ii. What Is Scientology?

The origins of Scientology date back to the 1930s when L. Ron Hubbard, the American who was to become the founder of Scientology, travelled the East and asked himself why man was living such a miserable life. No one had been able to answer his questions, when, as a young man, he had asked where man came from and where man was going.

In 1950, Mr. Hubbard wrote a book on a subject he called Dianetics (“through mind”), which was his early research into the mind. The book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, was very popular and soon became a bestseller, and has sold more than 17 million copies. As the Dianetics movement grew and the research expanded from the mind into the spirit, another subject was born—Scientology—and the first Church was founded in 1954 in the United States. Dianetics first entered Japan shortly after that, but the first formal Scientology missionary expansion into Japan occurred in 1962, making this the actual starting point of Scientology’s history in Japan. On 10 September 1962 the first official lecture on Scientology was given to a packed auditorium.

The word “Scientology” comes from the Latin scio, meaning “Knowing—in the fullest sense of the word,” and the Greek logos, which means “to study.”

In the book Scientology—The Fundamentals of Thought, Mr. Hubbard explains that the subject is actually descended from the roots of psychology, but that we must understand that it is not descended from current psychology, but rather the older psychology as was taught in the religions of the world before the spiritual essence of the study was removed in the last century.