Mr. David Miscavige, Chairman of the Board Religious Technology Center

Keynote Address at the Grand Opening of the Church of Scientology of San Francisco (cont.)

For if this church marks the beginning of a new era it is only appropriate since it is also where the entire journey began. Or, put another way, when LRH delivered his famed lecture "The Story of Dianetics and Scientology" the events in this city are that story.

It was here, as a young boy, he boarded the U.S.S. Grant for a cruise that would take him through the Panama Canal, en route to Washington DC. Yet more significant than his destination, were the events of that voyage. Specifically, it's where he met and befriended Commander "Snake" Thompson, a man who had studied under Sigmund Freud, at the behest of the United States Navy.

And while LRH soon discovered those answers left much to be desired, in terms of unlocking the riddle of the mind, it was the catalyst for a young L. Ron Hubbard to embark on a life's journey to find them.

Then, four years later in 1927, it was San Francisco again where LRH boarded the President Madison en route to Guam. It was an era when very few Westerners, of any age, had experienced, let alone knew about the ancient wisdom of the East extending back thousands of years.

And it would serve as the next great lesson in LRH's life. For what he saw was a land where spiritual, not materialistic values, dominated, and people possessed a kind and gentle nature, all but lost in modern western culture.

Yet, with abject poverty in evidence everywhere, LRH also concluded there must be more to it all — a meeting ground between east and west. These were the experiences that motivated his quest, continuing for the next two decades, and taking him deep into twenty-one different cultures, from the Aleut Indians on the Alaskan frontier, to primitive cultures, in then-still unexplored West Indies Islands, to further travels even deeper into Eastern lands — right into China and India.

While between those travels, came lessons as a student in the first class of nuclear physics, at George Washington University, where LRH continued his search for the long elusive life force. So yes, while people often speak of "the world as one's laboratory," in the case of L. Ron Hubbard, it was literally true. And if those researches were yet interrupted by the Second World War, well, the war itself was the ultimate testing ground for his discoveries.

Because, we once again return to the Bay Area, where LRH walked at the outset of his service in that war, and where he then pioneered the very techniques of Dianetics at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital securing his own and others' recovery from injuries from that war. In fact, those were the very techniques he would soon publish in Dianetics: The Original Thesis, and then, as further developed in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.