After graduating from high school at age 17, I spent the next 8 years in the military, and college, searching for “the meaning of life.” Psychiatry, psychology, sociology, theology and medicine all failed to provide any glimmer of the meaning of life. And, one was expected to take much of these disciplines on FAITH.

     In 1974, with the help of my wife, I encountered “a new religion,” Scientology. I started by reading books. In Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought, in the introduction, was the statement, “Change no man’s religion, change no man’s politics, interrupt the sovereignty of no nation. Instead, teach Man to use what he has and what he knows to the factual creation, within any political reference, of a civilization on Earth for the first time.

     “And so we work.”

     It was the first “ism” that did not ask me to believe anything, but just to take the material given and use it. This idea was so startlingly refreshing, so different from previously studied “isms” and “-ologies” that I kept reading and started using the information.

     Lo and behold! It worked. I’ve been using it ever since.