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Jan. 11, 2024 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:25:04
Raised by Thetans in a Galactic Gulag | Aaron Smith-Levin | EP 413
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Hello, everyone.
I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024.
Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information.
I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, Out November 2024.
We who wrestle with God, I'm looking forward to this.
I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon.
Bye-bye.
That type of family destruction is what I personally find most objectionable about Scientology.
Whether it's coercing women to get abortions to keep serving Scientology instead of starting families, I challenge anyone to name one other quote-unquote religious organization that weekly buses its clergy members to the abortion clinic.
I don't think you'll be able to find one Hello everyone Today I'm talking to Aaron Smith-Levin, and he has a YouTube channel called Growing Up in Scientology, where he discusses, as you might guess, growing up in Scientology.
And he left the organization after a number of decades, and we talk a fair bit about Why he did that, why he came to the realization that this was a sterile route.
But more importantly, the conversation allowed us to delve into a problem that we all face, which is the fundamental problem of distinguishing truth from falsehood, especially organized falsehood.
The difficulty that we face in determining what organizations, which are clearly necessary, can be trusted and what metaphysics are reliable, how you distinguish bitter fruit from sweet fruit in that regard or separate wheat from chaff.
And so our discussion is very interesting in that regard, enabled us to take those abstract considerations and to nail them down to something very specific, you know, the events of Aaron's own life and The particular cult-like nature of Scientology, which is one cult among many.
And so, well, welcome aboard for the trip.
I've been writing a fair bit in this new book I'm finishing up.
It's called We Who Wrestle with God.
It'll be the subject of my next tour.
I've been writing a lot about the manner in which we come to distinguish truth from falsehood.
In general, in our lives, in the scientific enterprise, and then let's say in matters of faith, you know, now the scientist types would say, well, all faith is delusional, but I'm afraid we can't move forward without faith, so that's not a helpful, that's not a helpful objection.
But it does raise us, the fact that that is an objection at all indicates the existence of a very serious society.
Underlying problem, which is, well, how do we distinguish truth from falsehood, especially in relationship to religious claims, which in some sense, by definition, aren't amenable to scientific analysis or proof?
One answer is we just throw out the entire religious domain.
That's actually not even technically possible.
So...
I thought it'd be interesting to talk to you today about Scientology specifically, because I think that it's not unreasonable whatsoever to regard it as an outright cult.
And that will enable us to use a very specific example to delve into a more general problem, which is how do you separate wheat from chaff or bitter fruit from good fruit in the pursuit of the truth, or even what is the truth.
And it's always better to ground an abstract analysis in something concrete and real.
And so talking to you about your experiences and what you've learned should enable us to get a long ways in this discussion.
Then we can more broadly flesh it out into the issue of truth versus falsehood and issues of faith.
So let's start right at the beginning.
Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself personally, about where you come from, about your background, your employment?
Let everybody get to know you a bit, and then we'll turn to the Scientology issue more specifically.
I'll do my best.
How about I start from present time and then I backfill a little bit?
Sure.
So one of the things I spend most of my time on right now is my YouTube channel, Growing Up in Scientology.
And so that alludes to the fact that I was essentially born and raised in Scientology.
I was actually four years old when my mom got into Scientology as a single mom of two young boys.
And I was 12 years old, maybe just 13 years old, when I was taken out of school and started working for Scientology full-time.
Full-time, not day job.
You know, 100 hours a week, 110 hours a week.
And so, you know, my first employment history was Scientology.
And I've had employment history.
After getting into Scientology, I've had employment history after leaving Scientology.
But just probably most relevant to the conversation that we're having is, you know, by the time I was 30 years old, I'd spent half my life working for Scientology as a staff member and what they call a C organization member.
Those are the guys who signed the billion-year contracts.
So, yeah, we can go deeper in that if you want, but that's the nutshell.
Well, okay, I think there's two directions we could go there.
The first is...
Well, let's start when you were four, even.
So, what do you think it was that attracted your mother to Scientology?
Like, you said she was a single mother, and so it's easy for single mothers to be preyed upon, because they're quite isolated, generally speaking.
And so that's a problem.
What do you think, and what has she told you about, what pulled her in the direction to begin with, and what was her structure of belief or background of Let's say metaphysically before the blandishments of Scientology were laid out in front of her.
So she was raised a Christian.
She was raised in a very religious household, going to church every Sunday.
I don't know exactly to what degree she would describe herself as having been a true believer.
But I know the way she's explained it to me, it was just this feeling, this understanding that there is something more, something greater, something outside ourselves.
But not necessarily having bought in to the traditional religious story.
She was meant for something greater.
She was here for some reason.
There was some greater value to life than just a parent in this mortal realm.
And for her, Scientology answered that question.
It filled that hole.
Whatever shape that hole was, it was a Scientology-shaped hole, apparently.
She was introduced to Scientology by a woman her same age, roughly, who had just had her own son just a few weeks before my brother and I were born.
She was not a single mother.
But that relationship between my mom and this woman named Cheryl who got her into Scientology, that's how my mom was introduced, was through her friend Cheryl.
That's how most people are introduced to Scientology, is through some friend or associate, you know, business associate or acquaintance or something like that.
Now, the thing about Scientology, particularly at the lower levels, is Scientology is something that bills itself as requiring no belief, no faith.
Scientology does not see itself as a faith, even though it does see itself as a religion.
And the distinction between those things, if there is one, might be an interesting thing for us to discuss.
But Scientologists do not believe that you have to believe in Scientology.
They believe it is a technology.
It is something you apply.
It can be The results can be measured.
They have this device, the e-meter, that they believe assists with this measurement.
And so it's this kind of two-sided coin where my mom's looking for some greater meaning, looking for some greater purpose, looking for a way to help others.
She comes across Scientology and she goes, oh, it's something that will give me greater purpose and greater meaning but isn't asking me to believe in In X, Y, and Z. We can just do.
There's a very kind of like self-helpy, applied, practical aspect to Scientology, which, by the way, is why they call themselves an applied religious philosophy, is how a Scientologist would describe Scientology.
Okay, well, there's a bunch of things to delve into there, so let's list out some of them and we can pursue them.
So, your mother was raised religiously, and so there's two interpretations of that in the realm of possibility that spring to mind, and one is that that prepared her to be subsumed into an alternate cult, right?
Because you might say, well, because she was raised in a religious family, she was The belief that you should turn to some sort of religious belief system was inculcated into her.
You could also say that she needed that initial religious belief like everyone does, but it lacked something that she required, which is something you alluded to, which is the sense not only of a higher purpose that's specified for her, but a higher purpose that can be practically which is the sense not only of a higher purpose that's specified
And then you also mentioned, and this has more broad implications, that Scientology was attractive to her because it claimed, at least at the outset, to be part of the technological enterprise, the scientific enterprise, you might say, that you didn't need faith in.
There was a technology that was at hand.
It had that, at least, the facade of scientific acceptability.
We can talk about the e-meters in a while.
And that it was practical.
And so it seems to me that the most logical conclusion with regard to your mother isn't so much that her previous religious training had prepared her to be subsumed into a cult, but that there were lacks in her previous religious training.
For example, the specification of a particular destiny for her and the provision of practical...
Practical guidelines for how she might act to bring the world into a higher harmony.
All of that was attractive to her.
Does that seem about right?
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Okay, okay.
And we'll talk about the e-meter.
From my understanding of the e-meter is that it's a galvanometer.
And of course, that measures skin conduction changes in people's hands.
And, you know, when I did my PhD, we used a galvanometer, essentially.
It was a bit more sophisticated, but same basic idea.
