Donation: $142
Length: 64 hours
Category: ACCs
“We’re walking, right now, into a space‑opera age. And we are probably the only people that know anything about what Uncle Sammy and Uncle Khrushy face.” While Soviet leader Khrushchev rejoiced over the Russian satellite Sputnik and Russia’s newfound supremacy in the space race, L. Ron Hubbard convened a truly historic ACC.
"I believe we have attained the first major breakthrough Man has gotten in this universe for a very, very long while.
"To confront the rather high do-nothingness but very wise state of the Asiatic holy man and to actually partake of this, and to look at it with something like horror that people could be so idle and know so much and do so little, and to turn around on the other hand and confront the brutality of engineering, was probably too great a disparity on both hands. And out of a state of shock and an inability to reconcile them, I did what has been done here—and we have accomplished the breakthrough." —L. Ron Hubbard
On 4 October 1957, an aluminum alloy sphere 23 inches in diameter and weighing 184 pounds left Earth at a speed of 5 miles per second and, exiting the atmosphere, curved into an orbit 560 miles above the planet’s surface. The Russian satellite Sputnik had entered history, and the Space Age had arrived.
However, among Western governments, to whom the launch came as a complete surprise, there was far more consternation than celebration. And when the Soviets followed a month later with a second and much larger satellite, communist ascendancy in this new era seemed confirmed—especially when a rushed American attempt to match the Soviet achievement ended with a Vanguard rocket exploding two seconds after takeoff on 6 December. Thus, American political leaders were jittery, facing what they believed could be serious military consequences from a failure to achieve dominance in space.
That, then, had been the backdrop of world events when L. Ron Hubbard convened what he described as “the most important Congress we have ever held” in the closing days of December 1957. Marked by a series of breakthrough announcements, the Ability Congress is where he released new data concerning the source of mental image pictures, the anatomy of Start, Change and Stop—and, of particular relevance given those world events—the means to Third Dynamic survival.
And hot on the tracks of the Ability Congress , with a detailed rundown on application for auditors, came the 19th American Advanced Clinical Course. Then again, if that Congress had been historic, it was to be an ACC equally memorable. For the auditors who had flown in to be on the ground for one of Mr. Hubbard's now legendary Advanced Clinical Courses were about to learn more than a few things about the “Space Age” that neither US President Eisenhower nor Soviet leader Khrushchev could even have conceived.
The date was 20 January 1958. The location—a fine ivy-covered building at the corner of R and 19th Street NW in Washington, DC. The atmosphere—charged with a sense of urgency and expectation that was soon to be more than fulfilled:
“It’s quite amusing for this much space opera to be turning up at this time. Actually, space opera is restimulated by science fiction. Or science fiction is restimulated by space opera. But we’re walking, right now, into a space-opera age. And we are probably the only people that know anything about what Uncle Sammy and Uncle Khrushy face.”
What followed was Mr. Hubbard’s riveting account of whole track incidents implanted in beings by space societies, the implications for this civilization and, specifically, the consequences in any preclear.
“You get some randomity such as I’ve just described to you in space opera and the fellow pulls a curtain. He just literally drops a mental image picture called a ‘curtain’ over it.
“Well, he generally picks it up from the backtrack and it generally comes out of space opera. And the amount of force, blast and duration and upset in one of these space-opera incidents would make anything that could happen to anybody at this stage on Earth look pretty pale. It would be something on the order of firing a guy with a catapult mechanism at a couple of hundred thousand miles an hour, or something like that, into a stone cliff, you see? You got lots of impact, you got this and that. So the amount of savageness which occurs in these incidents makes them very resistive. And so it has taken a very, very long time to solve this thing called fields and it’s quite a triumph today to be able to solve one.”
An essential tool in that solution was the reintroduction of something none of those auditors had foreseen—the E-Meter. Their use had been abandoned 3 years earlier when Mathison (the manufacturer) made them too complex for anybody but an engineer to operate while, at the same time, their needle reactions proved inadequate to the advanced processes L. Ron Hubbard had been developing for clearing. However, advances in electronics technology had now made possible a new type of transistorized meter—thus, the breakthrough of the famous American Blue Meter. Its use had already proven its effectiveness, cutting auditing time by two-thirds, and hence the E-Meter resumed its rightful place as an indispensable component to the successful accomplishment to Clear and Operating Thetan.
Yet notwithstanding his breakthroughs in whole track research and tools for auditor use, they all led up to and climaxed in a development which, in its application, would mark the 19th ACC as historic: Clear Procedure. A codification of all the processes Mr. Hubbard had found most workable when applied by auditors, it consisted of an exact series of steps to obtain the state of Clear. And its foundation stone was an element at the heart of all beings, for as he explained:
“Now, participation in the session is covered here in Clear Procedure and I want to point out to you that the kingpin, the main cogwheel, the center of participation is Help and this is cleared in CCH 0 and that’s the one that takes the stress.”
With participation established, auditors continued through the following stages of Clear Procedure toward the final goal of putting the preclear at Cause—for that was a Clear: A thetan who can knowingly be at cause over Life, Matter, Energy, Space and Time, subjective and objective. While to ensure their full grasp of every facet of clearing, Mr. Hubbard instructed them on its background, principles and mechanics:
And from all he had taught came the culmination of everything he had worked for—indeed, his primary goal in auditor training since the first Foundation and Book One. For given the urgency of broad scale clearing, he had laid down a particular condition: he would give no personal coaching. Rather, the Instructors alone would be responsible for the supervision of the course and for ensuring that the students knew how to audit. Therefore, when no less than 15 of those 35 select ACC students achieved the glorious state of Clear on the course itself, with many others well advanced on that road, that marked the crowning achievement—auditors other than L. Ron Hubbard with the skill, know-how and certainty to clear others, to clear them routinely, and thereby to lay the foundations for planetary clearing.
And that, ultimately, was the only race that mattered. Thus, Operation Clear: to “Clear you, then Clear your environment, then Clear the country.” For as L. Ron Hubbard declared,
“You could say that we’ve been marking time as an organization waiting for this day. The day has arrived. We need mark time no longer. In the teeth of a worsening world, we’ve made it, no matter what happens on Earth.
“Quod erat demonstrandum.
“It can be done for you.”
