--Lecture 63
Disc 67
A Lecture Given on 9 February 1954
63 Minutes==

I want to say just a few things about the auditing of groups.

With the processes you have and the way they can be delivered, it’s really not necessary to divide up groups anymore. You noticed, there, when I was Group Processing a bunch of you while exteriorized and we still had some people interiorized, the Straightwire processes which you would think normally would apply to your case who was still interiorized were applying quite well to those who were exteriorized.

We had an example there of three-a tape there with three types of processes: one which could only be done while exteriorized and one sort of media-media and one which could be done by everybody. And I asked you when we got through which one of these processes was the most effective on you, and the first one, which was the one where people interiorized or exteriorized could do it, was the most effective on the exteriorized cases.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? That means you’re still a being, still an individual, even though you’re exteriorized and even though you might not have found it out completely, yet.

Now, the processing o£ a group is done with an eye out toward the possible screamer, the possible commotion. The processes which are very, very hard on people, such as Nothingness in large quantities would-you might not think so at first, and you, of course, didn’t see it in this group, but in a broad group you’d see it-will turn on a screamer. Just like that. And you’ll all of a sudden have somebody in the group who is at high C and going higher. This is disturbing to other group members.

Furthermore, one of these days you will notice that getting a group line charging is not necessarily the most desirable process. Now there are processes-I could give you a list of processes which would get a group line charging and after you’ve been at it for a while you’ll find this to be the case. Unfortunate fact, but those processes applied which cause a lot of line charge in a group and a lot of laughter don’t necessarily make the people feel better. And this will be very sad to you.

You’ll have the whole group laughing and everybody obviously feeling fine. Well, they’re having a good time right then, that’s certain. And you’re going to come along-you’re going to come along a couple of days later and check over this group and you will find the individuals in it who were worried about their cases, still worried about their cases.

Now a line charge is all right in its place and where you get an individual preclear who never has laughed and all of a sudden you get him really line charging all over the place and blowing stuff in all directions, that’s a very desirable situation, but this is not necessarily desirable in a group. That’s a funny one.

And we don’t have to have any reason for it or explanation, it just sits there as a phenomenon which you yourself can observe as a Group Auditor.

The group, at first glance, has a tendency to come up uniformly in tone, at first glance this is the case. They tend to move upscale as a group, rather than as an individual. Well, this would seem, then, that there would be groups in which you had some people who are very well off and some people very bad off, who would be retarded by the people who are bad off. You see, you would suppose that, if they were all coming up on a uniform average tone.

Well, this is shades of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nearly everybody has this “compensation phobia.” And you’ll see it dramatized out in the society this way: “Well, it’s rained now for four days, so we’re going to have fair weather for four days.” See, next four days they have a hurricane. But they figure out that if it rains for a week, why, it’s going to be fair for a week. And if a fellow has been sick for a month, he’ll be well for a month. And this is their effort to master this “maybe.” And the society dramatizes the effort to master a “maybe” by talking about compensation.

So if a fellow has had bad luck for a long time, he’s bound to have a turn of luck. Gamblers make fortunes out of this-make fortunes out of it. You too can make a fortune out of it any time you want to, because that is the way the public bets.

At Monte Carlo one time, red had come up twelve times consecutively. Now, obviously, if red has come up twelve times consecutively, my God, it’s just got to get black, hasn’t it?

Well, the odds for the thirteenth turnup of red or black happen to be fifty-fifty, just the same as they always were. The number of times that it has come up does not influence the next time it’s going to come up.

Now, you start flipping a coin ... (Oh, and by the way, everyone lost his shirt on that because everybody went in and immediately bet on black and what came up? Red.) The odds are fifty-fifty.

If you’re flipping coins with somebody, every time you flip a coin is an independent chance and that independent chance results in a fifty-fifty chance. So it doesn’t matter how many times heads has come up, the new time, then you flip the coin, is a fifty-fifty. It’s either going to be heads or tails. The coin is not influenced by the number of times that it has come up heads or come up tails.

Now, likewise in a group, a group is not going to rise or be retarded in rising in tone, individually, because of any kind of an average, an overall average of the group. You could have about four total morons in the group who were not even capable of understanding your commands and you would find out that the ten other people you had in the group would come on up, whether those four morons were in the group or whether they were not in the group, with this reservation: if you have somebody in the group who has an embarrassed or nervous laugh, you’ll find that the group will be retarded.

Now, there are some people who titter. We don’t have any here, so don’t think this is that. But they titter.

