At the core of such problems lay what Mr. Hubbard termed the reactive mind, and defined as that “portion of a person’s mind which works on a totally stimulus-response basis, which is not under his volitional control, and which exerts force and the power of command over his awareness, purposes, thoughts, body and actions.” Stored within the reactive mind are engrams, which he defined as mental recordings of times of physical pain and unconsciousness. That the mind still recorded perceptions, during moments of partial or full unconsciousness, had been previously glimpsed. But how the engram acted upon the body, affected behavior and thinking—all this was entirely new. Nor had anyone ever imagined what the totality of engrams, as contained in the reactive mind, meant in terms of human misery. For this is that portion of the mind, as Mr. Hubbard put it, “which makes a man suppress his hopes, which holds his apathies, which gives him irresolution when he should act and kills him before he has begun to live.” In short, this was the source of all human failings.

     If ever one wished proof of what Dianetics said about the engram and reactive mind, one only had to look at what could be accomplished with Dianetics techniques. The cases are legion, documented and startling: a homicidal maniac returned to normality in a matter of a few dozen hours; an arthritically paralyzed welder returned to full mobility in roughly the same; a legally blind professor whose vision was restored in under a week; and an hysterically crippled housewife returned to perfect health in a single three-hour session. Then there was the ultimate goal of Dianetics processing: the state of Clear wherein the whole of the reactive mind was erased, leaving one with attributes and capabilities well in advance of anything previously predicted.