Through a long and adventurous pursuit of knowledge, L. Ron Hubbard did just that. His abiding interest in the human mind was initially sparked when, at the age of twelve, he studied under Commander Joseph C. Thompson – an early student of psychoanalysis and the first United States naval officer to study with Freud in Vienna. Although Ron would ultimately reject Freudian theory as both impractical and unworkable, he nonetheless came to one pivotal conclusion: “Something can be done about the mind.”

Pursuing his search across the South Pacific to Asia, Ron became one of the few Americans admitted into holy Tibetan lamaseries in the Western Hills of China. He additionally studied with the last in the line of royal magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. Yet, despite all the fabled wisdom of the East, he found lands of aching poverty and abject despair, and could only conclude: “Learning locked in mildewed books is of little use to anyone and therefore of no value unless it can be used.”

Returning to the United States, Ron next pursued a course of study in engineering, mathematics and nuclear physics at George Washington University, all disciplines that would serve him well through his later inquiries into the mind and life. In point of fact, L. Ron Hubbard was the first to rigorously employ Western empirical methods to the study of the mind and spirit, beginning with his university research into subjects as diverse as human memory storage and the nature of aesthetics. Yet beyond a basic methodology and thus a yardstick for further inquiry, university offered no real answers. Indeed, as he later wrote, “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.” Consequently, he added, “I knew I would have to do a lot of research.”

That research consumed the next several decades, and his laboratory was the world. Without access to comfortable “research grants,” and supported only by his acclaimed literary career, Ron studied no less than 21 races and cultures – from Pacific Northwest Indian tribes and Philippine Tagalogs to the jibaros of Puerto Rico. (In consequence, he is also remembered today on the rosters of the prestigious New York Explorers Club.)

The Second World War proved both an interruption of research and a further impetus to develop an actual technology of the human mind. The first procedures were tested at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Northern California where a then-Lieutenant L. Ron Hubbard received treatment for wounds suffered in combat.

His research cases were former prisoners of Japanese internment camps – men whom medical science had all but given up. Yet with the employment of seminal Dianetics techniques, each and every one of those Ron treated, summarily and quite remarkably, regained health.

With the restoration of peace, Ron set out to further test the workability of Dianetics, and with individuals from all walks of life. In full, to develop Dianetics as a uniquely practical and effective technology, he tested procedures on hundreds.

In 1947, he collected notes drawn from numerous case histories amassed through preceding years of testing, and prepared a thesis detailing both underlying theory and techniques. Copies of the manuscript were distributed to medical and scientific circles, then eagerly recopied and passed to friends. In that way, Ron’s original thesis on Dianetics saw immediate and wide circulation.

Today, that thesis is published as The Dynamics of Life. The work was followed, in late 1949, with an article written expressly for The Explorers Journal entitled “Terra Incognita: The Mind”.

To meet the veritable flood of inquiries from readers, Ron was next urged to author a definitive text on the subject.

Accordingly, in early 1950, he began work on Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the first comprehensive text ever written on the human mind.

Its release on May 9, 1950 became a landmark event in publishing history, capturing wide public interest and acclaim. The work immediately topped the New York Times bestseller list and remained there week after week. It has since become the most widely read and used book on the human mind in history, with 20 million copies in circulation.

Today, Dianetics is a worldwide phenomenon, used by millions in more than 150 nations and in over 50 languages. Dianetics, however, by no means marked a culmination of Ron’s research. Indeed, as 1951 drew to a close, he intensified his research into the true identity of the life force, and his discoveries formed the basis of the Scientology religion, the study of the spirit in relationship to itself, universes and other life.

In 1954 in Phoenix, Arizona, just months after the founding of the Church of Scientology by American Scientologists, Ron developed and codified many techniques to increase one’s ability to a level where exteriorization could be accomplished comfortably and at will. Further work led to development of techniques that enabled an exterior being to regain his innate powers to operate independent of the body.

Ron had succeeded in mapping a route anyone could walk to higher levels of awareness and ability — and, ultimately, to a state never even envisioned: Operating Thetan.

Building upon these advances, Ron’s researches over the next three decades yielded even greater gains, and today, L. Ron Hubbard’s works on the subject of man, the mind and spirit comprise tens of millions of published words recorded in volumes of books, manuscripts and over 3,000 recorded lectures.

The greatest testimonies to Ron’s vision are the miracle results of his technology, and the millions of friends around the world who carry his legacy forward into the twenty-first century. Both continue to grow in number with each passing day.

“I like to help others,” he once said, “and count it as my greatest pleasure in life to see a person free himself of the shadows which darken his days.

“These shadows look so thick to him and weigh him down so that when he finds they are shadows and that he can see through them, walk through them and be again in the sun, he is enormously delighted. And I am afraid I am just as delighted as he is.”