

ORGANIZATION SERIES - PART 06 OF 20

[New name: How To Present Scientology To The World]



HOW TO HANDLE AUDIENCES

A lecture given on 1 November 1956

[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

Well, the subject of this lecture should be randomity. But
actually, I intended to talk a little bit more about teaching
processes and the handling of groups -- that you as
Scientologists should be interested in.

First and foremost, we will examine the first threshold that
anyone has to cross when handling groups or attempting to teach
large numbers of people. That threshold is known as stage fright.
Embarrassment. That's the first thing, and that is a threshold
which has to be crossed by anyone sometime in his career. It is a
fascinating phenomenon for everyone except the person who has it.

It's very remarkable, the instances of stage fright I have seen,
but none of these made near as much impression on me as instances
of stage fright I have experienced myself. These made a
considerable impression on me. I remember very well in the field
of radio, of overcoming the mike consciousness right here in
Washington, going to the university. I had a fifteen-minute
program every day. And it was fascinating, as time went on, how
accustomed I became to handling that mike and going on, good
weather and bad -- mostly bad here in Washington.

And years later I was going to the Geller Theater Workshop in
Hollywood, after the war. And I walked in, and was going through
all the class -- everything was going along fine, smoothly,
pleasantly. I was learning to say "How now brown cow?" along with
the young starlets and so forth. I was studying acting, was what
I was doing, to find out how to make actors, because it seemed to
me that there was an answer to the mind and to training in the
field of acting. I felt that acting was a sort of a synthetic
living. And what you could know about it as a synthetic thing you
might then be able to apply to life and so understand life a
little better.

I, by the way, didn't finish up there at all. I got vastly
fascinated with other things. And I was a writer, not an actor,
anyway, you see. And I became very enamored with other fields of
action, and became particularly enamored with processing the
young actors who were going there. And actually, to the last days
I was in Los Angeles, these kids used to come up from there
saying "I hear you can do something for me." And I usually did,
one way or the other. I'd square them away on this subject.

But I walked in one day to their radio workshop with the rest of
the class and there was a microphone. There it stood -- pure,
innocent and chromium plated -- attached to exactly nothing. It
didn't even go out to a monitor station outside the room. It was
simply a dummy mike, and people were supposed to stand there and
practice plays, and so on, reading, and how you handle paper, and
how you talk, and so on.

And it came my turn, and I stood up in front of this mike and all
of a sudden, boy, that mike had more motion in it, and so did I,
than I would ordinarily care to experience. Brrrrrr! And I c-c-c-
couldn't talk! Fabulous! The thing was a dummy mike. I went back
and I sat down and I said, "That thing is a dummy mike! I've
handled one of these things for years!" Tuhh! Coo!

Well, as the days went by, I got all right again. But it made an
impression on me. I had actually experienced stage fright, which
was very interesting -- on a dummy mike! And I assayed one day to
know more about this. Now, the only time I myself pick up stage
fright in front of audiences is when they get up to a certain
size. Up to about twenty-five hundred, strictly cucumber. Above
twenty-five hundred, well, "My God, there's a lot of people out
there."

And then a famous English actress started clobbering me in recent
months to say something about stage fright. What was it all
about? She called it "first-night nerves." She said, "Every actor
on the first night has nerves." And she attributed it to the fact
that they didn't know how the play was going to go; and they
didn't know what was going to happen; and there was tremendous
uncertainty; and they were watching themselves every moment in an
unaccustomed scene, which would become an accustomed scene after
a few nights, and so they would lose their upset. This is the
theory on which man has worked and it is wrong. It is not the
theory. It is not what is behind stage fright.

The essence of stage fright is simply this: It is the
unwillingness to confront a mass. It is a "can't have" on the
mass. That is all. That's all it is. And to prove that, it is
only necessary to change one's mind or run a process in the
direction of having that mass to instantly cure stage fright. It
cures just like that. Remedy of Havingness. Why is it "first-
night nerves"? Why, after fifteen years off the air, do I step up
to a dummy microphone and get the shakes?

