2
Philosophy and Action in a Proto-Sect
Despite their deep attachment and respect for Henry B. Sharman, Emilia
and Harry Rathbun did not freeze the movement as Sharman had left it at the end of his
active career in 1945. Intellectually as well as organizationally, Sequoia Seminar became
a much more complex undertaking than anything Sharman had ever attempted. Sharman's
techniques for studying the teachings of Jesus remained the backbone of the Rathbuns'
work, but just as they moved toward a more institutional structure for carrying out their
mission, they also developed a more systematic ideology. By the end of the 1950s the
combination of a more formalized organization supporting a more formalized religious
philosophy began to define the group as a new religious sect.
The Rathbuns made almost weekly trips to Carmel to visit Sharman and
keep him abreast of their progress and to ask his advice for the work that they always saw
as building on his. Emilia told Sharman that she and Harry had "a tremendous sense of
the destiny we must play in the next step toward the fulfillment of your dream."
"Give us fifteen, twenty years more," she wrote, "and we will have been to
you what Paul was for Jesus." Noting that he was in his eighties and ill, she asked
him if he would write "a farewell prayer and discourse something like Jesus did in
his life for his disciples."[1] He seems to have resisted the
temptation. Although he may have been a reluctant prophet, Sharman was not unappreciative
of the work that the Rathbuns were doing, indicating in 1948 that he believed that the
Stanford activity was the most productive anywhere.[2] Harry
Rathbun, for his part, never pretended to be Henry B. Sharman. He was his own man with his
own religious agenda. Unlike Sharman, who had always worked from the gospels themselves,
Harry used Sharman's book, Jesus as Teacher, as the basis of his teaching.[3] As time went on, Harry deviated even further from the style and
content of the Minnesing model. After Sharman's death in 1953, Harry, and especially
Emilia, accelerated the rate of change until they had moved their work well beyond the
narrow academic boundaries in which Sharman had operated.
Many of the early changes introduced by Harry involved such
technicalities as the exact order in which issues from the Records would be raised. There
were also important differences in style, however. Harry enjoyed participating more
actively in the discussions than Sharman had; he also made some structural changes in how
the seminars were run.[4] The thirty to forty students that usually
comprised a Minnesing seminar were eventually reduced to as few as a dozen. The original
six-week seminar period that was so convenient to college students on summer vacation was
reduced first to four and then to two weeks, which was more realistic for working adults.
Although there continued to be references to the "vacation" aspects of attending
a seminar, in fact, Sequoia Seminar placed much more stress on study and less on leisure
than Camp Minnesing.[5] Harry evoked deep respect for his personal
warmth and teaching excellence. Younger participants in particular, who called him
"prof " in the early days, valued their contact with him. "The most
impressive single aspect for me," reported one Berkeley graduate student in
economics, "was the outstanding example of intellectual and emotional maturity set by
'the prof.' "[6]
The raison d'être of Sequoia Seminar was the study of the Records.
But exploring the life and teachings of Jesus was not an end in itself. Understanding
Jesus was a way to understand God. Understanding God meant living new lives doing the will
of God. Whereas Sharman had been content to help students discover the religious life, the
Rathbuns had a grander vision. Right from the beginning at "Minnesing'45" when
they proposed establishing a religious community, they had wanted to create a collective
situation in which members could help one another "live the life." Within two
years of the demise of Minnesing, and before the founding of Ben Lomond, they launched the
first experiment to put their ideas into practice.
Students Concerned: Practicing their Beliefs
Fired by the vision of total commitment and the possibilities
presented by the unsettled postwar conditions, Emilia and a group of students who had
attended the 1947 seminar at Asilomar began to draw up plans for a permanent organization
that would turn commitment into action. With her complete support, and possibly at her
instigation, the students decided to take a term off from school to engage in a period of
intensive study and planning.[7] As she later admitted, Emilia was
oblivious to the implications of a large number of students leaving school for the
tutelage of a professor's wife; she saw simply an opportunity to stop talking and start
doing. Despite widespread opposition from parents, other faculty, and some members of the
Stanford administration, the students launched a new group called Students Concerned.[8] Ten of the forty students who had attended the 1947 summer seminar
formed the core of the new group. They, in turn, recruited additional students from
thirteen colleges throughout the country. Thus, when the ten-week special study session
opened on April 1, there were twenty-five men and twelve women in residence.[9]
Many of the students were veterans of World War II. Trying to make sense
of the horrors they had seen and afraid of a third world war, they had been motivated by
Sequoia Seminar and now sought some specific way to work for international peace in those
first years of the atomic age and the cold war.
Students Concerned had a dual purpose. The first was to achieve complete
commitment to the will of God, and the second was to put that commitment into practice in
order to forestall the end of the world. The students testified that their study of the
life of Jesus enabled them to perceive what had "prevented his return to the
carpenter shop." "We see the action he initiated as the only adequate action
today," they concluded.[10] They were "Committed to
unlimited responsibility for making real One World," and, having "understood the
import of his message for our day," had "no alternative but to accept the full
responsibility as demonstrators." They declared that joining Students Concerned was
their surrender to God's will and required them "to leave school, our hopes of
professions, and our personal lives, in order to devote ourselves entirely to this one
purpose."[11]
They had to act because the very fate of the earth was at stake. As one
of their position papers warned: "Any thinking person recognizes that war is
outâthe term itself is simply obsolete. It should rather be called:
extinction."[12] The philosophical core of the new movement
was summed up in a statement that could have been lifted word for word from Beyond War
literature of the 1980s: "The creative resolution of any dispute, difference, or
disagreement depends upon the adoption of the attitude which can break through the impasse
of closed minds." "Peace among men," it continued, "is possible if
each man will foresake his blindness and adopt the attitude of discovery." Students
Concerned explained that they had been led to their position through "the study of
Jesus," and members were "assuming personal and group responsibility for
conveying this attitude to many minds over the nation and the world."[13]
Even though almost forty years separate Students Concerned from Beyond War, the
fundamental message is identical: the way to end war is through the transformation of the
individual.
Originally the group intended to achieve this purpose through a
three-step process. First, the 1948 spring quarter was spent studying the gospels and the
works of St. Paul.[14] This was done primarily under Emilia's
leadership, although on weekends Harry went to the camp they had rented. Second, having
obtained "a solid foundation in constant principles," the students hoped to go
to Europe for ten weeks so that they could "serve where the needs are greatest."[15] Finally, upon their return from Europe, they intended to disperse
to other campuses in order to "arouse student concern by indicating the seriousness
of the world situation and suggesting that the positive answer lies in a fundamental
change in men themselves."[16]
In fact, Students Concerned effectively disbanded after June 10, 1948,
when the ten-week seminar ended. As one participant remembered, "At the end of the
training program the 29 of us had 29 different ideas about the greatest significance of
Jesus and about the most effective plans and action."[17] An
illustrated journal kept by Del Carlson, a marine veteran and aspiring artist with an
acerbic sense of humor, reflected some of the problems that arose. Along with several
mocking cartoons of Emilia being worshipped by the participants, Carlson drew a group of
smug, self-satisfied students topped with halos, delivering food to starving people eating
worms. Closer to home, one cartoon indicated that ambivalence toward the mainline churches
was present almost from the beginning, when it showed members of the group emulating Jesus
by "overthrowing the tables at the Wed. night BINGO game at the Redwood City
Methodist Church." Perhaps most telling was the wry description of a group
discussion. Carlson depicted members of the group presenting their positions with effusive
apologies: "Now, correct me if I am wrong," and "Please feel free to
straighten me out if my thinking has been bad," and so forth. Then, Carlson noted,
when the others did criticize them, "they smother their negative reactions under a
smile tinted with a subjective-objective tone, and bow backwards with: 'Oh, thank you,
you're so right,' " only to return with another proposal and begin the process anew.[18]
In addition to illustrating the conflicts within Students Concerned, the
Carlson cartoons also highlight the homocentric-sociocentric tension that plagued the
group and, indeed, marked all the Rathbuns' work. Carlson showed the students delivering
food to the hungry and scattering bingo cards in the church hall. He showed them, in other
words, taking concrete social action to further their vision of a just society. Social
action was seen as the inevitable consequence of surrendering to the will of God. In fact,
however, the group was much less clear on exactly what, if anything, they could do to
eliminate suffering. The only specific suggestion made was to encourage others to think
the way Students Concerned did, to see the light as they themselves had seen it. Everyone
in Students Concerned appeared to have agreed that the objective study of the gospels
would lead to the surrendering of the individual will to the will of God. The
sociocentrics wanted to go further and apply their beliefs through specific social action.
