


THE GPM

[From the modern clearsound BC cassettes - not checked
against the old reels]

SHSBC-253 rennumbered 282, 28 Mar 63 The GPM

A lecture given on 28 March 1963

*[Editor's note: The diagrams mentioned by Ron in this
lecture can be found in HCOB 2 April 1963, DIAGRAMS
ILLUSTRATING TAPE OF 28 MARCH 1963, Technical Bulletins
Volume VII.] [Fz Ed Note - also in FZ Tech Vol for 1963]


How are you today? This is the 28th of March, AD 13. I
don't have any messages here saying any of you people have
gone Clear or anything like that here today. I guess you
must be all slowing down, huh?

Well, it's getting towards the end of the week. Spring's
here. That's it - spring. You're suffering from spring
fever.

We have a new arrangement here today. We've got a - I got a
board here I can draw you some pictures on and it's about
time, because if you can't get it verbally you can always
get it through pictures, huh?"

All right. Now, let's see. Want to talk to you today about
the GPM - the GPM. The composition of the GPM - the GPMs -
and the composition of any single GPM actually marvelously
enough can be found in Dianetics: The Modern Science of
Mental Health in the description of how an engram is
formed. And we're right back to basics. Every time we've
had anything that was true and anything that was very
useful and usable to us, it is traced back, oddly enough,
to the dynamic principle of existence is to survive. That
is the primary take-off point, to survive.

And of course, the oddity of that problem is, how can a
thetan be so fixated on the effort to survive when actually
he can't do anything else. And that is his basic problem.
His basic problem is he can't do anything else and
therefore he works at it.

Truthfully, some thetan worries about will he get through
or will he make it. He worries about that in processing.
Well, I've been wrapped around a few telegraph poles myself
in processing, pioneering the way, as you very often are.
Pioneers fall into ice crevasses and that sort of thing.
I've had my share of ice crevasses.

But the basic problem here is that you haven't got any
other place to go. That's something for you to remember.
That's something to keep in mind.

Some pc says, "I don't know whether I should be processed
or not. Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha." Huh! That's silly. That's a silly
thing. "Whether I should be processed or not."

Well, you see, he in actual fact hasn't got any choice in
the matter. He's definitely in trouble. He may tell you he
isn't, but he is. And he's trying very hard to survive.

There one time after I wrote the first book I thought there
was a dichotomy here. And I thought that it was succumb was
the opposite to survive. And it isn't. There isn't any. The
trap of this universe is you can't quit.

Now, we've had - we've had a student who arrived over here
and he isn't a student, really and he's been playing
footsies with the idea that maybe he shouldn't go on
course. He thinks maybe he ought to quit. Did you ever try
to quit? Let me tell you something. You can't. It's not
possible to quit. You'll always rise up again and try again
because there isn't anything else you can do.

Now, if you digest that basic datum, "How can a man quit?" - 
you go back on the track and what do you find? You find he's 
still trying to fight this battle. He has not been able to quit.

You go back a hundred thousand years and he's still trying to 
play the game of knighthood was in flower. Only right now
he's still trying to play this game. He wants to be a gentleman 
or he wants to treat the ladies nicely or something of that sort. 
What's this impulse stem from? He's still trying. Well, this 
game's been over for ages.

In fact the first game of this nature I know is about a
hundred trillion years ago. And there's another sort of
knighthood-in-flower game earlier on the track than that
even. And he hasn't ever quit. Oh, become degraded, become
miserable, become bogged down; but he never quit. He can't!
Even though he says, "Well, I quit. Well, that's it."

Well, let's take a businessman. And the government
officials are all over the shop and all day and all night,
every day and so forth, and the tax people and the
licensing board and the food surveyors and the this and
that-a's, and he's always mixed up in some way or another,
and he just can't get the help to go on. And after a while,
why, he says, "Well, the hell with it, I'll quit."
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Let him try, let him try.

You know you always can pick up such a person a few months
later, and you can ask him whether or not they should have
quit. Well, you see, they've had to work twice as hard,
because all the papers that had to be filed have now got to
be refiled and so forth. And a bankruptcy or something like
this is the most overworked activity you can possibly
engage in. People come around and they say, "Well, how
about this tin of sardines that you didn't sign a receipt
for in 1952?" He says, "1952, tin of sardines. Were we even
in the sardine business back then?"

"Oh, well, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, you'll have to
figure that out," and so forth. He can't quit.

You take a box fighter. He has been in there shifting
around in the ring and he's gotten himself well up toward
the championship, and so on. And then one fine day, why, he
loses a fight, so he says, "I'll quit, I'll quit." Only he
hasn't got any finance with which to quit. And here he is
fooling around trying to quit and he has a few minor fights
so he can have enough money to quit, you know. And he has a
few other fights so that he can have enough money to quit.
Eventually, here he is a sparring partner, you see, for
five dollars to go three minutes, or something like that.
And he hasn't been able to quit there and eventually there
he is walking around in the street with the birds going
tweet, tweet, tweet on every side of him, still trying to
quit the fight game.

