Syntax aside, it is difficult to imagine what the writers thought an outsider would make of that statement. Unwilling to come right out and explain their religious motivation, fearing that they would be dismissed out of hand, they disguised their ideas in a flurry of words that could only bewilder the uninitiated.

Unsuccessful in these and other attempts to obtain outside funding, the National Initiative Foundation dropped its plan for "The Motivated Community" in 1970. In 1971 it changed its name to the Creative Initiative Foundation. The name Sequoia Seminar, which had first been used in 1946, continued to be the designation for the Jesus as Teacher seminars through 1982, but Build the Earth was absorbed by Creative Initiative after 1977, and the latter was the name by which the group was best known during its period of civic community action in the 1970s. The new name, which had real significance for members, frequently puzzled outsiders. People had trouble remembering it because the words did not seem to mean anything in conjunction with each other. To the movement itself, however, each word had a very specific and important meaning, but one that made sense only in the context of their total philosophy. A recruiting brochure tried to clarify the name by explaining that "creative" meant "being able to use both sides of the brain the rational and the intuitive," while "initiative" meant "taking charge, being a leader, accepting responsibility."^[37] But even this explanation failed to convey the Jungian background of the first word and the element of commitment to the will of God that lay behind the second.

The decade of activity under the Creative Initiative label was essentially ten more years of the same thing. Introductory events designed to attract nonmembers were followed by a lengthy process of involvement that culminated in an initiation ceremony. The experiments in civic community activity begun under Build the Earth and the National Initiative Foundation continued. A project would begin with tremendous initial enthusiasm and work, followed by a brief period of activity, and then be changed or terminated as the group explored some new avenue of activity.^[38]

Lying behind the decades of flux in names, courses, and programs,was the desire to expand the community of believers. To do this the group needed to communicate to potential members what they believed, what they were, and what they could mean for people who joined. None of these steps was as easy as it seemed because all of them involved coming to grips with the issue of presenting a new religion to the outside world and thereby risking being labeled a cult. If they came to be perceived as a cult they would find it more difficult to recruit new members and existing members would be forced to pay an even higher price for continued affiliation.

Statements of Belief and the Problem of Candor

Statements of belief posed a particular problem because the general population was likely to reject a creed that continued to be based on the conviction that the believers were instruments of God and members of a community that would be the salvation of the world. Yet, that was what everyone in the movement believed. Even Harry, who always prided himself on his more objective and rational approach to religious matters, was swept up in the vision of a new age. "All indications are that this is the time, " he wrote to his son, Richard. "We are calling it the Third Dispensation ." Like Emilia and most of the identified people, Harry believed that their mission was divinely inspired. "The work we are engaged in," he told Richard, "is a mystical work; it is directed from a plane of knowledge and intention far above that of the purely human (and that continues to be verified) so 'the sky is the limit!' "^[39] In its own eyes the community was not a messianic movement, because rather than following a messiah, they were the messiah. In a letter Harry explained their thinking as follows:

We have talked about our being a community in which every member is a carrier of the message, a "messiah," and that the "second coming" dreamed of in traditional Christianity is thus corrected and realized in this community of people not in a special individual (and certainly not in one who is a Judge and executioner!) who have the answer to the world's need, and who are demonstrating it in action.^[40]

Public statements of belief had to be consistent with these millenarian-messianic sentiments, while at the same time soft-peddling them lest they put people off. For the first few years, while Emilia and the early followers were developing the New Religion, Sequoia Seminar continued using the statement of general principles it had developed through the 1950s, still based heavily on Sharman's ideas.^[41] With the coming of New Sphere and Build the Earth, however, the movement entered what would be a prolonged period of conflicting styles, sometimes being so vague as to be misleading, and sometimes allowing their deep concern and commitment to overrule their caution so that they expressed their values directly.

There was real danger in frankness. In May of 1968 Build the Earth published a position paper entitled "This We Believe." In it appeared the statement: "Revolution is the key. Revolution in home, church, government, economics, education, sex, race, culture, art and science."^[42] The quote was intended to make the point that society was undergoing revolution in all facets of life; it went on to explain that Build the Earth was also revolutionary because it wanted to bring about a new age of peace, freedom, and cooperation. However, that one passage was quoted several times out of context to brand the group as radical.^[43]

At first during the early New Sphere period of 1965 and 1966 the group presented itself in a way that made it clear at the outset that they were a religiously oriented movement, if not a new religion. For example, in a 1966 sermon to the Unitarian Church of San Mateo, Harry explained that the third dispensation had arrived and mankind had to move beyond Christianity just as in the second dispensation Jesus had tried to move the Jews beyond Judaism. He called for new symbols for the new age and told the congregation that they were the second coming of the Christ who would save the world. Aware that these ideas might strike his audience as bizarre, he told them that they must be willing to "be called heretics, kooks, arrogant, blasphemous" because true leaders always suffered such accusations.^[44]

In 1967, however, the group recognized that their candor was sometimes counterproductive, and a new curriculum was developed "in response to the need to communicate the religious concepts in non-religious terminology." The new "Seven Steps to Reality" curriculum was the first in a long line of efforts to secularize the religious language without losing the religious message.^[45] So long as the group had perceived itself as an extension of Sharman's work, that is to say, as long as it was just Sequoia Seminar, its sole stated purpose was to explore the teachings of Jesus, and those who did not want to do that did not join. Once it had transformed itself into the religion of the third age and the communal personification of the second coming of Christ, then it had an obligation to spread its ideas and, ironically, one of the ways it did so was to downplay the very religious message it was attempting to disseminate.^[46] In 1971, when a reporter asked one of the leaders if Build the Earth were "a new answer to Christianity, the new religion?" the somewhat evasive answer was, "Well, in a way it is. But woman has never taken it seriously."^[47]

Because they feared others would misunderstand their responses, evasiveness in the face of specific questions about the religious nature of the movement was explicit policy. One ex-member referred to it as "the Strategy," that is, to tell the truth, but not the whole truth.^[48] When confronted head-on by a newspaper reporter, Richard Rathbun, who became president of Creative Initiative in 1976, avoided using the term "new religion" but did acknowledge that they followed the teachings of Jesus. He said that "religious words" tended to drive people away but that they never denied their religious foundations when asked.^[49]