Now, it is a symptom of embarrassment. That symptom of embarrassment was first pointed out to me by Commander Thompson one time when I was really a little boy. We were in a lecture on Freudian analysis at Saint Elizabeth’s-oh yeah, I used to bum around with Commander Thompson. I talked better psychoanalysis when I was fourteen than most psychoanalysts I’ve ever met. The difference was-the difference between them and me was that I was perfectly willing to take the subject or let it alone, I wasn’t obsessed with it. And you get that kind of an attitude toward a subject and you can generally discuss it or not discuss it at will.

Anyway, there was a chap there who was giving his experiences with schizophrenics and it was an interesting lecture, nothing wrong with it. But a navy commander, a doctor, sat in the audience and he laughed and squirmed and laughed and laughed and after it was over, well, he had a lot to say about, “Well, the schizophrenics” and so forth and so on.

And I asked Commander Thompson, I said, “What on earth is wrong with that man?” I said, “Everybody else was sitting here simply taking the material down and getting along fine and here’s that guy just laughing and upset and so on.” I said, “There’s something funny, the way he feels.”

And Commander Thompson’s name was Snake. He, by the way, had collected some of the largest collections of reptiles in various islands. Why, he was a fantastic man. He actually needs a niche in history. He did so many things in so many different directions that nobody ever adds him up. Practically all you know about anthropology as applied to psychology was invented by Thompson. He invented this subject. They now teach it in universities. They never mention Thompson, mostly because they’ve never read his work. If they did, why, they’d get to it. One of the reasons they’ve never read his work is he never paid much attention to what he did with his work. He’d write it and throw it back in the corner.

Anyway, he pointed out to me, he said, “That man-that man is ignorant. He hasn’t any idea what the lecturer has said or what the subject is about. But he is so afraid of it being discovered that he’s ignorant, that he must throw up this large facade of laughter and ridicule.”

And so it is you will find in your groups, individuals occasionally-when you’re just running guys here and there, and people one way and another, you’ll find that there are those present who are not capable of-and this by the way was true, I talked to the man myself out in the hall afterwards. And'I talked to him about automobiles-sly little cuss-and I found out that he didn’t even vaguely know any mechanics of an automobile. He had no idea of an automobile and so I talked to him about cooking. I found out he knew nothing about cooking. In other words, this was a-this was a fellow who was just blank across the boards, but his total dramatization, the way he got along through life and made everybody think he was very wise, so forth, was to say, “Well, that isn’t so good. Ha-ha-ha! Listen to that fool.” See, and this was just the way he carried on; everybody would think he was a very wise man, see? He was a stupid ass.

Now, you’re going to find in processing wide groups of people, then, several kinds of laughing members. And that one is going to be the hardest on you, because he is determined to upset your apple cart. And the reason he’s laughing is to show that, well, he can take it, too, you see, and he knows what it’s all about.

Now if you were to audit a large, strange group without an Emergency Auditor standing by, this one would throw your group, because you’d find there was a little area of comment going out from this individual and it would be getting worse and worse. Your stature or altitude with the group would be suffering continually. So that’s the first boy you look for in a group-for your Emergency Auditor to look for in a group.

And we find that that would disturb a group the most. Mostly because in every break and so on, he has so many comments to say that he’s knocking down the tone of all the people around him. But it’s only because he’s communicating-laughing and so forth-that he’s harming the group. You see that? It’s a tone he is manifesting.

So you can get an island of disturbance going on and it can be bad enough to ruin the entire group before you get through.

So, we get to the first principle of Group Auditing-rather sloppily get there. I did want to tell you about line charging. It has many, many manifestations. I mean, there’s honest laughter, there’s the laughter of relief, there is the laughter of embarrassment, there is the laughter of self-ridicule, there is the laughter of overt ridicule.

It’s just as an old Chinese physician, one time, thought that I was a very ignorant fellow for not knowing there were eighteen different kinds of pulse, you know? The Western world doctor measures the speed of pulse and he measures it against the second hand of his watch. And if it’s going at 72 it means one thing and if it’s going at 86 or 105 or something of the sort, it means something else, if it’s only going at 32, it means something else. Well, that’s a manifestation the Chinese physician pays no attention to at all. It’s the kind of pulse.

Is it going bud-a-ba-bah, bud-a-b-b-bah? Well, that means the fellow has a very bad kidney condition, believe me. And if it’s going thrrrrrom-boomrrrrrom-thrrrrom-boom the fellow is going to get a stroke by the time he’s about fifty-five and so on. They do a diagnosis, then, with the sensitivity of their fingers upon the pulse. There’s eighteen different kinds of pulse. Those are the broad general classes, the eighteen.

And just in such a wise, there are eighteen different kinds of laughter-only I’ve never counted them or categorized them, but it’s a good project for somebody. Somebody who wants to turn in a thesis sometime, let him go around and study some laughter. And you’ll find out exactly what each kind of laugh is trying to do.