Back in the 1960s or thereabouts, this was done even before then, I think reaching all the way back to the 1920s, it was shown that, you know, you could ask people questions while they were having the skin conductance of their skin surfaces, usually their fingers measured.
If something produces emotional arousal when it's touched upon, your skin conductance increases because you sweat a little bit and that makes electricity flow more easily.
And so you can use galvanometers to get at underlying complexes.
And I know that the Scientologists have capitalized on that idea, and the overlap between what they do with the e-meter, if I understand it properly, and what psychophysiologists have done for 100 years with the galvanometer also adds a layer of scientific credibility to it.
So, you know, and there is some utility in trying to get to the bottom of things.
So let's unpack that a bit later.
Okay, so now she got introduced, invited, let's say, by a friend.
Now, if you're an avid adherent of the Scientology discipline, let's say, or cult, Is it incumbent on you to try to bring other people into the faith or into the enterprise?
How is it that that's done and how is that also developed and fostered or trained?
So it's something that's highly encouraged.
It's not mandatory.
It's not required.
There's an incentive to do it because when you bring someone into Scientology, you're called their field staff member, their FSM, and that person is called your selectee.
And as an FSM, you get 10 or 15% commission on On every dollar that person pays to Scientology for courses or auditing or straight donations.
So there's a financial incentive to bring people into Scientology.
In addition to the incentive...
Is there a...
Is there a pyramid scheme element of that?
Or does it only go to one person?
If your person brings in more people, is that also a benefit to you?
It's one level deep.
You don't get overrides on your downline.
You only get credit for the people you directly bring in.
And once you bring them in, you have to continue to be sort of their personal coach and mentor on their way up Scientology's bridge to total freedom.
Or another Scientologist can swoop in and become that person's FSM and get commissions for them.
Oh, I see.
So there's a competition for that as well, an ongoing competition.
Yes, it's definitely a zero-sum game.
Okay, let's start out by giving the devil his due, you know.
Obviously your mother was attracted by this, and it's reasonable to assume that by hook or by crook, something that was genuine, or at least significantly attractive, was offered to her.
What do you think Scientology did for her that filled the void that had opened up inside of her?
At the lower levels, Scientology gives you an explanation for what's wrong with you.
Anything that you could, in an insecure way, feel is wrong with you.
Indecisiveness, not living up to your full potential, self-doubt, insecurity, all these things.
That the cause of this is called the reactive mind.
And that's kind of L. Ron Hubbard's version of the Freudian subconscious.
And that the reactive mind is a collection of all the recordings of pain and unconsciousness.
And these recordings are called engrams.
And these engrams compose your reactive mind.
And you're not to blame for the fact that you have a reactive mind.
It's not your fault.
The engrams are the source of all of this wrongness and negativity.
And Scientology and Dianetics give you the tools to resolve your reactive mind.
So there's an attractiveness to this, which is saying you're someone who always has wanted to do better than how you've been doing.
This thing called your reactive mind is holding you back.
It's not your fault.
And we have the technology through our procedures and our processes to We can get rid of your reactive mind and that will leave you, once you shed your reactive mind, that basically leaves you as a perfect computing, analyzing, leaves you with a perfectly computing and analyzing mind.
That's the pitch in the beginning.
So it's kind of solving a lot of problems at once and shifting responsibility to something outside of yourself.
Right.
Now, is that clearing...
Yes, the procedure of getting rid of your reactive mind is called clearing, and then you achieve the state of clear.
And if you ever hear a Scientologist say, our goal is to clear the planet, that's actually what they mean.
It's getting the majority of the population of Earth up to Scientology's state of clear.
Okay, okay.
So we're going to give the devil his due on that front, too.
So, you know, obviously Hubbard pulled his ideas from the broader, like, intellectual perspective.
That was popular and developing during his time.
And all of what you just described is analogous to psychodynamic complex theory.
And you can see...
So let me give you an example of that.
So if you're sitting with a client and they communicate a dream to you and you want to analyze the dream...
You can look for corresponding literary motifs the same way you would when you're trying to understand any story and analyze it thinking of a dream as a story.
But the association technique that Freud developed is predicated on the idea that You can flesh out the meaning of a dream, or any thought for that matter, any thought, by analyzing the pattern of associations that surround that thought or story.
So, for example, if there's an image in a dream, now imagine that you were dreaming and you dreamt that you pulled a boot out of a rampaging river and there was a diamond inside of it.
The first thing I would ask you is, well, what comes to mind?
And you have to watch this.
What comes to mind when you think of a river?
And then maybe a person will tell you a couple of stories about a river, and then you can ask them about a boot, and you can ask them what a diamond means.
You try to flesh out the whole expanse of ideas that surrounds those images.
And what you're doing is investigating the structure of the associated ideas that gave rise to the images to begin with.
And what you'll find when you do that is that...
And Freud laid this out first, is that if you pursue that with enough seriousness, you'll find something at the bottom of it that's often an unsolved problem.
And that would be, so the engrams are memories.
That's a good way of thinking about them.
And there are obstacles to people's progress that are unnecessary.
Implicit assumptions that they bring to bear about particular situations that are invisible impediments to their progress.
So, for example, I had a client who had a very traumatic experience in a hospital when she was about five.
She had kind of a dreadful accident.
She was in a shopping cart that actually rolled down a hill and it dumped her and hurt her quite badly.
When she was put in the hospital, she fell into the hands of a very sadistic nurse who was kind of tormenting her behind the scenes.
And at that time, the hospitals didn't let parents visit because they felt that the continual introduction of a parent and the separation was harder on children than just the absence of the parents.
Which is an absolutely preposterous, absurd, and cruel theory.
But that was the case.
And so she felt simultaneously betrayed, hurt, betrayed, and then she fell into the hands of this sadistic nurse.
And so when we were investigating some of the dream imagery associated with her memories, that story arose.
And she'd actually developed an entire complex of paranoia and suspicion in relationship to all establishments of authority.
Because when she was five, she had been betrayed by her parents who abandoned her in the hospital.
That's how she felt when she was five.
And then, of course, she fell into the hands of this psychopathic nurse who was basically torturing her behind the scenes.
And so...
It's often the case that...
So what happened to her as a consequence of that was that because she developed such a deep distrust of institutions, every time she was involved with an institution, she got herself in trouble.
Because she was, you know, she was like a little puppy that growled, you know, when someone leaned down to pet it because it had been kicked too many times.
And her paranoia just got her in constant trouble with institutions.
And of course, that fostered her belief that institutions were basically bad news.
The reason I'm going through all that is because the notion that there are invisible impediments to your progress that are nested inside your systems of memory, that's true.
And it's also true that clearing those, now you don't clear them just by recognizing them.
You clear them by reconfiguring them.
So with her, what we did was a pretty lengthy analysis of under what conditions a mature person would trust institutions and under what conditions you should be skeptical.
We tried to Generate a more mature viewpoint of institutions per se, rather than this reflexive distrust, which was too unsophisticated and low resolution.
Now, the reason I went through all that is because that explanation is actually quite credible.
And even the Alliance of the galvanometer with that explanation, that's derived directly from early psychoanalytic work in the 1920s because that's when all that started.
And psychologists, social psychologists and personality psychologists, psychophysiologists still use psychophysiological measurements of various sorts to infer the existence of these complexes that lurk behind the scenes.
It's a very integral part of psychology.
So you can understand, well, first of all, where those ideas actually came from, but even more importantly, why they would be attractive to people.
Now, you added another thing that was of interest.
I want to ask you more about this.
You said that the Scientologists also insist that this isn't your fault.