These fellows who quit the war are all very interesting to
me. They quit the war. They stopped fighting the war. They
stopped, and by God they're still in the war.

Every place a thetan has ever been, he is still trying to be, 
or trying not to be. But as far as an absolute succumb, this 
he cannot obtain. And his basic problem on the track is that 
he can't quit. I say that very advisedly, he is not permitted 
to quit.

I remember one time pulling a gag on the stellar
organization. There's an organization they used to have.
You know, they used to have ships on the sea before they
had missiles. You probably wouldn't remember that; it's a
long time ago. And they had these ships and they went
around and shot at each other, that sort of thing.
Interesting game. And I finallv worked out how to be left
alone. I decided I was tired. And day after day, why, I
just laid down on the job. I was on a base and I didn't
care anything about it, and so forth. And - why, I really
got reamed out, I was supposed to be in there every morning
and read that bulletin board and that sort of thing. I
found out about as close as you can come to quitting and I
said... This commander - I mean, he had gold lace and all
sorts of things - and he says to me, he says, "You're
supposed to be here every morning. You're supposed to read
that bulletin board. You're supposed to go out here and
muster oh-oh-ah-rruoww, you know, rocks and shoals, perils
of the sea." And I looked at him and I said, "Oh,
Commander, it's been a long war."

"Oh," he says, "you can't talk like that. You can't talk
like that. Oh, come on now. Well, we can find an easy
billet for you and so forth, and be a good boy and so
forth, and you can't just quit, you know." And God, after
that, why, anything I wanted on the base they let me have
because they thought I was about to quit. So all life
actually conspires to keep people in there pitching.

Now, a thetan exteriorizes out of some mangled body that
has unfortunately got in the road of some scientific
achievement and he gets out of the skull and he looks
around and he says, "I've quit." Well, he may have quit,
but what are you and I doing as auditors finding this guy
still exteriorizing, and still trying to quit. I don't care
whether - if it was a hundred trillion years ago or
otherwise; we find the engram of him doing that. Isn't that
interesting?

Now, engrams - engrams are there to provide methods of
survival - methods of survival. There's a long discussion of
this in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
He's long since found out that he can't quit so he adapts
methods of survival. And these methods of survival are
quite interesting. He learns lessons which he
instantaneously applies. The one thing he finds out is that
life permits him no time to confront. If he were given
unlimited time to confront, he could then work out any
situation he is likely to encounter. Do you see that? You
know that with a reality? If you just had time to confront
everything in your environment you would then be able to
get yourself enough familiarity with it, in order to handle
it.

Well, the one thing which this universe and life omits in
the platter of goodies they give you - the one thing they
omit - is enough time to confront. That's the main
thing - enough time to confront. That's the whole crux of
the situation.

Lacking enough time to confront you have to develop
instantaneous reaction. Gradually the individual becomes
convinced that he no longer has time to confront, so
therefore he builds a house which will instantaneously
react on given stimuli.

Here's the way this works. Fish swims into an area which
has a yellow sand floor and gets bitten. So he just solves
the whole problem of being bitten - he hopes, since he can't
solve the problem; he didn't have an opportunity to confront
it, and he just never seems to get around to having enough
time to confront being bitten - that every time he gets over
a yellow sand floor he goes away. That is his solution to
the problem. Yellow sand floors are dangerous so you don't
stay around them, you leave. So he has this engram and he
keeps this engram up so that if he doesn't leave over a
yellow sand floor, if he doesn't leave, he experiences the 
pain of being bitten. So when he experiences this pain he is
reminded that he had better leave, so he gets out of there.

You see that mechanism. That's an engramic mechanism. Then
he develops a crazy jerry-rig-built house whereby when he
sees a certain stimuli he then replies with a certain
response. And you've got a stimulus-response mechanism
which is built in in the form of engrams.

Father speaks loudly: drop food on floor. Well, it's a good
answer. It sure shut the old man up. He stopped talking
about that, didn't he? Huh? So there's a whole little
series of pictures here that go along with this and they
operate as a stimulus-response basis. It's all survival
mechanism. It may not look that way, but it is.

Remember all the data of the service facsimile? The service
facsimile was one the fellow used to get out of trouble.
This is how he operated. Well, it was very useful, very
useful. By observing a certain stimuli he recognizes danger
may be present. Lacking the time to adequately confront
that danger, he is now placed in a situation by the engram
of reacting in some way or feeling the pain of former
accidents.

In other words, he sees the stimuli and he gets the
response. And he either executes the response or he forces
himself instantaneously to execute the response by
inflicting upon himself pain - pain, unconsciousness,
something like this. There's always - these things are
infinite in the number of ways they can be worked out. This
is all discussed in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental
Health.

Well now, what's this got to do with the GPMs, or a GPM?
Well, we're dealing with the engram on a very easily
recognized and recognizable level. But the engram is hardly
a lock on to an item in the GPM. Every single item in a GPM
is to some degree active and the RIs are compulsively
active and they all have the same purpose. When confronted
by a certain situation, the thing to do in order to survive
is the terminal RI. When confronted by the oppterm RI one
then assumes the terminal RI. This is survival. One knows
what to do.

