5
Men, Women, and Children
Creative Initiative argued that the paradox of Jesus actually contained the essential scientific truth of creation: people were free only to obey the laws of nature and the will of God. Thus, they had to give up their egocentric wills and become slaves of God and God's order before they could achieve real freedom. Indeed, integrating apparent opposites was a continuing theme in all of Creative Initiative's work. They hoped to achieve sociocentric ends through homocentric means; they perceived a monistic universe and populated it with dualistic human beings; and they built a movement on science and Socratic inquiry and then linked it to a religion based on mystical revelation and philosophic dogma. None of these paradoxes was more complex, however, than the one by which a religion, started and led by women determined to save the earth from men, was transformed into a sect that promoted the traditional roles of wife and mother and expected women to eventually relinquish their major leadership role to men.
Masculine and Feminine
Creative Initiative believed that the transition from female to male leadership could take place because the men would have undergone the transformation process and in doing so would have acquired the necessary female characteristics. Only someone who had
gone through the transformation process would be able to act as both the feminine and the masculine because he then would have "brought into perfect balance the masculine and feminine components which are present in every human being." The model for this perfect combination of the two genders was Jesus who "demonstrated and exemplified this perfect balance."[1]
Creative Initiative borrowed the idea that a mature adult combined both masculine and feminine elements from the work of C. G. Jung. Jung contended that both men and women were born with a latent image of the opposite sex. He called the feminine aspect of men the "anima" and the masculine aspect of women the "animus." He thought people developed these images through their contacts with members of the opposite sex, reaching genuine maturity only when they had learned to use the qualities of the anima and animus appropriately.[2]
In Creative Initiative work the masculine and feminine principles, as they were usually called, were vital concepts in describing appropriate behavior for members. In theory Creative Initiative believed that each person had to cultivate those properties usually associated with the opposite sex in order to become whole. Their material, however, stressed gender distinctions so aggressively that it was easy to forget that the ultimate goal was gender synthesis. For example, a part of the A seminar in 1973 described male and female personality characteristics as sexual analogs. According to the course, "Even the genitals bear this out. Woman is inner—the male is outer. Because the feminine is subjective and the masculine objective, we can also say that the feminine is passive, a receiver, and the masculine is active, a doer." The material went on to say that women's "passive, subjective nature allows her to receive and to let the creative birth process take place within her," but men, deprived of this biological opportunity to create life, created in the world. That, said the course, was why the great music, art, poetry, design, and even cooking had been produced by men.[3] The categorization of masculine and feminine characteristics in course material was extensive and often included elaborate charts in which the various traits were lined up in columns, sometimes with the "given" trait paired with its "misuse." For example, the "given" feminine trait of "nurturing" was paired to its "misuse" as "smothering." This pair in turn was contrasted with the "given" masculine trait of "aggressiveness" and its negative counterpart, "domination."[4]
Yet in Creative Initiative the ideal was some kind of synthesis of the masculine and feminine. They did not mean, however, that the mature
person was an equal balance of the two. When it was properly struck, the balance was always within the boundaries set by traditional gender roles. On the one hand, "A woman who is too unbalanced on the feminine side," explained a course curriculum, "could be very passive, sweet, helpless, dependent [and] would probably have a hard time standing on her own two feet." On the other hand, "If she denied her femininity and functioned mainly out of her masculine side, she would probably be one of those bossy, domineering, aggressive kind of women of which we all know at least one."[5] Women had to somehow be feminine but not too feminine, and at the same time be masculine but not too masculine. The same course curriculum ended by saying:
And as for women, there are times when she must use her animus nature. There are times when it's appropriate to lead out and be aggressive. There are times when she needs to think logically and rationally. In fact, this is exactly what women must do today—be willing to be actively involved in the objective world—to use their minds and their strength. But the catch is, she must do it in a feminine way, motivated by her deepest feminine instinct—caring.[6]
This basically Jungian view of human nature had a profound effect on Emilia and, through her, on the entire movement.[7] She tended to see individuals within the movement in terms of Jungian types and based much of the underlying ideology of Creative Initiative on gender role models legitimated by, if not actually derived from, a Jungian world view. As we noted earlier, Emilia explained to an advanced seminar in 1978 that Harry was the Jungian archetype of the wise old man. He was not, however, the dominant male—that role, she said, was played in one generation by another leader, Jim Burch, and in the next generation by her son Richard. She told the group that "since Harry was not the dominant male, I had to move into position and function as if I were a dominant male until the transition to Community could take place."[8] But once that transition had occurred, Emilia explained, she and the women who had founded and led the New Religion movement during its first decade had to step aside. Men had been stymied because they had limited their dominance to war and science, but the time had come for "the Dominant Male archetype [to] move beyond the physical and mental dimensions to become the Spiritual Warrior, or we've had it." "The women cannot finish this mission," she explained, "because we don't carry this archetype of Spiritual Warrior. In the world, a man must manifest it."[9]
Because they equated the receptive with women and the feminine
and the active with men and the masculine, Creative Initiative philosophy taught that women had almost always been first to understand new ideas in the history of humankind. Indeed, Emilia liked to claim that "the very first, most primitive cells were feminine in function and form," and in a grand leap of logic, she concluded, "that gives us some reasons as to why girls develop earlier than boys and we are considered older and wiser."[10] From Eve who tempted Adam, to Emilia and the first ten women in the New Religion, it was the feminine principle that was open to receive change, but it was the masculine that actually acted to bring that change about.[11]
Emilia developed a fairly elaborate theory about the female life-cycle, much of which appears to have been based on her own personal history. This theory dominated her ideas about the proper role of women through the mid-1970s and was a vital component in the overall philosophical structure of Creative Initiative. According to Emilia's theory, the first stage an adult woman entered was that of "lover." In this stage she surrendered the independence she had enjoyed as an unmarried woman and devoted herself completely to her husband from whom, in return, she expected reciprocal dedication. The key element in the first stage was the woman's willingness to give up herself for her husband—to "capitulate." The second stage was motherhood, in which the woman learned to love life through the life she had created. It was also in her role as mother that a woman cultivated "her certain talents, innate talents, on how to civilize and humanize the race so that [it] no longer will kill life but will be for life."[12]
It was, however, the third stage that was the key to the unique role of women in the transition to the third age and the salvation of the human race. In the third stage, said Emilia, the woman had to detach herself from the bonds she had forged in the first two stages: "She must detach herself from any demands of being loved by the lover. . . . She must surrender that, releasing the man so that he can help heal the planet. She must release her attachment to her children." In the third stage the woman had a new function, one that had been "predestined from the beginning of time," which was "releasing totally and aligning herself with everything that is for life."[13] The third-stage woman would transfer "her dependency on man to a dependency on a supra power, intelligence, will." The relationship she had once had with a man she would then have with "a power higher than man," who would become "the great love of her life."[14]
So profound was this transition to the third stage that it required
new nomenclature. If one broke down the word woman into its componant parts (a favorite Creative Initiative explicatory device, sometimes employed, as here, in a way that had nothing to do with the actual etymology of the word), one got "wo[e]-man." But the third-stage woman, the Third Age woman, would not bring woe to men but would be a source of blessings and therefore needed a new name. Creative Initiative called her Blessman. "To be the Blessman," they explained, "has a different ring to it from being the WO-man. To be the Blessman would be to embrace and become one with the living myth."[15] In fact, the word Blessman was used for a number of years as the complimentary closing in movement correspondence.