Laughter in general is trying to reject. But what it’s trying to reject gets very interesting. Well, you’d better be sensitive to this as a Group Auditor. You’d better be real sensitive to it, because there is a time to start line charges and a time not to. And there’s a certain kind of line charge that’s bad and there are not many kinds that are good. But the laughter of relief has a lot of whews! in it and, huh, ha-ha-ha and huh, yeah, huh, gee, haaa!

It’s the manifestation of a fellow who has just gotten away from a saber-toothed tiger and while he does not have his lion skin on yet, still, he at least has his own skin on. And he’ll sit down and laugh about it. And that’s a good healthy manifestation to get from a group, it’s the laughter of relief.

But the hectic, giggly, tittery laughs you just might as well-you just might as well just skip the process because you’re not doing the group any good.

Now, the time to call for your Emergency Auditor (and I-let me put in first that we have an Emergency Auditor), when you’re auditing strange groups of considerable size, you park five or six. (I mean considerable size. We’re auditing, now, a hundred and fifty, two hundred people.) You go in there with a crew. If you don’t have at least two boys standing by for you, oh brother! You can get into some of the hottest water you’ve ever been in. There you are up on the stage, you see, and you start dramatizing “I have to be someplace else”-which is down in the audience getting that woman who just fainted. And it disturbs your aplomb and poise. And it also has some bearing upon your altitude with the group, because tension starts entering into you and starts entering into your voice and it’s mirrored then by the whole group, generally.

So the group manifests something. The auditor who is auditing them tends to react to this, one way or the other, and it kicks back into his auditing. And he misses entirely this fact: he’s auditing a lot of people. A lot of people. He’s not auditing just two people or three people. He’s got a lot of people out in front of him. And if he starts to (quote) “go in communication with the group” (unquote), he’s sunk. Because he’ll only be going into communication with maybe three, four, five people in the group. You get the idea?

In other words, he’s picking up and registering the kickbacks he’s getting from the group. Because the people who are really processing aren’t throwing out a superovert communication line.

And so he hears a little disturbance in the crowd. If he’s very sensitive and not very poised, he’ll go into communication with this little disturbance which is sitting there in the crowd and he will gauge his auditing against two or three people who are probably too stupid to do any auditing anyhow. And so he’ll miss the entire group.

Now, if you want to know what happens to Group Processes and why one Group Auditor fails and one wins, it’s just this factor of whether or not this auditor goes into communication with some small section of the group and then processes on that level.

Now, you can do that in instruction. You can forget about the people who are not communicating with you and start instructing just those people that address you from the crowd. You’re missing if you do that.

It’s not that the people who are addressing you from the crowd are bad or good or stupid or anything of the sort, but these people are on a different communication level than the other people in your group. And if you go into communication only with those who will communicate with you, then you are missing the tone-action level of others in the group which may be well above or well below that. So you’re not broadly instructing the group. You’re just maybe instructing those people who ask you questions.

You can err many, many times as an Instructor in thinking that the regard of your group for you is measured by the fact of those who immediately address you or communicate with you from the group. And it’s not monitored by that at all. But it will be if you pick the people who communicate with you directly up, hit their communication level, use that as the group level and throw it back at the whole group. And you have created, then, in the entire group that level of reaction to you.

Now, supposing these people who communicate with you-supposing you’ve got some sarcastic fellow who had eighteen years of psychology at Downbeat U and so forth and he always has a comment to make. He’s not sure of his own ground or what you’re telling him or something of the sort and he always has a comment to make to you.

At every fell swoop that you make a remark-you say, “Well, now children will be observed to follow the Tone Scale in manifesting behavior with regard to their toys. And you can see a child drop down Tone Scale with regard to his toys and you will see the Tone Scale show up and so on as he is refused toys and given toys and so forth.”

And this fellow will say, “Well, according to Downbeat University, we didn’t discover that. We found that dyspepsia was caused by Coca-Cola.”

And you never say suddenly, “You dumb bastard.” You never say this. As a matter of fact, you’re a very smart one if you don’t say anything. You just skip it.

If you skip it, he has no communication line to the group. If you pick it up, you’ve got a communication line.

Now you can ignore people in that fashion as an Instructor or a Group Auditor and get yourself way far in the lead of where you would be otherwise. So it is, that if two people in a group of twenty-five or fifty are laughing-everything they run and it’s apparently very good laughter-“Oh, my, that’s good” and so forth and if you then take them as your cue for the rest of the group, so as to get the rest of the group laughing, you’re just going to tip the whole group over. You’re just not going to do a single thing for them.

Interesting, isn’t it? Hm?

Now, I made a clinical test of this, a real honest-to-goodness test of this. I had a group in which I had three people who line charged very easily. Unfortunately, it was not the kind of line charge that we really call line charge and I processed an hour one time against their line charges. That is to say, I kept them line charging. And the net result and gain on the rest of the group was zero. And, of course, there was no gain on them because that was just their dramatization. Their method of meeting life was with this kind of laughter.

