Being Raised in the "I AM"

 "I AM" is a shortened way of saying I was raised in the Saint Germain Foundation but people outside of this worldwide religion often call it "The I AM".

From a psychological point of view we all are conditioned from birth into whatever culture and religion (if there is a religion) that we are raised in. So, this conditioning can be good or bad and is usually both.

I was lucky enough to have a very intelligent and kind Father and a very wonderful and intuitive kind mother and so I was lucky to grow up with amazing down to earth people like this in my life.

But, as we all know nothing in life is perfect and there are good and bad aspects to everything. And often trying to ferret out the good from the bad experiences can be difficult to impossible, simply because everyone has different value judgements about everything both in the U.S. and around the world.

So, often my way of putting this is that "The religious influences in my life were the best things and the worst things about my life growing up". This covers what is good, what could be good, what most people would see as bad and what is actually bad. As well this covers what is at best neutral and boring and difficult about life in general.

First of all, life in the 1950s (I was 2 to 12 years old from 1950 to 1960) was difficult at best for literally everyone on earth then. And I think I could say that this is still true today for everyone. It's just that the difficulties now are entirely different in many ways than the difficulties in the 1950s.

In the 1950s it was mostly about physical survival more than anything else. Psychological survival wasn't a thing if you were raised mostly blue collar like myself. It was completely about physical survival and hopefully you had a good family that would take care of you and not physically or sexually abuse you.

All kinds of abuse were much more common then in the 1950s but much less talked about than now. Talking about physical or sexual abuse could get you killed then but now it is a more acceptable topic of conversation than then. So, we have come a long way in dealing with the traumas of our lives at this point than we did then.

So, my experiences helped me to be functional (and dysfunctional) growing up in the religion I was raised in. Whenever you are raised in a religion that is smaller than the main ones often people see that smaller religion as a cult.

However, all religions are cults if you are serious about this topic. There are no religions that aren't cults. The main difference is ONLY the size of the religion people wise worldwide.

Everything in this small religion has likely changed a lot since 1969 when I left it. But, in the 1950s and 1960s until 1969 I was a part of this through my parents. At the time it was very conservative and patriotic and there were a lot of military officers, especially in the Navy and Air Force which makes sense because they were the ones who would have seen UFOs a lot (when they called them Foo Fighters) during World War II).

And this religion believed in Jesus and Mary his mother and Saint Germain and Archangel Michael and many others that they called "Ascended Masters".

However, if you were black  (at that time) 1950s and 1960s there were separate churches for black people from White People (even though Black "I AM" students often came to the Pageants in Mt. Shasta for the presentation of the "LIFE OF CHRIST" from birth to Ascension in August of every year since the 1940s now. So, this has been going on either in the City Park or at the present Amphitheater that my father helped build summers starting in 1953 when he and I went there for 6 weeks just the two of us and he electrically wired the Amphitheater at that time when I was 5. So, I was set loose with Boys 5 to 12 years old then for 6 weeks during the day to wonder the Shasta Springs so we often would go down the main trail from Shasta Springs to the Railroad Tracks and some boys would ride the freight trains to Mt. Shasta. You couldn't ride south to Dunsmuir because the trains were going downhill and going too fast to climb aboard them. But, sometimes the trains going uphill to the city of Mt. Shasta were going slow enough to grab the ladders on boxcars and climb aboard. However, I never saw the point of doing this mostly because then how are you going to get back to Shasta Springs because none of us under 12 could drive or owned cars then. And besides, my father would have been really mad at me if I had done this too. So, instead I did things like climb up on Railroads bridges to the top and let trains ride under me on the bridges instead. What I mean is this one bridge was a metal suspension bridge with metal girders with bolts you could use as a ladder to climb them and then you could watch the train go underneath north or south and watch the Sacramento River Below.

But, now in the 1970s and after the U.S. government forced the integration of all churches in the U.S. after I left the Saint Germain foundation in 1969. So now, all the "I AM" churches in the U.S. are also now integrated just like All Churches are legally by Law. I have no idea what happens though in England, France, Germany Switzerland, Australia or New Zealand where there are likely still "I AM" churches still worldwide and likely new places that didn't exist in 1969 when I left the organization.