When confronted with too many loud voices one becomes - or
when confronted by a hostile audience, one becomes a
cabaret singer. That's the dictates of the RIs.

Well, what about this goal? Well, a thetan was going along
minding his own business and he finally found out he
couldn't trust himself. That is always the common
denominator of the formulation of any pattern such as a
GPM, an engram or anything else. The lesson he learns is
that he cannot trust himself. He did not have enough time
to confront, so therefore he could not properly react.
That's elementary. He found out that his efforts in some
direction became nullified through an incompetence in
himself.

Well now, it's slightly more gruesome than this. That's his
first determination before he enters these things. But
before he enters that, there's a slightly earlier one. And
that is he gets the idea of possession and protection. This
is compounded later by using things to create an effect
with. But early on he is simply trying to protect what he
has. And he protects what he has and eventually he has areas
as a thetan, you know, like King of the Wood, talked about
in Frazer's Golden Bough, so on. He plays this game of King
of the Wood and he's protecting the wood, don't you see?
And somebody comes along and decides to cut down the wood
and he protects the wood.

He's playing a game there of havingness, and havingness is
an integral portion of this. And then he finds out he can't
trust himself to protect the woods, so he fixes up an automatic
mechanism. When confronted with an axman, he becomes a storm, 
something like that. Oppterm, axman; terminal, storm. All right.
That's a solution to the situation and he'll put it into
effect. He knows that he won't have enough time to confront
the situation and analyze it. He's lost trust in himself as
an analytical mechanism. He has made mistakes is what he
has done, so then he no longer can quite be himself. In
other words, he can only continue to be himself as long as
he had a reliance upon his own judgment and upon his
ability to protect things which he considered his.

Those are the mechanisms on which he is operating. And when
he finds out that he cannot trust.himself, he has made a
mistake. He then, as a being, himself, a thetan, tends to
degrade and tends to become some other thing. And these,
then, are repeated over and over with - that is to say, his
disasters are repeated over and over with consecutive
removals.

Here you have the individual himself, right here. Now, here
he is. And as himself he is being perfectly happy here,
he's - so on - got a nice halo and so on. He's just a happy
thetan and he's not bothering anybody particularly - so on.
Somebody comes along and they say to him, "That halo looks
silly." And he says, "Well, it's worn by all the very best
saints," and so forth. And they say, "It's still silly."

And he says, "Well," he says, "I'm - I'm - got a perfect
right. I have a perfect right to wear this halo." And he
gets mixed up in a glare fight of some kind or another and
so on. And instead of being himself, here, totally capable
of having a halo or not halo, he becomes fixedly - he
becomes fixedly an identity: a thetan with a halo
confronted by a critic. So a critic; here appears a critic.
When confronted by a critic he becomes a thetan with a
halo.

Now, he's had some wins this way, don't you see? He's had
some wins this way. He finally manages to spread the word
around that thetans with halos are actually - are actually
the chosen of the big thetan. And the critics are actually
daring the wrath of the big thetan if they criticize
thetans with halos. He's had to then adapt a secondary
thing over here which is an imagined force or an imagined
power.

But, he's now an identity. That's an item. He's no longer,
actually - feels safe as just himself. See, he's protecting
the havingness of the halo and he is (quote) a thetan with
a halo (unquote).

Well, that'd be some kind of a way backtrack sort of a
glare fight area thing and we wouldn't have any GPMs yet.
But he finds out through many encounters of this character,
he finds out that, eventually, that he had better have a
purpose in life. And that is about the first identity that
he assumes that he never really gets rid of. And the common
denominator of all thetans who have ceased to trust
themselves is a thetan with a purpose. It is easier to
survive with a purpose, he thinks, and he's got this all
worked out, but he's always a thetan with a purpose.
Therefore he never becomes himself. He never becomes
himself. He's always a thetan with a purpose.

What is this purpose? Well, it's any postulated action
which he feels will get him out of the trouble he's been
in. That is his purpose. And one of these purposes is
characterized just that way. It's a postulated purpose
which will get him out of the trouble which he has been in.

Now, I covered that briefly. I said here he was, and one
day he mocked up a halo and somebody - somebody criticized
it and so forth. Well eventually - eventually, he will have a
goal "to be godly." He's now a thetan, not only with a
halo, but he'll have a purpose.

Of course, this is way back. Later on he gets this idea of
having a purpose, and he'd better have a purpose or else.
That's the thing, to have a purpose or else. So he
says - about the time he adopts God here - he says "to be
holy" or "to be a holy person" or something of that sort.

Well, "to be holy," this is perfectly all right. There's
nothing wrong with this, but in the process of "to be holy"
he starts out as a thetan with a purpose. There he is, he's
a thetan with a purpose. All right. That's fine.

