Lecture: Survival (1)
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1952, 7 January
Document title: Survival
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Professional Course
Location: Wichita, Kansas
Document ID: 5201C07A
Description: Hubbard compares his one-word philosophy of "Survive!" with the Christian "Word of God."
Now, I thought it might be an awfully good idea to talk to you about what survival is. As long as we have known about this word survival, I have never given a lecture on it. I have never written anything more about it than is contained in the handbooks or Science of Survival, and perhaps it might be interesting to you to know how and why this word is what it is. The history of the word is interesting. They used to talk about all knowledge being known in one sentence. Well, back about fourteen years ago or something like that, one sentence was too long. I got things peeled down to one sentence; then I found out it could be put down in one word. This one word happens to be survive.
This follows a very remarkable tradition. Mathematically, it is very sound to be able to reduce all problems to a single common denominator; that is very sound mathematics. It is also very sound mysticism. The Gospel of St. John begins with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Now, that’s interesting that there has been all of this data about a word. There are Persian legends which go back, if I remember rightly, even earlier than the Bible, on one word.
A codification of knowledge contained in a couple of syllables is an interesting attempt. And there is something funny about that word survive. Every time a technique has departed from it or has gone outside its perimeter of definition, the technique has failed and is unworkable. But it becomes workable the moment that it is brought into the area and definition of survive. Now, the entire package that is Dianetics today, a science of static’s and motion, has come all the way round in a circle again and is finally embraced entirely, at last, by that word survive. So perhaps it might help you to know something about it.
I have asked several gentlemen of various faiths, what was the Word in the Bible? Well, oddly enough, several gentlemen of the Jewish faith who know that faith very well tell me that the Word has never been written down but is generally supposed by the church to be known as motion or life as an animate thing. That is supposed to be the Word. That is strange, isn’t it? How long a bridge did you have to build to make the word motion mean anything in a complete scientific sense?
In several Christian churches, you ask what is that word and you draw a blank. They say, “Well, that was the Word. The Word was God.”
“And what is God?”
And they say, “Well, that’s Creator or Creation.”
You could also say that this means point of origin or point of creation. And we study origin — origin of what? There is origin of only one thing, according to what we know today in nuclear physics: there is origin of motion. So we get back to the same thing.
You go back in India’s sunny clime and start asking the old boys what this is all about and they say, “Well, it has something to do with motion.” Good heavens! How long has man known this? I see it going clear back pre-Vedic hymns — that far back — and coming forward along this track.
In science, when they had studied physics — they had studied natural philosophy (the ancient Greeks had, the Romans had, and they applied it; they were good engineers) — up through the Middle Ages, on into all of the periods of philosophy that we have gone through here in the last few hundred years, you find in each and every case that they were reducing the universe to motion. Sometimes they do it with mathematics and sometimes they do it with an explanation and sometimes they do it with a parable. But each time they reduce it to motion. And today your nuclear physicist with his cyclotrons, his particles, his speed of light, his vanishment of time and all this sort of thing — motion. What is in matter? Incredibly enough, it is motion. That is all. It has to do with a particle of energy — which is motion itself but has weight and mass because of a vibrational point — that is surrounded by several electrons, protons and neutrons, which forms an atom. And these atoms form into molecules — or just form in the structure as atoms — and make compounds. A piece of metal is simply motion. It is fields of motion making up small bits of matter — very interesting. Motion is something that takes place in time and space, and time and space are evidently reducible themselves to motion. Fascinating business.
Now, you look over life. What is life? Life has a quality of animating matter. You can see plainly that life animates matter. A man is alive, he can move and he can move things, and then you shoot him and he is dead and he can’t. That is a very simple proof: that life and living organisms have the power to move matter, and when they no longer have life in them they no longer have the power. That is what is known as one of these open-and-shut cases — very simple proof.
The life static and the origin of life must be, then, something which merely has the power of handling motion. We go back up the track and we look at the various old philosophies and so on, and we find “Creator” or “origin point” or “motion” — it’s motion handling.
Hubbard, L. R. (1952, 7 January). Survival. Professional Course, (5201C07A). Lecture conducted from Wichita, Kansas.