That's because for fifteen years I didn't have something which I
had. It's the fifteen years of not having the microphone which
make you shake the moment you have one, because you already had
one and it didn't worry you. The first time you had it, you
hadn't had it, don't you see? So there was no period there of
not-havingness to overcome with some sudden havingness. But we go
on, then, for a short time and have one a few years, and then all
of a sudden we run this long span of no havingness on a
microphone. The next time we meet one, snap!

The instant we get one, it's an important item; it is an
important havingness. We are trying to have it all at once. It is
motionless. There it is. It is obtainable, and available,
obviously, but we try to get fifteen-years worth out of one
second of microphone. And there isn't fifteen years worth in the
microphone. You got that? There is only one performance worth.

All right. Now, let's take that audience. If you'd never had an
audience, no audience would give you a quiver. If you'd never had
one, you would never experience stage fright. You would be
graceful and aesthetic and carry off the role like an old
trooper. But having had an audience over a period of time, then
not having an audience for a period of time, the next audience we
get is going to make us go mnnnunyaaaa!

Why? During that one presentation, we are trying to get the
entire no-havingness of audiences filled full during that period,
because they're important. You see, it's an important havingness
to have an audience. That's an important havingness. And it was a
not-havingness over a period of time, and the no-havingness of it
makes it a shiver. Now, this is a basic mechanic. There are
considerations above this, but I am telling you the mechanic so
that you can understand it as a principle which can be utilized
in the curing and overcoming of embarrassment -- both on the part
of your preclears and on your part if you don't like to confront
an audience.

Now here, in essence, is Remedy of Havingness on audiences as the
cure. That is the only cure there is that is a good, reliable,
standard cure. It's a good cure.

Have them mock up audiences, go and find audiences, don't you
see? Find out what part of audiences they can have, what part of
audiences they can dispense with. Go take them to a movie theater
and stand back in the aisle someplace toward the back and have
them point out the backs of audiences. That's perfectly all
right. It's still mass -- back or front. Make somebody go and
talk to some people someplace. That, in essence, is having an
audience. But making a person go and talk to a bunch of people
gives him two things to do at once: both perform and have. And
it's one too many for most people who have had, and then haven't
had.

If you experience embarrassment because of an audience, it is
because you have been without one for a long time; not because
audiences customarily, in the last few lives you've led, leaped
over the footlights and tore you to ribbons; not necessarily
because you confuse every audience you see with a jury of twelve
good men and true, who want to hang you for stealing that horse.
It isn't necessarily true that you confuse things at all. It's
just that you've been a couple of hundred years without a good
audience! And therefore, you try to remedy a couple of hundred
years worth of no-audience with an audience. And it scatters them
all over the track. Really! They go tzzzzz! from your point of
view.

They are evidently much more critical. Their critical level is
tremendously exaggerated by any person who is giving a
performance in front of an audience. He thinks their critical
level is something fantastic. Well, I'll agree with you, it's
something fantastic, but it's not that bad.

I've seldom seen audiences file in, to an ordinary entertainment
production at least, with Tommy guns held under the overcoat. You
know? Seldom. Very few. And yet a lot of people who get up and
try to perform or talk in front of an audience certainly seem to
be convinced that the very least that is under those overcoats is
Tommy guns.

Now, as you reduce havingness, you heighten critical level. As
the havingness goes down, critical level goes up. So as
havingness goes down on audiences, one's belief in their critical
level goes up, as well as one's own critical level of the
audience. And to talk to an audience you mustn't have a high
critical level of the audience, let me assure you. You have to be
in communication with them. And if you have a high critical level
of any audience to whom you are speaking, you are not going to
communicate with them at all. And as a result, you're going to
have difficulties.

If you haven't had audiences for a couple of hundred years --
ever since you stepped out of the Swan Theater, or something of
this sort... Maybe you were awfully good at Hamlet once; maybe
you were one of the most terrific Othellos that ever trod the
boards, but you haven't done it for a long time -- that is, you
haven't had for a long time on the subject of audiences. And one
day you go out to do Othello and, boy, do you lay eggs!

Several things can happen. But you think that their critical
level of you is much greater than it is. And you think at the
same time, that your performance is much worse than it is. And
you also suppose that their demands are much greater than they
are. Maybe you got this idea out of a Roman arena. That's a
discouraging place to have audiences. But wherever you see bad
performance you simply have a case of no havingness of audiences
and theaters.

