

Last night’s episode of the A&E network’s Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath was special in a number of ways. Through the first season and into the second, Leah had said she didn’t want to get into specific Scientology “beliefs,” and she mentioned the Xenu story in particular, saying that it was irrelevant to her mission to expose Scientology’s abuses. But last night, she got into Xenu and the rest of Scientology’s “Bridge to Total Freedom” in a big way.

In our preview on Monday, we suggested that if there was one thing this episode should be remembered for, it was the way Leah exposed Operating Thetan Level 8 — the top auditing level in Scientology — in a way it never has been explained for a large audience.

She and her mother eviscerated the top of Scientology’s “Bridge.”

Here’s a transcript of that portion of the show, in which Leah and her mother reveal the “end phenomenon” — the planned-for result — of OT 8.


Leah: Mom, when you got to OT 8, you told me then that you were done with Scientology. Vicki: Correct. Leah: Was that because OT 8 wasn’t what you thought it was going to be? Vicki: It was nothing that I thought it would be. Leah: Well, what did you think it would be? Vicki: I thought it was spiritual freedom, forever. Forever. Leah: When I had talked to you, I go, “Is it everything that you wanted, mom? Is it everything that you sacrificed your whole life for?” And you said, “Not now, Leah.” Vicki: Right. Leah: And I go, OK. So basically what she was saying was, “No, I can’t talk to you about it now because either they’re listening, or they’re going to keep me here if they know that I’m not happy.” Vicki: Exactly right. Leah: Yeah. So this is from somebody who completed OT 8. [Leah reads from a comment at Mike Rinder’s blog] “I thought OT 8 was the end of the Bridge. It made sense to me that you created your own reactive mind.” Vicki: Created it, exactly. Leah: [Still reading comment] “OT 8 cognition is that your case was all made up by the body thetans, that you were never that person that these body thetans were remembering as your past.” Vicki: Right. Advertisement Leah: [Still reading comment] “And at the top of the Bridge, after parting with a million dollars or more, you have re-achieved the state of who and what you were before you ever walked through the door of a Dianetics center or organization.” Vicki: Right, that you’re yourself. Leah: That you are yourself. Vicki: Right. Which is what I’ve been saying all along. Leah: Well doesn’t anybody, let me ask the cameramen — Do you know, sir, that you are who you are? Camera guy: Absolutely do. Leah: Interesting. And you’ve never done any Scientology. Camera guy: Not at all. Mike Rinder: We’ve just saved you millions. (a little later) Rinder: The final carrot is, you will find out who you really are on OT 9.



Rinder was referring to an auditing level, OT 9, which doesn’t currently exist. But Scientology leader David Miscavige has been promising church members that he’s going to be releasing OT 9 and 10 soon. (Former top official Marty Rathbun revealed in one of his books that there are no auditing levels above OT 8, even though L. Ron Hubbard had talked about eventually producing them to OT 15.) One more detail to keep in mind: OT 8 is only delivered aboard Scientology’s private cruise ship, the Freewinds, which goes back and forth between several Caribbean islands.

We were curious about how some other OT 8s experienced this moment in their journeys up the Bridge, and we received a couple of different replies. Mary Kahn, who was featured in a season one episode, tells us that although OT 8 wasn’t what she was hoping it might be, it wasn’t her biggest concern at the time.


“OT 8 was a very short level and I was finished after one or two sessions. And even though it wasn’t what I expected, it was not my main beef,” she says. “There were signs early on that there was a great deal on the Bridge that didn’t exactly ring my bell, and yet I continued. So the fact that OT 8 wasn’t all it was cracked up to be wasn’t a phenomenon that was new to me… My beef with Scientology — and with being on the ship and for OT 8 — was all the other shit. One cannot describe how horrible it actually is, but by then I was trapped.”





