The creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch.
Dianetics (Gr., dianoua -- thought) is the science of mind. Far simpler than physics or chemistry, it compares with them in the exactness of its axioms and is on a considerably higher echelon of usefulness. The hidden source of all psycho-somatic ills and human aberration has been discovered and skills have been developed for their invariable cure.
Dianetics is actually a family of sciences embracing the various humanities and translating them into usefully precise definitions. The present volume deals with Individual Dianetics and is a handbook containing the necessary skills both for the handling of interpersonal relations and the treatment of the mind. With the techniques presented in this handbook the psychiatrist, psycho-analyst and intelligent layman can successfully and invariably treat all psycho-somatic ills and inorganic aberrations. More importantly, the skills offered in this handbook will produce the dianetic clear, an optimum individual with intelligence considerably greater than the current normal, or the dianetic release, an individual who has been freed from his major anxieties or illnesses. The release can be done in less than twenty hours of work and is a state superior to any produced by several years of psycho- analysis, since the release will not release.
Dianetics is an exact science and its application is on the order of, but simpler than, engineering. Its axioms should not be confused with theories since they demonstrably exist as natural laws hitherto undiscovered. Man has known many portions of dianetics in the past thousands of years, but the data was not evaluated for importance, was not organized into a body of precise knowledge. In addition to things known, if not evaluated, dianetics includes a large number of new discoveries of its own about thought and the mind.
The axioms may be found on Page 42 of this volume. Understood and applied, they embrace the field of human endeavor and thought and yield precision results.
The first contribution of dianetics is the discovery that the problems of thought and mental function can be resolved within the bounds of the finite universe, which is to say that all data needful to the solution of mental action and Man’s endeavor can be measured, sensed and experienced as scientific truths independent of mysticism or metaphysics. The various axioms are not assumptions or theories -- the case of past ideas about the mind -- but are laws which can be subjected to the most vigorous laboratory and clinical tests.
The first law of dianetics is a statement of the dynamic principle of existence.
THE DYNAMIC PRINCIPLE OF EXISTENCE IS: SURVIVE!
No behavior or activity has been found to exist without this principle. It is not new that life is surviving. It is new that life has as its entire dynamic urge only survival.
Survival is divided into four dynamics. Survival can be understood to lie in any one of the dynamics and by faulty logic can be explained in terms of any one dynamic. A man can be said to survive for self alone and by this all behavior can be formulated. He can be said to survive for sex alone and by sex alone all behavior can be formulated. He can be said to survive for the group only or for Mankind only and in either of these the entire endeavor and behavior of the individual can be equated and explained. These are four equations of survival, each one apparently true. However, the entire problem of the purpose of Man cannot be resolved unless one admits all four dynamics in each individual. So equated, the behavior of the individual can be estimated with precision. These dynamics then embrace the activity of one or many men.
DYNAMIC ONE: The urge of the individual to reach the highest potential of survival in terms of self and his immediate symbiotes.
DYNAMIC TWO: The urge of the individual to reach the highest potential of survival in terms of sex, the act and the creation of children and their rearing.
DYNAMIC THREE: The urge of the individual to reach the highest potential of survival in terms of the group, whether civil, political, or racial, and the symbiotes of that group.
DYNAMIC FOUR: The urge of the individual to reach the highest potential of survival in terms of Mankind and the symbiotes of Mankind.
Thus motivated, the individual or a society seeks survival and no human activity of any kind has other basis: experiment, investigation and long testing demonstrated that the unaberrated individual, the clear, was motivated in his actions and decisions by all the above dynamics and not one alone.
The clear, the goal of dianetic therapy, can be created from psychotic, neurotic, deranged, criminal or normal people if they have organically sound nervous systems. He demonstrates the basic nature of Mankind and that basic nature has been found uniformly and invariably to be good. That is now an established scientific fact, not an opinion.
The clear has attained a stable state on a very high plane. He is persistent and vigorous and pursues life with enthusiasm and satisfaction. He is motivated by the four dynamics as above. He has attained the full power and use of hitherto hidden abilities.
The inhibition of one or more dynamics in an individual causes an aberrated condition, tends toward mental derangement and psycho-somatic illness and causes the individual to make irrational conclusions and act, still in an effort to survive, in destructive ways.
Dianetic technique deletes, without drugs, hypnotism, surgery, shock or other artificial means, the blocks from these various dynamics. The removal of these blocks permits the free flow of the various dynamics and, of course, results in a heightened persistency in life and a much higher intelligence.
The precision of dianetics makes it possible to impede or release these dynamics at will with invariable results.
The hidden source of all inorganic mental disturbance and psycho-somatic illness was one of the discoveries of dianetics. This source had been unknown and unsuspected, though vigorously sought, for thousands of years. That the discovered source is the source requires less laboratory proof than would have been necessary to have proven the correctness of William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. The proof does not depend upon a laboratory test with complicated apparatus but can be made in any group of men by any intelligent individual.
The source of aberration has been found to be a hitherto unsuspected sub-mind which, complete with its own recordings, underlies what man understands to be his “conscious” mind. The concept of the unconscious mind is replaced in dianetics by the discovery that the “unconscious” mind is the only mind which is always conscious. In dianetics this sub-mind is called the reactive mind. A holdover from an earlier step in Man’s evolution, the reactive mind possesses vigor and command power on a cellular level. It does not “remember”; it records and uses the recordings only to produce action. It does not “think”; it selects recordings and impinges them upon the “conscious” mind and the body without the knowledge or consent of the individual. The only information the individual has of such action is his occasional perception that he is not acting rationally about one thing or another and cannot understand why. There is no Censor.
The reactive mind operates exclusively on physical pain and painful emotion. It is not capable of differentiative thought but acts on the stimulus-response basis. This is the principle on which the animal mind functions. It does not receive its recordings as memory or experience but only as forces to be reactivated. It receives its recordings as cellular engrams when the “conscious” mind is “unconscious.”
