Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  All muscles, voluntary and “involuntary,” can be at the command of the analytical mind.

  Here, then, is the composite of a sentient being. There is no chance for error beyond the error incident to insufficient data and erroneous but accepted data (and the last will be used by the analyzer just once if that once proves the data to be wrong), Here is the realm of pleasure, emotion, creation and construction, and even destruction if the computation on the optimum solution says something has to be destroyed.

  The dynamics underlie the activities of the analytical mind. The urge toward survival explains all its actions. That we can understand the fundamental simplicity of the functional mechanism does not, however, mean that a man operating this way alone is cold or calculating or intent on “tooth and claw.” The nearer Man approaches this optimum, in an individual or in a whole society, the quicker and warmer is that society, the more honest may be its moods and actions.

  Sanity depends upon rationality. Here is optimum rationality and therefore optimum sanity. And here also are all the things Man likes to think Man should be like or, for that matter, what he has represented his better gods to be like. This is the clear.

  This is sanity. This is happiness. This is survival.

  Where is the error?

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  CHAPTER II

  The Reactive Mind

  It is fairly well accepted in these times that life in all forms evolved from the basic building blocks, the virus and the cell. Its only relevance to dianetics is that such a proposition works -- and actually that is all we ask of dianetics. There is no point to writing here a past tome on biology and evolution. We can add some chapters to those things, but Charles Darwin did his job well, and the fundamental principles of evolution can be found in his and other works.

  The proposition on which dianetics was originally entered was evolution. It was postulated that the cells themselves had the urge to survive and that that urge was common to life. It was further postulated that organisms -- individuals -- were constructed of cells and were in fact aggregations of colonies of cells.

  As went the building block, so went the organism. In the finite realms and for any of our purposes, Man could be considered to be a colonial aggregation of cells and it could be assumed that his purpose was identical with the purpose of his building blocks.

  The cell is a unit of life which is seeking to survive and only to Survive.

  Man is a structure of cells which are asking to survive, and only to survive.

  Man’s mind is the command post of operation and is constructed to resolve problems and pose problems related to survival and only to survival.

  The action of survival, if optimum, would lead to survival.

  The optimum survival conduct pattern was formulated and then studied for exceptions, and there were no exceptions found.

  The survival conduct pattern was discovered to be far from sterile and barren but was full of rich and most pleasant activity.

  None of these postulates outlawed any concept concerning the human soul or divine or creative imagination. It was understood perfectly that this was a study in the finite universe only and that spheres and realms of thought and action might very well exist above this finite sphere. But it was also discovered that none of these factors were needed to resolve the entire problem of aberration and irrational conduct.

  The human mind was discovered to have been most grossly maligned, for it was found to be possessed of capabilities far in excess of any heretofore imagined much less tested.

  Basic human character was found to have been pilloried because Man had not been able to distinguish between irrational conduct derived from poor data and irrational conduct derived from another, far more vicious source.

  If there ever was a devil, he designed the reactive mind.

  This functional mechanism managed to bury itself from view so thoroughly that only inductive philosophy, traveling from effect back to cause, served to uncover it. The detective work which was invested in the location of this arch criminal of the human psyche occupied many years. Its identity can now be certified by any technician in any clinic or in any group of men. Two hundred and seventy-three individuals have been examined and treated, representing all the various types of inorganic mental illness and the many varieties of psycho-somatic ills.

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  In each one this reactive mind was found operating, its principles unvaried. This is a long series of cases and will soon become longer.

  The reactive mind is possessed by everyone. No human being examined anywhere was discovered to be without one or without aberrative content in his engram bank, the reservoir of data which serves the reactive mind.

  What does this mind do? It shuts off hearing recall. It places vocal circuits in the mind.

  It makes people tone-deaf. It makes people stutter. It does anything and everything that can be found in any list of mental ills: psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions...

  What can it do? It can give a man arthritis, bursitis, asthma, allergies, sinusitis, coronary trouble, high blood pressure, and so on down the whole catalogue of psycho-somatic ills, adding a few more which were never specifically classified as psycho-somatic, such as the common cold.

  And it is the only thing in the human being which can produce these effects. It is the thing which uniformly brings them about.

  This is the mind which made Socrates think he had a “demon” that gave him answers.

  This is the mind that made Caligula appoint his horse to a government post. This is the mind which made Caesar cut the right hands from thousands of Gauls, which made Napoleon reduce the height of Frenchmen one inch.

  This is the mind which keeps war a thing of alarm, which makes politics irrational, which makes superior officers snarl, which makes children cry in fear of the dark. This is the mind which makes a man suppress his hopes, which holds his apathies, which gives him irresolution when he should act, and kills him before he has begun to live.