Yet once more the ambivalence that marked so much of Emilia's life expressed itself in her definition of Blessman. She was a charismatic and socially dynamic woman who had married a somewhat shy and introspective man; believing that woman should play a traditional role in the family, her entire adult life had been an attempt to reconcile emotionally and intellectually the clash between her assumptions and her reality. Carried away by the vision of women as the avant-garde of the New Religion and the new evolutionary stage, Emilia painted a picture of women who had moved beyond their husbands and families to devote all their energy to God's will. When it actually came to defining how this new woman, the Blessman, would act, however, the extreme rhetoric translated into a much more traditional reality.
According to Creative Initiative, the Blessman would use her special female gifts of nurturing and caring for life to nourish her relationships with others, especially her family; she would not blame others for family problems but would look to "her own state of mind to discover what is going on with her."[16] She would be aware that she was "the servant, the giver." That is, she would give without expecting to be appreciated. She would give because she knew there was a need: "A good servant gives and gives freely to whatever is needed. She is not preoccupied with the question: Will I be appreciated, recognized, or thanked?" This position was a variant of the surrender theme that characterized surrendering the individual will to the will of God. By accepting the needs of her family as legitimate in and of themselves and by finding satisfaction in fulfilling them, the new woman was practicing an analog of her relationship with God. She was, however, at the same time freeing herself from her dependency on her husband. No longer doing things for his approval, the Blessman was freer to express her feelings of both love and anger toward him.[17]
Although they never quoted the poem, Creative Initiative certainty embraced the theory of William Ross Wallace who wrote, "The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world." The poet whom they did quote frequently was Wallace's Victorian contemporary, Matthew Arnold, who predicted, "If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the benefit and good of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known."[18] The sentiments of Victorian aesthetes were congenial to Creative Initiative's view of women because the movement had a basically Victorian conception of sex, sex roles, and the family. Much of Creative Initiative's views of women appears to have been a projection of Emilia's personal history and ideals, which were in fact of Victorian origins. She had been born and reared just after the turn of the century in an aristocratic Mexican environment, although an American father and schooling in the United States enabled her to escape the most extreme elements of that machismo culture. As a powerful and magnetic woman and a natural leader she had, nevertheless, to create for herself, and by herself, an environment in which to exercise her abilities and still be true to the values of her past.
Emilia found her solution within the New Religion as a spiritual leader. Like Victorian women who also made virtues out of necessities, the new religion acknowledged the secondary role of women in the world and their primary role in the home and then sought to show how they could exploit their positions to bring about the desired end. "It may be a long time yet before we shall be permitted to share temporal leadership and policy making at all levels," she wrote, "but spiritual leadership and power is ours for the taking at all levels, and we must assume it while we can still hope to turn the tide."[19] Emilia was able to attract other women to her new vision because they shared many of her life experiences, had similar problems, and sought similar answers. In the early 1960s, before real economic opportunities were open to women, and for women who had been raised to value being wives and mothers, becoming part of Creative Initiative both justified their preexisting beliefs and gave them a sense that they could move forward to work for the betterment of all humankind.
The women Emilia rallied to her cause may not have had power, but they did have a lot of discretionary, time they could devote to the work. "As economically emancipated housewives, living in a time of frozen foods and gadgetry, we know that conditions in the world must be changed and that it is our obligation to effect that change," announced a
flyer for an early seminar.[20] Creative Initiative always worked on the assumption that the women in the movement would be free to devote all their nonfamily time to the work. Indeed, theirs was a movement by and for women who did not work. For the first dozen years or so after Emilia's revelation in 1962, the group was completely dominated by women. "Men," as one participant remembers, "were almost incidental." Most of their meetings were held during the day, which made it extremely difficult for any interested working woman to participate. Moreover, as the same woman wrote, "a great deal of pressure was placed to reevaluate why a woman was working and to quit."[21] A workshop series put on especially for young mothers assured them that "the crisis in the world today is a result of the breakdown of relationships—the traditional role of mother" and urged them to resist the temptation to betray their true natures by looking for a place of prestige and power in the business world.[22]
Although the movement was never comfortable with working women, and working women (there were some) were never very comfortable in the movement, by the mid-1970s the women's movement had changed public attitudes sufficiently to make some concessions necessary. A speech to a women's gathering in 1974 acknowledged that women had moved out into areas once dominated by men, but "in the process [the woman] has abandoned or devalued her place of natural functioning." The speaker did go on to assure her audience, "this is not to say that woman must return to being tied to the home, stuck in roles in which she feels unfulfilled, but simply that woman must claim her feminine side, her natural side and make it conscious."[23] As late as 1977, nevertheless, they were using a guided meditation called "Arriving Home" which asked the man to "imagine in your mind's eye that you are driving home from work" but told the woman, "picture yourself in the house. It is late afternoon . . . You remember that your husband will be home shortly."[24]
The group built their theory of a special female strength using standard Victorian ideas about the nature of women. First, women bore children. "Every woman's task is to be a priestess to the flow of life," said an early paper, "to procreate, nurture, and fan the fires of creation.[25] From that undeniable biological fact they then deduced that women had a special aptitude for love. The narrator of a 1966 program told her audience that love "has been given to us as a gift that accompanies our role of giving birth to the race of man."[26] Love was defined not
as doing but as giving, as a form of self-sacrifice: "Woman's basic self derives from her basic function: to love, to give of herself, and through giving, realize herself."[27]
There was a curiously contradictory element to Creative Initiative's ideas about married love. They were quite sure that the family was a model for the world and that the love between spouses was analogous to the love of the individual for God, but they were not sure whether individuals developed a love for God by experiencing love for people or if a love for others followed from the love of God. "We learn to love God through the workout of learning to love people," said the syllabus to a 1982 marriage course, "therefore marriage is the perfect workshop for learning to love with totality."[28] But Emilia told people that real love between spouses occurred "only when both partners are committed to loving God first. You relate as 'sons' of God, 'brothers' committed to the same goal."[29]
The love a woman felt toward her husband was defined as a "passive love" that taught her how to give; the love she felt toward her children taught her "pure love."[30] Women were told that just as they all had given love to their husbands and children they now had to give love to the whole world, to "give totally to a self-transcending cause." The group taught that giving love was the process of "civilizing."[31] "The only two things women can do better than men," wrote one leader in her personal notes, "is to bear children and civilize."[32] "Civilization" was used as a contrast to materialism and war, considered male in origin. A speaker at a 1969 women's meeting illustrated this point with an anecdote about her own children. Her sons had built a fort in the backyard, and one day her daughter went out and put curtains in the fort's windows, much to the disgust of the boys. "She was," said her mother, "trying to civilize at that early age."[33]
Putting curtains on the windows of the fort was a particularly apt example for women in Creative Initiative because one of the qualities that women were supposed to have to a greater degree than men was an appreciation of beauty. Beauty could have a functional role in helping people appreciate the mystical, or it could be seen as an important part in creating the right atmosphere for recruiting, but beauty could also be an expression of the woman's sense of self. In making the move toward taking responsibility for herself and for the work, one woman explained that the first thing she did was to "look at how I appeared." "It was quite a blow," she admitted, "20 pounds too heavy, no lipstick, very comfortable with 'Plain-Jane-Me.' "[34] Such an aesthetic self-assessment
was not incidental but part and parcel of the process by which women discovered their special abilities. Women were told to evaluate all the visual aspects of themselves and their environment, "home decor—color, objects, dress, make-up, attitude, walk, stance," and others in the group were urged to share with a new woman their views on her appearance.[35] It is hardly surprising then that a newspaper reporter described one spokeswoman as "wearing a chic lime green frock and looking more like a fashion model than a crusader."[36]
The beauty that women could create contrasted with the ugliness that was so often the product of male activities. In Emilia's mind there was no doubt that men were in fact the source of most of the world's problems. "This is the century of women," she wrote in a personal reflection. Man, she continued, had been "emancipated from the child bearing function and been allowed to develop his psychic spiritual function," but he had not done a very good job of it. "On the whole, except for rare individuals," she wrote, "men have rejected the prototypes of excellence in the domain of human nature. For the most part they are arrogant, violent destructive beasts." The time had come for women to "move into enlightenment and to declare to men what God wills, or they, men, will destroy the earth." She wrote that men had been poor stewards of the earth and should no longer be the "rulers, priests and guides of life."[37] Although such powerfully antimale sentiments never made their way into any of the movement's course material, they do reflect a profound ambivalence in Emilia's feelings toward men. On the surface, she and the other women in the movement were always loving and supportive of their spouses, but underlying that was the explicit belief that women were morally superior. There were two kinds of ethics, a movement spokeswoman told a reporter in 1975, and Creative Initiative had developed a "new feminism based on the need to stop acting on male ethics based on greed, power and war, and form new female ethics."[38]
Dramatic readings at an early presentation designed to recruit new women into the movement captured the richly female-centered nature of the work. The audience was told that women contained "those watching, waiting, loving characteristics of awareness that know intuitively the needs, the conditions, the relationships for beauty, harmony, joy, movement, well-being—the climb toward God," and that each woman had those qualities because she had "built into her body . . . the chalice, the response to sunlight, the living well of water filled to overflowing."[39] Creative Initiative truly believed that anatomy was destiny, not
merely for the individual woman but for the whole world. Through their use of Victorian gender stereotypes, however, the women of Creative Initiative were not locking themselves into the limited domestic sphere. They were saying instead that the whole world was their domestic sphere and that just as they could bring peace and love to their own families, they could do the same for all humankind.
