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... educational technology, now mainly to be found on the Study Tapes.
A Clay Table is any platform at 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....
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.
Large classes should have several clay tables.
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....
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.......
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 student and his 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....
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... 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 demonstrate in clay 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.
Any part of the mind can be represented by a piece of clay and a label. 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.
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Everything is labeled 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....
The procedure should go - student makes one object, labels it, makes another object, labels it, makes a third object and puts a label on it and so on in sequence.
If a student makes all the masses of his demonstration at once, without labeling them, he is sitting there with all those significances stacking up in his mind instead of putting down each one (in the form of a label) as he goes.
The correct procedure is label each mass as you go along.
The size of the demo can be important.
A clay demo should be rather large. (One or two inches high is usually inadequate.) Large demos help to increase the student’s reality on what he is demonstrating. More reality means more affinity and communication and therefore more understanding.
The clay demonstration must show that the student’s understanding of the materials being demonstrated is present. The clay shows the thing, not the labels or the imagination. If a student’s clay demonstration isn’t correctly done or doesn’t show what is to be demonstrated it must be flunked with reference to the material. In such case, the student must be referred to the correct Bulletin, Policy, Book or Tape reference from the materials of the course. Another student’s demo is never referred to or used as an example.
Clay is messy. Until we find or unless we find a totally non-oily clay, precautions must be taken to keep students clean, and if not clean, cleaned up afterwards. Therefore the course administrator can provide liberal quantities of cheap cleaning tissues and odourless solvent.
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.
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.