This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Terryeo (talk | contribs) at 23:32, 6 March 2006 (Feldspar, I would appreciate your edit summarys being less slanderous and would appriciate it if you would discuss on talk pages instead of those sorts of edit summarys). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 23:32, 6 March 2006 by Terryeo (talk | contribs) (Feldspar, I would appreciate your edit summarys being less slanderous and would appriciate it if you would discuss on talk pages instead of those sorts of edit summarys)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Scientology defines thetan to mean spirit or soul. More exactly, a thetan is "the person himself, not his body or his name, the physical universe, his mind, or anything else; that which is aware of being aware; the identity which is the individual. The thetan is most familiar to one and all as you." Another definition Scientology uses is: "having no mass, no wave-length, no energy and no time or location in space except by consideration or postulate. The spirit is not a thing. It is the creator of things."
Scientology doctrine states that a human being is a thetan, operating or using a human body. The term and concept were introduced by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who adopted the Greek letter theta (Θ) to represent "the source of life and life itself". .
Hubbard gave an example of such a consideration, where a thetan exhibited the consideration of having mass. In the Pheonix lectures, later published as a book, he claimed that a thetan had been measured to exhibit a small but measurable amount of mass:
- "From some experiments conducted about fifteen or twenty years ago--a thetan weighed about 1.5 ounces! Who made these experiments? Well, a doctor made these experiments. He weighed people before and after death, retaining any mass. He weighed the person, bed and all, and he found that the weight dropped at the moment of death about 1.5 ounces and some of them 2 ounces. (Those were heavy thetans.)"
This appears to be a garbled reference to the the work of Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who in the early 1900s sought to measure the weight purportedly lost by a human body when the soul departed the body upon death. MacDougall weighed dying patients in an attempt to prove that the soul was material and measurable. He claimed to have measured a loss of mass amounting to three-fourths of an ounce (21.3 grams) on the death of the patient. These experiments are widely considered to have had little if any scientific merit. .</nowiki>
Notes
- Scientology Glossary of Terms, Church of Scientology International
- Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary. Bridge Publications, June 1975. ISBN 0884040372
- Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary. Bridge Publications, June 1975. ISBN 0884040372
- Hubbard, The Phoenix Lectures, p. 147. Bridge Publications, 1982.