Probably the strangest place an explorer can go is inside. The Earth’s frontiers are being rapidly gobbled up by the fleet flight of planes, the stars are not yet reached. But there still exists a dark unknown which, if a strange horizon for an adventurer, is nevertheless capable of producing some adventures scarcely rivaled by Livingstone.

During the course of three minor expeditions before the war the realization came about that one of the most dangerous risks in the field of exploration is not located in the vicinity of the geographical goal, but is hard by from the first moment of planning until the last of disbanding—the unbalanced member of the party.

After some years of war it became even more of a conviction that there are some things more dangerous than the kamikaze, just as they had been more dangerous than malaria.

For a mathematician and navigator to become involved in the complexities of the mental frontiers is not particularly strange; to produce something like results from his explorations into the further realms of the unknown definitely is.

There is no reason here to become expansive on the subject of Dianetics. The backbone of the science can be found where it belongs, in the textbook and in professional publications on the mind and body.

But in that Dianetics was evolved because of observations in exploration for the purpose of bettering exploration results and safeguarding the success of expeditions, it would be strange, indeed, to make no mention of it in its proper generative field.

Based on heuristic principles and specifically on the postulate that the mission of life is survival and that the survival is in several lines rather than merely one, Dianetics contains several basic axioms which seem to approximate natural laws. But regardless of what it approximates, it works. Man surviving as himself, as his progeny, as his group or race, is still surviving equally well. The mechanisms of his body and his society are evidently intended to follow this axiom since, by following it in a scientific manner, several other discoveries came about. That Dianetics is of interest to medicine—in that it apparently conquers and cures all psychosomatic ills and that it is of interest to institutions where it has a salutary effect upon the insane—is beyond the province of its original intention.

What was wanted was a therapy which could be applied by expedition commanders or doctors which would work easily and in all cases to restore rationale to party members unduly affected by hardship and, more important, which would provide a yardstick in the selection of personnel which would obviate potential mental and physical failure. That goal was gained and when gained was found to be relatively simple.


1 Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in The Explorers Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. I New York, winter 1949-spring 1950.