But, as it almost always would in the Rathbuns' work, the homocentric view carried the
day, and the group finally sought only to convert others to their philosophical position.
Students Concerned was the high point of the Rathbuns' early work among
students. It was also the low point. The naive enthusiasm of the young people struck even
Emilia as unrealistic. She remembers going through boxes of clothing they had collected to
give to the poor to rescue the students' hand-knit sweaters and expensive jackets, which,
she said, in the sober light of day they were happy to get back.[19]
The lack of any permanent accomplishments coupled with the opposition from parents and
colleagues helped convince the Rathbuns that the future of the movement lay outside the
university. They did not abandon Sharman's constituencyâHarry continued to
lead study groups on campusâbut after 1948 the focus permanently switched
from students to adults.
Individual Conversion and Social Action: Resolving the
Tension
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Sequoia Seminar was
limiting itself to fairly straightforward Records study, participants who were inclined
toward social action found outlets for their activism in other groups. Many Records-study
alumni worked in social service divisions of churches, and a significant number went into
the ministries of liberal Protestant denominations. At least one Jewish participant
entered the rabbinate. A large number were attracted to The Church for the Fellowship of
All Peoples, a nondenominational, interracial Protestant church in San Francisco under the
pastorate of a black minister, Howard Thurman. The issue of racial justice was of great
concern to group members, including Emilia who was actively involved in the Palo Alto
celebration of National Negro History Week during this period. Others worked through the
Quakers, especially with the European relief activities of the American Friends Service
Committee. Informal alumni newsletters of the early 1950s indicate Sequoia Seminar
encouraged many of its graduates to participate actively in teaching Sunday school and
pursue careers in the helping professions.[20]
Because transformation of the person was primary and social action only
consequential, the Rathbuns at first focused on the individual conversion and ignored the
resulting community activity. Such a position, however, was potentially self-destructive
for Sequoia Seminar. Since the group itself did not sponsor any social action, persons
whose transformation induced them to work directly in the community had to look outside of
Sequoia Seminar for opportunities and could no longer devote their complete energies to
the movement. A permanent organization that depended on continuing membership to survive
could not afford to infuse its members with the desire to go beyond it. Thus, as the
movement evolved into a sect, it became increasingly unambiguous in its purely homocentric
focus.
Occasionaly at first, and more often toward the end of the 1950s, the
Rathbuns began to claim that personal transformation was the sole function of the
movement. The appropriate social action was to remain within the group and help it spread
the word because in a homocentric world view spreading the word was the way to
change the world. Their homocentric position was an ideological compromise between those
who worried most about the next life and tended to ignore this one, and the social gospel
adherents whose concern for this life led them to support collective acts of social,
political, and economic reform. The Rathbuns sought to bring about the Kingdom of God in
this life through mass transformation of individuals. "Economic and social change is
a waste of time, as is fighting through law courts to change the social structure,"
wrote a seminar student in 1952. She believed such victories were transitory and that
"the fruit of this activity fades away in time."[21] What
was permanent was the transformation of the individual. "Ours is not the
responsibility of reforming the world," wrote a participant in a 1953 seminar,
"for through individual enlightenment, and only through individual
enlightenment, shall the world be reformed."[22]
As the homocentric philosophy became increasingly explicit, there was
mounting criticism of those who took the sociocentric position. The idea that the world's
problems could be solved by politics was labeled "political messianism." They
contrasted political messianism with their own position, which they characterized as
"realism": "realism stresses that the only way I can do something about you
is to get myself straightened out. My problem is not my mother, my conditioning, my
values, etc., but myself ."[23] Thus, the
responsibility of Sequoia Seminar, wrote Emilia, was "to present an opportunity for
persons to progressively put themselves at the disposal of a creative power greater than
themselves that will result in a fulfilled life for the individual and effect a
transformation in the life of the community in ever widening circles of nclusiveness,
ultimately to encompass all mankind."[24]
A New Constituency
The Rathbuns countered the tendency of people to leave for social
action by emphasizing the social implications of individual transformation. But they still
had to keep people involved beyond the first round of Records study. The Records study
approach was inherently self-limiting. Although some particularly dedicated individuals
would come back year after year to plow the same ground, most people were satisfied with
one or, at the most, two seminars and then moved on to apply what they had learned in
their lives. Although some did start their own Records study groups, there was no central
direction or control from Palo Alto, and most other groups appear to have been
short-lived. The high turnover had been no problem for Sharman or for the Rathbuns at
first, because they saw students as their primary constituency, and every year brought a
new crop of potential recruits. Records study seminars no more needed to change than did
Harry's final lecture. It might be the same sermon year after year, but there was always a
new congregation to hear it. However, after the collapse of Students Concerned, when the
Rathbuns increasingly turned their attention to Bay Area adults, they discovered that if
they wanted to keep people involved they would have to introduce not only new techniques,
such as shorter summer seminars, but some entirely new course work as well.
By beginning to develop new material that went beyond the scope of
Sharman's approach, the Rathbuns were taking yet another step toward the development of an
independent sect. This growing proto-sect status derived in part from the philosophical
content of the new courses that encouraged the development of a distinct religious
ideology, and probably in part from the economic realities of the new camp at Ben Lomond.
To keep Ben Lomond full, to justify its existence, to pay its bills, to develop it into
the kind of facility that the Rathbuns long envisioned, it was necessary to have a lot of
people making use of the facilities. One way to get more people was to develop a greater
number and variety of seminars.
New advanced or "continuation" seminars were created to meet
the demand for continuing study from people who were becoming permanent members of the
movement. From 1951 through 1955 one continuation seminar was held each summer and,
according to one participant, "the discussions ranged over Eastern religions, modern
psychology with particular reference to the problems of the individuals present, and
prayer and meditation."[25] In 1953 for the first time the
group held a special leadership seminar to train people who had taken the basic course and
now wanted to lead study groups on their own.
With these newly trained leaders the summer seminar schedule fairly
exploded in the mid-1950s. Gerald Heard, whose ideas were so influential with the
Rathbuns, gave guest lectures and led seminars at Ben Lomond in 1954 and 1955, and during
the summer of 1956 there were eight seminars, including two continuation groups and a
leadership seminar. There were fifteen in the summer of 1958 and seventeen the next year.
