Reference: Scientology Fundamentals
Please see The Definition of THETAN
Individuality is not something different from identity.
Individuality is an aspect of identity.
Anything that creates a unit
Is part of the identity of that unit.
If thetan is an awareness of awareness unit,
Then it is a bundled up awareness.
That bundled up awareness is an identity.
Thetan itself is an identity.
.
In the book Scientology 8-8008, Hubbard wrote:
Identity versus Individuality
The most common confusion on the part of a preclear is between himself as an identified object and his beingness. One’s beingness depends upon the amount of space which he can create or command, not upon his identification or any label. Identity as we know it in the MEST universe is much the same as identification, which is the lowest form of thought. When one is an object and is himself an effect, he believes that his ability to be cause is dependent upon his having a specific and finite identity. This is an aberration; as his beingness increases his individuality increases, and he quickly rises above the level of necessity for identity for he is himself self-sufficient with his own identity.
The first question a preclear undergoing theta clearing asks himself is quite often: “How will I establish my identity if I have no body?” There are many remedies for this. The worst method of having an identity is having a body. As his individuality increases and his beingness expands—these two being almost synonymous—he is less and less concerned with this problem; that he is concerned with the problem tells the auditor where he is on the tone-scale.
One of the control mechanisms which has been used on thetans is that when they rise in potential they are led to believe themselves one with the universe. This is distinctly untrue. Thetans are individuals. They do not as they rise up the scale, merge with other individualities. They have the power of becoming anything they wish while still retaining their own individuality. They are first and foremost themselves. There is evidently no Nirvana. It is the feeling that one will merge and lose his own individuality that restrains the thetan from attempting to remedy his lot. His merging with the rest of the universe would be his becoming matter. This is the ultimate in cohesiveness and the ultimate in affinity, and is at the lowest point of the tone-scale. One declines into a brotherhood with the universe. When he goes up scale, he becomes more and more an individual capable of creating and maintaining his own universe. In this wise (leading people to believe they had no individuality above that of MEST) the MEST universe cut out all competition.
Hubbard threw a curve by describing individuality as something good and identity as something bad. He derided the goal of Nirvana in Buddhism. Nirvana is to extinguish self or individuality.
Being a fundamental datum of Scientology, this worship of individuality puts up a filter that distorts the subject of Scientology. Even though, Scientology contains some brilliant new technology to address the subject of mind, it ends up producing “scientologists who are assimilated into the world view of Hubbard“ as its valuable final product:
.
