Article 231059 of alt.religion.scientology:
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From: segger@netlink.com (Sandra Egger)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: SURVIVAL & L. RON HUBBARD:FOUNDER OF SCIENTOLOGY
Date: 4 Nov 1996 22:15:05 GMT
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Many falsehoods and inaccurate statements regarding several aspects
of the religion of Scientology have been observed on ars.
The purpose of this message is to give you a sample of the true data
from the book 'What is Scientology?' and show you where you can look
to get the full contents of this book.

                         -------------



L. Ron Hubbard was searching for a principle which would lead
to the unification of knowledge and explain the meaning of existence,
something other philosophers had set out to find in the past with
varying degrees of success. In fact, many Western philosophers had
given up on the idea that different peoples held anything in
common and were no longer even asking questions about the life
force or the essence of life. Man had become just another animal,
mere flesh and bones.

Yet Mr. Hubbard saw man in a very different light. Although he had
no name for it yet, he felt certain that life was more than a random
series of chemical reactions, and that some sort of intelligent urge
underlay our actions. Organizing the tremendous body of data he had
acquired his travels, research and experiments he embarked upon
a new experimental path, this time to determine how cells functioned.
And following an elaborate series of experiments in early 1938, he
made a breakthrough of magnitude: he isolated the common denominator
of existence. SURVIVE.

That man was surviving was not a new idea. That this was the single
basic common denominator of existence was.

The predominant theory of the time held that life was simply a chance
chain reaction in a sea of ammonia. Disproving this materialistic
belief and forming the basis for all his later work, his findings
were compiled into a philosophic manuscript, "Excalibur," written
during the first weeks of 1938.

He wrote: "I suddenly realized that survival was the pin on which
you could hang the rest of this with adequate and ample proof. It's
a very simple problem. Idiotically simple! That's why it never got
solved. Nobody has ever looked at anything being that simple to do
that much. So what do we find as the simplicities of solution? The
simplicities of solution lie in this: that life, all life, is trying
to survive. And life is composed of two things: the material universe
and an X-factor. And this X-factor is something that can evidently
organize, and mobilize the material universe."




For more information go to the following URLs:


          http://www.scientology.org
          http://www.lronhubbard.org
          http://www.dianetics.org

(c) 1993 Church of Scientology International. All Rights Reserved.