Now, what's his next action? Is to assert the purpose. He's
doing this all for survival, don't you see? He's already
learned the lesson that he can't trust himself. He's
already learned the lesson that he had better protect
things and he's already learned the lesson that the real
way to survive is to have a purpose. So here he is, thetan
with a purpose.

Now let's take our next progressive action here and he
isn't a thetan who has a purpose, he's a thetan who is a
purpose. Now, this we just have as the stated purpose.
This'll just be the purpose here "to be holy." But this, by
the way, will be an all-dominating thing, and he'll call
this the goal "to be holy." Now, this becomes the thing,
you see. That's becoming more - more important than he is.
And now let's take it one more stage - one more stage
here - and we've got a purpose and then we also have him as
somebody. "Somebody with the goal to be holy" or "somebody
who wanted to be holy," something like this, and we get the
first three stages of evolution of a goal.

First it's just the goal. You see, it - all by itself, it's
just the stated postulate. And then the postulate gets a
little more massy and becomes, "the goal to..." And then
gets a little more massy, "somebody with the goal to..."
you see. And that succeeds in every case. There is no
variation from this.

Now, he goes further than that. And as he goes up the line
here, he eventually finds himself in a very fine state of
affairs. Let's take it the way you find it.

Here's a purpose and over here some kind of a provocation
and here is the goal, stated as the goal - purpose, you
know; "the goal to..." That has some kind of an opposition.
And then over here, here is, "somebody with the goal to..."
and more opposition. And then, so on, and then so on, and
then here he Is, his terminal lines, don't you see. Well, a
lot of these things - but when we look this over we find out
that he is down here, he's down here, and that's just the
stated purpose. And then it becomes "the goal to ..." and
then "somebody with the goal to..." And now look, if this
is holy, this will be "a holy person," see? The purpose is 
now getting more and more massive, don't you see? It's 
interiorizing more and more.

In other words, the more he conflicts with these things
over here - these opposition terminals which are the
difficulties he finds in life - the more he conflicts with
these things, why, the more massive he himself becomes and
then of course conflicts with something else and then the
more massive he becomes, and then he conflicts with
something else and the more massive he becomes. He
conflicts with something else, don't you see? And then to
assert that he becomes more massive like this, and there he
goes, you see. Rather fascinating the way this thing winds
itself up along the line.

In other words, he's asserting this same thing based on the
fact that he can't trust himself, based on the fact that he
wants to protect or defend something or to survive in
general, and based also on the fact that he can't quit.

Now, he gets up the line here and - well, "a holy person,"
you see. And now he's liable to go into some postulate
character like this. He's "being holy." You see? He can't
quite be a "holy person," but he's "being holy."

Well, that's fine, that's fine. Now, what's our - what's our
evolution up here at the top, as we get into the top of
this thing? Here he is "being holy," and what he's
confronting here, what he's confronting, you see, is
"critics" was the first one, you see. And then "critical
people" was the next one. And when we get up here, why,
we'd say "sneering, overwhelming people." And then over
here, see, this is "being holy" - in sequence to the other
one that we just had - this is "being holy." And over here
are "critical church people.

Oooh, what's this? Well, his purpose is beginning to cross
over here, don't you see. Is - he's getting a cross-over
purpose. So he's-now he's got, "critical church people,"
you see. Waah, what's this? Golly, he's now fighting,
"critical church people," so what you resist you tend to
become. And he gets up here and he's got here a new
identity which is a crusader. Well, that's not quite a holy
man, you know, that's somebody who fights.

And over here - over here he's got, "religious bishops who
excommunicate, or "excommunicators" or something of the
sort. And now as we go on up he finallv gets to these top
terminals and here you have him being "a critical thetan."
That's "a critical thetan," see, and then over here what do
we find? We find "holy people." You see the evolution of
what he did there, see. And here we have "a critical
thetan."

Now, what have we got? What are we looking at? We're
looking at the bottom-to-the-top proposition. We're looking
at a situation here where the individual is being called on
to defend mass. He postulates himself new identities in
order to do this. He can't trust himself, so he has to
postulate these new identities to keep it going. And of
course he starts in fighting critics and he gradually
mingles his identity until the whole thing crosses over and
changes over.

Well, what do you know? This is still a survival situation,
just as the bottom of the thing was a survival situation.

How did you handle a critic? That was his problem. And he
solved it by becoming a holy person and he winds up here
fighting holy people.

Now, there is the course of existence as far as he's
concerned. To some degree he becomes these too, don't you
see? So he's less and less his goal, and more and more the
enemy becomes his goal.

Now, you ask, in running off goals you say, "All right" - 
here's oppterms - "What would be the goal of holy people?" 
See? And he'd say "to be holy." Bang, and you'd get the 
thetan's goal. You ask, "What would be the goal of a critical 
thetan?" He'd say "to be critical." And it won't check out 
because that's actually the goal of the oppterm throughout.

Now, this is very interesting. These things contain... I
haven't drawn the complete number of items which are
actually to be found in one of these GPMs, whatever it is,
twenty, thirty, forty. And it all takes - how long it takes
them to graduate, you see. And here he goes right up to the
top.

