I want to talk to you now about group auditing.
A group auditor is one who stands in front, sits in front of, or relays by some voicecanning system to a group (and a group consists of two or more people), and audits them so as to improve their condition of beingness as thetans. That's a full, complete definition of a group auditor.
If he's standing there to improve their condition, he will of course do his group auditing well. If he's simply auditing, he might do something too, because mechanics will carry forward a great distance. But if he really wants to make people well, cheerful, better, put them up into an operative band, change their condition, make the able more able and so forth, he recognizes as he audits a group that he's auditing a number of preclears, and he's auditing them collectively and individually all at one time. And a good group auditor recognizes that this is not unlike driving one of these twenty-mule teams. It's a trick.
So, some people are good group auditors. They recognize it and they don't flinch and they can do it. And some stand up in front of the room and give auditing commands, but you'd hardly call them a group auditor.
Now, what are the conditions under which group auditing is best done?
So this would include, under a subhead, the fact that people don't come late to a group auditing session. Those people don't come to a group auditing session. You understand that?
I mean, there's no such thing as coming late to a group auditing session. A group auditor who knows his business simply follows that as a rule. He doesn't let people come late. They just don't come. When they get there, they will find the next group auditing session is next Thursday (which fact it might announce on the door or something of the sort). He impresses this upon his people and upon his group, that people mustn't come stumbling in fifteen or twenty minutes after the group auditing starts, fall over a couple of chairs, fall over a couple of preclears, drop a couple of ashtrays, step on a couple of ashtrays and then drop their pocketbook, upset the chair, nudge the fellow in front of him so they can say "Excuse me," and in other words, interrupt the session.
Do you know what can happen by reason of that? You might have somebody sitting there in the back of the room where these people came in and sat down, who was just at that moment getting into something that was pretty darn hard to handle, and he was having to wrestle it with [by] himself. You were there helping him as a group auditor, true, and your next command would have a tendency to straighten this out. But this individual has started to flounder. And all of a sudden somebody comes in and helps him out by falling all over him. This introduces an automaticity into the environment which is not conducive to that case improvement.
So a group auditor is somebody who starts case improvement, and that's not conducive to case improvement. So the group auditor has a code all of his own, which happens to be the Auditor's Code. But the Group Auditor's Code has some more to it. And amongst those things is people don't ever come late to a group auditing session.
Another thing is that he doesn't audit — just to give you a few other little items on this code — with processes which establish long comm lags. He avoids processes which do this on individual preclears. If he knows that a certain process produces a long comm lag on individual preclears here and there, he certainly avoids it in auditing a group. He audits primarily with techniques which will discover every person in the group alert at the end of an hour's processing. And that certainly doesn't include anything that'll give somebody a twenty-twohour comm lag.
Now, another one in that same bracket is he must be willing to grant beingness to the group. He isn't a lion tamer sitting up there with a bunch of lions about to pounce upon him. He is somebody who is standing up in front of a group willing to grant beingness to that group. And as he grants beingness to the group, so the group recovers. If he is willing to grant beingness to a group, a great many things immediately fall into line, and these follow.
He gives his commands in a clear, distinct voice. And if he notices that people at some part of the room or another look at him suddenly after he's given the command, or look at him questioningly, he simply repeats the command for the whole group. In other words his mission is to get that command through and registered.
He recognizes and must recognize that the people to whom he is talking in this group are not an audience. They are a number of people who are in a greater or lesser degree involved in recognizing, looking at or resolving problems relating to their beingness, and as such, of course, they are slightly out of communication with him. And so he must recognize this, just as he has to in an individual session. He has to give his commands clearly, distinctly and get an answer.
In a group auditing session he doesn't have the answer. He doesn't get that answer that says "Yes, I've got that," "Yes, I've finished that," and so forth. Therefore, he must do all of his auditing on such a basis that it obviates those answers. You see, he says this and he's not going to get a reply from his preclear, and so he must therefore take enormous precautions — actually very exaggerated precautions — to make sure that every word he says is clearly registered to the most anaten person in the entire group. They're registered.