And the next hour that I processed this same unit, I completely ignored whatever they were doing and picked up the members of the group who were processing quietly and just continued to process them, leaving this disturbance in the group and everybody got a gain-even the people who were doing the laughing. But, of course, it was a sloppy hour because people were disturbed by this charge.

Now in processing groups of children this becomes extremely upsetting to some of the children present. Some of the children present are very nervous and children are quite overt and as you start processing them a little boy suddenly mocks-up a choo-choo train and, by golly, he is the choo-choo train. And he’ll come down the aisle choo-choo-choo-choo-choo.

You say, “Mock-up a choo-choo train” and here he comes.

And another guy, you say, “Mock-up an airplane.”

This little fellow mocks-up an airplane, "Rhrrrr-rrrrrr." Oh, full sound effects. You said an airplane, well that’s an airplane.

Well, you can process this group of children very broadly. And for the first time we get into a necessity to split a group on that level. Or when you would see this same manifestation occurring too much in an adult group, you would split the group. Otherwise, you can keep the group together.

Now we get down to what process do you use on the group? Well, you can use the same processes on the group now because we have this little trick of some places.

Occasionally you give them a specific number, one or three or something, just to nail somebody down, but you’ve got some places, you see.

“Give me some places where you are not.”

“Some people who are not present.”

Well, your swifties will go in there and they’ll get, “Well, Mom, Dad, Grandpa, George, Bill, Agnes, Uncle Oscar-yeah, none of those.”

And the guy who is slow will say, “Let’s see, somebody who is not present. Well, let’s see-let’s see. Now I’m-I’m not present. Oh, I’ve got somebody who isn’t present-me. Okay. No, wait a minute, that’s wrong. I-I-I-he means somebody else who isn’t present. Let me see, let me see, let me see. Oh ... uh ... uh ... mmm ... uh ... mmmm . .. uh . .. well, a fellow named Oscar isn’t present because there isn’t any such fellow. Yeah.” Bang.

Now, you see the same command will get the same boys. When you start splitting them up is when part of the Group Processing is being very badly disturbed by the other part of the group. And you do not go into communication-I repeat, I repeat-you do not go into communication on a conversation basis with the group.

In other words, you don’t get their reaction, you don’t pick up what they say and then immediately reflect this back at them. If you’re doing that, you need to run the process of going around and assigning cause to an awful lot of things, because you’re doing an effect side of the line.

Now, it would amaze those that we were working with on the-getting up the voice and so forth, that the amount of conversation intended by the auditor, you see, the amount he was receiving, the backlash of sound from the group and so on, was directly proportional to his inability to get out to the group.

In other words, let’s put it even more plainly and in another way. His ability to be heard across the group was proportional to the amount of avoidance of the sound coming in from the group. In other words, if he wasn’t meeting or paying any attention to the sound coming in from the group, he was heard across the whole group. And he was not heard to the degree that he was taking in this sound.

Some people are meeting it at the first row. And some people are meeting it at the second row. And some people are meeting it way back, and some not at all. And the person who is meeting that inflow of sound and action from the group, not at all, is heard by the whole group. And that, by the way, probably has some very significant facts about leadership in it.

If you depend as the Group Auditor upon knowing the reaction of the group only by means of three or four people in the group communicating with you and making comments to you, then you have to a large degree overlooked the majority of your group. And you are not, probably, hitting their tone level.

It’s a very interesting thing that an auditor has a tendency to look through a group, and those people who communicate with him in a group, to take those-because they are merely sitting in the middle of the pool of the group-to take those as knowing more about the group than he does.

Well, let me give you this one: Most people work on this basis-this is getting in down toward the “only one” computation-they work on this basis: there are two classes. There is “me” and “they.” And when you see that the whole sea, this vast sea of “they,” each one, is running on “me” and “they,” you see that there isn’t a whole mass of “they” at all.

And in terms of stage fright, an individual only need to throw that up to himself and all of a sudden he’ll realize that everybody sitting there-everybody sitting there is sitting there as an individual versus the world.

Now, they look like a cohesed mass to him. And seeing this mass of people sitting there in neatly arranged chairs and so forth, it’s liable to give him this feeling that he’s talking to a mass. He’ll react to a mass. He’ll react to a mass to this degree: after he’s processed the group he’s liable to leave the room, go outside someplace or leave the session or go home, and he’ll feel a little bit downhearted or a little bit degraded.