Now, the classic Christian attitude towards your complex of problems is that the degree to which it's your fault is open for dispute.
So let me give you an example of that.
So imagine that you have a mother who's kind of overbearing and overprotective, and you're a six-year-old kid, and you didn't do your homework one day, and so you decide to feign illness to skip school.
And your mother, who's overbearing and overprotective, also hasn't pursued her own life.
And she's lonesome.
And so you tell her you're sick, but you're not.
And she doesn't think you are, but she is just as happy if you're at home.
And so you might say, well, that's the mother's fault because she's so damn overbearing.
But it's also, to some degree, the kid's fault because he's looking for an easy out.
And so, and this is what you do in good psychotherapy too.
You know, like if I found out that you had a complex, The first thing I'd try to do is think, okay, well, what were the situational conditions that gave rise to that?
Like, maybe you had a very overbearing father.
But I'd also want to find out, well, what temptations did you fall prey to, let's say, that increased the probability that you would develop that complex for reasons of your own?
Those are called secondary gain.
So, for example, this is the secondary gain issue I'm curious about.
You said that these...
What did you call them?
Engrams?
These engrams, these engrams in the reactive mind, they're not your fault.
See, you can see why that would be attractive, right?
Because it enables you to place the responsibility for your suffering on someone else's, on someone or something else.
And so I'm wondering, what do you think about that?
Like, is that one of the things about Scientology that's particularly manipulative?
Or there's a mercy in it, you know?
And I mean, lots of people are abused by their parents and abused by society, and it's not surprising they're hurt, and it's not exactly their fault.
So what do you think about that?
The appeal and the attractiveness of being told that everything that's wrong with you is because of this thing and you are not to blame for this thing.
The attractiveness of that is why that is the message Scientology gives you at the introductory lower levels.
So it's the bait.
The switch is that as you progress in Scientology, you come to realize that actually...
As a spiritual being, everything that happens to you, by you, by others, to others, is actually your fault.
And to assume full responsibility, you have to understand how you are actually the prime cause for everything that has ever happened, including happened to you.
And so, this is the difference between Dianetics and Scientology, actually.
Dianetics is supposed to be a mental science, and it's supposed to be the process of getting rid of these engrams.
And then fast-forward a couple years after Erwin Hubbard started Dianetics, and then he started pursuing the spiritual angle, the religion angle.
And so instead of trying to recall moments of pain and unconsciousness as early as prenatal incidents in the womb, all of a sudden people were remembering incidents of pain and unconsciousness from previous lives.
And that opened the door to, oh, previous lives, what's happening here?
The introduction of an immortal spiritual being.
And then L. Ron Hubbard continued on with the religion angle and said, well, actually, as a spiritual being, you were the one creating your own reactive mind.
And once you've gotten rid of your own reactive mind, L. Ron Hubbard introduces you to the confidential upper-level materials, which is, by the way, you as a spiritual being, in Scientology they call you a thetan, you have now gotten rid of your own reactive mind.
But now the reason why there's still things wrong with you is you have tens of thousands of other thetans, spiritual beings, stuck to you as parasites, as entities on your body, all over your body.
And those beings all have their own reactive mind.
And those beings are...
Through some sort of, you know, spiritual connection, projecting onto you.
You are experiencing their pains.
You are experiencing their neuroses, psychoses, whatever, you know, anything that could be wrong with you.
And so now you have to go through a years-long process of telepathically counseling, using the Scientology procedures, these entities, these beings, these thetans, To basically exercise them off of your body, wake them up so that they'll realize who they are, what they are, and go and pick up a new body at the local maternity ward and grow up to be a cleared individual and likely join Scientology.
So this idea of getting rid of your reactive mind is something that's introduced to you at the very lowest levels and applies all the way up to the highest levels.
It just switches from getting rid of your own reactive mind to getting rid of these entities' reactive minds.
Okay, okay.
So let me take that apart in a couple of ways.
So the first question I have there is...
How is the switch from it's not your fault to it's your responsibility?
How does that come about?
And what's the rationale for that?
It comes about when you introduce the immortal spiritual thetan, the immortal spirit, into the equation.
And L. Ron Hubbard's version of that is that About 65 trillion years ago, there was some sort of spiritual big bang when all spiritual entities that exist came into existence.
You'd think he would talk a little bit more about this in Scientology, but he really doesn't.
And that these spiritual entities are all natively godlike.
And I'm not like the Christian god, but like...
Like, you know, ripping atmospheres off of galaxies, creating planets, destroying planets, creating universes.
Like, that each spiritual entity here on Earth, me, you, we are natively godlike.
And we basically got so bored with our power that we wanted a more interesting game.
So we decided to handicap ourselves in various ways and then just choose to forget that we had handicapped ourselves.
We used to not even exist in a physical universe.
There used to not be a physical universe.
So we created a physical universe to have something that we could then trap ourselves in to have some sort of a game that we could try to, some sort of a trap that we could try to get out of to have this, you know, interesting experience.
Um...
And without being too long-winded about this, it's basically when L. Ron Hubbard makes the jump from just trying to be a poor man's mental health care, like a mental therapy.
Dianetics was supposed to be mental therapy.
To going, okay, we're going to slightly jump off from what we're pretending is a science.
Now we're going to get into religion and spiritual philosophy.
And honestly, that was introduced by going into past lives.
When you start going into past life memories, you have to talk about some entity that transcends death.
And that becomes Scientology's Thetan, the soul, the spirit.
Okay, so he is introduced.
See, part of the reason that cults have such attractiveness is that they do harness archetypal ideas, right?
Eternal religious ideas, that's a good way of thinking about it, or patterns of attention and action that are...
Intrinsic to what it means to be human.
And there's clearly the introduction of a karma-like idea there, right?
That your destiny is a consequence of your past choices.
I mean, that's a tenet of Hinduism, obviously, and that you're playing out the consequences of this infinite array of choices extended over the longest possible period.
It's also the case that...
See, and this is a very tricky issue.
So Dostoevsky said, for example, that you're not only responsible for everything that you do and everything that happens to you, but for everything that everyone else does and everything that happens to them, right?
And that's...
Well, that's a doctrine that's associated with the broadest possible conception of responsibility.
And then the Buddha...
Now, when the Buddha hits enlightenment under the bow tree, he's offered the opportunity to stay in paradise forever.
But, you know, eternally.
And he rejects that because he believes that it would be inappropriate for him to occupy the paradisal state unless everyone was brought into the same state.
You know, and so in many religious systems, there is a Transition point that you might consider equivalent to the initiation into the religious enterprise that brings people beyond their local concerns, let's say, with their own destiny, and provides them with the insight, let's say, that they are in some sense ultimately responsible, right?
And then God only knows what that ultimate responsibility means.
Now, Hubbard concretized that and added a variety of levels of strange narrative information.
Overly.
Including the idea of these thetans.
But let's take that apart a little bit too.
You know...
You might think that you have your act together quite well.
You know, let's just assume that you do as an autonomous individual.
But then, you know, you're home for Christmas and you go see your family members and there's all sorts of unresolved issues around that within your family.
And those are definitely affecting you in all sorts of ways, right?
And then in the broader social community, you're going to be interacting with people Who are possessed by one idea or another, and that's going to interfere with your movement forward.
And so, in some sense, there is no Redemption for you in an absolute sense in the presence of the pathology, unresolved pathology of the past and of other people.
And so it sounds to me like Hubbard concretized that idea with the notion of these Phaetons.
And so you said that he conceptualized them as sort of stuck to you.
And so can you elaborate a little bit more on that?
