4
Surrendering: The Process of Personal Transformation
Emilia's religious experience of 1962 led her to formally transform
the proto-sect of Sequoia Seminar into a self-defined new religion the New Religion of the
Third Age." For Emilia and for the first ten women who joined her in the original
Dawn initiation ceremony, the supranormal aspects of the vision and automatic-writing
episodes that followed were instructions from the gnostic plane to move from a proto-sect
within the Christian tradition to a sect meant to transcend Christianity and usher in the
third dispensation.
For Creative Initiative, the process of sect formation was neither
sudden nor dramatic. Emilia's revelation confirmed, rather than created, the New Religion.
She was a compelling personality who attracted people, especially women, to the movement,
but she did not claim that she was essential to its continuation. People certainly found
her fascinating, but she was not the reason they were attracted to nor remained in the
movement. Initially, most individuals appear to have been drawn by the sense that here was
a group of people like themselves white, educated, refined, and financially
successful who had gathered together to give one another support and friendship
based on a sense of grand purpose. The full details of just how grand that purpose was
were not revealed immediately but emerged slowly as the new members entered into a
multiyear process that engaged them ever more deeply into a psychological and religious
commitment to the movement. For new members what had been an attraction to a group
eventually became a new life style. Individual involvement was multifaceted.
Psychologically, members substituted God and sometimes the group itself for previously
held authority figures in their lives. People found new understandings of themselves and
of their relationships with others that were continually reinforced by the intimate social
interaction within the movement. The process that drew them into group commitment made it
increasingly more difficult to leave, although they were always free to do so. They were
willing to stay in the group because the psychological cost of leaving would have been
higher than the social and economic costs of staying.
In addition to the psychological benefits of participation, members also
found strong religious reasons for staying. They came to believe that they were playing a
key part in God's plan for humankind and that by participating in the movement they were
performing a messianic role that would save the earth. Although their messianic
self-image, unique ceremonies, and unorthodox theology would seem to have placed the
movement outside the mainstream of traditional American religious values, in fact, most of
the beliefs were quite compatible with the American value system and, indeed, provided
members with a way to synthesize and reconcile some of the inherent conflicts within the
mainstream ethos. Superficially the sect appeared to be another New Age monistic movement
that preached the oneness of humankind and the unity of humanity and nature. As a
democratic and ecology-minded group it fit neatly into its liberal Palo Alto environment.
But under the monistic exterior beat a dualistic heart. The movement's philosophy had as
much in common with its Calvinist antecedents as it did with its transcendentalist ones.
While espousing the humanistic liberalism that derived from their monistic beliefs, they
also adhered to a strict code of conservative personal behavior and believed sincerely
that there were absolutes of good and bad, right and wrong, God and "the Devil."
This group of solid citizens could remain solid citizens because, in
their own view, they were not captives of a guru and were not sacrificing their values or
basic life style to the group. They believed they were involved in a rational educational
process whose objective approach should make sense to any educated person. For that
reason, among others, the new religious sect that emerged after 1962 did not base
its legitimacy on Emilia's revelation. Although it was the decisive confirmation of their
belief system for the original initiates, the fact that the revelation happened at all was
something very close to a secret that was shared by only a few of the oldest and closest
allies of the Rathbuns.
Although the details of the way in which Emilia received her insight
into the third age were never widely disseminated, the new theological justification for
the movement that grew out of Emilia's experience became part of the group's most
fundamental beliefs and was learned by all participants.
There were several reasons for keeping the revelatory experience quiet.
First, mystical revelation had no place at all in the rational style of Henry B. Sharman,
and very little, if any, in the teachings of Gerald Heard and C. G. Jung. The vision had
served the purpose of resolving Emilia's psychological crisis and legitimizing the
proto-sect as a sect, but it could not be presented to the membership at large because
there was no intellectual tradition within the movement to legitimize it. Second, Emilia
was intellectually committed to a nonhierarchical movement free of a charismatic
leadership cult. Although her powerful personality and commanding style made her the de
facto prophet of the movement, her unwillingness to have others see her as a
supernaturally anointed savior led her to keep the vision private and not use it as a base
for building the New Religion.
The philosophy that evolved in the wake of Emilia's vision consisted of
an end and a means. The end was God's purpose for mankind. The means was the Creative
Initiative method of education that would lead individuals to accept the will of God and
transform themselves into new people who would be instruments of God's purpose. Over the
years the movement developed a cycle of courses and seminars that took as long to complete
as a college education and had as its purpose the breaking down of old psychic and
intellectual structures and replacing them with new constructs that were appropriate to
the new people of the third age. Unlike the common liberal ideal of a college education,
the Creative Initiative process had no sympathy for relativism. On the contrary, it sought
to erase relativism (although not tolerance) and build a new structure of dualism.
The Nature of God and the God of Nature
Creative Initiative was, at its very core, a theistic movement. Every
article of belief and every individual and collective action was predicated on a belief in
God and in God's plan for the human race. Most of the group's thinking and writing about
the nature of God appears to have been done by Harry, who was the movement's acknowledged
philosopher, although his ideas were augmented by Emilia, and the resulting views went
virtually unchallenged by their followers. Creative Initiative's description of God began,
but did not end, with God as first cause. Taking their clue from Genesis In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth the movement attributed the existence of the
universe to the hand of God. If asked, then, "Who created God?" Harry responded,
"Here we are indeed up against an aspect of Ultimate Mystery, the aspect of First
Cause . . . . Why not admit that we cannot answer the mystery of First Cause, accept
the fact of Ultimate Mystery and include that in our content for the word God?"[1] At this most basic level the philosophy of Creative Initiative
retreated from the scientific formulations that marked most of their ideas and rested its
case on faith and mystery. As a seminar outline from 1974 put it, "There is no way to
prove God as Source, so you finally give up and either accept it or not."[2]
The standard problem with the God-as-first-cause argument is that it
makes God remote and perhaps even irrelevant. Creative Initiative obtained a divine
immediacy by equating God not only with the origins of the universe but with the universe
itself. God was not only the creator, but also the created. God was understood to be
present everywhere in the physical universe, and therefore everything in it was of God. In
this definition of God, Creative Initiative was positing a monistic world view in which
all and everything were part of a fully integrated whole.[3]
Creative Initiative usually summed up this idea by saying that God was reality. It
followed, then, that if God were reality and all reality were God, and if humans were part
of reality, which they clearly were, then in some sense God and humans must be one. And,
indeed, that is just what the movement believed. This idea was occasionally expressed in
the startling formulation, "Men are walking Gods."[4] So
central was the monistic world view to Creative Initiative's philosophy that the
three-word article of faith, "We are one," became the movement's most visible
public expression in the late 1970s, appearing on everything from Christmas cards to
bumper stickers. A meditation prayer from 1973 started out with the the refrain, "We
are 'ONE' before birth. . . . We are 'One' with origins. . . . We are 'ONE' with the
earth," and ended, "Take the old divisions into the setting sun. March to the
ancient drum made new. It has a single beat. Face together the rising sun. We Are One. We
Are One. We Are One."[5]
Although making God imminent in all creation, including human beings,
certainly solved the problem of a remote first cause, it still left the question of
meaning. Creative Initiative answered that question by attributing teleology to the
creation that was God. "We believe," wrote Emilia in an early statement of
faith, "in the purpose of God, the guidance of God, and the power of God."[6] Harry explained that science could find the answers to
"how" but was unable to help with the question "why?" But his response
was hardly more enlightening. Once more he was forced back to an explanation based on
faith: "The only answer that can be made at our present level of consciousness is,
'That's just the way it is!' Or if we don't object to the use of religious language,
'That's the way God decided to have it!' "[7] Creative
Initiative believed that the way things are, "reality," had to be faced and
accepted. But reality was neither static nor directionless. "God is Direction,"
proclaimed a 1979 "Meditation on God." "His plan is set before us. Within
his plan, his will is the blueprint for life, and we can choose to follow it or not. When
we decide to obey, we become co-creators with God."[8]
When Creative Initiative used the word "direction" in
relationship to God's plan, its members really had two things in mind. First, they
believed that there was a development direction for each individual that could take him or
her from the basic survival needs of food and shelter up through steps of mental and
aesthetic development to reach a final stage of "spiritual discernment" in which
the person embodied knowledge, understanding, mercy, and love.[9] A
second document put it more briefly, if ambiguously: "The plan is the movement to
fuller and higher consciousness which both enables and requires us to co-operate and
execute God's plan."[10] In other words, they believed that
God had a plan for individuals that would enable them to carry out a second plan for human
beings as a whole. This second plan was God's intention for the human race. It was God's
will. "What is God's will or desire for mankind?" asked one of a series of
handwritten questions in the Creative Initiative files. "Is God's will for mankind
being done? What part do you personally play in God's plan for mankind? What is keeping
you from doing God's will?" the writer ended.[11] Although
sometimes couched in an interrogative form, there was no doubt what the answers were
supposed to be. Queried one discussion-course question, "What would you say in
response to the proposal that God seems to have an intention or purpose for
'his' Creation, and that it is beneficent?"[12] People who did
not respond in the affirmative could hardly have remained active in Creative Initiative.