Well, that’s just exteriorization from mass. He’s left the mass of the group. You see that? He feels he didn’t do them much good and so forth. This is not true at all. It’s just the fact that he walked away from the mass and so he lost a big mass. And you quite often get an auditor not processing groups simply because after a while this manifestation has gotten just a little bit too onerous to him. And of course it’s progressive, this manifestation. So that after he’s done this a few hundred times, or a few dozen times even, why, it can become very upsetting to him to face a group. Because what’s it done?

It’s got him to a point where he can’t have a group. Well, all he’d need to do, if he has to process himself on such a thing, is just mock-up the group a few more times, and this mass will remedy.

Now, going into communication with a group is, at best, an art. You look at a group, there’s a certain feeling about a group, there’s a certain feeling of reaction about them and so on. But do you know something? The truth of the matter is that the auditor who does a completely dispassionate piece of work with regard to the group is-he’s not monitoring everything he does against everything the group does and so on-the fellow who really isn’t paying very much attention to the group actually gets the furthest with the group.

Well, you can know that a group is getting sullen, for instance. You just know the group is getting sullen. It’s getting worse and worse and worse. And you could then make an effort to bring them out of this sullenness. Or you could simply ignore their tone and continue to do a job of work that you know is a good job of work.

They will come out of their sullenness faster if you do the latter. You just go on processing the group. They finally get the idea that a hurricane could strike and a ten-ton truck rush in the back door and that eight ambulances could suddenly materialize in the middle of the audience, complete with accident, and you would still stand there processing the group. And it’s a certain inexorableness which finally knocks them flat.

Those that are still resisting like mad and resisting running commands and so forth, will run them much more easily, and sooner, if the auditor is apparently very poised and very undisturbed.

They associate serenity with command value-poise, aplomb, so on. So that resisting the group itself is probably the best manifestation to process in an auditor who can’t be heard by the group. Somebody who can’t be heard broadly across a large group is probably just to that degree resisting the group or interlocking with the group and is upset about the group. This is command value of a group.

Of course there are many tricks that are used by people on the stage and lecturers and so on but these tricks are of questionable value.

A group has in it a lot of hecklers-let’s take park lecturing, it has in it a lot of hecklers-will disintegrate the moment that the lecturer addresses one of the hecklers. His command of the remaining portion of the group will disintegrate.

Now, this can be carried through just a little bit too far. When they’re climbing up on the platform and drawing knives, it isn’t likely that continued aplomb will send them back into the mass. So this is a point of judgment.

Once in a while you have to pay attention to something like this, and the odd part of it is that when you’re handling a broad group, sarcasm and irony are really the only truly effective weapons as you come downscale.

As you come downscale from serenity-sarcasm, irony, are themselves about the only weapons that you dare lay your hand on. They’re cruel weapons. They’re vicious.

Now, here we have a case of a fellow addressing a group and one of them keeps heckling, heckling, heckling so loudly that he is having a very difficult time being heard.

If he’s to say, “Well, if you’ll just come up here and give them your views” and so on, this will silence the fellow. But every once in a while he does get somebody up on the platform. That’s all right, if he is very careful to make sure that the fellow makes a fool out of himself the second he gets up on the platform, just by stopping communication suddenly. The communication line is from the person in front of the group to the group. And if the fellow doesn’t aid and abet somebody else’s communication line who suddenly steps up on the group, why, the chances are the newcomer finds himself without a comm line and this is upsetting.

You see what happens there? You can actually call somebody up on the platform and then refuse to give him a comm line. And don’t say, “Well, we’re waiting.” Say, “Well, now I have these good people waiting here and so on and now we will undoubtedly hear something very enlightening.” And then wait.

You’ve ruined the guy, just cut him to pieces. But that’s very dangerous, to go into stuff. And fortunately Group Auditing doesn’t go too much into group lecturing, but you’ll run into it occasionally. So we have to know something about it.

Sarcasm and irony are the safe means and getting the group to help you are-that’s a very safe mechanism. This fellow all of a sudden starts heckling you or getting upset and causing commotion and tittering and laughing and causing something of the sort, and you can look down and say, “If the people around that gentleman don’t feel too safe, why, there are some other chairs over here on the other side of the room.” Something that simply divorces him from the group. You just cut him out, utterly. His influence stops at that moment on the group to a large extent.

But in Group Auditing, as I-again, we do not run into the same problems of lecturing. I say, there’s just a little fringe problem there.

So, you leave this up to a Group Emergency Auditor. And you don’t process a group of any size, and you certainly don’t process a group of strangers without having an Emergency Auditor or two standing by, at least.

And the duties of this person are very simple: They are to take people who start snickering or getting upset at a private upset when everybody else is being very solemn. He just waits for the moment, see, he waits for the moment when the group really starts to object to and is becoming upset by this, you see? The Emergency Auditor does.

This fellow has laughed-that’s all right, that’s quite common in a group. A fellow will laugh, he’ll laugh for a minute or so, and that’s all right. It doesn’t disturb anybody.