Six of the seminars were the basic Jesus as Teacher groups, but not one of them was led by
Harry or Emilia. They had moved up to the continuation seminars that dealt with such
issues as "methods and proce- dures for implementing the way of life implicit in the
teachings of Jesus," "knowing the self," and "Prayer and
Meditation." Yet, the Rathbuns did not carry the full load of the continuation
seminars alone. An inner circle of leaders was beginning to emerge, some of whom would
remain into the Beyond War era of the 1980s.[26]
Of particular interest was the special seminar that Emilia led in 1956
at the request of group leaders who felt the need "for renewal of fellowship and
inspiration."[27] The fact that some members of the group went
to Emilia to ask her to lead this seminar indicates that, for them, Sequoia Seminar and
not their churches had become their social and spiritual touchstone. They saw nothing
inappropriate in requesting additional institutional support from the group. The movement
was not unaware that its structure was becoming more sectlike, and they took pains to
disavow any such purpose. In that same year, 1956, the Sequoia Seminar newsletter assured
its readers, "we are keenly aware that it is not our chosen mission to become a new
sect nor promulgate any dogma or creed."[28]
Unlike the Jesus as Teacher groups that had their framework established
by Sharman, the continuation and postseminar meetings were in a state of constant flux
seeking some kind of coherent theme and methodology. The 1960 annual report acknowledged
that the groups varied "considerably in content and approach." It admitted that
they sometimes wished, "rather wistfully," that they could develop a uniform
structure similar to the Jesus as Teacher groups, but it concluded, "to date we have
not found one and we are not sure there is one."[29] Al-though
it would take ten years to develop a coherent pattern of additional courses, many of the
ideas eventually used by Creative Initiative were first tried out in the continuation
courses of the 1950s. In particular, they began the process of what would later be called
"deconditioning," that is having people examine their lives to see what forces
had shaped them, and then freeing themselves of those chains to the past so that they
could move forward in their commitment to God.[30]
The shift from students to more mature members and the introduction of
the continuation seminars were organizational changes that significantly altered the
nature of the movement. The postseminar groups both provided more activity for existing
participants and more opportunity to expand the membership base. Toward the end of the
Sequoia Seminar era, in 1957, both Harry and Emilia began giving public lecture series
outside the churches in an attempt to attract more people into the work. The Rathbuns
shifted Sharman's clientele and, while they did not change his message, they augmented it.
From being the end, Jesus as Teacher became the beginning. Where Sharman had left it to
the individual to determine how to implement the teachings of Jesus, the Sequoia Seminar
movement sought to become a vehicle not only through which individuals could change their
lives but through which they could live them as well.
Philosophical Sources: Jung, Buchman, and Heard
The changes in style and content took place incrementally through the
1940s and 1950s so that the transformed seminars as they finally emerged in the beginning
of the 1960s were an amalgam of the ideas of Henry B. Sharman and of several other people
whose philosophies were synthesized by the Rathbuns into a total world view. Indeed, the
philosophical and spiritual foundations of Creative Initiative were firmly established in
the 1950s. The three most important influences other than Sharman were C. G. Jung, as
received through Elizabeth Boyden and her mentor, the German psychologist Fritz Kunkel;
the Oxford Group Movement (Moral Re-Armament) of Frank Buchman; and the English popular
philosopher Gerald Heard.
Elizabeth Boyden had been introduced to the Sharman method by Frances
Warnecke in 1929 and had attended four summer seminars at Camp Minnesing.[31]
She went to Europe several times before the war to study psychology with Fritz Kunkel and
returned with him to this country where they worked together between 1942 and 1948.[32] Kunkel's work closely paralleled that of C. G. Jung. Both Kunkel
and Jung stressed the importance of religion in the process that Jung called
"individuation," by which a person comes to integrate all aspects of the
personality into the subconscious. By coupling the Sharman study method with the
techniques of psychotherapy, Boyden was supplying one of the components that many of his
disciples felt was missing from Sharman's work. Since psychology was perceived as a
science, and Records study had always been seen as a scientific process, it was easy
enough to include the search for psychological as well as religious truth in the seminar
process. When Kunkel came to this country for the first time in 1936, the Rathbuns and
Henry Sharman traveled to Los Angeles to attend seminars he was leading at Holmby College.[33]
Elizabeth Boyden eventually founded her own center, the Guild for
Psychological Studies, which combined Jungian psychology with Sharman's Records study.
Other Sharman students followed similar paths. The Rathbuns, however, never fully
committed themselves to a particular school of psychotherapy. Kunkel and Jung would
provide themes for much of their work over the years, as would other psychologists such as
Carl Rogers and Erich Fromm. Psychological issues were never far below the surface of the
Creative Initiative movement, and at some points threatened to take over. But Harry, with
his single-minded loyalty to Records study, and Emilia, who was always more attracted to
the intuitive than to the rational, ultimately followed a different road to personal
fulfillment.
The Oxford Group was the second major outside influence on the Rathbuns
in this early period. Founded by Frank N. Buchman in 1921, the Oxford Group was a somewhat
amorphous religious movement that stressed individual conversion, confession of sins,
adherence to a strict code of morality, and listening to God for guidance in daily life.
In 1938 Buchman rechristened his movement "Moral Re-Armament" and took a stand
opposing America's involvement in the growing conflicts of Asia and Europe. He advocated
the idea that Americans remain neutral and live a philosophy of love and cooperation in
their families, workplaces, and government.[34]
As a toiler in the vineyards of religion, Sharman was well aware of the
Oxford Group and had himself attended one of their huge "house party"
conventions in Briarcliff Manor, New York, in 1932.[35] Although he
did not join the followers of Buchman, Sharman did consider them to be "the most
vital religious movement of the time" and urged any of his followers who were
interested to examine the group for themselves. Harry never had much use for the
movement's minimizing intellectual understanding and emphasizing a purely emotional
surrender to the will of God. Emilia, however, found the Buchmanite approach more to her
liking.[36]
When Emilia attended an Oxford Group house party in Stockbridge,
Massachusetts, around 1935, it was even more important to her than her first Sharman
seminar because, unlike the seminar, the Oxford Group addressed her feelings. At the
seminar she had made the decision to dedicate her life to the will of God, but at the
house party she was forced to confront her own human weakness. She was shocked by being
placed in a group of the "unchanged" (that is, unconverted), where she was
constantly urged to confess her sins so that she could open herself to the voice of God.
Having led a rather traditional and somewhat cloistered life, the only sins Emilia could
think of were having taken a book from the YWCA lost-and-found and having been rude to her
mother. She traveled to Los Angeles to return the book in person, as required by the
Buchmanite theory of restitution, and then waited for a "leading" from God. What
she felt frightened her enormously. She had the strong sense that God wanted her to put on
a black velvet dress and visit William Randolph Hearst to urge him to use his fortune to
end all wars. She feared that such behavior would be not merely eccentric but a sign of
serious mental illness. After discussing the matter with Harry, she decided not to follow
the leading.[37]
Although worried that she might be "cracking up," Emilia
remained active within the Oxford Group in California. For several years after 1935 she
dropped all work on the Sharman Records study and devoted her time to the Buchmanites.
Harry continued to lead study groups, while Emilia did individual counseling that included
the hearing of confessions of sin. This was an eye-opening experience for her. Although
her worst conscious sin might have been filching a book from the Y lost-and-found, others
had indulged more fully in life's forbidden behavior, and their recounting of it to Emilia
served as her education in the broad range of human weakness.[38]
In the years before the outbreak of the war, Buchman and some members of
his inner circle were clearly sympathetic to Hitler and at least marginally anti-Semitic.
Although the quasi-fascist elements of the movement were not publicly stressed by the
Oxford Group leadership, they were pointed out by the group's critics.[39]
Harry and Emilia appear to have been unaware of the unsavory aspects of the Oxford Group's
politics, although they went along with Moral Re-Armament's strong isolationist position.