To do God's will, one had to know God's will, and one could know it by
studying his plan, the direction that was God the process of evolution. The Rathbuns
were convinced by their studies with Gerald Heard in the 1940s, and by later reading
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that humans had not finished evolving, but were capable of
another step up the evolutionary ladder. They made this theory of evolution one of the
core beliefs in their philosophy. Evolution was a major mechanism through which God
worked, and because it was a theory confirmed by a hundred years of biology and
paleontology, evolution was the nexus between faith and science. Like Sharman before them,
the Rathbuns insisted not only that there was no conflict between science and religion but
that despite their belief in mystic revelation and the gnostic plane their religious
enterprise was conducted in a scientific manner. "The seven basic concepts of the
Challenge to Change [introductory course] process are really the 'scientific method'
restated in the context of everyday life," they told new members of the movement.[13]
Because Creative Initiative believed that God was the first cause and
did not intercede miraculously in nature indeed, God could not because nature was
God then it followed that the laws of nature were the laws of God. The essence of
their scientific approach to the study of human beings and religion was "cause and
effect." Just as God was the first cause and all creation was the effect, so all the
relationships within that creation, "reality," could be understood through
"natural law, or 'the laws of science,' the cause and effect
dependability built into the structure of Reality."[14]
By getting neophytes to accept the validity of the premise that all creation was subject
to natural law and that scientific knowledge consisted of understanding cause and effect,
and then by couching all its philosophic and religious propositions in scientific
language, Creative Initiative was able to draw large numbers of technically educated
people into the movement, appealing directly to their predisposition to accept the
legitimacy of ideas proven by objective scientific logic. For example, the "Leader's
Manual" for one course listed a sample question for discussion, "When our goal
is personal fulfillment, what do we need to know?" and then informed the leaders (in
direct contradiction to the Socratic tradition of H. B. Sharman) that the discussion
should "bring out answers such as . . . 'the cause-and-effect relationships which
must be observed or obeyed in order to reach it.' "[15]
Members believed that God worked his will through science (natural law)
and, therefore, by studying science they could come to know God's will. That was
particularly true for evolution, because evolution, as understood by Creative Initiative,
both explained the past and pointed to the future. So crucial was their interpretation of
evolution that it formed the basis for one of the first and most frequently repeated
courses in the Creative Initiative curriculum, "The Challenge of Time." The
Challenge of Time was a simplified synthesis and recasting of the works of Gerald Heard
and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. From Teilhard the Rathbuns borrowed the concept of
"complexification" and much specific terminology.[16]
From Heard they borrowed the idea that there were three distinct stages of human
development. They agreed with both men that human beings were on the threshold of a new
stage in evolutionary growth.
The idea that the human evolutionary journey was incomplete really
constituted the essence of Creative Initiative's message. Their discussion of biological
evolution was always a preface to the main text, and it served two purposes: it
established their credentials as a group that took a scientific approach, and it grounded
the course in a universally accepted theory that established the basis for the more
problematic step of predicating direction in future evolution. By using Teilhard's and
Heard's theories in the courses, people were led from scientifically and historically
known facts to a speculative future. Teilhard's description of the biological evolution of
Homo sapiens suggested that the process of "complexification" would bring a
higher consciousness. Heard's three stages of human development began with biological
evolution, passed through technic evolution, to predict a third stage in which "man
hatches a soul."[17] Educating people so they could partake in
this third, and least scientifically grounded, aspect of the human journey was the raison
d'être for Creative Initiative.[18]
Unless individuals were willing to accept the evolutionary premise of
Creative Initiative's system of beliefs, there was no reason for them to become active
members of the group. Hence, the idea of evolution and a personal journey to the final
stage was made the subject of the first intense weekend course that new members attended
after they had completed the initial introductory courses.[19] They
taught that each person's individual journey toward personal fulfillment went through four
stages (an idea loosely based on the concept of the hero's journey as described by Joseph
Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces ) and augmented with Erik
Erikson's ideas of the stages of childhood.[20] The first three
stages involved growing up and taking on traditional adult roles. Although such roles
might be temporarily satisfying, eventually people experienced "a growing
dissatisfaction with life and a vague yearning for something more. . . . Those goals which
at one point were thought to bring happiness no longer satisfy." This dissatisfaction
corresponded to Jung's belief that there was a natural crisis in midlife that could act as
the stimulus to increased "individuation" and a more mature second half of life.[21] This Jungian theory was certainly compatible with the goals of
Creative Initiative and also dovetailed neatly with Emilia's personal history. Thus, the
Creative Initiative view of life reflected both the theoretical view of C. G. Jung and a
projection and universalization of Emilia's own midlife crisis. The course listed a number
of things people did when faced with a midlife crisis: "job changes, excess seeking
of pleasure, changing houses, returning to school, divorce, affairs, depression,
etc."[22] With the exception of divorce and excess seeking of
pleasure, Emilia engaged in (or was as least tempted by) each of these deadend roads to
finding meaning.
Although many, perhaps most, adults remained mired in the unsatisfying
self-indulgences of their later years, Creative Initiative believed that some few would
choose to enter the fourth stage where they could learn to experience a new unity with all
life. As Harry explained, the individual's evolution into the fourth stage was
"neither automatic nor a matter of chance" but rather a matter of the person's
"conscious choice." One key was to find "a wise one, a teacher" who
would awaken the individual's "inborn capacity to perceive and inspire him to
undertake the journey to fulfillment, to maturity, to the wholeness which is his
birthright!"[23] At the final stage of personal maturity,
Creative Initiative believed that a person was at last able "to take his position as
an active co-creator of an unfolding universe. He becomes a creative initiator at the
frontier of time."[24]
The belief that human beings could, through their own volition, break
through into a new dimension of life gave the ultimate sanction to the group's homocentric
approach to reform. They were not merely trying to get individuals to adopt a more benign
stance in the world. They were trying to transform the very essence of the race itself.
"The dead end is to assume the internal environment to be fixed, and respond by
seeking only to change the external world of objects and other beings," explained a
document from the early 1970s.[25] The movement argued that such a
sociocentric approach ignored the opportunity for personal growth and evolutionary change.
Although they recognized that whatever change was supposed to take place would not be
genetic, they nevertheless frequently used Darwinian language that carried all the
implications of biological transformation.[26] A formal
introduction to a course in 1979 declared that people had to accept the responsibility to
do God's will, and when they did, "in large enough numbers, evolu- tion continues, a new
mutation occurs (a loving, responsive human being), and life is open-ended."[27] It would be easy to dismiss the reference to a "new
mutation" as hyperbole except that it fits a language pattern that manifested itself
throughout Creative Initiative's writings, not only on evolution, but generally. An early
pledge signed by new men who joined the movement said, in part, "We declare ourselves
to be the nucleus of the new collective, the new community, the new church, the new
race, the new species, the new world."[28] The
combined references to a mass movement and to a new race are the key to the final
complication in the concept of continued evolutionary progress. The movement taught that
the time was right for the next stage to be achieved through a three-step process. First
the individual would change, then the changed individuals would gather in a community, and
finally the whole world would undergo a transformation.[29]
Teilhard's ideas were the essential ingredient in allowing the movement
to believe that it could change the entire earth even when it was obviously having trouble
reaching more than a few thousand people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Teilhard had
explained that each new phylum was begun by just a few radically different individuals.
When such biological sports found an unexploited ecological niche their numbers exploded
and the few actual pioneering individuals (the peduncle, or stem, he called them) would
quickly be overwhelmed by their successful offspring and be lost to the fossil record.[30] Thus, even a very few individuals, or a "creative
minority," could be the root stock of an entire new race so long as they appeared
when the time was ripe for their growth.[31]
Creative Initiative people knew that there could be change and they knew
how to bring that change about; they even knew what the changed people would be like; but
what they did not know were the exact details. They admitted that the community could not
"tell any of its members that he or she must evolve in a certain manner or at a
certain rate of speed," and although they claimed to be "as gods" in the
limited sense that their "imaginations, willpower and dedication [did] bring about
change," they also admitted "exactly how and when and where the change occurs is
not ours to determine that is subject to a higher control of a more universal sweep
than any one man's intelligence, or any group's foresight." But they did think that
if they could gather one thousand "clear" persons (a term apparently borrowed
from Scientology) in one place, "public opinion on the war-peace issue could never
again return to its old level."[32]
The Supranatural
Because it had not yet occurred, and because it dealt with ideas that
fell outside of the normal boundaries of the natural sciences, the exact nature of the
next step of evolution remained somewhat vague in Creative Initiative writings. Even more
vague were a number of other extrascientific issues that were frequently discussed under
the same rubric. They included higher consciousness, spirituality, mysticism, the soul,
and the gnostic plane.
"We are a community of men and women who are committed to discover
and operate at a new higher level of consciousness. We seek to pioneer the next step in
the evolutionary growth of man," said a statement of principle from the mid-1960s.[33] Although they talked at great length about the attitudes, values,
and feelings of people who had obtained this higher consciousness, those human responses
were thought to be reflections of a state in which the individual was in connection with
some extramundane force. Borrowing heavily from Teilhard, particularly in their earlier
period, they sometimes referred to this force as the "noosphere." Teilhard used
the term to designate a presumed aura that surrounded the world as a result of the thought
of human beings.[34] So influential was Teilhard's vision and
terminology that two of the group's early names were borrowed directly from him. In 1965
they began calling themselves "New Sphere," an admitted play on the term
"noosphere," and in 1968 the women's part of the movement adopted the name
"Building the Earth," the title of a brief, nontechnical summary of Teilhard's
ideas.