But the Group Emergency Auditor starts to see heads turning now and then-a flick toward this individual, and this manifestation continues, then your group is being disturbed by this. And as soon as he observes this happen, then he creates the additional disturbance of taking the fellow out of the group to give him a moment or two of Straightwire or straighten it up, or really let the guy get the charge off, and then bring him back to his seat. You’ll see relief kind of spread through the group when this is done and when it’s done right.

Your Emergency Auditor is very quiet. Now I’ll give you a tip on Emergency Auditors, is if you’re doing this very well, the gentleman will not wear hard-heeled shoes and so forth. In other words, minimum disturbance. His moving around can itself be more disturbing than somebody line charging.

An officious Emergency Group Auditor can practically ruin the Group Auditor by knocking over a chair now and then, and by yanking somebody out of his seat, and by going back and saying, “Shh!” you know, to three or four-oh no, see? No. So you want to advise your Emergency Auditor what he’s supposed to do. And he’s supposed to pick up those who are, independently from the group, line charging on something that nobody else is, to the disturbance of the group.

And you’re not doing that because it’s bad for this individual to disturb the group; this individual has hit something and he could probably blow it.

Now, a noteworthy example of this: One time I was processing a group and I was running mock-ups for the group on stealing babies-fathers and mothers stealing babies and so forth, you see? And of course this was knocking out the Assumption.

And this fellow whose case had been hanging fire for, I am ashamed to say, months and months-this was a long time ago-and his case had just been hanging fire for a long time and he’d just been getting auditing from this Book Auditor or that auditor or something of the sort, you see, and it really-really, no advance. All of a sudden, he starts to line charge. The fellow was stuck right in the middle of the Assumption and it went on for about fifteen minutes.

Now, the rest of the group got no processing, really, during those fifteen minutes, it was so disturbing. But this fellow’s case broke to smithereens. He changed physiologically, afterwards. He came out of the arrested development state that his body was in and so on.

Well, I was processing that group without an Emergency Auditor, so there was nothing I could do about it except just keep on processing, just as I was. I had merely started it as a demonstration process. And this fellow simply kept on. He suddenly started to laugh and it was a sort of, at first, an embarrassed self-conscious laughter and then it finally got into very overt line charging, which is the way it would.

Now, what does your Emergency Auditor do after he grabs somebody out of the unit like that? He finds out what command he’s stuck on. The fellow is stuck back on the track. He’s not continuing to run the things you’re giving him, he’s back there running something earlier.

So let’s just find where he is. You just get that, you see, by-ask him, “Well, what was the thing that caused a change to take place in your case here?”

You don’t say, “What started you laughing?” or anything. Don’t call his attention to the laughter or the crying even.

And “What command was it?” The Emergency Auditor would find out then that it was a command that was maybe ten, fifteen minutes earlier.

Now, you as a Group Auditor have just been laying stuff in on a point where the individual was suddenly ruminating and chewing around and knocking the bank to pieces, and you’ve just been disturbing this fellow with additional auditing, you see? You wouldn’t as an individual auditor go on auditing somebody who was doing that. Well, same way in a group.

The other thing is crying. Now, crying is very easy to handle. Psychotherapy had no other manifestation than crying. Actually, crying is simply a dramatization-a physical dramatization of the Boohoo. It’s an automaticity. And the way you handle somebody who suddenly starts to cry in a group . .. It’s a cruelty, by the way, to keep on processing, because people around will start feeling sorry for this person and they’ll start going into grief. It’s a cruelty to keep on auditing over the top of this preclear who has started to cry. It’s a cruelty, because the individual has hit something too hot for him to handle. So your Emergency Auditor should keep fairly alert to this.

Well, now this tells you where the Emergency Auditor ought to be in a room. He ought to be at least on the flank of the group and at best, if you have a couple of Emergency Auditors, on the front wings.

That is to say, they ought to be on the same floor level as the group and not as far back from the group as you are, but if you were to put them there in chairs they would be facing the group. And one would be way to the right of you and the other one would be way to the left of you, off the points of the group. Not between you and any group member and not in any straight line, because people will have a tendency to fixate on them slightly and say, “Oh boy, here’s where I get a little individual auditing.” That’s the reason why these boys don’t give much auditing. They handle line charging just by finding out what the fellow hit and then solving that immediate problem with some mock-ups or something else that can be given for that and they handle grief, or any other manifestation, as an automaticity.

They tell this person who suddenly started to cry, “All right, now get an idea of yourself breaking into tears again. Now get yourself breaking into tears again. Breaking into tears again. Now breaking into tears again. Now mock yourself up breaking into tears again.” And all of a sudden, the fellow has clipped out the automatic machine which is connected to the command that made him cry.

