Dianetics: Dianetics spiritual healing technology. It addresses and handles the effects of the spirit on the body and can alleviate such things as unwanted sensations and emotions, accidents, injuries and psychosomatic illnesses (ones that are caused or aggravated by mental stress). Dianetics means "through the soul" (from Greek dia, through, and nous, soul). It is further defined as "what the soul is doing to the body."

Author of Dianetics and a philosopher and humanitarian, L. Ron Hubbard began his studies of the mind and spirit in 1923, resulting in a manuscript entitled "Excalibur" in 1938. It was in this unpublished work that the word "Scientology" first appeared to describe what Mr. Hubbard termed "the study of knowing how to know." He decided against publishing the book, saying, "Excalibur did not contain any therapy of any kind but was simply a discussion of the composition of life." And he added, "I decided to go further."

The "going further" resulted in Dianetics, a subject which was, in fact, introduced into the much broader field of Scientology to provide some kind of "therapy" that could be easily utilized by the man in the street. Thus, in 1947, he wrote a manuscript detailing some of these discoveries.

It was not published at that time, but circulated among friends, who copied it and passed it on to others. (This manuscript was ultimately formally published in 1951 as Dianetics: The Original Thesis and later republished as The Dynamics of Life.)

As copies of the manuscript circulated, Mr. Hubbard began to receive a flood of letters requesting further information and more applications of his new subject. He soon found himself spending all his time answering letters and decided to write a comprehensive text on the subject.

He first published an article on the subject. "Terra Incognita: The Mind," appeared in the Winter-Spring 1950 issue of the Explorers Club Journal. This was followed by the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, published in May 1950. It became a nationwide bestseller almost overnight. By late summer, people across the country were not only reading the book, but were also organizing their own groups for the purpose of applying Dianetics techniques. The book has remained a bestseller ever since, becoming number one on the New York Times bestseller list more than five decades after its initial publication. It continues to appear on bestseller lists around the world.

In the course of thousands of hours of Dianetics counseling on tens of thousands of individuals all over the country, it soon became apparent that many people audited on these procedures were coming into contact with incidents that seemed to occur in previous lives. Although certain officials in the Dianetics organizations attempted to suppress research into this phenomenon, L. Ron Hubbard refused to allow this. In his subsequent investigation, during which he asked himself the question of "Who was looking at these mental image pictures?" (a question raised in 1950 in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health as a vital matter to resolve), Mr. Hubbard believed that it had to be something other than the mind itself. He came to the conclusion that it was man’s spiritual self that was doing so. Eventually, Mr. Hubbard confirmed that he was dealing with an individual who was a spirit inhabiting a body and using a mind, and that man had a fundamentally spiritual nature.

It was this discovery, in the fall of 1951, that completed the circle for Mr. Hubbard and brought him back to the broader subject of Scientology and what Dianetics had been addressing all along — the spirit. It was then that he publicly announced Scientology. As he put it, "I found out what was looking at the pictures. And described it. And found out that you could do things with it from a very practical standpoint that nobody had ever done before and found myself suddenly in the field of religion . . ."

In 1954 the first Church of Scientology was formed in Los Angeles by a group of Scientologists, and within a few years churches were formed across the country and around the world.