Returning to the United States in the autumn of 1929, Ron resumed his formal education. After attending Swavely Prep School in Manassas, Virginia, he graduated from the Woodward School for Boys in Washington, D.C.

In addition to studying in one of America’s first nuclear physics programmes at George Washington University, Ron wrote for The University Hatchet, scripted radio dramas, performed ballads and reported for the Washington Herald.

He enrolled at George Washington University. His university major should probably have been ethnology, since he was already an expert in many different cultures — from the Philippine pygmies to the Kayan shamans of Borneo to the Chamorros of Guam. But fate and his father placed him, fortunately, in mathematics and engineering instead. With his knowledge of many cultures and his growing awareness of the human condition, his background in engineering and mathematics would serve him well in undertaking a scientific approach to solving the riddles of existence and realising man’s spiritual potential.

Theorising that the world of subatomic particles might possibly provide a clue to the human thought process, he enrolled in one of the first nuclear physics courses taught in the United States. Moreover, he was concerned for the safety of the world, recognising that if man were to handle the atom sanely for the greatest benefit, he would first have to learn to handle himself. His aim, then, was to synthesise and test all knowledge for what was observable, workable and could truly help solve man’s problems. And to that end, he set out to determine precisely how the mind functioned.

In one of his first pioneering experiments on the subject, he employed a sound wave measuring device called a “Koenig photometer.” Two students read poetry from extremely different languages — Japanese and English — into the device. He found that the device identified the speech as poetry regardless of language. When haiku was read in the original Japanese, the wavelengths produced by the Koenig photometer were the same as those produced when English verse was read.

Here, then, he concluded, was scientific evidence that people were not so different as he had been led to believe, that there was indeed a meeting ground, and all minds did in fact respond identically to the same stimuli.

Reasoning that questions arising from his experiments would best be answered by those who were paid to know about the mind, Ron took these discoveries to the psychology department. Rather than answers, however, he found that George Washington University psychologists had no comprehension or understanding of the results — but more importantly — they weren’t even interested in such things.

Stunned, he soon came to the realisation that no one knew how the mind worked. And furthermore, no one in the fields of psychology or psychiatry was about to find out.

Not only were there no answers in the East, there were none to be found in any Western centre of culture.

“To be very blunt,” he put it, “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.”