L. Ron Hubbard – The Early Years
Returning to the United States, Ron 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 inquiry into the nature and principles of life. In point of fact, he 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 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, with the world his laboratory. Without access to comfortable “research grants,” and supported only by his own acclaimed literary career, Ron studied some 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 in which he was a flag bearing member.)
The Second World War proved both an interruption of his research and a further impetus to develop an actual technology of the human mind. The first procedures he developed 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 – whom medical science had all but given up on. Yet with the employment of the Dianetics techniques he had just researched, they regained their health.
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