David Miscavige - Articles and Speeches

On the eve of the year 2000, before a Los Angeles audience of nearly 14,000 from dozens of nations, Mr. David Miscavige presented an historic address — benchmarking the end of the first half-century of Dianetics and Scientology.

Here was the story behind the meteoric rise of the Scientology religion, and all that it faced and ultimately overcame.

What follows are extracts from this pivotal event.

MR. MISCAVIGE: Welcome to an evening like no other in our history, and a New Year celebration like none other on Earth. For while the whole world awaits the New Millennium tonight, with whatever hope and aspirations they can muster, this one is different for us.

Because we are not only celebrating the first half-century of LRH Technology, but before this night is over, I guarantee you those words “New Millennium” will take on an entirely new meaning.

Now, of course, a thousand years is hardly a blip in the greater galactic drama, not to mention the greater scheme of a thetan’s existence. But considering how long beings have been spiraling down the chute, and just what Scientology represents as the turning point upward, the last half of this twentieth century is one that nobody will forget.

But let’s first assess the last fifty years, from this phrase, “Fastest Growing Religion on Earth.” Because while you may still find some places where Scientology is not yet a fully operative word, you’ve got to consider the real substance behind that phrase. Factually, the full story runs so much deeper
— L. Ron Hubbard forging a technology to bring about total spiritual freedom. And therein lies the story, of not just this twentieth century, but the saga of all ages past and future.

So tonight, let’s step back and examine the grand view. And to begin, let’s return to 1950, and consider what it really meant to introduce Dianetics and Scientology at the mid-point of this twentieth century.

Historians would eventually call it the “Age of Uncertainty.” After all, in reply to a first world war that took 37 million lives, came a second which claimed another 55 million. And while they all died beneath the slogan “War to end all wars,” what was the commonly accepted solution provided by world leaders, on the eve of Dianetics?

As they said it, if you really wanted to put an end to war, there was only one “solution.” Build a bigger bomb. And as for the psychiatric role in executing this strategy, their job was to convince an American public to willingly support this system and the increasingly exorbitant tax bites to pay for it. It was all part and parcel of that plan to keep America on the edge of panic. And it worked.

What that modern-day Inquisition created, was best described by a United States Senator in these terms: “Race is set against race, party against party, religion against religion, neighbor against neighbor, and child against parent.” So let there be no doubt that the real tool of the Cold War was not the launching of an atomic bomb. It was terror, as in terrorizing the population. And, it appeared they had no opposition — no one to get in their way. All they had to do was make sure everyone was on their payroll.

So that was 1950. Bigger and bigger bombs. Cold War psychiatry generating terror. And a population living in the shadow of a mushroom cloud. And make no mistake, that was the world stage in which L. Ron Hubbard presented Dianetics.

As we gather here on the eve of the Year 2000, when I refer to Book One you may instantly think to yourself “a handbook of auditing.” But you can’t forget that world view of 1950, and the real purpose of Book One — the eradication of the source of aberration that had brought the planet to the state it was in, as of May 1950. And in evidence of that LRH purpose, once again listen to the very first paragraphs of Dianetics, “A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands of generations of man. Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have perished for the lack of it. Rome went to dust for the want of it. China swims in blood for the need of it. And down in the arsenals an atom bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it.”

The fact is, LRH’s discovery of the Reactive Mind as the source of man’s ill, and auditing as its cure, had given the people of the world a “weapon” — one far more powerful than the atomic bomb. So what did Dianetics represent to a 1950 population, nervously scanning the skies for incoming nuclear warheads? Not just a bolt from the blue — Dianetics was a bolt from the very heavens!

And therein lay the spark behind those words, “Book One Boom” and “Grass Roots Prairie Fire.” And as that fire continued rolling out across the American heartland, newspapers in towns, like Houston, Texas, were soon reporting this: “Booksellers were still dizzy with surprise, but not too dizzy to write for extra copies of the ‘sleeper,’ which had suddenly taken the local reading public by storm.” And why exactly the surprise? Well, here was a book with no fawning review in the New York Times, no establishment “endorsements.” Moreover, the book had been published by a small textbook publisher — hardly the type to reach bestseller lists. And still, Dianetics was outselling every other book on the shelf.

But there was something else unique to that Book One story, and it’s what really “rattled the china,” in establishment quarters. Here was a book that wasn’t simply read and then relegated to the living-room shelf. Rather, here was a book that sparked a national storm of activity. People weren’t just reading. They were doing.

