COMMENTS ON CLAY TABLE TV DEMO
A lecture given on 4 November 1964

Thank you.
Well, you should give the first team, actually, some applause. Give them a hand. They were very good.
Well frankly, you know, I’m astonished and pleased. I’m very pleased. The Instructors have done a very beautiful job of relaying this.
Do you realize that both Clay Table Healing and Clay Table Processing—I mean Clay Table Clearing, alike, I have never demonstrated. And this was straight off the cuff and actually I’ve never coached anybody on this and just written up the bulletins and there it is and it’s going along very, very well. You can Attribute a lot of that, both to the excellence of your Instructors, which I think is very high and to the fact that I had studied how to write study materials before I did it. You know, the relay of the communication.
But that is—that’s one of the most reassuring things I’ve seen in a long time. Both of those sessions just went along pocketa—pocketa—pocketa. It’s a shame—it’s a shame now, that I have to—I have to groove them in nicely, but I just want to say that you got the word. And nothing I’m going to say now destroys that fact. We can make this a little bit better but oddly enough it has practically nothing to do with Clay Table that I’m going to mention with regard to these sessions. It has to do with basic auditing. And I have just seen something and recognized it and it becomes important.
I realized that what we had as repetitive auditing—repetitive auditing levels where you keep giving a command—which is now by the way HQS and it’s HCA too, of course. As you give the command, repetitively, over and over and over, that can be learned splendidly. That’s very fine. That can be learned very well. A person can get that down and they’ve gone a long way when they’ve gotten there.
Now having become able to duplicate—and you see, this is one of those things where after you know your business, why then you can do something else. Do you follow that? Because if you’re doing something else because you don’t know your business, why, watch it. Do you see? And those two points of somebody doing something else because he knows his business, you see, and somebody doing something else because he doesn’t know his business, is pretty wild.
For instance, I remember when Wilson was elected, there were a bunch of photographers and they were holding reflex cameras over their heads and shooting a picture of Wilson, don’t you see. Well, you could have immediately said, ”Well, these boys—these boys are—that’s pretty wild!” you know, and somebody who didn’t know anything about it could say, ”Well, I could hold my camera over my head and take a picture.” No, that takes a great deal of skill. That takes enormous amounts of skill. A reflex camera has a ground glass in the bottom of it. Well, you wouldn’t know that ordinarily. But these press photographers were so hot they could swing a camera over their head, look at the ground glass, get him in focus and fire him. And to the public at large it just looked like somebody was holding a camera over his head wildly, you know. It’s very interesting.
European photographer, he often takes pictures around corners with those things. And you know, that sort of thing. Well, it takes a fantastic amount of skill to hold a camera steady at arm’s length and that sort of thing. You see, the guy’d really have to know his business. I didn’t mean to get photography into this, but I’m trying to give you a frame of reference, see.
On the other hand, somebody who doesn’t know enough to look through the view finder, well that’s another story. So he holds a camera over his head to take a picture. Of course he never gets anything. And that’s the single test of it. Do you get what you start out for? Do you see?
So an expert is only interested in getting what he starts out for. Do you follow that? That is his aim. He wants to get what he starts out for. Now, he has to be pretty well trained as to the stylized or regular or very routine methods of getting what you start out for, see. He has to know that there is a way to get what you start out for, to get this end result. And he has to know for instance that you—you’ve got to compose and look through finders and ground glasses, don’t you see, in photography, see, in order to get a picture in the frame and so on; he’d have to know all these things, you see.
Well, now an auditor—that’s because we won on a study of photography, why I hope you’ll forgive my interjecting it as a comparative example here. But now, both of those sessions wound up, you see, with what the auditor started for. That made them competent sessions. That’s all that made them competent sessions. And there was just one point of the second session which demonstrated very conclusively that the auditor had gotten what he started out for. Regardless of how he was getting it, he’d gotten what he started out for.
All right, now did you recognize the point? What was it?
Audience: Cognition—pc cognition.