He must also be careful to give his commands in such a way as not to give a number of failures to one or more individuals in the group.
For instance, he says, "Now, get a place where you are not. Now just contact that place."
And he shouldn't give another, contradictory command until he's sure that everybodyin the group has found at least one place where he is not.
Now, let's take an example of that. He says, "Give me a place where you are not."
And he waits for a moment and several people in the group already have spotted this place with accuracy.
So he says, "Get one place certainly, and then some more."
You see? Now, what he's done is take those five, six, eight people in the group who did not find that one place right now, right away, and he let it be all right for them to go on and comm lag on it, you see? And still made it all right for the remainder of the group to go on and find some other places.
Now, one doesn't have to have a stylized patter in order to do this, but that happens to be a very stylized patter — "Get one place, one place for sure, and get that place, now. All right. And when you've got that one place, get some more. Get some more places." You see?
Now, if he's willing to grant beingness to the group, he'll be heard all the way through the group, and if he's not willing to grant beingness to the group, he won't be heard all the way through the group.
Furthermore, if he's not willing to grant beingness to the group, he will find himself willy-nilly shifting processes halfway through. He suddenly decides he'd better run something else. He'd better run something tricky. He'd better run something that's very stunty.
You know, I mean, "Oh, let's see. Now, we were doing all right. We were spotting the walls of the room." And we were doing Group Opening Procedure which, given in the Group Auditor's Handbook, is a very precise process. It was figured out as an opening procedure for a group, and he's got that going fairly well, and he's just got that well started and he decides "Well, let's shift off to some Duplication by Attention." "All right. Look at the right wall." "Look at the left wall." "Look at the right wall." "Look at the left wall." "Look at the right wall." "Look at the left wall."
"I don't know. That doesn't seem to be getting very far. Let's see, what really should we do?" "Well, fix your attention very, very solidly on the front wall and just look at it." "Well, that's fine." "Fix your attention on the front wall, now, and look at it." "Now look at it." "Now let's pretend it isn't there. Let's pretend the front wall isn't there, and let's mock up something in its place."
The group by this time is getting sort of restless, you know? What's basically the trouble here? Is it the fact that the man doesn't know what he's doing? Well, it could be, to some slight degree. But why doesn't he know what he's doing? Every single one of those commands and the theory behind it can be found in the publications of the HASI. What's he doing not knowing what he's doing?
Well, I'll tell you what he's doing. He's trying not to grant beingness to that group. And there'll be people in that group who are worried about granting beingness to the group and allthese people getting well and improving and becoming thetans and flying around and demonically attacking people and "You shouldn't make everybody free like that, you know?" And these people will step on ashtrays, upset chairs, come late, get up in the middle of the group session and open and close windows, open and close doors. And then we discover, of course, that they don't want to have beingness granted to them. But, particularly, they're worried about the group session going on with this individual granting all that beingness to all these people and improving all these people. And if all these people improved, why, goodness knows what would happen-something horrible would happen, competition would get too high or something of the sort. But something dreadful would occur. That's the computation that's running on when bad auditing commands are used. And don't ever think otherwise.
No, don't say, "Well, he just doesn't know," or something of the sort. Every one of Homo sapiens, individualized the way he is to an "only one" complex, and so forth, has some facet of his beingness which is refusing to grant beingness. Every man alive has it to some degree, otherwise he'd never have a game or a contest. There's always the other side. He isn't going to grant any beingness to the Princeton football team — that sort of thing, you know?
And when you exaggerate this consistently and continually, you'll get somebody who doesn't want to have any beingness granted to anybody anywhere. And so, before he does some group auditing, he won't bother to read over the way you do it. You see? And if he does, he'll do something else. And he won't study up his subject, he won't look over his people and he won't audit in such a way as to make them well.