  If there ever was a devil, he invented it.

  Discharge the content of this mind’s bank and the arthritis vanishes, myopia gets better, heart illness decreases, asthma disappears, stomachs function properly, and the whole catalogue of ills goes away and stays away.

  Discharge the reactive engram bank and the schizophrenic faces reality at last, the manic-depressive sets forth to accomplish things, the neurotic stops clinging to books which tell him how much he needs his neuroses and begins to live, the woman stops snapping at her children and the dipsomaniac can drink when he likes and stop.

  These are scientific facts. They compare invariably with observed experience.

  The reactive mind is the entire source of aberration. It can be proved and has been repeatedly proven that there is no other, for when that engram bank is discharged, all undesirable symptoms vanish and a man begins to operate on his optimum pattern.

  If one were looking for something like demons in a human mind -- such as those one observes in some inmates of madhouses -- he could find them easily enough. Only they are not demons. They are by-pass circuits from the engram bank. What prayer and exhortations have been used against these by-pass circuits!

  If one did not believe in demons, if one supposed that Man were good after all (as a postulate, of course), how would the evil get into him? What would be the source of these insane rages? What would be the source of his slips of the tongue? How would he come to know irrational fear?

  Why is it that one does not like his boss although his boss has always been pleasant?

  Why is it that suicides smash their bodies to bits?

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  Why does Man behave destructively, irrationally, fighting wars, killing, ruining whole sections of Mankind?

  What is the source of all neuroses, psychoses, insanities?

  Let us return to a brief examination of the analytical mind. Let us examine its memory banks. Here we find all the sense concepts on file. Or so it appears at first glance. Let us take anot
her look, a look at the time factor. There is a time sense about these analytical mind banks.

  It is very accurate, as though the organism were equipped with a fine watch. But there is something wrong here about time -- it has gaps in it! There are moments when nothing seems to be filed in these standard banks. These are gaps which take place during moments of

  “unconsciousness,” that state of being caused by anaesthesia, drugs, injury or shock.

  This is the only data missing from a standard bank. If in hypnotic trance you examine a patient’s memory of an operation these incidents are the only periods in the banks you will not find. You can find these if you care to look and don’t care what happens to your patient -- of which more later. But the point is that there is something missing which has always been considered by one and all in any age never to have been recorded.

  One and all in every age have never been able to put a finger on insanity either. Are these two data in agreement and do they have relationship? They definitely do.

  There are two things which appear to be -- but are not -- recorded in the standard banks: painful emotion and physical pain.

  How would you go about the building of a sensitive machine upon which the life and death affairs of an organism depended, which was to be the chief tool of an individual? Would you leave its delicate circuits prey to every overload or would you install a fuse system? If a delicate instrument is in circuit with a power line, it is protected by several sets of fuses. Any computer would be so safeguarded.

  It happens that there is some small evidence to support the electrical theory of the nervous system. In pain there are very heavy overcharges in the nerves. It may well have been

  -- and elsewhere some dianetic computations have been made about this -- that the brain is the absorber for overcharges of power resulting from injury, the power itself being generated by the injured cells in the area of injury. That is theory and has no place here save to serve as an example. We are dealing now only with scientific fact.

  The action of the analytical mind during a moment of intense pain is suspended. In fact, the analytical mind behaves just as though it were an organ to which vital supply was shut off whenever shock is present.

  As an example, a man struck in the side by a car is knocked “unconscious” and on regaining “consciousness” has no record of the period when he was “knocked out.” This would be a non-survival circumstance. It means that there would be no volition on the part of anyone who was injured, and this is the time when the organism most requires volition. So this is non-survival, if the whole mind cuts out whenever pain appears. Would an organism with more than a billion years of biological engineering behind it leave a problem like this unsolved?

  Indeed, the organism solved the problem. Maybe the problem is very difficult, biologically, and maybe the solution is not very good, but large provision has been made for those moments when the organism is “unconscious.”

  The answer to the problem of making the organism react in moments of

  “unconsciousness” or near “unconsciousness” is also the answer to insanity and psychosomatic illnesses and all the strange mental quirks to which people are liable and which gave rise to that fable “it is human to err.”

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  Clinical tests prove these statements to be scientific facts: 1.

  The mind records on some level continuously during the entire life of the organism.

  2.

  All recordings of the lifetime are available.

  3.

  “Unconsciousness,” in which the mind is oblivious of its surroundings, is possible only in death and does not exist as total amnesia in life.

  4.

  All mental and physical derangements of a psychic nature come about from moments of

  “unconsciousness.”

  5.

  Such moments can be reached and drained of charge with the result of returning the mind to optimum operating condition.

