Games and GPMs
 

by Clearbird

It is said, what makes organic life in this universe tick is the urge to survive and thrive. To make it worthwhile to Beings, however, there must be fun and games. So having a game is right up there--and Survival itself could be understood as a game. We as Beings love games. Above all, it seems, there must be a game–and that’s where the trouble starts...

According to the technical dictionary a game consists of freedoms, barriers and purposes.
You can have simple games where you don’t really have opponents. An artist can simply go out in nature, set up his scaffold and paint a picture of what he sees. His immediate purpose is to paint a pretty picture; his ultimate goal: to create Beauty. The barriers are all the difficulties that have to be overcome in order to put it on a canvas. The freedoms are the many practical and artistic choices to be made before he is done.

When we talk about games we do, however, normally talk about two sides competing against each other; or about a number of competitors competing against other participants, such as in a race. Besides freedoms, barriers and purposes, we here find opposition in the form of opponents or competitors.

When we talk about a games-condition we here mean a certain state of mind where the player or players have become obsessed with a game and can’t take their attention off it. You could initially think of an obsessive gambler who has moved well beyond a healthy state of mind. He keeps gambling because he is hooked. His eyes hang onto the roulette and he is afraid to look the other way, even for a second. In games-conditions we typically have two opponents obsessed with fighting each other. It’s often an “I love to hate...” type of situation. Examples of games-conditions would be the Cold War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or a divorced couple that always finds something to fight about, be it custody of children, visitation arrangements or their common furniture and things. They are in it for the fight. Once one problem is solved a new problem is instantly found and endlessly exploited. Their family life has decayed into a family feud.

The Goals Problems Mass
A GPM is a super problem of sorts that has layers and mental mass to it. There are numerous GPMs stored in a person’s mind. Each GPM is a collection of old conflicts and games-conditions. The basic elements of a GPM are: a goal and the identity pursuing the goal (self in some form); a counter-goal and the identity behind it (the opponent). Such a pair is called a dichotomy or polarity. A GPM, furthermore, contains a series of such similar dichotomies, one layered on top of the previous one. These conflicts are all held together by a common subject matter or theme. Big examples of GPMs in action are, as mentioned, the Cold War (theme: world supremacy); the Middle East conflict (theme: the land of Palestine) or a stormy marriage headed for divorce (theme: marriage). The problems and conflicts in one GPM are all related as they are fights over the same subject matter, the same theme. Both sides want to win the game they are playing, be it in politics, war or in life. The super-problem of the GPM in play is constantly being added to and made even harder to resolve as these kinds of conflicts are intimate parts of living and surviving. GPMs do, however, also exist as completed matters on the track. At some point the game is declared ended. The local convenience store owner may at some point on his track have been a player in the game of “world supremacy”. It hasn’t bothered him much lately. He gave up on that theme eons ago. Once one walks away from a theme completely the GPM is "ended" or simply stored on the track as part of one’s history. Yet, even in this case it can be restimulated and come back into play; say, when the store owner plans for supremacy in the local convenience store market. A GPM, in other words, contains a wealth of experience and patterns on how to react to things and handle opposition related to its theme. It’s a recipe for how to be, do and have in that regard.

The Line Plot
The GPM gets initially formed step by step as the person lives through the eons. One conflict comes to an end and gets layered as sediments and fossils at the bottom of the sea. This happens when the person stops pursuing a certain goal and modifies it. A new conflict based on the modified goal on the same theme comes into play, only to be layered on top of the previous one in due time. It starts with a big idea and no thought of opposition. Just like the artist above who wanted to create Beauty. Over time, he may have to modify his goal time and again to stay in the art game. The goal will step by step degrade to less ambitious ones due to the opposition. From being the postulate of a free spirit it eventually becomes that of a trodden down player that, despite all, still has a passion for art and beauty. From his original dream of being the greatest artist who ever lived he has become a shy assistant in an art store sweeping the floors. 

Below is a fictive example related to a woman’s marriage. It shall be noted that the "Marriage GPM" is not a record of one marriage with its ups and downs. It's a composite of the woman's whole track marriage history as it’s grouped in her mind. It will thus include many different identities, periods and scenarios on both sides of the dichotomies. Yet, the woman has this blueprint that very well may determine the fate of her current marriage. It shall be noted that goals and identities have to be found individually for each person to have any value.

