Leaving the hill country [in Texas], having left everything behind in Houston, giving it all away, they struck out in their last possession, a little sports car convertible. They seemed to just go where “the spirit” led, lacing the country up and down and from side to side as if they were being used as cameras and microphones for the Next Level. They did odd jobs to sustain travel funds, everything from carving crosses for a little store in Las Vegas where the owner took an extreme interest in them, to digging septic tank test ditches near Savage Rapids on the Rogue River in southern Oregon.51
Applewhite’s retelling of his and Nettles’s wandering invokes both the biblical trope of time spent in the wilderness and the American cultural image of freedom on the open road. (In a convertible even!) This sort of “errand into the wilderness,” to borrow the phrase historian Perry G. Miller used to describe the Puritan founding of New England, represents a religious quest that indicates intentional unmooring from one’s roots. Jack Kerouac spoke of the same sort of spiritual wandering in his On the Road and Dharma Bums, two of the most popular travelogues of the counterculture, and texts with which Nettles and Applewhite were surely familiar. The Two understood their experience as a form of data collection for the Next Level and preparation for their ministry, and it prefigured the way that they understood their followers’ sojourns as well.
Once the movement itself became established, physical crossing quickly became a standard mode of living in the world. Nettles and Applewhite established a series of camps wherein members would congregate and create temporary communities. Shortly after the Waldport meeting the two founders stopped traveling with the group, and in fact divided the movement into smaller groups they named “families.” The families traveled extensively but haphazardly. Balch and Taylor describe “wandering aimlessly,” camping along the California coast in such a small family group, though later adherents reported traveling only in pairs or even alone in the event that a partner had abandoned the movement.52 Similarly, James S. Phelan, who interviewed the Two for the New York Times Magazine, described this travel as “seemingly aimless wandering in pairs and small groups, mostly from one campsite to another.”53 As a result of this approach, the group lacked any social cohesion in its early days. The families spent their days on the road and in the wilderness, constantly traveling. Adherents of Heaven’s Gate seldom traveled with their founders, and many converts joined without even having met the group’s founders. Balch and Taylor summarize:
Each family was completely autonomous, traveling almost constantly, going wherever it felt it was being led. Family members held public meetings of their own as they traveled. Most of them were small, but a few attracted audiences of several hundred people. . . . During their random movements across the country, families rarely kept in touch with each other, and after the press lost interest in Bo and Peep’s [i.e., Ti and Do’s] odyssey, many families had no way of learning anything about other members of the UFO cult.54
Such travelers spread the message of Nettles and Applewhite—who used the names Bo (Applewhite) and Peep (Nettles) at this point—and sought to encounter hardship and new experiences so as to overcome their human attachments and cleave toward the Next Level. Applewhite and Nettles characterized this as “leaving one’s life behind” and “straining” to develop a “clear line of communication” with the Next Level.55
Yet they wandered with some purpose. In Phelan’s interview with Nettles and Applewhite they indicated that they encouraged their followers to seek out Oregon, Colorado, and Sedona, Arizona, all of which were “high energy places.”56 In a 1975 public meeting they hinted at what the Christian tradition would call a “gathering of the saints,” wherein those who accepted their message would spontaneously journey to special parts of the Earth where they would congregate and wait for the Next Level saucers to arrive.57 This also paralleled New Age practices of gathering in convergences at sacred places thought to possess special energy or power. (Interestingly, Steven Spielberg wrote a nearly identical idea into the plot of his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which a few special souls journeyed to Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming to wait for the extraterrestrial flying saucer, though I have seen no evidence that ufologists generally followed similar practices.) Members also sought out areas that adherents of the inchoate group had not yet visited, so as to hold new meetings and seek new converts.58 Still others moved where the spirit led them, and sought only to encounter new experiences to help them overcome their human conditions.59 All this indicates that crossing served multiple roles in the movement’s corpus of religious practice: separatism, evangelism, and introspection among them.
Looking beyond physical crossing, one finds ample examples of Heaven’s Gate members engaging in forms of religious practice meant to enable a metaphoric crossing toward the Next Level, and (members hoped) an eventual physical crossing over to that level. These took multiple forms, but most notable adherents engaged in bodily practices involving self-control and self-purging and acts of prayer and meditation meant to help them focus on the Next Level. All of these practices served to direct the adherent’s psychological and spiritual focus toward the group, the leaders of the movement, and their ideal of transcending the Earth and achieving membership in the Next Level.
