Lecture: Research and Discovery
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1950, 29 June
Document title: Research and Discovery
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Professional Course
Location: Elizabeth, New Jersey
Document ID: 5006C29
Description: Hubbard quotes from a letter from the Institute of General Semantics.
Someone from the General Semantics Institute wrote in recently and mentioned that General Semantics and Dianetics went hand in hand. He is absolutely right, because the reform of language and how to think, how to look at things, how to differentiate—all of these things are of vast importance to a clear.
A person can get up to a point where he has no more aberration and there is no more false data in the bank that is going to be thrown at him and enforced upon him by pain. Now he is free to think about any part of his life that he wants to think about and all of a sudden he finds out that he hasn’t enough data. So he starts getting data and aligning it. A person at the state of clear doesn’t sit around and gaze at his navel, which is something else that is important. Not one of these people have I been able to slow down and stop actually long enough to thoroughly investigate. They take off!
The following is an excerpt from a letter we received recently from the Institute of General Semantics:
“As I see it, the process of clearing doesn’t automatically furnish a man with a system of evaluating and a scientific orientation which will enable him to live most efficiently in our present socio-cultural environment. Nor is it supposed to. It simply removes his engrams and frees his analyzer.
“Now an Australian bushman with a freed analyzer, to take an extreme example, still doesn’t have the scientific data and orientations necessary to sane evaluating by our standards. Conversely, General Semantics, which we believe provides an optimum orientation for sanity, probably can’t be adopted fully by a normal aberree full of engrams.
“To oversimplify, Dianetics will clear his engrams and General Semantics will give him an optimum 1950 orientation for sane and effective living. We hope that workers in Dianetics can be persuaded to give thorough consideration to the notion of Dianetics and General Semantics as a working team. To this end, I am inviting information, advice, suggestions and so forth from Dianeticists on Dianetics and its role. In return, I hope that we workers in General Semantics can contribute something of value to Dianeticists, and Dianetics.
“If you and other workers in Dianetics could come to our summer seminar workshop, we might cooperate to our mutual benefit and to the eventual benefit of people everywhere.”
In this, we are now dealing with the field of education. There is Educational Dianetics. It is a rather precision proposition. For instance, it starts out with definitions of a datum and continues on through with evaluation. It covers the field of logic and thinking and the evaluating processes of the mind, and it covers the optimum way to teach, and so on.General Semantics and morphological thinking are all very well, but remember we have suddenly moved into the field of education. Here opinion can exist, and the self-determinism of the individual. That is not something you can enforce. You would no more be able to push down the throat of a clear how he should think or what he should use for the basis of his thinking than you would be able to knock the Empire State Building over by sneezing.
So it puts education straight out of the authoritarian realm. Education goes into a very strange state on this because it says the mind, if it is going to be right, reserves to itself the right to evaluate. If the mind is being forced to evaluate, it cannot then guarantee that it is going to be right.
Hubbard, L. R. (1950, 29 June). Research and Discovery. Professional Course, (5006C29). Lecture conducted from Elizabeth, New Jersey.