Who is Jeffrey Augustine?
Jeffrey Augustine is a blogger who bills himself as an “investigator.” But behind that front, his obscure writings make reality plain.
An unearthed cache of documents online—the majority of which Augustine tried to scrub from the Internet—reveals a fanatical and unbalanced occultist. In his scores of rambling tracts, Augustine announces his conviction that “the universe” gave him his calling to be a spiritual leader. He unfolds hallucinatory revelations on the secrets of God and the origin of the universe—revelations he declares he received from a “voice” inside his head and “a massive download from Infinity.”
Augustine also makes clear his antireligious intent, proclaiming that “religion has become a barrier to the ascent and evolution of humanity.” He divulges that his calling involves the destruction of both Christianity and Scientology—the latter a consequence of his so-called “Dream of the Karmic Vortex.” From that same delirious state of mind, Augustine claims he was a Scientologist and is an “expert” on the religion. He was and is neither.
The reality of Jeffrey Augustine has been masked by antireligious propagandists—most notably his wife, Karen de la Carriere—who use him to harass and spread bigoted and malicious rumors about Scientologists and those de la Carriere deems enemies.
Augustine proclaims his calling by the universe to make new truths known through a spiritual teaching
Jeffrey Augustine, a lapsed Pentecostal, renounced his Christian faith in early adulthood and successively became a student of Zen Buddhism, a devotee of a self-styled “avatar,” and an adherent of freemasonry. He immersed himself in Masonic secret symbology and delved deeply into his study and practice of the occult while carrying on his “ordinary life” as a salesman of lighting products.
In his voluminous writings, which he later tried to erase from the Internet, Augustine calls himself a “natural born mystic” and expounds on his calling:
“My calling is remarkable,” he proclaims. “That my last name is Augustine and that I have been called to produce a spiritual teaching resonates with the calling and mission of St. Augustine. The name Augustine itself has spiritual power and the Universe is once again using a human with this name as the agency by which new truths are made known.”
Those “new truths” consist of a series of revelations Augustine claims he received through otherworldly means.
He proffers first that he unlocked “how God dreams and how those dreams are turned into universes.” These revelations, he writes, are based in part on having “deciphered the esoteric secrets hidden inside the symbol of the Masonic Pyramid.”
Augustine asserts a voice inside his head—“The Eminence”—imparted the secret of the origin of the universe
A significant fraction of Jeffrey Augustine’s rambling passages involves his claims to have been conferred “secrets about the origin of our Universe.” As he explains, these secrets were revealed to him through the voice of “The Eminence,” who, as Augustine typed one of his writings, was “speaking inside of my head”:
“The voice had authority, dignity, and was, I felt, approaching me with both respect and a demand. The voice was that of one whom I have learned to call The Eminence.…
“The essence of the moment was that the Eminence had called me to communicate something about the way in which our Universe was brought into existence. While I didn’t know the details of what I was supposed to communicate, The Eminence confirmed to me that my writing would be the key aspect of the communication.…
“I remember staring at the words on my computer screen and knowing that the Eminence was communicating to me directly.”
Augustine states of this experience that his consciousness was expanded “far beyond any limits I considered safe or reasonable.” Exposure to his writings would lead many to agree.
The result is Augustine’s “striking new cosmology” he calls “TechnoMysticism,” which he claims “can expand a person beyond their boundaries and into a new and higher level of Consciousness and spiritual understanding.”
“I will begin spiritual teaching and create a spiritual community of people who are attracted to the teaching,” Augustine vowed. “The TechnoMystic Awakening is an initiation that will be offered by The Dream Tribe Lodge. This Lodge is being formed and will be a membership-only organization.”
There is no evidence Augustine’s Lodge attracted any members.
Augustine’s “massive download from Infinity”: the Big Bang and Bubble Universes
Augustine’s increasingly incoherent and hallucinatory ramblings reached a new peak in his self-published 2013 book, What Caused the Big Bang? in which he recasts his channeled knowledge from “The Eminence” and unfolds his revelations about the Big Bang and Divine Creation.
In a promotional description, Augustine reveals in third person that he “had what he describes as a ‘massive download from Infinity’ wherein he saw everything.”
In the book, Augustine expounds upon his theory of “Disunification Cosmology,” explaining “bubble universes” and other revelations of his state of mind.
Though Augustine may leave readers less than enlightened, he does make clear his antireligious ends, explaining the “premise” and intent of his work:
“Take away the concept of Divine Creation and Christianity collapses….My work is part of the larger effort to intellectually and spiritually dismantle the model of Divine Creation in favor of more powerful, expansive, and futuristic views of the human condition.”
Augustine’s antireligious sentiments go well beyond Christianity, declaring that “religion has become a barrier to the ascent and evolution of humanity.”
Augustine becomes obsessed with destroying Scientology after his “Dream of the Karmic Vortex”
In one of Augustine’s postings, he writes of seeing the destruction of the Scientology religion in his “Dream of the Karmic Vortex” and enlightens readers on his mission of “Divine Judgment”: “That I am a Sadhu [holy man] by choice, a Wanderer of the Crazy Wisdom School, obligates me to do this work.”
