Lecture: Elements of Auditing
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1954, 21 April
Document title: Elements of Auditing
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Fifth American Advanced Clinical Course
Location: Phoenix, Arizona
Document ID: 5ACC-17
Description: In this discussion about religion, Hubbard discusses Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Christian history of violence and wars; says that being "exclusively religious" would be chaos. Defines Dianetics as a biological-mental study and contrasts this with religion; talks about Scientology's concept of soul and thetan, exteriorization, the development of personality, and the ability of Scientology to separate the spirit from the physical.
All right. What about religion? Is this a total and an all where we are concerned?. After all we are a society, and we have individually and collectively various interests and so forth. Well, is religion an end answer? Well, certainly not as practiced. Religion itself has been responsible, probably, for more deaths – just as itself it’s been responsible for more deaths and more unhappiness than any other single item. Dictators, plague – these things are actually very small compared to the amount of damage which has been done by religion in the name of peace. In the name of peace we have had nothing but endless war.
Religion broke its back, by the way, finally on that point. For, oh, a long, long while religion taught nothing but peace, peace, peace; turn the other cheek, turn the other cheek; peace; man is a spirit; save your soul; be good, go to heaven and get your reward; or if you don’t, why, you’ll go to hell and burn forever. They taught this philosophy that we must have peace, peace, peace. And World War I found troops of one side finding the dead bodies of troops of the other side on the battlefield with such legends as “Gott mit uns” on their belt buckles. Well, God was on the other side, see. God was on their side. God was on the other fellow’s side. God was on everybody’s side because it was a Christian cataclysm. And it broke the back of Christianity because it almost entirely ruined the faith of troops in Christianity.
Up to that time the major wars had been fought against major faiths. It was sort of Catholic against Protestant. It was one faith against another faith. Christian against Mohammedan. The godlessness of the Mongol versus the Christian Europe. You know, their big cataclysmic wars that had this sort of a division.
But World War I was not of this character. It was Christian against Christian, just like that. And each side was trying to pep up its own troops with the idea that God was on their side. They wore it out.
Naturally, there followed a very godless area. There was no more godless area in the Christian world than that one which immediately succeeded World War I. And today Christianity hasn’t gotten on its feet. But if you were to follow all the principles in government, and so forth, which are laid down in the name of the spirit, the soul, so on – if you were to follow these exactly you’d have an awful mess on your hands.
You see, we’ve actually had periods when these were followed exactly – very, very close to exactly. The first time they were ever followed brought upon the crash of the biggest and grandest and most plentiful society that we’ve had on Earth, the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon writes there – I don’t know how many million words Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but his private purpose in writing that book was to demonstrate the actual action of Christianity in the society. That was his purpose in writing the book. Ostensibly he was very interested in the Roman Empire, and because it is a scholarly study of the Roman Empire it can still be bought in its entirety. Otherwise it long ago would have been put on an Index Expurgatorius. It’s an interesting book. It tells you that whereas the Roman nation was responsible for about ten purges of Christians, and that there were probably less than a hundred thousand Christians in all the purges combined for the Roman Empire, there were probably less than a hundred thousand Christians who were arrested and imprisoned or condemned. And that was over a period of a long while; that was over a period of centuries. There were only about thirty Christians in that first purge that – the first Roman push against Christians -there were only about thirty Christians who were martyred in that time.
And yet the Christians themselves slaughtered one hundred thousand of their own people in one year of rioting in one city in the Roman Empire, Alexandria. In one year the Christians themselves murdered more Christians than were murdered in ten purges officially conducted by the Roman Empire.
Now, it tells you there must be some mad-dogness in this, isn’t it? There’s been more inhumanity conducted in the name of religion than under any other heading. I saw a wonderful book one time. It covered the life of Torquemada. It was oddly and symbolically bound in human skin. It’s in a library down in Pacific Groves, California. It’s in Spanish. It’s a very, very old book; the life of Torquemada. The Spanish Inquisition.
The bloody chapters which have been written back through history in the name of Christianity and peace tell us that it doesn’t apparently operate all by itself as a good operation point – you know, if we’re going to consider the health of a society. If we just said, “All is now going to be operated from the standpoint of religion,” we would be making a considerable error if we wish to bring about anything like a pleasant or peaceful or progressive culture. This is no condemnation of Christianity or a condemnation of man; we’re just facing a few facts here. The world under the rule of religion has not been successful or peaceful. This we can see with a good clear glance at history.
