This book - Scientology: The Fundamentals Of Thought is excellent beginning book on Scientology.            WHEN DID SCIENTOLOGY OPEN? It opened to the public when L. Ron Hubbard wrote his first book on the subject. But before Scientology - a study of the spirit - you are the spirit - there was Dianetics - a study of the mind - your mnd. To be a Scientologist one needs to be able to read a book on the subject and use the data in it. Books can be bought from the Church of Scientology, but one can also usually borrow Scientology books from libraries. There are others. But a web site is no replacement for a real book. Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought, is good. The Problems Of Work is also good. No one will give you a Scientology pill. It takes a bit of work to get it, and in this case, that means being literate enough to read a book. Check your local library too. I bet they have some. The first Scientology book was actually in the form of a paper, titled The Original Thesis, written in 1948, two years before Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the book which started it for real, and which had hundreds of groups set up all over the world within a year in 1950. But The Original Thesis was not its first name for this text. Originally it was called Scientology: A New Science. Back then L. Ron Hubbard was experimenting with different techniques mental and spiritual and wanted the data to be made available to the medical world, so instead of using the word Scientology - which literally meant a study of wisdom, he used the word Dianetics, which meant through mind. (Remember, in the 1930s L. Ron Hubbard traveled extensively through Asia and even crewed on an Asian ship, named the Mariana Maru - registered in Yokohama, Japan. He travelled the lamsaries in China, travelled into India and then more. His thoughts, perceptions and warenesses were great by the time he published this first manuscript.) But all this while he was helping public people with the data he had researched. So, the earliest Scientology as a subject had been open to the public would have been 1948, after The Original Thesis was released. Before this, L. Ron Hubbard was researching what was the mind and spirit. He first used the word, Scientology, in 1932. So the word itself has been in use since then.