You can cure the first-night nerves or the mike fright with
subjective processes by which simply someone mocks up audiences
and shoves them in, audiences and throws them away, microphones
and shove them in, microphones and throw them away. There is
nothing to this. It is one of our most elementary processes and
it works. Works very satisfactorily.

But people get so bad off in having an audience that they can't
have one even when they have one. So what do we do then? We have
people waste audiences.

The total reason for the existence of Hollywood and the cinema
today is entirely attributable to the fact that nobody can have a
show. Look it over. Do you think a bunch of shadows playing on a
screen with no substance is an adequate show? Well, that is
wasting the production, don't you see? That's a waste of
production. I tell you it's a waste of production because people
go downhill on going to shows and after a while don't go to
shows.

It must demonstrate, then, that it's not an adequate havingness
for the amount of motion contained in the presentation. They have
gotten to a point of no-show, to a point where they have no show,
so that they can have no show, don't you see?

Now, we've reduced the screen... First it went up. Hollywood
asserted itself. It got big enough to be seen, with VistaScreen,
VistaVision, BroadView. What are some of those? Cinerama,
CineScope, "Cinemope." There are a whole bunch of them. They got
big, you know. And then they got fifteen different varieties of
color. And the actors got to be 115 -- that's the stopping point
of this is when the actors get to be 115 feet high. What are they
trying to do? They're trying to remedy somebody's havingness.
They're trying to put up enough mass there to keep the people
coming. They are trying to say, "Look, they may be only one
molecule or one photon thick, but they're awfully tall!"

And the audiences have turned aside -- not being able to have a
show -- to a point where they look on a little seventeen-inch
screen or a twenty-one-inch screen which isn't even in color
these days. And they don't even look at it, they simply go to
sleep. The fellow says, "I slept a good show the other night on
TV. Did you snore it?"

Now, it must be -- if people are wasting shows to this degree --
conversely, somebody must be wasting audiences, too. And
certainly this is the truth. The Hollywood actor wastes audiences
and wastes them and wastes them. You never saw a poorer audience
than cameramen. I've talked to them and they didn't notice what
was happening during the scene at all. But they knew how many
feet they ran. They knew what the light reading of the scene was.
But they couldn't tell you who the actors were unless they read
it on their card.

The assistant director is a very bad audience. No mass! He's the
furtive little fellow that runs around when the heavier director
tells him to, you see. And the director, he's only looking for
bad acting or bad positioning, so he's no audience. He doesn't
see any of the good stuff. Man, are those people wasting
audiences, and they go mad in the process of doing so. They do!
They just go mad in the process of acting before nobody.

If you were around a movie colony any length of time, I can
assure you that your services would be pulled in that direction.
Because they have lots of preclears for you that nobody had
better find out about.

Now, here we have, then, the disappearance of show. We're seeing
it happen. We're trying to have people sit in front of the
camera... I mean, pardon me, the TV set -- I mean, the Fac One
thing... We're trying to have them sit there for twenty-eight
hours of the day in order to remedy the fact that there aren't
three minutes worth of show. There is no mass in there. They
can't have any mass; there's no mass involved.

The very thing to do, if you wanted to kill all entertainment in
the country, would be to take all mass out of entertainment.
You'd kill it. So therefore, the very thing to do on your part --
the very thing to do to take all confrontingness out of you -- is
to have nothing ever to confront.

Well, one of the ways you move up into this on a gradient scale
is simply go to a lot of live theater for a while, or go to a lot
of lectures, so forth. It's amazing. There are still things going
on. Playing to somewhat empty halls, but these things are still
going on in the society. Get yourself a few tickets and slide in
and listen to what people are talking about. You'd be utterly
fascinated. They're seldom very good. People go to see them; they
listen to them. And just note carefully whether or not anybody in
the theater audience picks up any tin cans or rotten eggs or
anything. Just note carefully, by the end of the production, how
many people have leaped over the footlights with a knife in their
hands.

