CHAPTER 11
EXTERIORIZATION
This chapter might be too advanced for some beginners. It needs to be presented as early as possible because some students will bump into this area after a small amount of processing. Also, an increase in spiritual awareness at this level can rekindle hope and wash away despair. But if it is too difficult, feel free to skip it for the time being and go on to the next chapter. In that case, you should come back to this one and do it after you have done a few more chapters and feel ready.
At the ultimate level, you are pure thought, a nothingness with the capabilities of creation and consideration.
Our existence stretches back before this universe, and therefore at basic we cannot be composed of or dependent upon matter or energy.
Although many metaphysical schools concern themselves with astral or energy bodies, the more advanced schools recognize that these also are not the pure spirit but simply less physical constructions that are used by the spirit much as it uses the physical body.
Again contemplating the ultimate state, one would not have a physical location because one existed before there were any universes to be located in. The idea of being located in some specific area is more of an agreement and a convention rather than an enforced fact. The spirit can be anywhere it chooses to be and can be all pervasive if it so desires. But we normally play the game of life by operating from specific viewpoints.
One can be in the body or out of it. One can be outside as a pure viewpoint while leaving most of one’s “stuff” in the body or one can pull most of the “stuff” out as well. Astral walking type practices try to get a person out with a lot of their stuff. Early Scientology, on the other hand, was more interested in exteriorizing the pure spirit so that it could think and operate without the impact of all the body’s energy fields. Anything like an astral body was seen as just one more thing to get out of.
In those early days, Hubbard decided that the word “soul” had too many connotations. It is sometimes considered to be an energy form. It is sometimes thought of as something other than the person himself. Similar problems occur in using the word “spirit”, with much arguments occurring between different spiritual practices. Therefore he coined a new term to describe a pure thought unit. He chose to call this a “thetan” based on the Greek letter theta which is sometimes used to represent thought.
Early Scientology worked to exteriorize the “thetan”, meaning the person himself as a pure thought unit rather than exteriorizing the person in an energy body of some sort.
The pure spirit or thetan is you yourself and is capable of all actions and operations including creation and perception. However, we have long since decayed to the point where we are dependent on the physical body for our sensory input and our operations in the physical universe.
Without a physical body, we fall back to using an energy body of some sort, and depend on that for our perceptions and operations. That is the usual condition of somebody between lives or astral walking or engaged in some other out of body experience. But these non physical bodies are generally weaker and further decayed than the meat body and the sensory and operating capabilities are usually unsatisfactory.
Therefore, Scientology undertook as its goal the rehabilitation of the thetan or pure spirit itself to the point where it could perceive and operate without the need for any bodily construct of any sort whatsoever. This hypothetical end goal is referred to as an “operating thetan” or OT.
Later Scientology became sidetracked. There were many other things that needed to be figured out and addressed besides this point of exteriorization or the development of OT abilities. To a large degree, they never got back to the earlier material in this area. But we will take a more balanced approach, working things both from the spiritual and the human sides.

