Covered in this HCO Bulletin are:

1. The Construction of Clay Tables.

2. Clay Table use in Training.

3. Clay Table Definition Training.

4. Clay Table Use in the HGC.

5. Clay Table Healing.

6. Clay Table IQ Processing.

The only reason any student is slow or blows lies in failure to understand the words used in his or her training.

You will find that students at any level in any course will benefit greatly from Clay Table work on definitions.

The importance of this will become apparent as you study our new educational technology, now mainly to be found on the tapes of the few weeks before this date.

A Clay Table is any platform on which a student, standing or sitting, can work comfortably. In an Academy it may be 3 feet by 3 feet or 5 feet by 3 feet or any larger size. Smaller sizes are not useful. In the HGC it is about 2½ feet by 4 feet.

The surface must be smooth. A table built of rough timber will serve but the top surface where the work is done should be oilcloth or linoleum. Otherwise the clay sticks to it and it cannot be cleaned and will soon lead to an inability to see clearly what is being done because it is stained with clay leavings.

In the Academy castors (wheels) can be put on the legs of both the clay table and the clay container where they will be moved a lot.

Several different colours of clay should be procured. The best source is a school supply house where educational supplies are sold. Artists’ clay is not as good as the school type. (Ask for kindergarten clay.)

A receptacle, also of wood or metal and having a separate stand of its own of any type is also valuable. It should have subdivisions in it for the different coloured clays.

The amount of each colour is not important so long as there is at least a pound or two of each colour in a small class or an auditing room.

In the Academy colours are only used to make a student see the difference between one object and another and have no other significance as the objects in the mind are not uniformly coloured. While “ridges” are black, they can become white. Engrams may be a number of colours all in one engram, just as Technicolor is a coloured motion picture. However, some persons see engrams only in black and white. So the colour in the Academy is for instruction only, assisting to tell the difference between one object or another. (In the HGC it may be very significant to the pc, as covered later.)

The instructor works with the table before classes at times, so it is of benefit to have a table so arranged that it will tilt toward the class at about a 30° angle with the floor. This can be done as easily as putting the back legs of the table on temporary wooden blocks or as complicatedly as using a large engineer’s drawing table which tilts its whole top. If a table is to tilt, the lower edge during the tilt must have a one or two inch guard board to keep the covering or the clay from falling to the floor if it slips. It doesn’t slip, usually, on a linoleum table surface but sometimes a bit is dropped and an instructor can more gracefully recover it if it hasn’t rolled off on the floor. A loose linoleum top is also prevented from sliding off by a guard board.

Any part of the mind can be represented by a piece of clay or a white card. The mass parts are done by clay, the significance or thought parts by label.

A piece of clay and a label are usually both used for any part of the mind. A thin-edged ring of clay with a large hole in it is usually used to signify a pure significance.

The labels used by Instructors (but not by students) are done on white cards, inked with a heavy black inking means such as a china marking pencil or a “GemMarker” where a metal cylinder holds ink and the point is made of felt. The inked label is mounted on a small stick two to four inches long of the kind used by nurses for swabs or metal ones used to hold meat together. Scotch tape or Sellotape will bind a label to a stick.

Everything is labelled that is made on the clay table, no matter how crude the label is. Students usually do labels with scraps of paper written on with a ball-point. An Instructor would use the fancier kind so that these would easily be visible to others.

The main clay table and its clay container is set up in the lecture room of a course in such a way so that it can be moved up in front of a class, or over in the corner out of the way, or to an area in the room where two or three students can gather around it or work. More than one clay table must be made for large classes but the additional tables need not tilt. In the HGC a clay table is narrower and longer and one is placed in each auditing room. Any HGC clay table can be used to train staff auditors. The clay tables in auditing rooms are used for processing. In the HGC there is not just one table for everyone’s use. There is one in each auditing room.

Any part of the mind or any term in Scientology can be demonstrated on a Clay Table.

This is an important point to grasp. The use of the table is not just for a few terms. It can be used for all definitions.

The ingenuity of the instructor or the student and their understanding of the terms being demonstrated are the only limits on a Clay Table.