In a drugged state, when anaesthetized as in an operation, when rendered “unconscious” by injury or illness, the individual yet has his reactive mind in full operation. He may not be “aware” of what has taken place, but, as dianetics has discovered and can prove, everything which happened to him in the interval of “unconsciousness” was fully and completely recorded. This information is unappraised by his conscious mind, neither evaluated nor reasoned. It can, at any future date, become reactivated by similar circumstances observed by the awake and conscious individual. When any such recording, an engram, becomes reactivated, it has command power. It shuts down the conscious mind to greater or lesser degree, takes over the motor controls of the body and causes behavior and action to which the conscious mind, the individual himself, would never consent. He is, nevertheless, handled like a marionette by his engrams.
The antagonistic forces of the exterior environment thus become entered into the individual himself without the knowledge or consent of the individual. And there they create an interior world of force which exerts itself not only against the exterior world but against the individual himself. Aberration is caused by what has been done to not done by the individual.
Man has unwittingly long aided the reactive mind by supposing that a person, when “unconscious” from drugs, illness, injury or anaesthetic, had no recording ability. This permits an enormous amount of data to enter into the reactive bank since none have been careful to maintain silence around an “unconscious” person. The invention of language and the entrance of language into the engram bank of the reactive mind seriously complicates the mechanistic reactions. The engrams containing language impinge themselves upon the conscious mind as commands. Engrams then contain command value much higher than any in the exterior world. Thought is directed and motivated by the irrational engrams. Thought processes are disturbed not only by these engramic commands but also by the fact that the reactive mind reduces, by regenerating unconsciousness, the actual ability to think. Few people possess, because of this, more than 10% of their potential awareness.
The entire physical pain and painful emotion of a lifetime, whether the individual “knows” about it or not, is contained, recorded, in the engram bank. Nothing is forgotten. And all physical pain and painful emotion, no matter how the individual may think he has handled it, is capable of re-inflicting itself upon him from this hidden level, unless that pain is removed by dianetic therapy.
The engram and only the engram causes aberration and psycho-somatic illness.
Dianetic therapy may be briefly stated. Dianetics deletes all the pain from a lifetime. When this pain is erased in the engram bank and refiled as memory and experience in the memory banks, all aberrations and psycho-somatic illnesses vanish, the dynamics are entirely rehabilitated and the physical and mental being regenerate.
Dianetics leaves an individual full memory but without pain. Exhaustive tests have demonstrated that hidden pain is not a necessity but is invariably and always a liability to the health, skill, happiness and survival potential of the individual. It has no survival value.
The method which is used to refile pain is another discovery. Man has unknowingly possessed another process of remembering of which he has not been cognizant. Here and there a few have known about it and used it without realizing what they did or that they did something which Man as a whole did not know could be done. This process is returning. Wide awake and without drugs an individual can return to any period of his entire life providing his passage is not blocked by engrams. Dianetics developed techniques for circumventing these blocks and reducing them from the status of Powerful Unknown to useful memory.
The technique of therapy is done in what is called a dianetic reverie. The individual undergoing this process sits or lies in a quiet room accompanied by a friend or professional therapist who acts as auditor. The auditor directs the attention of the patient to the patient’s self and then begins to place the patient in various periods of the patient’s life merely by telling him to go there rather than remember.
All therapy is done, not by remembering or associating, but by travel on the time track. Every human being has a time track. It begins with life and it ends with death. It is a sequence of events complete from portal to portal as recorded.
The conscious mind, in dianetics, is called by the somewhat more precise term of analytical mind. The analytical mind consists of the “I” (the center of awareness), all computational ability of the individual, and the standard memory banks which are filled with all past perceptions of the individual, awake or normally asleep (all material which is not engramic). No data are missing from these standard banks, all are there, barring physical organic defects, in full motion, color, sound, tactile, smell and all other senses. The “I” may not be able to reach his standard banks because of reactive data which bar portions of the standard banks from the view of “I.”
Cleared, “I” is able to reach all moments of his lifetime without exertion or discomfort and perceive all he has ever sensed, recalling them in full motion, color, sound, tone and other senses. The completeness and profusion of data in the standard banks is a discovery of dianetics, and the significance of such recalls is yet another discovery.
The auditor directs the travel of “I” along the patient’s time track. The patient knows everything which is taking place, is in full control of himself, and is able to bring himself to the present whenever he likes. No hypnotism or other means are used. Man may not have known he could do this but it is simple.
The auditor, with precision methods, recovers data from the earliest “unconscious” moments of the patient’s life, such “unconsciousness” being understood to be caused by shock or pain, not mere unawareness. The patient thus contacts the cellular level engrams. Returned to them and progressed through them by the auditor, the patient re-experiences these moments a few times, when they are then erased and refiled automatically as standard memory. So far as the auditor and the patient can discover, the entire incident has now vanished and does not exist. If they searched carefully in the standard banks they would find it again but refiled as “Once aberrative, do not permit as such into computer.” Late areas of “unconsciousness” are impenetrable until early ones are erased.
The amount of discomfort experienced by the patient is minor. He is repelled mainly by engramic commands which variously dictate emotion and reaction.
In a release, the case is not progressed to the point of complete recall. In a clear, fill memory exists throughout the lifetime, with the additional bonus that he has photographic recall in color, motion, sound, etc., as well as optimum computational ability.
The psycho-somatic illnesses of the release are reduced, ordinarily, to a level where they do not thereafter trouble him. In a clear, psycho-somatic illness has become non-existent and will not return since its actual source is nullified permanently.
The dianetic release is comparable to a current normal or above. The dianetic clear is to a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane. Dianetics elucidates various problems with its many discoveries, its axioms, its organization and its technique. In the progress of its development many astonishing data were thrust upon it, for when one deals with natural laws and measurable actualities which produce specific and invariable results, one must accept what Nature holds, not what is pleasing or desired.
