Based on a lecture given on 21 April 1964 by Ron Hubbard. 6404C21 SHSpec-17 "Problems and Solutions".

There are some research rules and maxims that are separate from, but in a way senior to, the body of Clearing Technology. They have to do with how to figure things out. These maxims give the way of thinking and how you figure it all out. 

Every once in awhile, one of these maxims gives you a grip on existence. For instance, one maxim was, "Take a body of knowledge that has produced bad effects and bad results; you take it out, throw it away and pay no further attention to it. You can eventually round up the truth by elimination by this method. You use this all the time when analyzing cases. You see what didn't work, so you don't run the pc on that. The reverse rule doesn't happen to be workable. That would be, 'Something having been true in one instance' - that doesn't prove anything. That does not have any wide workability. Auditors who don't realize this get stuck in a win with some odd process or approach that worked with one pc, but had very limited workability and they wind up with failures. 

In doing research and solving cases one rule we used in classifying problems was:
"A problem is as complex as it presents potential solutions." A complex problem needs to be attacked in numerous ways to get resolved in other words. It is the number of solutions, not their complexity, that determines the complexity of a problem. This defeats the idea of producing a "one shot Clear"; meaning making a Clear with one simple process. It's a beautiful dream - but it remains a dream to be able to do that. This maxim tells us, it is not going to happen. Cases are too complex. There isn't one process that is going to take care of everything. There are too many things that has to be looked into and resolved.

The problem of government must be terribly complex since it has had many, many solutions. It is not that a big solution equals a big problem. It is that a complex problem equals many solutions. It has to be approached, looked upon and attacked and worked upon in numerous ways. 

This could be the situation that you are faced with when a pc doesn't respond well to processing. It could be that you have a complex case on your hands that will only be resolved by a number of processes - a complexity of processes, so to speak. If a person's problem in life has required many solutions, then it must be very complex and will require a number of processes, a complexity of processes to resolve. Simple solutions don't work on complex problems. You don't resolve all political problems by voting democratic.

There is another maxim: "A solution must be as complex as the potentials of the problem." In this context, 'potentials', means "threats along the dynamics", or threat to survival. Here, you are talking about a dangerous problem. For instance, a problem that has the potential of knocking out survival along various fronts is a big problem. You will get defeated if you offer a simple solution. If a person has a dangerous problem and you give him a simple solution, he will reject it. Problems that are simple don't become dangerous. Only complex ones do. They require complex solutions. If this were not the case, the person would have solved the problem already. A problem wouldn't be dangerous if the problem hadn't been allowed to develop and develop pretty far. 

The proper course of action in handling a problem is to find out all aspects of the problem that must be solved. There are bound to be some that are not apparent at first. Find out how many solutions will be needed. 

You could look it over by dynamics. The procedure is: 1. Get what the immediate pressure is. Indicate that there has to be a solution. 2. Get the situation sorted out into its component problems. Indicate the necessity for a solution for each.   This takes the confusion out of the situation. Just getting the guy to sort it out makes him feel better, because he can now at least see and confront the area better. Also, you have put the buffer of "solution needed" in front of every element of it. The pc will be half way handled just by that action. 

Then you can find solutions on a gradient. He could start gradiently to see which problem could be solved now. This makes Grade One a breeze, when it otherwise would be rough. The lower Grades 0-4 are rough to tackle because most people's problems are so big that they don't know they have them. They don't look at the importances in their vicinity at all! Beginning pc's are incapable of perceiving the relative importances of the threats surrounding them. Man is in such a bad condition because no solutions have been possible. 

Simple solutions to complex problems fail. As you go up the levels, it may appear that you are confronting more complex problems, but actually both problems and solutions become simpler as you go up the levels. As you go up, you are actually confronted with fewer problems and fewer demanded solutions. 