And you'll find, by the way, that his group sessions will not be well attended. A group auditor's group sessions cannot be anything but well attended. And they will be continuously well attended, and they will increase in their attendance to the degree that the individual is willing to grant beingness to people. In other words, do a good job.
Now, that's the long and short of it and that's a very uncompromising statement. And you can tell me there are a lot of things which mitigate this statement, but I'll argue you out of them. The truth of the matter is that it comes down just to this business of granting beingness. He will or he won't.
Now, can that be remedied with him? Yes, when he has a little more freedom. Just the standard auditing sessions which are given in the Group Auditor 's Handbook will bring him up to a point where he will grant more beingness to people. It will do this.
You could run it just as a straight process, as a group session. "Let's grant some beingness to the front wall and some beingness to the back wall." And so you could do this if you wanted to. But again this is too much significance in the process.
The reason he's not granting beingness is because he himself is enchained and enslaved, and he feels himself attacked to some degree by the environment, and you've got to get him up to a point where he has a little more operating margin in his survival. And if he has a little more survival margin, and so forth, he's willing to let somebody else survive. He begins to treat survival as a commodity.
There's only five quarts of it in the world, and he's darned if anybody's going to get any part of those five quarts, because he knows he needs it all himself. Now, there you can tell immediately a good auditor and a bad auditor. So there is a case computation at the bottom of group auditing, isn't there? An individual who is afraid of effort is a good mark of that.
Now, people recognize that instinctively, that a fear of effort, an unwillingness to put out energy or effort and so forth, is right there along with "bad off," "won't grant beingness," "got to slow other people down too."
So we have a group auditor who sits down, who puts his feet on a desk and audits a group? Oh, no, we don't. The group won't get well, won't recover, won't do anything. Why?
They'll sit there and run the commands, because they've heard that Scientology is a good thing. But they say, "This guy, this guy doesn't care. He isn't interested." There is no necromancy involved here. We don't have a beam of energy coming out from the group auditor, settling over like a little star over the head of every person. That is not the case in point.
But there's another case in point. There's the simple matter of duplication of a communication. Why do people recognize this rather instinctively, that a person doesn't care and so forth, if he hasn't any energy or effort?
Well, here's this individual; he seems to have some vitality. If he's got some vitality, the communication line has as its source point, vitality. And whatever it's got as its effect point at the beginning, it will at least wind up at the end of it with vitality. If you've ever talked to somebody for a while in a rather bored tone of voice, you have found them after a while getting kind of bored. Well, this is just Q and A.
Have you ever listened to somebody who was very electrifying, a William Jennings Bryan sort of a speaker? I mean, boy, pound and howl and beat and so forth. Look at an audience that has been talked to this way: they're aroused — see, they definitely are aroused. The man didn't say anything logical at all anytime during the time he was talking, and yet just simply the fact that they're duplicating a speaker who seems to have some vitality comes on through to the audience and gives them some vitality. But does it give them some vitality or do they simply duplicate that vitality? They just duplicate it, that's all.
Now, a group auditor could sit down, you see, and talk to the group. As a matter of fact — and this is a very dangerous point to tell anybody — that actually brings about a little bit better duplication, because the audience is sitting down. But if he is sitting down, for heaven's sakes, think of how much, now, his voice has to do. He can't depend on anything else to do anything for him. Everything he does must be contained in his voice. Everything he does must be contained in his voice; everything he thinks must be contained in his voice.
"Oh, my goodness," you say, "this then requires an actor."
Yep. If you're not willing to be various things and if you can't be various things at will, you actually haven't even got any business auditing. Why?
Because you're trying to keep things from being. And the first person you're trying to keep from being is you. And if you're trying to keep you from being to any marked degree, you will, on a duplication basis, more or less re-stimulate this fact: on the other end of the line you'll keep others from being. You see that?
So a group auditor could sit down. That would make a good physical duplication. But if he does, think of the vitality that has to go into his voice. The audience has got to become even more aware of the command line.