There was, however, much more to Creative Initiative's view of the
supranatural than an invisible envelope of collective human thought. There was also the
aspect of the human psyche that sought communion with God, an aspect that Creative
Initiative variously called "spirit," "mysticism," and
"soul." According to Creative Initiative beliefs, there were three levels of
reality: the physical with its laws of biology, chemistry, and physics; the
mental-emotional with its laws of psychology; and the world of the spirit, which was
"more nebulous, less tangible than the physical and mental categories."[35] Harry defined the spiritual level of existence as the one in which
the intuitive plays a central role. "It is in this, the field of direct perception of
reality, that people have their communication with Ultimate Reality, with God," he
wrote.[36]
What Harry referred to as the "Ultimate Reality," or God, was
more frequently called the "gnostic plane." Like other terms that referred to
the supranatural, gnostic was never given a very clear definition. A discussion of
the Book of John called the "gnostic level." "a plane of knowledge and
spirit and energy which can be penetrated in moments of powerful prayer and which, in
turn, can pierce down through to the earth plane and make contact with an open mind in the
form of thought and idea." The description then went on to say that for people who
are in touch with the unconscious, "there are documented instances of 'presences'
being manifested in material or auditory form."[37] The clear
implication of these two statements is that "presences" conjured up through the
unconscious actually come from the gnostic plane."[38] Not
only was the gnostic plane the source of individual insight, it also controlled the grand
schemes of time. Creative Initiative believed that gnostic time occurred in thousand-year
units: it was a thousand years from Abraham to David, from David to Jesus, from Jesus to
the Norman Conquest, and it would be a thousand years from the Norman Conquest to the New
Age, in the year 2000.[39]
Not only was Creative Initiative literally millennial, dealing with
thousand-year blocks of time, but it was also religiously millennial, predicting that the
turn of the century, which would also be the turn of the millennium, was destined to be a
new watershed for the human race. One course claimed that all the great art and music had
already been written and, curiously for a group headquartered in Silicon Valley, that all
the great technologies had already been invented. Therefore the new focus of people's
effort had to be to "perfect the human instrument." The way to accomplish this
goal was to have, by the year 2000, one thousand people "deconditioned, educated in
truth, and totally committed to service of the gnostic plane." The course ended with
a claim that explained how the concept of the community as a collective messiah would
work: "When we accomplish the mission of the 1000 whole persons, we will have
accomplished the mission of the 4th millenium. . . . When we do this, we will have
safeguarded the gains of past ages, and insured the future."[40]
The exact mechanism to be used by the thousand people in the year 2000 was not specified
because it was unknown. "When the time comes when we have the thousand, and if we
have done our job," they believed, "we will find out what we are supposed to do
then."[41]
In Emilia's mind, at least, the numerological millennialism of a
thousand people in the year 2000 was the way to inaugurate the third age. It was not
merely symbolic for her, it was mystical, almost magical. Speak ing before admiring
audiences, as they almost always were, Emilia tended to wax hyperbolic. When pressed about
her more extreme statements made in the heat of the moment, she would usually explain that
she was speaking symbolically and did not mean to be taken literally. The consistency and
volume of Emilia's statements lead, nevertheless, to the inescapable conclusion that both
she and her followers certainly believed they knew the truth. So there is no reason not to
take it literally when Emilia told the participants at an "A" seminar that the
thousand people would "have a channel that is sufficiently powerful to counteract the
negative psychology, psyche, fields that are created by people's psyche. You can only do
that by a thousand clean, pure, absolutely complete people. Plus if you can produce
a thousand people, you have established the new species."[42]
The most common device for trying to make contact with the supranatural
was meditation. "We have to leap into the irrational through the rational,"
Emilia said. The "communication from God" was irrational, but she believed in it
nevertheless.[43] Borrowing from the work of Gerald Heard, who was
heavily influenced by Asian meditative practices, the movement distinguished between vocal
prayer and meditation. Praying aloud was considered a lower form of devotion but still a
useful one for verbalizing feelings and overcoming inhibitions about dealing with God.
Much more common were "guided meditations" in which people were told to imagine
a short scenario. They believed meditation helped people understand their inner selves
and, when done together, unified "the group so that the force of God's power may be
experienced."[44]
The group never engaged in intercessory prayers of the type
traditionally addressed to a personal God. Prayer and meditation were devices aimed less
at God than at the person praying. According to an early course, prayer would produce
"1. right psychic being, 2. right knowledge, 3. right doing, and 4. right physical
body." Prayer was an action that integrated, motivated, emancipated, and transformed
the person praying. Yet above all, prayer was a way to get in touch with the
"abstract spirit, abstract idea, abstract truth, which exists in the gnostic
plane." Prayer was the conduit to the supranatural. They believed that "a
praying human is in active relationship to the gnostic plane (noo-sphere, new sphere,
heaven), receiving, understanding, and carrying out orders step by step."[45]
The very process of meditation was extrarational. The meditations were
exercises with the express purposes of taking the movement beyond what they saw as the
masculine world of systematic thinking into the feminine realm of the intuitive. Although
they sometimes used a mantra to induce a more traditional eastern kind of meditative
state, they usually employed the meditative process as a way to personally experience the
suprarational. The meditations had the additional effect of investing the group's
philosophic doctrines with an aura of mystical legitimacy. Their style of meditation was
not so much a device designed to achieve the monistic goal of sensing unity with all
creation as a prayerlike method of visualizing the duality and conflicts of the world and
marshaling personal strength to do God's will: "At this moment / You and I / and all
humankind / are standing at the crossroads of time. / Together / we are standing / on the
razor's edge of two cataclysmic forces. / On the one side / are the forces of decay, /
destruction / and death for all humanity . . . We believe / if we join together / as One
Earth, One humanity, One spirit / we can tip the balance / toward new life."[46]
Living in the Kingdom of God: The Individual and the
Community
The future that Creative Initiative hoped to insure as a collective
messiah with a thousand "whole" people gathered by the turn of the millennium,
was, of course, the Kingdom of God. "Man has always dreamed of an ideal world in
which all his needs and desires would be met," wrote Harry in 1975, "a world in
which he would exist in an imagined state of bliss. There would be no war, no violence, no
unpleasant conflict among people, no crime, no poverty and everyone would be loving and
cooperative." Harry did not deny that such a world might be possible but insisted
that to bring it about people had to be responsible for one another and for the world as a
whole. In other words, the Kingdom of God on earth would be created by human beings:
"There is no magic. The outcome is up to man." There would be no second coming
of a messiah to save the world in "one radical or cataclysmic happening"; rather
the "worldwide Kingdom of God is the product of a process which takes time and man's
growth in consciousness and responsibility."[47]
Written material for a basic seminar in 1968 contained a description of
life on earth when all people had been converted to the new way of thinking. Although it
did not label the ideal world the Kingdom of God, the course material is the closest to a
description of Creative Initiative's ideal world that we have. The course described four
aspects of life that would be improved in the utopia the movement was trying to build.
First, in the economic sphere, there would be "adequate provision for the material,
physical needs of every person on the planet." Second, politically, there would be a
"world government with world law to function until all people shall have transcended
the need for legal controls." Third, the environment would be aesthetically pleasing
because nature would be preserved and "man-made ugliness" would be banished.
Finally, people would interact spiritually out of "loving concern for one another in
order that the continued evolution of each individual shall be most effectively
nurtured."[48]
In the Jesus as Teacher course, which was the capstone of the Creative
Initiative program of study, Jesus' ideas about the Kingdom of God were explained in some
detail. The course began with the historical background of the various Jewish
interpretations of the Kingdom of God in the time of Jesus. It explained that some Jews
expected a political messiah who would establish a Jewish kingdom on earth ruled by a man
anointed by God. Other Jews looked for an apocalyptic messiah who would come to judge
human beings and sort the saved from the damned. It was important to Creative Initiative
to demonstrate that these were false expectations rejected by Jesus, because it was that
understanding that led them to reject political action as a means of saving the world,
while at the same time denying that God would again intervene with an anointed leader who
would lead the human race to salvation.[49] In addition, Creative
Initiative claimed that Jesus rejected "economic messianism" when he said
"Man does not live by bread alone," by which he meant "economic
emancipation does not give meaning to a person's life."[50]
This interpretation, too, was designed to show the parallel between the teachings of Jesus
and the movement's strong rejection of materialism as a goal of life. Instead of using
political action or awaiting a great leader, Creative Initiative believed that Jesus told
his followers they could, by following his teachings, become the Kingdom of God.
To explain explicitly what Jesus meant, Creative Initiative turned to
the parables, giving each an interpretation that strongly supported the values and actions
of the movement. The parable of the mustard seed was said to make the point "that the
society of people who make up the Kingdom of God has a very small beginning," a
comforting thought to the modestly sized group. Similarly the story of the leaven in the
meal was said to show how "a growing 'creative minority' makes progressive changes
that affect the whole society." The wheat and tares parable meant that the Kingdom of
God and the kingdom of the devil could coexist in the world "so long as there are
people who have not entered the Kingdom of God." The parable of the growing seed was
said to show not only that the group would grow, but also that "anyone who has
experienced the values of 'citizenship' in the Kingdom of God 'can do no other' than
recruit others for membership. The impulse is irresistible to share those values."
Finally, the parable of the sower whose seeds fell on both rich and fallow ground meant
that not everybody who heard the message would seek the kingdom or join the
movement.[51]
The homocentric approach that found justification in Jesus' rejection of
political and apocalyptic messianism began with the elemental root of society, the single
person. Creative Initiative recognized that changes could be forced on people through
political coercion but argued that "any change in social structure which does not
have a change in attitude as its basis is superficial."[52]
The movement likened the individual to a single cell in a greater organism in which the
parts worked for the good of the whole and the whole worked for the good of the parts. The
chain of responsibility started with the person, then extended to the marriage, the
family, the neighborhood, and so on up the line until at last it reached the nation, the
continent, and the entire world.[53]
Even though all change had to start with the individual, it was the
collective through which the most effective change was implemented. "We are a
community of teaching and a demonstration of what we teach," claimed a
"Statement on Goals"; "We believe that the message and the messenger must
be one."[54] The central concept of cooperation obviously
presupposed that the process involved more than one person. The act of transformation was
not a private one between a person and his or her God but rather a first step toward the
ultimate goal of "cooperation of first the religions, then the races, and finally the
nations of the world."[55] Only by cooperating together in a
community could the validity of the individual transformation be demonstrated.
Their idea was to create in their own community a model of how the
Kingdom of God on earth would function. It was possible, they insisted:
It is a conscious decision to be made by the most developed persons of
destiny. These will constitute the prototype community of the future. There will be new
customs, conventions, and institutions. There will be a naturalness, spontaneity, freedom
in the person which springs from the intuition. There will be cooperation, peace,
harmlessness absence of violence and fear. There will be a new way to deal with
conflicts because truth will be objective.[56]
Surrendering to the Authority of God's Will
Just as the belief in continuing evolution was the cornerstone of
Creative Initiative's understanding of the external world, surrendering to the authority
of God's will was the basic internal act that the individual had to take in order to
participate in the furtherance of evolution.