Several months after Buchman launched his Moral Re-Armament campaign to keep the United
States out of the European and Asian conflicts, Emilia and a small group of others
sponsored an advertisement in the Palo Alto Times calling for continued American
neutrality.[40] And as late as October 1941, just two months before
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Harry and twelve others who took the "peace
position" signed an appeal for funds to help defray the expenses of conscientious
objectors.[41] There is no indication that the Rathbuns were either
pro-German or anti-Semitic, so their opposition to American involvement in the war
probably stemmed as much from the antiwar position that Harry had taken since his high
school years and from their sympathy with the Quakers as it did from the influence of the
Oxford Group.
Emilia has said that she eventually drifted away from the Oxford Group
because she felt that it lacked substance. She came to agree with Harry that the Oxford
Group depended too much on emotionalism, wishful thinking, and intuition. She also
objected to its aggressive proselytizingâan ironic position given the later
evangelical zeal of both Creative Initiative and Beyond War. Although she returned to the
Sharman model of Records study, Emilia brought with her a permanent legacy from her Oxford
Group involvement. Her experience hearing confessions left her with "an education in
how the devil worked in life" and prepared her for the role of confidante and
counselor that she would play in the future. Although she rejected as inappropriate the
message she received when she prayed for God's guidance, the idea that God could
communicate directly with peopleâwhich had no role at all in Sharman's
academic approachâwas immensely appealing to Emilia. Subsequent leadings and
revelations would have a major influence in directing the course of her life. Finally,
Emilia accepted the Buchmanite demand that all followers adhere to the four absolutes:
absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love.[42] Observing these absolutes meant surrendering to the will of God, a
concept that dovetailed neatly with the ideas of Sharman, so the four absolutes would
become an integral part of the teachings of the Creative Initiative movement.[43]
In addition to the psychology of Kunkel and Jung and the religious
beliefs of the Buchmanites, the Rathbuns were influenced in the Sequoia Seminar period by
the philosophy of Gerald Heard. Gerald Heard was one of those hard-to-define intellectuals
who combined science, philosophy, and mysticism in a life lived in the murky penumbra
between academics and journalism. Reared in England, he studied philosophy and philosophy
of religion at Cambridge University. He was a friend of H. G. Wells, Julian and Aldous
Huxley, and others of that left-wing humanist circle in the 1930s and 1940s. He spent his
early career writing, teaching extension courses, and commenting on current events and
science on the BBC. In 1937 he was offered a position at Duke University but, after a
brief stay in North Carolina, decided instead to move to California where he eventually
opened his own school in Trabuco Canyon near Los Angeles.[44]
Although it was called Trabuco College, Heard's school was really more
an ashram. Trabuco was not merely a place to teach the religious life; it was a place to
live it. Students were expected to do the work necessary to keep the school running, and
monastic rules governed much of their behavior. "All the amusements and distractions
of secular living," including smoking, were prohibited. Silence was to be maintained
from supper until breakfast, and all food was simple and vegetarian. Students meditated
for an hour three times a day in pursuit of the school's purpose, the "attainment of
a quality of consciousness above the ego." But such enlightenment was not an end in
itself. Like Sharman and the Rathbuns, Heard believed that religious ideas could change
the world, and his theory of social change was solidly homocentric. He thought that,
although enlightenment was not an end in itself, it was sufficient in itself to bring on
the necessary change. Once enlightenment was obtained, Heard claimed, "our
individual, our group, our international issues are solved."[45]
The Rathbuns had read some of Heard's work and attended a lecture in San
Francisco where they met him in 1937, the first year he was in this country. Then, in
1942, Emilia, who was ending her affiliation with the Buchmanites, enrolled in a seminar
on mysticism at Trabuco. Because her mother was ill, she was forced to miss the first week
of the three-week course, but undaunted she went down late to Los Angeles where she
received a very chilly reception. After hitching a ride from the mailman into the canyon,
hiking up a long dusty road carrying her suitcase, and being forced to wait outside the
gates "like a peon," she was told to go home because she was late. Emilia had
gone down to Trabuco to study and she was not about to be turned away. She simply refused
to leave. Rather than make a fuss, Heard allowed her to stay and work in the kitchen, but
she was otherwise virtually ignored.[46]
Emilia found the time she spent at Trabuco extremely important. The
silence, the three hours a day of meditation, and the time to explore books on prayer in
the college library all contributed to a new attitude. Harry said that she came back
"a new woman . . . at a higher level of being."[47] The
Rathbuns were so impressed with Heard and Trabuco that they hoped to hold one of their
seminars there in 1946.[48] Although those plans fell through,
Heard journeyed north on several occasions in 1954 and 1955 to give public lectures and
private seminars to the Sequoia Seminar. It would appear that Heard provided the necessary
bridge between the scientific analysis of Sharman and Emilia's strong intuitive bent. Just
as the work of Kunkel and Jung reconciled the science of psychology with religion, the
work of Heard reconciled science with mysticism. Heard's philosophy made it possible to
accept science and still engage in the apparently extrarational behavior of eastern
mysticism.
Since many of Heard's ideas were transferred wholecloth into the
philosophy of Creative Initiative, they are worth a closer look if we are to understand
the intellectual grounding of the Rathbuns' movement. Gerald Heard saw religion and
science as complementary. Science was the process of finding facts. Religion was the
process of finding meaning. At the very heart of Heard's philosophy, and subsequently at
the very heart of the ideology of Creative Initiative, lay the idea of the evolution of
human consciousness. According to Heard, pre-Paleolithic people lived in a state of
economic, social, and psychological integration. As humans began to develop tools they
experienced a breakdown of this integration and started down the road of objective reason,
a road that eventually led them to reject intuition in favor of science. Heard believed
modern people had to transcend the dualism of objective and rational science on the one
hand and psychology and religion on the other by developing techniques that would allow
them to generate the same kinds of insight in the intuitive areas as they had in the
scientific.[49]
Heard argued that reintegration was possible because in the evolutionary
process human beings had not become overspecialized and had retained the power to decide
among options. Human consciousness and the human psyche were not results of evolution, but
its cause. In a neo-Lamarckian inversion of standard Darwinian principles, Heard made
humankind the master rather than the servant of its biology. He was unabashed in his
teleology. There was an explicit right direction in evolution and human beings were
heading toward a specific and final stage of existence. Heard contended that once they had
reached the end of their physical evolution, human beings had then entered a stage of
technical evolution during which an emphasis on the rational had led to the systematic
suppression of extrasensory abilities. He placed great stress on extrasensory perception
and other aspects of parapsychology, frequently citing parapsychological studies as
evidence for his belief that consciousness, or the mind, had a reality of its own outside
the body. It was Heard's contention that human beings were on the threshold of a new age,
the "Tertiary Age" that would replace the "Age of Technique." In the
new age, the mind or consciousness would grow as much as the body had in the first and the
mechanical world had in the second. Humankind would come to recognize how each individual
was an integral part of the comprehensive consciousness that was nature.[50]
Heard found evidence that people had the potential to evolve into this
third age by the way they responded to pain and sex. He argued that both pain and sexual
desire were the result of redirected psychic energy and claimed that when people focused
on developing their consciousness, as in the mystic traditions of both east and west, both
sensitivity to pain and sexual desire were considerably diminished.[51]
Since Heard believed that people were still evolving, that the next
stage of evolution lay in the development of human consciousness, that achieving the new
state of consciousness was the same thing as understanding the will of God, and that this
next step up the evolutionary ladder was within the conscious control of individuals,
clearly there had to be some method to achieve this end. That method was prayer:
"Prayer is the only way in which our evolution may be continued and there is no other
way."[52] Heard discussed prayer at some length and concluded
that meditative and contemplative prayer, or what he called "high prayer," was
the way to achieve a unity not only of mind and body but also of human and God.[53]
Gerald Heard published no fewer than eighteen books between 1931 and
1959, and all of them were variations on the theme just described. The Rathbuns appear to
have been particularly influenced by Pain, Sex and Time, published in 1939, and A
Preface to Prayer, published in 1944. The ideas in these two books, plus what they
learned during several meetings and seminars with Heard, infused their personal beliefs
and established the philosophical framework for the Creative Initiative movement.[54]
The ideas of Kunkel, Buchman, and Heard found their way into the
Rathbuns' thinking within two years of their first exposure to Records study in 1934.