Now, when he gets here he's gota new problem, he's got a
new problem. He no longer considers this a survival
activity. This he doesn't like. It's a violation of his own
purposes. So he has to do something new, and this becomes
extremely important to him.

Here's the bottom of one of these - here's the same two that
you just saw. Here's "holy people" - right here, and here's
a "critical thetan." This game is worn out. This game is
worn out. The old game, you see, that's gone. That's gone.
He's not got anything more to do with this.

How do you get out of a spot like that? How do you get out
of a spot of being "a critical thetan?" Well, you do it by
postulating - you go into a sort of a blank area and you say, 
"I'm completely lost now. I haven't got a goal. It's all gone." 
Get into this blank area - you've still got, however, over 
here, "holy people."

How do you handle these dogs? Not as a "critical thetan,"
that's all unsuccessful and he feels pretty degraded. No,
he's got to postulate a new goal. A new goal has got to be
postulated here which handles these "holy people."

How are you going to postulate this goal? Well, you just up
and postulate it. But you see postulating and insisting
upon is quite interesting. You don't just sit off - you've
got - probably got an idea of a thetan sitting off in space,
in the blackness of space saying, "Oh, I think I will
postulate a goal. Yes,'to be a good boy.' Yes, that's what
I'll do. All right. Now, that's postulated." No, man, that
isn't the way that goal is postulated. That goal is
postulated something on this order, see: He says, "It's
gone. I just feel like the devil, you know. And
everything's gone to pieces here. And these confounded
'holy people.' God! What are you going to do about them?
There's only one thing that would work, I'm sure, only one
thing that would work, only one thing that would work.
Haarrrrrrrr! To be a devil. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. That would
work. Yes, yes, yes. I think... I think I'll try it out
tentatively."

"Well, how are you today father? You probably don't
recognize me. I'm a devil. Oh, holy people say, "Eeek! God
almighty."

"Oh," he says, "that's terrific." He says, "That'll handle
them." So he says, "To be a devil. All right, that'll
handle it. To be a devil. To be a devil. To be a devil. To
be a devil. I'm going to be a devil, a devil. I'm going to
be a devil. Now, you got that now. You hear me now. Me, you
Fznow. Listen! I'm going to be a devil, a devil, a devil.
Rrrr-rrr. I'm going to be a devil, I've got to concentrate
on that, you see. To be a devil, that's the thing to be.
Brrrrr." Finally - finally, "That's pretty good, you know,
that's pretty good, and it handles this. There, it handled
it." And he finds he's now the enemy of "good people.

He's got a new enemy. He handled these "holy people" but
now all the "good people" in the community turn on him as a
man and they say, "Oh, oh. He's a devil. Ho-ho-ho." And he
recognizes these are good people so he begins to detest
good people. So he dramatizes this one. And of course he
has to become the goal to be a devil and he runs into
self-righteous people, and then of course he has to be much
more - more mass involved in the thing. And he's got to say,
"I am somebody who is a somebody with the goal to be a
devil. That's who I am. I'm somebody with a goal to be a
devil, who else I am, that - that's me, somebody with the
goal to be a devil. I mustn't forget that." And of course
runs square into "inquisitors." And there we go again. And
what does he finally wind up at the top of the next bank?
(Just amputating this.) Winds up at the top of the next
bank "devilish people - a good thetan." You see how this
goes? It's his effort to survive. You don't even have to
mild it up to the point of saying, "the effort to have a
game." You understand? It is frankly, very correct, that at
the bottom of this bank it is a violent effort to survive.
He's finished. He's absolutely finished at this point. He's
a critical thetan. He hates himself. He is faced by holy
people; he can't stand that. It's an intolerable pair, so
he postulates himself a brand-new goal.

Now, how come thetans do this? How come they do this time
after time after time with such great regularity? How do
they do this? Why do they always do the same thing? Well,
they are faced with exactly the same problems.

The problems are identical. You have the problems of this
universe; you have the problems of formulation of MEST and
mass, matter, energy, space and time; you have the thetan's
effort to cope with this situation; you have a common
denominator that he actually can't quit; you have a common
denominator that he will wind up not being able to trust
himself; you have the common denominator that he inevitably
will try to protect some of this MEST and as a result he
winds up with the identical solutions.

And it actually rattles off on a whole set of axioms. These
axioms are unwritten at the moment, but they are a whole
set of axioms like the MEST universe axioms. And they
consist of now-I'm-supposed-to's or laws. And he actually
forms his GPM by law. And that law is all agreed upon
and - at any time that it's this and that. Actually they are
very simple laws and they are based on the very elements
which I gave you earlier in the lecture.

