He Worked Scientology Full-Time and Never Learned What It Believed at the Top

Lex Fridman asked Aaron Smith-Levin for a full overview of Scientology—ideas, operations, power—starting at the basics. Smith-Levin, a former Scientologist who now hosts Growing Up in Scientology and serves as vice president of the Aftermath Foundation, answered with the system's own first claim. It is a belief system created by L. Ron Hubbard: we are immortal spiritual beings called thetans, with native God-like potential. Nothing in the universe is more powerful than a thetan. God-like, he said, is quite literal.

Through decisions thetans made, they fell from that native power until most are not even aware they are thetans, have lived before, or have those powers. They are trapped in bodies, on Earth, in what the doctrine calls a prison of a physical universe and a prison of a planet. Only Scientology, the church teaches, can restore a thetan to its native state. The thetan is not a passenger inside you. The thetan is you.

At the non-confidential lower levels there is one primary thetan per body—about eight billion on Earth. Later, on confidential levels, students learn that tens or hundreds of thousands of sick, half-dead thetans are stuck to you as extra sources of trouble. Fridman noted that many religions and self-help systems offer a version of unlimited human capacity. Smith-Levin agreed the application here is a process for breaking limitations. The difficulty of describing Scientology at the start, he added, is that what members believe actually changes as they move further up.

Before Scientology, Hubbard published Dianetics in 1950 as a science of mental health, not a spiritual project. The model is the reactive mind: a complete recording of every moment of pain and unconsciousness, stored as engrams. Hubbard framed it as a stimulus-response mechanism evolved millions of years ago to keep the organism away from whatever once caused harm. In present time those recordings still fire, pushing you to avoid similar situations below awareness.

Human beings, he claimed, have evolved past the point where that mechanism helps; now it only harms. The method is auditing: one-on-one counseling that runs the painful incident again and again, then hunts an "earlier similar" engram, then another, up the chain. If you erase the earliest engram, later ones on that chain are supposed to vanish. In the 1950 book the earliest possible engram was birth, with prenatal incidents in the womb allowed. Past lives were not yet in the model. Hubbard still credited Sigmund Freud. Psychiatry had not yet been declared evil.

Fridman called it a powerful model of the mind, close to Freud's idea that adult life is spent solving puzzles formed in early childhood. Smith-Levin said that is probably what Hubbard took. Early Dianetics was almost entirely that auditing loop. The chain structure survived into Scientology. What changed was the starting point, once an immortal being entered the equation.

With Scientology, birth stopped being the bottom of the chain. The earliest incident could now be trillions of years ago, in other galaxies and other universes, because an immortal thetan's first wound cannot be only decades old. There is no accompanying physics. Hubbard posited a physical universe and, senior to it, a theta universe that creates the physical one. Creating a universe, Smith-Levin said, is essentially creating different thetan simulations—more Matrix than Genesis.

Fridman compared the setup to Plato's forms: abstract, more general structures that construct this particular reality. Smith-Levin laughed that he grew up in a cult, so he was not familiar with Plato. Fridman told him he could not use that as an excuse for everything, then made a larger request. A lot of philosophy, religion, and even science sits on uncertain ground. Communism and capitalism sound beautiful in ideal form and then go wrong, some more than others. Caricature is easy. The devil, he said, will be charismatic, not a cartoon, and that is how you learn which appealing ideas become dangerous.

Smith-Levin said that is a thrust of his channel: talk about Scientology so that current members hear fairness and accuracy, not just haters. Fridman used North Korea and Hitler as warnings against ridicule. Plenty of North Koreans deeply love the leader they were raised to love; millions loved Hitler. Mocking a haircut does not explain that scale. Scientology sits close to the American mainstream because so many Americans are in it. The interesting work is taking the underlying ideas seriously enough to see where they go wrong.

You would never get a Church of Scientology representative to sit with Fridman and be as fair and accurate as Smith-Levin intended to be, he said. Fridman disagreed, hoping transparency might be in the church's interest. Smith-Levin hoped he was right and still thought it would never happen. Members are not allowed to send someone out to speak honestly. An entertainment journalist might be fudged. A long interview that asks about Xenu, body thetans, Leah Remini, and Lisa McPherson is a no-go zone. They are not even allowed to say they are not allowed to talk about it.

