For a very long time we have been working on optimum dissemination to find out if there was such a thing.
Over the years we have found that in order of importance the following methods were workable.
Personal Contact: This by far is the very best method of dissemination. It is better done on individual basis rather than talking to groups since there is the factor in groups of being able to escape by saying „they aren’t talking to me“. Personal contact then means just that. no matter whether it is done to friends and then to other people or secondarily to total strangers there is nothing better than personal contact.
Books: Personal contact usually requires books to back it up. But books make a personal contact all by themselves if they can be put in the right places. If the library nearest you had some book about Dianetics and Scientology granted by you to them and your name and address was in the front as donor, you would get people calling on you. HCO WW Book Admin recently made books available for this purpose at a very reduced cost. You send in the cost of the books and the books are sent to your local library — providing you give HCO WW the address — and the books are sent with your name and address in them straight to the local library. Books placed in bookstores works mildly but it should be done. Books such as Problems of Work or Dianetics Evolution of a Science should be on hand in plenty to put in people’s hands. HCO WW is making stacks and stacks of these available to you at very small cost as soon as we can get enough copies. You can get them by the hundreds from Saint Hill and from your Central Org when this gets going. Dianetics Evolution of a Science is available now in a small edition in the UK and you can get it only from Saint Hill at £2 for 50 copies at a crack. That’s less than they cost us, Books we have learned the hard way must be heavily in circulation or we get nobody in the front door. You can always tell a Central Org slump is coming whenever booksales drop off. Central Org boom occurs about two or three months after book sales go up. All Central Org promotion gen begins with „given books in circulation then…“ so you can easily see that the success of any neighbourhood depends on getting books into circulation in that neighbourhood. At 409o discount an auditor can get them into a bookstore without losing on it.
A comment: We are trying so hard to make HCO Saint Hill self supporting because we want to get books collected in quantity and out at low cost. If you are trying to work without books to pass around you’re in trouble.
Casualty Contact: A fruitful source of HAS Co-Audit people is casualty contact. This is very old, is almost never tried and is always roaringly successful, providing the auditor goes about it in roughly the right way. Using his Minister’s card, an auditor need only barge into any nonsectarian hospital, get permission to visit the wards from the Superintendent, mentioning nothing about processing but only about taking care of people’s souls, to find himself wonderfully welcome. Ministers almost never make such rounds. Some hospitals are sticky about this sort of thing, but it’s only necessary to find another. It’s fabulous what one can get done in a hospital with a touch assist and locational processing. Don’t pick on the very bad off unconscious cases. Hit the fracture ward and the maternity ward. Go around and say hello to the people and ask if you can do anything for them. now here’s how auditors have lost on this one. They omit the following steps: They fail to have a card with their Ministerial name on it with their phone number. They fail to have a telephone answering service. They fail to tell the people they snap away from death’s yawning door that they can have more of this stuff simply by calling in. They get so involved in the complexities of medical (ha) treatment and so outraged at some of the things they see going on that they get into rows with medicos and the hospital staff. And also they pick unconscious patients or people who are halfway exteriorised already. This is a pretty routine drill really. You get permission to visit. You go in and give patients a cheery smile. You want to know if you can do anything for them, you give them a card and tell them to come around to your group and really get well, and you give them a touch assist if they seem to need it but only if they’re willing. And you for sure make sure that somebody is on the other end when they ring up. Giving them a schedule of your HAS Co-Audit will avail much. I’ve got a book scheduled the „sick person“ as a working title that will make good fodder for this. But your statement, „The modem scientific church can cure things like that. Come around and see,“ will work. It’s straight recruiting.
Newspaper Ads: Costly and hard to get taken sometimes, newspaper ads still work very well for the HAS Co-Audit. The best ad to date on actual test is „no matter how bad your problem is, something can be done about it, phone…“ also, „Body? Mind? Spirit? Who are you? Phone…“ also works.
Talking to Groups: This seldom produces much results and when you give away literature too this isn’t cheap. I am sure it is worthwhile for a good speaker and has been done with success but it is mostly useful in the production of future contacts and is not very useful otherwise in general experience.