Now, that's how that GPM parades. To some degree, you see,
each time, he becomes "holy people." To some degree he
becomes here, "good people." To some degree he becomes, in
each case, the opposition terminal. So when he's finally
through - when he's finally through this mess and mass and
potpourri - we have you, and actually have me. And when we
start going on the backtrack, what do we run into? We run
into the top of the bank (or we should), and we find the
thetan in his most degraded form opposing an exalted
opposition terminal. And then by opposition we go on down
through and we finally come down to the bottom and in every
case you find somebody with the goal "to be a devil."
Some - you'll find somebody with the goal to be a devil or
somebody who wanted to be a devil. You'll find in every
case an item down here which will be "the goal to be a
devil." In every case you will find right here "to be a
devil." That's inevitable.

Over here you get variation. This is variety at the bottom
of the bank. You say, "Well, listing these things out, if
the pc knew they were there he could simply put them on the
list." Yes, pcs who know they are there put them on the
list. But the trick is just this - if you're not overlisting
madly - the one that belongs in the position will fire.

Let us say at this position of the bank we've got an item
here, "a devilish fellow," see. This is this item here,
that's "a devilish fellow." All right. And the pc says,
"Well, let's get down to the bottom of this thing and get
the show on the road and let's put 'to be a devil' on the
list," see. Well, he'll also, of course, list "a devilish
fellow," and he'll list two or three other things. And
he'll also list "to be a devil." And it won't fire. What'll
fire on your short list is "a devilish fellow."

All right. Very well and good. Our next action in here when
we come down, the pc says, "Well, I - I - I know what this
would be. I know what this would be, this is obviously
somebody or something who wanted to be a devil. That's
obviously that." So he puts that and two or three other
things on the list. And if he, at that same time put on the
"goal to be a devil," and "to be a devil," on the same
list, only the one in sequence will fire.

You're saved from this embarrassment. We don't care how
he - well he knows the bottom of the bank. In fact, I'd
prefer him to know that there are three down there _at the
bottom of the bank. When he puts them on the list, if he's
way up here somewhere, "a devilish fellow," they just don't
fire. You say, "Well, that's the goal. Of course that will
fire." No, the goal won't fire as an RI when expressed as
an RI with - if it's not in proper sequence.

In other words, it will come out by 3M correctly unless you
are overlisting. But that's what occurs on the bottom of a
bank. And there's a border between these two banks like that, 
and you actually go over the border of the banks. Well, it's - 
they're two different GPMs. They exist as great big black 
masses in their own right, which is a compounded squeeze-together 
of all of these items I've been talking about. In other words, 
one goal, one black mass.

Well, what happens - what happens if you have four or five
goals all jammed together? No, they still come apart - one
goal, one black mass; one item, one black mass; one - inside
the goal but part of the black mass. In other words, every
GPM is a black mass. And the GPMs, if they're apart or
separate or stuck together or anything else, constitute
what looks at first glance like a mass; but as the pc
begins to run them his perception picks up, he begins to
recognize one mass from another mass. Quite interesting.

Well, why are they so burned down? Why are they so black?
Well, it's just that he's exhausted all the energy out of
them, that's all. You'll find he'll still dramatize these
things. They are apparently moving on forward into present
time and always under formation. He's always in some stage
or another of the GPM in its formation. He's always forming
the top of it, but he also very often dramatizes that which
has gone yesterday.

You see, he couldn't quit, so he's just as likely to use
this goal of his, "to be holy," in some given circumstance.
Well, he goes into a church and all of a sudden he's
restimulated. He feels kind of weird and kind of sick, but
he's restimulated. He goes into this church and at first
he - well, let's say he starts to church as a career. And,
oh, he gets along all right. He goes to church for a little
while, he goes a lot - a lot of Sundays, a year or two, or
something like that and one day he starts to feel kind of
sick. He gets into the - sits down in the pew, and he starts
to feel kind of sick. And he looks around and suddenly he
realizes that that priest is pretty critical, pretty
critical of him. Or maybe the priest did say a critical
thing. And he's all set, you see.

And the next thing you know, why, he gets this horrible
feeling that he had better do something devilish.
Inexplicable. All of a sudden he does something devilish.
In other words, he just picked up an old area in an old
GPM - was restimulated momentarily - he lived through it, 
did its responses and so forth.

Why? Because it's the now-I'm-supposed-to. He's got a whole
system of now-I'm-supposed-to's. And these
now-I'm-supposed-to's routinely will give him the right
answers and the right responses for any given condition
instantaneously without further inspection on his part. He
just knows what to do, man, and then he will survive. The
only trouble is these things have never been very survival
and formulated to match the times of Charlemagne, they
don't go very well in the days of Khrushchev. They don't
match anymore.

"I know what I'm supposed to do - a swordsman. Ha-ha. Golly,
ain't nobody wielded a sword for a long time." He feels
sort of out of place. He feels upset. He is faced with
something and it says to him that he must be a swordsman,
but, thhuh, he can't make it. He goes and reads books about
sword collections. That's about as close as he can come to
it. The more he reads, the more he's got to read. The more
he reads the sicker he gets, but he's still got to read
these books about sword collections. But he's in an
interplay here of the universe around him and these things
still have survival answers.

