III.II. confession, self-understanding, salvation: the way of religious service

    For Scientology, as for any strong religious culture and as for any religious order, the sermon is an important moment of the religious service. However, we do not find in Scientology such peculiar proselytism as exists in many traditional religions. On the contrary, Scientology is one of the few religions which permits followers to practice membership in another religion. Scientology is a complete religion and its members practice Scientology to the exclusion of any other faith even though they may retain membership in their natal religion for familial, social or cultural reasons, i.e. the member of the Church of Scientology can be a member of another religious culture or church. Therefore the Scientology service, when addressing the external world, uses a distinct confession, witnessing of personal experience and always underlines any rational aspects of the personal experience.

    The rationality of the confession assumes in detail a developed and, more importantly, a practiced technique of self-understanding: understanding oneself as an individual having personal experience of one's destiny as something continuing for millions of years; and understanding oneself as an eternal and powerful self.

    Confession and understanding one's self bring about salvation. Salvation is understood as a stable awareness of one's own true nature and removal of all internal spiritual barriers (engrams) which block the correct awareness of the powerful and eternal self, i.e., salvation of the awareness, finding the spiritual identity.

    The structure of the spiritual message of any religious culture receives its correct understanding only in the context of understanding the Absolute. Therefore we continue into the reconstruction of the concept about the Absolute, which is a characteristic of Scientology.
 
 
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