Self-control and self-purging served central roles in the lives of members of Heaven’s Gate and in their daily religious practices. In fact, Nettles and Applewhite taught that individuals could only transform themselves into extraterrestrial creatures through extreme self-control. Even in the movement’s earliest days they told those who accepted their teachings that adherents must abstain from the sort of activities that characterized the human level, and emulate those of the Next Level. Activities to avoid fell within two categories: those that were forbidden because they rooted one in a human-level social system, and those that led to various forms of attachment and distraction from the Next Level. The first category included working at a job, having relationships with one’s family and friends, and sexual relationships. The second category included drinking alcohol, drug use, indulgent eating, and casual sexual activity. Nettles and Applewhite called the avoidance of these forms of human level activity the “walking out the door formula.” They explained in one of the first statements that the Two wrote:
Each true seeker of the next kingdom must literally walk out the door of his life, leaving behind his career, security, loved ones, and every single attachment in order to go through the remaining experiences needed to totally wean him from his needs at the human level. Until this frightening experience is underway, a man cannot begin to comprehend the reality of these “higher” and simple experiences necessary for this total metamorphosis into a new being.60
Other sources from the first months of the movement in 1975 reveal that the Two had already insisted on many of the monastic hallmarks of the later movement. Potential members were instructed to leave behind all possessions with the exception of those of immediate use to the individual and group as they sought to persevere and overcome the human level. As the Two wrote in a letter to prospective members, “If you are ready to go you will need: a car, a tent, a warm sleeping bag, a stove, at least two changes of winter clothing and two for warmer weather, eating and cooking utensils, and whatever money you can bring.”61
Heaven’s Gate attracted media attraction in 1975 and 1976 for precisely this reason, most notably in October 1976 when between twenty and thirty-three people abandoned deeds to their homes, personal possessions, and family members—children and partners, in several instances—in order to follow Applewhite and Nettles into the wilderness.62 Members from this time period remarked upon the austerity and focus of their religious practices, of the near constant focus on what they needed to avoid. The group banned sex, drugs, drinking, most forms of media entertainment, and idle conversation, the ex-member noted. One member “recounted how this translated into a rather dull routine at HIM [Human Individual Metamorphosis, i.e. Heaven’s Gate]
retreats in Oregon. Highlights, he said, included cooking, eating, meeting, meditating, and hustling forays into the outside world in search of more recruits,” reports a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.63
Other monastic practices developed in response to the various limitations that the Two placed on their followers. Since Applewhite and Nettles taught that personal possessions and the accumulation of money were human level characteristics, movement members lived communally and shared what little money they brought with them. When money ran out, Nettles and Applewhite permitted members to work odd jobs, but discouraged actual permanent employment that might lead to attachment to one’s career or vocation, a possibility that sometimes occurred and resulted in several members leaving the group, in effect choosing secular over religious vocations.64 Members also developed a shared purse. One former member recounted his experience of the early months of Heaven’s Gate’s history, when he was a member: “Once at a camp in Colorado everyone in the group was told to turn over all his money to one member who handled money for everyone. . . . If you wanted a quarter for an ice cream cone you had to ask him, and he could say no if he wanted to.”65 This former member believed that Applewhite and Nettles had explicitly taught that members should operate with a shared purse, but several other members of the group describe the process differently, with one ex-member saying she had concocted the idea of a shared purse rather than the notion deriving from Nettles and Applewhite.66 While the specific origin of the practice remains in doubt, the underlying logic clearly owed its origin to the Two’s teachings about avoiding money and the ownership of personal property.67 Communal living and a shared purse became standard by spring 1976, when the group’s leaders ceased proselytizing and gathered all active members into a single remote camp in Wyoming. From that time forward, members lived as members of a monastic community with all property in common.
Group members lived by a rigorous religious code demanding self-control of appetite, mind, body, and self. A list entitled “17 Steps” provided the behavioral guidelines necessary for overcoming one’s human condition, and it forbade such activities as inconsiderate conversation, clumsiness, procrastination, oversensitivity, rudeness, overfamiliarity, and defensiveness. In an admittedly odd example of “using more of something than is adequate,” the rules note to avoid overuse of toothpaste or too high of a cooking flame.68 Such rules indicate how a thrifty communal group managed to live within its finances, but also how the adherents sought to live as uniform crew members within a highly regimented and dedicated community, akin to how they imagined the Next Level beings lived in outer space. These behavioral guidelines evolved over the lifetime of the group to become three “major offenses” of deceit, sensuality, and knowingly breaking instructions or procedures and a list of thirty-one minor offenses generally encompassing those drawn from the earlier 17 Steps.69
At first glance these restrictions appear to be drawn from the worst nightmares of anti-cult activists, who argue that NRMs such as Heaven’s Gate limit the freedoms of their members by enforcing bizarre sets of rules designed to force obedience to the group’s authorities and a suitable compliant membership. Such critics of NRMs have a point that these rules created a sense of obedience, and that members had to follow the instructions of their leaders to remain within the group. The movement actually made this approach quite explicit, spelling out such minor offenses as “[t]rusting my own judgment—or using my own mind” and “[r]esponding defensively to my classmates or teachers.”70 Yet members saw these rules as part of their process of overcoming their human desires for individualism and sensuality, and they looked to obedience of their leader as the primary way of identifying with part of a Next Level crew and living in the same way that the extraterrestrial members of the Next Level did. It must also be noted that not all of the initial adherents actually followed these rules at first, and that during the periods in which the founders were not present, a variety of alternative models of religious practice developed. However, upon Nettles’s decision to end proselytizing and the exertion of greater control by her and Applewhite, the practices upheld by the Two again became authoritative.
