About L. Ron Hubbard
“To know life you’ve got to be part of life,” L. Ron Hubbard wrote, “you must get down there and look, you must get into the nooks and crannies of existence, and you must rub elbows with all kinds and types of men before you can finally establish what man is.”
He did exactly that. From the open ranges of his home state of Montana to the hills of China, from the frigid coast of Alaska to the jungles of South Pacific islands, whether working with men on explorations or teaching inexperienced naval crews to survive the ravages of a world war, L. Ron Hubbard truly learned what Man and life are all about.
Armed with a keen intellect, boundless energy, limitless curiosity and a unique approach to philosophy and science which emphasized workability and practicality over all else, Ron embarked upon his study of life and its mysteries while still in his teens.
Traveling extensively throughout Asia and the Pacific, he studied the wisdom of Far Eastern philosophies yet observed widespread suffering and poverty. If there was such profound wisdom in the East then why all this, he asked.
After returning to the United States in 1929, Ron pursued the study of mathematics and engineering, enrolling at George Washington University. He was a member of one of the first American classes on nuclear physics and conducted his first experiments dealing with the mind while at the university. He found that despite all of Mankind’s advances in the physical sciences, a workable technology of the mind and life had never been developed. The mental “technologies” which did exist, psychology and psychiatry, were actually barbaric, false subjects—no more workable than the methods of jungle witch doctors.
Ron set out to find the basic principle of existence—a principle which would lead to the unification of knowledge and that would explain the meaning of existence itself—something other philosophers had attempted but never found.
To accomplish this, he began to study Man in many different settings and cultures. In the summer of 1932, upon leaving the university, he embarked upon a series of expeditions. The first expedition 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 Haiti and their esoteric beliefs in voodoo; and later he observed the beliefs of the Puerto Rican hill people.
After his return to the United States, Ron began to substantiate the basis of a theory, and in 1937, he conducted a series of biological experiments that led to a breakthrough discovery which isolated the dynamic principle of existence—the common denominator of all life—SURVIVE!
