Groups
Drawing on the three cases discussed in the preceding chapters, this chapter compares the process of group formation and the emergence of suprahuman entities and guidance processes, and extends the social identity approach to creativity to encompass suprahuman entities. It argues that Smith, Wilson, and Schucman played a distinctive role in mediating a first-person voice that they claimed was not their own. But their personal self-concept as mediator of something more than themselves cannot account for the formation of a new group around a newly revealed spiritual path. If an emergent group does not accept the presence of the suprahuman entities, no group will form and no path will emerge. Indeed, without group recognition, the individual claimant is likely to be perceived as eccentric, if not crazy. This means that the group itself is constituted in its own self-conception through its recognition of the presence of one or more suprahuman entities conveyed by and at the same time distinct from the humans who mediate them.