How did he conceptualize these Phaeton-like beings?
And what does it mean that they're intimately associated with you and that you have to also clear them?
And how do you go about doing that?
So this gets into some things that have been widely ridiculed, fairly so, in places like South Park and other places on the Internet.
So at the lower levels of Scientology, the non-confidential levels, everyone's considered a thetan, a thetan.
A thetan is the primary animator of the body.
It is basically the prime mover, unmoved.
I'm a thetan, you're a thetan.
A thetan is something you are, not something you have.
It's not until you get to the upper confidential levels of Scientology that L. Ron Hubbard introduces this concept of a body thetan and a thetan cluster.
And his explanation for what this is and how it came about is By the way, Scientology's conception of life in the galaxy is very much like Star Wars.
Every planet or every star system has intelligent biological life.
So L. Ron Hubbard discussed this thing called the Galactic Federation.
In this galaxy of however many planets that was composed of, there was this politician.
Hubbard decided to give him a name.
It's Xenu.
And he decided his system was too populated.
So his plan to get rid of a good portion of the population was to call everybody in for tax audits under false pretense.
And then when they showed up, to freeze them in glycol and load them up on space planes and fly them to Earth and drop these people into volcanoes and blow them up with hydrogen bombs.
Now, this incident was so severe...
This was such an engram for them.
And this happened about 76 million years ago.
Of course, the volcanoes on Earth didn't exist 76 million years ago, but don't think about it too deeply.
And this incident for these beings was so...
You can't kill a thetan, but it came about as close to it as you could.
That it's basically left these beings in this half-dead, unconscious, crazy state.
And they're just blowing in the winds of Earth for the last 76 million years.
And so then, when the human body evolved through natural selection, which Scientologists are not opposed to necessarily, Hubbard had his own spin on evolution, but it doesn't necessarily contradict with natural selection.
That when human bodies arrived here on Earth, a fresh set of thetans that were not exposed to the volcano incident, a fresh set of thetans were rounded up and dropped off to this planet so that this planet could be a prison planet.
And L. Ron Hubbard says that if you're on this planet, you were a troublemaker, you were a rebel, you were an artist, you were someone who couldn't be controlled, the system wanted to, didn't like you, thought you were going to help overthrow the system one day.
You're like the hippies, spiritual hippies.
And so L. Ron Hubbard creates this explanation that this is a prison planet, that we are basically doomed to live lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, with our memories being wiped in the between-lives implant station, and that the fact that we believe we live single lives, for the most part, most people on Earth are not spiritual or religious.
We believe we came from mud.
L. Ron Hubbard was very much...
He hates psychiatry, psychiatrists, psychology, Darwin, anything opposed to spirituality, Hubbard later on claimed to be absolutely against.
And so, and even Hubbard would even say that the religious people on earth, who, according to Hubbard, have been pre-programmed by our alien captor overlords, sort of spiritually programmed to invent these stories, the world's major religions, sort of spiritually programmed to invent these stories, the world's major religions, to sort of keep us occupied and to keep us from realizing that earth is And to keep us from seeking a way to get out of the prison.
And that even the religions of earth serve the purpose of helping to keep the population of earth trapped, trapped spiritually.
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Why is it, what's the explanation for the motivation to trap us spiritually and to put us on the prison planet?
So basically he's trying to conjure up an explanation for the fallen state of man, speaking, let's say, from a Judeo-Christian perspective.
Yeah, we have to address that because people do feel that, well, people do feel that The world is a veil of tears and that that requires an explanation.
And you associated that to some degree with the fact that the Thetan spirits who were trapped on Earth were there because they were rebels or because they were artists.
But rebelling against what exactly?
So Hubbard doesn't spend a lot of time talking about this, but it would just essentially be that, just think of Earth as the gulag of the Galactic Federation.
Anyone who's speaking out, anyone who might become popular enough to gather enough power in society to To be a thought leader, an opinion leader, maybe one day lead a revolt.
That anyone that Xenu or anyone like Xenu, I mean, his name could have been Bob for all that matters, that this is just a dumping ground.
A dumping ground, a prison where no one's, people are going to forget that we were ever even sent here.
No one will be coming to break us out.
And it's really only L. Ron Hubbard in Dianetics and Scientology that for the first time ever has offered the solution to free everyone from this trap.
Now, you mentioned Buddha.
You might be interested to know that Albert Hubbard claimed to have been Buddha and claimed that as Buddha, the state that he thought he created, and you'll know better than I, is it Bodhi?
Is it Bodhi?
Do you know?
I mean, I don't know.
Bodhi, yeah.
Okay.
That he thought bodhi was a permanent state.
But afterwards, he learned it was only temporary.
And he had to come back and create Dianetics and Scientology to create a permanent state that you would not...
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Well, it's okay.
So, it's so interesting, because...
Hubbard was a science fiction writer, and this is such an interesting meld of archetypal religious idea and science fiction presumption.
And it is also the case, by the way, that, you know, science fiction is very, and fantasy associated with it, is extremely popular among atheistic materialist people like engineers, and the more technically minded.
Like, they get a tremendous amount of their religious knowledge.
Education and motivation through science fiction and fantasy.
And you can see that manifest itself in the absolute cult-like followings of shows like Star Trek and Star Wars.
And Hubbard was certainly part of that dynamic complex.
I mean, I don't remember how many science fiction books he wrote, but plenty.
And so you can see this as a more religious manifestation of a much broader cultural proclivity to turn this kind of mythologizing into something approximating a belief set.
And that's certainly the case of With Star Trek and Star Wars.
You even see it to some degree in the Marvel Universe, right?
With the notion that the galaxy is populated by these cosmic beings.
It's a recreation of the...
It's a recreation of the...
Of the divine hierarchy of the Greeks and the Romans, essentially.
It's a recreation of the same ideas.
And so, how much...
Okay, so...
I can see the archetypal rationale for many of these ideas.
Now, there's a couple of things you touched on that are, again, temptations, I would say.
But they also rely on archetypal structuring.
So you don't get initiated into the mysteries until you've demonstrated your commitment to the religion.
That's not something unique to Scientology.
And it's confidential, so that makes it into a mystery religion.
But...
There's also a really interesting appeal to narcissism embedded in it, because from what I've been able to derive from what you've told me, Hubbard is also essentially describing, he's presenting to his higher-level acolytes the possibility that they're truly remarkable divine beings, marked out by their ability to become potentially dangerously charismatic and to pose a threat to the To the cosmic, tyrannical order.
And you can imagine that that's also...
You know, it's certainly the case that the typical sort of nerdy engineer who's a Star Wars acolyte, let's say, likes to style himself in his fantasies in the image of Mark Hamill's character, right?
And to look for a mentor like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I mean...
And so the notion that Hubbard could...
Because you might ask yourself, well, what's enticing people farther down the rabbit hole once they've hit that threshold of confidentiality and the higher mysteries are revealed?
And the revelation that you have this infinite responsibility to set the world right, but that you're also this sort of being that has that capacity because of your intrinsic specialness, you can understand that that's a pretty...
Potent and heady offering, especially once you're in it.
Why?
Like, you were in it for a long time, and I mean, you said you were born into it, so, you know, that makes it more complicated, but what element of ego do you think was present in what Scientology offered you that was psychologically attractive to you?
So for me, and the experience of someone who was put into it, brought into it, pushed into it as a child is greatly different than someone who chose to join as an adult.
I truly believed in the most fundamental level of the Scientology story, that we are eternal spiritual beings, that these bodies are actually a prison of their own type, and that with enough Scientology auditing, We're good to
go.
