More About 3rd American ACC

SOP 8-O is, of course, a technique which simply drills up the capabilities, on a gradient scale, of the thetan so he can see, hear, speak, get out electricity, throw out postulates, control bodies other than his own, and do other things which are well within his abilities. —L. Ron Hubbard

Such was the intensity of the demand from auditors living in the West to be personally trained by L. Ron Hubbard that shortly after the commencement of the first Advanced Clinical Course in Camden, New Jersey, he scheduled what he termed a “Western Clinical Course” for early 1954.

While two of his staff traveled ahead to Phoenix, Arizona, to prepare for both the Clinical Course and the Congress that would precede it, Mr. Hubbard completed delivery of the 2nd ACC, leaving Camden shortly thereafter. Given that he had not been to Phoenix in two years, the western Dianeticists and Scientologists were exuberant. But little did they know just how well-founded their exuberance was. For while the talk of the Scientology world was Standard Operating Procedure of 8-C (SOP 8-C), Mr. Hubbard had already advanced its use to unimagined heights, very much including a special form of SOP 8-C for auditing a group.

But if students first learned of that breakthrough at the Western Congress, it was but a foretaste of what awaited them when the 3rd American Advanced Clinical Course opened on January 4, 1954. For here L. Ron Hubbard taught not only SOP 8-C to accomplish Theta Clear, but the full application of Standard Operating Procedure 8-O to achieve an even higher goal: Operating Thetan. Addressed to the thetan exterior, SOP 8-O marked the development of a procedure intrinsic to the restoration of a thetan’s ability to handle energy and to grant life.

“The problem has two halves and one of these problems is this: he believes the mest universe is dangerous to him. You disabuse him of that. That’s the first half of SOP 8-O and the other half is jolly well convincing him he’s damn dangerous to the mest universe.”

While SOP 8-O stands at the forefront of the 3rd ACC, L. Ron Hubbard instructed the students on a wide range of related skills, phenomena and discoveries concerning the native abilities of a thetan and the auditor’s role in achieving them, including:

• How a preclear can endow mest with life—with his own endowment of livingness;
• How disendowment and endowment of the past, present and future are the best things an individual does;
• How the injection of livingness and beingness into an individual is effected through Livingness Processing;
• How Courage Processing relates to serenity;
• And, how Opening Procedure of 8-C is used with the next-to-the-last list of Self Analysis on both lower-level cases and exteriorized thetans.

But for all else the 3rd ACC signified in terms of technical advance, it also marked a turning point in organizational establishment and the widespread dissemination of new discoveries. For while continual demand for Mr. Hubbard’s personal instruction had already resulted in acquisition of new quarters twice over in New Jersey—it was here that he found the ideal locale and quarters to carry him well into the future. To just that end, and with a complex of offices across several buildings, L. Ron Hubbard moved all operations and saw to the permanent establishment for the headquarters of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists in Phoenix, Arizona.

So opened the first chapter of the Scientology era in the Valley of the Sun, an era that would forever be known as the Creation of Human Ability.