“The first principle of my own philosophy,” wrote L. Ron Hubbard, “is that wisdom is meant for anyone who wishes to reach for it. It is the servant of the commoner and king alike and should never be regarded with awe.” To this he added that philosophy must be capable of application, for “Learning locked in mildewed books is of little use to anyone and therefore of no value unless it can be used.” Finally, he declared philosophic knowledge to be only of value if true and workable, and thereby set the parameters for Dianetics and Scientology.

How L. Ron Hubbard came to found these subjects is an immense story that effectively began in the first decades of the twentieth century with his befriending of indigenous Blackfoot Indians in and around his Helena, Montana, home. Notable among these people was a full-fledged tribal medicine man, locally known as Old Tom. In what ultimately constituted a rare bond, the six-year-old Ron was both honored with the status of blood brother and instilled with an appreciation of a profoundly distinguished spiritual heritage.

What may be seen as the next milestone came in 1923 when a twelve-year-old L. Ron Hubbard began a study of Freudian theory with a Commander Joseph C. Thompson—the first United States naval officer to study with Freud in Vienna. Although Mr. Hubbard was never to accept psychoanalysis per se, the exposure was once again pivotal. For if nothing else, he later wrote, Freud had at least advanced the idea that, “something could be done about the mind.”

The third crucial step of this journey lay in Asia, where Mr. Hubbard finally spent the better part of two years in travel and study. There, he became one of the few Americans to gain admittance to the fabled Tibetan lamaseries in the Western Hills of China and actually studied with the last in the line of magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. Yet however enthralling such adventures may have seemed, he would finally admit to finding nothing either workable or predictable as regards the human mind and spirit.

[inline|iid=173]With his return to the United States in 1929, Mr. Hubbard enrolled in George Washington University where he studied engineering, mathematics and nuclear physics—all disciplines that would serve him well through later philosophic inquiry: point of fact, L. Ron Hubbard was the first to rigorously employ Western scientific methods to the study of spiritual matters. Yet beyond a basic methodology, university offered nothing. Indeed, as he later admitted, “...it was very obvious that I was dealing with and living in a culture which knew less about the mind than the lowest primitive tribe I had ever come in contact with,” and, “knowing also that people in the East were not able to reach as deeply and predictably into the riddles of the mind, as I had been led to expect, I knew I would have to do a lot of research.”

That research essentially consumed the next twenty years and led him through no less than twenty-one races and cultures including Pacific Northwest Indian tribes, Philippine Tagalogs and, as he was wont to joke, the people of the Bronx. In the simplest terms, his work through this period focused upon two fundamental questions. First, and extending from experimentation conducted at the university, he was searching for the long-speculated life force, i.e., the source of human consciousness. Next, and inextricably linked with the first, he wished to determine the common denominator of life; for only with that established, he reasoned, could one effectively determine what was both true and workable as regards the human condition.

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The first plateau of that search came in 1938 with an unpublished manuscript entitled “Excalibur.” In essence that work proposed life to be much more than a random series of chemical reactions and that some definable urge underlay all human behavior. That urge, he declared, was survive, and it constituted the single most pervasive force among all people. That Man was surviving was not a new idea. That this was the single basic common denominator of existence was, and therein lay the signpost for all research to follow.