a nose which maybe twitched better, but we haven’t gotten a better man. Now that’s interesting, isn’t it? And, the culmination of this material and a study by reason of intelligence testing and personality testing over the last many months – a program eight months in length, which has just been concluded – has brought me to the conclusion (which as far as I’m concerned is the conclusion) that we cannot lose if we stress the spiritual side of man and that we always lose when we stress his material side. It’s taken me twenty-five years to come to this conclusion and I give it to you just that way.

Why didn’t psychotherapy ever raise anyone’s intelligence? Why do they cut up men in order to heal them? Well, they do that just for this reason: that they know they can get nowhere by doing it. They can get nowhere by handling this mechanical object called Man. The mechanical object is not handleable by other mechanical objects. Now, that’s interesting, isn’t it? We have the same proposition. Two cars sitting down here in the garage and one of them has a flat tire and the other car is sitting alongside of it without a flat tire and we come back there three months later and those cars are still sitting there, one of them with a flat tire. Did the other car ever repair the flat tire? Well, Man is better than that, which is baffling; he can always grow a new tire, one way or another through the genetic line or something, he can always have a new tire. A car can’t even do this. But as long as we treat Man as a machine, he is capable of doing all the things a machine can do and no more. And a machine cannot change its intelligence and cannot change its personality. This is a fantastic thing that today in this twentieth century, thousands of years of belief in the field of religion have materialized into an actuality which can be put into an effect rather easily by the average individual. We have at last brought this material into the category of practical. The oldest material Man has, hope, the spirit, has come to a culmination of being intensely practical. Now, let me say something about this word “religion.”

You know that religion has a great many meanings. It has a great many different meanings. It can mean an enormous number of things. And where the public at large turns away from religion they don’t really know what they are turning away from, but where they are turning away from it they are turning away from its impracticality and that’s all they are turning away from. If you ask some avowed atheist, “Why are you mad-dogging on the subject of God? Why do you talk, talk, talk on the subject of God?” this man says, “Well, it started out when I was a little boy and I asked him for a new bicycle and he didn’t give me one and my father beat me with the Bible.” He’s telling you what? He’s telling you it didn’t work.

I practically cleared a preclear the other day by asking him just one question. The preclear sat back – of course, this was just a freak case – the preclear sat back; he was well educated in Scientology; he sat back and he did a sort of dazed look at his past on this one question and all of a sudden heaved a deep sigh of relief and was in beautiful condition. What was the question? “Which of your parents,” said I, “would you rather have run 8-C on you?” Now, 8-C, you know, is a little process by which you have someone go over and finish a cycle of action on one command. And he took a look at his father, and he said, “Well, my father would probably be best,” to himself, and then he said, “No, my mother. My mother sure would have made sure that I went over and touched that wall. No, but she wouldn’t have let me touch the wall. She would have said, ‘You go over there and touch that wall; no, I mean the other wall. What are you doing that for?’ “ All of a sudden the preclear said, “About my father, he just would have said, ‘What wall?’ He never would have ordered me to go over and touch the wall.” The preclear said, “Gee, with the kind of auditing I got when I was a kid, no wonder I got messed up.” Accepted it as an explanation, and revived. Remarkable, very remarkable.

But, do you realize that where religion is used for the self-centered and selfish control of other human beings it has been defamed? When papa was a member of the Baptist Bible Class and he came home and he said, “If you don’t be a good boy, yak, yak, yak, you’re going to hell. If you don’t do this, if you don’t do that – threat, threat, threat, punishment, punishment, punishment, threat, threat, threat.” You know that’s awfully bad control. That’s not good 8-C, is it? And where something has been used as bad 8-C, we can then expect that a great many people in the society are going to rebel against it. Just as they would rebel against any auditor who said, “Now look, there’s a wall right there in the air. Now walk over to it and touch it. All right. Now feel the floor two feet above where you are standing. That’s fine.” Then he’d close the doors very firmly and he’d say, “Now, there being no doors here, walk out into the hall.” Supposing he did this, however: said, “Now, if you don’t locate your chair at once a lightning bolt is going to originate somewhere in the vicinity of your head and you’re going to be sorry.” Does this sound like good 8-C?

