L. Ron Hubbard was an author, philosopher, humanitarian and founder of the Scientology religion. He was born March 13, 1911, in Tilden, Nebraska, and passed away January 24, 1986.

His long and adventurous road to discovery began at an early age. Under the tutelage of his mother, a thoroughly educated woman, he was reading well beyond his years: Shakespeare, Greek philosophy and an array of later classics. Yet his early years were far from bookish and with his family’s move to Helena, Montana, he was soon breaking broncos with the best of the local wranglers.

As an inquisitive youth in what was then still a rough and tumble American West, he was also soon befriending indigenous Blackfoot Indians—learning tribal lore and legend from a local medicine man and so achieving that very rare status of blood brother. By the age of 13 he had further distinguished himself as the nation’s youngest Eagle Scout, and represented American scouting to US President Calvin Coolidge.

Yet what most distinguished the young L. Ron Hubbard was an insatiable curiosity coupled with an innate desire to better the human condition.

Recognizing exactly those qualities, a student of Sigmund Freud’s and the only American naval officer to study psychoanalysis in Vienna, Commander Joseph C. Thompson introduced the young L. Ron Hubbard to Freudian theory.

Although genuinely fascinated with the possibilities of plumbing the human mind, Ron was left with many unanswered questions.

When his father was assigned to the South Pacific as a United States naval commander, Ron embarked upon the first of his famed Asian travels. By the age of 19 he had traveled more than a quarter of a million miles and traversed much of China and India. Through the course of it, he became one of the few Western adventurers to enter forbidden Tibetan lamaseries in the Western Hills of China and study with the last in the line of royal magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. Yet for all the wonders he witnessed, he could not help but conclude the legendary wisdom of the East did nothing to ease suffering and poverty in these overpopulated and underdeveloped lands.

Returning to the United States in 1929, Ron resumed his formal education and enrolled in George Washington University the following year. There, he studied mathematics, engineering and attended the first American class on atomic and molecular phenomena. Although not necessarily subjects of choice, such were the disciplines that provided him the investigatory tools with which to pursue outstanding questions of the human mind and life. Indeed, L. Ron Hubbard became the first to bring a scientific methodology to age-old questions of existence.

To round out his university days, he also became one of the foremost pioneers of American aviation and a barnstorming sensation across the Midwest. Ultimately, however, and particularly in light of what passed for a “science of the mind” in university psychology labs, he could only conclude that Western academia held no answers.

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. Knowing also that people in the East were not able to reach as deeply and predictably into the riddles of the mind, as I had been led to expect, I knew I would have to do a lot of research.”