Where you can be fully, stably exterior of your body at will and with full perception.
So it's not some vague sense or feeling.
It's like, as clearly as I'm looking at you from behind my eyeballs right now, I would be able to pop out over here and do the exact same thing and look at myself from behind.
And that might seem like an interesting little parlor trick that people are hoping they're going to attain.
Except that the ability to do that We're good to go.
And that you'd think that once you achieve that ability, you should be able to stop, keep reincarnating here on Earth.
You should be able to go out to, you know, visit all the other, get born on another planet somewhere or something.
And L. Ron Hubbard said, no, no, no, no.
You don't want your fellow mankind on your conscience.
So if you get to that level in Scientology, it's incumbent upon you to come back, reincarnate, grow up again in a new body, and help get more people into Scientology.
And up Scientology's bridge to total freedom because, keep in mind, becoming this natively all-powerful spiritual being doesn't inherently give you the power to help your fellow mankind.
You can still only help your fellow mankind by using Scientology's technology.
And so Scientologists are hoping to get to the point where they achieve this spiritual ability and also are able to bypass, I mentioned this word before, but I didn't describe it, the between-lives implant station.
So these are literal, you know, maybe a combination of physical and metaphysical locations that Scientologists believe exist on the moon and Mars and Venus and whatever, and that we're programmed as beings, as a part of our sentence to this prison planet.
We're programmed that once our body dies, we flash over to the implant station, get our memory wiped, our thetan memory wiped, flash back down, beamed back down to earth into a new baby body.
And you live a brand new life with full amnesia of your prior life and lives.
And Scientologists believe that with enough auditing, you can achieve this skill of being fully, stably exterior at will with full perceptions, and also the awareness and the ability to bypass the between lives implant station so that when you come back next lifetime, you'll have full and total recall of everything you learned in Scientology.
You won't have to get trained on how to be a Scientology auditor again.
You'll retain that knowledge, and you can just hit the ground running as, you know, I don't know, a 12, 13, 14-year-old Scientology auditor, helping to move more people up to the state of clear.
Achieving this state of clear, getting rid of your reactive mind, is everything Scientology is supposed to be about.
Now, in modern times, it's become nothing but a real estate fundraising scam.
But if we're talking about back when L. Ron Hubbard was actually running things, achieving the state of clear and getting at least half the population of Earth to achieve the state of clear is the day-to-day mission of Scientology.
Okay, okay.
So let's parallel two things here.
So I think we've done a good job of giving the devil his due.
Now, what we might ask ourselves is, well, Hubbard obviously had a talent for tapping into the archetypal fantasy substrate.
He wouldn't have been a successful science fiction author if he hadn't been able to do that.
So he certainly had some talent in that regard.
Now you made, I guess I would ask like, so then given all this, It's attractiveness on the ethical front, it's explanatory power, and the fact that you were born into it.
Why in the world did you start to become skeptical?
On what grounds did you manifest that skepticism?
And how is that associated with your kind of off-the-cuff comment there at the end that, you know, this is degenerated into nothing but a giant real estate scam, right?
And this brings us back to the beginning of our discussion.
It's like, well, we need to live in a metaphysical realm.
We need to live in a story that...
What would you say?
Offers food for the craving we have for a metaphysical explanation to round out our lives.
And Hubbard provided a very Baroque and elaborate explanation, which isn't without its internal logic.
Now, but you obviously decided at some point that this wasn't for you.
Or maybe for anyone else.
And so, apart from the, you know, science fiction preposterousness of the entire account, which, as I said, is grounded in a set of archetypal ideas, what is it that, well, let's say, what bounced you out of the Scientology conceptual world?
All right, let me...
Let me take a whack at this.
Because it's never just one thing, but I'm going to try not to get too far into the weeds on this.
And let me first make sure I fully answered your previous question, which was even as a person being born into it, what was it that appealed to the ego of it?
And so for me, it was actually believing that That this is a prison.
We do all need to be free from the prison.
And that these upper confidential levels, which I had never done.
I did not know what was on them.
These upper confidential levels really did deliver that result.
And that basically we're in the matrix here.
And by doing Scientology, you get unplugged from the matrix, and nothing could possibly be more important than that.
And even though I could see people in my environment as a young little good Scientology staff member, I could see people who had done all of Scientology's auditing levels, and I could see that they were no more special in any way than I was, not having done any of the levels.
That was evident to me at a very young age.
I still let the belief in what Scientologists call the upper unreleased OT levels.
See, in Scientology, you can only go up to OT 8.
Well, there's this story that L. Ron Hubbard went off for the last six years of his life and created OT9 through 15.
And that when he dropped his body in 1986, he didn't die.
He didn't have a stroke.
He causatively shed his body after finishing up through OT15. And he shed his body so that he could continue on with upper OT level research that his body was preventing him from being able to do.
So the myth that I believed as a Scientologist is We're good to go.
That the real magic is still in the vault.
And if we can only expand Scientology's current organizations up to a certain level based on the instructions L. Ron Hubbard left behind, these levels will be able to be released and we'll finally be able to have auditing that allows us to become fully, stably exterior at will with full perception.
That for me was the linchpin.
That for me was like my version of believing in a heaven.
Right?
Right.
Okay.
Well, did that also help to explain to you why the people who had gone through the clearing process were still not sufficiently special?
It's because, well, they'd gone a long ways, but there was still much more to be discovered.
Yes.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so what do you think...
Okay, so let's look into that a bit.
What do you think...
Made you find that appealing.
Like, it was the knowledge of...
I guess it was the knowledge that there were still things you could discover that would enlighten you, that were still part and parcel of the process that you'd already invested a fair bit of your life into and that also had, like, encapsulated your mother.
I mean, because to step outside of that, you have to...
Let go of a lot, right?
You have to think, oh my god, my mother was far off the beaten track, and that's a really complicated thing to come to terms with.
And then you have to come to terms with the fact that you were sort of arbitrarily placed in a position at your birth where you were engaged, you know, involved in this cult, which seems to be kind of unfair at a cosmic level, and then you have to reevaluate all of your own beliefs.
Like, there's a lot that you have to let go of before you can escape from this.
So that's a problem on the anxiety side, but then it also beckoned to you with the promise of knowledge yet, not yet attained, that you could get to with sufficient discipline.
Well, that's a heady mix, you know?
And not knowledge, but ability.
Okay, right, right, right.
And I would argue that it's not that there was an aspect of this that I found appealing.
It's that this is what I was told was true.
It didn't matter if it was appealing.
This is what's true, and this is a prison planet.
And it'd be like, you know, you're familiar with the movie The Matrix, I assume?
Oh, yes.
Well, you live in the Matrix, they can make your life amazing, and the steak tastes great, and the women, and the everything.
But reality, if you get unplugged from the Matrix, reality is not as nice.
It is not as fun, it is not as comfortable, but it's reality.
And Scientologists, you know, as a Scientologist, what I was told is, look, this might be a great lifetime, right?
We might have trappings of wealth, and great weather, and vacations, but that's the prison, the Don't be distracted by the matrix.
We need to unplug ourselves from the matrix and we need to unplug everyone else.
So, in a sense, it's not appealing.
In a sense, it's just the burden of the responsibility that we have if this is the version of reality we subscribe to.
Right, Oka.
That's so interesting because that means that it's not appealing in the narrowly hedonistic manner.
But that it's actually a call, strangely enough, to adopt something like a higher order ethical responsibility, right?
Adherence to the truth and then participation in this process of universal salvation.
Okay, well again, that sounds pretty good.
So why did you stop?
Why did you stop with your adherence?