Yes, that’s right. Pc had a cognition. Pc said there’s a place from which to start. There’s a what’s—what old John Sanborn one time or another said, ”You know, I always liked—I always get worried when sometime or another a pc doesn’t say, ‘What do you know!’ or something like that once during a session, you know,” and he said, ”I get worried.” Well, he had good reason to be worried, because a pc who doesn’t ever have a ”What do you know,” he isn’t going anyplace. Well, in other words, something had illuminated there. Some new concept had occurred, some new view had taken place, see. All right, when that took place pc expressed it as a cognition.
So therefore, the auditor did get what he started out for, correct? All right, that was a successful session. Now, somebody at HAS level perhaps thinks that he can get what he starts out for by giving some kind of a covert session that nobody knows is happening and he’s going around the corners and he’s weaseling in and out and he got somebody to talk and so forth, and he thinks he’s going someplace and he’s often astonished to find out that he doesn’t wind up with a proper result. He went through the motions, you know, but of course he didn’t know what he was going for or why he was going or what would happen if he did get there. He doesn’t know whether he got a result or didn’t get a result, because he didn’t know what he was going for in the first place. Do you follow me?
Well, so he’d be in a confused mess all the way, wouldn’t he? And therefore he doesn’t even know there’s a method of going.
All right, now let’s take Levels I and II where the terrific amount of repetitive processing is done. Now, that gets ‘to be quite a drill and it’s an interesting drill and it’s very fine and it must be done and it very often is much better to do it just that way than any other way, and I myself very often sit down and give one of these gosh—awful grind sessions, you know, of the equivalent of ”Do birds fly’?” you know. Right straight on through to the bitter, brutal end of it and so forth, and the pc winds up at the other end and says, ”Hey! They do!” you know. And I say, ”Yes sir, all right, that’s fine.” But I recognize what I’m doing—recognize very clearly what I’m doing—that I’m giving a repetitive process. And there is a point between Level II and Level III that an auditor is not trained to bridge. You bridge from the purely repetitive process to the expert tap at the exact correct moment only. Do you follow?
Now, there’s a bridge point. So that you’d really—you’re being well trained in practical on Clay Table Healing, yes, that’s the way it’s done. That’s a good drill and that drill is right there. Now, when you know that drill perfectly, you can drop about sixty percent of it. How? Well, you don’t ask the person if they’re satisfied every time because that is the thing you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to wind up your eyeballs so that they throw a little line of sparks and flitter and observe the fact that the pc is confoundedly well satisfied that that is it. And then you never mention it. You follow me? Say yeah, he’s satisfied.
In other words, between II and III we start tuning it up. In the first place, the person’s case state has upped now to a point of where he can observe. Our old subject and brain—cracking word: ”obnosis.” The observation of the obvious. The ability to look at the obvious. And so at between II and III we expect that the auditor has taken this step—that he has gotten to a point where he can observe the obvious.
So when somebody ... You ask them, ”What should be near them?” you see, and he says—and he says, ”a cow.” He gives it to you, see, ”a cow,» you see. That should be near. Then we don’t ascertain a point which we have already ascertained by our obnosis. See, we don’t ascertain that point now, because we’ve ascertained it. There’s no doubt in his mind as to what went near it, it almost snapped your head off, see, ‘a cow!” you know. ”Well, of course!” you know, he might as well be saying. No, you know what you’re looking for is the, ”Well—a cow?” That’s what you’re looking for, you see? And then you say, ”Well now, are you perfectly satisfied that that is what should go near?”
”Well, as a matter of fact, I’m really not,” and so forth. ”There’s some sort of a bovine—uhh—something there—I know what it is. Milk!”
Now, at that point for God’s sakes don’t say, ”Are you satisfied that it’s milk?” don’t you see. You follow me? And that’s the only hole I can punch in that. But you see that the process is quite workable, even with the repetitive. I’m just teaching you the fine point. And you don’t keep punching along on something which is already established by your own observation. And along about Level II, why, we expect the person to begin to observe.