Now, you will note -- you will note, in such a wise -- that there
is still a lot of presentation going on. There are still people
talking to people; there are still people listening to people. Of
course, I know it's getting in to the minority, and a small
percentage of the world indulges in such a thing. But the funny
part of it is, that it is that way, not because the excellence of
production has dropped, but because people have run out of
havingness on production.

Remember, this country for a long time was a backwoods country.
One drove up and down the streets of Philadelphia hoping that his
wagon would not sink to the hub during the next block. The
streets of Washington have only been paved for a short period of
time. Itinerant players tried to remedy the havingness of the
country, but it wasn't very easy to do. We went for a long, long
period with no show to amount to anything. We were a lot, a
tremendous lot, of wilderness.

It's an amazing thing that you don't find the older countries of
Europe fallen away to no-show to the degree that countries that
are newly emerged are without show. You can understand, of
course, that the Casino de Paris in Paris would of course be
fairly jammed, particularly during tourist season, in view of the
stage productions which they have. It isn't the costumes that
people go to see; it's the lack of them.

And, by the way, the Casino de Paris is noted for its
tremendously beautiful costumes -- the most overdressed place you
ever saw in your life. The amount of show given at the Casino to
an audience which numbers thousands and thousands of people --
it's big, that's a big place -- is rather fantastic. A lot of
poor people go to the cinema, but anybody with any money still
goes to shows. In other words, there is still theater and people
haven't completely flattened out on this entirely as a country at
large. But we're still climbing the hump.

I'm not telling you that people just normally dwindling-spiral
and run out of show. I tell you they get used to not having any
show -- as we've had for the last couple hundred years over on
this side -- and they kind of try to work up to it. They try to
get in to at least see the TV set once in a while, you know. They
work up to it on a gradient scale somehow or another. There is
hope! But it's all on a subject of havingness, no matter which
way these aspects play. Do you see that?

Now, you think that nobody would come and listen to you talk.
Bah! It's not true. It's not true at all. As a matter of fact,
you and your experiences, with your individual viewpoint and with
your knowledge and command of the subject of the mind, would
probably have no difficulty whatsoever talking to any audience
that could be mustered of whatever kind in America. Unless, of
course, you were running a bzzzzzz! every time you saw an
audience! And then they would realize that you couldn't confront
them, and they don't want, then, to confront you. Got it?

So, handling groups is being willing to have, so that one can
confront. Groups of people are people. They are essentially
audiences. They are something to have. And you, to them, are
something to have. And so with that communication possible and
made possible because of a mutual ability to have, we have such a
thing as stage presence. We have such a thing as audience
interest, don't you see?

I would love to tell you that it's your aesthetics, just the way
you hold the pinkie, the beautiful gesture with which you
undulate, the way you describe things. I would love to tell you,
as they do in theater workshops, that it's your command of
English, your proper accent, the way you pronounce "formidable."

But it doesn't happen to be true. Those are all significances
which hang on to the fact of actual havingness. The reason it is
difficult to study acting is because one does it without an
audience. It's very interesting.

The ways and means of remedying your havingness on groups, in its
crudest, rudest and most elementary form, is simply to get a
bunch of people and talk to them. Grab yourself sort of by the
back of the neck this way and say, "Good evening," and note
carefully that they are still there. That's rude and crude. But
there are other ways of going about this -- much smoother, more
positive ways of going about this.

And one of those ways is this whole subject of confrontingness
coupled with the subject of havingness. Havingness is the easiest
to talk about or deliver, as far as a process is concerned: Mock
up audiences. Mock up audiences in motion. Mock up audiences and
have the preclear push them in. Mock them up and throw them away.
Mock them up and let them remain. Mock them up and push them in.
Mock them up and throw them away. Mock them up and let them
remain. Just straight Creative Processing.

All right, you say, somebody has an entirely black field; he
can't possibly do mock-ups. All right, that's fine. Have him mock
up audiences in total blackness and push them in. You see that?
You know, this idea of having a... when you shut your eyes, never
being able to see a mock-up but seeing only blackness and so
forth -- that belongs, you know, as a problem, back to about '52
or '53. It doesn't belong to now. It really doesn't. Just "Mock
up a black mass and push it in, a black mass and throw it away"
gives us quite adequately a clearing of this. Fellow goes anaten
and lots of other things happen. But you can do it with good
auditing.

