As written in Balch and Taylor, Applewhite grew up in a strict Presbyterian family, even studied for the ministry and as an occupation, he taught music at University of Alabama and St. Thomas University in Houston. Despite his upbringing, in 1972 he already started to question orthodox Christianity since he got fired from both of his tutor jobs due to an embarrassing scandal involving homosexual affairs. This was the time when he met Bonnie Lu Nettles who also had her problems in marital life.
In this period, probably caused by his inner struggle about getting to terms with his sexuality clashing with Christian morality, Applewhite spoke out his desire to overcome sexuality altogether. The two founders fit together perfectly as soul mates, devoting their lives for their revelations and the “higher cause”, addressing themselves as Bo and Peep (210).
Bo (Applewhite) and Peep (Nettles)
Their teaching centered on the thesis that extraterrestrial entities that visited ‘the garden’, Earth 2000 years earlier and saw that humanity was nor ‘ripe’, was not ready to ascend to the ‘level above human’, to serve as good containers for the souls of the Next Level, the level above human. Upon instruction, a member of the alien crew was left behind, to move into the body of Jesus, who was to be the receptacle of a Next Level representative. This gave the foundation of their belief system that they began to spread from the early 1970’s on (Reece 151).