Note:This article is about Actual GPMs. In Implant GPMs the goals follow the exact same pattern and wording from person to person. An example is OT-2 that is run using printed lists of implanted goals. These set goal-series were implanted as a type of “brain washing” in the distant past. As a citizen, we assume, you went into a clinic and got “brain washed” by electronic means. All citizens, one could theorize, had to receive this treatment to remain in good standing. The effectiveness of these Implant GPMs rested on the fact that the person had Actual GPMs that were restimulated.

The below is thus only meant as an illustration:

As you can see, countless movie scripts could be built over this GPM. When you hear people “are playing games” with each other, you often find they are operating on old goals and identities that don’t serve anyone’s interest. They are dramatizing their GPM cases. Also note, the original opposition goal was “to break up the marriage”. As the GPM came to an end it briefly became the wife’s own goal. This is the sad proof of the maxim “What you resist you become” and also why it’s such a good idea to get one’s GPM case handled. Add to the example above that the wife’s husband has his own GPM case related to marriage that can look and play out quite differently from hers and you will know why marriages can be troubled. There is another thing to note about the series of goals in the example. Each goal runs on a cycle of action. It starts with the intention to succeed doing the goal. The opposition will, at some point, make the person give up on it and decide on a change of tactics, which is the next goal down in the Line Plot. The succession of goals runs likewise on a cycle of action until “to break up the marriage” ends it all. The original Line Plot of a basic GPM is formed in chronological order. The pattern of goals is, however, repeated many times on the time track and often out of the original sequence. As it exists in the present it can best be described as a sorting system that sorts experiences and efforts related to the theme. The GPMs could be said to float in time. They are in part being used as a portable reference library each time the person meets a challenging situation. The person has this library of ready-made responses whether they fit the situation or not. It’s a well known observation that “history repeats itself”, be it in marriage or politics. Each time a new marriage or era is begun, it starts with high hopes and high in the Line Plot. All possibilities are open. As things develop, more incidents and charge are added to the already existing goals pursued earlier. The identities behind them become more and more mired into fixed ideas and set expectations. You see the whole spectrum play out when young and visionary people rebel against the establishment run by solid citizens.

The Goals
Let’s take a step back and look at goals more philosophically. They are the reason the GPMs formed in the first place. You begin with a free Being to whom all possibilities are open. He is, however, bored. So he decides it’s time for some action. He decides on something to do -- on a goal. The basic goals on a case are lofty concepts, be it “to fight for justice”, “to create beauty”, “to facilitate understanding”, etc. No matter how lofty a goal may be, deciding on one is an action of exclusion and individuation. Once you “fight for justice” countless other possibilities are excluded. There are many activities you can’t participate in, such as simply having a good time as you constantly have to worry about what’s going on around you. And fighting for justice will get you enemies. In other words, once you settle on a goal you have a “me and them” situation; you have created a split and a polarity that will generate charge. In order to generate power, each pole in this polarity has to be able to persist and hold its position. To accomplish this an identity is formed. It is modeled to serve the goal and be an anchor for that goal. This gives the goal persistence and the capability to generate power. Yesterday’s power plant is, however sadly, today’s reactive charge generator that can make life very unpleasant.