It simply is addressed by addressing it. Also in confrontingness,
you can have somebody mock himself up confronting blackness, and
all sorts of interesting things happen. He finds himself standing
on the bridge of spaceships, going through space with little
asteroids pattering merrily through the windscreen.

But the subject of havingness is essentially the subject of
willingness to confront or willingness to be something that
you're willing to have confront.

In essence, then, people must become possessible to you if you're
going to handle and talk to groups. It must be possible for you
to possess people.

Now, let me assure you that the race at large runs on the idea of
no invasion of privacy. Got that clearly? This is a well-
established fact -- individuation. People feel they must
individuate. The whole idea of individuation, or falling away
from the race at large, is the story of disenfranchisement from
the game. As one is kicked out of the game he believes that he
had better individuate just a little further, he had better be
just a little bit different. A fellow who can play a game doesn't
have to be different.

Listen to some of our modern, very popular comics, and listen to
them say the same thing over and over again. It's quite
fascinating. It'd be a great loss, for instance, with any of
these boys if they lost a couple of their pat tricks. You've seen
these many, many times, yet you laugh at them. It's the
familiarity of them, it is the ARC, the repetition contained in
them which makes them acceptable.

So do you have to be new and different and come on the stage with
fifteen lions -- fifteen? No, you don't even have to have
anything to say. It's the most fabulous thing you ever heard of.

One time, many years ago, I was doing some high-school
theatricals, and we had a whole scene for which there was no
fill, and we all of a sudden had a blank spot on the program, you
see. The characters that were supposed to go through that
particular skit just hadn't appeared. They'd evidently backed out
at the last moment. I went on the stage and sat down and ate a
piece of pie and a sandwich.

Of course, I admit there was novelty in this since there was no
piece of pie and no sandwich. But I didn't say a word for twelve
minutes. And that's an awful long time to be on a stage doing
nothing and saying nothing, except eat this piece of pie. I did
not even eat it spectacularly! I just ate it -- and the audience
sat there and watched me eat this piece of pie and then eat this
sandwich, and rolled in the aisles.

There was only one original bit in it. When I was through with
the pie plate I did throw it -- non-extant -- offscene and have
somebody back there drop a couple of dishpans. But otherwise, I
didn't look at the audience, talk to them or apparently
communicate with them. There is evidently a tremendous
willingness, then, on the part of an audience to communicate.
This is what that proved to me. I just kind of knew that I'd get
away with it. I was cocky in those days.

But there are many instances of this kind. You really don't have
to have much to say or to be terribly original. The one thing
which you must not be, however, is nervous. Above all things, you
must belong there as much as they belong there. At least that
much. When you start to exceed this, you start to command the
audience. You see that? You belong there more, a little bit more,
than they belong there. This is delivered by your certainty and
your appearance. You are simply there and you look like you're
there. And you look like you're there because you know you should
be there. Don't you see? It's very esoteric.

Now, Scientology at this time is doing very well across the
world. If it were doing just a little bit better, there would be
things not happening which are happening at this moment on the
major scene of nations. Of that, I assure you. We do have the ear
of more people than you would suspect. There are more people
listening. Today, Scientology is accepted in a state of rather
frigid wariness by the professions which it is supplanting. They
are no longer scoffing at it. They get down to the point of
saying "Oh, Hubbard died yesterday," or "The whole subject is
uh... uh... Where did you hear about it?" We have conducted a
personal survey of such people; we know.

Also, it's quite amazing how many people you run into who have
vaguely heard of it. Now, if you run into one in a hundred on the
face of earth, this is quite amazing, quite amazing. Because
we're not doing the standard American Medical Association
advertising campaign. We're not doing any of these things.

In other words, we're doing, in a small way, all right. But one
of these days, one of these days, somebody about your shape and
size as an individual is going to have to stand up and talk,
because they won't let you sit there. You got the idea?

A military organization, which at this moment is engaged in a
very large and bloody war, has just interrupted its comm lines to
me, as far as I am concerned. But before this unfortunate
incident occurred, I was engaged in writing their manual on
mental health.