When one deals with facts rather than theories and gazes for the first time upon the mechanisms of human action several things confound him, much as the flutterings of the heart did
Harvey or the actions of yeasts did Pasteur. The blood did not circulate because Harvey said it could nor yet because he said it did. It circulated and had been circulating for eons; Harvey was clever and observant enough to find it; and this was much the case with Pasteur and other explorers of the hitherto unknown or unconfirmed. In dianetics the fact that the analytical mind was inherently perfect and remained structurally capable of restoration to full operation was not the least of the data found.
That man was good, as established by exacting research, was no great surprise, but that an unaberrated individual was vigorously repelled by evil and yet gained enormous strength was astonishing since aberration had been so long incorrectly supposed to be the root of strength and ambition according to authorities since the time of Plato.
That a man contained a mechanism which recorded with diabolical accuracy when the man was observably and by all presumable tests “unconscious” was newsworthy and surprising. To the layman the relationship of prenatal life to mental function has not entirely been disregarded since for centuries beyond count people were concerned with “prenatal influence.” To the psychiatrist, the psychologist and psycho-analyst, prenatal memory had long been an accepted fact since “memories of the womb” were agreed to influence the adult mind. But the prenatal aspect of the mind came as an entire surprise to dianetics, an unwanted and at the time unwelcome observation.
Despite existing beliefs -- which are not scientific facts -- that the foetus had memory, the psychiatrist and other workers believed as well that memory could not exist in a human being until myelin sheathing was formed around the nerves. This was as confusing to dianetics as it was to psychiatry. After much work over some years the exact influence prenatal life had on the later mind was established by dianetics with accuracy. There will be those who, uninformed, will say that dianetics “accepts and believes in” prenatal memory.
Completely aside from the fact that an exact science does not “believe” but establishes and proves facts, dianetics emphatically does nor believe in “prenatal memory.” Dianetics had to invade cytology and biology and form many conclusions by research; it had to locate and establish both the reactive mind and the hidden engram banks never before known before it came upon “prenatal” problems. It had been discovered that the engram recording was probably done on the cellular level, that the engram bank was contained in the cells. It was then discovered that the cells, reproducing from one generation to the next, within the organism, apparently carried with them their own memory banks. The cells are the first echelon of structure, the basic building blocks. They built the analytical mind. They operate, as the whip, the reactive mind. Where one has human cells, one has potential engrams. Human cells begin with the zygote, proceed in development with the embryo, become the foetus and finally the infant.
Each stage of this growth is capable of reaction. Each stage in the growth of the colony of cells finds them fully cells, capable of recording engrams. In dianetics “prenatal memory” is not considered since the standard banks which will someday serve the completed analyzer in the infant, child and man are not themselves complete. There is neither “memory” or “experience” before the nerves are sheathed as far as dianetic therapy is concerned. But dianetic therapy is concerned with engrams, not memories, with recordings, not experience, and wherever there are human cells, engrams are demonstrably possible and, when physical pain was present, engrams can be demonstrated to have been created.
The engram is a recording like the ripples in the groove of a phonograph record: it is a complete recording of everything which occurred during the period of pain. Dianetics can locate, with its techniques, any engram which the cells have hidden, and in therapy the patient will often discover himself to be upon the prenatal cellular time track. There he will locate engrams and he goes there only because engrams exist there.
Birth is an engram and is recovered by dianetics as a recording, not as a memory. By return and the cellular extension of the time track, zygote pain storage can be and is recovered. It is not memory. It impinged upon the analytical mind and it obstructed the standard banks where memory is stored. This is a very great difference from prenatal memory. Dianetics recovers prenatal engrams and finds them responsible for much aberration and discovers that any longing for the womb is not present in any patient but that engrams sometimes dictate a return to it, as in some regressive psychoses which then attempt to remake the body into a foetus.
This matter of prenatal life is discussed here at length in this synopsis to give the reader a perspective on the subject. We are dealing here with an exact science, precision axioms and new skills of application. By them we gain a command over aberration and psycho-somatic ills and with them we take an evolutionary step in the development of Man which places him yet another stage above his distant cousins of the animal kingdom. The progress of Mankind from the period of savagery to the present is marked with milestones. Conventional history books would have you believe that these milestones are battle monuments or the tombs of great men. Yet there are more important markers of Man’s progress -- and these are New Ideas. Whenever a New Idea has been created, Man’s chances for survival have been improved and the arduousness of his journey away from animalhood is lessened.
There have been numerous New Ideas in the past. To name a few of the more obvious, consider the invention of the wheel, the control of fire, the development of mathematics or even the newest one -- the discovery of the means of atomic fission. Every one of these ideas has altered the progress of Mankind -- sometimes temporarily for the worse, but ultimately for Man’s betterment.
In my opinion DIANETICS is worthy of being called a New Idea, and is destined to take its place alongside of these other milestones of progress. It might even be considered to be more important than any of these, for it is a science which for the first time gives us an understanding of the tool with which these other inventions were created -- the human mind.
In the creation of any New Idea, there is one step which is highly important. It is so obvious as to be frequently overlooked. This step, the sine qua non of any idea, consists in examining the basic assumptions of the subject and determining whether or not they need to be revised. The creator of a New Idea asks, “What would happen if I assume that this belief which everyone has had for centuries isn’t necessarily so?”
The primitive man who invented the wheel did just that. His fellows assumed that, when one wanted to transport an object, it had to be carried or dragged along the ground. The inventor changed the assumption -- and the wheel was born.
Again, so long as man assumed that fire was dangerous and should be avoided, he made no attempt to control it. When some brave soul re-examined this assumption and decided that fire, although it entailed some hazards, might offer certain advantages to the dwellers in his cave, he took the first step toward the creation of the science of chemistry and nuclear physics.
