In Pursuit of the Answers to the Mind
(continued)
During the years that followed, he spent thousands of hours developing and codifying the first ever workable technology of the mind. Ron had been steadily accumulating notes on his research, in preparation for a book on the subject. To further test his theories, he set up an office in Hollywood, California where he could work with people from all walks of life. It wasn’t long before he was inundated with a variety of public, eager to undergo "therapy."
Without their knowing who he was, Ron began to process them. "These people would simply turn up -- it was word of mouth. That was all. There was no advertising or anything... I had anything from movie stars to winos. And a fantastic parade of people.
"I just sat down with malice aforethought on a whole bunch of these people and just started clearing them up. They were there because there was something dreadfully wrong in their lives. They did not know the word Dianetics. They didn’t know Hubbard. They didn’t know what I was doing. They had no clue."
But the results were spectacular. Ron noted that; "Stutterers did not stutter. Harlots became moral. Arithmetic was easy. Color-visio, tone-audio recall. Color-visio, tone-audio imagination. Knowledge of what was imagination and what wasn’t."
Traveling east in 1948, Ron spent three months helping deeply disturbed inmates in a Savannah, Georgia mental hospital. "I worked with some of these," he recalled, "interviewing and helping out as what they call a lay practitioner, which means a volunteer. This gave me some insight into the social problems of insanity and gave me further data in my own researches." It also restored sanity to a score of previously hopeless cases and once again proved that his discoveries were applicable to all, no matter how badly off they were.
In his journey to understand behavior in the 1940’s, Ron found the sources of human aberration in the mind. "People are working on impulses and they are obeying things that are not of their own choice. Let’s take a look and find out what it is. And we found out that it was sheets of energy on which were engraved perceptions of past incidents, including the pain. Sheets of energy. Today we call them facsimiles. They’re actual sheets of energy -- as actual as anything else is actual in terms of energy. And this plate of energy is capable of exerting pain against the individual.... It’s a picture. It’s just as much as a picture as though you’d made a plaster cast, where plaster would be the energy."
Ron’s discovery that mental energy was in fact made up of mental image pictures, and that these pictures could be erased through processes he had developed, opened the door to improvement of man’s life potential.
This became Dianetics (Dia - through, noos - mind).