Take the Crusades. I don’t think there’s any more disgraceful chapter, actually, in the history of Christianity than these battles fought for loot in the name of religion. The enormous numbers of people who died of disease and homelessness. You take the Child’s Crusade. These are bitter chapters in our culture because America is essentially a portion of the European culture. You can call the American culture, European culture more or less the same cultures. And these succeed the Roman culture, which only indifferently succeeds the Greek culture.
But here’s one line of culture. And we look at this, “Has it… we can ask ourselves, “Has it been terrifically improved by the introduction of religion?” And if we consider by improvement a calmness, happiness, the ability to get, beget and to live, why, we just (as people looking for data and so forth) could not put our vote in the direction of “Let’s be exclusively religious. Let’s favor nothing but this spirit. And then out of this spirit monitor all of our thoughts and activities.” We certainly wouldn’t have a culture. It would be chaos itself.
All right. Whether you agree with that or not agree with that – because it’s not propaganda; I’m merely trying to tell you that here… over here we have this tremendous extremity. We have… everybody says, “Life is really caused by this mud” as a terrible extreme. And over here, “Life must be totally monitored by this spirit, and that’s all there is and it can’t do anything else but face up to God, and do this and do that and conduct itself spiritually and religiously.” And it says that over here, you see, and that’s an extreme. And we find out neither one of these things have really succeeded, because at this moment the idea that man is actually mud gives adequate license to the government and its physicists to manufacture sufficient weapons to destroy all the civil populaces of Earth.
How can they bring their conscience to do this? Simply by saying, “Well, man is just mud anyhow. He has no right to happiness. He has no spirit. He has nothing. He’s just, you know, animated rocks. Knock them off. Kill them. Kill everybody.” It’s insanity.
You have your rights in the face of such a proposed cataclysm. Actually, no government has the right to a single life – not even one life. We’re not saying, now, we don’t believe or should believe in capital punishment, but you see a government is not alive. It is an organism only so far as it is consented to by other organisms. And to say that a piece of paper up here has the right to a human being. Oh, no. It doesn’t, not by a long way. And yet here’s an extreme view – “All is mud.” Doesn’t work. An extreme view – “All is the spirit.” Doesn’t work. Truth must be someplace else.
Well, it’s closer in the field of biology. Actually, biology is making life better for people. Physics isn’t, religion isn’t, because they’re both too extreme. So there must be a closer truth in here.
Well, let’s take a look at Dianetics and find out that Dianetics was actually a biological-mental study. A biological-mental study – that’s “biological hyphen mental.” That’s what it was. And I call your attention to Issue 28-G of the Journal of Scientology which gives Scientology: A New Science, written in 1947. And there is actually the entering point. That’s where we enter the picture. We say, “Look, we have cells and bodies, and the cells are trying to survive and the bodies are trying to survive. And they live in colonial aggregations, and we multiply this out and we see these cultures existing. And this is what we can see with our naked eye. Without much assistance we can see that we do have cells, and we do have bodies and we can see that these organisms are thinking. So what are they thinking about? Well, if the cell is trying to survive and the body is trying to survive, therefore, the thinkingness must be on the subject of survival.” See? “And therefore, the… intelligence is the ability to resolve problems relating to survival.” So we get a law there. Does it work? Believe me it worked.
Well, then by headlining right straight down the line of a biological-mental science, we did suddenly find ourselves capable of changing the intelligence quotient of an individual – something that’s never been done before, observedly – and found ourselves capable of curing many psychosomatic illnesses in people, which had never been touched before. Miracles could happen, and that’s the first time anybody had reported any miracles for an awful long time. By monitoring the mind we got changes in the body. Well, this was very curious. Well, but there was a biological-mental science.
Now, as we started to continue our studies, observations and so forth, what happened? We, of course, walked over in the direction of the spiritual side of man and walked over in the direction of the physical side of man. In other words, we merely broadened the biological concept in its two component parts. And we all of a sudden found ourselves looking at this thing called biological science as a combination of the spirit and the physical universe. You see that? We just broadened that, and the next thing you know we have two component parts which themselves combined form this third part. And so we got the theta-MEST theory1.