Augustine’s reasons for selecting Scientology as a target have been a matter of speculation on his mental state, but that he became obsessed with the subject has not.
In 2005, Augustine began posting on an obscure, anti-Scientology message board under a succession of fake identities. He generated vile hate postings, including sexually explicit imagery and visual associations with excrement to defile the Scientology religion’s founder and the Church’s ecclesiastical leader.
Augustine kept changing his story—one day pretending to be a rabid former Scientologist, the next day posing as a Scientologist, another day saying he never was one—drawing blowback on his authenticity. Augustine ultimately owned up to his real identity. He also made clear, “I am not a Scientologist (even though in my third post I said I was).”
Augustine continued with his postings, increasing to an obsessive level of more than 10,000 posts on a single forum. Social media users ever since have questioned Augustine’s “game.” As one wrote in reply to that question in 2019: “How does a person go from Scientologist/Ex Scientologist, to a never in, to a Scientologist, to rabid critic….Has it got something to do with which way the wind is blowing?”
Though Augustine was never a Scientologist, he and those who use him to harass and spread malicious rumors about Scientologists have continued to falsely claim he was, along with the equally false claim that he is an “expert” on the subject.
Augustine finds a partner in Karen de la Carriere, expelled former Scientologist
After gaining no traction with his cosmic revelations, in 2010 Augustine left his wife of 20 years and their two sons and moved in with Karen de la Carriere.
A former mistress-for-hire, de la Carriere had been kicked out of the Church that year for unethical and abusive conduct. Vindictive, she found a willing partner in Augustine for her plans of retribution.
Mark Rathbun, an expelled former Scientologist who at the time was de la Carriere’s confidant, revealed that de la Carriere uses “kept-man first-class Jeffrey Augustine” to promote her causes.
Through contacts of de la Carriere, Augustine was elevated to tabloid source for scurrilous stories in the likes of the Daily Mail and The Sun. De la Carriere, who funds antireligious, Scientology-obsessed tabloid blogger Tony Ortega, also greased the way for Augustine to become a regular contributor to Ortega’s blog.
De la Carriere sought to gain control of the anti-Scientologists’ agenda of hatemongering and harassment toward the Church and its leadership. She began using income from her and Augustine’s business ventures to buy friends and influence, giving “generous donations” to select individuals and then using her “generosity” to dissuade them from turning against her.
The pair have continued the modus operandi ever since. In 2020, one former insider in de la Carriere’s circle referred to it as “a payment network that Karen and Jeffrey run using funds from Karen’s Kinkade business,” referring to profits from de la Carriere’s art dealership selling the paintings of Thomas Kinkade.
Control and manipulation: Augustine uses his investigator license to dig up dirt on dissenters
To broaden their influence, de la Carriere and Augustine gained control or moderator status on a smattering of anti-Scientologists’ social media and websites.
In postings and YouTube videos, former members of the couple’s inner circle have called out their “manipulation” techniques and “twisted” agenda. Defectors describe how de la Carriere and Augustine obsessively dictate what appears on forums the couple controls, including payments to censor anything incriminating or critical of them. “It's just very, very sick how these people are,” said one.
Augustine became infamous for using sock puppets—false identities—to engage in conversations with himself and bolster his and Karen de la Carriere’s profiles.
Both Augustine and de la Carriere have also earned notoriety for attacking and trying to ruin their critics. In one instance, their target was a man who had asked de la Carriere to return $7,500 he’d paid her for offbeat “life coaching” that left him feeling suicidal. He reported that de la Carriere and Augustine responded by filing a police complaint against him for “extortion.”
Augustine obtained and continues to use his private investigator license to dig up dirt to smear their perceived enemies or critics and to squelch dissent within their anti-Scientology circle. His tactics have included disseminating bankruptcy documents on one detractor and digging up and posting the criminal record of another.
A court finds Augustine’s word “not credible”
In 2015, a California state court judge repeatedly rejected the testimony of Karen de la Carriere and Jeffrey Augustine as “not credible.”
De la Carriere had sued CPA William Greene, a former employer and lover, after Greene threatened to foreclose on a $175,000 home loan he had given her, which had come due in 2008. De la Carriere claimed Greene had forged her signature on the promissory note with which she had secured the deed of trust for the loan, and she demanded clear title to the house. Greene filed a cross-complaint.
Augustine testified in support of de la Carriere during the ensuing trial in the Superior Court of Los Angeles.
“The testimony by Carriere and her husband Jeffrey Augustine…is not credible,” Judge Michael Johnson stated in his July ruling.
“Carriere and Augustine have tried to portray Carriere as naive and inexperienced about real estate, but this is wholly unconvincing,” the judge continued. “Carriere admitted in cross-examination that during the period between 1990 and 1995 she took a course on deeds of trust, obtained a real estate license, and worked in real estate buying and selling second trust deeds.”
After admitting the signature on the loan was, in fact, her own, de la Carriere lost the case. The court ordered her to pay Greene over $270,000 for what he was owed with interest, plus attorney fees.
The matter is exemplary of the lying and manipulative schemes of de la Carriere and Jeffrey Augustine, which continue to this day.