The entire upper half of Scientology's Bridge is simply confidential. Smith-Levin never did those levels while in. He did not learn what Scientologists actually believe there until after he left—and he was born and raised in it. His mother was introduced when he was four and got in fast. At twelve he was taken out of school and began full-time work for the organization, in various capacities, until twenty-six. He was thirty-four when he officially parted ways, which was really the church parting ways with him. That, he said, is how Scientology does it.

He now runs Growing Up in Scientology and, primarily, helps run the Aftermath Foundation as vice president. The foundation was created after Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, when non-Scientologists around the world asked how they could help people leave. It has been more successful than the founders envisioned, helping people escape from all regions and echelons. The core doctrine of an organization, kept from a member it trained for decades, is already a fact that does a lot of work.

The public-facing truths are three: man is an immortal spiritual being; his experience extends well beyond a single lifetime; his capabilities are unlimited even if not presently realized. Unlimited is not a metaphor. A thetan has no position in space or time and does not actually exist in the physical universe. It may locate itself there, forget that it chose to, and get trapped. Restored, everything here is a thetan playing a game. Physics does not have to make sense. It is thetans all the way down.

Hubbard splits life into eight dynamics, each a thrust toward survival: self, family, any other group, humankind, plant and animal life, the physical world, spirituality as thetans collectively, and an eighth he calls infinity or the supreme-being dynamic. Scientology says it does not deal with the eighth and will not tell you what to believe about it. Technically, nobody sits you down and demands you revoke God. Everything in the system is still inconsistent with a creator God, because thetans created everything. Members who say they believe in a supreme being are, Smith-Levin said, mostly lying to you through cognitive dissonance.

The PR line that you can be a Christian and a Scientologist is an example of baked-in dishonesty. Christians do not believe in past lives on other galaxies. The church knows that and says it anyway. During the second run at IRS tax exemption—Scientology had exemption early, lost it, and got it back in 1993—the IRS objected to the claim that you could be a Scientologist and a member of another religion. If you say that, the IRS said, we will say you are not a religion. The church put in writing that it had not meant that: in the beginning you can be both; eventually you just have to be a Scientologist.

Survival, Hubbard said, is the principle on which all life exists—a watershed he presented as discovered for the first time, greater than the discovery of fire. Fridman wanted the idea taken seriously: life trying to survive, a thetan fabric bigger than biological individuals, echoes Nietzsche's will to power and Schopenhauer's will. Smith-Levin was mocking the first-discoverer pose, not the observation. Fridman offered Stephen Wolfram's *A New Kind of Science* as a parallel: ego in the announcement, sometimes real ideas underneath. Declaring a new view is not a crime until the declaration becomes organizational discipline and doubt becomes sin.

Ethics, in this system, is purely functional: pro-survival is ethical, counter-survival is not. Because survival runs across all eight dynamics, and because applying Scientology and getting people into it is framed as the key to saving every spiritual being, the analysis collapses. Scientology is a third dynamic. Anything good for that third dynamic is held to be good for all of them. Whatever is good for Scientology becomes, by definition, ethical. That is where the ends justify any means.

Fridman noted the same reasoning in Soviet practice: kill, imprison, and censor for the workers' long-term good. Smith-Levin added a contrast he would unpack next. An organization famous for being hyper-capitalist and money-hungry runs, at its core, a Sea Organization he called a near-perfect communist experiment—from each according to ability, to each according to need—staffed by people on a billion-year symbolic contract.

Scientologists come in three echelons. Public live ordinary lives and pay for courses and auditing. Staff work two-and-a-half- or five-year contracts at a local org; finish the contract and the debt is considered paid. Sea Org members are the most dedicated brand. They sign billion-year contracts—symbolic, not legally enforceable; the church has not yet collected in a later lifetime. They do not own property, live in church housing, eat in church cafeterias, and have no life in the outside world. All of international, middle, and continental management, and even some lower service orgs, are one hundred percent Sea Org.

You may not marry or date outside the Sea Org. You are not allowed to have children unless you leave; if you accidentally get pregnant, the expected path is abortion and staying, because pregnancy distracts from the work and staying is the greatest good for Scientology. Sex is only once married, which is why people marry after a few days. Divorce is common; Smith-Levin has known people married and divorced three times by twenty-five, because marriage is practically dating and the way to get a room instead of a dorm. Celebrities are usually public, not Sea Org.