If the Book One sensation proved a surprise to others, from LRH’s view it was like a tidal wave. The figures actually worked out like this: Two thousand letters in May 1950, and two hundred every single day thereafter, through June, July and August — more than 18,000 letters. And finally, here was a book that literally sent readers to LRH’s doorstep in Elizabeth, New Jersey, packed his living room — standing room only — and otherwise redefined his life in these terms: It was never again to be his own. As a matter of fact — and we’re talking weeks — the flood of students required the renting of a second and third house. And then, the forming of the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation.

Meanwhile, by the end of 1950, over 250,000 more had audited their friends and family, until newspapers were finally reporting this: “It will bring the long-sought ‘rule of reason’ to the problems of local and world politics, communication, law, and almost every other field of human endeavor — the goal of a 3000-year search.” And all that was just the beginning — Book One, 1950.

Now, of course, there’s a parallel story to all I’ve just told you, and that’s the story of LRH research and development. Because, after all, Dianetics was only a beginning, and LRH’s final words couldn’t have been more to that point: “For God’s sake, get busy and build a better bridge!”

Book One had detailed the anatomy of the mind and the mental image pictures comprising the “reactive” mind. But, as LRH said, the key question still to be answered, was this: “Who or what is looking at the pictures?” And the search for that answer became LRH’s immediate target of research.

The first clues surfaced in the summer of 1950, when preclears began recalling past-life incidents. And in that regard, incidents prior to this life were not only appearing with greater and greater regularity, but, more importantly, cases only advanced when those apparently past-life incidents were addressed. Or, as LRH later stated: “Everybody ‘knew’ that you only lived once, and the Battle Royale which ensued on past deaths actually barred any research on them for about 6 months, merely because everyone that I asked to run one, was promptly and immediately invalidated, and it made them ill to be invalidated.

“I didn’t know why it would make a person so ill. You can invalidate an engram. That didn’t make him very ill. But if you invalidated a past death, ohhhh!”

What was that “Battle Royale?” Well, according to the Board of Directors at that New Jersey Foundation, it didn’t matter whether past lives were valid or not. So by actual Board decree, they attempted to “outlaw” any and all discussion of the matter. Why? Because if you wanted establishment blessings in 1950, you didn’t talk about anything that couldn’t be described in terms of physical phenomena.

But if that was prevailing think as of 1950, consider a much older “Battle Royale” — one that backtracks all the way to fourth century Rome. Now up until that point, past lives were common knowledge. Everyone lived more than once, and everyone knew it.

So what changed? Roman Emperor Constantine had a “vision” on the battlefield and attributed his victory to a newfound faith in Christianity. And suddenly, Christianity progressed from a “persecuted cult,” to the official State religion of the Roman Empire. There was, however, a tradeoff. The Emperor wanted something in return — and he got it. The Christian bishops outlawed past lives. The issue wasn’t even theological, it was political. Or, as the historians explain it: “The Church needed the whip of Judgment Day to keep the faithful in line. It was therefore a matter of survival for the Church not to allow belief in reincarnation to take hold among her followers.”

And if you’ve never heard of the Paulicians of Thrace, the Bogomils of Bulgaria, or the Patarenes of the Balkans — that’s because those were all people who doggedly held to their knowledge of past lives, and were slaughtered for it. That was the end of past lives across the western world.

That was also precisely what LRH encountered when the Foundation Board attempted to outlaw research in 1950. In response, LRH simply told them this: “You can’t pass resolutions to say what is or isn’t in the human mind. And you can’t tell me what to research!” At which point he traveled to pre-communist Havana, Cuba, away from such distractions, to commence the next step of research, with Science of Survival.

So came LRH’s breakthrough, to account for all phenomena observed through the previous months — the “Theta-MEST theory.” He explained it this way: “Theta is thought, life force, élan vital, the spirit, the soul, or any other of the numerous definitions it has had for some thousands of years. The physical universe would be the universe of matter, energy, space and time (MEST). As soon as we separate these two entities, a host of problems heretofore quite complex resolve into simplicity.”

Just as the discovery of the dynamic principle of existence, “Survive!” had led to the discovery of the reactive mind in Dianetics, the Theta-MEST theory, as contained in Science of Survival, would form the basis of research into past lives, and the life force itself. While LRH had empirical evidence of past lives — that still wasn’t enough.

