The first thing a Scientologist should know about Scientology is the use of its materials.
The materials of Scientology are not its tools. Its tools are processes — its materials are books, tapes, Professional Auditor’s Bulletins, Journals, letters and experience.
Now that we are operating from the standpoint of a known subject and known processes, we can handle material much better than before. Now that we know that auditors can be trained rather easily to use Standard Operating Procedure 8-C, Opening Procedure, and that they are happy to learn it, and that it will produce results for them, we would be very foolish, as schools, as auditors, as individuals, to abandon this gain.
The materials of Scientology are designed to communicate. That is all very well, but TO WHOM — AND WHEN? Certain of the materials of Scientology can be communicated with ease to people that never before heard of the subject. Certain others can be communicated to people who have been in association with Scientologists but who are not auditors. The higher level of material and data can be communicated to people who are in training to be auditors. Certain other material can be communicated to people who have been trained as auditors. And if we do not recognize this fact, and if we do not follow it, then we are going to produce a confusion with Scientology, and we are going to turn people away from Scientology, and we are going to defeat Scientology in doing what it is trying to do.
For a long time Scientology was in a state of change sufficiently rapid to be bewildering unless viewed as an orderly whole, taken with cognizance from the Original Thesis through Book One, up through Advanced Procedure and Axioms, through 16-G, 24-G, and Professional Course Tapes. But now there is no further excuse for using this material in a muddled fashion. To give you some example of this, I recently received a bulletin from an area in the United States which has a history of being confused and introverted on the subject of Scientology. This bulletin was from two auditors who should know better. It was an announcement. It had been mailed to a hundred and fifty people who were more or less interested in Scientology, including some auditors in that area. And this bulletin proclaimed that the Professional Course Tapes, July, 1954, intended for the training of HCAs, would be played as public lectures for these people over a few evenings. A telegram was sent to these two auditors, telling them that if they committed this crime against themselves and Scientology, their training privileges would be suspended for five years.
What would happen if they did this thing? Here are the Professional Course Tapes, designed to be played to a student after he has been thoroughly taught Opening Procedure 8-C, Opening Procedure by Duplication, Remedying Havingness, and Spotting Spots in Space, as well as Significances. After the many weeks which would be spent in teaching the student these named items, it would then be possible to communicate to him with the Professional Course of July, 1954, and only after a student has been so trained would he be further trained by playing these tapes to him.
Why is this? It is because one is talking as an instructor when he is talking to any public audience. He is talking as a teacher. Is his purpose, then, simply to confuse his audience and make them turn their backs on something which is confusing, or is his purpose to degenerate what he knows into the same level with all other confusions, or is it his purpose to inform his audience? If we in the HASI have learned over ten arduous months of communicating Scientology directly, face to face, with people who are there solely for the purpose of learning, and in communicating Scientology less directly to the American public (as in Operation Phoenix*
Bluntly, you cannot avalanche data onto the heads of partially trained, poorly comprehending people, or people who have no real conversance with auditing at all. And if you try to do so, you will fail, and Scientology will fail, and the people in the area will not have the least idea what you are trying to do. And they will walk away from your meetings, and they will walk away from your group sessions completely confused and vowing to themselves to have nothing further to do with Scientology. And they will not tell their friends about it, and people who should be brought in to be helped will not be brought in to be helped. And so a great many people, by this misunderstanding of the uses of the materials of Scientology, are being denied the benefits of Scientology simply because these materials have not been handled with intelligence.
Yes, I know that we have just learned this, but that we have just learned it makes it no less emphatic. However, one supposes that somebody who has been trained should have better sense than to use something with as much dynamite in it as the Professional Course of 1954 as fit diet for cursorily interested people.
