The Excalibur manuscript in which L. Ron Hubbard first laid out that survive was the single basic common denominator of existence.

     That research essentially consumed the next twenty years, and led him through no less than 21 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.

     The first plateau of that search came in 1938 with an unpublished manuscript entitled Excalibur.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.