So it is with DIANETICS. In it there has been a reexamination and a re-evaluation of numerous basic assumptions regarding the functioning of the human mind.
The originator has had both the temerity and the wisdom to refuse to accept all of the old assumptions.
For example, we have all assumed that when a person is unconscious, he is unconscious -- that’s all there is to it. The originator of dianetics was critical of that assumption and, as a result, was able to demonstrate that the mind is never totally unconscious. The assumption that nobody can remember anything which happened to him before the age of three or four also came in for consideration -- and the result of these and other reassessments was DIANETICS.
Yes, basic assumptions are important. They are especially important when they get such a strangle-hold on our ways of thinking that we can’t get away from them. For hundreds of years it was assumed that the sun and the planets revolved around the earth; it was not until the assumption was tested and found to be faulty that modern astronomy was able to develop. For hundreds of years a certain group of philosophers and religionists have assumed that Man is fundamentally evil; now comes DIANETICS to test this assumption. It will be highly interesting to see if there will be any change in our interpersonal relationships as a result of a new, different basic assumption. The basic assumption is also a long-lived brute, hard to kill. Perhaps one reason for his hardiness is that he feeds upon Authority. There is a vast difference between Authority and an authority. An authority might be described as a man who propounds a basic assumption which is valid for his time and applicable to the state of knowledge at the time it was propounded and has had his ideas accepted. No doubt this man would not be at all averse to altering his assumptions if a change in knowledge warranted it. His protagonists and disciples don’t seem to act this way, however; before very long they begin to treat his idea as if it were some sort of divine revelation -- and the man now becomes an Authority.
The words of an Authority carry much more weight than do those of a mere authority. They are sacrosanct, holy, not to be questioned; the words themselves are Authority. And, in time, another change occurs; Authority becomes confused with knowledge and is accepted blindly, unthinkingly. A man can even become an authority himself by knowing a great deal about the things Authority said.
Perhaps the epitome of this sort of foolishness is exemplified in the attitude of numerous doctors toward the work of Harvey, the man who first described the circulation of the blood. Harvey’s views, even though they were well founded in observation and experimentation, ran counter to those held by his predecessor, Galen, who was the great medical Authority of that day. So great was the controversy that some men took the stand, “Male errare cum Galen qualm veritam Harveii amplecti.” (“I would rather err with Galen than accept Harvey’s truth.”)
Now, respect for authority is all very well. There are certain brands of authority which we may tacitly agree to accept, such as customs and morals; there are other brands of authority which we may vote to accept, such as our laws. But we should be wary of self-constituted authority, especially the type I have called Authority. We should feel free to examine the basic assumptions of any body of knowledge we wish, without fear of committing lese majeste. If any system of thought is going to wither in the light of investigation, it does not deserve the title of Authority.
The originator of DIANETICS has, without the slightest effort towards being iconoclastic, succeeded in dislodging a good many of our false gods of Authority from their pedestals. perhaps the job wasn’t too difficult -- so many of the idols who bear that name have feet of the poorest sort of clay. Those authorities whose work was sound and valid are still in their proper places in the temple of Knowledge, and will no doubt continue to remain.
In early 1948 I first heard about DIANETICS from a colleague. I studied it, getting reports from others who were familiar with aspects of the therapy. Shortly thereafter I corresponded with the originator of dianetics, which resulted in my traveling East to study with him, and finally, in my experiencing personal dianetic therapy under his supervision.
For the past year I have been practicing DIANETICS on my patients, on my friends, and on my family. For the first time in my life, I’m satisfied that there is a method by which many questions, hitherto unanswerable, can be answered with definiteness and proven correct. Correct, insofar as the improved health of the patient is concerned. Correct, insofar as his well-being has been implemented by a feeling of security. Correct, insofar as his approach to living has become more advanced, interesting, and productive of growth. To me this correctness is meaningful and worthy of acceptance.
Let me state that this is my opinion. I do not urge you to accept that opinion; I would much prefer that you make your own tests of DIANETICS, carefully, impartially, and arrive at your own opinion. This statement is directed towards doctors in general, psychiatrists, psychologists, psycho-analysts, etc., as well as the layman.
DIANETICS is a science. It has certain laws, and by following these laws we can predict the results which will be obtained under given circumstances. These laws have no exceptions -- or at least, no exceptions have been found. In this respect the laws of DIANETICS are like the law of gravity: if you suspend a mass heavier than air above the ground and then remove the support, it will fall. It won’t fall seventy per cent of the time or eighty per cent of the time; it will always fall. And if it doesn’t fall, we are justified in re- examining the law.
The discovery that engrams (the ability of the cell to record a lasting trace of an event) are recorded on a cellular level when the higher sphere of the mind is “unconscious,” insensitive, and not recording (as, for instance, in severe injury, delirium, or surgical anaesthesia) and that the recorded engrams then received are highly reactive, portends a new trend for psychological and psychiatric thought and practice. The engram recorded during a period of “unconsciousness” is susceptible to reactivation during future periods of mental anguish. This fact has been found to be a single, direct source of aberrated behavior. Its discovery and isolation with the mechanics of its operation within the psyche, bring new and brilliant light to hitherto obscure phenomena of the mind and its behavior. The engram, hidden beneath unexplored layers of “unconsciousness,” possesses a power of command not unlike that of a hidden and unsuspected monitor upon the conscious mind; it produces effects which are comparable to those of a post-hypnotic suggestion, though in a far more insidious and involved manner and with greater and more tragic effect.
The technique of DIANETIC therapy is basically simple and can be understood and applied to each other by any two reasonably intelligent people after a brief study of this volume, which is the operating manual for therapy. (Dianetic psychiatric treatment of severe derangements is also delineated.) No previous background in psycho-analysis or psychology is necessary. The therapeutic technique offered in DIANETICS is independent of hypnotism or narco-synthesis.