The idea that the individual had to give up his or her own egocentric
will and submit wholly to the will of God was a tenet whose roots could be traced back to
the earliest work of Henry B. Sharman. Sharman had been adamant about the necessity of
obeying the will of God but very vague about just what it was that God willed people to
do.[57] Through the use of the concept of continued evolution,
which the Rathbuns appended to Sharman's doctrine, they were able to give their followers
much more direction than Sharman ever had. Like Sharman, nevertheless, the Rathbuns'
discussions of God's will could be extremely imprecise. When he was attempting to
formalize the philosophy of the movement in a book, Harry described the process thus:
Total commitment to God's will, to the undivided love of God, means to
be doing what is right all the time, not just some of the time, in every situation, not
just when it is convenient. What is right, to repeat, is what works toward, rather than
against, the best outcomes for all, what makes for the continuance of the evolution of
consciousness, and the well-being of our entire planet.[58]
If one were inclined to ask how one could know what was right, one
answer was, "All of us who are normal know what that is."[59]
Because Creative Initiative believed that God was everything and
everything was God, almost any point they wished to make could, and usually was, couched
in terms relating it to authority (God). Material from both the Old and New Testaments was
easily interpreted in ways that were consistent with their broad definition of God as
authority. They taught that "God's authority is expressed through Jesus, who
verbalized for Him."[60] By holding up Jesus as the model of a
person who surrendered his will to the authority of God, the group was emphasizing the
benign nature of that authority. There were two kinds of authority, they explained,
authoritative and authoritarian. Authoritarian authority was said to be overprotective,
manipulative, subjective, and arbitrary. But the authority of God and Jesus and
those who align themselves with God's will was "enlightened authority that
loves, guides, shares and is aware of another."[61]
Creative Initiative taught that it was not enough simply to obey the
will of God; one had to surrender to the will of God. As in Sharman's day, the
operant text continued to be, "Whosoever shall lose his life shall save it."
"Losing life" meant giving up the individual will, the ego, and making all life
decisions according to God's will.
The ego-driven person was the corrupt tree that bore evil fruit:
"resistance, hate, rigidity, stoppage, alienation, slavery, death. You are a
walking devil ." Those aligned with the will of God were like good trees that
brought forth good fruit: "acceptance, response, love, mobility, flow, at-one-ment,
freedom, life. You are a walking God ."[62] A person
was either one or the other. There was no middle ground, no compromise, no halfway
covenant. God had to become the total focus of one's life. Emilia told members that
"God does not tolerate a rival." If a person said, before I give myself to God
"I am going to give to my children, my family or pursue my own interests," then
that person was creating a rival for God and would not find the peace and love that came
with total surrender.[63] Even a woman's maternal instinct had to
be surrendered to something bigger and more important. "Mothering, and the religious
life," said Emilia, "are mutually exclusive."[64]
These last two statements were probably not meant to be taken literally; rather, the group
would have explained that a person could be a better spouse and parent when he or she had
surrendered the egocentricity and aligned with God's will. The fact that Emilia could
speak in such extreme terms was, nevertheless, indicative of the depth of commitment she
believed was necessary to achieve totality, that is, detachment and obedience to the will
of God.
In the Creative Initiative system of belief, surrender was an essential
part of love. The way to love was to surrender to the love object and, since God was the
most infinitely loveable object conceivable, God was also worthy of the greatest love.[65] The movement expected that mature, loving people would manifest
their love by living in benign relationship with others and the world. Harry discussed the
worldy application of love in terms of the three categories described by Jesus: enemies,
neighbors, and brothers. When Jesus said love your enemies and pray for them, Harry
explained that meant people should try to "surround and envelop your erstwhile enemy
with a positive field, an atmosphere of good will, within which he has a better chance of
illumination than without it." In that case, said Harry, "you are, at the very
least, doing no harm to the subject of your concern."[66] This
desire to be harmless in the world appears to have been a belief the group took very
seriously and explains their gentle demeanor, which outsiders frequently had trouble
accepting as genuine. They almost never confronted or replied to critics or enemies and,
in the one situation in which they did have a direct confrontation with another group,
they bent over backward to resolve the differences amicably. In that case a dispute
over the Ben Lomond property they controlled jointly with the Quakers a local Quaker
historian has concluded that the Creative Initiative acted more like Friends than the
Friends.[67]
"Your neighbor," said Harry, "is defined as anyone you
encounter who has a real need that you can fulfill, irrespective of his race, color,
nationality, creed, or economic or social status." The parable of the Good Samaritan
was the model for loving all people, even those who were culturally distinct from you.[68] Finally, brother was defined as "one who is committed
to the same goal as yours, namely, to 'doing the Will of God.' " Within this context
love took on a more complex meaning than in the previous two cases. Love of an enemy could
mean just wishing the enemy well. Love of a neighbor meant helping the person. But love of
a brother included both of the above plus the obligation to rebuke a brother who sins
because "that gives him an opportunity and responsibility to mend his ways."[69] As we shall see below, this interpretation of love as criticism was
also taken quite seriously by the group.
If surrendering to the will of God, which was the same thing as loving
God, was the only proper goal of life, then, as far as the movement was concerned, free
will meant only that human beings had the freedom to give up their own wills and obey the
will of God.[70] By making the great paradox so basic to their
philosophy, Creative Initiative created an intellectual structure that required members to
accept a logical contradiction from the very beginning of their association with the
group. People could be free only if they enslaved themselves to the will of God. Time and
again in their lectures and their courses they would repeat the same litany: "There
is no freedom," and "We can command nature only by obeying it." If people
had no freedom but to obey nature, if evolution were the method through which nature (God)
carried out its intention, if the community of Creative Initiative was an integral part of
the next evolutionary stage of history, and if the individual wished to be part of the new
third age, then it followed that people had no choice, no freedom, to do anything but
dedicate themselves totally to the will of God and the work of Creative Initiative.
Psychological Techniques for Surrendering to the Will of God
Explicit psychological techniques were used by Creative Initiative,
both to prepare people to surrender their wills to God and to "live the life"
once they had become "identified" (i.e., initiated) members of the community.
The use of psychological counseling and personal growth techniques had been introduced
during the Sequoia Seminar period and continued uninterrupted through the Creative
Initiative era. In the latter period, however, psychology became at once more central and
more instrumental to the overall functioning of the movement. All active members
participated in the self-discovery and conversion process and, for many, the preparation
for the surrender of self was their most important single experience in the movement.
However, the mutual criticism sessions among members which followed the personal
transformation were just as frequently cited by people as the most negative aspect of
their participation.
Stripped of its context, which makes the whole process appear more
manipulative and calculated than it probably was, interaction at formal meetings moved
from unconditionally given love and support at the beginning of membership to grudging
approval doled out parsimoniously and perhaps even arbitrarily to the fully initiated.
Members who had been initially inundated with flattery and support during their first year
with the group might get nothing but demands for time and effort, accompanied by critiques
of their style and attitude, after they had been in for several years.
From the philosophical perspective of Creative Initiative this switch in
approach was both humane and logical. Initially the new people needed to be supported and
reassured of their own importance as human beings while, of course, feeling very
attracted to this group that was supplying all the positive feedback. Once the neophytes
had developed sufficient ego strength to be objective about themselves they could begin
the process of investigating their own psychological strengths and weaknesses
admittedly a more painful process, but one which frequently led to tremendous
personal insight and growing appreciation for the group providing the guidance. Finally,
after surrendering their wills to the will of God, fully identified members were assumed
to be acting from a totally new evolutionary perspective (as a new species) in which right
behavior was its own reward. Hence, lack of praise and loving criticism would not be
hurtful to them and indeed might have the unrecognized effect of making the person
work harder, trying somehow to recapture the psychological support that had drawn them
into the group in the first place.
First contacts with prospective members were designed not only to
introduce the Creative Initiative philosophy in general terms but also to make the new
person feel accepted and important. Most of the psychological support during this early
stage was informal or incidental to courses that focused on ideas, yet there were also
more structured ways of accomplishing the same purpose. A brief introductory course called
"Positive Self-Assessment," for example, stated that its purpose was "to
affirm the positive qualities in ourselves in a way that gives us a realistic picture of
the way we are."[71]
Once people had become more deeply involved in the movement and had
accepted the basic system of beliefs taught in the first series of courses, the time came
for them to begin preparing themselves for the crucial psychological step of surrender.
The first step in this process was called the "A seminar." The name, specific
content, and methodology varied, but the basic purpose remained consistent.[72] The A seminar was designed to help people examine their past
interpersonal relationships, particularly with their parents, and in so doing to begin the
process that Creative Initiative called "deconditioning," the necessary
preparation for surrender to the will of God.[73]
The seminars, which at times lasted longer than five days, guided the
participants through some extremely focused examinations of the relationships that had
molded them. They tried to get people to look at themselves and reach their own
conclusions. Leaders were warned that they could not make decisions for the participants
and, in fact, that it was inappropriate for them to even give advice. In theory, their
role was to ask questions and be supportive, nothing more.[74] In
practice, the leaders could become quite dominating. One man reported that the leaders in
his A seminar acted like parents while the participants "reacted as the dutiful,
spoiled or resistant child," a technique that he felt was dishonest and manipulative.[75]
Because the process took place within the supportive environment of the
seminar, isolated from the real world (usually at the group's beauti ful mountain retreat
in Ben Lomond), people identified strongly with the movement both as the instigator of
their psychological insights and as the support network for their continued personal
growth. Participants reported that they went through some of the most searing emotional
periods of their entire lives at the A seminars. "The purging of my hatred caused a
feeling of euphoria which I think about often," wrote one man, "wondering if
that was the high a totally loving person feels."[76] A
woman who attended one of the seminars described how she shared "something very
personal" about her childhood with one of the leaders and that the leader "was
very understanding and accepting." That night, the woman reported, "I had a
dream that all the stars in the universe had shifted and changed their patterns. I began
to trust at a much deeper level."[77]
Most of the Creative Initiative members who wrote about their A seminar
experiences in our questionnaires linked the insight they had obtained in the seminar with
a fundamental shift in attitude. Because the people who responded to the questionnaire
were long-time members who had deeply internalized the group's philosophy, they almost
always described that attitudinal shift in religious terms. "I knew answers were
available for every need all I had to do was learn to ask, seek, believe,
knock," explained a participant, "so, I was gaining TRUST IN GOD and learning
more & more what that meant."[78] Similarly a man who
confronted his own anger at his mother and felt compelled to "go out into the woods
and beat the ground and release torrents of absolute, uninhibited rage," came to the
realization that he could no longer "trust my own rational thought processes."
