Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  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.

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  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.

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  Book One

  THE GOAL OF MAN

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  CHAPTER I

  The Scope 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 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 13

  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.

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  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.

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  CHAPTER II

  The Clear

  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.

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  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.