Marriage
In 1952, almost a full decade before her vision, Emilia articulated a model of male-female relationships that remained constant throughout the history of the movement. Speaking to a continuation seminar (in that period, a seminar that followed Jesus as Teacher), she said that boys should be reared to have a "code of responsibility" toward women, and that girls should not be taught to think of themselves as sex objects. Girls' self-image, she said, "should be that of the saint, as in bygone days, so that man will do anything, slay all dragons, to get the worthy woman!" The most important thing, she added, was for girls "to be educated into the art of being good homemakers and how to handle men rightly; they ought to be educated to be feminine."[40] They were to be, in other words, traditional wives and mothers.
Creative Initiative believed that the family was the paradigm for the world: it was primarily the woman's job to make the family work, just as it was primarily women who would launch the third age for all people. "If we as women want a better world we had better start with ourselves," they were told. "We can change the atmosphere affecting first our family situation and then moving out into the world. What is going on at home, is going on in the world." Their language seemed to leave little hope that the unmarried would be able to achieve wholeness as human beings because, as they explained, "to learn to love reality and our fellow man is the created purpose of a human, and the marriage is key in promoting this discovery."[41] For obvious reasons, then, single people frequently did not feel welcome or comfortable within the group. The movement considered single people, especially single women, incomplete, and at various points in their history Creative Initiative either excluded unmarried people altogether or relegated them to special singles groups.[42] This practice was particularly hard on those who wanted to participate in the various ceremonies usually carried on in families, or by groups of families. One
such woman remembers "having to invite myself to dinner" so that she could celebrate the Sunday ritual.[43]
Like so much else in Creative Initiative's program, the stress on the importance of uninterrupted marriage appears to have been a projection of Emilia's personal experience that struck a responsive chord in other women. She had always taken a personal interest in helping couples avoid divorce and, as the movement grew and became increasingly institutionalized, more formalized methods were developed to help preserve and strengthen marriages. Making a "lifetime commitment" to marriage became one of the milestones in the Creative Initiative involvement process. The stress on lifetime monogamy must have been especially appealing to Creative Initiative women, not only because it reinforced traditional social values but because many of them had given up the opportunity for outside employment and were therefore economically dependent on their husbands. By making marriage a core value, Creative Initiative was, in effect, rewarding its women members for the economic opportunities they had foregone.
In order to help couples build the kind of "responsible" marriage that would allow the wives, and eventually the husbands, to participate actively in the work of the movement, Creative Initiative conducted numerous marriage courses. Like the various self-assessment courses, these experiences were designed to get people to look at themselves and their relationships honestly, build communication, and strengthen commitment—to the marriage, to the community, and to the will of God. Some of the courses were offered at a beginning level and were actually recruiting devices. Others were longer, more complex, and designed to complement the married couples' education in other Creative Initiative beliefs. In all cases they emphasized the importance of giving over getting.
Like all other Creative Initiative programs, the marriage courses were constantly undergoing revision, but for the most part they followed a series of steps that sought to help the participants move through a process of insight and renewed commitment. The courses usually began with an introspective session in which both partners sought to identify "areas of resentment, dependency, hurt, conflict, guilt, non-giving, patterned behavior, and all other manifestations of hate." This was followed by a lesson in conflict resolution in which the individuals were taught to see that their anger at their partner was their own problem, to look for the sources of that anger in their own psyches, and then to resolve both the feelings and the issue that had caused them.
Next, the courses tried to help people to recognize the frame of reference, based on personal history or "conditioning," that each person had in the marriage. Finally, they were guided to find what was "unique and precious" about their marriage and hopefully to realize that the marriage was "a training ground for living the Life of the Spirit."[44]
The material from the marriage courses stressed the importance of communication, sharing, and conflict resolution. From all appearances such techniques were gender-neutral and placed no special obligation on either spouse to fulfill a particular role or make any concession to the other based on sex. Participants were always instructed to come to their own conclusions on such potentially gender-related issues as housework and child rearing. The even-handed approach of the marriage courses is somewhat surprising in light of the group's outspoken support of gender-linked character traits that were supposed to express themselves in specific behavior patterns. There was nothing in the marriage courses that would have prevented a very traditional division of labor between husband and wife, but there was also very little that seemed to advocate it. Other evidence, however, indicates that this neutral appearance did not in fact reflect reality. As might be expected from the group's beliefs about masculine and feminine characteristics, women were frequently advised to take a passive but controlling position within the marriage.
In various courses that involved only women, participants were told that women were the ones who actually set the conditions that determined whether or not a marriage would succeed and therefore they had to take on the responsibility to make it a "creative marriage." There were no "Prince Charmings" to rescue them from their problems, just as there were no great leaders or messiahs to rescue the world. Women had to shoulder the burden.[45] Their control of the marriage was not, however, straightforward. Handwritten notes, evidently taken by one of the participants in a marriage course, indicate that loving a husband was the same thing as "training" him to be good, "encouraging" him to seek enlightenment, and "pushing" him into the Kingdom.[46] The same tone can be found in another set of participant notes that seem to say that a woman could (should?) use sex as a reward or punishment for her husband's behavior. This second set of notes observed that consent is necessary for sex, therefore, the woman "can get the man to do practically anything you want, so want the highest for him."[47]
The use of affection as a device to control men, even for their own good, does not appear to have been either widely advocated or used (although the fact that it turned up in two sets of notes is suggestive).