The psychologist and psychiatrist think that you go down through Man's psyche to the bottom. They are wrong. You are there. You have to go up, to heightened awareness. A person on his way up has to get more aware and develop new kinds of awareness of existence. His only route is up. Psychiatrists think that you have to go down in Man's psyche to get to rock-bottom motivations, etc., through three or four sub-conscious or sub-volitional layers. This is untrue. You don't go down in Man's psyche. You are already there. There isn't any hidden, deep motivation. All you have left is the individual, and he has his motivations. You have to go to higher levels. This fellow hasn't got an unconscious mind to be explored. He is unconscious. The psychiatrists are looking for the wrong thing. They are looking for the hidden depths below a guy's level of awareness. Those "deeper levels of unconsciousness" that they are looking for are sitting in the chair right in front of them. It is not in some secret places that are hidden. You can't get the individual further down, with drugs, etc., and learn anything. In order to discover anything about the individual you've got to make the individual more aware, not make him less aware, in order to find out more about him. 

A pc is his own soul. He doesn't have to find his soul. Psychiatrists are doing this: they are asking the engineer in a ship to help them find the engineer. And the engineer, having lost his identity and beingness, will willingly try to help out by looking around. But he is really being asked to look for himself. You are looking for Man's spirit, but he is the spirit. A thetan's increasing awareness of his beingness, his awareness of existence, and the problems and solutions of life are what make up the levels of processing, the Grades up to Clear. 

You could draw up the Grades just by asking people at various levels, "What is a problem to you?" If a person's awareness of his relationship to existence is increased, you can bring about a heightened condition of livingness, performance, ability, etc. And that is the only way to do it, regardless of claims for drug enlightenment or high performance on drugs.  Drugs reduce awareness. People can think that they perform better when drunk or drugged. That is because they are less aware of their condition. They simply become unable to see that they are performing worse.

The "logic" behind this way of thinking "if we became a little less conscious, we would be a lot better off" has been around since the beginning of this universe. The 'final solution to problems' has been to become unaware of them. The ultimate solution is the conviction, "I'm doing right," the assumption that whatever you are doing is the only right thing to do. 

So, if someone wants to improve himself he has two courses he can take: (1) To become more aware; or (2) to become less aware and hope that he doesn't get run over. The latter is treacherous. It is hoping that everything will be all right. Hope has replaced control, confront, awareness, and certainty. "I'll just forget about it and hope that it doesn't bother me. I'll become less aware," that is the idea. 

For instance, women in the 19th century fainted as a solution to anything they couldn't confront. This is worse than simply ignoring things. It is unawareness and unconsciousness as the solution. Something embarrassing is said or happening and any woman of good upbringing back then would simply pass out.

 People get somewhat terrified when you reverse the flow on them and get them to confront all the things of which they have become unaware. The trick of becoming unaware is that you never actually get there. This universe is a progress towards less and less awareness. It's the route to total sleep. But the trick is that it's so rigged that you never get to go to sleep entirely. The lower you go, the more problems you've got, because now even the small problems seem huge. Becoming unaware of the big problems brought about less power or force on the part of the thetan. It reduced his confront. So now he is less able to confront small problems; so the little problem now seems as big as the big problem seemed one stage back. It seems far more threatening. The power and threat of the big problem is now present in the smaller one. There was a bigger problem of the same type, that he had ceased to confront; say, the problem of a gale force wind. He became unaware of it almost on purpose; now he can confront only one of a slight wind. But the big problem of the gale force wind was full of terror; so now the breeze inherit that content and is full of terror. There is the trick of uncovering hidden memories. They got buried in order not to have to confront the big problem connected with them. Occasionally you can uncover hidden memories by trickery, and increase the pc's awareness slightly, and he will lose a little fear, but it doesn't improve his condition that much. He just shifts to another fear. All little fears are irrational and are based on bigger fears behind them, but hidden. You really need to increase his ability to confront as well. 

Freud pointed this mechanism out. "This happens because the individual solves the bigger fear by becoming less aware". You can find the bigger fear that caused the lesser fear. This is what Freud was looking for. He called it symptoms substitution. But you can also throw the pc into the bigger fear and overwhelm him by not bailing him out. You mustn't increase a person's awareness beyond his ability to confront. He has the choice either to cognite or to run away. He is very likely to just run away. That is why patients commit suicide in psycho-analysis, when they do. Don't process by reaching into the deeper states to find the fears that motivate this individual and just stick it in his face. His ability and confront has to come up. 