[Mary Kahn described losing contact with her son in season one of ‘Aftermath’]

Among her grievances, she says: “Being pressured to give money, to go to mandatory ‘briefings’ so I could give more money, having my case supervisor corner me in an office to pressure me to give money, having my Ethics Officer corner me to get me to give money, having the IAS corner me about giving money — very high pressure stuff… the effing long sec check I had to go through right after doing other long sec checks to finish OT 7, and I went right to the ship after 7, having to do more Dianetics on the ship after 7 because now after all this time they have ascertained that I am not really Clear, so I had to ‘Go Clear’ again. (And try not to think of the Clear Cognition when you already know what it is.) Cha Ching!

“Also,” Mary continues, “I had to do more NOTS to handle my sea sickness which the incompetent MLO decided was ‘case.’ Cha Ching! And all of that was just while I was on the ship. OT 8 the course included a section that took two weeks to do if one hadn’t already done it. This was trickery to me because it was a section that people could have easily been told before they came to the ship, but the ship gets you there and this ‘confidential’ section is sprung on you once you enter the OT 8 course room. Cha Ching! Fortunately, I had already done this section but I am sure it really pissed off people when they saw this on their checksheet.”

Mary says that she would like to have said she was finished after OT 7, but she couldn’t bring herself to. Her husband had paid her ticket to go, and she had a hard time telling him no. But when she got to the ship, she regretted it. “There was so much horrible regging for money and ‘Basics’ and sec checks, it was a slice of hell,” she says. “This is my main beef with the Church of Scientology. It gets many good-intentioned people into this position; you can’t just leave or get off when you decide you’ve had enough.”

Luis Garcia also described to us all of the preliminary madness that he had to go through when he did OT 8, with intense interrogations to make sure that he was “eligible” to do the auditing level. At one point he says, he was pressured to answer a question about whether he was connected to the FBI for two straight days — the same question, over and over. And this was after years of similar interrogations that he had had to endure every six months while he was on OT 7.

Like Mary, he also says that once OT 8 itself began, it was a fairly quick process. A few days, rather than the ten to fifteen years it can take to complete OT 7.

He confirmed what Vicki Marshall said, that on OT 8 you learn that you had been “remembering” a life your body thetans had actually lived. But he helped us understand why that is so shattering for a Scientologist. For years, he reminds us, you are being asked in auditing to remember past lives going back millions of years. And as you do that, you construct a multitudinous identity. “You might remember you were a pirate hundreds of years ago,” he says. “And that identity begins to work its way into who you think you are today.” But then, at OT 8, you learn that all of those memories you had been gathering for years during auditing in Scientology are actually the memories of your body thetans, and they are all stripped away. It’s devastating, he says.

“For 28 years I was chasing ‘spiritual freedom,’ which I never really equated with ‘super powers’ but rather with an ability to be spiritually free and to be able to remember everything in my existence,” he says. “L. Ron Hubbard wrote that OT 8 ‘handles amnesia on the whole track.’ The Church of Scientology pushes this line in their promotional materials with gusto. This level is known as ‘Truth Revealed,’ the connotation being that it is here where you will find the Truth of everything,” he says.

So, while you have been piecing together your “whole track” — your trillions of years of existence as a thetan — OT 8 promises to finally let you see your entire whole track once and for all, and to perceive your true, full existence.





[Luis Garcia]



“They also market OT 8 as the first real OT level where you actually get ‘Positive Case Gain’ for the first time. Until this level it is all negative gain, meaning you ‘get better’ by getting rid of negative things like engrams, phobias, worries, anxieties, and disabilities. You believe you are recovering lost abilities as you shed the garbage that was suppressing them, such as the ability to communicate to anyone on any subject, as in Grade 0, which happens pretty early on The Bridge… With OT 8 the expected result was that one could finally break the vicious and eternally repetitive cycle of dying, assuming a baby’s body, wiping out your entire life’s memories, being born, and going through all the ‘growing up and learning’ again. Not to mention being able to avoid the pitfalls of uncontrolled ‘body selection lottery.’ I mean, in a new life I could end up in a country not of my liking! As an OT 8 I would be in control of my own fate. I would remember everything from life to life, just as I remember where I was and what I was doing last year. As an OT 8 I would be able to remember my entire existence, and learn from it, I would recover long-lost memories and abilities… So yes, all of this sounded cool and I sacrificed much to reach this pinnacle,” Luis says.