The good thing about goals is, once you have decided on one you have a game. You have a better chance at achieving happiness, as happiness can be defined as pursuing a goal successfully and eventually accomplishing it. Also, goals are so important to living that people without goals are considered bums. Once you pursue a goal, you have a role to play in life, you are part of existence. There is a distinct role, identity or valence connected with a certain well-defined goal. It’s a whole package of characteristics, knowledge, experience and agreements. The reason for this identity, is to be what one has to be in order to succeed. 
        There is another characteristic about goals that is crucial to the forming of GPMs. That is the fact that old goals don’t necessarily just fade away and disappear. This is partly because they have been anchored in solid identities. More importantly, some goals are so basic that they always are part of existence, even when not pursued actively. It also seems to be a characteristic of Beings that they never totally give up on old goals.
Basic goals include “to create beauty” and the many other goals that are part of the games of being human and a spiritual Being in this universe. Other goals you find in a GPM are typically abandoned goals, but they failed and their cycle never completed. They still exist as dormant intentions. Unless one at some point decided to undo the goal completely by as-is-ing it and its anchor, it will still exist in a dormant form that can be revived as a dramatization. 
A GPM, thus, could be said to be a collection of successive own incomplete goals that have accumulated charge. Each goal is anchored in an identity. The charge-mechanism of the GPM has become permanent as the goals, one by one, are hung up against the anchored opposition goals that made them fail. The effort or resistance each side executed towards the other side, and still executes when restimulated, builds up charge and mass. All goals and identities in one particular GPM are held together by a common theme.

Being Tough and Determined
To survive in this universe one has to be tough and determined. As Ron Hubbard said, “Only the tigers survive, and they have a hard time too”. To succeed with a goal one has to be of a single mind. This has to be expressed and anchored in one’s beingness to work and be recognized by others. The toughness is ensured by opinions, agreements and fixed ideas held by the individual. All this, combined with professional knowledge, forms the identity behind the goal. In any war, soldiers are taught to see the enemy as totally evil and inhuman. They are told it’s a just war and God is on their side. Only in this manner can they keep fighting and killing. A whole army culture of fixed ideas, altered facts and lies will blossom. These fixed ideas, being “lies”, make the identity of, say, being a “God’s soldier” persist, even after the war is long over. Once a person in processing is made to find a number of these fixed ideas related to the past identity of a “God’s soldier”, he can undo that old identity. Needless to say, numerous past identities are highly irrational in the person’s present environment.

Each profession and occupation has its own professional beingness a member of that occupation has to adhere to. Be it a doctor, a priest, a cowboy, or a ballerina. There is a whole set of skills and agreements that goes with each occupation.

The toughness, skill set and single-mindedness that go with a role in life is essential to successfully practice a profession or play a game. One has to be recognized as, say, a doctor in order to do healing work and get a respectable job. To gain the proper recognition one may have to adapt many inexplicable habits, characteristics, opinions and points of view–their origin often lost in history. 

When it comes to past games and GPMs, these solid identities (valences or characters) are part of what is wrong with the person. The goals in the GPMs are anchored by identities and the identities are anchored by fixed ideas and old agreements. It is not enough to simply find the goals and bleed some charge off them. The “tough” identities, that are the poles that perpetuate the generation of charge, have to be found as well and the fixed ideas they operated on have to be inspected thoroughly before the whole thing can be taken apart for real. Once this is done, you will typically see the two identities or poles melt and sort of reconcile with one another. What's actually happening is, they have been dis-created as somewhat autonomic fixtures in the mind. The goals and identities in the dichotomy have been resolved. The person being processed has gained a new ability to see it from both these two characters point of view and has thus obtained a new wholeness, a new and higer level of pan-determinism.

Processing GPMs
If it only were a matter of finding the goals the whole thing would long ago have been resolved. It seems to me, what made Ron Hubbard's GPM research of the early 1960s come out short of effective standard processes, was the fact that it was focused on mapping the whole structure of the GPMs. It was, as research, a pursuit to find the Line Plots and the sequence the themes would line themselves up in on the track. The GPMs were found to be packages containing all the better known bank elements, such as engrams, secondaries, problems, overts/withholds, ARC breaks, fixed ideas and special identities (valences). All phenomena, associated with a certain theme, would group themselves into this mega-structure known as the GPM. This mix of aberrative content is, of course, already being contacted on the grades and what can be confronted is being addressed. What the more recent research of GPMs has showed is, there is much left of the GPM core structures that have hardly been touched. This is well worth pursuing as “the GPMs imitate life” as well as “life imitates the GPMs”. They are formed as records of the games of life we have been involved in since the beginning of time and are the cause of “history repeating itself”. The instructions, role models and patterns they contain are followed or fought against repeatedly, over and over, more or less reactively. When processing the GPMs, the person is being re-introduced to old endeavors, to old friends and foes and all the good and hard times he had dueing these undertakings, people and identities in the past. 

