DIANETICS
THE MODERN SCIENCE
OF MENTAL HEALTH
A HANDBOOK OF DIANETIC PROCEDURE
By
L. RON HUBBARD
Dedicated to Will Durant
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SYNOPSIS ........................................................................................1
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................7
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK..................................................................10
Book One THE GOAL OF MAN...............................................................12
CHAPTER I The Scope of Dianetics....................................................13
CHAPTER II The Clear ...................................................................16
CHAPTER III The Goal of Man..........................................................22
CHAPTER IV The Four Dynamics ......................................................30
CHAPTER V Summary ...................................................................33
Book Two THE SOURCE OF ALL MENTAL AND PSYCHO-SOMATIC ILLS.......36
CHAPTER I.................................................................................37
CHAPTER II The Reactive Mind.........................................................41
CHAPTER III The Cell and the Organism ..............................................53
CHAPTER IVThe “Demons”.............................................................61
CHAPTER V Psycho-somatic Illness....................................................65
CHAPTER VI Emotion and the Dynamics..............................................76
CHAPTER VII Prenatal Experience and Birth..........................................84
CHAPTER VIII Contagion of Aberration...............................................91
CHAPTER IX Keying-in the Engram ...................................................95
CHAPTER X Preventive Dianetics.......................................................102
Book Three THERAPY ..........................................................................108
CHAPTER I The Mind’s Protection .....................................................108
CHAPTER II Release or Clear............................................................112
CHAPTER III The Auditor’s Role.......................................................114
CHAPTER IV Diagnosis..................................................................118
CHAPTER V Returning, the File Clerk, and the Time Track.........................127
CHAPTER VI The Laws of Returning ..................................................134
CHAPTER VII Emotion and the Life Force.............................................146
CHAPTER VIII Some Types of Engrams...............................................166
CHAPTER IX PART ONE Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy...................174
CHAPTER IX PART TWO Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy...................199
CHAPTER X Dianetics -- Past and Future..............................................247
APPENDIX I The Philosophic Method ........................................................254
APPENDIX II The Scientific Method ..........................................................255
APPENDIX III (A) Mind Schematic............................................................259
APPENDIX III (B) Analyzer Schematic .......................................................261
APPENDIX IV Advice to the Pre-clear.........................................................263
Glossary............................................................................................270
SYNOPSIS
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 1
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 TW
O: 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 2
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 3
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 remembe
ring 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
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