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 psychoanalysis, 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.
[...]
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.
[...]
In a
clear, full 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 current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane.
— L. Ron Hubbard
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
(Twenty-fifth printing 1981)