Instead he "decided, not that clearly at first but more and more clearly over time,
to have faith that God existed and to put my faith in God."[79]
That shift to trusting God was, of course, the ultimate purpose of the
entire process. The real purpose of the A seminar in terms of the Creative Initiative
process was to free individuals from the psychological fetters that kept them bound to
their parents, liberating them to transfer their emotional allegiance from the authority
figures of their past to the authority of God. In the last years of Creative Initiative
the A seminar experimented with the "STAR" technique in which feelings of
resentment and anger were expressed in screaming and hitting with newspapers and pillows.
"I will forever remember the incredible atmosphere inside," wrote a participant,
"2 dozen people beating newspapers, screaming yelling dust flying all over . .
. trying to 'kill' our parents!!! The ones who got finished early were surrounding the
slower ones & coaxing them & screaming. . . . It was wild!"[80]
When the people had "killed" the parents of their childhood, they were then able
to be obedient to God. Because they felt it did not promote group bonding, and because the
group was undergoing the transition into Beyond War, the STAR technique was dropped after
one year.
Creative Initiative believed that "we are born with an inherent
potential to see reality clearly," which was their way of saying that humans are
inherently good. Because the environment is imperfect, however, all people develop defense
and survival mechanisms that protect them from the "traumas and hurts we encounter in
the early years of our helplessness and dependency." These psychological defense
mechanisms, or conditioning, not only screened and distorted people's perception of
reality; they also created for each individual a particular and personal "frame of
reference." The effect of this, they said, was enormous. Nothing less than "the
problems of the world" were caused by people who functioned "from a restricted,
private point of view" because they think "more of themselves and their way than
what is good for the other person or the world."[81] Thus, the
A seminar was designed to begin the process of "deconditioning."
The first step a person had to take in deconditioning was to recognize
that he or she could not change what was at any given moment. "The essential attitude
is acceptance, neither resistance to nor rebellion against reality," wrote
Harry.[82] By acknowledging that there was no point in railing
against what was, the individual would be purged of nonproductive anger and be open to
taking action creative initiative to make changes in accordance with God's
will.[83] Thus, in the tradition of New Thought and New Age
philosophies that have been so attractive to middle-class Americans since the nineteenth
century, the battle against "resistance" sometimes took on a strong flavor of
salvation-through-positive-thinking.
Somehow the conditioned self had to be "destroyed," the
personal frame of reference broken, the resistance to reality replaced by response.
According to Creative Initiative that was what Jesus was doing when he was baptized. It
was at that point that he "let go of himself" without reservation to seek and
obey the Will of God."[84] Indeed, there was no end of
metaphors used by the group to describe this deconditioning process. It was, said Harry,
"the night before the dawn, winter before spring, death before rebirth, crucifixion
before resurrection."[85] "If a pitcher is full of water,
it must be emptied first, in order to fill it with milk," explained a course;
"the conditioned self cannot perceive, know or experience the unconditioned."
"You must 'sell all ' that you have," continued the course material,
"you must empty yourself totally . Then you will be transparent."[86]
Since the Creative Initiative process of transformation was expected to
take up to five years and was based on an educational model, there was no expectation that
the change or conversion to "transparency," would occur suddenly. Nevertheless,
the process was set up so that participants would spend the one-week "B" seminar
taken at the end of their second year concentrating on the deconditioning experience.
People could have dramatic insights into their own psychological problems at the A and B
seminars, but the assumption appears to have been that the movement from resistance to
response would probably occur slowly over time, as a cumulative result of the
breaking-down process of deconditioning and the subsequent building-up process of
education in the teachings of Jesus.
Besides the general introspection that accompanied the psychological
seminars, there was one specific process that Emilia introduced from her own experience
which formed a somewhat unexpected link with the early history of the Rathbuns
confession. Confession was perceived as a kind of moral emetic, the use of which
cleansed the system of poisons and opened it to healthy new food. "The process of
'emptying' and 'cleansing' is possible through a one-time, all-at-once confession of all
the negative things you have done in your lifetime," leaders told participants in the
seminars.[87] One seminar described "the first stage in the
religious process as "purgation, that is cleansing the self so that it does
not project subjectivity on reality."[88] The term purgation
was repeated frequently in Creative Initiative documents.
Participants were asked to scour their memories and write down every
negative thing they had done that caused them "guilt, blame, shame, feeling of
unworthiness, pride, jealousy, etc." Simply writing it down was not sufficient,
however. As in the Oxford Group from which Emilia drew this process, the sins then had to
be shared. In the Oxford Group they were shared with a single "confessor," but
in Creative Initiative, collective ideology dictated that they be shared with the group.
"It is not enough to acknowledge it by yourself," the leaders continued; people
also had to read their lists at a meeting where the other participants listened but did
not comment.[89]
To assist them in the confession process, Creative Initiative supplied
seminar participants with copies of the "four absolutes" that had been the
central tenets of the Oxford Group. Frank Buchman had taught his followers that they had
to follow lives of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute
love.[90] A Creative Initiative information sheet on the four
absolutes defined each of the admonitions. Absolute honesty meant confessing all sources
of guilt and shame (they never used the term "sin"). Absolute purity referred to
sex, requiring the confession of masturbation, incest, childhood sexuality, premarital
sex, unnatural sex, pornography, adultery, and fornication. Absolute unselfishness applied
to all aspects of life including time, money, possessions, skills, and so forth. Finally,
absolute love, the goal of life, was discussed in terms of God and the model of Jesus.[91]
There was no sense of antinomianism in the movement. Having surrendered
to the will of God did not mean that people automatically knew the will of God or that
they could have the absolute knowledge that what they did was the will of God. Once more
the problem that had plagued Sharman's students came to the fore. Even when one
surrendered one's will, how could one know just what it was that God wanted one to do?
Whereas Sharman had supplied no answer, Creative Initiative, by implication, did. Although
they made no claims to infallibility, Creative Initiative appeared to believe that the
collective could be trusted to know the true road more often than the individual, and that
once a person had passed over into the identified state, he or she needed to be open to
guidance from other identified people. Jesus said, "If your brother sins, rebuke
him." To Creative Initiative, "brothers" were people who were together in
the Kingdom of God. By sharing their perceptions of one another's faults, brothers and
sisters in the kingdom gave one another the "opportunity and responsibility" to
mend their ways or, if the rebuker were incorrect, to turn the criticism back on the
originator.[92]
On the one hand, mutual criticism was sometimes described in gentle
terms, as when a course told students that "the truly open mind will welcome a
reminder that one seems to be defensive about a position held," or when a personal
notebook revealed the belief that people should "receive & be grateful for gifts
from others (confrontation)."[93] On the other hand, it could
be presented in much harsher terms, usually by Emilia, who liked to leave the bark on. It
was apparently she who told a group in 1967 that it was "necessary both to help each
individual ferret out the shoddy egocentric motivation that became mixed in with his
goodwill, and to give him love and support while he swallows his
pride and risks himself to the next encounter."[94]
And it was definitely she who told another group more than a decade later, "In CIF
you will not only not get paid or thanked, but actually you'll only get criticized and
straightened out."[95]
The reality appears to have been much closer to the harsh than the
gentle. "The constant focus on what was wrong constant criticism" was the
worst aspect of her affiliation with the group, reported a member, "it bred hurt and
resentment lots of hurt. Much of the confrontation was done through public
humiliation. Many people felt very bad about themselves for years. Our common bond tended
to be around our mutual hurt over being humiliated in front of our peers."[96] Another person reported that the confrontations made her feel
"shattered physically ill, reduced to constant crying for weeks"; and
"after one relentless year," a ten year veteran of the movement said, "I
had to go to a therapist for 6 months just to regain some self-confidence."[97] They were, wrote a man, "bloodbaths . . . replays of the
abusive harassment the Army put me through in basic training."[98]
Despite the terrible personal stress created by the criticism, some people did feel that
it helped expose problems, but, as one woman wondered, "the only question I often ask
is did it have to be so very painful?"[99]
Much of the criticism of the confrontational approach focused on the
attitude of the leadership toward others. The process of appointing people to leadership
positions was informal and dominated by the "hub" group. There was a "power
drive among the 'top' people," wrote one respondent and "dominant and aggressive
women became 'the authority.' "[100] Those who were not among
the chosen leaders sometimes complained that the leaders felt they knew what was right for
others because they were more religious. Although some complained, others appear to have
been content to accept criticism and guidance from the leadership because they in fact did
believe that the leaders had some special religious authority. Even the man who called the
mass confrontations unwarranted "bloodbaths," nevertheless recalled his
one-on-one confrontations with Emilia as vital to his growth and concluded, "her
focused power, combined with a perceptiveness that enabled her to penetrate a person's
thoughts and attitudes, was overwhelming."[101] One woman
characterized Emilia as "a well spring, forever giving, of her knowledge of the
religious life. We have been the receivers of her gifts." Obviously such a person
would feel no resentment at having her faults exposed by such a leader. In fact, this
woman summed up her feelings about the Rathbuns by saying, "Emilia and Harry have
been my experience of God in persons, a demonstration of what a person can become."[102]
Those unwilling to undergo the episodes of humiliation simply dropped
out, and those who remained could view the defection of those who left as evidence that
they had not truly made the transition into the new evolutionary state of being. For the
people who did stay, the confrontations may have strengthened their commitment on several
levels. First, many found them useful in gaining personal insight and were thankful for
the opportunity. Second, since by normal social standards subjecting themselves to public
criticism was not behavior they should have endured, they had to reason that whatever it
was that caused them to suffer must have been very important to justify their paying so
high a price. It was a classic case of cognitive dissonance that is, conflict
between what one believes and how one is acting. Cognitive dissonance can be resolved
either by changing beliefs or by changing actions so that the two are once more consonant.[103] Those who left the movement resolved the conflict by eliminating
its source. Among those who stayed, some people lessened the tension by coming to believe
that there was truly something useful in the process of mutual criticism. Others simply
accepted the dissonance by admitting that the mutual criticism was distasteful, but saying
it was compensated for by the many other benefits derived from membership.