You don't think we get around? It's quite fascinating. Wherever
you look, we are more capable of penetrating and we are doing a
better job of penetrating than before.

You see, we have the know-how. We do have the know-how. Even if
you, in your experience and so forth, were only able to bring
calmness or sobriety to one alcoholic in the case of three or
four hours of processing -- if that was all you could do, you
see, by running a little bit of 8-C, just make him feel better --
you're still doing more than anyone else has ever done in the
field of the mind.

But the other day, over at the HGC, we raised somebody's IQ, I
think, forty-four points. Forty-four points! It's not possible.
We did it. We do it rather usually.

And what is more promising: with indoctrination into good
auditing procedure, and with a better understanding of
techniques, and better codifications to deliver an understanding
to auditors, and with their better use of them with better
procedure, we are getting better and better and better results.
And somewhere along the line, we'll have to quit or we will
become far, far too popular.

You can't sit and know all we know forever. You see, you just
can't do it. It isn't true that people will try to shoot you
down. Only the weaker-minded will, and they're always bad shots.

No, one of these days -- one of these days, let's face it --
you're going to have to face it.

I was scared a few weeks ago. I had a piece of paper put in front
of me that moved me back about an inch in the chair. You know,
thud! You know -- quickly recovering my aplomb and saying, "Oh,
yes, yes. Carry on," and all that sort of thing, and --
rrrrrrrrr!

A discussion was taking place of what we would use for training
quarters in a certain country for 250 thousand men. And the size
hadn't come home to me at all until a choice of bases was under
discussion. And they had a spare infantry-training school which
had been closed down since the war. And it turned out that it
wasn't big enough for the task we were going to have to
accomplish in about three years. A whole infantry-training school
isn't big enough to handle a quarter of a million men, who would
only be run through the school, you see, at a few at a time.

But, let's take 250 thousand men and divide it by thirty-six. Can
you do that? A third of a quarter of a million. How many men is
it? How many people is that? How long you going to train them so
as to resist brainwashing, be able to handle enemy propaganda, be
able to withstand the rigors of modern war? How long? Well, I
wouldn't attempt it in under three or four months. How many
people is that over a period?

Well, the training school would have had to have been enlarged
because it wasn't big enough to hold the number of people which
would have had to have been trained at one time. And I had no
more chance of laying my hands on enough Instructors to run that
school than a man in the moon, even though I'd reached out for
every auditor in the world today. And that's only a quarter of a
million men. You don't train thousands of people at a time
without personal contact.

If anybody has a long memory, do you remember Los Angeles? Now,
how many people was that? How many people was that? And the
tremendous amount of randomity, of course, might have been
occurring from lack of know-how in terms of organization, but it
was an awful lot of randomity. There was a lot of motion there
which wasn't under good control at all. We still learned
something.

But are we going to do a first-class, Los Angeles sort of a job
on a project of training 250 thousand men? No, then it takes
everybody everywhere to pitch in on that job. Fantastic as it may
seem, it would take everybody everywhere. And of course, a lot of
people can't come. They've got their sectors nailed down. So we
just have to multiply everybody by four, you see, that is there.
And we say, "You're four people today. This is your class, that
five hundred people over there that are milling in a small
circle."

Now, we're not embarking on that tomorrow. We're not embarking on
such projects immediately in all directions. But the time to
learn to confront groups is now. The time to train groups is now,
because the very best you could do is simply stand up and train
men to train groups, which men know nothing about your subject at
all.

It makes a sad look when you look it over. The thoroughness of
the training would be very un-thorough indeed, under present
circumstances. The handling of groups, though -- the handling of
groups definitely includes the handling of a large group of
students under lecture. Don't think that you wouldn't have to
handle them just like you would an audience of any kind. They
won't learn a thing unless you do.

All right. Now, completely aside from some large project which is
now put up on the shelf because the army involved is shooting,
you have a sphere of activity yourself in which you can talk.
Your ability to talk is one thing. Your ability to confront a
group is another. And under that heading is your ability to
handle and control them. And here's the funny thing: If you can
handle and control them, the amount of effort you have to put
into the talk is very slight indeed. Strain comes on instruction
only when you can't handle and control the people to whom you're
talking.