Co-operating with Groups: This is almost totally unworkable according to past record. A group is composed of individuals. As a group it normally has a different goal than you. Business firms in some areas responded well but in the US the record of this is very poor. It is far far better to spend weeks getting to meet the man in charge and then handle only his personal problems, and only then get into what his group is doing. A straight attack on groups is a waste of time.
Newspaper Stories, letters to editors, these are all more or less a liability and should be avoided.
Radio ads have produced results but only when accompanied by lectures on the subject. Radio spot ads are worthless.
Posters and billboards have produced now and then some very spectacular results. This depends on what they say. In the LA area a bunch of posters scattered around town once produced a very heavy attendance.
This has the advantage of being cheap.
General comment: What you are up against in disseminating Scientology is the generality of what we do. When you cover all of life and all living things you don’t have enough point of concentration for people in general to follow you. They get such hazy ideas of it all and life to them is wrapped in such covert obscurities that they don’t track with you, they just go into their engrams and know that whatever it is you’re talking about must be beyond them. To disseminate successfully you have to have an APPARENT goal that is understandable to the audience or person at his tone level and with which he will agree. Show him then something about himself and the battle is pretty well won. We try too often for a total effect on people and try to tell them everything there is in a single moment. The motto here is: Don’t try to overwhelm, just penetrate. If we attack with our eyes open we will guide this penetration just as we guide a session. We don’t try to sell Scientology then. We give an apparent and understandable goal of what we’re doing and then put the person or persons to whom we’re talking into a state of being interested in their own cases. The use of the Dianetic idea of the Reactive Mind is almost infallible. I once told a casual fellow passenger on a short train ride: „Say, did you hear about them isolating the freudian unconscious?“ I said this because he looked like a scholarly bloke. And he said, „No, who did that?“ And I said, „Oh, some scientists. “ And I said, „Yes, they found it was the sum of all man’s bad experiences and nothing more mysterious than that. “ And he said, „That’s interesting. “ And I said, „What was your last bad experience?“ and he said… Well, he was in session and called me up later. Another fellow I met on a bus. I said, „They’ve found the dynamic principle of existence and it’s about time. “ And he said, „What?“ and I said, „Yes, they know what makes a man tick now. “ It looked for a while like the machine would win and he said, „What was it?“ and I said, „The urge to survive. “ And he said, „Well I always thought it would be something like that. “ And I said, „I don’t know. Have you ever had the urge to succumb?“ and of course he was in session too, only I had to get off. I once tied up the whole US Senate lunch room with these remarks, and if you can get a senator to listen instead of talk, you’ve done something. Another time on a boat I said dreamily so a girl could overhear me: „I wonder if man really does have a soul?“ And she said, „Oh I don’t think so really, isn’t it all a lot of religious talk?“ And I said, „Try not to be three feet back of your head. “ Gave her an hour or two of processing and she’s still interested.
Don’t try to persuade. Penetrate. Don’t try to overwhelm. Penetrate. And even a newspaper reporter will fall in your lap. (The last one that came down to see what mud he could sling didn’t sling any because I showed him an E-Meter, told him not to say anything and then located, by asking questions which only the meter answered, his last car wreck, who was hurt and what part of his body was injured and how many years ago it was. Man, he looked at that E-Meter like he was a bird and it was a cobra. But he sailed off into a full run of the engram and I walked him through it three times until he had good somatics turned on, told him I wasn’t going to really put him in it because it would hurt, and ended the demonstration. He didn’t write any mud.)
Take an E-Meter to a boy scout meeting and watch the fun. Send notes to their parents when you found them in a bad way. Use an E-Meter as a dissemination weapon.
When you can do these things to people they know we know what we’re talking about. You don’t have to explain.
Don’t explain. Penetrate. Don’t overwhelm. Penetrate. And you’ll have HAS Co-Audit going in no time.
We are the first group on earth that knew what they were talking about. All right, sail in. The world’s ours. Own it.