This unwillingness to be completely open invoked keen displeasure from some attendees at Creative Initiative activities who thought the events were one thing only to find out they were something else. One man, who spoke warmly about the benefits of the marriage seminar, went on to explain that he was "appalled at how an essentially sectarian group could so cleverly and brazenly disguise their religious intent."^[50] Another charged the movement with being as dogmatic as any established religion, but unlike them unwilling to admit it. His response to the usual statement that the group's ideals were printed in the Challenge to Change course (itself not available to the public) was "Bullshit!" "Specifically," he charged, "the community has a closed mind and holds dogmatic positions in the areas of human sexuality, the roles of men and women, the meaning and significance of a certificate of marriage, etc."^[51]

So deeply was the religious message buried during some periods that people were sometimes active for several years before they realized the psychological work was built on a religious foundation. One long-time member reported that it was two years before he understood that Creative Initiative was a religion, but by that time he "liked the movement enough to put up with the religion, eventually coming to really appreciate the Teachings of Jesus and finding it more valuable than anything else."^[52] Yet even people who eventually accepted the religious basis of Creative Initiative and committed themselves to "living the life" were frequently uncomfortable with the initial lack of candor. One fourteen-year veteran said that while the group purported to be "straightforward and honest," it. had "used very devious methods in order to attract new members" and thereby violated its own rule that the ends do not justify the means. He remembered being specifically "instructed to avoid mentioning [religion] to new people." They were told to answer the question honestly if it should arise but not to bring it up themselves.^[53]

The Functioning of a Sect

Whatever their hesitation in publicly declaring themselves a new religion, privately the members of Creative Initiative functioned as a religious sect. Their religious philosophy and ceremonies were described in chapter 3, but their sect behavior was not merely a matter of belief and ritual but consisted also of the pattern of demands they made and rewards they provided for their members. Despite bland public statements that they had nothing really new to offer and were merely teaching the great religious truths of the ages, Creative Initiative did believe that it was a new religion and the precursor of the third age. Hoping at first to maintain some of their ties to the mainstream churches, the group tended to paint itself as an ecumenical movement during its New Sphere period. Indeed, in defining itself it stated, "We do not seek to build new political or religious organizations; instead we seek inspired human spirit to operate within and supplement these structures."^[54] In 1966, apparently in this ecumenical spirit, they managed to attract half a dozen ministers from the Palo Alto area to a special ecumenical weekend.^[55] A minister who did not attend later claimed that those who did were "tricked" into going and allowing their names to be used in New Sphere promotions under the guise of ecumenical activity.^[56]

The minister's suspicion would appear well founded, because all evidence points toward Creative Initiative using the churches primarily as a recruiting ground, a practice they continued until at least 1972.^[57] So long as there was only Sequoia Seminar, an uneasy alliance could exist between the churches and the movement, but as harbingers of the third age, members of Creative Initiative saw the churches as irrelevant at best and at worst as stumbling blocks on the road to continuing human evolution. There were reports that from the very beginning of the New Religion phase Emilia demanded that women choose between the movement and their churches.^[58] In fact, almost all members of Creative Initiative had to give up their outside church affiliations by the time they went through the initiation ceremony. In one interesting case, a Presbyterian minister who joined in 1969 wrote about the intense pressure he felt to leave his congregation and church. Eventually he did leave, but only after the top Creative Initiative leadership had passed down the word for others to leave him alone. In addition, his decision to join Creative Initiative was substantially facilitated by his discovery that both his father and grandfather had studied Jesus through the works of Henry B. Sharman.^[59]

Having gotten wind of the stories that people were being "forced" to leave their churches, San Francisco Chronicle religion columnist, Lester Kinsolving, wrote a very critical piece on the group that quoted someone (who sounds very much like Emilia) as saying, "Christianity has evolved to its highest level . . . New Sphere is the next level . . . Now that the church is out of it, nobody cares what side it takes," and cited examples of couples leaving their churches after they joined New Sphere.^[60]

Kinsolving's column branded the movement a "cult" and complained that all his attempts to get straight answers about their ideals and values were met with vague generalities. Although he apparently did not know of Emilia's connection to the Oxford Group, he compared New Sphere to Moral Re-Armament because both groups seemed to focus their attention on "attractive and sophisticated young couples." Ex-members would sometimes use the pejorative term "cult" when discussing their experience with Creative Initiative. One such person described the "deconditioning" process during which new members rid themselves of the effects of prior authority figures not as preparation for accepting the will of God but as preparation for accepting the authority of the group.^[61] A three-part series that ran in the Oakland Tribune in 1976 included the following headlines and comments: "CIF: Cult or Way of Life?" "The CIF: Atomic Age Zealots," "a mystical cult," and "a movement of 'middle-class Moonies.' "^[62] Although the content of the articles did not live up to the sensational headlines, they were the kind of publicity that perpetuated the idea that Creative Initiative was a cult.

The label "cult" was, however, clearly inaccurate. As highly educated and reasonably sophisticated adults, the members of Creative Initiative worked hard to avoid the cult label, and the continued success of the movement clearly depended upon the members reassuring themselves that they were there of their own free will and by virtue of reasoned judgment. A long-time member reported, "My experience of early CIF has enabled me to see how cults like Moonies and Jim Jones could take over people's thinking for them." The saving grace, he said, was that "people were always free to leave, which they did."^[63] The leadership, too, was acutely conscious that it was constantly in danger of becoming dogmatic, which would have been a violation of their claims to scientific objectivity. "The community itself must avoid becoming another orthodoxy which prescribes for its members exactly what they should do," warned an early description of New Sphere.^[64] "We are constantly aware of the possibility of errors and aberrations," admitted the author of another early position paper. "We know of failures of other groups with utopian aims. Ignorance, naiveté selfishness, fanaticism, organization, infiltration . . . all are dangers which we must guard against."^[65]

The role of the leadership was particularly problematic for many members who took the analytic approach at face value. There was a reluctance, perhaps inevitable, on the part of the inner leadership to share their authority with newcomers even though Creative Initiative assumed that it would spread by training new leaders who would, in turn, train new leaders, ad infinitum. In actual practice, not only did the leaders relinquish power slowly, but there was some feeling that they also cultivated what one member called "a cult-like leader dependency."^[66] This analysis could be somewhat misleading, however. It must be remembered that most of the complaints were aimed at a relatively large group of Palo Alto-based leaders, not specifically at a single prophet figure. Harry simply did not have the personality to be a cult figure. Emilia, by contrast, could easily have stepped over the line from leader to prophet. She was aware, however, of the tendency of women in particular to endow her with supernatural insight, and she usually refrained from demanding personal loyalty. Indeed, she was primarily responsible for preventing the formation of a cult around her by her insistence on sharing insight and responsibility among the group. Although she was usually the spark plug for change, she was careful to provide the membership with an opportunity to criticize and confirm her ideas. Whereas Emilia's propensity for brusque critical confrontations with members in whom she perceived faults was a problem for some, most members found her to be an inspiring spiritual leader, a helpful counselor and confidant, and a role model.

