George Washington University, circa 1929, where L. Ron Hubbard studied engineering, mathematics and nuclear physics.

     The third crucial step of this journey lay in Asia, where Mr. Hubbard finally spent the better part of two years in travel and study. There, he became one of the few Americans to gain admittance to the fabled Tibetan lamaseries in the Western Hills of China, and actually studied with the last in the line of royal magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. Yet however enthralling such adventures may have seemed, he would finally admit to finding nothing either workable or predictable as regards the human mind and spirit.

     With his return to the United States in 1929, Mr. Hubbard enrolled in George Washington University where he studied engineering, mathematics and nuclear physics—all disciplines that would serve him well through later philosophic inquiry: point of fact, L. Ron Hubbard was the first to rigorously employ Western scientific methods to the study of spiritual matters. Yet beyond a basic methodology, university offered nothing. Indeed, as he later admitted, “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,” and, “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.”