Editing Thetan (section)

== Origins of the concept ==

The concept for the thetan was first described in the early 1950s by [[L. Ron Hubbard]], drawing on reports by [[Dianetics]] practitioners, who in session found clients came up with descriptions of [[Reincarnation#Scientology|past-life experiences]]. He adopted the [[Greek alphabet|Greek letter]] [[theta]] (Θ) to represent "the source of life and life itself".{{r|hubbard-techdict|p=431-2}}

Hubbard once defined a thetan as: "... having no mass, no wave-length, no energy, no measurable qualities and no time or location in space except by consideration or postulate. The spirit is not a thing. It is the creator of things."{{r|hubbard-techdict|p=431-2}} In a lecture series later published as a book ("The Phoenix Lectures"), he jokingly pointed to a study that implied that a "thetan" manifests a small but measurable amount of mass:

{{Blockquote |text=From some experiments conducted about fifteen or twenty years ago—a thetan weighed about 1.5 ounces {{interp|45 grams}}! 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 {{interp|45 grams}} and some of them 2 ounces [60 grams]. (Those were super thetans!) |author=L. Ron Hubbard <ref>Hubbard, ''The Phoenix Lectures'', p. 147. Bridge Publications, 1982 {{ISBN|0-88404-006-2}}.</ref>}}

Although Hubbard did not name the doctor concerned, there was indeed such an attempt, by [[Duncan MacDougall (doctor)|Duncan MacDougall]], to measure the weight of dying patients to determine the weight of the soul, although [[21 grams experiment|MacDougall's experiments]] took place about fifty years before Hubbard's lectures, not fifteen or twenty, and are generally not regarded as having any scientific validity.{{r|mikkelson}}