In addition to the increased depth of personal commitment that such
rationalizations encouraged, the raw power of mutual criticism also had the effect of
promoting commitment on another level. It was surely intimidating to have everybody in the
group upon which the member was totally dependent for social and psychological validation,
gang up on a member and accuse him or her of doing something wrong, and Creative
Initiative people had few if any friends outside the movement. People found that they not
only quickly changed the "offensive" behavior, but much more importantly, they
constantly checked themselves to make sure that they were not doing anything that might
trigger another critical confrontation. One particularly perceptive respondent wrote,
"Even short of damage, the confrontational style affected nearly everyone. It was
reflected in a tendency to be on the alert for how one appears to others, especially in
group meetings, and led to a conformity and uniformity of speech and behavior."[104] Others said the same thing, blaming the criticism for the
homogeneity of thought and personal style that so struck everyone who came in contact with
the movement.[105]
Theodicy and the Apocalypse
Confession and confrontation were complementary methods of dealing
with the same issue: what in traditional religion is called "sin" or
"evil." If, as Creative Initiative believed, God and nature were one and if
natural laws were an expression of the truth that was God, then how did one deal with the
problem of evil? Evil does not fit easily into a monistic world view. Rather than choosing
to minimize evil to keep the monistic philosophy intact, Creative Initiative developed a
structure that allowed monism and dualism to exist side by side. The educational process
taught members to appreciate the unity of creation while at the same time stressing that
there was an absolute distinction between good and bad.
The operant text was Matthew 5:39, which Creative Initiative usually
rendered as, "resist not evil." Their interpretation of this message was
somewhat in the tradition of late nineteenth-century New Thought religion, which held that
the world was good, or at least neutral, and that wrong thoughts in the individual created
the external evil. Taken to its logical extreme, as in Christian Science, this idea
suggests that all apparent evil, including biological disease, can be eliminated through
positive thought. Creative Initiative never went that far, but it did insist that "the
problem of evil is internal and never external ."[106]
"No external event is evil as such," explained an early position paper,
"but only as man at an inner, unconscious level projects outward the interpretation
of evil upon it."[107] In another end-run around the issue,
several courses dealt with what was really the issue of evil but was always referred to as
"violence." Thus, they defined violence as "that which violates the true
nature of anything." Using this definition, not only actions but feelings and
attitudes could also be violent and lead to negative (evil) consequences. They taught that
"violence is leading us to death; it is all around us and consuming us," and
that only individual reform could control it.[108]
Harry tried to explain the Creative Initiative interpretation of evil in
moderate terms. When Jesus told his followers not to resist evil, Harry said Jesus was
telling them to face reality and not to deny that there were things that they did not
like, because not until the difficulties were acknowledged could people take creative
action to improve them.[109] Emilia's explanations of evil were
characteristically more blunt and enigmatic. "Our birthright," she told members
of an advanced seminar on the Book of John, "is to become co-creators with The
Creator, to be co-determiners of the destiny of the planet, to know truth and express good
will, to be reflectors of reality, to be wayshowers, to be lights to the world."
There was no other choice she argued, "there is no half and half. There is only
totality. You are totally a 'walking God,' or totally a 'walking devil.' "[110] By using the traditional term "devil," Emilia appeared
to be setting up a Manichaean duality and thus contradicting the fundamental assumption
about the overall goodness of the universe. But the devil she envisioned was only
partially outside of the individual. The devil, she said, was "the self will of the
human being."[111]
By setting up the dichotomy between good and evil so starkly, Emilia was
expressing a world view that underlay much Creative Initiative thought. The world, they
believed, would be destroyed by its inhabitants unless they changed their thinking. It
would be destroyed by people who continued to view it from their own selfish, conditioned
perspectives. Although the group avoided the antinomian belief that everything done by the
converted was good, they sometimes seemed to subscribe to the converse proposition:
everything done by the unconverted was evil. "When a person will not die an ego death
or drop his resistance to taking in truth," Emilia told a Jesus seminar, "the
resulting action is evil. When a person knows that what he is thinking or doing in a
moment of resistance is not right, he is enacting evil."[112]
The traditional Christian view of humans as sinners survived in Creative
Initiative in only slightly altered form. Although the word "sin" was never
used, the concept of individual culpability for breaking God's law was inherent in their
concept of evil in fact, it was their concept of evil. The excessive desire
for "food, drink, drugs, sex, comfort, pleasure, entertainment, sports, possessions,
home, car, money in the bank, profession, job, family, position, prestige, popularity,
power, reputation," were all violations of the first commandment according to
Creative Initiative, because they constituted "other gods" put before the God.[113] In an "authority seminar," leaders wrote the following
words on the board: "alcohol, drugs, tobacco, perverted sex, pornography, adultery,
premarital sex, dishonesty, violence, greed, power." The participants were then told
to come up with a code of conduct in relationship to these items. The course instructions
noted that some people would "not want to choose to live that way, but it is the only
way that a religious community will live."[114]
In Creative Initiative's philosophy the idea of "sin" was
subsumed in the word greed . There were, they said, four forms of greed:
addictions, possessions, pretensions, and personal relationships. Each of them interfered
with a person's doing the will of God because each of them put the individual first.
Addictions were all "things of the flesh." Possessions were all material goods.
Pretensions were the desire to be recognized by others as good, successful, or important.
Finally, greed in personal relationships was defined as the demand that others love or
support you.[115] No seventeenth-century American Puritan could
have been more severe in his condemnation of the worldly distractions that might divert
the faithful from living a godly life.
Their formulation of God combined two disparate, even contradictory
characteristics. On the one hand, they perceived God as the remote first cause of a
monistic universe. On the other hand, they combined this with an almost pietistic sense of
God's immediacy to produce an intense moral rigorism. The dictum that people had to obey
the will of God as represented by their interpretation of natural law resulted in a de
facto situation similar to that of traditional Puritanism. Like the Puritans they believed
that God had created people to glorify Him through work and worship and that God's plan
for the human race was immutable. Creative Initiative believed that those who lived their
lives in glorification of God were, to use the traditional labels, "saved" and
those who violated it were "damned": "You can say 'yes' or 'no.' 'Yes'
equals Life, 'no' equals death, and no middle."[116]
Thus, lurking at the heart of their gentle, New Thought, New Age, monism
was a very old-fashioned dualism. Over and over again their courses presented participants
with the choice between "100% life" and "100% death." It was a choice
without compromise that each person had to make. "How do you feel about classifying
things as black or white?" participants were asked, "Why is it important to see
things black or white and not grey?"[117] In 1984, one of the
very last courses prepared in the style of Creative Initiative explained that "the
Great Paradox is a binary decision." "There are only two ways to live one's
life," the course declared. One was to be 100 percent loving and enter the Kingdom of
God. The other was to be anything up to 99.9% loving and remain trapped in the Kingdom of
Man.[118]
Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins have suggested that most new American
religious movements can be categorized either as monistic or dualistic. These new
religious movements, they argue, are responses to the destruction of the traditional moral
framework over the last fifty years. Prior to the New Deal, Anthony and Robbins claim that
Ameri-
cans balanced economic individualism with a very strict but limited
code of moral conduct. Thus any behavior not explicitly proscribed was considered
legitimate in the pursuit of private wealth, and people who failed in that pursuit were
individually responsible for their own fates. During the last half-century, however, an
increasingly bureaucratized economy has undercut both entrepreneurial opportunity and
individual responsibility. Furthermore, according to Anthony and Robbins, an increasing
acceptance of "hedonistic, leisure-oriented, 'permissive' " culture has
destroyed the limited but very powerful traditional sanctions for deviant personal
behavior.[119]
Anthony and Robbins suggest that people searching for something to
replace the destroyed civil religion frequently join movements that either reconstruct a
traditional dualism between right and wrong or seek a new synthesis in a monistic world
view that sees everything as interconnected and good. The dualistic groups, which include
both the right-wing Unification Church ("Moonies") and the left wing People's
Temple, see themselves as models for and precursors of a nationwide or even worldwide,
revolution against evil forces. The monistic groups, such as the Meher Baba movement or
almost any other New Age group, try to find an ideology that moves beyond ideology. That
is, they point to the underlying unity of all people, or all things in the universe, no
matter what their apparent physical, cultural, or ideological differences. Thus, the
dualistic groups reconstruct a structure based on rigid exclusive categories while the
monists reconstruct it on an inclusive whole.[120]
Creative Initiative would appear to be the exception to the Anthony and
Robbins model by incorporating both monism and dualism into the same movement. Their New
Age monism that viewed all people and, indeed, all creation as integrally unified, gave
the movement its humane, politically liberal outlook. But their dualistic interpretation
of individual behavior allowed them to make strict demands on personal conduct. At least
within their own community, they managed to recreate the lost Puritan synthesis by
providing a rationale for generalized love in conjunction with being individually
judgmental. Within Creative Initiative, traditional Protestant liberalism and traditional
Protestant moralism once again went hand in hand with traditional Protestant economic
success.
The ambivalent attitude toward materialism that characterized all of
Creative Initiative thought was also essentially Puritan. They viewed wealth and material
possessions not as evil per se but as dangerous when acquiring them became the object of
life, when they became "other gods." A "Responsibility Inventory"
asked people about their jobs: "Do you run it or does it run you?" "Is it a
means or an end?"[121] Living the life of God through hard
work and community were the central tenets of both Creative Initiative and traditional
Protestantism, and worldly success, if it followed, was incidental. Creative Initiative
and its neo-Protestant ethic appealed, after the fact, to precisely those people who had
made it within the capitalist system. The New Religion did not view economic success as a
sign of God's approval, but neither did it condemn wealth per se. Within their new
religion they, like their Puritan antecedents, could maintain a very comfortable life
style so long as pursuit of that life style did not become an end in itself.