So...
The experience of being a staff member in Scientology and being a Sea Org member in Scientology, it's a very hectic, chaotic, high-stress experience.
And as a good little Scientology staff member, I always believed that at Scientology's secret management base, now I know it's in Gilman Hot Springs, California, but at the time in Scientology, no one was allowed to know where the secret international management base was, where David Miscavige and all of his staff worked.
What I believed of Scientology led me to believe that if Scientology were true, if L. Ron Hubbard's technology was true and accurate and worked all the time when applied correctly, the international Scientology base would be a utopia.
It would be like a perfect existence of people working in harmony, in coordination, in affinity with one another, no stress, no anxiety, no anger, no temper, none of the trappings of the reactive mind, you might say.
In 2009, the Tampa Bay Times did a series of articles called The Truth Rundown.
And for the first time ever, some of these Scientology executives, high-level Scientology executives, who had recently departed, but Scientologists didn't know these people had departed.
Not only had these people left the management ranks, they had left Scientology altogether.
These people were celebrities in Scientology.
These were the international managers that all Scientologists would see at the international events five, six times a year.
These people started speaking out about what an unmitigated hellhole the International Scientology Management Base was, working under David Miscavige.
That, for me, was the first crack in the dam.
It just caused me to immediately question and reframe things.
Like, hold on, hold on, hold on.
At the International Base, they don't even have to deal with Scientology public.
They don't even have to deal with anyone's demands.
They don't have to deliver services to anyone.
All they have to do is get along with each other.
How could it be so bad?
Why did you believe the accounts?
Oh, because they were people who I had famous figures in Scientology.
I see, I see.
Five, six, seven, eight of them.
The highest level managers working under David Miscavige.
So it was hard to reconcile.
Well, that's right.
And so, up until then, any horrible experiences I had in Scientology working as a staff member or a SeaWorld member, in my mind, I was like, it's only bad at this level because we're too far away from David Miscavige.
There's too many filters between us and him, but one of the things that kept me believing was that the closer you got to David Miscavige, the better things were.
And once I was exposed to information that allowed me to credibly conclude that the actual opposite was true, the closer you got to David Miscavige, the worse it was.
And what I was experiencing at the lower levels was just the trickle-down effect of his horribly abusive and psychotic behavior.
Right, right.
So now the higher echelons are contaminated rather than pure.
That's right.
And so that's the first thing that got me going, hold on, something is not as I thought it was.
Okay.
But that wasn't it.
That wasn't it.
The following item is what did it for me.
There was a particular Sea Org member that I knew of by the name of Dan Kuhn, and he had a particular job at international management where I knew that if anyone knew what L. Ron Hubbard left behind, it was this guy.
Like, the job that he had was to compile everything L. Ron Hubbard had left behind and figure out what of that material, how it could be organized and released as services that Scientologists could do.
He was one of the former executives that left and was speaking out.
And when I heard from him that these upper unreleased OT levels were a myth, they don't exist.
L. Ron Hubbard did not leave behind any notes.
There is nothing in the vault that no one in upper Scientology management has any clue whatsoever what was supposed to be on these upper OT levels.
I said, you should have told me that 20 years ago.
I'm done.
I said, that's all I needed to hear.
I said, that was the keystone that was holding it all in place for me anyway, was this belief that that's why Scientology was important.
Because these unreleased OT levels is what would unplug all humanity from the matrix.
And then we would go off to another planet and unplug everyone on that planet and off to another planet.
And so, honestly, Jordan, it was just that one piece of information.
There are no upper unreleased OT levels.
Well, that's a major piece.
There's a gospel insistence that you have to evaluate the spirits to see if they're of God.
Because you can have a revelation, you can encounter information that seems credible, but that is perverse in some manner.
And so then the question is, how do you distinguish, again, truth from falsehood?
And by their fruits, you will know them is a good one.
So let me give you a concrete example of that.
So I worked in the 90s at Harvard.
And that was a very interesting place to work.
They claimed the pursuit of excellence, right?
And when I went there, that was the case.
Like everything at the university, virtually everything was subordinated to the pursuit of excellence.
So when the undergraduates arrived there, they weren't disciplined harshly.
It wasn't a rule-bound tyranny.
It was a place that was extremely competitive.
But it was competitive because everyone was doing everything they could to work as hard as they possibly could.
And so it was very intimidating for the undergraduates because they came there with all these other very smart kids.
And, you know, they were generally valedictorians and so forth in their own class.
But when they got to Harvard, they were kind of average on average.
And so it was a very intense place.
But that also was true of the assistant professors, the junior professors.
It was true of the associate professors.
It was true of the full professors.
And the administrators served that enterprise and were bound by the same ethos.
And so not only was excellence worshipped at the top as a principle, That ethos saturated the entire organization.
Okay, now I left Harvard and I went to the University of Toronto.
And the University of Toronto is a pretty good university, but it wasn't as good a university as Harvard by any stretch of the imagination.
And it did a lot of mouth service with regard to excellence.
In fact, you couldn't walk anywhere anywhere.
At the University of Toronto without, you know, being berated about excellence.
But in the details, that just wasn't the case.
Like, the pursuit of excellence was frowned upon often and punished.
Now, not universally.
I'm not saying that.
But in contrast to Harvard, which, you know, was arguably the preeminent university in the world at the time.
And so...
You could tell the difference between the two organizations in the actual details of day-to-day interaction, right?
There was a fractal relationship between what was being claimed, excellence, and its distribution at Harvard, which was obvious, and then at the University of Toronto, where any deviation in the direction of excellence, you might say this about Canada in general, by the way, was just as likely to be met with punishment as reward.
And so that is one of the ways that people can calibrate the truth, right?
It's not the only way, and it's not sufficient.
But you can go to an organization.
This is one of the reasons, by the way, I'd like to work with The Daily Wire.
You know, I had no idea what would happen when I started a partnership with them.
But my experience has been that they're very open to creative ideas.
And not only do they leave me the hell alone, if I have an idea, they try real hard to help me put it into practice, and it's actually helpful.
Right, so as far as I'm concerned, that adds to their credibility, right?
Because they're practicing what they preach.
Now, what you pointed out was that you had a belief that...
At the higher levels of effort, there would be a commensurate reward that the whole enterprise was predicated on the pursuit of something approximating excellence.
And that was one of the things that kept you going.
And then when you found out that that wasn't the case, that the fruits were bitter, that was enough to collapse the enterprise for you.
Now, you laugh about that now, kind of ruefully, but I can't imagine that discovery was anything approximating pleasant for you.
Like, why didn't you collapse completely?
I think it's because to a certain level, what I did in Scientology I was really just as a child put on this path, given tasks, and at some point decided that my goal was just going to be the absolute best at doing what it was I was being asked to do.
And it didn't necessarily require a huge commitment on my part other than getting really good at my job.
I did not every day have to buy in to this entire story of the prison planet.
It was only when I would be struggling, when I would feel underappreciated, if I was feeling I was receiving an injustice, that I didn't want to do this anymore, that I would go, now hold on a second.
There was a really good reason I'm spending my entire life dedicated to this cause.
Now, what was that reason?
Because I seem to have forgotten it.
And then I'll go, oh, prison planet.
Prison planet's the reason.
Oh, I feel so much better now that I've reminded myself that the reason I'm suffering in this way is for the cause of freeing everyone from the prison planet.
And then I would rededicate myself to very much doing my job in the best possible way.
Right.
Are you a conscientious person?
Well, I mean, I don't know if I'm qualified to say that.
Well, I'm asking because you said that you found it meaningful to be dedicating yourself to your job and attending to the details.