To the outside world, the group always described itself as leaderless. None of the group's presentations or publications carried any credits (except Harry's book, Creative Initiative ), and the dedication to anonymity was explained as an expression of the collective dynamic of their movement. In an early speech, one of the long-time leaders denied there was any "hierarchy of human authority." He said that nobody was in charge and that everybody took responsibility.^[67] In fact, of course, there was a clear and universally recognized hierarchy within the movement with Emilia and Harry at the top, a handful of old allies from the Sequoia Seminar days under them, and then a slightly larger number of inner-core people completing what was usually referred to as the "hub." In an early draft of his book, Harry presented an unexpectedly candid rationale for this structure. Having just defined the group as a "province" of the Kingdom of God, he then explained that within the province there would be a hierarchical leadership headed by an "elite." Membership in the elite would "be based on such qualities as wisdom, breadth of experience, natural and developed gifts of leadership and initiative, and the ability to evoke the loyalty and cooperation which the religious commitment calls for."^[68] That particular explanation never made it to the final version, but it accurately describes the structure and probably the attitudes of the leadership.

The perceived abuses of power were not the cultlike excesses of a prophet but the more sectlike problem of an inner core of administrators, most of whom had roots in the Sequoia Seminar period, and who were reluctant to entrust their movement to newcomers who might not share their commitment and who certainly did not share their history. In theory, and to some extent in practice, the movement held that "the full and equal worth of every human being is a basic fact to be recognized," and, therefore, the "consent of the governed: that is, of the entire group., needs to be obtained before important policies initiated by the leadership and affecting all are put into operation."^[69] But the consent of the governed was often sought only after the self-appointed governors had already made the basic decisions.

The opportunity to lead was the reward for commitment as defined and interpreted by the existing leadership. "People who were in leadership were the very important ones and really could do nothing wrong," one member wrote, "while the rest of the people were around to get confronted and do the grunt work. People vied for the leadership and the status that went with it."^[70] Just what individuals or couples had to do to become leaders was not always clear to the members. Several respondents to our questionnaire used the same phrase (clearly Emilia's): People either "have it" or "do not have it," but "it" was never defined. If, however, you were deemed to "have it," you not only could lead your own study groups, you could also become part of the informal hub leadership group, referred to by some as "the elders," and it was they who tried to insure that members toed the mark in "living the life."

Because they had few other sources of affirmation, many women were particularly hurt when they were found wanting and denied the opportunity to lead and, in turn, resented the "dominant and aggressive, left-brained, masculine" women who held authority.^[71] A woman who joined the group in the mid-1970s reported that on one occasion her son was questioned in front of her as to whether she "was really living a religious life." In retrospect, she was not sure why she "put up with it" but felt that the "leadership took liberties with peoples' lives that were beyond what was appropriate." She did not approve even at the time but acquiesced, she said, because if she had said anything "it would be turned into MY problem . . . it always was . . . and I would be OUT of an organization which had important goals."^[72]

Although there was no formal process by which nonconforming members were tried and banished, those with an "attitude problem" were asked to reflect on whether they might not be happier in some other situation. The tight homogeneous structure of Creative Initiative insured that people either changed or left. If anything, the group bent over backward to avoid attracting and keeping people who did not share their philosophy, and it was this tendency to be exclusive rather than inclusive that differentiated them from the more heterogeneous "cults." Even critics pointed out that the movement was not rigidly structured and did not try to trick people into joining or overwhelm them emotionally (brainwash them) to get them to stay. Quite the contrary, the formal governing structure was loose, and numerous "escape hatches" were built into the involving process to permit people to leave gracefully if they discovered that they were uncomfortable with the group.^[73] For example, leaders of an introductory course followup were reminded that the meeting was not only a way to attract new members, it was also a way to screen them. "No one who decides to continue," said the instructions, "should be able to say that he didn't know he was expected to 'do' anything." And people who were judged not ready to take on the commitment of action were to be discouraged from going on.^[74]

Clearly, then, Creative Initiative never attempted to cast a wide net. The selectivity, even exclusivity, of the movement was one of its main attractions to those who could qualify. Furthermore, unlike the better-known religious "cults," Creative Initiative never tried deliberately to manipulate people into psychological or financial dependence on the group. Nevertheless, if we substitute the more neutral word sect for the pejorative term cult, then Creative Initiative's exclusiveness was cer tainly an important component of sect formation. Participants who completed the first-level A seminar were asked, among other things, "Do you feel at one with every individual in this group?" They were told, "Each A Seminarian must see himself contributing money, time (two nights a week), energy (two work camps a year)."^[75] In a first draft of his codification of Creative Initiative philosophy, Harry included the passage, "If you were to apply for training for membership, how would you catalog for yourself the assets you could contribute to the community and the mission?" and the first two he listed were "financial and material."^[76] Significantly, this section was left out of the final version, presumably because the expectation of commitment, like the religious nature of the movement, had to be introduced slowly.

Certainly if the critics who called Creative Initiative a cult had seen the statements of purpose that circulated during the late 1960s and 1970s they would have been more convinced than ever that the level of commitment demanded from members went well beyond anything required by mainline churches. One such statement, a pledge for men in the New Sphere period, which may not actually have been used, began with a doomsday preface: "People are consumed in war, riot, racial hatred, and moral decadence. We crouch in isolation, fearing in others the murderous impulses we ourselves possess. I must begin now to change the world or we will continue our downward plunge, until death."^[77] Acknowledging that a new age was coming, the signer of the document promised to dedicate his "total life and energy" to fulfilling the work. He promised to "rise above desire for power for myself, my group, or my nation" and further pledged to rise above the desire for wealth and possessions, the desire to escape his obligation through recreation, to forego charitable work in outside organizations, and to "rise above desire for indulgence of bodily appetites."^[78]

As this pledge and similar ones used later indicate, most of the members' free time was dedicated to working for the group for women who were pressured to give up outside employment, this meant virtual full-time work for Creative Initiative.^[79] Eventually a significant number of men either retired early or took sabbaticals to devote themselves full time to working for the movement. Just as they divorced themselves from other churches, most group members appear to have divested themselves of outside friends. It was not that they were in any sense "forbidden" to have friends who weren't in the movement but that total commitment left them no time for anything else, and so friendships naturally revolved around the activities of Creative Initiative.^[80]