Thus, although the concepts gleaned from these three men were alien to the long tradition
of Sharman's study groups, they were all part and parcel of the Rathbuns' religious
philosophy from its inception. Sequoia Seminar may have been the institutional successor
to Camp Minnesing, but it grew out of a more complex ideological tradition than Sharman's
Records study alone. By itself, the Records study movement was able to survive only as
long as it had the personality of Henry B. Sharman at its head. Once he was gone, all
Records study groups gradually faded away except the two in California, Elizabeth Boyden's
Guild for Psychologial Studies and Harry and Emilia Rathbuns' Creative Initiative
Foundation, both of which had enriched the core of gospel study with additional ideas.
In Search of an Ideology
From its beginning as an independent entity in 1946, therefore,
Sequoia Seminar adopted a different tone than that which had characterized earlier Records
study groups. The first announcement of the Rathbuns' Sequoia Seminar owed as much to
Gerald Heard as it did to Henry B. Sharman. It proclaimed that the world was in danger and
that people had to act immediately if the earth were to be saved. Pointing to the recent
advent of the atomic age, it warned, "the very existence of our species is seriously
threatened." The announcement went on to say that people had the choice to use this
power dangerously and, if that were to be avoided, human nature had to be changed:
"The ultimate and basic need has to do with the nature, the character, the
spirit of man himself; it is the need to achieve so radical a change in human nature that
man no longer will be his own worst enemy."[55]
It is clear from the language here and in similar statements contained
in the 1947 announcement that the Rathbuns did not perceive of their seminar merely as an
opportunity to explore the teachings of Jesus in order to gain personal insight. Rather,
it was a place to learn the solution to the problem that might end civilization. The
method was still the critical study of the Records of the life of Jesus, but now its
purpose was to "discover the thought behind his teaching and action, and thereby the
psychological secret of his insight, his maturity and his vitality." The method was
the study of the gospels, but the purpose was to change the person. This was not change in
Sharman's somewhat limited sense of commitment to the will of God. This was change in the
sense of Gerald Heard's theory of human evolution. As the announcement put it:
It must be obvious to all thinking persons that our problem is man
himself. His psychological development has failed to keep pace with his matchless
technological advances. The need is for a body of mature men and women, ready to pay
whatever personal price is necessary to preserve and enhance the actual and potential
values which are inherent in humanity. A small band of such mature people committed to
objective and persistent effort to discover the demands of the situation and to such
fearless action as the discovery may entail, can alter the course of history, can prevent
the disaster which imminently threatens, and can direct man's feet again into the path of
his evolutionary ascent.[56]
These early statements of purpose are important because in the
first flush of enthusiasm at having their own group and an opportunity to do something
about the new danger of the atomic age, the Rathbuns: did very little to soften the public
appearance of their movement. Their apocalyptic language, their frank avowal of a cosmic
framework for future human evolution, and the centrality of individual psychological
change were presented in bald, uncompromising language. Forty years later these same ideas
would form the ideological heart of the Beyond War movement, but they would be presented
in a way less at odds with popular values. Indeed, popular ideas about nuclear war had
changed by the 1980s, but the movement also learned that religious true believers could
not attract a large following among educated, professional, middle-class Americans and
that the message and the medium had to be secularized if the movement were to have broad
appeal.
By the mid-1950s even, the apocalyptic tone of the first announcement
had been toned down considerably. The emphasis had shifted from changing people to save
the world to helping individuals find greater fulfillment and meaning in life. Ever
sensitive to the shifting whims of popular culture, Sequoia Seminar, like the rest of the
country, moved from the high anxiety of the early cold war to the introspective psychology
of the 1950s. In 1956 Sequoia Seminar published a little booklet that sought to describe
the purpose of the group. Under the subheading "The Need of Our Time," the
booklet referred to an age of uncertainty in which old values had broken down but no new
ones had taken their place. "We don't know what we want or feel," it said,
"we don't know ourselves." Echoing the era's concern with the mindlessness of
the "organization man," the booklet warned that "conformity with the crowd
has taken on higher value than the development of one's individuality." Without ever
quite saying so, it strongly implied that the seminar would provide individuals with what
was missing in their lives by helping them find a new and more mature understanding of
religion.[57]
When the Rathbuns used the term "religion" they did not mean
Christianity. They felt that too often Christianity had become the belief that "being
polite to God will bring powers which insure prosperity and success," "an
anaesthetic that brings peace of mind and obliviousness to the unpleasant realities about
us," in other words, a socially acceptable neurosis that allowed one to avoid facing
up to the real world, or "a lot of false ideas and superstitions stemming from
wishful thinking."[58] What they sought was a mature religion
that they believed could be found through studying the teachings of Jesus not as the words
of God (both Rathbuns doubted that Jesus was divine) but as the reflections of "Cone
who thought deeply about human life and what it could be."[59]
Studying Jesus brought one to God. For Sharman, God was the
"ceaseless dispenser of that which makes for man's evolution, growth, creative
motivation," and humans were the vessels that had to open themselves to what God was
willing to dispense.[60] Harry too, emphasized the absolute
centrality of God to the work. There was no point, Harry argued, in asking whether God was
or why God was: "The basic assumption at this point is that one is no longer fighting
God, but taking God on the faith in a Being that is." Like Sharman's God, Harry's God
was the power that allowed "the self and all else . . . to function growingly."
Harry's "minimal definition of God" was truth, goodness, and beauty:
"Goodness is that which I must do. Truth is to be used in terms of goodness. Beauty
is to be appreciated and enjoyed."[61]
Both Sharman's and Harry's definitions of God deemphasized any personal
aspect of God's nature, but Emilia was less comfortable with a depersonalized God. At the
same seminar in which Harry gave the definition of God just quoted, Emilia told the
participants, "God is personal." She was concerned that people understand that
prayer was efficacious. Yet, when she defined "personal," it becomes clear that
she was no more talking about an anthropomorphic God than were Sharman or Harry. By
personal she said she meant "the capacity to project unrealized meanings into the
future." God was then defined as "unrealized Purpose, the unrealized meaning who
can, through prayer, be translated into concrete being.[62] Murky
as this definition was, it nevertheless captured the essence of Sequoia Seminar's
messageâhumans have the potential for evolution which could be achieved by
following the will of God, a process facilitated through prayer.
A Codification of Ideas
In 1959, as the result of two years of experimenting with postseminar
groups, the leadership of the movement prepared a "leadership handbook" to
provide some common approaches and methods for the work being carried on in a wide variety
of postseminar meetings. This handbook was the most comprehensive attempt during the 1950s
to codify the philosophical structure of Sequoia Seminar and represented a major step
toward the establishment of a distinct religious sect.
Of course, nothing even remotely comparable had been produced by
Sharman, who only issued an occasional manifesto about the importance of studying the
teachings of Jesus. Even though the group continued to insist that it had no interest in
establishing its own creed, the leadership handbook had all the appearance of a compendium
of dogma. Its importance lies not in the originality of its contents, since almost
everything in the book was the result of years of discussion and development, but in the
fact that the group felt the need to commit its beliefs to writing and thereby begin an
independent tradition of passing on its ideals through the printed word.