Simplicity is the keynote. Nothing is too insignificant or unimportant to demonstrate on a clay table. The first mistake is to believe that only R6, for which the lower grade student is not ready, can be demonstrated on a clay table.

Anything can be so demonstrated if you work at it. And just by working on how to demonstrate it or make it into clay and labels brings about renewed understanding.

In the phrase “how do I represent it in clay” is contained the secret of the teaching. If one can represent it in clay one understands it. If one can’t, one really doesn’t understand what it is. So clay and labels work only if the term or things are truly understood. And working them out in clay brings about an understanding of them.

Therefore one can predict that the clay table will be most used in a practice or organization which understands the most and will be least used in an organization that understands the least (and is least successful).

Let us look over the level of simplicity of the terms to be used in a course of instruction.

Let us take BODY. All right, make a few lumps and call it a body and put a sign on it “BODY”.

Now that doesn’t seem to be much to do. But it is a lot to do to forward understanding.

Let us make a yellow ring of clay beside the body or on it or in it and label it “A Thetan”.

We can thereupon see the relationship between the two most used terms in Scientology, “Body” and “Thetan”. And cognitions will result. The student’s attention is brought right to the room and the subject.

Getting the student to do this by himself, even when he’s seen it done by the Instructor, produces a new result. Getting the student to do it 25 times with his own hands almost exteriorizes him. Getting the student to contrive how it can be done better in clay or how many ways it can be done in clay drives home the whole idea of the location of the thetan in the body.

ART is no object in clay table work. The forms are crude.

Take a large lump of clay of any colour, and cover up both “thetan” and “body” with it and you have MIND.

Take every part of the mind and make it in clay by making a thetan, making a body and making one or more parts of the mind (Machine, facsimile, ridge, engram, lock, what have you — all Scientology terms) and get the student to explain what it is and we begin to clarify what we’re about.

Get a student to make a Present Time Problem. Make him put in all its parts represented in clay (boss, mother, self) and have each one done with a body, a thetan and a mind and some rather remarkable insights begin to occur.

The quantity of things that can be made has no limit.

The principal thing is to get every Scientology term made in clay and labels by the individual student.

You will see a new era dawn in training. You will see Academy blows vanish and time on course cut to one fifth in many instances. These are desirable attainments in any course so Clay Table work is serious Academy business.

Ingenuity and understanding are the only limits on the use of the clay table and the attainment of excellent results with it.

The Clay Table presents us with a new series of processes.

The preclear is made to make in clay and labels whatever he or she is currently worried about or hasn’t understood in life.

Scientology terms such as the Present Time Problem can also be graphed but this is a specialized (if very beneficial) use.

But the essence of Clay Table Processing is to get the pc to work it out.

In training you mostly tell the student.

In auditing the pc tells the auditor.

This is still true in clay table processing.

The preclear shows the auditor the objects and significances of his difficulty.

Example: Pc has a continual pain in the right leg. A perfectly ordinary clay table and clay container as above are used but the table is narrower and longer than a training clay table. The auditor seats the pc on one side of the table and the auditor sits on the other side. There is no meter between them. The auditor report is kept on a side table or the auditing table nearby not on the clay table. The container is handy to the pc and contains several colours of clay. The pc under the auditor’s direction but with no coaching as to how then makes the leg of any colour the pc chooses and a label “my right leg” and puts it on the clay leg. This done, the auditor asks the pc to say what should go near the leg. The pc then makes it crudely and rapidly in clay (again of any colour the pc chooses) and makes a label for it and puts it on the new object. The auditor wants to know what else should be near the leg. The pc says what and makes it in clay and labels it. Usually the pc chooses colours which are significant to him or her but which in fact need have no significance to the auditor.

Under the auditor’s brief questioning or voluntarily the pc tells the auditor all about each and every object he or she makes as it is made and labelled.

The full auditing comm cycle is observed but the auditor acknowledges more often than he or she commands.

The representation in mass and label form and the pc’s explanation of each mass and label as made constitute the valuable actions. The pc can put aside or re-use the clay of objects already made, but not the leg, which must remain.

If this is done well, and completely, the pc’s right leg will alter in condition.