Now, the odd part of it is, an audience is perfectly willing to
be handled and controlled. Very willing; tremendous willingness.
All you have to do is run good 8-C on them, and they think this
is gorgeous. You just talk to them with good 8-C. Talk to them
complicatedly enough, too. But you talk with good 8-C. You don't
say, "Now we'll take up the problem of all of these airplanes.
Now, how many of you boys have studied your lessons about
submarines? Well now, that's very, very good. By the way, at 2:15
we all stand to for baggage inspection." This isn't running good
8-C on a group and they don't like it.

So, handling, controlling a group has a great deal to do with the
ARC you can maintain with a group. And every Scientologist
should, on his own initiative, put himself into a better
havingness in terms of audience. Don't start crossing the first
stage-fright period with your first real audience. You get the
idea? Cross it first -- either on the gradient scale of simply
going out and talking to the Boy Scouts Troop 10 or remedying it
in an auditing session. Any way you care to go about it, you
actually should practice up a little bit on being able to handle
and control a group of people. It would do you worlds of good.
Make you feel good; make you feel real good.

Now, actually, in handling groups and so forth, I, of course,
myself, am a little shy. I like to be amongst friends. I do. I
like to be amongst friends. I do not like to talk to hostile
groups. I really do not.

And I'm mean, too, when I do. You never saw such a change in a
man in your life as when I have to talk to a hostile group. I
immediately go off onto an entirely different line of stagecraft.
It's tough! It's tough! They're there challengingly. They are
willing to listen, but they already have been told how bad it is.
They're sure you're not going to say anything interesting. But
they're going to suffer through it somehow so that they can get
on with the dessert or something. I get mean about that time, and
I do bad things. I seldom give bad reports on myself, but that is
actually an instance when I do.

I hypnotized, one time, the staff of St. Elizabeth's. Told them
they'd heard a good speech and left the stage. They all came
around afterwards saying, "What a good speech that was you gave!"
That was a mean thing to do. That was certainly backing out of
it, wasn't it? But it was in the early career of Dianetics and I
felt very much like backing out of it. I was preceded by someone
who told all of them how bad it was over "Ron-ward."

They might afterwards have suspected my knowledge of the mind,
but certainly not my knowledge of hypnotism. It's very easy to
hypnotize groups.

Another time, I talked to a group of people that couldn't have
cared less about hearing anyone. But it was on their schedule
that there was twenty minutes going to be devoted to a speaker,
and at the last moment they hadn't been able to find any, so they
got me. This is the sort of a position, you see, which is optimum
-- optimum. Well, I found out that in view of the fact that they
couldn't care less, I might as well make them care more, and I
became a bad boy at once and started insulting them. It's all I
could do. I at least got their attention.

I was rather amazed afterwards -- I was rather amazed
afterwards... Actually I was rather insulting. I talked about
their particular activities and not about mine at all. Never said
a word about my activities, but said tremendously about theirs.
And they hadn't been very nice to me when I had come in, you see,
and I taught them better. I went down the list of their faults,
one after the other, castigated them rather roundly,
sarcastically and impudently. And afterwards, two of them came
around and congratulated me for having given the only sincere
speech they had ever heard there.

I suppose that one has a havingness on hostile groups as far as
that's concerned. But the truth be told, I've never had any group
be hostile long. Their hostility rather has a tendency to blow up
to the degree that you find them on the Tone Scale. And you talk
to them on their position of the Tone Scale and they will very
quickly realize that you are real.

Now, this isn't necessarily a trick. One simply falls into it. He
inspects the situation and he talks. So actually there is no such
thing as a bad audience -- unless, of course, it is a group that
wants to hang you. But of course, they are not technically an
audience. The type of entertainment they want doesn't include you
alive. So even then there's a saving grace. But there is no
really bad audience.