The drift away from outside friends as couples became more deeply involved in Creative Initiative work was a natural consequence of the demands for time and commitment, and it took place without any pressure from the leadership. Friendships with couples who left the movement was another story. Ex-members rarely denounced the movement or its principles and thus continued to share a personal history and values with the friends who remained in Creative Initiative. Yet rather than allowing the bonds of friendship to dissolve slowly (as they almost certainly would have in most cases), couples who remained in the movement were told to sever all ties with those who left. One member used the term "shunned" to describe how defectors were treated. The leadership told members that the dropouts needed "space" and that leaving them alone was "the loving thing to do." There reportedly was a great deal of pain, however, on the part of those who left when they discovered they had given up not only the formal community, of Creative Initiative but the personal friendships as well.^[81]

The expectation of time, energy, and exclusiveness made by the group was one of the major reasons that people dropped out. In a letter of resignation, one couple explained that the "demands for total commitment to the life of the Community" made it impossible for the husband, who was involved in nuclear research, "to speak out as a qualified and independent scientist" and also made it impossible for them to continue their outside professional and church activities.^[82] Harry confirmed the seriousness of this problem in a letter to Richard when he wrote, "We continue to lose people from involvement in the 'mission' in the work in which we are engaged. And whatever the reason they assign, it almost invariably turns out that dedication to the mission proves to have more implications of demand as to what they have to do than they are willing to meet."^[83] Interviews with six ex-members in 1979 revealed that all of them left because "the unending series of meetings often kept them out of the house for several nights in a row and away from their children."^[84]

Creative Initiative leaders were sometimes willing to admit publicly that members were expected not to drink or smoke or be unfaithful to their spouses.^[85] But neophytes who accepted the group's assurance that it had no dogma and did not dictate life style could be in for a rude awakening. One new member was surprised and distressed when he was told it would be "inappropriate" to serve wine that a guest had brought to an introductory dinner. He asked, "Does C.I.F. say 'Thou shalt not drink wine'? Does C.I.E. have any 'Thou shalt nots . . .'?"^[86] There is no easy answer to the last question. Formally there were none. Informally there were a great number. Similarly, there was no formal dogma, but the philosophy codified in the courses and ritualized through the ceremonies became for all intents and purposes a dogma. What irritated neophytes and raised suspicion in outsiders was the group's unwillingness to admit that they were a religion that placed the same kinds of limits on thought and behavior as all other religions.

Obviously, then, there were high costs involved with being a member of Creative Initiative. Even if the pledges were not taken literally, and the evidence is that they were, people were making an explicit commitment of the strongest kind. They not only gave up their churches, their friends, their time and money, they also agreed to change their life style and reorient their goals from personal material aggrandizement to spiritual growth and concern for the commonweal. The group sought to strike a balance between the demands of individual life and the demands of the movement, and, once again, that balance kept it from going off the deep end and becoming an all-consuming "cult."

The high costs required high rewards. If they could not be the traditional rewards of private, middle-class, suburban family life, then they had to be something else. The economic model predicts that the higher the cost of joining a group (i.e., the most sectlike the group), the higher the rewards that people will require to remain active in it and those rewards have to be practical as well as spiritual.

Long-term members of Creative Initiative continually cited the sense of community they found in the group as one of the important practical reasons for joining and remaining in the organization. Time after time in answering our questionnaire members spoke about the quality of people in Creative Initiative. They were described by one respondent as "dynamic, interesting, intelligent, caring and genuinely interested in others."^[87] Another said he could not "recall any such effort [of cooperation] in my church, or on the job in my profession."^[88] Moreover, because of the great stress on sexual probity and the integrity of family, the working relations between men and women within the group appear to have been marked by a singular lack of sexual tension. A psychotherapist member said he "had never encountered any organization, business, professional or religious, where there was not at some level, a Pattern of sexual seductiveness or flirting going on among some of the members."

Yet in his eight years in Creative Initiative, he claims never to have encountered or heard of any, even in his capacity as a psychotherapist for certain group members.^[89]

Ultimately, however, it was not simply the quality of the individual members but the quality of the community that held people in the group. "It was," said one woman, "an extended family." She knew that "if someone was ill, meals would be brought in, children would be taken care of, the house would be cleaned, etc." This was affirmed for her every Sunday when the family gathered to light their candles and repeat, "We are families of Light and we have come from the Place of Light."^[90] She reported that the members of the family groups showed "a tender interest in one another, often pitching in to baby-sit and cook for members in difficult straits."^[91] The support community, particularly among women, provided a sense of belonging and friendship that was both practically useful and psychologically fulfilling because it was based on the belief that their assistance to one another reflected a model of enlightened humanity that would save the earth.

Men, too, gave each other practical as well as moral support. During the 1974 economic slump in high-technology-oriented Santa Clara Valley, a special task force of men established a project that helped those out of work organize their search for new positions.^[92] Although they deliberately avoided setting up a placement service, in fact a large group of men eventually found work at ROLM Corporation, a manufacturer of computerized communication equipment, one of whose founders, Gene Richeson, had retired to devote full-time service to the movement.^[93]

For some, the sense of community could become stifling. People inside as well as outside the movement found that there was a tendency for everybody to begin looking and sounding alike. For women the pattern was obviously set by Emilia. Her style of dress, her pet phrases, even her voice inflections were picked up by others for whom she had become a role model. The source of male homogeneity is less obvious, but it was still there. Several members expressed relief that with the transition to Beyond War there was more variety in the membership and less informal pressure to conform to a community standard.^[94]

The family was a vital component of Creative Initiative's concept of community, and virtually every person who responded to our questionnaire said their marriage was improved or even saved by having joined the movement. There was a strong sense that the courses they took gave them insight into their own problems, their spouses' problems, and a forum in which to talk out their mutual difficulties. Moreover, because of its assumption that both partners in a marriage would work in the movement, Creative Initiative gave couples a common interest beyond their home and children. Fairly typical was a comment from the evaluation of a woman who attended a 1975 seminar. She noted that "the most important factor leading us to seminar was a crisis in our relationship. We had reached the point of decision either we get the relationship into shape, or we end it." She was a woman seeking a solution to a specific problem, and Creative Initiative was simply one of a number of "courses and experiences" she had tried.^[95]

The practical benefits of being part of a loving community were recognized as extremely important by those who were members. Ultimately, however, those people who chose to stay with Creative Initiative did so because it fulfilled both their need for community and their spiritual needs and provided them with a sense of purpose in life. Community was not enough by itself. People also joined Creative Initiative for the same reason that they joined any movement that promised to answer life's larger questions they had the questions but had not yet found the answers. Asked in 1979 why they had joined Creative Initiative in the first place, several ex-members included both community and a sense of spiritual purpose in their explanations. They wrote that "they were at turning points in their lives and they were looking for support, acceptance and sense of belonging."^[96] "I felt the values of family life, of women taking their place in the world for the cause of 'saving the world,' were paramount in my life," reported a member. "It is wonderful to have a mission in life and CIF provided the right one for me," she concluded.^[97] Not a few of the members were self-defined "seekers" who had tried a number of New Age and human potential movements (est was frequently mentioned) before finding what they were looking for in Creative Initiative. They spoke about "coming home" when they found Creative Initiative, but they found home only after knocking on a lot of doors of houses that looked very much alike.