LRH looked at it this way — science already had “devices” to measure virtually every physical universe phenomena. Applied to the physical, they had even led to the discovery of how to split the atom. But they had never managed to penetrate the universe of life itself. Why? The answer is simple. They weren’t looking.

In fact, the “victories” of science became the failures of past religion — “proof” that all was physical in nature. For example, when Galileo said the Earth revolved around the Sun, he was arrested by the Catholic Church, for “heresy.” Of course science, did in fact, prove that the Earth traveled around the Sun. All of which tended to redefine religion as — “mere belief having nothing particular to do with reality,” while science was defined as — “what was observable?” Meaning, could you touch it?

That is where both science and old religions hit a brick wall, and precisely where LRH picked it up. It’s a key point. After all, great philosophers, and religious leaders, had been looking throughout the ages. Why did they fail? In LRH’s words: “They needed the higher mathematics and electronics, which would, over two-thousand years later, develop their philosophies.” And why does he specifically mention electronics in terms of proving the spiritual nature of man? The E-Meter. And with it came the proof of past lives, and so much more. The source of life itself could be seen, and could be measured.

Then came the landmark research with the meter, when LRH plotted out the principal incidents on the whole track. And what he found was that every preclear responded to the same incidents in exactly the same way. Their description of the incidents, their reaction to the incidents, and the E-Meter phenomena, all the same. He released these discoveries in a book called What to Audit, known today as History of Man. And when one observes the fact that LRH was no longer dealing with engrams that could be explained as traces on a cell — but the theta universe — then you get pretty close to his jump-off point from Dianetics to something else. As a matter of fact, you get to February 6, 1952 when LRH announced a new subject — Scientology!

What followed was a full briefing, decade by decade, on the history, triumphs and accomplishments of Dianetics and Scientology, culminating in the close of the 1990s, and thus where Scientology stood at the onset of the 21st century.

While everywhere we bring our technology to bear marks a milestone in itself and cause for celebration, you have to take it all in.

You have to consider the whole.

So let me roll it in just those terms and tell you what else we accomplished in the 1990s and exactly where we stand today, in all sectors, as we close out this century.

It starts with the global view of the Association for Better Living and Education — ABLE — now with 445 groups across 59 nations utilizing LRH tech to heal populations devastated by a century of psychiatry, and so lift them to the point where they, too, can go free.

And exactly to that point, there’s Criminon. Because you can’t set people free if they’ve been terrorized by criminals. So by the end of the nineties, we brought seventy-five hundred inmates through the Criminon courses, and court systems from California to Alabama now regularly direct offenders to Criminon. Every prison in Israel utilizes Criminon, as well as nine hundred more programs in twenty nations.

Likewise, people can’t go free if they are drugged out, or suffering what drugs bring to their neighborhoods. And that’s LRH drug rehab tech in application under the Narconon banner. As of tonight, 1.2 million students have been turned away from drugs through Narconon drug education lectures. While in total across 27 nations, there are more than 65 Narconon centers.

Then there’s education, because people can’t go free if they can’t acquire wisdom — not to mention all illiteracy costs in poverty and despair. But through the 1990s, Applied Scholastics has been turning the tide with LRH Study Tech in 289 centers world over. In South Africa, where more than two million students now employ LRH study tools. In China, where more than five thousand teachers have been trained to use those tools and yet another eighteen hundred in the Dominican Republic. Until, as of tonight, nearly thirty-three thousand teachers apply LRH Study Tech for the benefit of almost twenty million students.

But you still have that planetary moral crisis for which LRH wrote The Way to Happiness. It’s distributed world over by The Way to Happiness Foundation, and today The Way to Happiness is in more than sixty countries, translated into 27 languages, with a worldwide distribution of more than 54 million copies.

Yet even removing rampant criminality, drug abuse, illiteracy, moral despair and psychiatry, you’re still facing a population trapped in a carefully-woven web of economic lies and pervasive anxiety. And the answer is WISE — the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. In the 1990s, WISE came into play in honestly miraculous ways, using administrative tools to bring whole cities back from the dead, across an economically devastated Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, in South Africa, the Inkatha Freedom Party employs the LRH org board. Just one more example of how that dream to provide black Africa with the tools for freedom, has been realized.

