Searching for God 1969 to 1980

I was thinking as I woke up this morning of 1969 to 1980 and my quest for God in my life then. In 1969 I was 21 and had just been excommunicated from the "I AM" Activity that my parents had joined (my mother in 1936 and my father around 1940). So when I was born in 1948 I was naturally just indoctrinated into my parents religion as well. So Saint Germain and Jesus became the basis of my spiritual life along with personal experiences with visibly seeing Achangel Michael and his band when I was 2.

So after being trained as a youth leader within the "I AM" activity that was run by Edna May Ballard after her husband passed away in 1939. Since my parents were in charge of the main "I AM" church in Los Angeles which at that time had about 1000 members so I came to know Mrs. Ballard quite well from the time I was 2 months old and played the part of the boy Jesus in 1960 in the "I AM Come" pageant of the Life of Christ present every summer in Mt. Shasta, California at their Amphitheater there. I also had parts of what they call Violet Flame Angels from 1963 until 1968 and in 1969 played the part of Archangel Gabriel who zaps open the tomb of Jesus while surrounded by other Archangels and many other angels.

Since I slowly developed the philosophy of: "God is where you find him, her, the being". This way of viewing the universe is not compatible with any organized religion if you speak about it to any minister. If you are quiet and don't say a word and don't make any waves you might still be able to survive in your church. However, for me, the truth must be spoken and written about and so I was asked to leave the church I was raised in.

I was young and very idealistic then whereas now at age 61 I would still call myself a pragmatic idealist. In other words 'do what works but still have lofty but practical ideals'.

So at age 21 I found myself without my thousands of church friends around the world and without an expanded world community that I had depended upon up until then. I was completely unprepared for "shunning" and many people die eventually from suicide under these conditions. However, it turned out I was made of stronger stuff than that and having to leave my childhood religion turned out to be the best thing that had ever happened to me in the long run.

I became my own person and capable of thinking my own thoughts and having my own ideas about everything and not limited in any way by any person, place or condition. It forced me to grow in amazing amazing ways in order to grow and to stay alive in spite of this horrid temporary knockdown. So though I was suicidal for about 2 years, within 5 years of this incident my son was born and I then had a reason to stay alive for him no matter what and I could completely put this incident behind me.

To say my life has been lonelier because of this incident would be true. However, instead of about 10,000 to 25,000 people being my center of the universe all life on earth and the universe became my center which is infinitely more expansive in scope and my understanding of God and life grew infinitely as well and will never stop growing.

So, in an enlightened sense I have lived "God is where you find him, her the Being" literally in every way every moment.

In 1975 when my son was about 1 year old my wife and I contacted her old boyfriend who had become a member of the Summit Lighthouse in Del Mar, California. He and his new girlfriend were living there at the Del Mar Center and studying under an older gentleman who lived there name Paul who was then in his 60s. In 1975 I was 27 and still fairly idealistic but practical enough to be a good husband and father to my son.

My father became interested also in the Summit Lighthouse and started buying their literature and recordings of dictations. In 1977 my marriage started to fall apart and so my mother and I went to Summit University for 3 months when it was located in Pasadena, California. At this time I met Elizabeth Clare Prophet formally even though I had met her once in Del Mar on the beach while she was swimming there. She was 9 years older than I. The second meeting she was wearing a sarape from Mexico and I watched her study me there in Pasadena as she was and is a very intuitive person like myself. She later said to my father and I, "I have found that my students who come from the 'I am Activity' tend to have psychological problems". That was her take on her transplanted students from the "I AM".

However, my point of view now would be that serious members of almost any religion are sort of "in their own world" and when you try to "change worlds" it can be very difficult no matter what they reason.

So, for me joining the Summit University with my mother was definitely a "change of worlds" for me.

The Summit at that time was very similar in teachings to the "I am Activity" in many ways. However, the main difference was that the "I AM Activity" had been persecuted as a religion at the beginning of World War II when Mr. Ballard had passed away. So it was still reeling from this public thrashing that had taken away about 90% of its members. So it is safe to say that they were no as open to sharing their teachings with everyone as the Summit Lighthouse was then since the Summit hadn't been persecuted as a religion yet.

So when I joined the Summit I saw all these young people like my self with advanced degrees. In other words Doctors, lawyers, nurses, successful Business people and a whole lot of people who had been very idealistic hippies before joining the Summit. However, most of the males cut their hair in order to appear more mainstream and to help the movement grow among all people which it did by leaps and bounds.

However, there was another side to the Summit of being a group that stayed together to sort of face together "The end of the World as we know it". So in this way it became eventually known as a doomsday cult. However, I don't think this is a completely fair assessment. However, they did go to Montana and buy about 2300 acres of land and then access geothermal energy there for generating their electrical power and then dig down and create nuclear fallout shelters and buy rifles then during the 1980s. However, this was only a very small minority of the people in the religion that did this.

I never believed the "end of the world was coming ever" simply because I had grown up with people who moved to places like Santa Fe, New Mexico and Denver during the 1930s and 1940s when they thought the world was going to end in "The Change". So I always thought this kind of thinking was a bunch of hooey.

My idea was, "NO. The world is not going to end. You are all just going to have to find a way to Cope with thousands and maybe millions of years of this!"

So that is where I still find myself. The world isn't going to end and even if it does it would be a long slow torturous death of the world that people directly cause by not dealing with things as they really are. Scientifically, that is very real!

After going to Summit University and putting my son in their Montessori school for one year he got Whooping Cough and so I left the Computer Staff and moved to San Diego with my parents to better take care of my son as a now single parent.

In 1980 I moved with my son to Mt. Shasta and married a lady with 2 children from her first marriage and we bought 2 1/2 acres of land there and built our home. Though I still went to a couple of Summit Lighthouse conferences at Camelot in Malibu Canyon I mostly started going off on my own and started studying with Native American Medicine Men and Women and then Tibetan lamas in California, Oregon, India and Nepal during the 1980s culminating with a 4 month pilgrimage to India and Nepal with my family (3 kids, the wife and I in 1985-6).