You could assign several words to this activity to explain it. You could call it “symbolism” or “healing by projection of one’s troubles into mass”. You could call it “remedy by duplication”. But you really don’t have to explain it with a new term, because it works. This type of healing is very old. In fact it is the first recorded effective healing recorded in the dawn of man. But when we add to it what we really know of the mind, when we add to it the auditing comm cycle, when we use it with the pc telling the auditor, not the practitioner telling the pc, we move into zones of healing never dreamed of before.

This is in fact one of the new healing processes I have been promising levels I to IV. Its name is Clay Table Healing.

The pc’s havingness stays up while the significance comes off, which is a chief value.

IQ (intelligence quotient or the relative brightness of the individual) can be rocketed out of sight with HGC use of a clay table.

This is another process than Clay Table Healing. Don’t mix them.

This is done with the following steps:

1. Find out where the pc is trying to get brighter. It won’t do any good to try to make the pc brighter in fields or zones of knowledge where the pc doesn’t know he or she is stupid. So it is of great interest to find out where the pc is trying to become smarter and then using only that subject. If you as the auditor select the zone, it has been inferred that the pc is stupid in the area the auditor chooses and usually you get an ARC Break even if it doesn’t show in the session. So choose a zone of knowledge where the pc is striving to become more informed and the process works.

2. Trace back (with no meter) what word or term the pc failed to grasp in the subject chosen in 1. above. Trace one word, early in that training that the pc didn’t understand. (Never ask for the first word — merely an early one.)

3. Get the pc to make up the mass represented by the word in clay and any related masses. Get them all labelled and explained.

4. Repeat 2 and 3, (but not Step 1 until Step 1 is flat).

The process for any one subject can be considered flat when the pc is alert and interested in the subject of 1. It may take several sessions to flatten Step 1.

Once one subject has been straightened up and pc is bright about it we get Step 5 which consists of doing 1, 2 and 3 again, rather than just 2 and 3. But flatten Step I before finding a new subject or the pc will be just as confused as ever.

Clay Table IQ Processing is a clay table version of one of the new educational processes. If the clay table version is used don’t use the other Itsa or Meter versions. If the other Itsa or Meter versions are used, don’t use the clay table version. This is called, for purposes of reference, Clay Table IQ Processing. That is different than Clay Table Definition Training. And it is different than Meter Definition Processing. And different also from Coffee Shop Definition Processing. All these are different activities and the others named will be issued in due course. Suffice at this time to cover Clay Table Definition Processing. It is fantastic in producing results and in raising IQ.

In all clay table processing the pc handles the mass. The auditor does not suggest subjects or colours or forms. The auditor just finds out what should be made and tells the pc to do it in clay and labels. And keeps calling for related objects to be done in clay (“Do it in clay,” is the phrase. Avoid using “Make it,” because it’s a GPM word.)

A good clay table auditor takes it very easy, is very interested, acknowledges when it is expected, is very sure to understand what it is and why, and lets the pc do the work.

It is particularly important that the auditor grasp what the clay objects are and what the label means. An auditor tends to blow or become critical of the pc when the auditor glosses over his own understanding of what the pc is making and why. So when the auditor understands perfectly he or she simply acknowledges and when the auditor doesn’t understand completely, he or she asks and asks until he or she does understand. The auditor never asks a question “so the pc understands” when the auditor already does, as this makes a false ARC in the session.

Clay is messy. Until we find or unless we find a totally non-oily clay, precautions must be taken to keep students and particularly pcs clean, and if not clean, cleaned up afterwards.

Clay can get on E-Meter cans and insulate them from the hands. Clay can get on clothes and papers and walls and doors in a most alarming way.

Therefore, students and pcs using it can provide smocks for themselves and the instructor and auditor can provide liberal quantities of cheap cleaning tissue and solvent.

Several cheap solvents work. The least odorous and easiest handled are best. Odorous solvents should be guarded against as Academies, HGCs and private practice rooms will soon begin to smell like cleaning shops or mortuaries. This can become serious in restimulating pcs. So use odourless solvents.

And provide baskets for used cleaning tissues. And empty them.

The clinging quality of clay and the odour of bad solvents could put an end to the great value of Clay Table work. So safeguard against this.

Good hunting.