Members in fact saw their obedience of these rules as part of their membership in a monastic community dedicated solely to the development of their true selves and eternal salvation. Since Next Level beings always obeyed the commands of their superiors and lived in order to serve as part of a crew, so did members of Heaven’s Gate. The group explicitly compared themselves to a monastery, since monks and nuns in a variety of religious traditions—Christian and Buddhist especially—make similar sacrifices as part of their communities. Ex-members generally saw the regulations as helpful. In the words of Mrcody, the rules meant that members “no longer cared about the petty stuff, only cared about what was best for all. . . . It was being with the best individuals of my life. They really had your best interests at heart.”71 These regulations, in other words, freed individuals to focus on each other rather than themselves, but paradoxically because of the power of the community, members felt supported and freed from inconsequential concerns.
Initially Applewhite and Nettles offered few instructions on which religious practices one should follow, rather than just those to avoid. One former member from 1975 indicated that “they were also ordered to ‘keep a steady communication with members of the next level who are fathering you through the process.’”72 The ex-member could not say what this meant, and offered only some vague suggestions that it involved meditation or prayer. Even Applewhite and Nettles offered only ambiguous suggestions at this point in the group’s history. One must “establish a strong, direct line of communication with your Father,” they counseled.73
Years later Applewhite and Nettles would offer explicit advice as to how to connect to the Next Level. In a July 1982 class that the members of the movement recorded onto audio tape, Nettles makes clear that meditation served as the key to this process. “We want you to devote as much of your time to sitting in meditation,” she explained. “You’ll need to spend more and more of your time in meditation.” Nettles called for members to rush through their “lab work”—outside jobs that sustained the community’s finances—so as to focus as much time as possible on meditation.
The specific meditation that Nettles taught combined multiple influences, with some aspects clearly derived from the New Thought tradition—an American innovation emphasizing the power of mind and positive thinking—others from self-actualization techniques, and also a strand derived from Asian visualization techniques. “Imagine the light passing through your body. Imagining yourself in perfect health, perfect harmony, extremely relaxed. Try to place your eye at the top of your head. Concentrate on the spot right here at the top of the brain.” Nettles did not indicate how she had developed or derived her meditation technique, but her allusion to the Indian chakra system’s codification of the third eye and topmost chakra there combines with the New Thought approach of the power of positive thinking, and even the Western Christian tradition of visualizing the light of God. Regardless of Nettles’s sources, she and Applewhite clearly understood that they had drawn from different traditions in assembling these religious practices. Immediately after Nettles described the process, Applewhite explained, “We will have people sit straight up in a comfortable way with legs crossed, but that’s as Hindu as we are going to go.”74
The Two also offered general guidelines for how to act. They instructed members to strive to be gentle, simple, cautious, thoughtfully restrained, physically clean, and respectfully do tasks requested by other members of the group.75 These various forms of mood and affectation combine to form a religious practice that one might describe as docile monasticism, a gentle otherworldliness that members believed characterized beings of the Next Level and their leaders Nettles and Applewhite, and that members strove to emulate. Outsiders reported that Applewhite in particular seemed to radiate this sense of docile monasticism. Those with positive bias toward the group often described this tra
it in positive terms, while those predisposed toward negative bias characterized Applewhite’s affectation as dangerous or nefarious. One of the earliest ex-members to become a vocal critic described Nettles and Applewhite as possessing “an aura of love and understanding. The man, especially, had hypnotic eyes, although I can’t explain the thing by hypnosis.”76
Members sought to emulate this docile monasticism since they believed it represented the mood of the Next Level, what one might call Next Level habitus, defined by a gentle communitarianism and group-centered monastic dynamic. Smmody described the Next Level and its inhabitants as “a genderless, crew-minded, service-oriented world that finds greed, lust, and self-serving pursuits abhorrent.”77 Adherents of Heaven’s Gate therefore adopted rules and principles aimed at reproducing this form of gentle monastic presence in order to propel themselves toward this affectation.
Bodily and Mental Control
Eventually, Nettles and Applewhite—and then just Applewhite, after Nettles’s death—offered new religious practices meant to encourage members’ overcoming through a variety of bodily control techniques. Among these were various forms of diet. According to Applewhite and several members, adherents of Heaven’s Gate followed strict eating regulations throughout the group’s history, yet changed these regulations regularly. They did this in order to break their attachments to the very human tendency to enjoy eating and become attached to specific foods or styles of food.
Like the adherents of most religious communities, the production and consumption of food served an important role in the daily lives of members, and while specific diets varied from time to time, all members followed a single diet at any one time. These diets limited members’ intakes of certain foods, and overall they seemed designed to distance adherents from the enjoyment of eating and transform food and eating into a purely utilitarian act. Adherents also used food for purgative purposes, with former member Neoody reporting several diets that he describes as meant to purge members in both a physical and spiritual sense, including ones involving cayenne pepper drinks and enemas.78
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