It began in 1959 when Ron started an investigation into people's goals which lead to the observation that many of a person's problems, overts, and upsets were connected with the goals that he was trying to achieve. The Saint Hill Special Briefing Course (SHSBC) was originally established to investigate and train auditors in the handling of goals. The lower grade processing was actually a spin-off of this research, being intended to deal with factors that were in the way of Goals processing.
The real source of trouble was soon worked out to be more than just a goal (you can have simple goals without problems). It was a mental mass formed by a goal and its opposition with the two sides jammed up against each other into a sort of super problem. Thereafter, these things were referred to as GPMs (Goals Problem Masses) to avoid confusing them with ordinary day to day goals which were not seen as a source of aberration (unless they locked up ontop of one of these GPMs).
A great deal of research was done into the anatomy of these things. The goal was found to have a terminal, which is the beingness that is used to do the goal. For example, the goal "To Keep Things Clean" might have "A House Cleaner" as the terminal. It was also found that there would be an opposition terminal or OPTERM. In this example it might be "A Slob". This research is recorded in the SHSBC taped lectures.
Soon they were putting together patterns of terminals and Opterms which showed how the person lived the goal. He would be one terminal and get opposed and fail and then try to be another terminal and fail again etc. until the goal was all bent out of shape and collapsed of its own weight, at which point the person would undertake a new GPM goal to try and solve the trouble he had gotten into with the first one.
These terminals and Opterms were referred to as "Reliable Items" or RIs because they reacted reliably over and over again on an E-meter and perhaps also because the person relied on these things. The pattern of these RIs as they opposed from one to the next was plotted as a pattern with arrows going from item to item and this eventually came to be called a "Line Plot".
In 1963 it was found that sometimes different people came up with the same pattern of Goals and RIs and that these particular patterns could also be found to react on other people. From this it was concluded that the patterns had been implanted hypnotically using electronics. These were thereafter referred to as "Implant GPMs".
This research line eventually lead to uncovering a large number of implanted patterns which included the ones that are currently used on the OT levels (and quite a few others, some of which can be found in the tech volumes).
Concurrently with researching the implanted GPMs, there was an attempt to find the person's own actual GPMs. These referred to his own abberated goals rather than ones which had been implanted. The implants were seen as gaining their force from the real ones. If you kick the person in the teeth electronically with a long list of goals, some of them will line up with his real goals and cause the implant to stick. The implanted GPMs were seen to be of only minor importance and low abberative power in comparison with the actual GPMs which were postulated by the person himself.
But the long and arduous research into actual GPMs simply lead to finding an even deeper implant, which is the one given in the clearing course. At that point, Ron apparently decided that it was all implants and abandoned the research line. Perhaps he meant to get back to it eventually, but if he did, it certainly hasn't been published.
I have been interested in this theory of Actual GPMs for decades, but it seemed always out of reach. Not only do the electronic implants interfere, but NOTS also makes wrong things react. Before I could get near these things, I had to go much further, handling things such as the early penalty universes which I will discuss in another write-up. Only after all this was I able to spot the real goal which I was actually operating on. The goal was "To Be Intelligent" and it was not only what I was doing, it was what I WANTED TO DO. And since then, I have learned a great deal about the Actual GPMs and that is what I will pass on to you here.