There is a moral striving in that.
I'm going to use this example, and I'm not saying it characterizes you, but it's a good example.
Many of the functionaries in extraordinarily pathological states, so we could take the National Socialists, for example, were very good at their local jobs.
You know, and they tried to, now there would be some striving upward and some ego competition there and some struggling for power, but lots of times people were just, as they say, following orders.
But to make that more realistic is that they had a bounded world where they had their tasks and they were Microtasks in some ways.
And there was no reason for them to lift their heads up above those microtasks and ask where the whole damn ship was going.
And you said, you know, essentially that characterized your life.
That is part of being in the matrix in a sense.
But it's also the case that people generally, that is generally how people run their lives.
like once you decide you're going to be a school teacher, you concentrate on teaching rather than assessing the validity of the entire educational enterprise, right?
Even if you're playing soccer, if you're out on the field, you don't be berating yourself because you're not playing basketball, right?
You're concentrating on trying to get the ball and the goal.
So, so it's not surprising that you took refuge in the, you know, the microcosm that you inhabited.
And What did you find that was locally rewarding about that?
What in your job day-to-day kept you going?
I know you had to remind yourself of the metaphysics from time to time, but what kept you going day-to-day?
There's a lot of great people in Scientology.
Scientologists are good people.
They're motivated by an intent to help.
They think Scientology is the best tool by which to help people.
And my job in Scientology was always to help people.
This is interesting to think of it this way.
My job was to help people who someone else had already convinced to pay for the course.
And yet another person had convinced them to come in and take the course.
And my job was to help get them through the course.
So I was, in my own way, as a good Scientology staff member, helping people who wanted to be helped.
And that's just a rewarding experience, no matter what the...
However it is you're helping.
If you're doing something that's appreciated by someone who you think is a valuable person.
And Scientologists, this is the irony of the whole thing.
Scientologists really are the ones who believe it and are in it.
They genuinely believe they're saving all mankind.
Tom Cruise believes that.
I promise you.
It's not a show.
No.
Well, you know, it's interesting, too.
One of the things I've thought about Tom Cruise that's quite, you know, rather striking is one of my friends in Hollywood informed me recently that there's maybe only one star now who's left that can guarantee boss office success on the basis of his name, and that's Tom Cruise.
And I've liked Tom Cruise's movies, and one of the things you can say about Cruise that's very, it's preposterous in a way, but it happens to be the case, is that his commitment to Scientology has protected him from woke nonsense.
So, you know, that's very interesting for me to see that.
And I would say, like, you're a lot crazier if you're woke than you are if you're a Scientologist.
And so, you know, it's a lot more destructive a discipline as far, or an endeavor as far as I can tell.
But so the reason I'm saying that is because, you know, people can be in error in fundamental elements of their metaphysical beliefs.
And still be in truth in some elements of the way they're acting and behaving.
And, you know, that's essentially what you were pointing out for yourself.
So that begs the question still.
It's like, why did you decide not to just ignore that evidence?
Like, you could have twisted yourself into knots and said that these people who were now sort of heretics and who were criticizing the organization were corrupt or that they were part of a background conspiracy or something like that.
Like, you could have written that evidence off.
That's true.
So, you must have been at a point in your own psychological development where, for other reasons, you figured it was easier to accept what they had to say as truth rather than, you know, to go through all the shenanigans you would have had to justify their deviation from the true path.
To believe them was very easy.
Right.
Because they were there at the highest levels.
So even if they were lying about the existence of the upper OT levels, meaning even if they were lying to me by saying they didn't exist and they really did exist, there would clearly be something...
I'll take half a step back.
If we use this matrix analogy...
And if someone can credibly convince you that the matrix is real, being unplugged from it is real, only Scientology can do it, and nothing could ever be more valuable than that.
And if you experience the truth of that for yourself, nothing could ever get you to leave.
Nothing.
Nothing.
And so these people, and it was, Dan Kuhn is only one person I mentioned because I knew that out of all the people speaking out, he would know even more than the others about the upper unreleased OT levels.
But the others would also know, just due to their proximity to David Miscavige and his entire staff, these people would know if Scientology was We're good to go.
Obviously, I mean, if we try to switch the conversation to, you know, Christians saving people to go to heaven, and I don't want to talk about my pay grade here, but it's like if you truly believe that you're salvaging spirits for eternity, nothing could get you to stop.
And I knew that these people at the highest levels, all having left and all saying the same thing, the fact that they could even bring themselves to leave was already a hell of a lot of evidence that whatever was being offered at the top, Right, got it.
So either way, even if they were lying, the fact that they had got that far and would then lie was even then that was indication that something wasn't right.
Okay, got it, got it.
Okay, so...
I'd like to know two things as we go forward.
I want to talk about the material corruption of the Scientology enterprise, because you referred to it as a real estate scam, and I want to delve into that.
But I also want to know the mechanics of how you freed yourself, because you aren't only metaphysically committed, which is a big deal.
And born into it, which is a big deal.
But you were also practically committed because it was your job.
And so that's a lot of...
So for you to leave, that's a more intense psychological transformation than even a divorce, which would be, you know, that's up there.
That's about as bad as it gets for people in terms of that death.
And so...
How did you manage to step out?
Where did you step to?
Why didn't you despair or deceive yourself and what belief did you manage to orient yourself with as an alternative?
So the answer to that question starts in 2006, when my wife and I were both working in the C organization of Scientology out in Los Angeles.
And we were getting sort of fed up with our day-to-day experience.
And in the C organization, you're not allowed to have children.
If you're going to have children, you have to leave the C organization.
And so we basically got pregnant so that we could have a very easy route out of the C organization.
Now, we still believed in Scientology.
We just no longer wanted to be basically working on a billion-year contract, 365, 18 hours a day.
And you both agreed on that?
On leaving the C organization?
Yeah.
It was very evident.
So you're not allowed to talk with your spouse about leaving the C organization.
Yeah, I bet.
Wink here and a nod there, we were like, we're ready to be done with this.
I see.
I see.
So you had an ally.
You had a real ally.
That's real helpful.
Okay, yeah, all right.
When we verified she was pregnant, we each went to our respective ethics officers at our organizations that we worked for, and we said, we're pregnant, we're not getting an abortion, we're leaving.
And that was our fairly easy route out of the Sea Org.
That was 2006.
We didn't officially leave Scientology until 2014.
So when we leave the Sea Organization, At that point, we are what they call in Scientology, public Scientologists.
We are now people who pay to do Scientology.
We don't work for Scientology.
So from 2000, my wife and I moved from Los Angeles to Clearwater, Florida.
She had a lot of family here, a great place to raise a family.
And I start working at jobs making a good living for various Scientologists, different companies.
2009 is when the Tampa Bay Times stories come out called The Truth Rundown.
So that's three years after I left the CEO organization.
Now information is coming out publicly that's making me question the entire Scientology paradigm.
I secretly start getting in touch with some of these former executives.
Now this puts me in a very dangerous situation.
Because speaking to people that leave Scientology is something that can get you kicked out of Scientology.
But I was still, my entire existence, I was still dependent on the Scientology ecosystem for my friends, my income, my children's friends, my kids' schooling, all connected to the world of Scientology.
So interestingly enough, from 2009, as we described, that's when my whole belief in Scientology started to dwindle.
Even when I no longer believed in any part of Scientology, I did not want to get kicked out.
I did not want to have to disconnect from my friends.
I did not want my wife's family to disconnect.
I was willing to continue to exist in this ecosystem and not speak out Not spread around negative information to other Scientologists.