Much more common was the advice that a woman capitulate to her husband's demands if she were otherwise unable to reach an agreement with him. The admonition "resist not evil," was interpreted within marriage to mean "resist not, period!" "We violate the laws of relationship when we resist," members were told. "For example, if you've a very egocentric husband, something has to give, and it will have to be you."[48]
Although men may have been advised to capitulate to their wives, we found no evidence of such in the historical record. All the examples we found consisted of women surrendering their resistance to their husbands. When they did so, they were often quite pleased with the act and the consequences. In a talk to a low-level course, one Creative Initiative leader told her audience of women how she dealt with a situation in which she wanted to go out to the movies but her husband wanted to stay home. "I would," she said, "respond by staying home with him—fixing something special for dinner and just relaxing with him." If she really had a need to go to the movie, she said, she would make arrangements to go see it with a friend during a matinee in the middle of the week.[49]
Not all women responded to the Creative Initiative philosophy by capitulating. Some seemed to find that the teachings gave them a sense of independent legitimacy that allowed them to claim their own feelings, although those feelings were often expressed in doing traditional woman's work around the home for its own sake, not because they expected some kind of reward from others. It may be that this also involved capitulation, if not to one's husband, then at least to the role of wife.[50] Just as the family was a paradigm for the world, the role of wife within the family was a paradigm for individual behavior in the world. The woman's special feminine qualities were given their primary arena for expression in the family. By bringing love, beauty, and morality to her family the wife could take the first step toward bringing them to the world. By learning to capitulate, both to others and to her role, she could rehearse and prepare herself for the necessity of capitulating to the will of God.
Sexuality
The paradoxical concept of victory through capitulation extended even into the bedroom. For a number of years Creative Initia-
tive used a book by Dr. Marie N. Robinson called The Power of Sexual Surrender . Like the group, Robinson placed great stress on women fulfilling their natural feminine role—the crux of her book on how women could overcome problems of frigidity. Robinson, for example, talked about a "masculine woman" who held an important position in business, earned three times as much as her husband, and was incapable of a "normal" vaginal orgasm.[51] Robinson said that the secret to achieving a mature orgasm was learning how to surrender. She believed that sexual relations were a reflection of the greater world, reminding her reader that "in sexual intercourse, as in life, man is the actor, woman the passive one, the receiver, the acted upon." By accepting that reality and surrendering to it body and soul, Robinson said that a woman could achieve the psychological freedom necessary to respond physically to the act of love.[52]
The movement used Robinson's book because it reflected their own view of women. Women could achieve what they wanted not by fighting for it but by surrendering. In an important sense, however, it is misleading to judge Creative Initiative's attitudes by their use of Robinson's book because Robinson stressed sexual satisfaction as a positive goal much more than did the movement. Creative Initiative's neo-Victorian model of feminine behavior included an inherently ambivalent attitude toward sexuality. Most course references to sex were fairly straightforward, advising that the couples look at their expectations and assumptions about sex and try to consider the other person's feelings instead of merely their own. Yet underlying this reasonable advice, there was a subtext that defined appropriate sexual practices very narrowly and implied that sex itself, it not actually bad, was a temporary desire that would be left behind as people moved higher up the evolutionary ladder.
Creative Initiative strongly rejected the unbridled behavior that grew out of the sexual revolution, and leaders of marriage courses were told to "present the community stand on marriage and sex clearly and firmly," and informed participants, that "our stand is not today's norm for the rest of the world."[53] Creative Initiative believed that sex achieved a special role only within the context of a monogamous marriage. When each person in a monogamous relationship was limited to one other sexual partner, something special was constructed from something universal. They claimed that fornication and adultery were wrong because they detracted from this uniqueness and substituted breadth of experience for depth of experience: "How many instruments can one learn to play in a lifetime?"[54]
The clearest evidence of their position on female sexuality was their use of Dr. Melvin Anchell's book, Understanding Your Sexual Needs .[55] Creative Initiative admitted that the book was controversial and cautioned that they did not subscribe to everything in it. They did, however, particularly recommend chapter 2.[56] They suggested the book in many of their classes and received permission from the publisher to reproduce and distribute the favored chapter in their courses. Couched in the folksy, anecdotal style so popular in mass-market self-improvement books, chapter 2 related the story of Patty and Bob, an "average young couple." The couple was having problems because after seven years of marriage and four children, Patty had lost interest in sex. Anchell explained that the couple's problems lay in the fact that they had accepted the popular notion that women were as sexually responsive as men, when in fact they were not. There is a "natural female indifference to the sex act," Anchell explained. On the average, he continued, men are capable of three orgasms per week after age thirteen. Women, however, cannot even have a "genuine orgasm" until their mid-twenties. Between their mid-twenties and menopause, Anchell wrote, most women are capable of a maximum of two orgasms per month, whereas after menopause a woman "gradually returns to a neutral or passive attitude."[57]
In other chapters in his book, Anchell railed against "sexpert professors" who claimed that women had libidos as active as men's, he attacked premarital sex, denounced the sexual revolution in general and "free-love hippies" in particular, and referred to oral sex as a "perversion." He implied quite strongly that a woman with a job could not have either a satisfactory family life or a normal sex life. Anchell blamed most of society's sexual problems on the media, which glorified female sexuality and thus misled both men and women into false expectations.[58] It would be difficult to imagine a book on sexuality more at odds with the trends of the time in which it was written—or more in tune with the basic beliefs of Creative Initiative.
As the use of Anchell's book implies, Creative Initiative did not equate sexuality with marital happiness. They considered sex between spouses a legitimate expression of marital love so long as it did not venture into excess, but sexual pleasure was not a goal to be sought of and for itself. Seeking sexual pleasure per se was considered "lust," one of the most frequently condemned human passions. "Lust is an experience of aberrated sexual energy," they believed. "It is a dead end and connected to a powerful pleasure complex," which, if left unchecked,
"would become obsessive and destroy the individual."[59] Their writings often referred to sexuality as "the procreative drive," implying that the primary purpose of sex was reproduction. In a discussion of the Old Testament myths, the group explained that Sodom was destroyed because "its name became synonymous with aberrated sex," and that "homosexuality is a violation of correct functioning because it produces no offspring."[60]
In a general sense, it is probably accurate to say that Creative Initiative understood reproduction to be the primary purpose of sex, although it also had its place as an expression of love. Yet the movement never took the Roman Catholic view that each act of sexual intercourse had to carry with it the possibility of conception. Quite the contrary. Not only was nonprocreative sex never condemned but, in fact, the movement placed great stress on the efficacy of birth control and abortion as a means of controlling world population. As an ecologically oriented group, they appear to have been heavily influenced by the zero population growth movement of the early 1970s, and a draft document from that period recommended universal voluntary birth control, to be achieved by "massive education, tax penalties for more than two children, free sterilization, intensified research on safe and convenient contraceptives, and unconditional abortion."[61]
The most direct formal confrontation with the group's ideas about sex came in the C seminar when participants used the "four absolutes" of the Oxford Group to confess their transgressions. The second of these four was "absolute purity," which was "to be looked at with reference to sex." They taught that cultural taboos existed in order to impose some control on sex; otherwise it might get out of hand because "man does not seem to be naturally monogamous." This comment implies that in the area of sex Creative Initiative inverted its basic philosophical assumption that nature was good and that people had only to discover the reality of human nature to know how to act. It would seem that Emilia believed (since the four absolutes came into the movement through her) that people were "naturally" inclined to unacceptable sexual behavior on which the group had to impose a strict code of conduct. To help people discover and confess sexual behavior that might have produced guilt or shame, the group listed seven problem areas: (1) masturbation; (2) incest; (3) childhood sex play; (4) premarital sex; (5) "sexual abnormalities," including, but not limited to, oral sex, anal sex, homosexuality, and lesbianism; (6) pornography; (7) adultery and fornication.[62]
Thus, Creative Initiative tried to confine sexual expression to the narrowest possible area and held out the possibility that members might eventually transcend it altogether. After marriage "normal" sexual relations between spouses were acceptable, but any action that seemed to expand the boundaries of sexual expression and thereby treat sex as an area of human creativity was discouraged. Sex was not to be banned, as for Catholic religious; nor was it to be used in a way open to the possibility of procreation, as for the Catholic laity; rather it was to be accepted as a necessary part of the natural order, good only so long as it was kept under control. The excessive pursuit of sex, like the excessive pursuit of beauty or material goods, could lead a person away from doing God's will by becoming a god itself.