If you exteriorize a person without taking off the charge of why he was in his head, if you take him out of his head and make him confront problems that he had gone into his head to avoid and not to have to confront, you will find that now you can't get him out again, even with a can opener.  You can put someone into a higher level of awareness. He now becomes aware of the problems that he has not handled. This alone makes it necessary for him to progress by gradients. You will make it as long as you let him sit down for awhile and enjoy the view. He is a victim of self-created charge, great masses of it. When he gets more aware, he backs off from it. You have to take charge off by getting TA action. Plenty of TA action means his confront is getting up. That is what needs to happen to do real progress. Then he can easily move up to a new level of processes where he can get more charge off. It is not a spectacular activity. As the pc moves up the line, his problems look bigger, but only because he can see more.

"Reduce the complexity of the problem by reducing yesterday's solutions." 

This is the key to processing. A person at Grade One has dangerous problems and must have complex solutions. How do we get around all this? The old solution is what he is sick from. The old solutions of yesteryear became this year's problems. It is this endless chain of  cures that calls for new cures that call for more drastic cures and so on. It is no use to try to solve somebody's problems for him. So we aren't trying to give people solutions. The basic error that made a problem is the most fundamental part of that problem; and that can be As-is-ed, because of the chain of solutions. As an auditor, you are not giving the pc new solutions for his life and livingness. You are taking out of existence old solutions, which now exist in the form of problems. You're As-is-ing what has been solved in the past and caused the person to become more unaware. You're As-is-ing old problems. You are As-is-ing past solutions. You are backtracking the process by going the way he came down. Running solutions is running yesterday's problems. You are taking out the old think that made him drop doing and confronting and become unaware. 

On many processes  you are backing the pc through yesterday's problems by getting his solutions (note: going 'earlier similar', as on rudiments, uses a similar principle). If you run such a thing as a problem, you are running it below its proper level of awareness. Here is the trick: A problem, by definition, is something that you can't confront, and a solution is a way by which you don't have to confront something. So your effort to handle the problem is to solve it, and if the way in which you solve it is to become less aware of it, you have moved into lower awareness levels. So you have pc looking at yesterday's solutions. Whether you are running problems or solutions, you are actually running solutions. When you ask for problems, you are asking for something that the pc couldn't confront. When you ask for solutions, you are asking for something that the pc could confront. Running problems requires you to confront only the pc's no-confront. Therefore, you don't run problems. You run solutions, which actually really are problems, but which can be confronted. It's the difference between running no-confront and confront.  You are actually running the same thing, but from a different point of view. If you call them problems, then you are saying the individual couldn't confront them. If you call them solutions, then you are saying he could confront them. 

So when you run solutions, you get rid of the problems that he sets up to avoid confronting things by backtracking his solutions. When you do this, the pc becomes more aware and more capable of confronting, up to the point where he can confront the problems that made him decide to become unaware in the first place; and he finds that those, in turn, were solutions, so he finds out what it was a solution for, etc., and he is all set to move on out to freedom. 

This principle holds true all the way up. You will find Bank structures that were very complex solutions, which must have had complex problems behind them. The main problem was an unwillingness to confront. So you don't ask the pc to confront it all at once. You do it gradiently. That is why the levels are there. They are there on the basis that the individual, at any given time, is at his lowest level of awareness. You bring him up from there, not down. You reduce the complexity of the problem by reducing yesterday's solutions. You've got to walk him back up into further awareness for him to hold his ground in the environment he has now entered. That is how to process someone. That is why a manic sometimes turns on, where the pc gets boosted up a bit too high for him at a particular time. So realize that you have to get off all the charge that stops the individual from confronting the problems that he has. This is happening when you have TA action. It takes lots of TA action to get the pc up to comfortably confront at a new level. The most complex being you will confront is the lowest-level pc. If you reduce the complexity of the problem by As-is-ing yesterday's complex solutions, you can get charge off, and the pc can act better now, because his awareness level came up. When you first ask for a datum you won't get it, but you will get off charge. Then, when you ask for the datum again, since you have gotten charge off the area, you will get it. This is how processing works. The road into this universe is a step by step of greater unawareness, and the road out is a step by step of greater awareness. He got himself into trouble by solving himself into trouble.

There are no lower levels of awareness for you to explore. There are only upper levels. The road out is not spectacular. You take the pc out via the road he came in:  step by step you undo the unawareness that he developed.