1. DIANETICS will help you to eliminate any psychosomatic illness from which you may suffer.
2. DIANETICS will help you achieve at least one-third more than present capacity for work and happiness.
3. DIANETICS offers to the medical profession, to psychiatrists, to psycho-analysts, to all who are interested in the advancement of their fellow men, a new theory and technique which makes accessible for therapy diseases and symptoms which hitherto were unusually complex and obscure.
4. DIANETICS is the most advanced and most clearly presented method of psycho- therapy and self-improvement ever discovered. Dianetics is an adventure. It is an exploration into Terra Incognita, the human mind, that vast and hitherto unknown realm half an inch back of our foreheads.
The discoveries and developments which made the formulation of dianetics possible occupied many years of exact research and careful testing. This was exploration, it was also consolidation. The trail is blazed, the routes are sufficiently mapped for you to voyage in safety into your own mind and recover there your full inherent potential, which is not, we now know, low but very, very high. As you progress in therapy the adventure is yours to know why you did what you did when you did it, to know what caused those Dark and Unknown Fears which came in nightmares as a child, to know where your moments of pain and pleasure lay. There is much which an individual does not know about himself, about his parents, about his “motives.” Some of the things you will find may astonish you, for the most important data of your life may be not memory but engrams in the hidden depths of your mind, not articulate but only destructive.
You will find many reasons why you “cannot get well” and you will know at length, when you find the dictating lines in the engrams, how amusing those reasons are, especially to you.
Dianetics is no solemn adventure. For all that it has to do with suffering and loss, its end is always laughter, so foolish, so misinterpreted were the things which caused the woe.
Your first voyage into your own Terra Incognita will be through the pages of this book. You will find as you read that many things “you always knew were so” are articulated here. You will be gratified to know that you held not opinions but scientific facts in many of your concepts of existence. You will find, too, many data that have long been known by all, and you will possibly consider them far from news and be prone to underevaluate them: be assured that underevaluation of these facts kept them from being valuable, no matter how long they were known, for a fact is never important without a proper evaluation of it and its precise relationship to other facts. You are following here a vast network of facts which, reaching out, can be seen to embrace the whole field of Man in all his works. Fortunately you do not have to concern yourself with following far any one of these lines until you are done. And then these horizons will stretch wide enough to satisfy anyone.
Dianetics is a large subject, but that is only because Man is himself a large subject. The science of his thought cannot but embrace all his actions. By careful compartmenting and relating of data, the field has been kept narrow enough to be easily followed. Mostly this handbook will tell you, without any specific mention, about yourself and your family and friends, for you will meet them here and know them.
This volume has made no effort to use resounding or thunderous phrases, frowning polysyllables or professorial detachment. When one is delivering answers which are simple, he need not make the communication any more difficult than is necessary to convey the ideas. “Basic language” has been used, much of the nomenclature is colloquial; the pedantic has not only not been employed, it has also been ignored. This volume communicates to several strata of life and professions; the favorite nomenclatures of none have been observed since such a usage would impede the understanding of others. And so bear with us, psychiatrist, when your structure is not used, for we have no need for structure here, and bear with us, doctor, when we call a cold a cold and not a catarrhal disorder of the respiratory tract. For this is, essentially, engineering and these engineers are liable to say anything. And “scholar,” you would not enjoy being burdened with the summation signs and the Lorentz-Fitzgerald-Einstein equations, so we shall not burden the less puristic reader with scientifically impossible Hegelian grammar which insists that absolutes exist in fact. The plan of the book might be represented as a cone which starts with simplicity and descends into wider application. This book follows, more or less, the actual steps of the development of dianetics. First there was the dynamic principle of existence, then its meaning, then the source of aberration, and finally the application of all as therapy and the techniques of therapy. You won’t find any of this very difficult. It was the originator who had the difficulty. You should have seen the first equations and postulates of dianetics! As research progressed and as the field developed, dianetics began to simplify. That is a fair guarantee that one is on a straight trail of science. Only things which are poorly known become more complex the longer one works upon them.
It is suggested that you read straight on through. By the time you get into the appendix, you should have an excellent command of the subject. The book is arranged that way. Every fact related to dianetic therapy is stated in several ways and is introduced again and again. In this way, the important facts have been pointed up to your attention. When you have finished the book you can come back to the beginning and look through it and study what you think you need to know.
Almost all the basic philosophy and certainly all the derivations of the master subject of dianetics were excluded here, partly because this volume had to stay under half a million words and partly because they belong in a separate text where they can receive full justice. Nevertheless, you have the scope of the science with this volume in addition to therapy itself.
You are beginning an adventure. Treat it as an adventure. And may you never be the same again.
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 arsenal is an atom bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it.
No quest has been more relentlessly pursued or has been more violent. No primitive tribe, no matter how ignorant, has failed to recognize the problem as a problem, nor has it failed to bring forth at least an attempted formulation. Today one finds the aborigine of Australia substituting for a science of mind a “magic healing crystal.” The Shaman of British Guiana makes shift for actual mental laws with his monotonous song and consecrated cigar. The throbbing drum of the Goldi medicine man serves in the stead of an adequate technique to alleviate the lack of serenity in patients.
The enlightened and golden age of Greece yet had but superstition in its principal sanatoria for mental ills, the Aesculapian temple. The most the Roman could do for peace of mind for the sick was to appeal to the penates, the household divinities, or sacrifice to Febris, goddess of fevers. And an English king, centuries after, could have been found in the hands of exorcists who sought to cure his deliriums by driving the demons from him.