Everyone in the Sea Org makes fifty dollars a week, except David Miscavige and some posts with cash bonuses. Even the head of a big organization gets fifty. There are no weekends. Friday is another day. Jobs look like any business: HR, sales, accounting, operations, quality control. Operations means delivering courses and auditing; business development means new members. The product is reminding you who you are. Money flows in from the paying public. The core execution layer lives on rations.

Auditing looks like one-on-one talk therapy in a quiet room. Almost all of it uses an E-meter—on the show, a Mark VIII—a box with knobs and a needle. The preclear holds metal cans that complete a circuit with a small battery. The device measures small changes in resistance. Scientologists believe the needle directs the session and shows whether it has reached a satisfactory conclusion. Every session must end on a positive note. If it does not, there are corrections. You do not get to say the hour was bad and see you next week.

Calibration starts with a can squeeze while the auditor sets sensitivity for about a one-third dial drop. Too sensitive and shifting in the chair wrecks the read, so the main instruction is to sit still. The larger knob is the tone arm. Ask "Is there something you're withholding from me?" and watch for a dip at the end of the question. The preclear does not see the needle. An instant read means the question will not be dropped. The auditor takes notes of time, place, form, and event on whatever confession arrives. A smooth back-and-forth is a floating needle, which means done—until checking the question produces another read, at which point you hunt earlier similar until it floats.

That loop is how any session can tumble into past lives. Hubbard said the analytical mind is a perfect recording across some 76 trillion years, pictures that have charge and mass, and that attending to them perturbs the meter's current. Cynics say the needle is palm sweat and movement. Smith-Levin, who trained auditors, said that is not true, even if he cannot fully explain what it does read on. Trainees drill generating needle reactions with happy thoughts. After every session you verify the float with a third party. Seasoned preclears know how to make the needle float at the examiner. He never enjoyed receiving auditing; it was forced on him as a child, and he never believed the past-life memories, so he got good at floating the needle to avoid an impasse.

Many people find auditing helpful; some describe it as addictive. There is no expectation of privacy inside the org, and also no expectation, among members, that files will be leaked for blackmail—you trust the organization. Whole-track memories can be high-reality breakfasts on distant planets, or genocides you supposedly committed. Fridman worried a self-critical person might manufacture extra guilt. Smith-Levin said thetans are held to be basically good, so the hunt is for the prior confusion that shifted you toward evil. After enough hours, members are convinced they have fixed the reason for any non-optimum conduct.

Auditor training can take years. Hubbard said Scientology is not about belief but about applying "the tech." Standard tech works 100 percent of the time when applied 100 percent correctly—an unfalsifiable hatch, because any failure means it was not applied correctly. Quality control nitpicks until it finds the one thing done wrong. Fridman heard the same escape in "communism failed because it was never implemented correctly." Auditors, Smith-Levin argued, rarely hit crisis of faith. They watch preclears hit euphoric, blown-out states, floating needles, and "you saved my life." If people found none of it helpful, nobody would stay.

Anecdotally, inside the org, lives look improved. From outside, Fridman offered *Animal Farm*: the ration shrinks while the pigs announce abundance. Smith-Levin said that could be an identical description of going up the Bridge to Total Freedom. You tell yourself everything is getting better while you no longer see family, you are broke despite earning, and you live at the beck and call of people who run your days. Relatives who were never in write to him asking why a loved one's life looks like that. He will not say the help is all in their heads. That does not feel honest.

If Scientology were only auditing on the subjects you wanted, take it or leave it, that would be fine. It is part and parcel of an organization that takes everything, demands everything, and controls who you may speak with, who you may love, and who you must erase. It is hard to pinpoint where it goes wrong, he said in the clip that opened the episode, because the good parts and the bad parts are all just Scientology. Information control follows. Public members have internet access but are not allowed to read anything critical. The claim is that only current members can know the truth—which makes former members' testimony a lie by definition.