A man should be able to control almost any kind of an audience.
Very few petitioners ever believe that the United States
government could be an audience. But there was a chap one time
who wrote... Did you ever read the story of The Man Without a
Country? All about Philip Nolan? Well, the author of that, one
time, wrote a petition for the Customs House -- if I remember
rightly -- on raising pay or doing something of the sort. And he
wrote it so well and it was so beautifully expressed, and it was
so seldom anything like that had ever been sent to the government
at large, that they raised everybody's pay. Even the government
could be an audience. Now, that's a fantastic thing. In other
words, there is no limit whatsoever to the direction you can
appeal or to the level you can appeal.

People used to criticize George Wichelow over in London -- rather
broke his morale down -- for going out in Hyde Park and lecturing
alongside of the communists and lecturing elsewhere. But the
funny part of it was, he has his regular group. He's over in
Jersey now, and he's not lecturing in Hyde Park anymore -- people
miss him. There are an awful lot of people drifted by there. As a
matter of fact, we were mentioned in two or three leading
newspapers, along with other groups that were seen lecturing in
Hyde Park.

But the point is that even this level of audience and that type
of talking was effective. It doesn't matter what kind of an
audience you get together. It doesn't matter particularly how big
they are or how small they are. It really doesn't matter how
interesting you are or uninteresting you are. The point of the
matter is, all you have to do is say something to them. And just
do this, and you find out you get along splendidly. But you find
out that by not doing it you are apt to someday find yourself
confronting an audience, not having had any havingness on
audiences for a long time, with the result: stage fright, tongue-
tiedness, and so on. I'm not backing up a horrible fate for you,
but I am telling you for true that you should talk.

Now, the whole world is trying to tell you as an individual that
you should never talk. There are two crimes in this universe. One
is thereness and the other is communicatingness. Both are
attempted to be punished. People attempt to punish both of these
things. Thereness and communicatingness. The only two things that
you can do wrong are to communicate and to be there. All crimes
fall into that category. The law uniformly makes you prove that
you weren't there. If you can prove you weren't there, why, they
immediately exonerate you. That's thereness.

 Now, we take the whole subject of communicatingness. I don't
care whether you did it by words or by bullets or with a knife or
something, the only thing anybody ever objects to is
communicatinguess apparently. This is the way the world runs,
apparently.

Two crimes: thereness and communicatingness. There are only two
ways for a man to get well: thereness and communicatingness.

Now, you, by succumbing to the law against being there and the
law against communicating, are aiding and abetting your own
demise. You are being a partner to the crime of your own
extinction. So, if you can be discouraged in doing either of
these two things, you can be made ill. That's for sure. Only
those things to which you cannot or dare not communicate can
affect you. Fantastic, but true.

Now, if you yourself feel that you cannot communicate to groups
and cannot hold them, you will become the victim of groups. And
because life is a third-dynamic activity -- not a first-dynamic
activity -- part of living consists of confronting groups. And
when you cut and ran, or let the shakes deter you from shaking,
you of course are being a partner to your own demise.

So then, it actually doesn't come down to a basis of you should
do this for dear old Scientology, see. It actually comes down to
a basis you should do it because in the past I am sure that you
have done an audience or two in. I'm sure you have. Otherwise you
wouldn't be shy of them today, if you are. Now, of course, many
of you are not at all audience shy, and that is very fine. That's
very fine. You should practice, however, once in a while.

One of the most interesting activities in which a person can
engage is the instruction of his fellow man, in making his life a
bit better and in making the world a better place in which to
live. In fact, I would go so far as to say I don't know of any
other activity. But that's just my stupidity. I have had some
past acquaintances who tell me that destroying the whole world
from pole to pole is an interesting activity, too. They have told
me this.

Well, the total win for destroying the world from pole to pole
will consist of not needing a fire in the future with which to
fry eggs on earth. You won't need a fire to fry eggs on earth
after the boys have got it all neatly dusted off, but you won't
have any eggs, either! So these blessings are not always
blessings.

It does seem to me that making the world a better place in which
to live, maintaining people's interest in existence, keeping the
game going, helping your fellow man -- these things seem to be
very worthwhile activities, and I know as long as I engage in
them and keep my attention off of my more wicked impulses, I feel
fine.

So that's really the only therapy I have indulged in recently.
And whereas I'm not in awfully good condition, you know -- I
never am -- I nevertheless feel more satisfied than many of the
preclears I've had recently.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]
