How are you?

Thank you.

My, it's good to see you here.

We have a very, very fine crowd here. Very fine. I was very happy at looking over the list of names, all the good people I saw coming in here. And this was a happy inspiration to hold this congress in Washington.

The congress here in Washington is a rather special affair. 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 consider it routine twenty-five points. 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 beginnings, 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 on 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 that 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 this kind of thing. We graduated from that. We recognized that man was basically a machine only so far as his body went; that man, otherwise, was 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 it. They say, "Well, I'm going to live a number of years and then I'm going to die. And that will be the end of me, and you should all feel sorry for me and send flowers." And 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'm 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 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 isn't 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 are dealing 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 ever sat and looked at anything for a quarter of a century, why, you'd 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 forward 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 that I consider great religious leaders — begin with a monk, a legendary mythical monk whose name probably was 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-the who in his Tao again handed on knowledge and said there was a spiritual side to life. But all 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 that there's no 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 another it is all going to come out all right in the end." And without that hope, I do not think man could have survived this far down the track.

Another one of these great leaders is 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." This 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 torturous 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, Mohammed.

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, and 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 all spiritual existence, they nevertheless furnished the modus operandi by which we could analyze these teachings and understand them better. And out of this analysis and understanding, we actually achieved a great deal. Don't think for a moment, 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. They could not completely tolerate looking this picture in the face. And I dare say there are Scientologists who can't completely tolerate looking at this picture directly, because it's too much truth. They like a few more vias, you know? If you look at something too straight, it's liable 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 any answer except perhaps that there is hope." And I was wrong. I was wrong.

And the biggest mistake that I have made — and I've made mistakes, believe me, but the biggest mistake I was — made was the day when I said, "All right, boys, we will 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 the society, and I never should have approved. Why? Because we went on a wide and large via. We associated ourselves with psychotherapy, and that was not good. It's not that there's anything wrong with psychotherapy; it's just that they have already a tremendous backlog of failure, and so we failed to some degree ourselves.

And it was only when in 1952 I recognized that we must be dealing with what we called right in Dianetics as "the awareness of awareness unit" — we must be dealing with an awareness of awareness unit which had tremendous survival power, because by various 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 — and I mean a scientist now, not a psychotherapist. I mean a man who is educated into exact mathematics, who is educated into precise, disciplined ways of thinking. And if that — or any one such man, or any thousand of them, cared to go over the backtrack 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 in 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. (audience laughter) 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 control of their environment as a spirit, we fail flatly.

I — remember, I have watched a long, long parade of cases. Thousands and thousands and thousands of cases — more case histories than has even 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 it, wherever we have stressed machine reaction, wherever we have attempted to heal the body at the sacrifice of the man — we've gotten a leg, maybe, that worked better, we've gotten maybe a nose which 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 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.

Now, 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, is 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 it without a flat tire. And we come back three months later, 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 why he's 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, nor can it change its personality.

This is a fantastic thing, that today in this twentieth century the 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 brought at last this material into the category of "practical." The oldest material man had — 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 could mean an enormous number of things. And where the public at large turns away from religion, they don't really know what they're turning away from. But where they turn away from it, they are turning away from its impracticality and that's all they're turning away from.

If you ask some avowed atheist, "Why are you mad-dogging on the subject of God? Why do you just talk and talk and talk and 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 a Bible." He's telling you what? He's telling you it didn't work.

Now, you know, 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, but the preclear sat back (he was well educated as a Scientologist) — he sat back and he sort of did a 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 somebody go over and finish a cycle of action on one command.)

And he took a look at his father and he said, well, his 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, uh — I mean the other wall. What are you doing that for?' "

And all of a sudden, preclear said, "About my father — he just would have said, 'What wall?' He never would have ordered me to go over and touch a wall." Preclear said, "Gee," he said, "with this kind of auditing when I was a kid, no wonder I'm in a mess," 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, that it has been defamed. When Papa was a member of the 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" — in other words, 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're standing. Now, that's fine." And he closed the doors very firmly and he said, "Now, there being no doors here, walk out into the hall." Supposing he did those things to you — you would think he was a kind of a bad auditor.

Supposing he did this, however: he said, "Now if you don't feel 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." This sound like good 8-C?

There are two kinds of control: There's good control and there's bad control. I could 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's 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 — just have to take my word for it at the moment.

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 on this order — "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 father, his grandmother — and did not, and left, then, a sort of a hole in existence which was timeless. Because time depends on change, and change is part of control. And 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 today. But there is good control. It would be a type of control where we had some agreement and knowledge of the goal to be obtained. Do you see that? Some agreement and knowledge of the goal that we were trying to reach — that would have to be there. It'd 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'd have to have an agreement of goals.

Another thing we'd have to have would be a completion of a cycle of action — 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, "All right. Now pick up that bunch of bo; no, leave them there."

Well now, what I'm describing to you is bad control, and that is very bad because it scrambles and confuses one's time. And bad control is done where one or the other 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, or 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. And where something has been used for bad control, it itself becomes infamous by the mere association with the confusion of bad control.

We could say, then, that if all of the — well, 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 you 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 two hundred dollars — which I think is the usual tax on a 1930 Model A car today — when you sent them two hundred dollars for your taxes and license fee, they then lost all 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, "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, "Oh, I could run this country much better than anybody else. All I'd 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, DC, and forty-five thousand people come out to hear him say that. And he says, "Now," he says, "that's all we need and that solves all of our problems. And be good or you'll all go to hell."

And we look at a stunt like this and we say to ourselves, "Tsk, tsk. Religion." But when we're saying religion that way, we're talking about the spiritual side of existence, and we're talking about this strange fact: that if the awareness of awareness unit is not in 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 escape from Pandora's box. We're just asking for it.

Little child goes to school and they say, "Be careful now, blow your nose, eat your vitamins, be careful how you walk across the street, wear your coat, wear your rubbers, don't play in those mud puddles," on and on and on and on and on. Constant tirade of what he's not or 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, depends upon your ability to have charity towards your fellow man, 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 — that 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 was 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 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 anyone 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 and energy manifestations — a thing which would be news to a nuclear physicist but which could be proven to him. It'd probably make a very old man out of him.

Now, we have that fact: that a 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 Group Processing to your abundant knowledge.

Now, thought handles mass. Of course, they've been saying this for years — they couldn't prove it. Fellow says, "Now, all right. There's that big truck running right down on me, and all I have to say is, 'No truck,' huh? Is that the way I do this? And right away that handles the whole situation?"

Now, 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 an individual, we're talking about something as precise as an apple. We're not talking about a collection of behavior patterns which we all learned about from studying rats. We're talking about something that is finite. We're talking about somebody, the somethingness that you are and the capabilities that you can be. And this is what we're talking about. We're not talking about the color of your hair or the length of your feet. We're talking about you, and we know what we're 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 greater 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. And the next few years — since this kind of an attack will not occur for a long 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're 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 and 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 and 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'm 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 — grrr," think of that: It's a practical religion. And religion is the oldest heritage 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 could 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.