When you take a case apart on the level of GPMs, you will find whole new aspects not really touched anywhere else in processing. It is important to do it right. You have to approach the task in a very disciplined way. The most important rule in modern GPM processing is to discharge the contacted goals and identities thoroughly before doing anything else. This includes handling any out rudiments and fixed ideas the identities may have inside the dichotomy. The approach is one step at the time and confronting clear and present danger rather than trying to jump ahead and solve the whole riddle. You are walking through a booby-trapped terrain that requires all your attention and presence of mind while dealing with it. You have to remove each booby trap methodically and not try to rush things forward. 

It has been found, what you run into of restimulation on any given person’s GPM case is a scramble of dichotomies from many different GPMs. They were formed at very different times of the person’s time-track. Their goals and identities are now part of the reactive experience the person is operating on. Rather than working out a research map you have to follow the very basics of processing used at the lower end of the Bridge. You have to destimulate what’s there before you restimulate new charge. You have to parallel what the mind is doing. You have to deal with what the person’s attention is stuck on and can confront.

Note: This may sound like R6-End-Words to oldtimers. The real difference is that goals and identities are completely discharged and as-is-ed when running GPMs by themes. In R6-EW restimulated goals are taken to key-out without trying to find identities or exhaust themes. R6-EW was released in 1965 where there was a great need to key out the charge research students had run into during experimental GPM processing and the process was well suited for that. It seems less relevant when you start from a clean slate.

Modern GPM running by themes takes all this into account. You start out finding a hot theme. It’s an area of the person’s life he/she has trouble with, is concerned about and active in. In short, it’s an area of ongoing drama in the person’s life. There are, of course, numerous themes in play in any given person at any given time. It reflects the many areas and subjects that make up life. Once a hot theme is established, you find a charged goal belonging to that theme. You take some charge off it. You find the opposing goal and take some charge off that. You then find the identity behind each goal. You bleed each goal for remaining charge, then bleed the identities for charge by finding the fixed ideas, lies and out rudiments they are sitting in. All these factors anchor the identities, that anchor the goals, that anchor the GPM structure.

The goal forms the identity. The identity is held in place by fixed ideas, including  cultural and educational ones. Of special interest are arbitrary ideas of own rightness and superiority.  A persistent identity is found to hold on to these beyond reason in a determined and ornery way to prove self right and others wrong. Since the identity has its attention on its goal and opposition, rather than self, the fixed ideas remain unseen and un-inspected.   Butler's goal: "to serve nobility". Fixed ideas could be: "a real butler shows no emotion" "I am the best", "I am more worthy than them", "they are decadent and childish", etc.

In processing GPMs effectively, you pay no attention to the Line Plot. There are too many themes in play to concentrate on just one GPM. As the person progresses well in this processing, the Line Plots will reveal themselves at some point and can now possibly be tracked down theme for theme, GPM for GPM. Still, it is like Dianetics, where it’s more important to find the somatics and then the related incidents the person can confront and process those, rather than trying to find Basic Basic in the first session. (The somatic as an item could be compared to the special flavor of the theme found in GPM processing. The somatic holds a Dianetics chain together as the theme with its special flavor holds the GPM together.) So you process the dichotomies you can get without forcing the issue. You make a note and recheck the theme later in order to complete themes.
It’s a matter of unburdening the case and take up charge that offers itself to be run next. Done this way, you bring about optimum progress and an amazing amount of case change per session. Furthermore, since it’s all based on the person’s ability to confront and there will be things to run whether one is a retired house wife or leader of an army, there is no particular reason to wait until the person is OT 8 or OT 14. It can be C/Sed to be run after grade 4, after Dianetics or after OT-3. It can be done once the person is in good shape. It works well, once the person has gotten rid of the charge processed on the grades.

Games and Games-Conditions are an intimate part of life. They lead to all kinds of aberrative incidents (out ruds, engrams, etc.) The way it all stacks up on a case over the millennia is what is described as the GPMs. Modern GPM processing is a safe way to undo the damage of lost games, of freeing a person of living through the same mistakes and disasters over and over. It frees up the person to, again, be, do and have without dramatizations.