There are two kinds of control. There’s good control and there’s bad control. I can show you a process which demonstrates that a total absence of control is sickness itself. A child who has no one in his vicinity to control him as much as he is controlling things is on a stuck flow. He is incapable then of proceeding. He gets upset. The total absence of control is itself sickness. I could demonstrate that to you, but you’ll have to take my word for it. The most aberrative person in your bank is probably the person who should have but did not control you. Now, that person, if you start running it this way – what did this person want changed, what did this person want unchanged, what did this person want changed, what did this person want unchanged – you’ll find your preclear becoming quite ill. All of the tiredness, the upset, the confusion and the hectic necessity to make an effect upon someone will suddenly rise up and haunt him, because that person should have controlled him – his mother, his grandmother, his father – and did not, and left then a sort of a hole in existence which was timeless, because time depends upon change. And change is part of control.

Without control, without moving particles, without being oneself moved, do you know that you would just float forever in a timeless void? So, there is something to control. But, the word control and control itself has been so badly done that control is almost a curse word. But there is good control. It would be a type of control where we had some agreement and knowledge of the goal to be attained. Do you see that? Some agreement and knowledge of the goal we were trying to reach. That would have to be there. It would have to be knowing. At least one party would have to know it very well, and both parties would have to know it somewhat for control to be functional. We would have to have an agreement of goals. Another thing we would have to have would be completion of a cycle of action. Once a command was given it should be completed before a second command is given. We shouldn’t tell somebody, “Now, pick up that bunch of flo– no, leave it there.” Well, now, what I am describing to you is bad control, and that is very bad, because it scrambles and confuses one’s time. And bad control is done when one of the parties is totally unaware of control being accomplished. Usually the person who is being controlled is unaware that he is being controlled or something of the sort, the person who is doing the controlling does not know it but is merely acting compulsively or obsessively – and here we get a situation where cycles of action are not agreed upon, the goals are not agreed upon, the cycles of action are not completed and we get chaos and we get bad control.

Where something has been used for bad control it becomes infamous by the mere association with the confusion of bad control. We could say then that if all of the auto license bureaus in the country were to get even worse than they are and were to get into a situation where when they issued a car license and you put it on your car they would then write you a letter and tell you that it was the wrong license and you should therefore return it, otherwise you would be arrested, and when you had returned it you were arrested for not having a license. When you sent them $200.00, which I think is the usual tax on a 1930 Model A car today, for tax and license fee they then lost all of the records and then had you arrested for not applying. Now this would be interesting, wouldn’t it? The first thing you know, every auto license office would have a very bad name and we would say that auto licensing is bad, wouldn’t we? That’s bad. Let’s just dispense with the whole thing. It’s impractical, it gets us nowhere, we have enormous confusion and that is the end of it. And do you know that in this Western world to a large degree that has happened to religion.

We look at the spectacular, unreasonable stunts. We look at some young man saying, “I could run this country much better than anybody else. All you have to do is tell everybody to believe in God and therefore the whole country would run well.” He gets up here on the Capitol steps right here in Washington, D.C. and forty-five thousand people come out to hear him say that and he says, “That’s all we need and that solves all of our problems and be good or you’ll all go to hell.”

Now, when we look at a stunt like this we say to ourselves, “Religion.” But, when we are saying “religion” the way we are saying it, we are talking about the spiritual side of existence. We are talking about this strange fact that if the awareness of awareness unit is not itself in control of the body the body is sick. In other words, if we neglect the spiritual side of existence and we do not recognize the existence of a spirit, we don’t recognize the part which this plays in life. We are making an open armed bid for all the evils which escaped from Pandora’s Box. We’re just asking for it. A little child goes to school and they say, “Be careful now, eat your vitamins, be careful how you walk across the street, wear your clothes, wear your rubbers, don’t play in those mud puddles,” – on and on and on, a constant tirade of what he is not supposed to do or what he is supposed to do with his body, one way or the other, reasonable or not.

And nobody ever says to him, “Son, your self-determinism depends upon your ability to tolerate the actions of others or to direct them at will. It depends upon your ability to have charity towards your fellow men. It depends upon your ability when in a position of trust to demonstrate mercy. It depends upon your ability to make a postulate stick on that body. When you tell it to walk, it walks.” Nobody tells him that, and by not telling him we have forecast for him a life of turmoil, confusion and sickness, and I would say that is a dirty trick to play on any kid. If the awareness of awareness unit is in control of the organism, the body, knowingly, we can expect a healthy body and a successful life. And if a machine is thought to be in control of the awareness of awareness unit, if it’s all just figure-figure and you-are-what-your-body-is-and-no-more and everything runs for the body exclusively, we have sickness.

