I really ought to talk to you as professional auditors on the subject of demonstration processing. It has no relationship, beyond some of the patter, with actual processing.

If you were a theater audience, I would be very happy to pick a screamer out of the crowd and have him bouncing all over the couch for you.

What you are doing is trying to put on a show. You want a Roman circus. You go up in front of a crowd of people who know nothing about Dianetics, and if you can feed somebody to the lions for them, they say, “That Dianetics is really something!” Then you take the preclear out and put him out of his misery! So, if you want to put on a stage demonstration before a group, put on a show.

Now, if you want to put on a demonstration to give people the idea of how you process, that is something else. But if you are working with a group that is new to Dianetics or very poorly indoctrinated, get a screamer; get somebody who will put on a big ruckus, something spectacular — a lot of noise, confusion, rolling up in a ball with blood spurting from both ears — and your crowd will go away perfectly satisfied!

Give them an orderly, accurate, perfect demonstration and they will go away bored. They don’t want it.

If you process for a group of people who are co-auditing, just to show them how, by all means show them how honestly. But if you start processing in front of an auditorium or a bunch of psychiatrists or down at Sing Sing or someplace and you want these people to get the idea that they ought to study Dianetics or they ought to look into it, knock a couple of rafters apart. Then they say, “That stuff has really got horsepower!”

In Oakland, for instance, there were three psychiatrists in a crowd where I worked on a young lady. She had never seen Mama and Papa and she was potentially a screamer. I ran her down the track, I picked up some incidents where she would be a little bit live, I showed her Mama and Papa and brought her up into, evidently, Mama’s death or something — the most horrible piece of bank I ever ran into — and it was a high C ! You could see the plaster coming off the walls of that theater. That was very interesting.

Three psychiatrists went away convinced there must be something in Dianetics, because they had had this girl as a patient and they had never been able to achieve any release of affect with her (by that they mean tears or a release of emotion — a sudden emotional upsurge). She had been under treatment for years by three separate psychiatrists and they were sitting there in the audience. She screamed, she wept, she moaned, she groaned, she busted a couple of springs in the couch, and when they went away they were happy. Then we took the preclear off the stage, somehow or other patched up the case a little bit and glued a couple of arms back on!

That is something you really ought to know about demonstrations. Showmanship commands utterly that you tie into the case and get a good solid bang out of it, and then your audience will alert and they will be interested. But as far as routine processing is concerned, if you just do that it is awfully tame. The person is liable to lose a chronic somatic or something — just routine.

See Research and Discovery Series Volume 4, the lecture entitled “Running a Secondary,” for the demonstration session mentioned here.