This girl is faced by a loud man and she knows what to be.
She knows what to be - a cabaret singer. And she goes ahead
and tries to be a cabaret singer and fails at it most
gorgeously. Whereas the girl could probably be an opera 
singer with no difficulty at all. The one - see, opera
singer, that isn't - wasn't going to be very upsetting. But 
a cabaret singer - oh-ho-ho-ho, that's the thing she's got 
to be and can't make.

You'll find people all the time trying to do things that
they can't do, whereas they can do something superior to
them superiorly and won't do it. That's one of the puzzles
of human behavior. Well, those puzzles of human behavior
are contained in this.

You can explain these things by engrams for the excellent
reason that that which sticks and has a command value in an
engram is actually one of these GPM items underneath the
engram kicking in. And when you ran the engram you actually
ran it off the top of the GPM item and it didn't trouble
the pc. Old repeater technique, or something like that will
as likely as not, as often as not, key the thing out and
free it.

This is why processes have worked where they have worked,
and also why they haven't worked where they haven't worked.
Because these items here, the fellow has lived. He's lived
those things with ferocity. Those goals haven't just been,
"Well, I now think I will put a goal in 'to be a devil.'
Yes, I think I will postulate that. All right,'to be a
devil.' That's postulated." Ah, God no, man. He worked at
the postulation of this goal day in and day out, week in
and week out, year in and year out. And he just got it so
it would stick. Never, never again is he going to be caught
in any such situation as "to be holy." Never. Never. "To be
a devil. That's the thing to be, to be a devil. Now, you
hear me now; you hear me now. Now, listen - to be a devil,"
and so on. This is to - in other words, he trains himself
into the thing. And then of course he inevitably gets its
enemies and then he partakes of those enemies, and then he
partakes of those and those and those and finally this
thing betrays him and he can no longer have that goal or
basic purpose.

A thetan has a basic purpose - a thetan has a basic purpose
when a thetan can no longer trust himself after trying to
protect something in the physical universe. That gives him
a system of goals and out of that system of goals you give
him the piled up system of items which you get in a GPM.

When a GPM fails to survive anymore - I mean, to serve
anymore as a survival mechanism - when the GPM fails our
next immediate action after that is to create a new goal
and to go the limit on it as long as it is useful. And
is - when that one wears out and one is no longer able to
see anything in it but a totally degraded form, to achieve
the next - to postulate the next goal to solve the GPM
that's just past. So we just have nothing but a solution to
a solution to a solution to a solution to a solution. In
other words, the cures become the illness.

Now we go back and look over this situation, and we find
out that the reason this fellow can't stand this universe,
can't stand closed places, can't stand anything in a dress,
can't stand this and can't stand that and yet can't stay
away from them is because of this goal "to be holy." And
the reason he can't do that, of course, is because he's got
a goal "to be a devil." I'm sorry, if anybody has these
actual goals I'm sure they will be found. I'm not using
synthetic goals in this lecture. But there's the whole
mechanism. There's the whole mechanism of the GPM. There's 
why it exists. There's how it evolves, and so on. It is 
far simpler than you would believe.

Now, when you realize - I said why they were black - when you
realize that this item here, the "goal to be a devil," may
very well consist of lifetimes, each lifetime having a full
array of pictures, and that that has all been burned down
and charred to nothing but cinder by the hammer and pound
of existence, you'll see why it's a black lump and you'll see
why the GPM is a black lump. Actually, the GPM is a lump of
burned up residue, but its postulates are still there, the
charge is still in it, and it still separates and it still
squares away.

Now, as you recognize, an individual has gone through a
great many very weird and terrible adventures on the course
of postulating a goal and becoming the various items in the
G - in a GPM. And you recognize also that he has been
through GPM after GPM after GPM in order to get where he is
today, and so on. And he's got a lot of overts, and he's
got a lot of difficulties on the backtrack and he's having
a lot of difficulties in present time - that it is not easy,
it is not easy to find the goal, to find the top item, to
go back on exactly the right number of items and to walk
all the way through the GPM, to never skip, to never jump
out into another GPM, to get down to the bottom of the GPM
and list it out and find your next goal, and so forth. None
of this, none of this could be considered to be easy. It
isn't easy. But oddly enough, these GPMs are so much a
carbon copy, one to the next, from pc to pc, they only vary
in the significance of the goal and the significance of the
items. They don't vary in the pattern of the goal.

You'll find the person's goal there and you'll find
the - the item, "the goal to be a devil," or "the goal to
catch catfish," or "the goal to be a tiger." "Somebody or
something who wanted to be a tiger" - you'll find that
there. You'll find out up here "a tigerish person" or "a
devil" or something like that. And we go up the line and we
get up to the top of the thing, we inevitably find in this
column of terminals, we find "a saint," something like
that. "A saintly person," something. It's totally reversed
from the situation.

We find out that the similarity of items in this GPM here,
well, let's say we have an item "people who care for
nothing." Nothings pile up more than anything else. We have
"people who care for nothing" as an oppterm here. And down
in "the goal to be good," "people who give up nothing" or
something. And those two items are liable to collapse one
on the other. And because they're liable to collapse one on
the other the GPMs bang.

