This book - Scientology: The Fundamentals Of Thought is excellent beginning book on Scientology.            WHEN DID SCIENTOLOGY START? L. Ron Hubbard travelled the Orient as a young man in he 1920's. He already had an interest in the mind from a naval commander he met as a teenager. Scientology research began in the early 1930's and the first time L. Ron Hubbard used the word was in 1932. After the war he wrote a book on the mind and it was mimeographed and distributed. In 1950 he wrote the first real publication on the mind called Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Here a person researched into his memories of earlier to find what was giving him problems now. What they found was an otherwise unknown mind that he labelled the reactive-mind. Since 1949 the practitioners of Dianetics had been occasionally reporting past life memories. So while people were getting well from Dianetics there was research into past lives through the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation. While past lives may have seemed controversial, the truth of what existed in the minds of men was too overwhelmingly evident to be ignored. In 1951 Mr. Hubbard gave a lecture on how spiritual thought could be physically measured by an instrument. An engineer in that audience manufactured the instrument, called an e-meter (electro-galvanometer). It was not complicated. With it the mind was available for total investigation, including before this lifetime. Now they were studying and researching memories that were not obviously the body's memory but the spirit's memory. This was what one might call a soul. But in Scientology you did not have a soul, you were that soul. In 1953 a group of Scientologists formed the first Church of Scientology in California. In 1954 the Founding Church of Scientology was established in Washington D.C.