And that was really the first big advance from that first approach of looking at the cells and looking at the bodies and saying, “Well look, they’re trying to survive, and therefore this is what the mind is trying to do.” So you see what happened there. We had theta. Theta was, in physical universe terms, a nothingness, a something that had no motion. It didn’t have wavelength, it didn’t have any place in space, it didn’t have any space. It didn’t have matter, mass – had none of these things – and yet seemed to be capable of the production of space and, actually, energy and matter; seemed to be capable of these. But it wasn’t itself these things; it was truly a nothingness. And this nothingness with these potentials we called theta, merely because that is the Greek symbol for thought. And said, “Look, we have this thing called theta operating upon the physical universe which produces this biological substance.”
Ah-ha! Now, what are the three parts of man? That part of him which is nothing, that part of him which is totally physical combine together, as far as the body is concerned, to be that part of him which is biological. Now, is man composed of these three things? Well, he sure is. When he’s dead, what remains there is totally physical.
Well, man has long observed this. Let’s turn it around and look at it the other way. When you subtract his body what have you got? And this has really been a tremendous thing in terms of cases and results and everything else, because we started subtracting his body. Instead of subtracting him from his body, really what we started doing is taking a look at him as he existed independent of a body. We found out the body was totally physical, but as long as he was – or a life unit (there are two life units in a body) – as long as this life unit was connected to this totally physical thing, you had an animate biological thing.
And then we got, of course, the spiritual and the physical side of the individual. And we have gotten up along the line of our science until we can look at each one independently. We have taken biology so far apart now that we can look at the spirit as an entirety, and at the physical beingness as an entirety, and we can also look at the biological combination as an entirety.
So that’s what we’re studying. We’re studying three things. We’re studying the physical side of existence – matter, energy, space, time – we’re sure studying it because we’ve got brand-new definitions for it.
A fellow came down here the other day… Talk about how new some of these definitions are. Chap came down here the other day, Wing Angell, and he said he was up at one of the big atomic plants talking to some of the engineers. And he talked to this nuclear physicist for a little while, and the fellow says, “Well,” – very reservedly – “if you do have something you’d have a definition for space.” And Wing said very promptly, “Yes. Yes, we do. We have a definition for space. Space is a viewpoint of dimension.” And the nuclear physicist sat there for a moment. And all of a sudden a kind of a stunned look came in his eye, and he rushed out and he grabbed the phone and he said, “Shut down the experiment in number seven!” They were about to blow the plant apart. All of a sudden one of his own experiments became meaningful. They’d been operating without a definition of nothing and without a definition of space.
All right. Over here in the field of religion did we clarify anything? Oh yes, we sure did. Everybody has been rushing around in their robes and so forth saying, “Save your soul. Save your soul. Now, look-a-here fellow, you’ve got to save your soul. Now, you’ve got to believe in something in order to save your soul, and you’d better save your soul.” And nobody ever thought of asking him, “Well, where is my soul? Is it over there? Or do I carry it in my pocket? Or what is this thing you’re talking about? You’re talking about something certainly, because it has a name. Where is it? What is it?”
Well, this statement “Save your soul” obfuscated the entire problem, because man is his own soul. How can you save your soul? You can’t. You are your own soul. Weird, but you are. You can’t save your own soul. You can yourself back out away from a body and take a look at it.
Now, what we call you, evidently, down through the years – we mean by that this biological combination of the physical and the spiritual, and that’s “you.” You have brown hair, and you wear shoes, and you are a man or you are a woman. Or you do certain things; you smile a certain way; you have eyes of a certain color. In other words, this youness, you see, has been pounded home as the combination of the physical and spiritual which is itself a visible biological manifestation.
Well, is it quite true? Well, when you tell a fellow “Be three feet back of your head,” believe me he recognizes that he is himself. But he also recognizes first that he doesn’t have his whole personality. Why doesn’t he? Because he associates his whole personality with an alter ego which consists of matter. Also these cells have independent life in them. And here he’s really – when you say “you” – a total package of life. When he’s three feet back of his head he is unable to muster up a personality because he’s so dependent upon the physical part of the thing to muster up this personality. So he feels kind of personality-less. The personality is still parked there in his head.