Then there’s the Hubbard College International in Los Angeles — now a fully recognized institution and granting Associate degrees, while there are now 29 Hubbard Colleges world over, 164 groups and more than 101,000 companies currently using LRH Tech.

But for all our groups and activities accomplish with the application of LRH Tech to halt the cultural tailspin, let’s not forget that people still need spiritual salvation. And so field auditors move out under the International Hubbard Ecclesiastical League of Pastors, or I HELP. And in addition to providing the LRH tools found in The Scientology Handbook, Volunteer Ministers are now moving into disaster sites — and so saving lives in Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, Greece, Venezuela and China. While today, even the Red Cross now calls in our ministers and uses our tech from Northridge, California to Papua New Guinea.

And as Scientologists continue moving out — across ninety-one nations to date — those they help reach for more tech. And so we build missions to open The Bridge under the banner of Scientology Missions International. And with missions, we’re not just halting planetary decline — we’re actually placing people on The Bridge to Freedom. And to make LRH tech accessible to virtually everyone, the on-ramps to The Bridge are no longer in only 14 languages, but in 53 languages — or more than eight-tenths of the world’s population.

And with a computer-networked International Translation Unit, translating a greater volume of materials in 1999, than through all forty-eight previous years combined. We’re also utilizing our own film studio, film production lab and dissemination facilities — all to bring our message to every inhabitant of this planet.

And to accommodate the millions stepping onto The Bridge, we’re continually building and improving our organizations. Because that’s our living Bridge to span the whole of this planet, with our Church organizations across Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. That’s 163 organizations in all, turning out a new breed of auditors in cities like Washington, D.C. — where LRH established the Founding Church — and Hamburg, where our new church building represents our most powerful statement to date in that nation.

And all of it for another resounding statement on just who we are and what we represent. From one end of this planet to another, with twenty-three hundred missions, groups and organizations.

And that brings us to the close of this evening’s event and this 20th century.

Now, we could all sit back and say to ourselves — look what we’ve accomplished, look how far we have come. From one man, with one book, to a movement that truly spans the globe bringing real solutions, and real help to every strata of society. And if we did that, we would certainly be right. For if you tuned in to all of the New Year’s events around the globe, rolled them into one, they still would not add up to what we have celebrated tonight.

Which brings me to my point. Because our story is not merely the most significant of this century, it is the story of all the ages.

Moreover, when you consider that we now hold in our hands what has never been held in the hands of anyone, then you come to the realization of something else that has been given to us: Responsibility. Religious movements that preceded us, have swept this Earth and, to one degree or another, have brought peace and compassion in their wake. Yet with all that, we find the planet in the state it is in because they did not have the one thing we hold: an actual technology by which Man can save his soul. And while we may be millions strong, let’s crunch the numbers and confront this fact: For every Scientologist, the population contains 1,000 who are not.

Now, I’m not trying to place responsibility on your shoulders. Because, whether I say so or not, that responsibility is already yours — merely from the fact you are one of the few on Earth who have tasted this priceless gift called Scientology. After all, if some scientist were to discover the cure for cancer, he would have a responsibility to do anything and everything in his power to bring that cure to the world. Well, consider our responsibility. We’re not just talking about a cure for the body, we’re talking about an illness so grave, Man now believes that he is that body. And what we offer is immortality and freedom, for all eternity.

Factually, the tough job has been done. The one task that has never been accomplished in all history of past religion. The way has been found, it has been mapped. And while we could place all of our materials on every shelf in the world — all in addition to making them indestructible to cataclysm — we would accomplish nothing if those materials aren’t used.

Although we have won the most important war, there will no doubt be battles ahead. So what? What else can we expect in a world subject to the very aberrations that Scientology has revealed? As LRH said in The Aims of Scientology: “In a turbulent world the job is not easy. But then, if it were, we wouldn’t have to be doing it.”

In the final analysis, others don’t have the answers. We do. But this isn’t a game of one-upmanship. Because there are a great many people out there who are searching, and who are trying. Where they fail, it’s because they lack the answers we have. So we can’t move into this new millennium nattering about the many failings of the world at large. No, we must wake up in the morning, each one of us, look in the mirror and say, “That’s my responsibility to handle.” Because we are the only ones who can.

So, where do we stand on the threshold of the 21st century? Well, we stand exactly where we need to stand. Fully poised and ready to carry the torch to ultimate victory.