Another shocking incident occurred in another area where a person who had finished an Advanced Clinical Course Unit actually permitted a mailing piece to go out to a great number of auditors from old Dianetic days, which had scrawled all over the back of it in large letters, “The meat of an $800.00 course for $38.50,” and this refresher course pretended that it would, in five evenings, bring these auditors up to date on Scientology, and pour into them material which it had taken this graduate of the course four hundred and thirty-two hours of hard study to begin to assimilate. The course graduate did not do this, but permitted it to be done. Of course there were considerable repercussions because of this. A Professional Course graduate was an HCA or BScn before he began the Advanced Professional Course. Most of the people in these units extended their training from the six weeks minimum up to twelve and fifteen weeks, since this could be done without further charge. Nobody is going to relay the material these people received in any five casual evenings.
In the first instance, where the Professional Course was going to be played in four or five nights as social entertainment, only chaos would have resulted. The two auditors doing this have often wondered what was the matter with their area, why more auditing was not done in their area, why, when they brought groups together the groups did not stay together. The reason is very plain. Instead of actually teaching these people something, these two auditors had been falling back on material taken from courses designed for people who were there to be trained and who had already spent considerable time in training. These auditors had done, previously, with other material, the same thing they were trying to do with the Professional Course. As a net result, the people in their area who came to them for a night, or two nights, would find only a steady avalanche of data far too technical for their assimilation. And out of those recordings would come sufficient restimulation to send them away, never to return.
On the other hand, think what would happen to an auditor, interested in the quality of auditing and the reputation of Scientology in an area if, after leaving such a thing as the Professional Course or finishing his training with a Doctor of Scientology, he should reach out for all the people who had ever been interested in auditing in the area, bring them in, and teach them how to run Opening Procedure of 8-C. In other words, to teach them, step by step, painfully and painstakingly, until they had it as a complete purity, until they had it drilled and ingrained into them so that they could not avoid doing it right, think what would happen to the auditing skills, and think what would happen to the reputation of Scientology as an immediate result.
Where public lectures are concerned, the HASI has a series of eight hours of tapes which describe Scientology, its various efforts and benefits. These are designed for the public at large. They do not so deluge individuals that they create a confusion, but simply spark their interest and curiosity sufficiently to bring them to a level where they will at least wish to experience some of the benefits of Scientology or desire to pursue it further.
There seem to be certain rules forming here about the use of such material, and these would be more or less as follows:
One could say that Man was a complicated animal simply because he is a simple animal and will not face it. When you have seen what we have seen here at the International Headquarters of the HASI, result from a continuous application to a psychosomatic illness, to psychosis and neurosis, of Opening Procedure 8-C, you will only then begin to understand what an essentially simple mechanism Man is, and how hard he works to be a complex one.
But only when you have been trained to use such a thing as Opening Procedure of 8-C, arduously enough to demonstrate that it is done just exactly the way it is done and no other way for hours and hours and hours and hours, will you understand what we mean by training, and will you discover that people can be trained.
The Director of Training in London who is, at this writing, completing the first course of this new type of training writes: “The present course is going well. The students have had days of Opening Procedure, both of 8-C and by Duplication. It has been exceedingly interesting to watch. We have spent about a month now getting across the simplicities in actual practice, spending, for example, a whole day on ‘Something you wouldn’t mind remembering’ and ‘Something you wouldn’t mind forgetting’ and two whole days on Spotting Spots in Space and Remedying Havingness. The spirit is very high and I think we will turn out the best bunch of HPAs ever. We have hammered home auditing by observation of communication lag. It certainly is a wonderful system, because auditors surely cannot miss with it. I know the students going through now will not.”
The grades of Scientology are: General Member, HASI; Scientology Group Leader; HCA (HPA); BScn and DScn. These are grades of knowingness of the subject. They demonstrate levels of skill in the subject and they very adequately demonstrate the results which can be expected, for these skills show up in terms of preclears.
Group auditing sessions, when done by the simplest of commands, reducing every communication lag for every member of the group, are the most effective group sessions. Here again we have simplicity at work. Here we have processes being used right.
If we expect Scientology to communicate itself throughout the populace of the world, it had certainly better be communicated as it can communicate. If this is not done we will be standing here talking to ourselves.