In other words, very similar items sometimes group. And
you'll be auditing along minding your own business and all
of a sudden the pc will go whop, or whoop, or urp, and so
on, and he'll have felt a couple of GPMs smashed together.

You'll have excited - through some wrong listing, or
something of the sort - you'll have excited a similar item in
another GPM and have collapsed it on.

Well, all this is avoided - the randomity is avoided - by
being particularly careful to get the items that belong in
sequence in sequence. And that is normally done by not
overlisting on an RI opposed list and not underlisting on a
source list. There's nothing much to it. You can even find
on the last R... - the goal as an RI oppose is a source list 
and you can even find the next goal on that if that last source
list from here down into this bank is completed.

There's all kinds of mechanical arrangements here and we
haven't even really begun to exhaust the number of
possibilities that you could do to get a GPM. It very
possibly is not necessary to do a goal oppose terminal to
get this top GPM up here. you just say, "All right. Tell me
an item, who or what would be the least likely to have the
goal 'to be a devil'." And the guy says, "a saintly
person." It RRs and you put it in as a beginning terminal
line. I mean these things - these possibilities are great,
but they are - are mostly assistive in recovery. If you do
the goal right in the first place you don't run into these
things.

And then there's the admonition that in actual fact you
should make a Clear before you try to make an OT You'll
find auditors will go on at a fantastic rate of speed GPM
after GPM after GPM and they never clean up the GPM they're
in and they never look for these various items. They don't
try to get the pc. They don't - they find something still
ticking so they just list it further. They don't go back
and patch it up. They don't try to find any of these
bypassed items. They don't try to get these bottom items in
the goal line. They don't try to neat this thing up before
they go along. As a result you've got three or four or five
GPMs alive and they frankly are maybe not as easy to patch
up as it would have been if you had just patched up one and
done it right in the first place. You haven't lost any
time. You can patch these things up. You can take care of
them.

The way to take care of them best, however, is to know the
anatomy of the GPM. To know what you expect to find in the
pc. Not go on expecting that every pc is different, that
every pc is going to have a different pattern, that all of
these things are going to be so difficult, and so on.

Well, I saw a GPM just today which - well, I won't try to
quote the items out of it, but it's something like this,
"the goal to be a lady," and the first oppterm, "a steam
locomotive," and the first terminal, "astronomy." Well,
come out of it. I mean, how does this relate? The auditor
has banged off into three different GPMs. He's got a goal
for something, but he hasn't got any terminals for
anything. In other words, he's very dispersed on the thing.

No, if you know, you get experience as to what these are
all about and you know what the thing should look like and
you know whether you're right or not and you know how this
thing should add up, you'll all of a sudden become aware of
the fact that you've skipped something - both by the pc's
ARC break and behavior and so forth, and because you can't
go on, and for other reasons; but also because you just
know your stuff on the anatomy of a GPM.

The easiest way to run a GPM is know what you're running.
I've given you the picture of the GPM, its basis, modus
operandi and repetitive characteristics of the GPM. If you
know these things quite well you won't have too much
trouble clearing anybody.

How many GPMs are there? I don't know. You've sure been
around long enough. I can hear you now on Marcab and on
this place and in that age and that age. "All right. So
that's failed. So I can no longer be a holy person, and so
forth. I'm going to be a devil. Yes, to be a devil. Now,
listen carefully, to be ..." You know? You've been doing it
for a long time.

I don't know how many GPMs you'll cook up in somebody. I'd
say the more complicated the GPM first found sounds as a
goal, the more GPMs there are in the bank. I think you'll
find out that's a working rule. If the first one - the first
goal you find of a person is "to be somebody who plays a
pipe on various clouds and looks sad," I think you've got
an awful lot of GPMs in the bank.

There's the other factor. The first GPM you encounter is
sometimes truncated there, so you just have a new thetan,
he looks like. His behavior will be very brash. Next one
will be truncated up here someplace and he'll be a
conservative. He'll be backing up the conservative. And up
here someplace it just happens to be where you find him in
that GPM. And you get him up here at the top ranks of the
thing, he will inevitably be a beatnik.

It's funny how coincidentally we have so many people who
are just winding up their banks in this present society at
this particular time. But remember we also have the new
ones.

So that we have somebody cycling down the track. At some
time we'll have the fellow being a great success. Well,
he's in this part of the bank, the lower part. He'll be a
rather conservative mediocre. He's in this part of the
bank. And well have somebody very degraded. Hell be in this
part of the bank. Actually his current conduct depends to a
large extent on where he sits in his first GPM.

All right. Well, that's all the data I had for you on the
subject. I hope it'll do you a lot of good. I know it's
been very difficult to dig the stuff up and get it hinged
together and make sense and get processes that make it
work. But we're at this point and the information is there
and it is stable and it's yours.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Good night.

[end of lecture]



