As just one indication of Mr. Hubbard’s continued popularity, fully 38 years after its initial publication, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health achieved the unheard of, returning to the top of The New York Times bestseller list in 1988. It still rides on bestseller lists around the world to this day and has thus far sold more than 20 million copies.

No less dramatic was the popular acceptance of Mr. Hubbard’s other discoveries. To date, for example, over a quarter of a million people attest to having been freed from the effects of drugs, utilising his rehabilitation methods in centres across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, including the world’s largest drug rehabilitation and training facility in Oklahoma, USA.

For many more throughout the world — two million in South Africa alone — the name L. Ron Hubbard means literacy and an ability to learn any subject, thanks to his developments in the field of study.

His breakthroughs in administration have enabled thousands of professionals in industry, business and community affairs to bring sanity and stability to their workplaces and their groups.

Every day, Mr. Hubbard’s discoveries on the subject of ethics help bring new order into people’s lives, into their families, their communities and their environment. A long-confused subject, it has been endowed with new clarity and workability.

Today, millions of people are using his principles and are finding they work. There is the mayor in Hungary who used Mr. Hubbard’s administrative breakthroughs to revive his city; there is the Swedish diplomat who uses Mr. Hubbard’s technology to help his friends and associates with their daily problems; there is the German professor who uses Mr. Hubbard’s fiction works in literary classes; and there is the French teacher using Mr. Hubbard’s education breakthroughs to help teach her students.

And through this application, L. Ron Hubbard’s dream, a dream that perhaps summarises the hopes of thinking men throughout the ages — “a civilisation without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights” — not only is possible but has become attainable.

Although one can enjoy the benefits of Scientology without fully knowing Mr. Hubbard, one cannot understand the man without understanding Scientology — for it is his work and his work alone.

Every few hundred or a thousand years, some genius rises and man takes a new step toward a better life, a better culture.

Such a man is L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.