Middle management edited Wikipedia so often from org IP addresses that Wikipedia locked those ranges. Early internet control had some success; Smith-Levin thinks they have mostly thrown in the towel. He uploads daily so a Scientologist who stumbles online meets fair, specific talk instead of a vacuum. The church built AaronSmithLevin.com after he appeared on Remini's show—every participant got a site—calling him an abusive father and a man with no moral compass, copyright Church of Scientology International. Private investigators staked out a house-flip he did with Mike Rinder, ran laborers' plates, and published criminal records as if hiring someone with a record were a scandal, thereby advertising the surveillance. He finds it ineffective and useful as a mirror.

L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology. David Miscavige, the current leader, was not selected to take over. He usurped. A line sometimes attributed to him is that power is not given, it is assumed. Hubbard spent his last six years in seclusion, hiding from lawsuits. Miscavige, whose father got in when David was a boy, had already risen in the Commodore's Messengers Organization, the unit that served Hubbard directly. He became known as a doer. When Hubbard left, he took messengers Pat and Annie Broeker. Mike Rinder told Smith-Levin they could be spared. Annie was the compassionate, intelligent one. The Broekers were supposed to succeed Hubbard.

Because they were in seclusion with Hubbard, Miscavige had the run of the operation. Information reached Hubbard only when Miscavige met Pat Broeker at a confidential location and handed over what he wanted Hubbard to see. False reports of treason produced Hubbard orders to remove people. Attorneys, accountants, and lobbyists already knew Dave. When Hubbard died, the Broekers appeared as strangers; Dave was the familiar. Suitcases of cash had been moving to Hubbard. Pat hid money in walls and pits. Miscavige threatened to turn him over to the IRS for tax evasion. Pat Broeker went away and kept his mouth shut. Annie stayed a loyal Sea Org member until she died, reassigned to menial paper-pushing with no authority.

Smith-Levin believes Miscavige is a true believer, but a different kind, because he holds damaging information about Hubbard that ordinary members do not. Scientologists are told Hubbard finished OT 9 through 15 before he died and left them in a vault. People who have done OT 8 know they have not reached native state, and they stay because they are told there is more. Miscavige knows there is no more. Hubbard did not accomplish full operating thetan and did not leave instructions. The fundamental promise to mankind is a lie. Smith-Levin thinks Miscavige reads that as Hubbard failing to finish, and hoped for a return around the twenty-one-year mark—busy putting things in place in case the founder came back.

He still thinks Miscavige sees himself as doing good, as the person who has to fix Hubbard's mistakes and expand the church if everyone would stop creating problems. After the 1993 IRS exemption, Mike Rinder says, checks on Miscavige's power came off and his behavior changed markedly. Shelly Miscavige, whose post was David's assistant—the marriage itself meaning almost nothing in Sea Org terms—was taken off post around 2006 or 2007 and sent to a Church of Spiritual Technology base in Twin Peaks, California. Smith-Levin says she is "missing" only in the sense that she is no longer seen with David; he has confirmation she was spoken with in 2019 or 2020, and she was in regular contact with outside family until about 2014. Isolation is baked into those bases.

Native state and full operating thetan are the same thing: a thetan operating at full capacity. The confidential upper Bridge is the OT levels, and that is where students meet Xenu and body thetans. After the State of Clear—reactive mind gone—Hubbard says the next problem is tens of thousands of thetans stuck to your body, each with its own reactive mind. You audit them yourself: cans separated in one hand, commands thought rather than spoken, watching the meter for reads at the instant of a thought. Telepathic auditing of spirits Hubbard says are stuck to you, Smith-Levin asked, sounds like a recipe for a mental breakdown. Combined with the ban on outside mental health care, it is a recipe for disaster. It very often is.

Where did the spirits come from? Hubbard's written story: seventy-five million years ago, Xenu, a dictator in a Galactic Confederation of some seventy or eighty planets, had a population problem. He called people in for tax audits—Hubbard disliked the IRS—froze them in glycol, flew them to Earth in space planes, dropped them in volcanoes, blew them up with hydrogen bombs, and captured the disembodied spirits, which have been blowing in the wind, sticking to bodies, still carrying reactive minds. Illness and cancer, at the upper levels, can be blamed on a body thetan that needs more auditing. Members often struggle on first reading. They wanted magic: exteriorization at will, real spirit powers. Shock, then self-blame, then the 100-percent-correct hatch, plus the extra hatch that present-time overts you have not confessed will also make the tech fail. Everyone is incentivized to make it work on them.

