Phoenix Lectures: Freeing the Human Spirit

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The main thing that we have uncovered today is the state of beingness which one actually has. Instead of speculations about does Man have a soul or doesn’t Man, we have data. We know exactly what a thetan is, we know tremendous numbers of things with great accuracy. —L. Ron Hubbard

Phoenix, Arizona, 1954: L. Ron Hubbard had been researching, lecturing and group processing on a nearly continuous basis for the past year. The aim of this intense activity was the achievement of a goal as old as Man himself—the freeing of the human spirit.

At the heart of that activity was a new training curriculum, Advanced Clinical Courses, providing profound insight into both the phenomena of the mind and spirit and the rationale of research and investigation. Groups of trained auditors enrolled for six-week periods of study and co-auditing, with personal instruction and lecturing by L. Ron Hubbard. And that training was relentless. In fact, over a nine-month period, he had delivered seven back-to-back ACCs comprising more than 450 lectures.

The training objective was twofold: first, to bring auditors to an exteriorized state themselves; and second, to increase their willingness and ability to audit others to that state. By the 7th ACC, and to exactly those ends, Mr. Hubbard had successfully finalized a processing regimen by which any auditor—even one with relatively little training—could and would free others. And with that, not only was training stabilized, but he was able to announce:

“We have, in this year of 1954, processes which, even when worked upon groups, produce en masse a state of beingness which 2,500 years ago was being groped for by the select few. We have more command over the phenomena of life than any have ever had before.”

In the wake of those words, L. Ron Hubbard next set out to render his hard-won discoveries into a concise yet comprehensive course of study every Scientologist could rapidly assimilate. In other words, he was about to present a panoramic view of Scientology, complete.

With just that in mind, he assembled a standardized textbook, the Auditor’s Handbook, now known as The Creation of Human Ability—A Handbook for Scientologists. To accompany the book, in July 1954, he then delivered a series of half-hour lectures encapsulating the principles, practice and wisdom of Scientology.

Through the months that followed, Mr. Hubbard added further lectures to round out this historic series. First, in August, he recorded four lectures embracing the Axioms. Second, in October, he provided an additional twelve lectures describing, one by one, each of the legendary thetan exterior processes of Route One.

The final compilation of lectures, handpicked by Mr. Hubbard and broadly released to Scientologists as the Phoenix Professional Course Lectures, soon became renowned as the Phoenix Lectures.

Here, then, is the Summary of Scientology, the very essence upon which the subject rests, the embracive statement of the religion and its heritage and hence, the embracive lecture series on Scientology itself.

As definitive as they are immortal, these lectures stand as L. Ron Hubbard’s landmark overview of the Scientology religion, containing the fundamentals, axioms and truths which made possible, for the first time, freedom from the endless spiral of birth and death.