From the most ancient times to the present, in the crudest primitive tribe or the most magnificently ornamented civilization, Man has found himself in a state of awed helplessness when confronted by the phenomena of strange illnesses or aberrations. His desperation, in his efforts to treat the individual, has been but slightly altered during his entire history, and until this twentieth century passed mid-term, the percentages of his alleviations, in terms of individual mental derangements, compared evenly with the successes of the shamans confronted with the same problems. According to a modern writer, the single advance of psycho-therapy was clean quarters for the madman. In terms of brutality in treatment of the insane, the methods of the shaman or Bedlam have been far exceeded by the “civilized” techniques of destroying nerve tissues with the violence of shock and surgery, treatments which were not warranted by the results obtained and which would not have been tolerated in the meanest primitive society, since they reduce the victim to mere zombie-ism, destroying most of his personality and ambition and leaving him nothing more than a manageable animal. Far from an indictment of the practices of the “neurosurgeon” and the ice-pick which he thrusts and twists into insane minds, they are brought forth only to demonstrate the depths of desperation man can reach when confronted with the seemingly unsolvable problem of deranged minds.
In the larger sphere of societies and nations, the lack of such a science of mind was never more evident; for the physical sciences, advancing thoughtlessly far in advance of man’s ability to understand man, have armed him with terrible and thorough weapons which await only another outburst of the social insanity of war.
These problems are not mild ones; they lie across every man’s path; they wait in company with his future. As long as Man has recognized that his chief superiority over the animal kingdom was a thinking mind, so long as he understood that his mind alone was his weapon, he has searched and pondered and postulated in efforts to find a solution.
Like a jig-saw puzzle spilled by a careless hand, the equations which would lead to a science of the mind and, above that, to a master science of the universe, were stirred round and round. Sometimes two fragments would be united; sometimes, as in the case of the golden age of Greece, a whole section would be built. Philosopher, shaman, medicine man, mathematician: each looked at the pieces. Some saw they must all belong to different puzzles. Some thought they all belonged to the same puzzle. Some said there were really six puzzles in it, some said two. And the wars went on and the societies sickened or were dispersed, and learned tomes were written about ever-increasing hordes of madmen.
With the methods of Bacon, with the mathematics of Newton, the physical sciences went on, consolidating and advancing their frontiers. And, like a derelict battalion, careless of how many allied ranks it exposed to destruction by the enemy, studies of the mind lagged behind.
But after all, there are just so many pieces in any puzzle. Before and after Francis Bacon, Herbert Spencer and a very few more, many of the small sections had been put together, many honest facts had been observed.
To adventure into the thousands of variables of which that puzzle was composed, one had only to know right from wrong, true from false, and use all Man and Nature as his test tube.
Of what must a science of mind be composed?
1. An answer to the goal of thought.
2. A single source of all insanities, psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions and social derangements.
3. Invariant scientific evidence as to the basic nature and functional background of the human mind.
4. Techniques, the art of application, by which the discovered single source could be invariably cured, ruling out, of course, the insanities of malformed, deleted or pathologically injured brains or nervous systems and, particularly, iatrogenic psychoses (those caused by doctors and involving the destruction of the living brain itself).
5. Methods of prevention of mental derangement.
6. The cause and cure of all psycho-somatic ills, which number, some say, 70% of Man’s listed ailments.
Such a science would exceed the severest terms previously laid down for it in any age,
but any computation on the subject should discover that a science of mind ought to be able to be and do just these things.
A science of the mind, if it were truly worthy of that name, would have to rank, in experimental precision, with physics and chemistry. There could be no “special cases” to its laws. There could be no recourse to Authority. The atom bomb bursts whether Einstein gives it permission or not. Laws native to Nature regulate the bursting of that bomb. Technicians, applying techniques derived from discovered natural laws, can make one or a million atom bombs, all alike.
After the body of axioms and technique was organized and working as a science of mind, in rank with the physical sciences, it would be found to have points of agreement with almost every school of thought about thought which had ever existed. This is again a virtue and not a fault.
Simple though it is, dianetics does and is these things:
1. It is an organized science of thought built on definite axioms: statements of natural laws on the order of those of the physical sciences.
2. It contains a therapeutic technique with which can be treated all inorganic mental ills and all organic psychosomatic ills, with assurance of complete cure in unselected cases.
3. It produces a condition of ability and rationality for Man well in advance of the current norm, enhancing rather than destroying his vigor and personality.
4. Dianetics gives a complete insight into the full potentialities of the mind, discovering them to be well in excess of past suppression.
5. The basic nature of man is discovered in dianetics rather than hazarded or postulated, since that basic nature can be brought into action in any individual completely. And that basic nature is discovered to be good.
6. The single source of mental derangement is discovered and demonstrated, on a clinical or laboratory basis, by dianetics.
7. The extent, storage capacity and recallability of the human memory is finally established by dianetics.
8. The full recording abilities of the mind are discovered by dianetics with the conclusion that they are quite dissimilar to former suppositions.
9. Dianetics brings forth the non-germ theory of disease, complementing bio-chemistry and Pasteur’s work on the germ theory to embrace the field.
10. With dianetics ends the “necessity” of destroying the brain by shock or surgery to effect “tractability” in mental patients and “adjust” them.
11. A workable explanation of the physiological effects of drugs and endocrine substances exists in dianetics and many problems posed by endocrinology are answered.
12. Various educational, sociological, political, military, and other human studies are enhanced by dianetics.
13. The field of cytology is aided by dianetics, as well as other fields of research.
This, then, is a skeletal sketch of what would be the scope of a science of mind and of what is the scope of dianetics.
Dianetically, the optimum individual is called the clear. One will hear much of that word, both as a noun and a verb, in this volume, so it is well to spend time here at the outset setting forth exactly what can be called a clear, the goal of dianetic therapy.
A clear can be tested for any and all psychoses, neuroses, compulsions and repressions (all aberrations) and can be examined for any autogenic (self-generated) diseases referred to as psycho-somatic ills. These tests confirm the clear to be entirely without such ills or aberrations. Additional tests of his intelligence indicate it to be high above the current norm. Observation of his activity demonstrates that he pursues existence with vigor and satisfaction.