The deemphasis on sex seems to have been linked to the movement's version of the Freudian notion that sublimated sexual energy could express itself through creativity. In one course on the teachings of Jesus there was a long section addressing the issue of lust. Among the questions posed for discussion was: "For the person who had decided to lead the religious life, what is the highest use of the procreative energy?" The desired answer was to "direct these energies toward creative action that benefits all life. This can only be done by loving other people and all life more than desiring our own immediate pleasures and self-interested pursuits."[63] The trick, however, was not to try to suppress the sexual drive—that, said Emilia, would only "reinforce the unconscious and focus attention there." She told the people in the movement that if they redirected their energy, the sex drive would eventually atrophy.[64]
The idea that libido would decrease by itself was borrowed from Gerald Heard who viewed sex and pain as manifestations of redirected psychic energy that would diminish as people moved up the evolutionary ladder and became more spiritual.[65] The sexual drive decreased as the level of psychic awareness increased. One did not achieve a higher spiritual level by repressing sex; rather one worked to fulfill the will of God and the diminution of the sexual drive was seen as a result, not a cause, of leading a successful religious life. Some people in the movement whispered about high leaders in the "hub" group sleeping in separate beds and, although it was not a topic of formal discussion, assumed that they had little if any sex.[66] A young woman who had grown up as a teenager in Creative Initiative wrote, "everybody knew . . . if you were truly a member of CIF (3rd seminar level plus commitment) then you would not engage in oral sex with your
spouse."[67] Because there was the widespread belief that the leaders were "better," in the sense that they had achieved greater "totality" in dedicating their entire lives to the will of God, what they did was presumed to be the appropriate model for others. These leaders not only believed that sex was inversely proportional to spirituality, they lived it ("the message and the messenger are one"). The result was, according to one member, that many of the people in the movement suffered from "severe sexual hangups."
The downplaying of sex, even within marriage, and the apparent lack of sexual contact among members not married to each other, had the very functional effect of focusing more of the participants' energy on the movement. Raymond Trevor Bradley has argued that in communes with charismatic leaders particularized relationships are usually suppressed while generalized love is promoted. This could be promoted either through celibacy or nonexclusive sexual relationships.[68] Given Creative Initiative's strong family orientation and moral rigorism, sexual promiscuity was obviously out of the question. Pure celibacy was equally untenable for a group that stressed marriage and children. Thus, they promoted celibacy for the unmarried and looked forward to refocusing their sexual energies as they became increasingly involved in the spirituality of the third age.
Men
Not surprisingly, given the distinctly feminine focus of the Creative Initiative movement, there was comparatively little attention paid to men. There were many fewer courses, many fewer special meetings, and generally less philosophical attention paid to the husbands until quite late in the 1970s when the second generation took over and eventually led the group into secularization.[69] As noted earlier, the women who formed the religious center of the movement appear to have had a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward men. On the one hand, they acknowledged men as the people with the greatest intellectual, economic, and political power, but on the other hand, they blamed most of the world's troubles on that power. They did not believe that they as women could lead the movement into the third age, but at the
same time they believed they had to get it started on the right path and educate enough men so that the males could eventually complete the journey. Thus men were both the root cause of the world's problems and its ultimate saviors. It was the women who had to change them from one to the other.
Men in the third dispensation were something like Eve; they came second and were produced out of the body of the women's religion. Their pledges and ceremonies were masculinized versions of the women's, and their courses and ceremonies were often afterthoughts. In addition to the philosophical reasons for the secondary male role in the movement, there was also the practical consideration of time. Creative Initiative women were not employed outside the home; their husbands were. Men had less time, less energy, and generally less inclination to become involved in unconventional spiritual enterprises, a fact that was recognized by the movement, which almost always aimed its recruiting material at wives.
Men never adopted a new name similar to Blessman, but they expected that through prayer, dropping resistance and hatred, mutual criticism, and following the example of Jesus of Nazareth, they would develop the character necessary to take up the burden of leadership. This army would emerge "made up of men who claim their destiny as men, exercising their masculine qualities of aggressive, courageous initiative at the highest level while coming to terms with their feminine components in such a way as to be integrated, resourceful, creative, effective human beings."[70]
The incessant use of the military metaphor to describe the activity of the men was necessary to integrate the Jungian concept of masculine traits with the movement's monistic world view. Because they believed that men were naturally aggressive, they frequently used martial language and symbols (the flaming sword) to express their desire to bring about a peaceful, unified world. Reading the men's material, one gets the distinct feeling that somehow Creative Initiative males were afraid that they would be considered unmasculine if they simply declared their support for peace, love, and unity, a feeling that may have been strengthened by their belief that men had to be shown the way by women and had to develop their own feminine characteristics (their anima) if they were to be successful. By adopting a martial posture, the men were able to dress these "feminine" values in traditional masculine garb and thus integrate the various roles they were supposed to play.
Children: The Second Generation
Creative Initiative taught that "the purpose of the family from the beginning has been to educate the young on how to survive" and that "what is needed now, more than ever before, is for parents to take back the power and responsibility for training their young in what it means to be in right relationship to themselves, other people and the environment."[71] Just as a person needed a spouse to experience one of the steps toward total love, so children gave parents an opportunity to expand their love. For a family to be a true model for the world, it needed two generations so that the older could train the younger to be part of the new age. Having children, however, as virtually all of the members did, not only generated the usual parent-child conflicts but two special problems that stemmed directly from the sect and its teachings.
The first problem might be called the issue of loyalty. Creative Initiative stressed that the family was the paramount social institution and structured most of its rituals around the nuclear family. So one's primary loyalty would seem to belong to the family. Yet the group also believed that the family was only a second step (the individual was the first) toward the ultimate goal of changing the world, and the instrument for that final purpose was the community. For many years, subgroups of cooperating people in the movement were called "family groups" and people in these larger "families" were expected to treat one another like family members, which they in fact seem to have done. So individuals were expected to be loyal to their blood families, to their movement families and, of course, to the movement itself. Loyalty to the movement or commitment to the cause was a measure of "totality," of having surrendered the individual ego for obedience to the will of God. Practically, however, given the limited resources of time, money, and energy, totality as an attitude could not be translated into giving totally in all places. Somehow a way to explain the lack of totality in some areas had to be found.