  “Unconsciousness” is the single source of aberration. There is no such action as

  “mental conditioning” except on a conscious training level (where it exists only with the consent of the person).

  If you care to make the experiment you can take a man, render him “unconscious,” hurt him and give him information. By dianetic technique, no matter what information you gave him, it can be recovered. This experiment should not be carelessly conducted because you might also render him insane.

  A pale shade of this operation can be obtained by hypnosis, either by its usual techniques or drugs. By installing “positive suggestions” in a subject, he can be made to act like an insane person. This test is not a new one. It has been well known that compulsions or repressions can be so introduced into the psyche. The ancient Greek was quite familiar with it and used it to produce various delusions.

  There is what is known as a “post-hypnotic suggestion.” An understanding of this can assist an understanding of the basic mechanism of insanity. The actions under both circumstances are not identical, but they are similar enough in their essence.

  A man is placed in a hypnotic trance by standard hypnotic technique or some hypnotic drug. The operator then may say to him, “When you awaken there is something you must do.

  Whenever I touch my tie you will remove your coat. When I let go my tie, you will put on your coat. Now you will forget that I have told you to do this.”

  The subject is then awakened. He is not consciously aware of the command. If told he had been given an order while “asleep,” he would resist the idea or shrug but he would not know. The operator then touches his tie. The subject may make some remark about its being too warm and so take his coat off. The operator then releases his tie. The subject may remark that he is now cold and will put his coat back on. The operator then touches his tie. The subject may say that his coat has been to the tailor’s and with much conversation finally explain why he is taking it off, perhaps to see if the back seam had been sewn properly. The operator then releases his tie and the subject says he is satisfied with the tailor and so replaces his coat.

  The

  operator may touch his tie many times and each time receive action on the part of the subject.

  At last the subject may become aware, from the expressions on people’s faces, that something is wrong. He will not know what is wrong. He will not even know that the touching of the tie is the signal which makes him take off his coat. He will begin to grow uncomfortable. He may find fault with the operator’s appearance and begin to criticize his clothing. He still does not know the tie is a signal. He will still react and remain in ignorance that there is some strange reason he must take off his coat -- all he knows is that he is uncomfortable with his coat on whenever the tie is touched, uncomfortable with his coat off every time the tie is released.

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  These various actions are very important to an understanding of the reactive mind.

  Hypnotism is a laboratory tool. It is not used to any extent in dianetic therapy, but it has served as a means of examining minds and getting their reactions. Hypnotism is a wild variable. A few people can be hypnotized, many cannot be. Hypnotic suggestions will sometimes “take”

  and sometimes they won’t.

  Sometimes they make persons well and sometimes they make them ill -- the same suggestion reacting differently in different people. An engineer knows how to make use of a wild variable. There is something which makes it unpredictable. Finding out the basic reason hypnotism was a variable helped to discover the source of insanity. And understanding the mechanism of the post-hypnotic suggestion can aid an understanding of aberration.

  No matter how foolish a suggestion is given to a subject under hypnosis, he will carry it out one way or another. He can be told to remove his shoes or call someone at ten the following day or to eat peas for breakfast and he will. These are direct orders and he will comply with them. He can be told that his hats do not fit him and he will believe that they do not. Any suggestion
will operate within his mind unbeknownst to his higher levels of awareness.

  Very complex suggestions can be given. One such would be to the effect that he was unable to utter the word “I.” He would omit it from his conversation, using remarkable makeshifts without being “aware” that he was having to avoid the word. Or he could be told that he must never look at his hands and he will not. These are repressions. Given to the subject when drugged or in a hypnotic sleep, these suggestions operate when he is awake. And they will continue to operate until released by the hypnotic operator.

  He can be told that he has an urge to sneeze every time he hears the word “rug” and that he will sneeze when it is spoken. He can be told that he must jump two feet in the air every time he sees a cat and he will jump. And he will do these things after he has been awakened.

  These are compulsions.

  He can be told that he will think very sexual thoughts about a certain girl but that when he thinks them he will feel his nose itch. He can be told that he has a continual urge to lie down and sleep and that every time he lies down he will feel that he cannot sleep. He will experience these things. These are neuroses.

  In further experiments he can be told, when he is in his hypnotic “sleep,” that he is the president of the country and that the secret service agents are trying to murder him. Or he can be told that he is being fed poison in every restaurant in which he attempts to eat. These are psychoses.

  He can be informed that he is really another person and that he owns a yacht and answers to the name of “Sir Reginald.” Or he can be told that he is a thief, that he has a prison record, and that the police are looking for him. These would be schizophrenic and paranoid-schizophrenic insanities respectively.

  The operator can inform the subject that the subject is the most wonderful person on earth and that everybody thinks so. Or that the subject is the object of adoration of all women.