Scientology is knowledge. That’s all Scientology is. The word “Scientology” means knowledge, that’s all it means. Scio means knowing in the fullest sense of the word. Many people believe that this is named after science. No, it’s scio, knowing in the fullest sense of the word, studying how to know in the fullest sense of the word, but this is the same word as Dharma, which means knowledge; Tao, which means the way to knowledge; Buddhism, which means the way to spiritual knowledge. It’s an old word, a very old word. It happens to contain within it today possibly the bulk of what is knowable in terms of theory, that is immediately knowable to anybody anywhere. But it contains in itself something else. It contains a positive direction, a positive goal and is itself committed along a certain path, and this is the first time that this has ever been committed along this path and is the principal thing I wish to announce to this Congress. There is no doubt any longer in my mind that a postulate made by an awareness of awareness unit is a higher manifestation than any energy-space manifestation and that the postulate is totally and entirely in control of space-energy manifestations, a thing which would be news to a nuclear physicist, but which could be proven to him. It would probably make a very old man of him. Now we have that fact, that postulate. A thought is the most senior thing there is. It is senior to any and all masses because thoughts can handle masses, as I hope you will see in the group processing here to your abundant knowledge.

Now, thought handles mass. Of course, they have been saying this for years but they couldn’t prove it. A fellow says, “All right, there’s that big truck running right at me and all I have to say is ‘no truck. ’ Is that the way I do this, right away, that handles the whole situation?” What are you doing there in a mass that can be run over? That’s where you enter that problem. What are you doing there in a mass that can be run over? Since you could be there just as easily in no mass at all; and that is what is startling and what is new. Now Scientology contains, then, a direction and it contains a goal, and the goal is simply a greater freedom for the individual, and when we say the individual we are talking about something as precise as an apple. We are not talking about a collection of behavior patterns which we all learned about in the study of rats. We are talking about something that is finite. We are talking about somebody. The somethingness that you are and the capabilities you can be and this is what we are talking about. We are not talking about the color of your hair or the length of your feet. We’re talking about you and we know what we are talking about when we talk about you, and therefore, a greater freedom is indicated for this individual, you. Why? Because this individual, you, is today threatened by one of the greatest cataclysms Man has been called upon to face. He is threatened by a lot of bodies running around, evidently on total automatic, doing and planning interesting things for the demise of the race. In the next few years, since this kind of an attack will not occur for some time, the next few years are going to be nerve-racking years.

If we understand what we know – you know, that’s an interesting thing, you have to understand what you know – if we understand what we know we can go a long way in assisting or mitigating the effect and onslaught on a society of weapons which exceed the imagination of any of us in their destructive power and which are going to cause on every hand a decline of the state of Man unless some of us know what we are talking about. And fortunately, right now, we do know what we are talking about. It will depend upon us to a very large degree whether Man will become an animal in earnest or will continue to be a spiritual being. Because, Man is today threatened by men who have become animals, who have no thought of any other thing than this. This work does not represent a revolt; it doesn’t even vaguely represent a desire for the demise of any of these things. All it represents is the hope that Man again can find his own feet, can find himself in a very confused mechanistic society and can recover to himself some of the happiness, some of the sincerity, some of the love and kindness with which he was created, and if Man can do this and if we can help in any way to accomplish this, then all the years of my life and all the years of yours will have been well paid for, and none of us will have lived in vain.

I am very, very happy to see you here. I have a great deal to tell you that is technical. I want to tell you first that we have a practical religion. And before you say, “Religion, grrrr,” think of that it is a practical religion and religion is the oldest heritage that Man has. Many, many of those present are ministers. The fact is that we do not fit at all or influence or have any real contact with medicine, certainly not with psychiatry. We do not exist in the tradition of psychology. We can only exist in the field of religion. Of course, it would be up to us to make religion a much better thing than it has been and to use it to run much better 8-C on our fellow Man. Thank you.