OT 3 is body thetans; you attest to having no more, then OT 4 says psyche, more, hidden by drug problems. OT 5 says psyche, clusters you must break up first. OT 6 trains you for OT 7, which is more body thetans in the environment. OT 8 tells you the hundreds or thousands of past-life incidents that have become your identity were not yours—they were your BTs. Now that you know who you are not, you are ready to find out who you really are, on OT 9 and 10. Those do not exist. Finding that out was part of how Miscavige moved Pat Broeker aside: Broeker was thought to hold the unreleased levels. When Miscavige determined he did not, it was a bad day. Members still have faith the levels exist. Miscavige knows Hubbard did not write down what anyone is supposed to do.

Why do people inside not leak? They are true believers. A conspiracy runs through the church: Scientology is an existential threat to the powers that control the planet—international bankers, with shades of antisemitism, plus big pharma and big psych, who also control the press. Earth is a prison planet. If you truly believe only Scientology can save every being from eternal amnesia and slavery, you do not leak; wanting to leak means you would not want to be a Scientologist. Smith-Levin said that when he was in those shoes, nothing anyone could have said would have changed his mind. More evidence of harm just proved you worked for the psychs.

Most people who leave, in his experience, do not drift away after realizing it was nonsense. They still believed and were treated so horribly they almost had no choice. That is an argument against Miscavige as expander: it would not be hard to treat people a little less badly and stop the bleeding, because belief is already strong. Numbers have fallen since the early 1990s. Smith-Levin's generous spreadsheet—175 to 200 orgs, staff and public per org, Sea Org at every management layer, a scrape-the-earth total as if Hubbard were announcing OT 9—does not exceed 35,000 worldwide. The church says millions, even ten million. Peak active membership was about 100,000, never millions.

Dozens of former Sea Org members from the international base describe assault by Miscavige. Mike Rinder, among the highest-ranking executives, born in, worked with Hubbard and Miscavige for decades, and author of *A Billion Years*, was probably assaulted more than anyone else. He still believed for years after escaping, even doing Independent or Free Zone Scientology. What broke him was being forced to lie on camera to protect Miscavige rather than Hubbard, then sadistic orders that would ship him to Australia and end contact with his wife and kids. Leave or obey, he would lose them; leaving at least meant freedom from something. Marc Headley, co-board member of the Aftermath Foundation and author of *Blown for Good*, escaped the international base on a motorcycle. Smith-Levin does not hate Scientology, Miscavige, or his own years. For a long time he attributed every good trait to the only path he had traveled. He left school in seventh grade; people say he sounds smart, and he still does not know what else to point to.

His own exit began when his mother was kicked out for talking smack about Miscavige. They told him to disconnect or be kicked out. He lied for a couple of years and kept contact. Then they told his wife to divorce him; she said no. Then they told her parents to disconnect from their daughter and three granddaughters or lose three other Scientologist children and those grandchildren. Until that point each person had been choosing for themselves. At the grandparents the question became which grandkids to lose. He spent hours arguing there was another way. It was not considered. As long as they destroy families like that, he told Fridman, they are a cult. Hubbard's policy had caveats that an Annie Broeker might have applied with discretion. Miscavige built the worst possible version.

Tom Cruise stays, Smith-Levin said, because he genuinely loves it, and because he is the one celebrity whose staff Scientology hires and interrogates; Miscavige runs the life, the company, and the household. Best friends, them against the world. He knows of no one who stays from blackmail fear. Sins are mostly bringing disrepute on Scientology; psychotropic drugs and SSRIs are near-pure evil; Hubbard once wrote that bedroom activity would no longer draw justice actions, then the Sea Org's shipboard chaos made sex a production problem, and Miscavige's version has grown puritanical. Influence is lobbyists, attorneys, and what he calls soft corruption: triple off-duty pay for Clearwater police, nonprofit donations around the mayor, a lobbyist who is the mayor's friend. He is not afraid. After the family was destroyed there was nothing left to fear. His identical twin's death in a car accident, he said, was not mechanically Scientology's, but the path that put his brother there was. Recovery, for him, is success, some trolling, and making his kids happy. Advice: travel, and drop people who do not celebrate your success.