But then, the reality of OT 8 presented itself. “When I completed OT 8, I learned that everything I had learned about myself during all those years was false, and were not my experiences,” he says.

And after going through the processing, he says you are brought a piece of paper, and on it is the lesson you should have absorbed from OT 8. He says that printed on that page is a simple statement: Now that you had learned who you were not, you could begin to find out who you really are. “In other words, I had come full circle and I was once again at the same place I was when I first set foot in the Scientology mission. I had the same exact reaction and cognition as Vicki,” he says. “The irony is that they were partially right. It was at that moment that I truly started to find out the answers and the real truth. The truth about them.”

With Luis’s confirmation of what Vicki was saying, it reinforced for us that the OT 8 materials that Wikileaks put online about a decade ago really don’t reflect the process that Vicki and Luis describe.

In 2008 Wikileaks put out a collection of Operating Thetan levels, including “Original OT 8,” the infamous “antichrist” statement by L. Ron Hubbard which was used only for a few months in the summer of 1988 before being cancelled. We now believe there is good evidence to suggest that this bizarre document is authentic. Wikileaks also included what it calls New OT 8, the materials that have been used since the disastrous “antichrist” document was scrapped.

We’ve shown that Wikileaks version of New OT 8 to several Scientologists who have completed OT 8, and they tell us it isn’t familiar to them. And it certainly doesn’t describe learning that your past-life memories were actually the memories of your body thetans.

So what are the current OT 8 materials?

Several years ago, a group of former church members who had completed OT 8 worked to reproduce the document they received when they did OT 8. We can’t tell you who they were, but as far as we know, they didn’t include Vicki Marshall, Luis Garcia, or Mary Kahn. When we showed these new materials to several OT 8s, however, they told us it was very close to their memory of what they were given.

Luis Garcia, for example says it is very much like the OT 8 he experienced, with an exception. We’ll explain that difference in a minute, but for now, here is the reconstructed OT 8 materials that is not what Wikileaks made public in 2008…

NEW OT VIII Having handled the BTs and Clusters case on the previous OT Levels, the Pre-OT can now take a look at identities and/or valences that have arisen during his prior auditing or in life. He must now determine whether these identities/valences, for this and other lifetimes, were actually his or not. It could be that the pre-OT possibly has an un-flat Process thus has been dragging those identities/valences throughout his entire Bridge from the point they were encountered or, in fact, it could be that these identities/valences were false. If any of this, or other lifetime identities/valences are still “alive” on the case they haven’t blown. On the other hand, if those identities/valences have blown there is no need to re-hash them; they are as-issed. Example: the Pre-OT had previously run an engram in Dianetics wherein he apparently was General Custer fighting the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Now, of course it could well have been that he really was there and had been General Custer in that previous life, but the Pre-OT, if asked about this before running this level, may express some doubt in greater or lesser degree as to whether he could really had been such a famous personality. Or he may be asserting strongly that he was General Custer for various reasons, such as the novelty of having been a famous personality from the past or any other considerations. If he truly had been General Custer, and once he establishes the veracity of it, all remaining doubts, the charge associated with that identity plus any other charge connected with that time period would blow. But, if he was not General Custer of the Little Big Horn he will be assuming, as part of his current identity, the various characteristics he has ascribed to General Custer. Again, any charge associated with that identity, the charge connected with that period of time or any possible assertions will blow once he spots that that particular identity was false. There can also be un-specific identities or valences — they do not have to be a named person, for example: “thief,” “vagabond,” “sweetness and light identity,” “Roman Centurion,” “Gestapo Officer,” “Marcabian racetrack driver” etc. An OT blows huge amounts of charge by simple inspection (glancing at the charge); once the identity or valence has been determined as true or false, any and all related charge to it would blow. But, it can occur that after spotting an identity/valence that charge still seems to hang around on this lifetime. If this is the case the C/S could C/S for a Repair type action such as a Prep-check on this identity/valence, but this would be rare. In most cases all of the charge blows on spotting the veracity or falseness of it. When the Pre-OT is in doubt of having been a certain identity or valence when he actually was, or when he is asserting he was a certain identity or valence when he really wasn’t, we could get some interesting snarl-ups on the track. This process could very well turn back on lost memory or blow false memory. False characteristics can be expected to blow so that the pre-OT, by the end of this Level, may have changed remarkably such as loss of weight, or body distortions disappearing or other various changes — all from straightening out past true or false identities or valences and their concomitant characteristics. The pre-OT has to look over his past auditing or from his own memories and take a this life time, or past life identities or valences, and check them on the E- Meter to determine if they are true or false. Now, on OT VIII we want to establish the veracity or falseness of these identities/valences; it would read on either “True?” or “False?” and as the pre-OT determines which one is it, and as he cognites on this the charge will then blow accompanied with an LF or a BD and FN. The process is as follows:

. 1a. Fly a rudiment to F/N.

. 1b. Look over your prior auditing or from your own memories and take a this life time or past life identity or valence.

. 1c. Once spotted (should read) write it down on the WSs.

. 1d. Check: Was (name of the Identity/Valence) mine True? Was (name of Identity/Valence) mine False?

Example, with the General Custer identity, the question would be: “Was the identity ‘Custer’ mine True? “Was the identity ‘Custer’ mine False?” If after determining that the identity/valence was True or False there is no blow, you can vary the question such as: on the Identity (Valence) being mine (True-False) was anything suppressed? Was anything invalidated? Anything asserted? Protested? On the Identity being mine (True-False) was it really mine? Was it from an implant? Was it a BT’s identity? Was it simply not mine? Was it truly mine? Is this a True identity/valence? Was it actually false? Get the idea? Vary the question until the charge connected with that Identity/Valence being True or False blows accompanied with an LF or BD and FN, or at times even with a big wide FN or a floating TA. It is not expected that the Level could be finished in as little as one session. One should expect several sessions and various identities/valences to peel off before considering this Level being complete. At some point the pre-OT will bring forth a remarkable cognition, which will vary with each Pre-OT, … something like: “I now know who I really am” or, “My fear of death has vanished” or, “I know now that I will exist (or live) forever” or, “My memory has dramatically improved” or variations and/or combinations of the above. The result of doing it could bring a straightened-out time track, turned back on lost memory or blow of false memory.

There’s obviously a lot of Scientology jargon here, and checking a glossary might help. But the tech experts in our comments section will no doubt be ready to help you understand particular words and phrases.

After we showed him this document, Luis told us he had an issue only with the idea of “true” or “false” memories. He says it wasn’t that you were trying to determine whether a memory you had regained in previous auditing was “true” or not, but whether it was actually yours. He says that as he went through the auditing on OT 8, he discovered that every single one of the many memories he had obtained through auditing — except one — turned out to be the memories of his body thetans. (And he stressed to us that this was how he understood it at the time, and he no longer gives any credence to auditing or Scientology today.)

Well, there you have it. What Scientologists spend years and anywhere from half a million to two million dollars to discover (as estimated for us by Marc Headley).

It still astonishes us that Leah Remini last night exposed the OT 8 “end phenomenon” for a national television audience. What a time to be a Scientology watcher.



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Posted by Tony Ortega on September 6, 2017 at 07:00

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The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2016 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2016), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward

UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists

GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice

SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | Scientology boasts about assistance from Google | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our Guide to Alex Gibney’s film ‘Going Clear,’ and our pages about its principal figures…

Jason Beghe | Tom DeVocht | Sara Goldberg | Paul Haggis | Mark “Marty” Rathbun | Mike Rinder | Spanky Taylor | Hana Whitfield