Just because evil grew out of individual misperceptions of reality did
not mean that the consequences were limited to the individual. Creative Initiative not
only recognized but even emphasized that the collective impact of wrong perception (evil)
was powerful enough to destroy life on earth. In fact, they predicted that the sole
alternative to the millennium created by the continued evolution of humans was the
apocalypse created by humans who refused to change. The apocalypse was near, they said,
and it was humankind's unwillingness to obey the law of cause and effect that was bringing
it on. Just as health and sickness were the result of cause and effect in the right
functioning of the body, they argued that "the same can be said for a family, a city,
a nation, or a planet. It is sick or it is healthy." It was a simple dualistic
choice: people could remain ignorant, evil, alienated, unfocused on a single goal and
bring sure death to the world, or they could move over the line to "hold all advances
made to date, keep beauty and increase it in the world, advance education, ecology,
population control, be a human race living in harmony cooperation and love," and
bring sure life the Kindgom of God.[122]
By constantly holding up an apocalyptic vision to its members and
prospective members, Creative Initiative sought to frighten them into changing their
lives, for it was only by changing their lives that the millennium could be substituted
for the apocalypse. The script for a public slide show from 1967 summed up both the
problem and the solution when it warned, "Either man will guide and shape the rapidly
accelerating forces of change in the world guide them consciously toward the goals
of survival, cooperation, and fulfillment for all men or he will be swallowed up in
a cataclysm the likes of which the world has never known."[123]
The Cycle of Courses
Because Creative Initiative firmly believed that "the message and
the messenger are one," the process of learning the philosophy was also a process of
learning to live it. The vast majority of members were white, well-to-do,
college-educated, married suburbanites. It is reasonable to assume that at the point at
which they entered the movement they shared the religious beliefs and values of their
peers. If they stayed in the group and rose through the ranks to a level of higher
leadership, they did so only because they were willing to alter significantly those values
and the lifestyle connected with them. The persons who emerged from the four-year process
were supposed to be profoundly changed; they were a new species. The cycle of courses that
brought about this transformation was no haphazard collection of do-it-yourself adult
education classes, but a carefully developed and constantly refined process that
paralleled the college education almost all the participants had experienced. Yet, for
many of them it had the effect of nullifying the relativism that is so often the result of
higher education.
The overall process was so complex as almost to defy description. New
members were attracted by word of mouth, community presentations, or invitational
meetings. From there they attended a course called "Challenge to Change" at
which the basic philosophical positions of the movement were described, but in rather
vague, nonreligious terms. If they decided to move on, their next step was to take
additional low-level courses, like "Challenge of Time," to receive first-level
leadership training, and then to lead their own invitational meeting.
There were always lots of courses and presentations to work on and, as
people demonstrated ability and commitment, they were given additional leadership training
and permitted (expected) to lead other courses including "Challenge to Change"
and second- and third-step programs. The real heart of the educational process, however,
was the seminars. Each of these was approximately one week long and usually held at the
group's retreat center in Ben Lomond. Because they were presented in the summer when
people were on vacation, members usually took one new seminar each year after having made
a formal decision to move on from the previous level of involvement. The intervening time
between seminars was used to work on other Creative Initiative projects and to test the
depth of commitment reached at the previous one. The initial A seminar, as noted earlier,
was designed to help new members explore the meaning of authority, especially parental
authority, in their lives. Having severed the immature bonds that tied one to other
authority figures, the participants were then free to move on to the B seminar, also
designated a "psychological seminar," where the process of "purgation"
could take place. After the B seminar, they were expected to make a commitment "to
the marriage forever" and to continue "the process of purgation until it is
completed."[124] People who entered the third or "C"
seminar were presumed to have internalized a concept of God, resolved problematic
relationships and traumatic life experiences, gained a positive self-image, and adopted a
giving, spontaneous attitude that led them to live life "with a sense of
gratitude."[125] C seminars were explicitly described as
"transitional" from the psychological to the religious, devoted to exploring the
meaning of certain Old Testament stories, always called "myths" in Creative
Initiative nomenclature. Having come to grips with the self or "I" in the first
two seminars, the third was the opportunity to begin to explore the "Thou," and
other-than-self. "To pursue this goal means to leave behind the narrow perspective of
an individual point of view," the course said, "and move toward and into the
Universal Frame: the all-encompassing, eternal dimension we call God."[126] It was as a result of this third seminar that people were expected
to achieve what Creative Initiative called the "pass over," that is, the passing
over from the egocentric world view of the personal will to the universal loving outlook
of God's will.[127]
Finally, at the end of the fourth year, people were allowed to take the
"D" seminar, the Jesus as Teacher or Records seminar. This seminar, based on the
books and method of Henry B. Sharman, was the single most important carry-over from the
Camp Minnesing era. Now, however, what had once been the first and only course in the
movement had become the "senior seminar," available only to those who had
persevered through three years and demonstrated their ability and commitment to the cause.
As it had been in the Sharman days, the purpose continued to be "a religious seminar
where a person can understand and adopt for himself the model for spiritual man as lived
out by Jesus of Nazareth."[128]
Almost immediately after Emilia had her revelation and gathered the
first ten women to launch the New Religion, the group began developing course material to
explicate the new system of beliefs. The basic pedagogic approach involved the use of
seven principles or seven steps. These were first formulated in 1963 and taught for four
years as the "Seven Steps to Reality."[129] In 1967 they
were developed into a seven-week course called "Challenge to Change," which
itself became part of a four-course introduction to the ideas of Creative Initiative
entitled "Quest for Meaning." This was the prerequisite, in turn, for a course
called "Preparation for the New Religion," and so on in an apparently infinite
variety of ways that allowed people to keep busy studying or teaching aspects of the work.[130] The Challenge to Change course was designed as an introduction to
the ideas of the movement. If, after discussing the seven steps, people were still
interested, they would be invited to move on to the next level.[131]
Old Testament Myths and New Testament Models
The philosophical positions first presented to people in Challenge to
Change would continue to be developed through courses and seminars over the years a person
remained active.[132] After the A and B seminars in which they
freed themselves of the psychological baggage that prevented people from reorienting
themselves to do God's will, people moved on to the third, or C, seminar, in which the
purely religious aspects of the work moved to the fore. At this level almost all biblical
study was conducted under the rubric of "myth," and the myths of the Old
Testament were invariably used to illustrate, demonstrate, justify, and "prove"
the ideas introduced in Challenge to Change and other lower-level courses.
Using a combination of ideas from Rollo May, Jung, and P. W. Martin's
interpretation of Jung, Creative Initiative justified the study of myth as a legitimate
method of exploring the "intuitive aspect of the mind."[133]
The movement claimed that the myths of the Old Testament contained "the most advanced
and thorough symbolic history of the development of the three levels of existence,"
and that they expressed "in a dramatic form, a psychological truth, and often a
wisdom, which otherwise would be inaccessible to our understanding."[134]
The language of their analysis, which contained references to symbols and archetypes, was
obviously drawn from Jung, who described myths and their archetypes as expressions of a
human collective unconscious.[135] Theirs, however, was not an
attempt to use Jung in any systematic way to analyze the Old Testament myths. He was
barely mentioned. Rather, Creative Initiative took a few fundamental concepts and
constructed their own entirely original interpretations. In addition, they apparently
hoped that by demonstrating the legitimacy of these old myths, they would, at the same
time, be justifying their own symbols and stories, or what they referred to as the
"living myth."
Their interpretations of the Old Testament were a long way from the
close textual analysis that characterized their standard method of exploring the teachings
of Jesus in the gospels. There, following the model of Henry B. Sharman, each phrase was
explored for its meaning. In the case of the Old Testament, the group (in fact, Emilia)
had come up with its own official interpretation of each story, and the process was to
understand how the Old Testament myths fit the Creative Initiative view of the world, not
to examine them in any fresh analytic way. Creative Initiative believed that "the
basic steps of the religious life" were contained in those stories, and participants
were told, "In the Old Testament we will see the unfolding of the psychic journey of
mankind. The Old Testament is a story of the evolution of consciousness."[136] In other words, the Old Testament was a widely respected text that
could be used to legitimize their own uses of myth and symbol.
Each Old Testament myth had its own particular interpretation. The most
frequently studied was the story of Moses, and it can be used as an example of the group's
approach. The Old Testament was, for Creative Initiative, the "history of man's
experience in the domain of the opposites" and the expression of the first
dispensation, and Moses was "the symbol of the Old Testament."[137]
Over the years, Creative Initiative used at least five different interpretations of the
Moses myths. Each of them had unique aspects, mostly having to do with the elaborate
decoding of symbols, and some of them directly contradicted one another. For example,
according to a 1968 commentary on the burning bush, "Fire is in nature. Man is
nature. Fire in man is a generator of energy."[138] But a
later version from 1974 stated, "Burning bush, not consumed. Not natural, not of
nature. Refers to another dimension."[139] The 1974 version of
the story specified the meaning of thirty-seven different symbols ranging from the major
figures in the story to "shoes," "stone," and the numbers three,
seven, and forty.[140]
The Creative Initiative gloss made Moses into a personification of every
major philosophical position held by the group. When his mother put Moses in a basket in
the river, they interpreted it as symbolic of a son's necessary detachment from his mother
so that he would be free to pursue his destiny. When Pharoah's daughter saved him it was
to show that the "masculine [is] safe when in touch with the right feminine."
Moses killing the Egyptian was his "first act of totality" but was also meeting
violence with violence and therefore made him unworthy to lead the Hebrews into the
promised land. Every incident, from the well where Moses meets Zipporah, to the wandering
in the desert, was linked to a Creative Initiative idea: dawn, archetypes, third
dispensation, new role of women, life of the spirit, new identity, obedience to God's
will, conscious and unconscious mind, mysticism, and so forth.[141]
The seminar questions used in conjunction with the study of the Moses myth, like the
interpretations of the myth itself, were designed less to explore the meaning of the story
than to use the story for specific didactic purposes. The first three questions, for
example, asked participants to explore their own relationships with their mothers.