Now, the reason for that is very, very precise. It probably has never occurred to you entirely that point of view and power of choice are synonymous. They’re practically synonymous. If a person can occupy a viewpoint or a person can be a viewpoint, then he can observe. And observing, he can then choose. Because he is choosing out of observation always. Either the observation is past observation or it’s pure extrapolation, but he can still observe, you see.
Now, the detached person—the person that you run into that takes no responsibility for anything in life and that sort of thing—he isn’t where he is looking from. See, he’s detached. We use that word advisedly, you see. He’s detached from existence. He hasn’t got anything to do with it. Existence is up here, you see, and he’s sitting back, you know. ”Has nothing to do with me,” you know. You got the idea? But as you process somebody he starts moving back up into a viewpoint. And of course, just before a person exteriorizes or something like that he has to be able to accumulate his viewpoint very nicely. He has to be able to occupy a viewpoint at will, actually.
Therefore, that is raised on power of choice. What’s power of choice? You say, ”Well, what’s right and what’s wrong?” and the pc says, ”What’s right and what’s wrong? Oh, my God, don’t ask me a question like that.” Yeah, at some lower level, you know, ”Who knows?” you know? A Pontius Pilate reaction, you know. ”Who knows? I wouldn’t know. Who’s to say?” Well, you feel like saying to somebody like that, ”You’re to say.” You see?
Now, how would he say something about it? Well, he’d have to bring himself up to a point of what he was looking at and look at it and say whether it was right or wrong, according to his judgment and experience, don’t you see? So we ask him what is right or wrong. Why, this is very, very esoteric, this is far—flung and far away, you see. But the moment we can understand this by saying, ”About that,” or ”about an existing situation,” you see. We say, ”About this existing situation, what is it—what would be the right action, what would be the wrong action?” We can ask him something like that. Well, he has to swing himself into where he observes it.
And the whole course of processing is actually bringing somebody up to a higher and higher ability to view their existence and the existence around them in life and their mind from their point of view.
And when you first pick somebody up, he hasn’t even found himself or located himself or done anything. So that you can bring about the most magical change in a person’s life by just asking him where he is in the auditing room. It doesn’t sound like a process, don’t you see, it doesn’t sound like anything, but it’s a complete sneaker. You’ve asked him the very question which will take him all the way to the top. The type of question would take him all the way, you see. ”Where are you?” What do we stress in case analysis? ”Where are you?” See, find the pc, we say. See? Well, that pc, if we just sat there waiting for the auditor to find him and so forth, he’d remain pretty buttered all over the place. But the actual case of the matter is, is we’re asking the pc to find himself and we’ll give him a little bit of help with the meter, but there he is.
Now, I just got through running a session earlier today which was a very interesting session from my point of view because it didn’t have any process that I ever heard of connected with it. It was just me having observed that the pc was upset. Saw clearly that the pc did not respond to an explanation or a datum or a spotting of bypassed charge or anything of the sort, pc still upset, you understand. So I said well I’m getting—I’m not getting anyplace, so this pc must be mired down someplace. Must be obviously mired down in an end word, root word, something like this, don’t you see. And I’ll just try to get this out. And I put the pc on a meter and I got a big surge on one word and I was asking the pc what—I tried to get a flash answer, don’t you see. This is old stuff, you see. ”What word occurs to you when I snap my fingers?” you know, boy that’s really going back, you know. And said, ”Noth—nothing. Nothing. Didn’t get anything.”
”All right now, what word occurs to you when I snap my finger?” Repeated it, see.
