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Template:ScientologySeries The term thetan is used in Scientology to mean something roughly synonymous with spirit or soul. More exactly, "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."

Scientology doctrine states that a human being is a thetan, operating or using a human body. A distinction is made between the body, the mind and the thetan. The thetan is said to operate the body through the mind.

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 first spoke of "Theta-beings" - which he later called "thetans" - in a lecture series of March 1952 and attributed the coining of the word to his wife Mary Sue .

Hubbard was somewhat inconsistent about the physical properties of a thetan. He defined it as "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." However, in a lecture series later published as a book, he claimed that a thetan had 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. .

Operating Thetan

According to Scientology doctrine, a thetan can exist whether operating a human body or not. Scientology advertises that they can rehabilitate a thetan to achieve this degree of freedom, if one undergoes a number of courses. If an individual can operate with or without a body then the term "operating thetan" would apply as it does when an individual is operating a body. The Operating Thetan levels are the upper level courses in Scientology.

The Church defines "operating thetan" as "knowing and willing cause over life, thought, and matter, energy, space and time (MEST)."

The Church of Scientology makes claims that an individual can exist with or without a body. Scientology claims that people with proper Scientology training can "exteriorize with full perceptics" after completing OT levels, but this claim has yet to be validated by any research.

Body thetan

There is also a type of thetan that Hubbard termed the "body thetan". Hubbard claimed that this type of thetan was stuck in, on, or near a persons body due to a nuclear explosion that blew up millions of space aliens in volcanos ~75 million years ago, referred to as the Xenu incident. However, these type of thetans are considered bad, and the Church requires further courses for people if they want to remove the thousands of disembodied souls of space aliens from their body. This was revealed in Hubbard's own handwriting in Operating Thetan III course materials.

Notes

1. Scientology Glossary of Terms, Church of Scientology International
2. Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary. Bridge Publications, June 1975. ISBN 0884040372
3. Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky, chapter 4. Lyle Stuart, 1990. ISBN 081840499X
4. Hubbard, The Auditor 21, p.1
5. Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary. Bridge Publications, June 1975. ISBN 0884040372
6. Hubbard, The Phoenix Lectures, p. 147. Bridge Publications, 1982.

• Scientology beliefs and practices