“To know life,” he once wrote, “you’ve got to be part of life. 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.”

And throughout his long and adventurous pursuit of knowledge, L. Ron Hubbard did just that, in the process also becoming one of the twentieth century’s most influential authors, with more than 160 million copies of his works in worldwide circulation.

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 reached 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 for all the fabled wisdom of the East, he found 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.”

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