It’s really therapeutic. You’re just not stopping him from crying, you see, you’re just making him run the automaticity of these sudden tears-which, by the way, is occasionally quite alarming to somebody.

Then your Emergency Auditor, if you’re doing a really superlative job, will start looking through the group for bad boil-offs. Real bad boil-offs. The fellow is flopping over sideways and practically snoring, see?

And he looks for this boil-off and he just takes him out and has him mock-up lots of unconsciousness, one way or the other, and takes the edge off of this boil-off.

Well, it’s best to do that because it’s not terribly harmful for your commands to keep going in on top of a boil-off, this is not going to really upset anybody badly. But the case has a tendency to worry concerning the commands which have been going while he’s been out and he worries about it a little bit. Well, that’s one thing, but the main thing the Emergency Auditor rakes this fellow out for is the individual isn’t getting all of the process. The process then is being wasted for this group member.

So there are two categories there that people fall into. The Emergency Auditor taking care of them for their own sakes and the Emergency Auditor taking care of them for the group’s sake, and he takes care of both.

Now, his auditing of the group members is very brief. He should have a place where he can go to, immediately near to hand, to do this without his voice then being heard echoing back into the group. Should be out of sound range or back of closed doors which are soundproof to some degree.

Well, that door right there is perfectly adequate for that purpose. You just take somebody in there and straighten them out and put them back in the group. But your Emergency Auditor should remember this: he should put them back in the group as fast as possible-right away. This person is being group audited, not being grabbed for individual auditing. Because the moment that you lengthen the time of individual auditing, you will get other people in the group suddenly demonstrating manifestations which will get them some individual auditing.

Now, you can turn the mock-ups of a whole group of children off-can turn them off right now, by bringing up one child and giving him a special mock-up.

This little boy, you’ve noticed, as you processed this group of children, just was sitting there with a blank stare on his face. And you finally said-asked for hands, how many of them could get that last picture and his hand didn’t go up. And now how many of them didn’t get it and his hand goes up-oh, boy.

And you bring him up to the front of the room and you say, “All right, now, let’s get a mock-up of a cowboy,” something on that sort.

Now you turn around to the rest of the group and you say, “All right. Now, let’s get-us all get a picture of a cowboy” or something of this sort. “Now how many didn’t get that?” and you will see practically every hand in the room go up.

Well, this works on adults. The only difference between an adult and a child is the adult isn’t free anymore. All right. Then it works out the same way.

So you want to get that person which has been sneaked out of the group back into the group right away.

Now, when you get a whole group line charging with relief, carry it on. Two-thirds of this group are line charging with relief, pour it to them. If only one or two are, you just keep right on with what you’re doing, don’t pay any attention to them. If they start to upset the rest of the group, your Emergency Auditor, without any signal from you-and you should never have to give an Emergency Auditor a signal, he just operates-out they go. And they get enough to settle what they’re stuck on.

They hit something that was very funny to them. And he settles it, that’s all, just in a hurry. He just says, “All right, now. What one of those commands were you particularly interested in?” and he just runs it again. Now he can sort of run it on a Repeater Technique basis. He can make him put it up and move it around the room. Or he can make him go into the automaticity of laughing, but people get awfully upset when you do that. They’ll go into the automaticities of grief, but when you make them run the automaticity of laughing they get upset with you. You’re trying to run out their laughing machine; that’s all they have got left, they think.

So he just remedies whatever command they’re stuck on and gets them back to battery or lets them get the laugh off their chest and then gets them back into the group again-zang, zong real quick.

So that you have another team member there then, don’t you, as a Group Auditor? And if you’re auditing any number of people, particularly strangers, without an Emergency Auditor present and without a couple of Emergency Auditors, if the group is very big, you’re trying to do what? You’re trying to audit in a subway station or-I mean, it’s the equivalent of it. You’re not going to be able to do too much with the group because they’re going to break down on you.

Now, you shouldn’t have to vary commands against the manifestations of the group. You don’t suddenly have to run some new kind of command for this particular group, just to handle their manifestation. You can do that. I’ve got one I throw at people very calmly as I go along on the thing. The group was getting more and more bogged and more and more serious and there were more and more people who were boiling-off. I can always shock a group into wakefulness by having them pat their body on the head for being a good Seeing Eye dog, which is of course exactly what a body is, is a Seeing Eye dog.

And people will get this, and you have them do that many times and something of the sort, and you’ll have the whole group line charging. It’s funny. It’s a very funny process. There are some of them that are quite funny.

ARC Straightwire, next-to-the-last list, if run for forty-five minutes or something, just that and nothing more, will finally start a general line charge, and a very healthy one, with an entire group. It’s been tested quite a few times, by the way.