Recruiting New Members

The ultimate purpose of the Rathbuns'work was to "bring the entire world of men under allegiance to God."^[98] Central to the success of this monumental task was the belief in the geometric growth curve to be realized as each participant recruited a specific number of new members each year. Creative Initiative was a movement that legitimized itself in terms of its potential growth but whose real growth was limited by its desire, inherited from H. B. Sharman, to attract only successful, well-educated people. They wanted people, said Harry, "who can be motivated here to carry forth the torch to spread the good news to become motivated for the life that God desires, which means becoming infectious sources of inspiration to change, to action and to illumination for others."^[99] In 1961 Harry drew up a list of the kinds of people he hoped to attract to the movement. They included business executives and leaders, teachers, college faculty and staff, graduate students, professionals such as doctors and lawyers, and church lay leaders (although ministers were pretty much discounted). Even as late as 1968, when discussing geographic expansion, university towns were preferred and church groups were targeted as excellent sources of recruits.^[100]

The major thrust of recruiting, usually called "outreach," was through one-on-one contacts. A 1967 memo urging participants to recruit more actively was unequivocal: "There is no excuse," it said, "for each person or couple not getting at least 10 people to their homes to hear about this work."^[101] Members were urged to use their own positive experiences as a basis for contacting friends, parents of their children's friends, colleagues, and fellow members of civic and church groups. Once contact was made, they were told to send the prospective members brochures (which were to be kept "in your coat pocket, purse, or desk for opportunistic use") and then to phone the person again. "Follow-up. Follow-up. FOLLOW-UP. We KNOW that personal follow-up does the job," said a 1966 recruiting memo.^[102]

During the first few years after Emilia's religious vision, while the group still retained some of its ties to the established churches, they defined one of their tasks as "sorting out church member people for pulling together identified people in their churches to actually launch New Sphere."^[103] The "people" referred to were invariably women. "Lead off with the women " advised a 1968 recruiting memo.^[104] Women had more free time to devote to the movement and, since women were the ones who made most of the initial contacts, it was obviously easier for them to approach other women. In addition, of course, in its early years Creative Initiative was primarily a women's movement. Because of the heavy stress on the family, however, neither women alone nor men alone were satisfactory members. The movement wanted couples. Indeed, when initial contacts were made with either men or women, Creative Initiative found that the new people did not retain interest unless their spouses became involved. Special efforts were always made, therefore, to involve the husbands and wives of new recruits as soon as possible.^[105]

The common thread that ran through all the recruiting techniques was food. Beginning with the student teas and dinners they held before the war when they were recruiting for Sharman's seminars, the Rathbuns always placed great store in the effectiveness of food as an attractant. The meals themselves provided additional opportunity to present the ideas of the work and to get a commitment for further participation."^[106] With a long history of etiquette instruction dating back to her college days in the YWCA, Emilia and other leadership women undertook to teach hostesses about the proper food (butter rather than margarine), table linen (cloth rather than paper napkins, pink preferred), and decorations (fresh flowers). The instructions on proper form were not hard and fast, and were always presented as suggestions rather than requirements. Nevertheless they seem to have been universally followed.

In what might be called the "classical period" of Creative Initiative, the mid-1970s, when it achieved its most developed form, the recruiting process was raised to a highly structured art. Potential hosts for "introductory evenings" were given instructions at a special "recruitment preparation meeting." These preliminary meetings began by stressing the religious importance of attracting new people to the mission and by reminding them that Jesus also recruited.^[107]

The second part of the preparation meeting, called "clarification," consisted of sample questions designed to get the recruiters to clarify their beliefs, and thereby their answers to issues that might be raised by recruits. There were twenty-one clarification questions indicating the kind of questions raised regularly. Along with general points about the history, methodology, and governance of the movement, the sample included questions about the religious aspects of Creative Initiative and its relationship to established churches, the lack of minorities, the emphasis on married couples, the upper-middle-class membership, the impact of membership on one's social life and children and, finally, questions as to what the members hoped to accomplish for themselves and for the world.^[108] Although it may have taken some people several years to discover the religious nature of the work, these questions indicate that others frequently perceived the group as a sect of some sort and that the recruiters had to clarify the issues in their own minds before they attempted to attract others to the work.

The recruiters were carefully briefed on all aspects of the presentation. The location was usually someone's home, but sometimes a rented public space was used. The recruiting site was supposed to be "aesthetically pleasing," and the hosts were reminded to clean their homes because "a clean home helps set a positive atmosphere." The food, they were told, "should be simple, attractive, delicious and abundant," and they were reminded not to serve alcoholic drinks, "including wine." Decorations were to be kept simple. The hosts were to greet their guests with name tags ("attractive, Do not have children write them"), punch, and nuts. It was suggested that one of the two leadership couples at each dinner dress more formally and the other more casually, so that guests would feel comfortable whatever they chose to wear. Specific suggestions were given on how to run the predinner discussion, complete with sample questions, and the instructions ended with a last reminder to try to get checks for the seminar before the guests left and even to write checks for them if they had forgotten their checkbooks.^[109]

Toward the end of the decade of the 1960s there appears to have been a turning away from the somewhat unrealistic expectation of rapid exponential growth toward a concentration on developing a dedicated core of leaders.^[110] One obvious way to expand their leadership pool, and perhaps their membership as well, was to move beyond the Palo Alto region. Although there had always been small "outposts" in other cities, usually set up by Palo Alto people who had moved, they had never been systematically cultivated. Starting in 1968 and expanding through the 1970s, however, geographic expansion became a more consistent theme in the recruiting policy. Whereas in the Sequoia Seminar days the goal had been to generate autonomous units capable of leading seminars in the Records and perhaps creating their own offshoots in turn, in the sectarian operation of the 1970s, outposts were to be closely supervised by Palo Alto headquarters. An early plan to expand the outposts emphasized that Palo Alto was to "maintain close control from here over who does what, how many, leadership, etc." In addition, Palo Alto was to provide leaders for the outpost weekends, and continuation seminars were to be held only in Ben Lomond. It was even suggested that both Palo Alto and the outposts exchange tapes of important meetings so that each would know exactly what was going on at the other location.^[111] Clearly the assumptions were long gone that any group could discover the will of God by studying the Records and that leadership was as simple as "see one, do one, teach one." As a sect with a highly organized philosophy, almost a dogma, and a complex ritual structure, consistency even orthodoxy had been imposed upon the individual search for truth.