Second, there was a conflict between the desire of members to make their children active participants in the movement and their realistic recognition that they could not force their children to believe anything. Unlike their parents, the children did not have to go through a process of transformation, nor did they make a conscious decision to commit themselves to the movement. Because they had joined the movement of their own free will and had paid the personal costs of being members of
an unconventional religion, the parents were highly motivated. The children, however, were born into the New Religion and for many, establishing independence meant rejecting their parents' religious beliefs, at least for a while. If adults could not force their children to believe, at least they might try to have their children behave according to the Creative Initiative code of values. But their children were growing up in an era of political radicalism, sexual liberation, and drug use. It proved to be even more difficult to get their children to act the way they wanted than to get them to think the way they wanted, although in the end Creative Initiative members appear to have had at least as much success as other parents—perhaps more.
In theory, Creative Initiative took a relaxed view toward parenting; the term they used was "detachment." Their entire childrearing philosophy was based on the presumption that children were not, and could not be, their parent's possessions: "Our children are not our children but the sons and daughters of life. . . . And although they are with us they don't belong to us." All parents could do, all parents should do, was to remember that the message and the messenger were one and lead their lives accordingly. If parents were sure about their own journey, the group said, then the children would be able to see what was the right path for themselves.[72]
Drawing on the work of Erikson, Piaget, Maslow, and other psychologists, the group saw childhood as a series of distinct stages, each with its own characteristics and needs. Creative Initiative explained that children, by the time they entered school, were beginning to look to people outside the family for friendship and models, and they emphasized the necessity of allowing children to develop independence. Although they did not say it in so many words, the group appears to have been trying to minimize the kind of authoritarian parental control that had created "authority problems" for many in the movement. The message seemed to be that if they could raise their children to be as free as possible of destructive parental control, then the children would find it that much easier to discover the will of God on their own.[73] If children were to find authority and support outside the family, however, then it was crucial that those outside authorities be supportive of the ultimate goal of following God's will. Thus, it was obviously best if Creative Initiative children found their closest friends within the movement, and most of them did. It was also important that they saw the movement itself as an extended family to whom they could look for support.
In addition to this religious justification for seeking a detached style
of childrearing, there was also the practical matter of parents dividing their time between children and the work. Although there was a continuous series of child-centered activities through the history of the movement, and detachment did not mean laissez-faire, there was also a sense that if parents could realize that their children were independent persons who had to find their own way with the help of people outside the family, then parents would feel less guilty about putting time into the movement and not into their nuclear family. "Do you have a private life of fun and work and relationship with your kids?" Emilia asked a group of seminar participants.[74] "Yes" was the wrong response.
People were supposed to give their first loyalty to the group. The sense of community had to be built among adults and between the adults and all the children, not just their own. The essential tasks of parents included "caring, concern, honesty, direct encounters, establishing trust, [and] demonstrating and communicating right attitudes and right conduct" to all the children in the community.[75] One of the most frequent comments to appear on our questionnaires from movement children was how much they appreciated the genuine closeness, love, and support they received from adults other than their parents. "Every father was your father," wrote one young man.[76] One of their most frequent complaints, however, was how much time their parents had spent on movement work to the neglect of the family. This view was also shared by some parents, one of whom told us, "I feel the time commitment was out of proportion and caused many parents to neglect their children. People (myself included) were made to feel guilty if they didn't attend meetings, seminars, etc., and were told they were too 'attached' to their children."[77]
Since the movement had always defined its end as transforming the individual and its means as education, the education of children became a central concern. The fullest development of their educational philosophy came in 1972 when they took the logical but short-lived step of creating their own elementary school, called Escuela de Luz, which taught only kindergarten through grade three and enrolled approximately fifty children. When they discovered halfway through the first year that the open classroom format they had begun with was not working, they switched to a more structured and disciplined style. They concluded from this experience: "We saw once again the freeing effect on the children of knowing exactly where the limits are, rather than operating from a personal base."[78] Thus, they interpreted the educa-
tional. experience of their children as another example of the great paradox—obedience is freedom. The Escuela de Luz experiment lasted only two years. It was shut down because it demanded too much time and effort that the group thought should be going into projects to educate adults, which was, after all, their main purpose.[79]
Most of the Creative Initiative childrens' programs were of a less formal nature. Afterschool, weekend, and summer programs led by teenagers and parents were the most prevalent form for communicating the group's ideas to their children. The education program for children had originally begun as a direct response to the needs of young parents who, by the late 1950s, made up the overwhelming majority of participants. If these people were to take the necessary seminars to deepen their commitment, something had to be done to accommodate their special needs. For these young adults a stay of two weeks (or even one week) at Ben Lomond was a near impossibility since there was no practical way either to take their children to the camp or to leave them for that length of time with somebody else. So, in 1960, Sequoia Seminar ran an experimental "family camp" that included a day camp for the children of adult participants. It was sufficiently successful for Harry to announce that there would be additional family camps in the future. At first, the children's camps were mainly day care with no attempt to achieve an educational function of their own. "It is the experience of the adults which is the really important factor," Harry declared. "If the parents achieve the change which the seminar envisages, the children will be direct beneficiaries for the rest of their lives."[80] By 1969 the summer camp program had expanded to accommodate the children of many of the adults attending "continuation" seminars. Although the prime purpose was still to keep the children occupied while the adults participated in the seminars, Creative Initiative did promise that they would "give the children a good growing experience."[81]
Finally, during the mid-1970s, the camp program reached a highly developed form. Most of the children of members attended camp as campers or counselors or both, and many remember their experiences with great fondness. The camps now had names, Aurora for the girls, Arriba for the boys. In 1973, more than forty adults and fifty teenage counselors cared for over two hundred children, with a budget of more than fourteen thousand dollars. More important than size, however, was the new purpose of the summer camps. No longer content to provide merely a safe place for children, or a "growing experience," the camps were now invested with a full educational and religious purpose.
The camp prospectus for 1973 stated that they wanted campers to learn about the outdoors, "new ways to behave, relate to others, a sense of wonder, and a feeling of belonging to this Community."[82]
An overview of youth activities in 1980 gives some idea of the extensive variety of services that Creative Initiative organized for children. It is also indicative of the kind of services that the group provided for members in its functioning as a sect. Twenty-five of the fifty youngest children, all under age eight, were taken to a camp out of the county to avoid the helicopter spraying of pesticides for the Mediterranean fruit fly that infested Santa Clara and surrounding counties that summer. The fifty children of elementary-school age were involved with various family-centered youth programs, had special seasonal celebrations led by teenage counselors, and could attend either the boys or girls summer camp. Thirty-one junior high schoolers had young-teen groups, Aguilas for the boys, Jovencitas for the girls. They could attend boys' or girls' summer programs, and there were several ceremonies for those young people who had already gone through their Eagle or Spring Maiden rite. High school students (and there were ninety of them in 1980, more than any other age group) were offered a communication course, an organized youth center with lectures and social events, an opportunity to begin studying the Records, and the chance to become counselors in the summer camps. That year they could also participate in the Youth Conservation Corps, a community action program. Finally, the seventy college-age students could participate in two experimental live-in cooperatives, attend special discussion groups with high-level leaders, or supervise the Youth Conservation Corps.[83]
As indicated by the creation of separate boys' and girls' summer camps and other sex-segregated activities, the strong sense of gender distinction that marked the movement's adult philosophy was played out fully at the children's level as well. In fact, the group made a point of promoting parent-child activities that were almost always structured along traditional gender role lines. A particularly telling example of this traditional division of roles can be found in an outline for a series of meetings for teens and their parents. The first day was to begin with "informal discussion while breakfast is being prepared by women." On the second day "girls help get breakfast"; this meal was to be more formal, so participants were instructed, "Men seat wives." After breakfast, leaders were told to "ask girls to clean off the table and the boys to do some task (You might ask them to go out and find a rock.)." The third day's breakfast had no specification as to who should prepare it
because it was a cookout, but girls were once more asked to help the women with the fourth day's breakfast while the boys and men met together to "discuss how they could show the girls appreciation of breakfast."[84] There were numerous projects in which boys and girls, especially in their teens, worked together, but there were even more programs that divided children by sex in order to imbue them with what were considered gender-appropriate values.
