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....

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.  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.  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 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.  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 the individual can be estimated with precision. These dynamics then embrace the activity of one or many men.