Besides utilizing couples who had moved from the Palo Alto area to start new outposts, Creative Initiative considered two other techniques for geographic expansion. The first consisted of sending a team of people into a city for a brief but highly concentrated drive. The second, which eventually became the model followed into the Beyond War era, was to have a couple actually move from Palo Alto to live in the target city for a protracted period that might be as long as two years. Both techniques were de facto models of mainline missionary activity and were one more expression of the institutionalized new religion that Creative Initiative had become.

The short-term team method of setting up an outpost was used in an attempt to spread the work to Napa, a small city in California's wine country, about ninety miles north of Palo Alto. A team of nine men spent approximately a week there contacting the media and city officials to give the group "credibility" and to invite people to subsequent presentations by two teams of three and four couples each. The fourteen people in the second group arrived two months after the advance guard of men, approached the contacts established by the first group, and attempted to gather additional names of people to meet. The results of the three-week effort by two dozen people were meager. Only six people went to any meetings beyond the introductory ones. Assessing the meaning of the "Napa experience," the participants concluded that it had been a valuable learning episode for them because they had come to view themselves as a "team of 'priests' " and had developed "closer bonding to each other and the mission."^[112]

Creative Initiative, however, was more concerned with expanding the membership than with reinforcing the missionaries' level of commitment. To that end, in 1972 the group drew up a comprehensive plan for overseeing outposts. Harry was very excited about the possibility that some hub leaders might be able to take a sabbatical from work to become full-time resident recruiters in a new area.^[113] His idea was not pursued at that time because the group was still afraid that it might overextend itself. Instead the plan was to operate only with those active couples who found themselves in new locations and wished to start a local Creative Initiative group.^[114] An outreach newsletter was created to keep everybody in touch, but there appear to have been only a couple of issues published, and they were rather casual. There were nine outposts or "outlying areas" (apparently areas with members but no formal recognition as an official outpost). They were Los Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Rosa, Monterey, and Santa Cruz in California. In addition there were active groups in Portland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; Seattle, Washington; and, aguely, "the East Coast."^[115]

The cautious attitude toward expansion reflected both the limited resources of Creative Initiative and their fear of growing too quickly and losing their identity. For a movement that spoke so freely about transforming the world, they were always extremely reluctant actually to plunge into the turbulent reality of a mass movement. In 1976, somebody prepared a plan to spread the movement aggressively by blitzing key cities in the nation with a team from Palo Alto and then following them up with a core of semipermanent couples who would build on the momentum established by the first group. Within a year each city was supposed to mount a similar assault on others in its area, which in turn would spread the movement to a third level.^[116] Although this was another more grandiose version of the geometric progression concept, the basic plan outlined in this proposal was finally implemented in 1984 when Beyond War sent several full-time "missionary" couples and their children to live in cities in the midwest and east and set up what once would have been called outposts.

"Who We Are": The Demography of Creative Initiative

In 1965, when the movement was first presenting itself to the public, a New Sphere paper entitled "Who We Are" sought to describe the group. Although most of the statement addressed philosophical questions, it began with a demographic definition. "First," it said, "we are an emerging group of women of all ages and stages, backgrounds and talents, single women, wives, working women, grandmothers, women of various racial and religious backgrounds."^[117] As a group whose ideology was founded on the assumption that all people were brothers and sisters and that God willed the unity of all nations, races, and religions, it was natural that they would try to present themselves as multiracial and ecumenical. The community, their community, was supposed to be a model for the world, and how could it be a model of the unity of humankind unless it contained all kinds of humans?

Except for several years in the mid-1960s, however, when they worked with two black churches in East Palo Alto, Creative Initiative had very little contact with minorities and even fewer minority mem bers. From time to time there were a handful of blacks affiliated with the group and a smattering of Chinese and Japanese names appear on the membership lists over the years, but for all practical purposes the group was all-white and overwhelmingly Christian despite an ongoing interest in attracting Jewish members. Just as the group was ethnically homogeneous, so was it similar in terms of members' social, economic, and educational background.

There were several reasons for the remarkable homogeneity of Creative Initiative, some which may have been related to their philosophy and some which were the result of conscious choice on their part, even though such a choice could be interpreted as violating the spirit of their purpose. First, as a movement based on the teachings of Jesus it was inevitable that Jews would be reluctant to associate with Creative Initiative, even though Emilia insisted they were not Christians and they spoke only about Jesus' humanity and never his divinity.^[118] Emilia had an ambivalent attitude toward Jews. On the one hand she shared most of the ethnic stereotypes of her generation, viewing them as exclusive, clannish, and paranoid and others appear to have adopted her attitude. A handwritten note from the 1966 period states, "Jews have a tremendous vitality, aggressive, acquisitive, they are greedy for things, good money makers."^[119] Emilia encouraged Jewish members to persevere but thought they had special ethnically linked barriers that they had to overcome before they could move into the third age. "They claim a Godhead and a clan that totally poses an enemy and will fight absolutely to the death for it," she told a seminar. "It is a total mind set. The mind is rigid. It is in the very genes of the Jew to hate, fear and pose the enemy of all 'others.' "^[120] Furthermore she blamed Jews in the Stanford power structure for many of Harry's academic problems. On the other hand, the prominence of Jews among the kinds of professionals Creative Initiative sought to attract, and the group's self-professed goal of uniting all religions, made Jews a logical recruiting target. Although some Jews remained in Creative Initiative and rose to prominent leadership positions, most seem to have found the work too alien, too Christian, and did not stay long.

Second, by focusing on the conversion of the individual as a necessary precursor to the coming of the Kingdom of God to earth in the third age, the group did not address the immediate needs and concerns of poor people and that was how they themselves frequently explained their failure to attract working-class members. From Creative Initiative's own point of view, the explanation was particularly attractive because it absolved them of any responsibility for their failure to attract minorities and the poor, most of whom, they argued, were preoccupied with surviving. They believed that those few poor who had some discretionary time to devote to reform would join movements that addressed the immediate issues of economic discrimination. This explanation appears fairly weak since Creative Initiative, as a millennial movement, might just as easily have attracted poor people who would have much more to gain from a new world and much less to lose in the destruction of the present one than the kind of people who did join Creative Initiative.

