The book "Dianetics: Evolution Of A Science" is a brilliant piece of work and a fun read. The book explains, in layman's terms, the process Ron went through to discover Survive! as the dynamic principle of existence, and derive the basic principles and practice of Dianetics.

This book proceeds in a unique way. Ron had been all over the world and had contacted many spiritual traditions. He'd observed human behavior from a lot of different vantage points. He'd studied eastern and western philosophies. He had studied mathematics, science and engineering. And now he was studying something (the mind and human behavior) which had never really yielded more than a smidgen of true data.

But there were truths. Some here, some there. They were all scattered about. Ron had to somehow capture all the truths, discard all the lies, and formulate a dynamic principle of existence, something which might be fundamental enough to unlock other aspects of the problem. How could he proceed?

The book presents a novel strategy used by Ron, which might be called, "wisdom by discarding of areas" (Ron calls it something else, which you will see). We examine an area, and determine if it actually has any truth or workable ideas in it. If not, we discard the area and look elsewhere.

For example:

Examination was made of hypnoanalysis. It sounds good in the texts, but it doesn't work. It doesn't work for several reasons, first among them being that you can't hypnotize everybody. Further it works only occasionally, even when a person can be hypnotized. So hypnoanalysis was buried-- along with the water-cure of Bedlam, and the prefrontal lobotomy and the demon-extraction techniques of the shamans of British Guiana-- and the search for the key which could restore a mind to normal was continued.

And at some point, Ron came up with the "Doctrine of Selection of Importances".

One looks at a sea of facts. Every drop in the sea is like very other drop. Some few of the drops are of vast importance. How to find one? How to tell when it is important? A lot of prior art in the field of the mind-- and as far as I was concerned, all of it-- is like that. Ten thousand facts, all and each one apparent unit importance value. Now unerringly select the right one. Yes, once one has found, by some other means, the right one, it is very simple to look over the facts and pick out the proper one and say, "See? There it was all the time. Old Whoosis knew what he was doing." But try it before you know! It's a cinch Old Whoosis did not know or he would have red-tabbed the fact and thrown the others away.

So with this new Doctrine of the Selection of Importances, all data not of personal testing or discovery was jettisoned. I had been led up so many blind alleys by unthorough observation and careless work on the part of forerunners in this business that it was time to decide that it was much, much easier to construct a whole premise than it was to go needle-in-the-haystacking.

And for most of the book you can see Ron discarding areas which yielded little or no truths, or measurable progress toward the goal. You get to watch as Ron takes each area in turn and examines, and then discards it. And ultimately by this means Ron arrives at the philosophy and practice of Dianetics.

To me, this was a unique and brilliant way of proceeding. As a young man, I surveyed philosophies, both eastern and western, as well as a number of the major schools of psychology. And almost as soon as I started, the search for wisdom among them was over. As a student of history, they might be of interest. But as sources of wisdom, they were not, even if here and there appeared a truth. And being on a quest similar to Ron's, I had to proceed alone, without any help from my predecessors. Until I rediscovered Scientology this lifetime. And here I found that Ron had already done all the heavy lifting for me.

You can imagine any pioneer taking a similar route, if he's smart. Throw away areas which are unproductive in the current context. And pursue only those areas which are yielding real, positive results consistently.

Watching Ron think in this book is very worthwhile. It is engineer thinking, workability thinking. And the book is a short, light read. Highly recommended.