Well, we’ve done a tremendous thing in just finding out that you could say to 50 percent of the people you meet “Be three feet back of your head,” and the fellow says, “For heaven’s sakes I am.” This was awfully tough. It’s only tough because it was very simple. Been talking about “Save your soul” which, of course, put a red herring on the whole track. The whole track had a red herring on it. What was it? “Your soul is over there.” You know, your soul is something you carry in your hip pocket; not you. Well, the second we recognize that a man’s soul is himself – all the life which he will ever have really, as far as an intimate contact with life itself, is himself, and that is a unit which is capable of producing space, is capable of producing energy and is capable of producing matter. And that is the individual. We shouldn’t say the body’s life unit.
But when we first get him out he doesn’t have any real recognition of himself, usually, as a personality. It’s only after he looks around a little bit and recognizes that he can have a personality, and this whole thing called personality is built on a lot of postulates, that he can take his personality onto himself. In other words, while exteriorized – which is to say, a soul without a body while the body still lives – he yet can have a personality and he yet can experience joy and pain and so forth.
Now, here is the individual. This individual is immortal. But his immortality, of course, can be on a very gradient scale of comfort. He can be mortal very uncomfortably and rather blind, or he can be immortal, clearseeing and able to take care of himself. And we find out that this individual, you, evidently go all along the track of life, but that the shock of loss of one of these bodies – while you’re attributing all your personality to the body – the shock of its loss is sufficient that it wipes out your memory concerning it. Because you say, “Well, the body remembers.” Man believes this; he believes that the body does his remembering. It does his eating for him, doesn’t it? And it does his talking for him. Well, therefore it does his remembering.
And an individual with a little drills begins to pick up memory on the whole track. But completely aside from these things – we’re getting off into controversial things – we do have here these component parts, then, in a preclear. We have, first, this unit which is capable of the production of energy, which unit is alive and is aware. And we would call this an awareness unit. It’s also a space-energy production unit, and this is the individual. And when you’ve subtracted that you actually do have the individual because with a little bit of drill he can have returned to him the personality which he ordinarily attributes to himself plus his body. But this is a matter of postulates. But we do have this and we can separate this individual from his body.
This is a fantastic thing and is actually a very major discovery. Here we had first this biological-mental approach. And the next thing we had right on top of that – we came along with this theta-MEST theory that there is a nothingness up against an allness, and these two in combination make this biological phenomena. And the next thing above that is all of a sudden we’ve got the pure spiritual side of existence staring at us there. We actually can separate an individual from his body.
Well, these are quite some discoveries, by the way, to have a concatenation of that character, but look at the pattern. These are the inevitable discoveries aren’t they? Once we take a rear view of the whole thing we find quite easily that, naturally, we’d discover more. Once we started looking at it you couldn’t help but discover more about the physical universe. And that once you started looking at it, instead of just believing in it or protecting your soul or something, you’d certainly discover more about the spiritual side of things. And, of course, naturally then you’d discover an awful lot of things about the biological side of things. It’s a combination of the two.
There are the parts with which you are working. The primary difference between the physical and the spiritual side… You see, it’s not fair to say mental side. Where is mental parked? Biological. Biological-mental – that’s the center pin. The only real phrase which fits it at all is what man considers spiritual. That phrase fits it much more aptly than any other, but, of course, he really hasn’t had a phrase for it. We’ve had to put a new word in there – thetan. A symbol to represent a missing hole in the language. Because spiritual – he means many other things by spiritual. But we say over here the spiritual side of existence and the physical side of existence have a primary difference between them, an enormous difference between them. One thing which you will recognize instantly – instantly. The physical side of existence does not get ideas. You see that? I mean, there’s an immediate difference there. Now, over here on the spiritual side of existence you got ideas. And over here on the physical side of existence you have no ideas at all.
Hubbard, L. R. (1954, 21 April). Elements of Auditing. Fifth American Advanced Clinical Course, (5ACC-17). Lecture conducted from Phoenix, Arizona.
Notes
- Definition: Theta-MEST theory ↩