The third reason that Creative Initiative failed to attract a more diverse membership, and one which the members felt ambivalent about, was their own elitism. Although Emilia and Harry strayed from the narrow academic focus of Sharman, they adhered to his underlying logic that social change could be most efficiently effected by first changing society's leaders. For Sharman, the leaders were students and professors. For the Rathbuns, the leaders were adults who had achieved positions of prominence and respect. In fact, they believed that they could change the planet if they could motivate a "creative minority" of 8 percent.^[121] Both Sharman's and the Rathbuns' models, however, excluded working-class people by default if not by intent. Indeed, the rhetoric about being a heterogeneous movement that accurately reflected the ethnic, religious, and economic spectrum of society was sporadic, and acknowledgments of the middle-class makeup of Creative Initiative began fairly soon after the movement went public. At the end of a statement of self-definition written in 1967, the leaders of New Sphere referred to themselves as "middle-class, affluent Americans, who by virtue of their education and privilege could . . . lead the way."^[122]

By making a virtue of their exclusiveness the movement was able to give its members a sense of specialness while at the same time providing them with an opportunity to remake the world for everybody. If we use the traditional model of the volunteer social improvement association, including everything from the Junior League to the Kiwanis, then Creative Initiative can be seen as very much in the mainstream of middle-class reform. The organization itself is exclusive, applying criteria for membership that screen out socially unacceptable people and allow those people who are accepted to feel special. Yet the purpose of the organization is charitable, thus mitigating any guilt caused by the undemocratic selection process. "The people we seek have probably already achieved a certain degree of success: a good job, a nice house, marriage, children the things we usually associate with the 'good life,' " explained a recruiting pamphlet, "Yet they know that something important is lacking."^[123] Harry told Richard in a letter, "We are becoming increasingly effective in 'turning on' the middle-class grass-roots people . . . and they are the ones who are going to have to 'do it.' " Harry believed that the "frustrated underprivileged" were not ready to abandon their "exciting destructive 'kick,' " and that people of great wealth were too self-centered to care about the fate of the world.^[124]

It was precisely this concern with doing good work that the group used to justify itself when outsiders accused it of being exclusive. Responding to a charge that "CIF has shown no interest in recruiting outside the class of the comfortable," Richard Rathbun countered, "We have always believed that it is imperative that those people who have achieved a certain degree of economic freedom take on the responsibility to use their time and resources for something more than just self-satisfaction."^[125] The response, of course, did not address the charge. In fact, it tacitly acknowledged it. Richard was in effect saying, yes, we do only recruit among the middle class, but that is OK because we do good things for everybody, even those who are not members of our group.^[126]

From its early days as Sequoia Seminar through its most recent incarnation as Beyond War, Creative Initiative has consistently made a point of advertising the high-status employment of its members. This policy became particularly obvious after 1965 when, as the self-proclaimed New Religion of the Third Age, the group risked being dismissed as a cult. A 1972 brochure designed to describe the Creative Initiative Foundation to the outside world, for example, had a list of seventy people on the back cover described as those "whose deep involvement and leadership help guide the Foundation's programs and direction." Of the seventy, only seven were women, and not one of them had a professional affiliation listed after her name. The names of every one of the remaining sixty-three men were followed by a profession and, in the cases of a dozen men, advanced degrees (Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s).^[127]

Outsiders always voiced the impression that Creative Initiative was made up of highly educated, well-to-do, white people. All the evidence available confirms this impression. For example, the answers to a brief questionnaire aimed at those members of the leadership who were thinking about moving to Portola Green give us a very good idea of the life style of some of the people who were setting the pattern for the movement. Not counting the Rathbuns, who were retired with a very modest income and assets, four of the six returns reported earning over $22,000, enough to put them in the top 5 percent of families in the country in 1971.^[128] Another batch of data, apparently personal information cards for a seminar in 1964, lists the birthdates, jobs, and education of eleven couples. None of the women worked outside the home. All the men except for one were in business or education, and all but one had degrees and/or jobs in science or engineering. Except for one couple, neither of whom had gone to college, all the other wives and husbands had college degrees. Most of them had graduated from prestigious schools (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT), and three of the men had Ph.D.'s.^[129] Neither of these very limited sources of data is conclusive, but they both tend to confirm the impression given by the published lists of people and their jobs. Creative Initiative members were well educated and economically successful.

In order to try to develop a more accurate statistical picture of Creative Initiative as it existed prior to its dramatic expansion as Beyond War, we drew up a questionnaire that included questions about the personal, educational, and economic background of members who had been in the movement prior to 1982. Our sample was biased by several factors. First, of those people who had been active before 1982, we reached only those who were still active in 1986 when the questionnaire was distributed. Second, because the questionnaires were distributed by and through the communication network of Creative Initiative, it is possible that certain people were deliberately excluded although we have no reason to believe this happened. More significantly, because we did not have control over the distribution process, we are not sure exactly how many questionnaires actually reached members so we do not know the kind of percentage of returns we received. It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that given the high level of achievement of most members, those who thought of themselves as below the norm either refused to or were more likely to forget to return the questionnaires to us.

We nevertheless received responses from more than four hundred long-term adult members (a separate questionnaire was answered by children who had grown up in the movement). They enable us to say with a high degree of assurance that those people who did answer represent the hard core of Creative Initiative members and that their social, economic, and personal situations are typical of people who remained active in the movement for extended periods.^[130]

Over the years, numerous observers have commented on the "whiteness" of the Creative Initiative membership, and in fact more than 85 percent of the people who responded to the survey came from northern European ethnic backgrounds and, concomitantly, more than two-thirds of them were from mainline Protestant backgrounds. In an area where more than a quarter of the people were Catholic, only about 15 percent of Creative Initiative members were Catholic, and about 6 percent were Jewish. Thus, despite their strong commitment to the ideal of unifying the races and religions, the liberal Protestant origins of the movement and the strong informal preference for high-status members biased the group toward a heavy WASP participation. The preponderance of people from white, mainline Protestant backgrounds is particularly notable given their location in the San Francisco Bay Area where there is a large Catholic population and where a focus on highly educated and successful people could have been expected to bring in a higher percentage of Jews.