The first few pages of the handbook placed great stress on the concept
of community, and this time there were no cautions about conflict with peoples' church
activities. It reminded the leaders that "the God-centered life is the shared
life" and urged them to make it clear that one of the purposes of the group was to
build a spirit of community. Participants were to be told that they would all "be
expected to do some work, to take some responsibility, to be willing to give something in
return for what they are receiving."[63] Community meant
commitment, and participants frequently found it very difficult to distinguish in their
own minds where commitment to God's will ended and loyalty to the Sequoia Seminar
community began.[64] Intentionally or not, the demand for sacrifice
from the members functioned as a device that built loyalty to the group. The more people
could be persuaded to invest in terms of time, effort, and money, the greater stake they
would have psychologically in justifying their participation and confirming the truth of
the group's values to themselves.
Sequoia Seminar was not yet ready to announce that it had fathomed the
will of God and was going to teach it to participants in the seminars. It was willing
however, to go beyond anything done by Sharman to instruct followers about the meaning of
Jesus' teachings as they applied to life. The leaders' handbook laid out a way of thinking
and a way of living that it deemed appropriate for people who had dedicated their lives to
the will of God. These intellectual, emotional, and behavioral prescriptions (and
proscriptions) amounted to a blueprint for a specific life style lived within the Sequoia
Seminar religious community that would be different from a life led within one of the
mainline churches. It followed, then, that "living the life" within the
community was an indication of obeying the will of Godâalthough not the only
way, because neither Sequoia Seminar nor Creative Initiative ever claimed exclusive
knowledge of the will of God.
One of the first changes that Harry had made when he began to lead his
own Jesus as Teacher seminars was to start the study with the two great commandments of
Jesus, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind and with all thy strength," and "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself." These became the central teaching for Sequoia Seminar
participants, requiring people to love God, love themselves, and love other people. As
part of the emerging ideology of the proto-sect, Sequoia Seminar developed its own
nomenclature to refer to these three requirements. Love of God was called authority, love
of self was called integrity, and love of others was called responsibility.
Love of God was called authority because love meant surrendering to the
authority of God. When discussing this concept the leadership handbook used terminology
that minimized the significance of the human individual and stressed that people could
choose neither the ends nor the means of their lives. God had determined what was to be
done and how it was to be done, and "our function is simply one of opening ourselves
so as to be able to discover what is required of us and of responding to what we discover
as required." "Do you really see that you have no choice, and that you never
will?" asked one of the clarifying questions suggested for discussion.[65]
The issue of authority led directly to the discussion of the problem of
evil. The handbook explained that "followers of Jesus see no external evil:
the 'evil,' the duality is within." The group believed that to call something or
someone evil was to assume a prerogative open only to Godâjudgment. Instead
of looking outside for something to blame, instead of passing judgment on others,
participants were told "any 'evil' effect is traceable to a root cause of
ignoranceâusually the ignorance of thinking that you can be the first cause,
the authority."[66] As a consequence members took the position
that evil should not be resisted and that they should make no enemies. Much seminar time
was devoted to discussions of what this meant in practical terms. How did one respond to
crooked politicians, road hogs, people who threw garbage out of their cars, and the like?[67] Even if one did not act judgmentally and vindictively, what did you
do to cope with the anger? There were no simple answers to these specific questions, but
there was an obvious personal style that emerged as a result of this philosophical
orientation. Sequoia Seminar people had a gentle and benign attitude toward the world and
its occupants. Individually and collectively, when they were wronged they did not strike
back but sought a "creative" solution to the conflict.
It followed naturally that if individuals could have no enemies,
neither could groups of people, and thus war, which assumed collective enemies, was not a
way to solve problems.
Their refusal to resist evil was integral to the homocentric orientation
of the movement. If there were no external enemies, then neither could ultimate solutions
be external, that is, political. Politics was a method of passing on the responsibility
for things that individuals needed to do for themselves. Political leaders were neither
the cause of nor the solution to the world's problems. The movement also held that the
source of evil did not lie in the "old order" and therefore would not be solved
by the coming of a savior. As an extension of the logic that rejected political action and
as a consequence of their rejection of Jesus as the messiah, this idea made perfect sense.
Yet, when one remembers that they also believed that people were capable of evolving into
a third stage, the idea that the "old order" was not the cause of the world's
problems becomes less clear.
The handbook then dealt with a series of other problems related to the
issue of authority. It explained that since the function of the individual was
"simply to be aware, to be," people should not seek identity through traditional
customs and institutions. They should not think of themselves simply as members of
churches, or nationalities, or ethinic groups, or professions, or any other category that
divided people from one another. Categories tend to separate people, and the entire
Sequoia Seminar philosophy was based on the unity of human beings and the world: "We
were created to be part of the whole. Atonement (at-one-ment) is the exhortation to drop
our separation."[68]
Just as the philosophy of the group promoted the unity of people with
one another, it also stressed the necessity of individuals to integrate themselves. The
integration of the self was "integrity," the second major theme derived from the
commandments. Integrity meant coming to grips with personal hopes and fears, and being
honest with one's self. The handbook urged leaders to challenge all participants to see if
they had been open with themselves and with others, using Jesus as the appropriate model
for achieving personal integration. The purpose of this self-exploration was not to solve
personal problems, not to make individuals happy, and not to let people live lives
successfully on their own terms. Nor was it merely psychotherapy. Although a happier and
more satisfying life in which doubts and fears had been overcome was seen as a beneficial
side effect, integrity was primarily "a means toward the goal of full acceptance of
authority."[69]
The third form of love that members of the group were urged to develop
was responsibility, or love of others. As interpreted by the handbook, love for others was
more than another way of saying "make no enemies." Being responsible meant
accepting a special obligation toward the others in the group. "Responsibility leads
us to communityâthe brotherhood of those who are serving God," stated
the handbook. It distinguished clearly between a community, which was a group working to
carry out God's will, and a collective, which was working for immediate human goals and
thus was not expressive of authority. Participation in the community meant that
individuals were expected to join others in working at carrying out the will of God, and
that meant teaching others the ideas they were learning in the seminar.[70]
It is in the discussion of this third area that the movement came
closest to declaring itself a sect. A series of questions were laid out in the handbook
that leaders might use to clarify the issue of responsibility. These questions were
obviously not meant to open a Socratic dialogue. Each of them was designed to elicit a
specific response, and those responses constituted a virtual definition of a sect. The
very first one asked, "Does it seem that in order to work most effectively toward
helping people to meet their real needs you must join yourself with others who are working
together for the same cause?" This was more than a simple invitation to join a
community of believers, it was a demand for the surrender of self to the group: "This
means the surrender of your illusory freedom so as to multiply your effectiveness by
joining together with others who are working for God." The handbook conceded that
this question might well "initiate a rather intensive discussion of community."[71]
As stated in the handbook, the way people could demonstrate their
acceptance of authority, that is, commitment to God's will, was by joining a group
dedicated to that end. Here at last was a clear demand for specific behavior that was a
test of authenticity. Sharman had never posited any test of commitment, but the Rathbuns
were doing exactly that. Commitment to God now meant commitment to the group to the point
of surrendering individual freedom for the community good. There was an implication that
those who refusd to sacrifice their individual freedom for the effort of the group lacked
genuine commitment to the will of God and were therefore not among those who would be the
harbingers of the third age. But the addition of a final qualifier kept open the
possibility that people could do the will of God outside the movement and prevented the
handbook from being an open declaration of independence from the established churches and
a public admission that they were indeed a sect. "We need people to join with us in
the work we are doing," the handbook declared, but it went on to provide people with
an escape clause: "If this doesn't seem to be the place for you to function, then
quit wasting time and go out and find the place where you can serve God most
effectively."[72] Aware of the dangers of absolutism, the
leadership refrained from declaring themselves either the only or best medium for carrying
out the will of God.
