More About The Golden Dawn: Phoenix Evening Lectures

The salvation hoped for these past two thousand years is here. You are being told that in this paragraph. And it is true.

It has not come with blares of trumpets or the flare and flash of flame. It has come quietly into your letter box and you aren’t at all sure you should believe it. —L. Ron Hubbard

The site was Phoenix, Arizona, the year 1954, and with no less than an offer of immortality, L. Ron Hubbard issued an Invitation to Freedom that quite literally marked the beginning of a golden dawn.

Having advanced from Dianetics and Book One in 1950, application of those discoveries in eradicating the Reactive Mind had, in turn, resulted in a breakthrough of even greater magnitude: The isolation, description and handling of the human spirit and the birth of Scientology. Yet if that discovery of the human spirit had taken place two years earlier in 1952, it was not as if the general public had any inkling of it by 1954—a circumstance Mr. Hubbard fully intended. Until now.

More specifically, the full and complete statement of what he had achieved could be summed in a single word: Exteriorization. And with its achievement by himself and others, he had immediately set out to accomplish the next most crucial target: developing techniques and processes that could be applied by every auditor to, in turn, help every being achieve this ultimate freedom. Hence, while the preceding two years had included his instruction of no less than seven Advanced Clinical Courses to train the most expert auditors, delivering more than 450 lectures, all had been given to a select few in preparation of what he could now roll out. For with that technology refined and codified—exact processes to be applied in an exact sequence to an exact and inevitable result—Mr. Hubbard was now ready to bring it to the planet at large.

Indeed, with what had now been accomplished, Scientology had firmly entered the domain of religion, capable of realizing the hoped for dreams that Man had sought since the dawn of recorded time. And therein lay the backstory of a new publication now rolling out from his headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona. Appropriately entitled “The Golden Dawn,” it included L. Ron Hubbard’s articles on “The Church of Scientology,” “The Creed of the Church,” “What Is Scientology?” “What a Group Session Is Like” and exercises to “help your friends”—specifically auditing assists. But what he was offering was more than information. Rather, it was an invitation to an introduction to Scientology by Mr. Hubbard himself.

And so began a series of weekly lectures, Wednesday evenings to be precise, beginning in the fall of 1954. Opening at the Church of Scientology at 403 East Roosevelt, demand would soon be so great that he was next lecturing at the Monroe School Auditorium at 215 North 7th Street. Yet, if what those attendees experienced was unique in all their lives, the timeless nature of what L. Ron Hubbard presented is no less extraordinary today.

As for how it rolled out, while the format included an hour lecture providing a fundamental of Dianetics and Scientology, each was then followed by an hour of Group Processing—all delivered personally by Mr. Hubbard. And while that agenda may have been designed for those newly interested in Scientology, here were Group Processing sessions directly drawn from the most advanced processes he had developed to accomplish exteriorization and exterior abilities. Hence, here is a public lecture series like no other, the one-two of lecture and Group Processing, for both ground-level introduction and advanced group clearing.

Then again, what L. Ron Hubbard put forth in these first public lectures since 1950 stand today as timeless classics—“Miracles,” “Scientology and Ability,” and “On the Second Dynamic,” to name just a handful of the wide range of titles. Similarly, datums from Mr. Hubbard that spark immediate recognition by Scientologists and non-Scientologists, alike, received their first broad release in these public talks. Case in point is his famous delineation of “being there” and “communicating” as the only two “crimes” this universe punishes. And from there, with Mr. Hubbard providing a comprehensive sweep through Dianetics and Scientology, entire lectures on fundamentals and the application of Scientology solutions within society: “The Affinity-Reality-Communication Triangle,” “The Eight Dynamics” and, even addressing an individual and social problem common both then and today: “Alcoholism.” While as to those Group Processing sessions, they were drawn right from The Creation of Human Ability and not even the most serious could keep a straight face when L. Ron Hubbard gave the auditing command, “Start Laughing.”

And yet, with all these lectures provided, there was an even greater story unfolding: Mr. Hubbard setting the future course of Scientology with the very formula for creating a new civilization:

“Therefore, a group such as Scientologists and Dianeticists working in a society by simply pointing out to a society—by doing nothing else, you understand, no processing or something—but simply pointing out to a society that freedom can and does exist, could probably by that action alone, if they consistently and continually did this, produce a Golden Age for a race.”

To the accomplishment of just those aims, he presented a full panoply of breakthroughs:

• Participation—how the physical well-being of a person is as good as he can participate in life;
• Games—how a game is an activity engaged on by one or more individuals in order to maintain their interest in communication in life;
• The Environment—how Man makes progress when he adjusts his environment to himself, not the other way around;
• Success—how it occurs when a person can look around and see what has to be done, what has to be remedied, what is actual, and then goes and does something about it;
• Dianetics and Scientology—the history of their development;
• Reality—the reality of individuals at different levels of the Tone Scale, and why an individual in apathy would only see sharply those things which were apathetic;
• The Family—why today the Second Dynamic is the biggest government of the individual;
• Auditing—how the auditor’s mission is to bring the individual up to where he can be, to some degree, a player;
• The Mind—how the romance and adventure of Dianetics and Scientology are actually in the domain of the auditor;
• Group Auditing—it increases one’s awareness of the environment, and one’s communication;
• Space and Energy—unless they are understood in their psychological frame of reference, physics will never be understood;
• Science—the different sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology are missing the essential element of life;
• Certainty—the two types;
• Specialization—if you had a race of individuals who could associate without fear and without any slightest qualms with any part of existence, you wouldn’t have any specialists but you would have a civilization.

When it comes to what L. Ron Hubbard’s lectures meant for the Phoenix area, one need point no further than a rapidly growing field, the expansion of Scientology premises to eight buildings and a dedicated auditorium for his lectures—whereupon they even outgrew those facilities, leading to the establishment of the Founding Church in the nation’s capital.

As to what they mean for Scientologists today, here are the public lectures and Group Processing sessions, drawn from the highest levels, yet providing the data and means of application to bring about the golden dawn of a new civilization.