I decided that how I was going to add value was I was going to be someone on the inside who shared information about the current status of things with former members who were now on the outside and are reporting on such things to the world.
So you're a double agent then?
I wanted to be a double agent, yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Unfortunately, I'm just way too sloppy to succeed at that for more than a few years at a time.
So eventually, and at this time, my mom had gotten kicked out for spreading around information about David Miscavige that they considered to be negative.
And they told me I had to disconnect from my mom.
Well, or I was going to be kicked out, but I didn't want to be kicked out.
But I was never going to disconnect from my mom.
So I just lied my butt off to them for two years about this.
I had disconnected from my mom, but in reality I didn't.
In Scientology, they have a very strong snitching culture.
People are reporting on each other all the time.
And I was just getting lazier and lazier and more careless while I was hiding all of this.
So that's something we shouldn't just jump over.
We'll go back to the story here right away.
In terms of the fruits by which you might know an organization, that's another good one.
We already talked about hypocrisy.
People claim to be pursuing one thing, but their actions indicate that they're not.
That's a performative contradiction philosophically, when you claim an explicit belief, but your actions belie it.
But then...
That snitching culture, that's a really bad sign, right?
Because one of the things you see that's absolutely 100% characteristic of totalitarian states is that they insist upon the ethical duty of their participants to inform on other people to the authorities.
And you really can't think of anything that poisons the relationship between people more thoroughly than that, right?
Because not only are you in danger of being informed on at any moment, you're also in danger of being informed on by the worst sort of person who lies about you to inform on you to do nothing but redound to their own credit.
Plus, you don't know who you can trust and who you can't trust, in which case, you know, you have a proclivity not to trust anyone.
So, So the snitch culture, how in the world did that develop within Scientology and what were its manifestations as far as you were concerned?
Oh my goodness.
How it developed, I mean, L. Ron Hubbard explicitly laid down various sets of quite draconian rules and then created another policy that says if someone is found to have done something and you were found to have known about it and to not have submitted a report on that activity and behavior, you would be penalized.
So, in Scientology, there's something called a knowledge report, and all Scientologists are expected to submit knowledge reports on other Scientologists.
It's considered the individual group members putting in ethics on each other, not leaving it up to the executives to put in ethics on everyone under them, but people putting in ethics on each other.
L. Ron Hubbard says— So it's a distributed tyranny.
That's right.
He says a productive, easy-to-live-with-and-work-with group is a group that enforces the discipline member-to-member on each other and doesn't leave it up to the higher-ups.
And so the snitching culture is such an important part of Scientology.
And I remember way back when, back in like 1998, I saw this movie called—oh my God, it was about swing kids.
And it was about people in Nazi Germany and the swing dancing and— This is when I still believed in Scientology, but this should have been a red flag for me way back when.
I remember seeing the snitching culture portrayed in this movie about Nazi Germany, and I remember sitting there going, that's Scientology.
That's Scientology.
I mean, it might seem like it's a stretch there, but it's like the idea that the only good Scientologist is the one who's reporting on all of his fellow Scientologists.
Oh yeah, boy, that's bad.
That's bad.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's also, you know, that's one of the ways that totalitarian systems really get a grip.
You know, one way is that everybody in a totalitarian system lies about everything all the time.
But the other one is they inform on each other to the so-called higher authority, right?
And then they make that into a moral virtue.
Yeah, that's really bad.
So that's a bad one.
Okay, so you're being told that you have to leave your mother, but you're not going to do that.
You don't want to alienate her.
Your wife and you have already decided that you're going to have a child.
You've left the specifics of your job, and now you're kind of living a double life, eh?
No, I'm going to try to cover this superficially and quickly, because if I get into the details, I'm going to get emotional.
And I'm going to...
Try not to do that, okay?
Okay.
So.
What did you remember that produced that emotional response?
It's the answer to this question.
That's an engram, eh?
That's an engram for sure.
And the story that I'm going to tell you here is why I do my YouTube channel and very much relish exposing Scientology every single day on my YouTube channel.
You could say I'm motivated by pure revenge, and that's okay with me.
So, by the time they realize I'm not going to disconnect from my mom, they officially kick me out of Scientology.
And then they go to my wife, and they say, well, you have to divorce your husband.
Now, at this point, we have three daughters.
So you have to divorce your husband, or you're going to get kicked out of Scientology.
And she says, that's not going to work for me.
So they kick her out of Scientology.
And so then they go to her parents and they say, you have to disconnect from your daughter and your three granddaughters or you're going to get kicked out of Scientology.
But my wife's parents have three other kids who have spouses that are Scientologists, who have kids whose spouse's parents are Scientologists and And I felt like my mom had a choice that she could have made for herself.
I felt I had a choice I could have made for myself.
I felt my wife had a choice she could have made for herself.
But by the time you get to her parents, they're basically going, which kids do we want to lose?
Which grandkids are we never going to see again?
So my wife's parents disconnect from her and the grandkids, even though they live five minutes down the road.
Brutal.
And then my wife never saw her dad again until the day he died.
Oh, yeah.
That's a rough one, all right.
And so my kids, you know, when my wife and I were officially kicked out, we had both been working for Scientologists, so we lost our jobs.
Our kids had been going to private Scientology schools, so they were kicked out of their schools.
And we live in Clearwater, Florida, which is the home of the largest Scientology organization in the world.
So the vast majority of all of our friends severed all ties with us, including our best friends.
And so that type of family destruction is what I personally find most objectionable about Scientology.
Whether it's coercing women to get abortions to keep serving Scientology instead of starting families.
I mean, I challenge anyone to name one other quote-unquote religious organization that weekly buses its clergy members to the abortion clinic.
I don't think you'll be able to find one.
Oh yeah, that's a rough one.
That's a rough one.
And those women have a lot of pressure applied to them to convince them that they have to get an abortion because it's so much more valuable to save the planet than it is to raise a family.
Well, there's plenty of that going on in the broader public at the moment too.
Yeah.
All right, well, look, let's do this.
Let's do this.
Because we're coming up on our hour and a half.
I want to talk to you more about what happened to you personally after you've left and about, I know for everyone who's watching and listening, there is a website.
There is a website associated with Aaron that is hosted by people who aren't very happy with him.
And we haven't had a chance to talk about that at all.
And so what I think I'll do, we've gone through some of your autobiography, which is often what I do in the additional half an hour that I speak to my guests on the Daily Wire Plus side.
But I think we'll do that there.
And so for all of you who are watching and listening, you know, thank you very much for persevering with us through this part of the story.
If you want to hear that part, which is extraordinarily interesting, it's the backlash against Darren and what's happened to him publicly as he's come out as a critic of the Scientology movement.
We're going to delve into all that on the Daily Wire Plus side.
And so...
Before we do that, I'll thank everybody who are watching and listening for their attention and the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this conversation.
I'm way up here in Northern Alberta.
We got a crew gathered so we could do this today, so that's really good.
We'll delve into all that for another half an hour.
You guys can join us on the Daily World Plus site if you want to do that, and I'm going to thank you for walking through this.
I learned a lot about Scientology today, and it was very interesting to see what it is that it offers that's so seductive, both on the plus side, right, the fact that it provides people with a framework within which their life takes on an enhanced meaning, And then on the negative side, the punishments that are associated with any deviation from the true path.
And so we'll delve into that more on the Daily World Plus side.
So thank you very much, sir, for your time and attention and for everyone else who's participating and watching and to the film crew here in Sexsmith, Alberta, which is where we are today.
And we'll take 10 and then we'll get together and finish this off.
Sounds good.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you.
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