This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
L. Ron Hubbard began as a prolific writer of pulp science fiction and adventure stories before publishing Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, a self help system claiming that traumatic mental images called engrams, recorded during moments of pain or unconsciousness including before birth, could be located and cleared through a counseling technique he called auditing.
The book found a wide popular audience on its own, well beyond what a self help title from a genre fiction author might ordinarily expect, and Hubbard organized the movement that grew up around it into the Church of Scientology in the early 1950s. Over the following decades he developed that organization into a global religious and commercial body with its own cosmology, ecclesiastical structure and copyrighted upper level materials available only to members who complete a graded sequence of courses.
Hubbard spent his final years living at sea and then in seclusion, directing the organization by written policy rather than by direct public presence, until his death in 1986. The transition from a single popular self help book to an institutionalized global organization with graded, restricted materials happened within Hubbard's own lifetime and largely under his own continuing direction.