”Oh! Oh, well, yeah, I got a word that time, that’s ‘survival,’ see, and the meter starts falling off the pin. The tone arm was way at the top of the meter, don’t you see. Well I was just trying to talk this meter down by finding out what end word was this pc sitting in. And that was my purpose, see. I don’t know what purpose the pc had. But we went on and with a bit of itsa and a bit of this and a bit of that, I get another word. Zooom! You see, a big surge. But the surge didn’t repeat when I said the word. Did it when the pc said it. Didn’t do it when the auditor said it. So therefore, it couldn’t be the word the pc was sitting in, because if it was the word the pc was sitting in, then, of course, my saying the word would cause the word to react. Do you follow me? But the pc saying the word—that was all the—the whole cause of the reaction, don’t you see. So therefore, I knew the pc wasn’t sitting in that word.
But anyhow, we’re getting charge off and we started getting tone arm action finally and the tone arm was going up and down madly and I wasn’t even running a list. Somebody else looking at it said, ”I wonder what this is, a listing session or what?” No, no, no this wasn’t anything. This was a sortout on—based on my observation of the pc.
Well, the pc finally bit some computation or another that the pc was perfectly satisfied with without a ”What do you know.” But I hadn’t found the end word the pc was sitting in. So I got the pc to talk some more, seeing if the end word would now fall out of the conversation. Using the words which I’d already gotten off of the pc. And then got the pc to state the whole thing as a problem, based on these words. The pc did state the problem, the end word occurred in the problem. It now, after all this time—you see, I knew the end words of the bank so I just—there it is, see. Hah! What do you know! The meter of course started going booooom and started blowing down and heat started coming off and so forth. Well, I’d reached my purpose as an auditor. See, that was it. And I wouldn’t have cared after that if the pc had gone on and itsaed for an hour or two or anything else, I knew we had it. So I almost—I didn’t interrupt the pc, but I waited for a pause and I said, ”All right, now, that’s the end word which has been thrown into restimulation in the last twenty—four hours. And that is what you have been worried about.”
”Oh, yes!” the pc said, ”that’s right! That’s right. It sure is! I’m sure glad to find that,” and so forth, and the pc would have gone on then. But I said, ”All right, how do you—you feeling all right now? Good, thank you very much. That’s the end of that assist,” and took the meter back—took the cans back.
And you would have said, ”That’s a very interesting looking session. Because it really didn’t look like any kind of a session. There was no listing.” But there was listing. But we’re trying to find a word but we didn’t have any word which would require the pc to give us a word, you got the idea? So what you were seeing—what you were seeing, was simply the camera held over the head—snap! Know the mechanics of the bank, ability to observe the pc, you follow this? Had a certain goal, knew more or less what it was, because of knowledge of the bank, steered the pc and knew then I was getting off locks.
So let those go off, but then used the locks to trail in against the end word and there it sat. Do you follow that?
You would have been surprised at the amount of charge that came off. Would you say in a fifteen minute assist or something like that there should be upwards to twenty divisions of TA? Well, there were in those fifteen minutes. And I don’t know how much TA came off afterwards, because I didn’t bother to find out. Don’t you see? I just ended the session. PC walks off still chattering about it. Not worried about what the pc—because undoubtedly pc walked off with a lot of tone arm action still going on. Well, let the pc cognite on their own time, see? You got the idea?
All right, now, let’s compare that kind of an approach. You know all the factors involved, you could do them all right, you know a dozen ways to do any of these things and you just go ahead and hit the meat of the situation, and clank! You see, right there. Session rather terrifically controlled, almost controlled right up to the stretching point of—well, if you’d controlled it much more you’d have blown the pc out of session, don’t you see. Right up to the point where the pc doesn’t blow and is still in—session, see. Makes for great speed of auditing. But the nice judgment it takes to audit at that brink—that’s pretty close to the edge, you see. You can hear rocks fall every once in a while.
All right, now there is one run you might say at upper Class VI, you see. And here’s this other session on a repetitive. Do you follow? Now actually the repetitive could never have done this other assist, of course, but the repetitive would have gotten a person quite a distance with the assistance of the exact routine being run. So nobody’s saying anything against repetitive auditing. I’m just saying the bridge between repetitive auditing and your beginning to be your own master is at II. From II to III. The upper II and lower III and in that zone you as an auditor should begin to master this point. Obnosis should start setting in right at that point. Your own determinism as a case should be pretty well up. You’re able to occupy a position as an auditor without a flinch, don’t you see. You can view the pc from where you are. Your power of choice over what you do should have risen considerably because of skill that you’ve developed on your lower levels.