Further, these results can be obtained on a comparative basis. A neurotic individual, possessed also of psychosomatic ills, can be tested for those aberrations and illnesses, demonstrating that they exist. He can then be given dianetic therapy to the end of clearing these neuroses and ills. Finally, he can be examined, with the above results. This, in passing, is an experiment which has been performed many times with invariable results. It is a matter of laboratory test that all individuals who have organically complete nervous systems respond in this fashion to dianetic clearing.
Further, the clear possesses attributes, fundamental and inherent but not always available in an uncleared state, which have not been suspected of Man and are not included in past discussions of his abilities and behavior.
First there is the matter of perceptions. Even so-called normal people do not always see in full color, hear in full tone, or sense at the optimum with their organs of smell, taste, tactile and organic sensation.
These are the main lines of communication to the finite world which most people recognize as reality. It is an interesting commentary that while past observers felt that the facing of reality was an absolute necessity if the aberrated individual wished to be sane, no definition of how this was to be done was set forth. To face reality in the present one would certainly have to be able to sense it along those channels of communication most commonly used by man in his affairs.
Any one of Man’s perceptions can be aberrated by psychic derangements which refuse to permit the received sensations to be realized by the analytical portion of the individual’s mind. In other words, while there may be nothing wrong with the mechanisms of color reception, circuits can exist in the mind which delete color before the consciousness is permitted to see the object. Color blindness can be discovered to be relative or in degrees in such a way that colors appear to be less brilliant, dull or, at the maximum, entirely absent. Anyone is acquainted with persons to whom “loud” colors are detestable and with persons who find them insufficiently “loud” to notice. This varying degree of color blindness has not been recognized as a psychic factor but has been nebulously assumed to be some sort of a condition of mind when it was noticed at all.
There are those persons to whom noises are quite disturbing, to whom, for instance, the insistent whine of a violin is very like having a brace and bit applied to the eardrum; and there are those to whom fifty violins, played loudly, would be soothing; and there are those who, in the presence of a violin, express disinterest and boredom; and, again, there are persons to whom the sound of a violin, no matter if it be playing the most intricate melody, is a monotone. These differences of sonic (hearing) perception have, like color and other visual errors, been attributed to inherent nature or organic deficiency or assigned no place at all. In a like manner, from person to person, smells, tactile sensations, organic perceptions, pain and gravity, vary widely and wildly. A cursory check around amongst his friends will demonstrate to a man that there exist enormous differences of perception of identical stimuli. One smells a turkey in the oven as wonderful, one smells it with indifference, another may not smell it at all. And somebody else may maintain that roasting turkey smells exactly like hair oil -- to be extreme.
Until we obtain clears it remains obscure why such differences should exist. For in the largest measure, such wild quality and quantity of perception is due to aberration. Because of pleasurable experiences in the past and inherent sensitivity, there will be some difference amongst clears, and a clear response should not be assumed automatically to be a standardized, adjusted middle ground, that pallid and obnoxious goal of past doctrines. The clear gets a maximum response compatible with his own desire for the response. Burning cordite still smells dangerous to him, but it does not make him ill. Roasting turkey smells good to him if he is hungry and likes turkey, at which time it smells very, very good. Violins play melodies, not monotones, bring no pain and are enjoyed to a fine full limit if the clear likes violins as a matter of taste -- if he doesn’t, he likes kettledrums, saxophones or, indeed, suiting his mood, no music at all.
In other words, there are two variables at work. One, the wildest, is the variable caused by aberrations. The other, and quite rational and understandable, is caused by the personality.
Thus the perceptions of an aberree* (non-cleared individual) * Aberree is a neologism meaning an aberrated person vary greatly from those of the cleared (unaberrated) individual.
Now there are the differences of the actual organs of perception and the errors occasioned by these. Some of these errors, a minimum, are organic: punctured eardrums are not competent sound-recording mechanisms. The majority of perceptic (sense message) errors in the organic sphere are caused by psycho-somatic errors.
Glasses are seen on noses everywhere around, even on children. The majority of these spectacles are perched on the face in an effort to correct a condition which the body itself is fighting to uncorrect again. Eyesight, when the stage of glasses is entered (not because of glasses), is deteriorating on the psycho-somatic principle. And this observation is about as irresponsible as a statement that when apples fall out of trees they usually obey gravity. One of the incidental things which happen to a clear is that his eyesight, if it had been bad as an aberree, generally improves markedly, and with some slight attention will recover optimum perception in time. (Far from an optician’s argument against dianetics, this assures rather good business, for clears have been known, at treatment’s end, to have to buy, in rapid succession, five pairs of glasses to compensate adjusting eyesight; and many aberrees, cleared late in life, settle down ocularly at a maximum a little under optimum.)
The eyesight was reduced in the aberree on an organic basis by his aberrations so that the perceptic organ itself was reduced from optimum operating function. With the removal of aberrations, repeated tests have proven that the body makes a valiant effort to reconstruct back to optimum.
Hearing, in addition to other perceptics, varies organically over a wide range. Calcium deposits, for instance, can make the ears “ring” incessantly. The removal of aberrations permits the body to readjust toward its reachable optimum, the calcium deposit disappears, and the ears stop ringing. But far and beyond this very specific case, there are great differences in hearing on the organic basis. Organically as well as aberrationally, hearing can become remarkably extended or closely inhibited so that one person may hear footsteps a block away as a normal activity and another would not hear a bass drum thundering on the porch.
That the various perceptions differ widely from individual to individual on an aberrational and psycho-somatic basis is the least of the discoveries outlined here. Ability to recall is far more fantastic in its variation from person to person. An entirely new recall process which was inherent in the mind but which had not been noticed came to light in the process of observing clears and aberrees. This recall process is possible in only a small proportion of aberrees in its fullest sense. It is standard, however, in a clear. Naturally, no intimation is made here that the scholars of past ages have been unobservant. We are dealing here with an entirely new and hitherto non-existent object of inspection, the clear. What a clear can do easily, quite a few people have, from time to time, been partially able to do in the past.
