Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done about 625 of them now or something like that. So if this is new to you and you’d like to check out some of the previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll see them all categorized in various ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website. There’s also a page with some alternatives to PayPal. Donations page. OK, my guest today is Dr. Betty J. Kovacs. I always say this, but I just spent a very delightful week listening to many other interviews that Betty has done and listening to her two books. She’s written two books. The first is called “The Miracle of Death: There is Nothing but Life.” And then the second is called “Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That is Changing the World.” That book was the winner of the Nautilus Silver Book Award and the Scientific and Medical Network 2019 Book Prize. So we’re going to be talking about both of those and a lot of other things. Betty and I were just saying how this will be kind of a free-flowing conversation. We don’t know quite where it’s going to go, but I’m sure it’ll go someplace good. So–
Betty: Let’s hope.
Rick: Yeah. So Betty, rather than me read the bio that you sent me, because it’d be boring for people to listen to me read, why don’t you just off the cuff tell us a bit about yourself and your life and how you got interested in the kinds of things that we’re going to be talking about today?
Betty: Well, I think I’m like so many people in our time, is that I kept wondering if there isn’t something more to what I’m experiencing. Isn’t there something more to life than what I was told by the scientific worldview, that we’re simply– there’s nothing but matter. We’re a fluke of nature. There’s no meaning and no purpose. And when we’re dead, we’re dead? There couldn’t be a more destructive worldview. And I just always hoped that that wasn’t true, but it was presented as the truth because it was science after all.
Rick: Yeah. Let me just interrupt you. You know that school shooting that happened in Michigan a few weeks ago?
Betty: Yes, yes.
Rick: 15-year-old kid shot several of his fellow students. They discovered his notes that he had written down before he did this. And one of the notes was, “The world is dead.”
Betty: Oh.
Rick: You know, and that’s exactly what I thought of when you said that. And I remember a time when I was a teenager where the world looked dead to me, and it was extremely depressing. It certainly doesn’t now.
Betty: No, but we don’t know then what we know now. Yeah. I know so many people who have suffered so deeply because they couldn’t find meaning. They couldn’t find it. And we were just told, “Well, this is scientific. We know this is true.” We learned later, of course, that science was limited by the Roman church at that time to the study only of matter. So what we have is a very limited science until, of course, quantum physics. Thank God, as Paul Levy says, “This is our collective dream to heal ourselves.” It’s a much vaster science. But as a young person, that’s the message I heard. Of course, there was also the religion message. But when, and I went to church. My parents didn’t, but my brother and I always found a church wherever we lived. And we went to church and we heard wonderful stories about a man called Jesus and how he was ethical and honest and loving and wanted a world that we all longed for. But gradually I couldn’t accept the religion because I didn’t want to just believe it. I wanted to know it. I wanted to experience it myself. So I lived with these two worldviews. For the religion story, there was meaning because if you lived in a certain way and believed in a certain way, there would be a beautiful continuation of life later. But I needed to experience that. So here were these two world views. So I went to university to try to find out what’s going on anyhow. I remember my brother, when we were kids, we played all day and we would try to discover everything. What if there wasn’t a tree? Well, what if there wasn’t a world we’d play? And so it was, we’d close our eyes, squint our eyes and say over and over again, “What if there wasn’t a world?” There wasn’t, until we could actually get to a feeling that there was nothing. And then the world came flowing back in on us. But my brother then went up to my mother one day and he said, “You know what? “When I get to heaven, “I’m just gonna walk right up to God. “I’m gonna just ask him, how come all this anyway?” And I think that’s the question that, that we were children, children have it, young people have it. And I have seen people who become addicted to anything because they can’t find that meaning in life that they need or they’re fanatics or there’s aggression and violence. And that usually very often, one of the worst forms of that response is since we don’t have that empowerment inside us, we want to control the world. And that’s part of the decay that is a result of 2,600 years of censorship. So that was kind of the world. I always wanted to try to find out what’s going on anyway. I studied in university and then I went to Peru, worked with shamans there and went to Europe. I went to Russia, worked with shamans. It’s just always was a search. It was when our son died that those visions really came through. And I understood so much more than I had before.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack in everything you just said. You know how religions in the West are often referred to as faiths. What’s your faith? I’m of the Christian faith or I’m of the Jewish faith or whatever. In the East, they would never refer to religions that way because they had the kind of experiential orientation that you were just alluding to. There was no emphasis on what you should believe. There’s something you can experience and okay, here’s how to do it, XYZ. Go follow these steps. So that to my mind is a very scientific approach. It’s empirical. You can believe certain things hypothetically, but only as sort of targets that you might want to try to hit. But the emphasis is always on experiencing the thing. There’s very little value placed on believing something for belief’s sake.
