Initially he searched for answers in existing resources. He returned to the congressional library and the psychology department searching for clues; he questioned professors and even reviewed ancient oriental texts ... but all to no avail.
It was clear that the answers to the mind and the true nature of man were riddles no one had solved and were locked in mystery.
Thus it became Ron’s task -- to fill that hole in the culture. As one of his primary guiding principles he wrote, "knowledge is only valuable if it is true or it if works." He also knew that before one could begin the pursuit of philosophic knowledge, one had to know something about the "computer of the retainer of and the vessel which holds knowledge" -- the human mind.
Having completed an exhaustive search of all available texts on the subject, Ron was convinced that there were no answers to be found in George Washington University or any other Western center of learning. Discovery would be a road he would have to walk himself and a road that would take him far from the boundaries of the nation. For, as he put it, "To be very blunt with you, 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. 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."
L. Ron Hubbard
In the research that followed, Ron set out to find the basic principle of existence. He was searching for a principle which would lead to the unification of knowledge and explain the meaning of existence -- something other philosophers had set out to find in the past but never found.
To do this, he knew he needed to study man in many different settings and cultures and in the summer of 1932, he embarked upon a series of overseas expeditions. The first, aboard one of the last four-masted schooners, took him to the Caribbean where he examined the primitive villagers of Martinique. Returning to the West Indies a few months later, he studied cultures of other islands including Haitian and their esoteric beliefs in voodoo. He observed the Espiritismo beliefs of the Puerto Rican hill people ... and all the while continued to ask the questions -- "What did these people have in common? What is it that motivates them and where did they come from?"
