Spiritual Immortality
The Church of Scientology describes achieving the state of Operating Thetan as "complete spiritual freedom from the endless cycle of birth and death" and literally promises immortality:
"Some of the miracles of life have been exposed to full view for the first time ever on the OT levels. Not the least of these miracles is knowing immortality and freedom from the cycle of birth and death."
The "immortality" referred to is not immortality of the body, but of the thetan, and Scientology does not claim that it causes the thetan's immortality, but makes a Scientologist aware of that immortality and alleviates the distress that might otherwise be felt at the prospect of death:
"The subject of death is never a very serious one to a Scientologist beyond the fact that he feels kind of sorry for himself sometimes. ... was thoughtless enough to dispose of his body and go out of communication. A person sometimes feels pretty unhappy about it and thinks it's a thoughtless thing for a friend to do."
Read more about this topic: Supernatural Abilities In Scientology Doctrine
Famous quotes containing the words spiritual and/or immortality:
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)
“If God bestowed immortality on every man then when he made him, and he made many to whom he never purposed to give his saving grace, what did his Lordship think that God gave any man immortality with purpose only to make him capable of immortal torments? It is a hard saying, and I think cannot piously be believed. I am sure it can never be proved by the canonical Scripture.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)