We have around us today many problems: the problems of the criminal, war, individual illness and juvenile delinquency. We are faced with very intimate and vital problems which we are not, as a large society, adequately solving. Dianetics has introduced into the society a technique by which it is possible to increase the potential of working groups in the country.

I would like to tell you a little more about Dianetics and its general ability to remedy some of the troubles and problems with which the community, the individual and the nation are faced. We have quite a few things in this society today which need remedying, and we in Dianetics are in a little bit better position to remedy these things.

Dianetics is a series of techniques, tested on an engineering basis, which do things with the science of thought. You hear people say, “Dianetics? This is probably just another idea. If we sleep on feather beds we will all be much healthier.” This is the sort of thing that has been going on in the past about thought itself: “If you sit with your legs crossed for fifteen minutes every morning and say ‘Every day in every way we are getting better and better,”’ and so on. In the past they were trying to sell this sort of thing as a substitute for a good science of thought. The public is very justly suspicious of anything new that pretends to do something about the human mind.

We have reached the place where we can blow a whole town off the face of the earth, drive automobiles at 110 miles an hour, and unload how many tons of weight where at such-and-such a time, but nobody has been adequately studying the human mind itself.

Doctors know that human ills stem from the mind. New remedies come out: “All you have to do is take so-and-so and life is wonderful.” The thinking medical men, however, who have ability and who have done observations on their own, know that none of these medicines are panaceas. We do have sulfa, penicillin, Aureomycin and other medicines that are in the realm of bacteria. This has been the one advance in medicine which has been made, in addition to anesthetics, but with seventy-five percent of man’s ills very little advance has been made. Things like arthritis, bursitis, myopic astigmatism, ulcers and enormous numbers of other ills have gone without being healed. Very seldom would one of these illnesses go away.

In Dianetics we demonstrate the fact that we have techniques to do away with psychosomatic illnesses. People say, “Why didn’t someone know this before? Why didn’t someone know that we could recover all our memories of childhood?”

One day I ran a lady. She hadn’t known who her parents were. Actually she was not an amnesia case. Her parents had died before she knew them. I took her back to the period where she could see her parents. We found her name, what her birthday was, where her parents had died, of what they had died, and so on. She came back to present time in a remarkable state, tremendously enthused. Four different psychiatrists had worked on this lady and were in the audience. Two came up and confessed to me that they had thrown this patient at me to prove that Dianetics did not work. They had worked on her for five years and considered her the hardest patient in the area. These two gentlemen were more courteous to me after that.

I have received a letter from a gentleman in the Midwest who wants the Foundation to send him a certified auditor trained in these techniques to instruct the staff of an entire sanitarium in order to accomplish what they have not accomplished before.

They did not know how thought works, what the parts of the mind are, or any of the fundamentals we deal with in Dianetics. As a consequence they could not predict how a person would react under certain circumstances. They did not recognize that when a nation goes to war it is in a period of madness.

Dianetics is interested in experimentation in order to increase the application of these techniques. Our Research Department is very hard at work running a pilot project on a small group in order to perfect these applications of Group Dianetics. In a few days Group Dianetics has taken an apathetic company and has brought it up to where its income potential has almost doubled. These things are the vital stuff out of which we hope to make a larger and better future for all the world.