For boys, the group proposed a complete cycle of activities beginning when they were seven and ending when they were fifteen. Although this plan was not always followed to the letter, the general structure was instituted and for many years was an excellent example of the kind of practical benefits that Creative Initiative provided members of the sect. Each of the activities was designed to help the boys become more independent and self-confident and to give them a sense of their maleness. Boys could not participate in the program unless their fathers did too. Not only did the group believe that the fathers had to be present to be models for the boys, but the activities were thought to benefit the father as well as the son, specifically his "masculinity and identity will be strengthened when he consciously puts himself in the position of leading boys."[85]
The most elaborately developed of the childhood activities for boys was the "Eagle" ceremony. "Eagle" was later changed to the Spanish aguila in line with the widespread use of Spanish in community activities, especially those for the children. The ceremony, which took place after the boy had turned thirteen, was consciously designed to be a rite of passage from boyhood to young manhood and, unlike most of the other activities, was overtly and almost exclusively religious in nature. It was intended to be the "high point in [the] entire Boy's Program."[86] Candidates for the ceremony were told that "throughout history, men have recognized the passage of their sons into young manhood with special rites and ceremony." By participating in the ceremony of Las Aguilas, the boys were demonstrating their "acceptance of responsibility of manhood and a willingness to cherish and preserve our religious tradition."[87]
Participation in the ceremony was not automatic. Like all other steps in the Creative Initiative program it was voluntary and, like most others, it also needed the approval of the community. Candidates for the Eagle ceremony and their parents had to demonstrate a high degree of commitment. The parents were required to have reached a point where they were participating in advanced-level seminars, which meant that they had to have been in the program for at least three years. All those
concerned, sons and fathers, met for counseling and instruction with peers who had previously gone through the ceremony.[88] The actual plans for the ceremony were approved by "elders in Region to insure quality and appropriateness of Blessing: content, tone, size."[89] And finally, the candidate went through a two-month period of intense religious training in preparation for the ritual, in which he received instruction in the beliefs, ceremonies, and obligations of Creative Initiative.
The Eagle ceremony was intended to be more than a symbolic rite of passage. Within the belief system of the movement, those who went through the Eagle ceremony were seen as separating from their parents, freeing themselves in preparation for commitment to God. The boy's father was told to take "initiative out of internal motivation to pass on what is of value to his son." Although the exact meaning of that rather opaque phrase is not obvious, the implication appears to be that the father would pass on to his son the right and the ability to make decisions for himself. More explicitly, the ceremony was said to "mark the 'first cut' from the family, a move from the family into the brotherhood of peers." In the process the son was transferring his concept of authority "from the family and father to the clan, represented by men other than the father."[90]
This last aspect was formalized by the boy choosing a new "spiritual father" from among the other adult males in the movement. Girls also chose a spiritual mother for their equivalent ceremony. The use of spiritual parents actually worked two ways. For the spiritual children there was a sense of independence from the nuclear family, and for the spiritual parents there was formalization of the communal ideal that the adults were parents to all the children and youngsters children to all the adults. This ceremony confirmed both the young person's progress on the path toward enlightenment, moving away from parents as authority figures, and also reinforced the sense of mutual support and caring so crucial to the operation of the community as a sect. Several Creative Initiative children whom we interviewed or who answered our questionnaire expressed special fondness for their spiritual parents.
There appear to have been many fewer structured opportunities for women to engage in activities with their daughters, but those for which we have records were, like the boys' programs, designed to reinforce the sense of the child as a member of a gender with very specific sex-linked skills. A program to recruit girls to take care of the babies of people attending seminars required that both mothers and daughters agree to be a team, with the mother acting as advisor and emergency backup for
her daughter. The girls were told that the experience was worthwhile not only because they would be paid but also because it would give them "the opportunity to prepare for your own motherhood by having a baby to 'practice' on."[91] But for the girls, as for the boys, the highlight of the formal youth programs was the rite of passage into young adulthood—the "Spring Maiden" ceremony.
The Spring Maiden ceremony was an analog of the Eagle ceremony. Like the Eagle ceremony, it was an act of commitment not only by the child but also by the same-sex parent. "Because our work is mystical in nature, this program evolved as a way for mothers to pass on this spiritual heritage to their daughters," said the ceremony announcement. It went on to explain that before her daughter could participate in the program, "each mother must first decide that this work is the focus for her life."[92] The ceremony itself was designed to affirm the "maiden's" "femininity and her uniqueness." The decorations were quintessentially feminine: pink and yellow roses with butterflies symbolizing the metamorphosis of the girl into womanhood. The girls also went through a preparation for the ceremony which at times included learning female crafts like crocheting, candle-making, and flower arranging. They were given lessons on the meaning of the ceremony and on problems faced by teenagers such as drugs and sex. There was also a session on choosing a college (which seems a bit premature for thirteen year olds) and, interestingly, a session on careers. Creative Initiative mothers apparently assumed that their daughters would not only go to college, but would also have careers, even though they themselves did not work or had left their jobs to work in the movement.[93]
Teenagers: Living (And Not Living) The Life
The preparations for the Eagle and Spring Maiden initiation ceremonies were the most formally structured religious instruction given to Creative Initiative children. It was assumed that by the time the children reached their teen years, they would have absorbed the basic principles of the movement, and therefore most of the teen-focused activity was directed at showing the young people how to apply their beliefs, how to "live the life."
The movement mounted two particularly ambitious programs to allow teenagers to put their values into action, one for young men and the
other for young women. The men's project began first, in 1979. Nineteen young men, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-two, were given a six-month training course and sent to work for three months in Nepal. Richard Rathbun, Harry and Emilia's son, had spent three years in the Peace Corps in Nepal and acted as the project supervisor. After their work in the Nepalese villages the participants returned home and, except for high schoolers, decided not to go back to school immediately. Instead, they created an organization called YES (Youth Evolving Solutions). Until they all returned to college in the fall of 1980, the young men in YES lived together and participated in a series of ecology projects designed to get people to use less fuel by riding public transportation, bicycles, and carpooling. Participants lived in a house in Palo Alto that they ran as a cooperative. It was during this project that YES first used a slogan that would be resurrected in 1987 by Beyond War, "Think Globally, Act Locally."[94]
Admittedly jealous that the boys had had an opportunity to do something denied to them, a group of movement girls asked if they could set up a similar project. So for a year, from July 1981 to June 1982, about a dozen young women also lived cooperatively in a house in Palo Alto, creating and running their own community service projects. They called the one-year program "Salvatierra" (save the earth) and, unlike the boys' project, Salvatierra had a very strong religious element. Initially the girls were employed at a variety of jobs, including work on the line in a San Francisco factory and field work on farms in Fresno. Most of their time, however, was spent in religious training, self-improvement, and preparing to teach three one-hour units to elementary school children.[95] A particularly difficult aspect of Salvatierra was the problem that the young women had dealing with adult expectations. One participant had two nervous breakdowns trying to cope with the demands placed on her in that intense living environment.[96]
Although Creative Initiative did promote a process of freeing children from their parents' authority, in no sense did it give the young people carte blanche to explore freely in the world to find their own truths. In place of the parents' authority the movement substituted the authority of the community, usually described as an expression of the will of God. So long as they were living at home, children could rebel against their parents, but when they were living away, among their peers, a more oppressive kind of authority exerted itself because rebelling against one's peers meant risking alienation from friends and community.