Harry Rathbun Interprets the Philosophy
As the intellectual spokesman for the movement, Harry developed a
speech, given repeatedly, that summed up the Sequoia Seminar philosophy. The philosophical
consistency of Harry's speech over many years demonstrates a sectarian reluctance to
change even in the face of shifting social values. The form changed, the institutional
support structure changed, but the core truths that the Rathbuns had perceived in the late
1930s were immutable. The first version of the speech was delivered to two different
conventions of educators in 1942. More than forty years later, the authors heard Harry
give basically the same talk to a meeting of Beyond War leaders. In fact, it seems to have
been the only speech that Harry gave through most of his life. Notes to some of the last
of the "final lectures" that he delivered to his Stanford classes indicate they
too covered the same ground and used most of the same illustrative material. Mixing the
order in which he presented his points from speech to speech, Harry invariably mentioned
science, evolution, psychological maturity, individual obligation to the group, and Jesus
as a model for thought and action. He liked to set up the speech, when possible, with a
dramatic statement about the danger the world was in. This was easy enough during World
War II, and later he usually managed to mention the possibility of the end of civilization
from nuclear war somewhere in the talk. Soon after the war, in 1947, he used for the first
time a quote from Albert Einstein that would later become the virtual motto of Beyond War:
"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking,
and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."[73]
Having established the danger, Harry proceeded to imply a solution by
describing Heard's theory of human evolution.[74] In a 1959 version
of the speech that was reprinted and apparently widely distributed, he argued that there
was a direction in the evolutionary process toward greater complexity, greater
specialization, and greater understanding. He then likened each of these ideas to one of
Heard's stages of human development: "The first, the biological or organic state, was
that in which we developed the characteristics that made us men. . . . The second stage
has been called the technic stage, and we are in the middle of that now. . . . The third
is the psychic stage in which we learn how to use this equipment above our ears more
effectively."[75]
The speech then usually moved into a section dealing with the importance
of psychologically mature individuals, "men and women adequate to the situations in
which they will find themselves."[76] And always, in every
speech, he illustrated what he meant by reciting that paean to bourgeois self-sufficiency,
Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If." The selection of Kipling's poem was understandable
on most counts since it defined maturityâ"you'll be a Man, my
son!"âin terms of sobriety, hard work, and emotional control. But it
also stressed the importance of personal independence from others, an idea that ran
directly counter to the great emphasis within Sequoia Seminar on interdependence. Harry
was apparently untroubled by the fact that the poem could be considered inconsistent with
the goal of community because it described a person of great inner strength derived from
solid middle-class values.[77] Finally, Harry came to the logical
conclusion of his talk: the way to achieve the next step in evolution, the way to attain
psychological maturity, the way to insure human cooperation and the survival of
civilizationâreligion. He always insisted that religion was universal.
"I contend that everyone has a religion whether he knows it or not," Harry told
an audience in 1960. "I say that," he continued, "because it seems to me
that historically it is true that what we encompass by the word religion is a person's
views of the universe in which he lives, his relationship to that universe, the way things
are, the things that are valuable and so on."[78] His
definition of religion might not have passed muster in an academic setting, but it had
another purpose. Since everybody had a religion, then it was "extraordinarily
important for a person to have a realistic religion instead of one based upon illusion; .
. . a mature rather than a childish one."[79] He defined
mature religion in Sequoia Seminar terms as total loyalty to the highest good, that is,
the surrender of the individual's will to the will of God, and pointed out that Jesus was
one of the finest exemplars of that mature religious approach to life. The purpose of
accepting a mature religion, as he defined it, remained constant through Harry's speeches,
but the wording was softened somewhat in the later years. The first full-blown example of
the standard speech, delivered in 1942, pulled no punches. Man, he explained, had to
"cast off the shell of separateness in which he is imprisoned and emerge . . . into
the next stage of human evolution which is not organic evolution but that of his psyche,
his spirit, his essential nature." Using an explicitly biological term, he stated
that this "mutation is attained by giving one's complete and total loyalty to
the underlying spirit of ultimate and total good, call it by whatever name you like. Such
is the essence of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth." Harry had no doubt that what he
was saying was scientifically true and would someday be proven through psychology, but, he
declared, "we can't wait for that. We must save civilization now so the psychologist
will have an opportunity to make that discovery."[80]
Psychology in Sequoia Seminar
Psychology was the most poorly defined of all the elements that made
up Sequoia Seminar's philosophy, yet it was one of the most important and, even more than
the ideas of Buchman or Heard, it set Sequoia Seminar apart from the tradition of Henry B.
Sharman. Since Harry always argued that psychology would eventually prove what religion
already knew, why bother with psychology at all? Because, among the three appropriate
objects of loveâGod, self, and otherâlove of self or integrity
required that people come to understand their subconscious needs and fears so that they
could be free to carry out the will of God. The movement believed psychology could help
people toward religion, and religion could help them psychologically. A physician
participating in a 1953 seminar wrote that he had learned that psychiatry taught, "To
be happy you must be properly oriented to your environment and totally integrated, so that
every action is a productive one leading to full potentiality." The seminar taught
him that Jesus had said the same thing two thousand years ago and, he concluded, "a
well-adjusted person is, by definition, religious."[81]
Psychology was, nevertheless, also perceived as potentially dangerous;
when wrongly used it could either undermine the religious message or become the primary
purpose of the group, relegating the teach ings of Jesus to a secondary role. Freudian
psychology, which defined religious belief as neurotic, was an example of the first
danger. Harry believed that "Freudian psychology leads to a mechanistic view of the
universe and to a philosophy of meaninglessness."[82] There is
some indication that the Rathbuns felt, not without reason, that Boyden and her followers
fell into the second danger when they split off from the main Sharman group in 1941 and
began their own work.[83] The Rathbuns referred to them as
"the psychologizers."
The exact role that psychology played in Sequoia Seminar meetings prior
to 1955 is not clear, although its flavor is suggested by a list of recommended readings
from 1950 that included works by Rollo May and Erich Fromm in addition to books by Kunkel,
Jung, and Heard.[84] Much of the psychological activity that did
occur took place under the direction of Emilia with the assistance of Betty Eisner. Eisner
had been a student of Harry's in the business law course. She had attended a Records study
group at the Rathbuns' home in 1936 and was at the first Sequoia Seminar in 1946. She had
gone on to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and came up from her home in southern
California to help lead some special seminars in the mid-1950s.[85]
A set of very complete notes from a 1952 continuation seminar gives some
insight into the kind of psychological activity that took place in the sessions. A
parenthetical comment near the beginning of the notes indicate that there were
"several sessions during which Seminar participants verbalized their 'seventh veil'
matter, their inmost blocks to further growth and progress on the Way."[86] These group confessions may have owed something to Emilia's years
of experience hearing confessions in her Oxford Group work. When she told the
participants, "nothing that has been said is a surprise, at least to me," she
was repeating language she had used to describe her Buchmanite experience. Emilia assured
the group that they became more lovable when they opened up and admitted their
"inmost natures and problems," and explained that it was all part of the process
of discovering what they could be so that they could see where they were and how they
could move toward what God intended them to be.[87]
As the decade progressed the role of psychology in the group's
activities increased. In 1956 Emilia and Betty Eisner were coleaders of a group that wrote
spontaneously on themes suggested by Emilia, "trying to express their own feelings
rather than intellectual concepts."[88] In addition to
spontaneous writing, they also did Jungian dream interpretation in groups and used art to
express their feelings.[89] The 1958 annual report explained,
"painting and other art work is becoming an increasingly important part of our
program, particularly at the Continuation seminars. We are learning how such activities
can contribute to the process of individual change with which we are concerned."[90] So pervasive was the psychological approach by 1958 and 1959 that
almost all of the continuation seminars given in those summers were psychologically
focused and many included art. The most explicit was a seminar entitled "Group
Therapy" led by Betty Eisner. It was described as "an intensive group therapy
situation and will be conducted on a very personal level aimed at removing barriers within
the individual which obstruct his growth in creative living. . . . The use of art
materials will play an important role."[91]
Two comments made in 1959 indicate that the heavy emphasis on psychology
may have gotten out of hand. The announcement letter for the 1959 seminar season cautioned
potential participants that the leaders were "neither qualified nor intended to
perform the function of psychotherapy," and they would not accept anybody who seemed
more interested in that than in pursuing a religious life. About the same time, a
handwritten memo from Emilia asked if people should not be "well grounded in the
teachings of Jesus and have made the decision to follow the 'way' before they are enrolled
in any group which has as its objective the process of introspection (therapy)." And,
conversely, she asked if people who started work in psychotherapy should be "told
that the process in the seminar structure leads to a choice of 'the way' of life commended
by Jesus (commitment)?"[92]
Emilia's fear that the psychotherapeutic aspects of the work might have
begun to take precedence over the religious purpose seems particularly apt in retrospect.
