Working in the dark, it is difficult to find these things and take them apart. But once I got far enough to see how it all fit together, everything became easy. So you can't just go after this stuff with some rote procedure. You need to gain some understanding first. The good news is that once you know the pattern of these things, the goal becomes fairly easy to spot.
The full structure is not obvious in the current GPM because it is incomplete, you are still living it. So I had to get through the completed GPM that was just prior to the current one before I could really see how it all worked.
For me, the preceding GPM was the goal "To Be Holy" and the current GPM ("To Be Intelligent") was in opposition to it. Just think of an intellectual opposing holy men, or a scientist opposing priests and you will see what I mean.
Notice that both of these are "good" goals. You would never have a bad goal as an Actual GPM. The goal "To Be Evil" would never be used as an actual GPM, it exists only in implants.
But there is a brief tail end to the goal "To Be Holy" where I was trying to get away from the goal and my goal at that point could be stated as "To NOT be Holy". An in this section of an actual GPM, you might think that you have an evil goal, but that is incorrect. At that time in my existence (many lifetimes ago), I committed many evil acts, but got no satisfaction from them. It was not like they were contributing to a goal that I had and it did not feel like I was achieving anything.
A negative does not work as a goal. You can't live life with your whole purpose being "to be not holy". You get desperate. You search around wildly for a way out of this thing. And finally you realize that there was one thing that had been successfully opposing you and that was the intellectuals. And so you choose the goal "To Be Intelligent" because it solves the opposition of holy people. And so you begin a new GPM.
There is also another reason why you slide into the next GPM (and why the previous one becomes so decayed and degraded) and that is that you finally resort to committing horrible overts against the next GPM because it is successful in opposing you. In other words, as you live the goal to be holy, you keep running into intellectuals who give you a hard time and ridicule your faith etc. and finally you begin to do them in. And you loose all judgment in this and reach the point where you'll shoot any intellectual, even if they are on your side. And because of that, you do in friends and allies just because they were witty one day and seemed too smart. And these crimes have no real justification. And this is the basic source of that wild E-meter reaction known as the rock slam. And after you commit too many heavy overts against something, you have a tendency to flip over and become it.
Until I found this, I had a distaste for priests and holy men. It was due to my own horror at what I had become at the end of that GPM. Once this was cleaned up, I found that I had abandoned all of my ability to heal and to care for people along with that goal to be holy. It was only the end of the GPM that was horrible. These things go on for many lifetimes and the earlier ones back when I first started the goal were truly wonderful.
Perhaps the biggest gain I got out of finding this was the ability to hold the concepts of holiness and intelligence together without instinctively feeling that there was an inherent conflict between them. Of course you might be running on a different goal and wonder why I would even have a problem holding these ideas together, but rest assured that you will have something like this (maybe the conflict between freedom and responsibility for example) in your way.
From seeing what happened with the goal "To Be Holy", I can also predict how the current goal "To Be Intelligent" would have ended up if I hadn't found this out. I can already see that strong people (I would have said "dumb strong people" in the old days) are the ones that successfully harass and oppose intellectuals. Given a few more lifetimes on this goal and I would have reached the point of shooting all the strong tough guys, probably beginning in a reasonable manner with executing gang members but eventually even getting around to doing in the strong men in the circus. And when everything finally failed, I would try to not be intelligent and finally I would see that the only way to do that was to become strong and would launch myself into a new GPM with the goal "To Be Strong".