The Second World War proved both an interruption of research and a further impetus—the first owing to service in both the Atlantic and Pacific as a commander of antisubmarine patrols; the second because if anything underscored the need for a workable philosophy of human betterment, it was the sheer horror of that conflict. Or as he so succinctly put it, “Man has a madness and it’s called war.” Mr. Hubbard was also among the first to express concerns over what the advent of atomic weapons meant when unaccompanied by a corresponding understanding of human behavior.

The culmination of work to this point came in 1945, at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. Left partially blind from injured optic nerves and lame with hip and spinal injuries, Mr. Hubbard became one of five thousand naval and Marine Corps patients under treatment at Oak Knoll. Also under treatment at the facility were several hundred former inmates of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Intrigued by their inexplicable failure to recover despite intensive medical care, Mr. Hubbard took it upon himself to administer an early form of Dianetics. In all, some fifteen patients received Mr. Hubbard’s attention as he utilized his techniques to remove what he postulated as the mental inhibition to recovery. What he eventually discovered, and what factually saved the lives of those patients, rested upon a key philosophic point: notwithstanding generally held scientific theory of the time, one’s state of mind actually took precedence over one’s physical condition. That is, our viewpoints, attitudes and emotional condition ultimately determined our physical well-being and not the reverse. Or as Mr. Hubbard himself so succinctly put it: “Function monitored structure.”

With the resolution of this matter and the restoration of peace, Mr. Hubbard set out to further test the workability of his discoveries through intensive research on individuals from all strata of society. Included were actors from a Hollywood theatre workshop, industry executives from the neighboring studios, accident victims from a Pasadena hospital and the criminally insane from a Georgia mental institution. All told, Mr. Hubbard personally worked with some two hundred men, women and children before compiling his sixteen years of investigation into a manuscript. Entitled Dianetics: The Original Thesis, the work was not actually offered for publication, but rather passed to friends for review. Through the process of hectographing, hundreds of copies eventually saw circulation; and so enthusiastic was the response that Mr. Hubbard was encouraged to present a broader announcement. That paper, entitled “Terra Incognita: The Mind,” appeared in the Winter/Spring 1950 issue of the Explorers Club Journal. Immediately thereafter, Mr. Hubbard found himself literally deluged with requests for further information, eventually prompting his formal handbook, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

Without question Dianetics was a landmark event. In what would prove a telling prediction, then-national columnist Walter Winchell proclaimed: “There is something new coming up in April called Dianetics. A new science which works with the invariability of physical science in the field of the human mind. From all indications it will prove to be as revolutionary for humanity as the first caveman’s discovery and utilization of fire.” If Winchell’s statement was bold, it was nonetheless accurate; for with Dianetics came the first definitive explanation of human thinking and behavior. Then, too, with Dianetics came the first means to resolve the problems of the human mind, including unwanted sensations, emotions, irrationalities and psychosomatic ills.

At the core of such problems lay what Mr. Hubbard termed the reactive mind, and defined as that “portion of a person’s mind which works on a totally stimulus-response basis...which is not under his volitional control, and which exerts force and the power of command over his awareness, purposes, thoughts, body and actions.” Stored within the reactive mind are engrams, which he defined as mental recordings of times of physical pain and unconsciousness. That the mind still recorded perceptions, during moments of partial or full unconsciousness, had been previously glimpsed. But how the engram acted upon the body, affected behavior and thinking—all this was entirely new. Nor had anyone ever imagined what the totality of engrams, as contained in the reactive mind, meant in terms of human misery. For this is that portion of the mind, as Mr. Hubbard put it, “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.” In short, this was the source of all human failings.

If ever one wished proof of what Dianetics said about the engram and reactive mind, one only had to look at what could be accomplished with Dianetics techniques. The cases are legion, documented and startling: a homicidal maniac returned to normality in a matter of a few dozen hours, an arthritically paralyzed welder returned to full mobility in roughly the same, a legally blind professor whose vision was restored in under a week and an hysterically crippled housewife returned to perfect health in a single four-hour session. Then there was the ultimate goal of Dianetics processing: the state of Clear wherein the whole of the reactive mind was erased, leaving one with attributes and capabilities well in advance of anything previously predicted.

Needless to say, when word of Mr. Hubbard’s discoveries began to spread, the response was considerable: more than 50,000 copies of Dianetics sold immediately off the press, while bookstores struggled to keep the text on shelves. As evidence of the workability grew—the fact that Dianetics actually offered techniques anyone could apply—response was even more dramatic. “Dianetics—Taking US by Storm” and “Fastest Growing Movement in America” read newspaper headlines in the summer of 1950. By the end of the year, some 150 Dianetics groups had spontaneously formed from coast to coast, and six cities boasted Dianetics Foundations to help facilitate Mr. Hubbard’s advancement of the subject.