This is one thing you can’t lie about, is a group reaction.

Now, is there any difference between processing a group of veterans and a group of streetcar conductors? Not a bit. You start slanting your processes too strongly at the profession or past of this particular group and you lose some of the effectiveness of your processes. The housewife has not really come down there to be told she’s a housewife. She’s looking for something new and strange. It is adventure which she wants.

Now, don’t run processes which are out beyond her understanding and you could run processes directly that would lighten up her housework very materially. But the best success that you will get is just by running general processes.

Now, if we get a group of veterans and we insist on running bullets and bombs, just because they’re a group of veterans who have been bunged up in the war, we’re going to bog the whole group. Because they’re being constantly reminded by this auditor that they are veterans and that they have been bonged up and you’re going to get them into all of their pet engrams. You can do that individually, but you can’t do it with a group.

You can slant your patter but that’s different than slanting your process. You take a group of GIs: all you’ll do is drive them into a flock of line charges which are totally meaningless, really. It’s just funny. It’s like you told them a supremely funny story. You know you can stand up in front of a group and process them in such a way that they will react just as though you have released the largest number of new jokes these people have heard in any one place for a long time.

You can do a Bob Hope on them. You get the same therapeutic result as though Bob Hope had talked to them for a while. Well, all right, that is a therapeutic result, see? But you’re looking for something a little higher than that.

Now, you can say, “Get four captains that you are not” or “four second lieutenants that you are not” to a group of GIs and they’ll laugh like hell. This is, by the way, bing bing bing bing bing this is hitting it right on the button, because they’re resisting like mad being second lieutenants or captains or something, you see? “Give me three second lieutenants that you are not.”

You can tell some housewife, “Give me several children that you are not.” You know, some housewife who has some children and she’ll spring the communication collapse on her children. Therapeutic; no doubt about it. But you tell a group of housewives this and so on and they will line charge like mad. Well, that’s not bad, you understand, but that’s slanted processing.

Slanted processing-the only point I’m trying to make is that slanted processing is interesting, keeps a group very alert, but is not, fortunately, as therapeutic for a general group as just general processing. They don’t want to really be reminded they’re privates or housewives. You’ve just agreed with their agreement with the mest universe and the process is poorer just to that extent.

Now, as far as your poise is concerned, you can get poise mixed up and calm mixed up with a ministerial presence. This is bad. A supersympathetic attitude of “Oh, you poor people” or something like that and so on-a group just runs like mad from this. They don’t like it. They like a rather usual but crisp delivery. And they want to hear what you’re saying.

Now, a Group Auditor, who can’t be heard easily, should get himself one of these little hand-PA systems. You know, they’ve got them, they just magnify his voice. You can buy them for guitars. They amplify the guitar. If he has any question in his mind about his being heard across this group ... Now, by the way, this would apply to almost anybody, you see. We’re just talking about the generalized sizes of groups. If an individual can be heard very easily across a group of twenty-five, thirty people, well that’s-no point in that.

But the same fellow, when he gets a group of two or three hundred, starts to accumulate the inevitable mass noise. The rustle of clothing in itself will begin to magnify into a considerable sound barrier. Just that. Breathing in a large mass of people becomes audible enough so that you can’t be heard across it. This is what you call cumulative sound. It is the sound of a group of people. They’re not talking. They are attentive. They are being quiet. And their cumulative sound can get so large that you’ve actually got to go up to parade-ground volume in order to be heard across them. Well, at such a time, don’t go up to parade-ground volume because you’re just going to start ripping out your vocal cords. You take a PA system or something of the sort and rig it up and let it boost for you.

Now, there’s a thing called an electronic megaphone which we had during the war. And instead of talking into it as a megaphone you can just put a mike connection to it. And you can simply lay it on a table. It’s battery operated and battery contained. It’s a-simplest unit in the world. They’re still available and they’re not terribly expensive.

But one of the things that would maybe look strange to a small group of people wouldn’t look strange to a large group of people. If you just took a megaphone, a cheerleader megaphone, and blew your commands at them, they would understand what you were doing. Well, similarly, they’d understand a PA system. But a PA system always-I don’t care what kind of a PA system, whether it’s a stereophonic or hydrophobic sound, will always depersonalize the Group Auditor or the speaker. Always does.

The difference and amount of success, of various-down through the years-of various lectures has been, very often, the difference between whether a PA system was being used or not. Just that single difference.

But clarity comes first. Always. If your group is sitting there unable to hear what you’re saying, they will come out of the group session muddled and confused because you’ve broken a communication line on them which is the highest level of aberration that you can hand them. So be heard. Whether your voice is being beautifully heard or not is secondary. For God’s sakes, be heard. Now you can be heard so thoroughly, you’re scaring them to death. So that is a matter of judgment

Okay?