It isn't really absolutely necessary that a group auditor sit down. I mean, this is very far from it. As a matter of fact, the best results I have ever gotten in group auditing session was actually walking up and down in front of an audience and picking them out every now and then — singly, you know? "Did you get that all right?" You know? And so on. And the audience tone just starts up. And then the fact that they're doing drills which are just dynamite, of course will just practically lift them right straight out of their heads.
I think one of the last broad group auditing sessions I did, I got a report on it afterwards. I came away from a mike and was simply talking to the crowd, and I was really trying to do something for the cases, and so forth. I was quite interested because it was getting on down toward the end of a series of group sessions. And I got the report afterwards, and there were more people exteriorized during that particular session than in any other single session.
Well, here I was feeling more alive and I was feeling more interested and I was feeling more urgent about what was going on, and that in itself was communicating, and it was communicating very strongly.
A group auditor who has no wish to have anything happen will be disappointed. If he sits there and reads the commands in a flat, dull, dead voice out of the Group Auditor's Handbook to a crowd of people, he will get some results. This we've tested out — tested out. We took the worst group auditor you ever saw or ever heard, and took this group auditor and gave him some commands that were not too well written, and we sent him out to audit somebody. And he goes, "Well, I've got some commands here now. I've got some commands. Uh… let's see, uh… uh… let's see… Uh… Hum… Uh… look at the front of the room. Uh… It says here… Let's see… Uh… Uh… look at the right wall."
This guy still got some results. So what we're doing with processes is fabulous.
And in view of the fact that we have the Group Auditor's Handbook and all of these various sessions which go with it… And by the way, the best sessions we have for group auditing are in the Group Auditor's Handbook. The results on the part of people will come up just if they're read in that fashion. So the operating margin we have to improve here is the auditor, isn't it?
Now he, then, becomes the variable. So that we could take four separate groups with four separate auditors running the same — let's just say Session One in the Group Auditor's Handbook — and we would find that the most animated, most alive, most willing auditor there, who was the most interested in his audience, would produce the highest tone rise on his people, because that's the bonus we're operating on.
And the others, if we just left that factor out, they'd all improve equally. But we do add that factor and we get a considerable jump in our people in that group.
So there's something to know about group auditing, isn't there? And the most that you can know about group auditing is this: If you're afraid of a crowd, you won't want to grant beingness to them, because that's why you're afraid of them. You're sure that they're liable to interrupt you; you're sure they're liable to jump over the seats and attack you or something. If you're in that frame of mind toward a group, you will not be heard clearly through the group. You will have a tendency to change techniques, and your attention hunger will probably cause you to drop ashtrays, lose the place and do other things.
Now, what is this thing called — if we're going into this auditor, then — what is this thing called stage fright, and how could a person resolve stage fright?
Well, the crudest way he could resolve it is simply by some kind of mock-up. You know, just do mock-ups on being scared to death and the audience jumping him and so forth. Well, that's a very crude way to do stage fright — very, very crude way to do it.
The best way to cure stage fright is to walk up on a stage before a vast number of people and do your best, and after you've done it a few times you will recognize that this is an asisness, this condition, and generally everything connected with it, the strain and so forth, will blow. You just recognize clearly that you're under strain when you talk to this audience. You're just under strain. "So? So what? So I'm under strain when I talk to the audience," and you won't be.
All it is, is fear of what you will do, that you might do something unpredicted or something strange might occur. And after you've done it a few times, you discover that no strange things occur, that you get away with it every time, and you become quite accomplished.
Now, there's something else that you could do — there's something else definitely that you could do to improve your capabilities as a group auditor. And that's beingness! You could just practice beingness. Yeah, you could be actors and be therapists and be swamis and be this kind of thing and be that kind of thing, and just work on it, on this kind of a gradient scale, until you have got the idea you could be anything. You could have this run on you, you seeprocessing. And it will cure stage fright too, because a person with stage fright is being somebody who has stage fright. That's all there is to it, you see? It's just an as-is — Q and A.
