More About South African Anatomy Congress

From Southern Africa will spring the next great civilization on this planet, and it will succeed because Scientology and all its technology is on its side. —L. Ron Hubbard

Those historic words, written in the wake of the first and only Congress in the land, marked a period of intensive Scientology growth and development in South Africa.

The year was 1961. And between lectures, research, auditing and executive duties at the Johannesburg HASI, L. Ron Hubbard had come to know Southern Africa—from her Parliamentary Ministers and tribal chiefs, to the high-school students with whom he spoke in newly learned Zulu. While in light of what he saw across that troubled nation, he wrote:

“Our time has arrived.

“Politics has failed.

“On this planet only we and our technology stand between current threats and future destruction.”

To bring that technology to a continent, he convened the Anatomy Congress, on 21 January 1961. It was the largest Congress to date anywhere in the world, with more than five hundred South African Scientologists on hand to learn of Mr. Hubbard’s new breakthrough: the means to unmistakably communicate basics of Dianetics and Scientology to anyone.

Moreover, since time immemorial, the entire field of the mind and spirit had been immersed in mystery and complexity. As he explained, that was because the field had been relegated to philosophical “figure-figure”:

“What we have done that is spectacular is to make a complete breakthrough in the field of the human mind, taking the predictable, practical character of the physical sciences and moving them over into the humanities. And that is what has happened in Dianetics and Scientology.”

And therein lay the substance of what he presented as the Anatomy of the Human Mind Course. Mr. Hubbard laid out the “Things” of Dianetics and Scientology—as concrete and demonstrable as a test tube or measuring stick and existing independent of opinion. Hence, here was the means to present Scientology as a practical subject and as exact and accurate as the physical sciences. Then, too, he did not just show those things, but detailed how to conduct the course itself: the cycle-of-action, start-change-stop, the time track, havingness, present time problems, mental image pictures, confusion and the stable datum—all told, a list of twenty-four fundamental items that formed the basis of this new course.

And were that not enough, he unveiled yet another new auditing and dissemination tool—the Pre-Havingness Scale. Here was an expansion on the “Deadly Quartet”—the four factors necessary to get a preclear fully in session and winning (London Congress on Dissemination & Help).

All of which is to say, with the South African Anatomy Congress came the tools to begin that next great civilization on Earth and thus the substance behind these parting words from L. Ron Hubbard:

“Therefore, the program for South Africa which we espouse, and which I am beating the drum for, is simply: let’s make every man, woman and child in South Africa that we can lay our hands on as able as we possibly can, as fast as we can.”