And therefore, you start dropping out the parts of the session which are not essential to the—I’m not talking now about parts of the comm cycle or something like that, but parts of—you start dropping out things to do out of the session which are not essential at that moment to the progress of the pc. Do you follow that? And you don’t say, ”Are you satisfied? Are you satisfied?” Well, it’s obvious, see. You follow this?
So at Level III don’t make yourself a slave, don’t you see, and at the same time don’t omit so much you don’t make any progress. You see. What’s being asked or something. That’s why Clay Table is up at this point. You know, Clay Table requires comm cycle the like of which nothing else ever—ooh! You’ve really got to be an auditor to run Clay Table. You can foul up faster than scat. You just, get in there too obtrusive in the session, see, a little bit too obtrusive. A little mauling around too much. A little too much control, and so forth, and your pc is brrrr—plow! See, you’ve just pushed your pc right out of session, bang! You’ve got to be on the ball.
PC makes an origination—you don’t understand it. You haven’t got a clue. PC all of a sudden says in Clay Table Clearing, ”Well, I have just suddenly—suddenly got it here, I—I got this right straight. Fire engines don’t always have hoofs. And . . .” The auditor says, ”Okay.”
Now, there’s a certain rapport exists between an auditor and pc. And when the auditor doesn’t understand something and he says he does, he’s introduced a lie into the session which will not only hang him up but very often practically flips the pc. So this auditor because he is now trying to be so unobtrusive, doesn’t then get anything clarified.
Now, you’ve got to learn—now, let’s take the bridge between III and IV. At III and IV anybody can understand Clay Table Healing, see. You can understand these things. It doesn’t take much. You still have to ask once in awhile, ”What is that, something like that, but that doesn’t require a lot of you, see. But you get up into the esoterics—did you notice between the two sessions, which I repeat, were well run—that they were entirely different in the presentation of clay, see. That’s why they are two different processes at two different levels. And did you notice—what was probably not visible is what was being demanded of the auditor was far greater, even though the auditor appeared to be busier at III, what was being demanded of the auditor at IV was far greater. Because he had to be on the ball all the way and all of a sudden the fellow says, ”Well, fire engines don’t have hoofs. And I—that’s—I get that now. And this is a representation of a fire engine with no hoofs” and so forth. And the auditor says ”Okay. Okay.” Well, he doesn’t even have to make a face over it. The pc knows he hasn’t got it. And at that moment it all goes appetite over tin cup.
Now, I invite you some time to go on a very sound, solid program of. For some space of time take the people around you and every time you miss a word, make them clarify it. Don’t develop this as a Scientology occupational disease. I find it gets that way with me once in awhile. Every once in awhile now I’ll see a dispatch coming back with a circle around it, ”I didn’t get this word.” Very good! It’s very good. The guy’s got an order of which one word he doesn’t understand, ohh! That would be very, very weird, wouldn’t it? But, here’s a circled word, ”I didn’t understand this,” and so forth, so I just clarified it.
Now—but, go at it on this basis. I don’t care if it’s total strangers and the guy says, ”Gluff—wuff ” Say to him, ”Exactly what did you say. What did you say?” Don’t give it to him on the basis of you’re challenging what they said, but just clarify it, you know? And your first reaction is liable to be a little bit of a snap from this person, see? And just train yourself not to let the snap deter you. And ask again. ”Oh well, if you must know, I said so—and—so. That was what I said.” See. And this person may get the idea that you’re a little deaf, he may get the idea that you’re so forth, or that you’re inquisitive or—we don’t care what ideas he gets. But if you followed out that program, you would find something very strange would occur in your relationship with that person. That person will become much more friendly, much more confiding and much more relaxed in your vicinity.