All right. The whole subject of group auditing then involves itself, today, not so much with a knowledge of technique, but it involves itself with a stage presence on the part of the group auditor and his command over the group itself. If he's willing for the group to get well, they'll get well; if he's interested in whether they get well, they will; if he's interested in having a group, he'll have one.
It's a very odd thing, but the very best auditors we have now have no real difficulty in collecting groups. If they're really good auditors, they have no real difficulty in collecting groups. So I don't know where all the scarcity of groups — where this idea came from unless it came from the same source as bad auditing. You know, the individual who is having a rough time.
Now, you can't have a feeling of embarrassment towards your fellow man actually and walk up to him on the street and say things to him, you know, and ask him to come places or sell him things or anything else. As long as you have an embarrassment toward somebody, or toward men, you'll have difficulty collecting a group or running a group or anything of this sort.
Well, what is this quantity called embarrassment? It is a matter of exhibition. Here we have appearance and disappearance as a dichotomy, you see, and a group auditor is somebody who has to be willing to appear. And if he's been compulsively made to appear many, many times against his will… One of his mother's favorite phrases might have been "Look at you. There you are, dirty from head to foot, and I just cleaned you up. Look at you. Look at you. Look at — you're appearing, you little swine." Some gentle upbringing of this character will tend to promote embarrassment. But you shouldn't go looking for embarrassment into deepseated significances.
The embarrassment is, the fellow is there kind of apologizing for his presence and trying to disappear at the same time. That's the as-isness of embarrassment, and that's just an asisness. We don't care where it came from, see? He's apologizing.
So, one of the first things you could do is simply, don't apologize for your presence. You might expect people to apologize for theirs, but don't you apologize for yours. You're here and their hard luck, they're there too — or their good luck that they're there. But if a fellow is in real good shape, why, this is the sort of an atmosphere that goes around a group session. He says, "I'm here and you're right there and I'm real glad to see you. And you're sitting there and that's awful unlucky for you if you're sick, because you're going to get well. And you could come in and not run any of the commands at all and sit down and you'll get well, naturally — I mean, that's a matter of course.
"I'm sorry you've got some things to be ashamed of, but you know I haven't got a single one. I can remember back down the track just as far as I can reach and all the women I've ruined and everything else. Well, you're just jealous, because you couldn't have ruined that many women."
And in other words, "Here I am and here we go and everything's fine," and so forth. Just a fairly calm atmosphere rather than an excited, ecstatic atmosphere. But even an excited, ecstatic atmosphere or a swami atmosphere or an Aimee Semple McPherson atmosphere is better than somebody standing there saying, "You know, I'm… I'm… I'm sorry I'm up here visible."
So the best way to get into the groove of group auditing is get your case in good shape just exactly as you would get your case into good shape — just with standard processing. Nothing peculiar, nothing slanted, nothing odd or unusual run on it, just it gets in good shape. You're a little freer, and as you become freer, then you are more competent to let yourself appear.
And the other, that goes right along with that and is not at all dependent on you getting your case in good shape, is the fact that you just go on making public appearances and group auditing people with this postulate: "Everybody's glad to see me. They're very happy to hear me talk, and I'm here and I know at the same time I'm scared to death and that's the as-isness of it, so what? But I'm putting on a good show, anyhow." And the next thing you know, why, all of that is gone. All that feeling of strain and tension and everything is gone, and you'll go on and give group sessions.
But you give sessions to people to make them well, not to be somebody standing on a stage running off a set of words.
You have reason, purpose and meaning in what you are doing and consider it a personal affront if somebody in this group did not immediately get entirely well after a couple hours' processing. That's a personal affront, and you treat it as such when they tell you about it. "You mean, you've come to one of my sessions and not gotten well? Humph! Well, I'll let you come to another one, but don't pull this again."
Okay.