An inherent, not a taught, ability of the remembering mechanisms of the mind can be termed, as a technical word of dianetics, returning. It is used in its dictionary sense, with the addition of the fact that the mind has it as a normal remembering function, as follows: the person can “send” a portion of his mind to a past period on either a mental or combined mental and physical basis and can re-experience incidents which have taken place in his past in the same fashion and with the same sensations as before. Once upon a time an art known as hypnotism used what was called “regression” on hypnotized subjects, the hypnotist sending the subject back, in one of two ways, to incidents in his past. This was done with trance techniques, drugs and considerable technology.
The hypnotic subject could be sent back to a moment “entirely” so that he gave every appearance of being the age to which he was returned with only the apparent faculties and recollections he had at that moment: this was called “revivification” (re-living). “Regression” was a technique by which part of the individual’s self remained in the present and part went back to the past. These abilities of the mind were supposed native only in hypnotism and were used only in hypnotic technique. The art is very old, tracing back some thousands of years and existing today in Asia as it has existed, apparently, from the dawn of time.
Returning is substituted for “regression” here because it is not a comparable thing and because “regression,” as a word, has some bad meanings which would interrupt its use. Reliving is substituted for “revivification” in dianetics because, in dianetics, the principles of hypnotism can be found explained and hypnotism is not used in dianetic therapy, as will be explained later.
The mind, then, has another ability to remember. Part of the mind can “return” even when a person is wide awake and re-experience past incidents in full. If you want to test this, try it on several people until one is discovered who does it easily. Wide awake he can “return” to moments in his past. Until asked to do so he probably will not know he has such an ability. If he had it, he probably thought everybody could do it (the type of supposition which has kept so much of this data from coming to light before). He can go back to a time when he was swimming and swim with full recall of hearing, sight, taste, smell, organic sensation, tactile, etc.
A “learned” gentleman once spent some hours demonstrating to a gathering that the recall of a smell as a sensation, for instance, was quite impossible since “neurology had proven that the olfactory nerves were not connected to the thalamus.” Two people in the gathering discovered this ability to return and despite this evidence, the learned gentleman continued the dispute that olfactory recall was impossible. A check amongst the gathering on this faculty, independent of returning, brought forth the fact that one-half of those present remembered smell by smelling it again.
Returning is the full performance of imagery recall. The entire memory is able to make the organ areas re-sense the stimuli in a past incident. Partial recall is common, not common enough to be normal, but certainly common enough to have merited considerable study. For it again is a wide variable.
Perception of the present would be one method of facing reality. But if one cannot face the reality of the past then, in some part, he is not facing some portion of reality. And if it is ageed that facing reality is desirable, then one would have to face yesterday’s reality as well if he were to be considered entirely “sane” by contemporary definition. To "face yesterday” requires a certain condition of recall to be available. One would have to be able to remember. But how many ways are there of remembering?
First there is the return. That is new. It gives the advantage of examining the moving pictures and other sense perceptions recorded at the time of the event with all senses present. He can also return to his past conclusions and imaginings. It is of considerable aid in learning, in research, in ordinary living to be able to be again at the place where the data desired was first inspected.
Then there are the more usual recalls. Optimum recall is by the return method of single or multiple senses, the individual himself remaining in present time. In other words, some people, when they think of a rose, see one, smell one, feel one. They see in full color, vividly -- with the “mind’s eye” to use an old colloquialism. They smell it vividly. And they can feel it even to the thorns. They are thinking about roses by actually recalling a rose.
These people, thinking about a ship, would see a specific ship, feel the motion of her if they thought of being aboard her, smell the pine-tar or even less savory odors and hear whatever sounds there were about her. They would see the ship in full color motion and hear it in full tone audio.
These faculties vary widely in the aberree. Some, when told to think of a rose, can merely visualize one. Some can smell one but not see it. Some see it without color or in very pale color. When told to think of a ship some aberrees only see a flat, colorless, still picture such as a painting of a ship or the photograph of one. Some perceive a vessel in motion without color but with sound. Some hear the sound of a ship but fail to see any picture whatever. Some merely think of a ship as a concept that ships exist and that they know about them and fail to see, feel, hear, smell or otherwise sense anything on a recall basis.
Some past observers have called this “imagery” but the term is so inapplicable to sound and touch, organic sensation and pain that recall is used uniformly as the technical dianetic term. The value of recall in this business of living has occupied such scant attention that the entire concept has never been formulated previously. It is therefore detailed at some length here, as above.
It is quite simple to test recalls. If one will ask his fellows what their abilities are, he will gain a remarkable idea of how widely varied this ability is from individual to individual. Some have this recall, some have that, some have none, but operate on concepts of recall only. And remember, if you make a test on those around you, that any perception is filed in the memory and therefore has a recall which is to include pain, temperature, rhythm, taste and weight with the above mentioned sight, sound, tactile, and smell.
The dianetic names for these recalls are visio (sight), sonic (sound), tactile (touch), olfactory (smell), rhythmic, kinesthetic (weight and motion), somatic (pain), thermal (temperature) and organic (internal sensations and, by new definition, emotion).
Then there is another set of mental activities which can be summated under the headings of imagination and creative imagination. Here again is abundant material for testing.
Imagination is the recombination of things one has sensed, thought or intellectually computed into existence, which do not necessarily have existence. This is the mind’s method of envisioning desirable goals or forecasting futures. Imagination is extremely valuable as a part of essential solutions in any mental problem and in everyday existence. That it is recombination in no sense deprives it of its vast and wonderful complexity.
A clear uses imagination in its entirety. There is an imagination impression for sight, smell, taste, sound -- in short, for each one of the possible perceptions. These are manufacturered impressions on the basis of models in the memory banks combined by conceptual ideas and construction.
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