Emilia had crystallized her opposition to drinking, smoking, and even
dancing as early as 1952 when she spoke out against them at a Sequoia Seminar continuation seminar.[97] Although the opposition to dancing did not survive, smoking and drinking continued to be anathema to Creative Initiative. There was tremendous pressure on the children not to engage in these forbidden practices, to the extent that teenagers were requested to sign contracts agreeing not to smoke or drink alcohol.[98] Although nobody was "forced" to sign such a contract, the teenagers realized that refusing to do so was tantamount to rejecting the movement's core demand for "totality."
The single most common complaint from Creative Initiative children who answered our questionnaire was the criticism and guilt they suffered for not being able to live up to the ideal of totality. In this sense they were no different from their parents who also found the demands for perfection and the confrontations that resulted from their presumed failures the most difficult aspect of their participation. Unlike the adults, however, the children did not have the option of dropping out of the movement. All their parents' friends and, in many cases, most of their own close friends were in the movement, and the costs of rebelling were extremely high. As one respondent told us, "I saw my [non-Creative Initiative] school friends as having lower standards, so I kept many of them at a distance."[99]
The responses to our questionnaire give the impression that Creative Initiative teenagers were more rebellious than other young people of their age and status, but that impression may well be misleading. Because of the strict standards to which they were held, behavior that would have been seen as normal or experimental among their peers was labeled "rebellion" by both the Creative Initiative children and their parents. And, within the context of the movement's demands, it was more rebellious than the same action would have been in the "outside" world.
Young men and women who violated the movement's values were made the objects of the same kind of peer criticism that adults experienced. Groups of teens were brought together, one young man reported, "and forced to accuse one another."[100] Although most of the mutual criticism seems to have been directed at personal behavior involving sex, alcohol, and drugs, other aspects of the community's values were also considered fair game. Another young man who remembered being critiziced for being insufficiently masculine (an apparently chronic fear among Creative Initiative men) said, "It was hard to feel good about yourself, but the criticism kept coming in the hope you
would become a better person because of it."[101] This process could begin when the children were as young as twelve. The effect was to seriously weaken the self-confidence of some who experienced this group criticism, thus undermining the very sense of self-worth and ego strength that the movement was trying to impart.
As a result of the demand for "totality," many Creative Initiative children reported that they developed a curious combination of hypocrisy and snobbery. Sometimes individually and sometimes as groups, they broke the rules, but they lied about it both to the adults and to some of their peers within the movement. They pretended that they were upholding the standards while leading a secret life.[102] Yet, despite the reports of widespread violations of community standards by teenagers, our respondents also wrote that there was a strong sense of moral elitism among the children. In one sense this is not surprising since it reflects a similar feeling among the adults, but, from all evidence, the adults lived up to their own values and were perhaps justified in feeling superior to ordinary folks; many of the children did not.[103]
Despite their willingness to break the rules of the movement, most of the children who answered our questionnaire ultimately valued their childhoods in Creative Initiative. Many mentioned the benefits of having parents who adhered to a strict moral code and who had worked out the problems in their marriages. Even more important, most were thankful for the values they had learned—even if they had, on occasion, wandered from the strait and narrow. The second-generation respondents tended to be positively disposed toward the movement, and many were active in Beyond War. Yet even those children who did not stay involved with the movement as they grew older usually expressed appreciation for the strong sense of right and wrong and the concept of unity with the world that they had learned from it. In addition, of course, there were those teens who never did rebel and who were able to operate in a world of drugs and casual sexuality without ever being touched by either because of their Creative Initiative training.
Creative Initiative never actually addressed the second-generation problem per se, although they discussed the unique problem presented by children who, unlike their parents, had never made a decision to join the movement. There seem to have been two reasons for this. First, the sect was very new. Every member was a convert and imbued with the fervor of people who had deliberately rejected one value system for another. Although the group had some structure, including an informal hierarchy, ceremonies, and a body of written dogma, it did not have a
standard churchlike organization. This meant that children did not have to be formally inducted into membership. Second, as a millenarian movement, Creative Initiative hoped it would be able to change the direction in which the world was moving. No dates or predictions were ever made, but one gets the sense from the group's materials that they thought the balance could be tipped during their lifetimes—some early works made vague references to the year 2000 as a kind of deadline. Given that assumption, the principal effort was always directed at educating other adults. Children's training was not ignored, but growth of the movement was linked to rational decision making by mature adults, and the assumption seemed to be that the children would make their own choice to join or not in the course of their own lives.
Gender and Paradox
The unifying theme in Creative Initiative's approach to men, women, and children in the family was an attempt to integrate opposites. Their dualistic view of human nature made them see human behavior as similarly bifurcated. Some things were either good or bad and thus could be dealt with in a straightforward fashion. Other dualities were more complex. Men and women were seen as opposites but not as good or bad. Likewise, sexuality and celibacy were two ends of a continuum on which they sought a middle ground. Finally, Creative Initiative tried to find a way to reconcile the conflicting demands of family and children on one side and of religious community on the other. In the area of family and gender relationships, Creative Initiative took the same course it did in other areas of awkward dualism. Rather than choosing between what seemed to be opposites, Creative Initiative wove the opposites together in a way that allowed them to explain the apparent contradictions in their beliefs.
For the women, the movement provided a sense of purpose within the traditional woman's role. Raised in an era when it was assumed that women would become wives and mothers and nothing more, these educated women found in Creative Initiative something better, but something that did not compete with their preexisting beliefs about what women should do. The movement assured them that being a good wife and mother was not only their most important task but, when done right, would make their families models for a new world. Working
for Creative Initiative was voluntary and, therefore, considered appropriate for housewives. Yet, Creative Initiative demanded more time than would have been acceptable to most traditional-minded women, so it developed both child-care institutions and a philosophy that allowed the women to spend less time with their families and more working for the movement.
Unable to take over leadership until they had changed sufficiently to be trusted with the fate of the earth, men played a less central role in the early history of the sect. Unlike women who were assumed to have a natural understanding of what needed to be done to prevent the apocalypse, men were assumed to have a natural inclination to bring it on. Women had to develop their leadership skills to spread the word to other women and eventually to men. Men had to sensitize themselves to the message being brought by women. For the most part, male activity was an imitation of female activity adjusted for what the group considered appropriate male characteristics. The martial style and language of much of the male activity appears to reflect both the assumption of male aggressiveness and a deep suspicion that somehow either the group or its message was unmasculine, a doubt that had to be countered at every turn.
Whether they were men, women, or children, the people who lived their lives in Creative Initiative participated in a totally integrated religious experience. For them, religion was not a Sunday thing, not an afterthought, not even a separate philosophical entity. Religion was the warp and woof of their existence. It informed all their thoughts and all their actions. It defined their gender identity, their marital relations, and the interaction between parents and children. The family was the first level of collective expression of their religious ideals. The community was the second.