Although nobody knew it at the time, Sequoia Seminar was one of a stream of sources for
what would become the "human potential" movement of the 1960s. Their stress of
religious values kept them from total involvement, but for several years in the late 1950s
they were the place where some of the California activists in the human potential movement
got their start. One was Del Carlson. Carlson was a Marine Corps veteran who had been
attracted to a Records study group at San Jose State College in 1947 and who had
participated actively in Students Concerned. He stayed with the movement after the demise
of Students Concerned and was, for a dozen years, one of the mainstays of the group. A
high school art teacher, he had his summers free and devoted them to Sequoia Seminar. He
was the group's registrar, business manager, and leader of art therapy sessions until
1962.[93]
Carlson was also a friend of Michael Murphy, the man who founded
Esalen. In fact, Carlson was a coleader of the first formal seminar ever held at Esalen in
1962, when it was still called Slate's Hot Springs.[94]
Even more important, both to Sequoia Seminar and the human potential
movement, was Willis Harman. An engineering professor at Stanford, Harman had attended a
study group led by Harry and then had gone to a Sequoia Seminar in 1954. He had not
expected the heavy emphasis on meditation, introspection, and self-exposure, but he found
that his engineer's rational world view was "permanently destroyed" as a result
of his experience there. He embarked on an extended period of self-education in mysticism
and psychic phenomena and moved into the inner circle of Sequoia Seminar.[95]
Harman had been very impressed by Gerald Heard's lectures on his
experience with mescaline; he also made contact with Myron Stolaroff, one of the original
American experimenters with LSD, who was also briefly involved with Sequoia Seminar. On
November 16, 1956, eight of the Sequoia Seminar leadership group accompanied Harman to the
home of a physician member of the movement, where Harman took LSD for the first time. In
subsequent years almost every member of the Sequoia Seminar inner leadership group
experimented with LSD on a number of occasions. Many of the drug sessions were led by
Betty Eisner who was very interested in the psychotherapeutic possibilities of low doses
of the then legal hallucinogen. She and Harman disagreed strongly, however, on how the
drug should be used since he preferred larger doses that would provide the user with
mystical experiences, rather than the milder effects that Eisner sought.[96]
Even though LSD was still a noncontrolled substance and, therefore,
legal to use, Sequoia Seminar employed it very cautiously. It was never distributed to
anyone other than group leaders, and their sessions were carefully planned and supervised,
usually with the presence of one of the planning group members who was a medical doctor.
There appear to have been few if any "bad trips," and the drug-induced mystical
experiences and psychotherapeutic sessions are usually remembered positively by those who
partook of them. Experimentation with LSD stopped after 1959 because most of those
involved felt there was nothing more to be gained from continued use and perhaps also
because of a difficult confrontation between Emilia and Betty Eisner that may have
involved the use of the drug. Those, like Harman, who wished to pursue further interests
in the drug left Sequoia Seminar and became active in other groups such as Esalen and the
International Foundation for Internal Freedom.[97]
Just how far the Rathbuns had moved from the tradition of Henry B.
Sharman by the end of the decade is illustrated by the controversy that surrounded the
last meeting of the trustees of the Sharman will in 1959. Harry was not only one of the
trustees of the self-liquidating foundation set up by the will; he was also its executor.
In 1958 plans were made to dispose of the last twenty-five thousand dollars of the funds
from Sharman's estate, and Harry apparently hoped that the bulk of the money could go to
Sequoia Seminar. To convince the others that his group met the intention of the will,
Harry invited them out to California for a seminar.[98] Opposition
from the other trustees to the kind of program that the Rathbuns were running killed both
the visit and any hope Harry had of getting Sharman funds, although Harry did lead a
seminar for the trustees the next year at Springfield College in Massachusetts.
Word of the psychological emphasis had spread, and those who toed the
orthodox Sharman line were not pleased with what they had heard. One trustee reported that
a number of students of his had gone to Stanford and had reported back unfavorably on the
Rathbuns' work. Another summed up his objections by telling Harry that he believed Sequoia
Seminar was "quite different from those led by Dr. Sharman. Very little serious study
of the Records themselves seems to be attempted and much time is devoted to the personal
problems of the individual members. Training and skill in psychology and psychiatry seem
to be very important."[99] And finally, a third pointed out
that Sharman had wanted efforts directed at students and faculty, but Harry and Emilia
were working mainly with nonacademic adults.[100]
The alienation of the trustees and the experimentation with LSD were
both aspects of the way psychology had come to dominate the work of the group. This
domination could have made the group an ongoing force within the new human potential
movement in California. That course was not followed, however, because in the period
between 1959 and 1962 Emilia underwent a number of severe personal strains that eventually
climaxed in a religious revelation. This revelation was the basis for a reclarification of
the whole meaning and purpose of the movement. The psychologizing that Emilia had first
questioned back in the early 1940s when it was led by Elizabeth Boyden had slowly worked
its way into her own group, and by the end of the decade it threatened to eclipse the
religious work completely. The philosophy that had evolved was based in part on the
validity of psychology as a means for personal insight, but it also used the evolutionary
and mystical theories of Gerald Heard, and always the objective study of the life of Jesus
in the Sharman tradition. Emilia's personal crisis of the period after 1959 would have the
effect of redressing the balance and putting psychology back into a secondary role.
Psychology would be exchanged for a new interpretation of the religious message that would
finally move Sequoia Seminar from proto-sect to a fully self-conscious religious movement.
The increasing stress on psychology toward the end of the 1950s, and the
growing formalization of ideology, were both indications that the group was moving away
from the churches (both literally and theoretically) and toward the sect end of the
church-sect continuum. The codification of the movement's ideology decreased the
likelihood that they would change to go along with trends in the larger society. The focus
on psychology was perceived by members as a "service," exactly the kind of
service predicted by the economic model as compensation for the increased cost of sect
membership. The transition was not yet complete. The most obvious component of a sect is
its divergence from standard church values. It is that divergence that makes membership so
costly. At the end of the 1950s, Sequoia Seminar was still primarily a gospel study group
that could operate from within the churches. There were signs of uniqueness beginning to
appear, but they would not be fully embraced until after Emilia had her vision of a New
Religion for the Third Age. |
