Original Thesis, written by Mr. Hubbard in 1948, summarized his 16-years investigation into the human mind. Publish today as The Dynamics of Life, it was originally offered to friends for review and through the process of hectography copies were circulated, hand to hand, around the world.

     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 that madness is 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.”