Because Creative Initiative saw the Old Testament stories as mythical
analogs of the spiritual history of both humankind and individuals, their study was
supposed to help people make the personal transition from the state of psychological
freedom obtained in the first two seminars to one of spiritual growth and commitment. They
believed that, like Judaism itself, the study of the Jewish Bible was transitional. In the
Old Testament God exercised his authority through the law, and the result was a Pharisaic
culture of righteous moralism unable to reconcile all aspects of the human condition. The
New Testament, using the example of Jesus, resolved the unanswered questions left by the
Old Testament. Thus, the next step in an individual's development would be to study the
documents of the second dispensation to discover the way love could triumph over law.[142] There were plans for a final, systematic study of how to apply the
rules of the second dispensation in the third dispensation that is, in the New
Religion of the Third Age (Creative Initiative) but they were never fully
implemented.
Studying the New Testament meant studying the life and teachings of
Jesus. Here Emilia's freedom to impose a Creative Initiative dogma on the biblical text
was somewhat more constrained because of the tradition of gospel study inherited from
Sharman and carried on, albeit in a very modified form, by Harry Rathbun. Creative
Initiative was, nevertheless, willing and able to be much more specific about the meaning
of what Jesus said than Henry B. Sharman would have been. At its most extreme, the
deviation from the Sharman pattern abandoned objective study of the gospels and instead
used the teachings of Jesus as post hoc justification for other ideas. Such an instance
occurred in the late 1960s when a course called "Life of the Spirit" used
Sharman's material to illustrate directly the seven steps usually taught in Challenge to
Change. Like the Old Testament courses, but unlike the Sharman gospel study, this course
laid out the interpretations for the participants and did not expect or even allow them to
come to any of their own conclusions. Whereas the Sharman technique had begun with the
teachings of Jesus and then asked the students to derive their own meaning from the text,
Life of the Spirit began with the seven steps and used the teachings of Jesus to validate
them.
Although there was no reluctance to use Jesus as an example for specific
principles, the Sharman texts and a modified Sharman method remained the major way to
study the gospels until all religious elements were dropped from the group after 1982.[143] Sharman had assumed that each person would come to a truly
personal conclusion about the proper way to obey the will of God. Creative Initiative
assumed that people would come to the conclusion that obeying the will of God meant
working through the movement. By placing the study of the gospels at the end of a
four-year program of philosophical and psychological development, the participants were
primed to look for very different kinds of conclusions than had been reached in Sharman's
day and during the Sequoia Seminar period. It would appear that Creative Initiative had
decided that the study of the teachings of Jesus was so powerful that it could be
undertaken only after people had been taught how to place it in the correct ideological
context.
The Jesus as Teacher seminar began with a brief presentation of the
historical background of Jesus in his time as a way of establishing the messianic
tradition of the Jews. It then proceeded through the life of Jesus, focusing on the
baptism, the wilderness experience, the two great commandments, the meaning of the Kingdom
of God, the meaning of the will of God, and the Sermon on the Mount. Each of these
subjects was explored using the Sharman books, but they were also supplemented with
techniques that had been developed by Creative Initiative and designed to elicit responses
in line with Creative Initiative philosophy. Among those that had no precedent in the work
of Sharman were interpretations of dreams, writings about personal feelings, group
prayers, outside readings unrelated to the gospels, and drawing.[144]
By continuing to use the Sharman books and the original Sharman
rationale, Harry and Emilia were maintaining the connection with their own religious
history. Sharman was held up as the founding father, the scholar who had the original
insight now carried on through the work of Harry Rathbun and the Records study activities
of Creative Initiative. Sharman and Harry were the Jungian archetypes of the wise old man,
and they gave a cache of scholarly legitimacy to what in fact had become a spiritual
movement. The three years of courses that preceded the final Jesus seminar made the study
of the gospels a methodology to cement commitment to the will of God, as they had always
been since the days of Sharman. But now the will of God had become coterminous with
Creative Initiative and its system of beliefs. Jesus was the model of the perfect person
in an age of individualism that had rejected him. Creative Initiative believed it was the
collective second coming that would lead the world to implement the ideas they studied in
the Jesus as Teacher seminar.
Dualism and the Educational Process
Although they had added a large, perhaps even dominant, spiritual
mystical component to the work, Creative Initiative continued to stress and believe
that theirs was a rational process that would appeal to modern, educated men and women.
The very structure of their work, similar to the organization and style of college
courses, was designed to further this image. Certainly the vast majority of the people who
became involved in the movement were educated at the finest universities in the country,
usually in scientific and technical disciplines, and many had advanced degrees. Clearly
then, the system of beliefs constructed by Creative Initiative, and the process for
teaching them, had tremendous attraction for one sector of America's educated elite.
We would argue, as suggested earlier in this chapter, that a major
reason for the attractiveness of the Creative Initiative belief system was its replication
of a traditional Protestant philosophy. Under the broad monistic umbrella that gave the
movement its gentle New Age air and liberal social views, it was able to construct a very
old-fashioned dualistic religion that supported traditional family values, condemned
indulgences of the flesh and excessive materialism, and thus set up a clear-cut dichotomy
between right and wrong without ever violating its own rule of posing no enemies. We do
not know why certain individuals and not others found the combination of monism and
dualism in Creative Initiative so compelling. The fact, however, that Creative Initiative
always downplayed, or even hid, their religious aspect during initial contacts with
potential recruits indicates that they believed they had to educate people into accepting
the extrarational aspects of their teachings. In a very real sense, the method of teaching
people to accept the religious absolutes was a reversal of the educational process that
William G. Perry, Jr., has suggested takes place in college. If one accepts Perry's model
as appropriate, then Creative Initiative in fact ran a program of re -education.
Perry has argued that college students undergo a process of cognitive
and ethical growth. They begin from a position of simplistic dualism in which they believe
that authority will be able to supply right, as opposed to wrong, answers to life's
questions. Eventually they move through eight stages to a position of committed relativism
in which they understand that there are no totally right answers but that people can take
strong stands based on their own ethical positions while knowing that those positions are
not absolute.[145] If we assume that many of the people who joined
Creative Initiative had reached the final positions in Perry's nine-point scale, then
Creative Initiative had to somehow move them back through a re-educational process to a
position in which they were once more comfortable with absolutes.
It is, of course, possible that Creative Initiative appealed to people
who had never moved beyond the dualistic stages of personal development and were delighted
to discover that Creative Initiative provided them with a spiritual rationalization for an
already-held position. The fact that the movement appealed to scientific and technical
people, who may have been less tolerant of ambiguity than social scientists and humanists,
tends to support this possibility. In any case, however, it was desirable for the movement
to put people through a process of education, or re-education, to get them to confirm
their commitment. If, on the one hand, the recruits had moved through the whole Perry
scale to a position of committed relativism, then Creative Initiative had to convince them
that dualism was a morally and intellectually legitimate position to hold. On the other
hand, if the potential members, despite the best efforts of their college professors,
still retained a dualistic world view, then Creative Initiative needed to reassure them
that such a view was legitimate and that they had been right to resist the authority of
their professors but that they should now surrender to the authority of God.
Although not a perfect inversion of the Perry scheme, the educational
process of Creative Initiative did try to achieve his last category, commitment, by moving
people to the first one, dualism. The initial introduction to the work was made in terms
of science, but science at a very elementary level. Creative Initiative's science was
dualistic. Things were either right or wrong, true or false. There could be neither
multiplicity nor relativism in the scientific world of Creative Initiative. Science was
the authority that everybody had to obey. That, essentially, was the message of the first
courses, especially Challenge to Change, that led up to the first seminar.
Having set up the dualistic model, Creative Initiative then proceeded to
systematically and deliberately destroy any competing sources of authority. The first two
seminars were designed to purge the individual of previous authority figures. Parents were
singled out, but the implication was clear that they were only the prime, not the sole,
authority figures who had to be confronted. The express purpose of the first two years of
work in Creative Initiative was to liberate people from the negative emotional ties of
their past and to purge the "frames of reference" from which they had previously
viewed the world. At the end of the second year, a person was supposed to be in a state of
openness, ready to begin a move to commitment. Although not exactly a position of newly
discovered relativism (which would be the middle, or transitional, point in the Perry
scheme), the people in the Creative Initiative process were supposed to have moved from a
position in which they had been their own authorities (albeit conditioned by their own
pasts) to one in which they recognized that they could never be first, they could never be
egocentric, but that real authority lay elsewhere.
The third and fourth years of the Creative Initiative educational
process were devoted to describing how the scientific dualism established as a
philosophical standard during the first year could be extended to the religious sphere:
God was equated with natural law. The end result was supposed to be people who saw all
human action, not just science, as being either right or wrong based on the authority of
God. Whereas they were politically and personally tolerant of those who did not agree with
them, most members of Creative Initiative appear to have been intellectually and ethically
sure of their absolute rightness and of the absolute wrongness of others, a position very
close to the most elementary dualism described by Perry.
Indeed, it would appear that such a dualistic position is necessary for
the formation of a sect. It is only by distinguishing insiders who are "right"
from outsiders who are "wrong" that a group creates the distance necessary to
separate itself from society as a whole. It is just that distinction that makes joining a
sect a high-cost proposition and that, in turn, forces the group to provide a variety of
rewards to offset those costs. The exclusivity created by a dualistic ideology insures
that a group will retain its distinctiveness and not be diluted to death by being
promiscuously inclusive. It took four years, four seminars, numerous courses, teaching,
working, socializing, and sometimes living with other members of the community, but for
those who saw it through, the process was successful in taking people who well may have
been independent relativists and transforming them into tightly knit dualists. Those thus
reborn into the movement believed that their sect was the New Religion of the Third Age,
that their community was a collective messiah that would usher in that age by instigating
the next step in human evolution, and that if they could only spread the word to the rest
of humanity, the whole world could become the Kingdom of God. If they failed, the whole
world would surely destroy itself. |
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