Even in Sharman's day, of course, it had been a WASP movement. Sharman operated through the YMCA and YWCA and the Student Christian Movement, all mainline Protestant groups. Under the Rathbuns, however, the student focus had been dropped in favor of more mature members. Indeed, if the questionnaire is an accurate reflection, students were virtually eliminated from membership. Fully 70 percent of those who responded first joined Creative Initiative when they were between the ages of twenty-seven and forty. Given the group's strong emphasis on marriage and the family, couples with children at home who were experiencing the stresses of midlife were the prime candidates for membership. This is borne out by the fact that the mean age at joining was thirty-three for women and thirty-seven for men and almost half of those joining had two children. In fact none of the long-term members who answered the questionnaire had been younger than twenty-two when they joined, and only 15 percent had no children.

Although Harry and Emilia did not pursue the Sharman tradition of seeking members only from within the academy, their desire to attract high-status people and their stress on education, both as a method for spreading their idea and as a technique for understanding it, meant that people comfortable with the methodology and terminology of college education would respond to their appeal. Only 18 percent of the women and less than 6 percent of the men did not have a college degree. Not only did virtually all the men have college degrees, but more than half had advanced degrees, and 20 percent had doctorates or medical degrees. Fifteen percent of the women had advanced degrees, and another 10 percent had teaching credentials in addition to their bachelor's degrees. Not only did they have college and graduate degrees, but they were disproportionately from high-prestige universities. Forty percent of the men had graduated from Stanford, Berkeley, or one of the Ivy League schools, although the corresponding figure for the women was only 15 percent.

Neither Harry Rathbun nor Henry Sharman brought to the study of religion the analytic skills common to the humanities and the social sciences. The systematic application of historical, sociological, and theological analysis was extremely rare in the work of the Rathbuns, and their use of psychology was always psychotherapeutic rather than analytic. When elements of the humanities and social sciences were introduced, it was usually through use of popular rather than scholarly work, and more for the purpose of bolstering previously arrived-at conclusions than to examine any basic assumptions.

It is, therefore, not surprising that rather few people with formal training in the humanities and social sciences were attracted to the movement and that a solid majority of the membership was made up of men whose degrees were in technical fields: the sciences, engineering, and business. Fifty-eight percent of the men had degrees in one of those technical fields. The same was not true for the women who went to school at a time when there were virtually no women in business or engineering. Yet even here, given the constraints of the system, the bias was clearly toward the technical, with almost half the women getting degrees in the social sciences and virtually none in the humanities. The second largest group, 15 percent, majored in education.

From the beginning, Creative Initiative operated on volunteer labor, almost all of which was provided by the women. Almost 60 percent of the women respondents to the questionnaire did not work outside their homes at the time they joined the movement, and only a handful had professional occupations outside of education. They were mothers with young children who could put what free time they had into their Creative Initiative work. Almost 60 percent listed their occupation as full-time volunteer for Beyond War when they responded to the questionnaire in 1986.

As could be predicted by their education, most of the husbands went into technical and scientific occupations, or into the teaching of those skills. Seventeen percent identified themselves as scientists and engineers, and about half were in managerial or sales positions but almost all in Silicon Valley's high-tech industries. Only about 10 percent were in education (which would undoubtedly have disappointed Sharman), and most of those taught technical subjects on the university level. They were extremely successful in those occupations. The average family income for respondents in 1986 was around seventy thousand dollars, and there were thirty-two families that made more than a hundred thousand dollars per year; and it should be remembered that these are, for the most part, single-income figures. At the other extreme, only ten families made less than twenty-nine thousand dollars per year. Obviously, the popular impression that members of Creative Initiative were well-educated and well-heeled was completely justified.

Demographically, Creative Initiative was made up of people who should have been members of a country club, or even a yacht club or polo club. Ethnically, educationally, and economically they were on the top rung of American society. Instead of joining with others like themselves in pursuit of pleasure, however, they joined a religious sect that advocated economic moderation, complete commitment to the movement, and living a life purged of the baser emotions. It was, moreover, a life style that incurred social cost because they aggressively rejected the competitive materialistic life of their peers. Although the highly structured community that Creative Initiative created tried not to advertise its unique religious position too blatantly, their many public activities and their instantly recognizable personal style made them the objects of curiosity and some suspicion.

People who became part of the community of believers made their participation in Creative Initiative the central involvement in their lives. The "totality" demanded by the group excluded the possibility of most other pursuits, and the great intimacy required of members meant that they recruited people from a very narrow slice of society. The tightly knit and homogeneous community that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was a successful religious sect, but one that, in some important ways, contradicted its own principles. Creative Initiative preached the gospel of oneness but lived a life of de facto exclusivity. The overwhelmingly WASP, educated, well-to-do membership rationalized the makeup of their community by explaining that it was a model that would demonstrate how the Kingdom of God would operate and a training ground for leaders who would eventually spread out to bring the word to a broader spectrum of people something they in fact began to do in 1983 when they became Beyond War.

So long as they functioned as a relatively small and geographically limited community of believers, Creative Initiative could be highly selective about the people it would accept as members. The process of attracting and involving new people required that they walk a very fine line between education and manipulation. The process in which individuals were freed from their ties to outside authorities and introduced to the group's concept of absolutes may be viewed as "re-education," but it was not brainwashing. Creative Initiative worked as a sect because it provided its members with a sense of community that was compatible with their established places in society. They continued to be the same successful business and professional families that they had always been. Their children went to school with outside children. They lived in their towns and interacted with their neighbors, clients, co-workers, and others without suffering acute conflict between what they were and what they believed. In other words, they were not cult figures who had to withdraw from the greater reality in order to preserve a new inner vision. Their new identity with the community of believers was based on an understanding of themselves and the world that left them free to be in it and of it, while, at the same time, giving them a sense of personal satisfaction and a new sense of purpose in life.

Henry B. Sharman, 1921

Emilia and Harry Rathbun at
Asilomar, 1948

Seminar group, Casa de Luz Lodge, Ben Lomond, 1960

Ecology and Population display, 1969

Scene from "Thirteen is a Mystical Number," 1972

March during Arab-Israeli War, San Francisco, 1973

Scene from "Blessman," 1973

Women's march as part of "Project Survival," Los Angeles, 1975

Women's demonstration about pesticides and toxics, San Jose, c. 1976

March in support of Irish women's peace movement, 1976

Women representing the races in "Blessman," 1976

"Global 2000" office, Palo Alto, 1980

Project headquarters for "Global 2000," Palo Alto, 1980

[

Emilia and Harry Rathbun, c. 1982