Betty: That’s right. So many people just can’t accept that. So many people can, and it helps them. It gives them something to hope for, but it’s not the same as experience. But that was the trouble. In the West, we had that same experiential, the Gnostic tradition of experiencing. But because these cultures were suppressed, they became religions in which you believe something and I will tell you what you should believe. But in 40,000 BCE, shamanism erupted all around the world and we had learned how to trigger that consciousness into a vaster state. I love how Bergson and Aldous Huxley say, “We are all born out of universal mind. We are all cosmic consciousness, but we have that valve that limits it to a stream so that we can live ordinary consciousness daily life.” But at 40,000 BCE, we learned how to release that valve so that we could experience who we are. They formed cultures, which I did not know. I think we didn’t know a lot of this until the last century. Scholars discovered the depths of some of these cultures that had just been dismissed. We know that the cave cultures knew how to experience at least the other dimension of reality. We don’t know if they really could experience Kundalini in its full development, but we know that Egypt certainly had a very powerful spiritual tradition and we know they experienced this complete rise of Kundalini because of the symbols of the serpent at the third eye. And the First Temple tradition of Judaism, and thanks to Margaret Barker, and Peter Kingsley tells us they were great shaman, mystic healers among the pre-Socratic philosophers, but they were suppressed and we didn’t even know about them until the 20th century. But the West had a spiritual tradition that was suppressed and repressed for centuries.
Rick: Okay, two main points I’d like you to elaborate on in what you just said. One is, I don’t think most of us realize that profound spirituality existed 40,000 years ago. Although, there’s some traditions in the East that trace, I mean, for instance, if you believe in the theory of the Yugas in Hinduism, they say there were highly advanced civilizations millions of years ago, but I don’t know if we have any evidence of those, but ’cause we’re taught to think in school when we were kids and all that, oh, 40,000 years ago, people were very primitive and they were bopping each other over the head with clubs and just, they didn’t know anything compared to us.
Betty: It was us who didn’t know.
Rick: Yeah, so can you embellish a bit how we now know, or you believe we now know, that these people were spiritually advanced so long ago?
Betty: Yes, well, I think there’ve been many scholars who’ve worked with them, and I’m very grateful for their knowledge in assessing what happened. But for instance, in the cave cultures, for so long, scholars couldn’t figure out what was going on, and they had all kinds of theories. Yet, when you go into those caves, if the person who knows a little bit even about shamanism, you certainly get the feeling some visuals were going on here. They were experiencing something. Then thanks to David Lewis Williams, an archeologist in South Africa, who had worked with the San Bushmen, and he understood their rock art, which expresses many of their experiences in altered states. He saw that this was also happening in the cave cultures in Europe. And he, with Jean Claude, wrote a book on the shamanism of cave cultures. When they went the next summer to work with the other scholars in the caves, nobody would even mention it. Or finally, they mentioned it with a chuckle. But this is the problem, is that, even when these things are discovered, there’s so much evidence to support it. The scholars and the universities usually have a very hard time being open to it. But I am grateful for those scholars, and there are other scholars in other fields who discovered, for instance, Alison Roberts in the Egyptian culture. So much more is available now. Jeremy Nadler, who saw that the pyramid texts were actually texts, not just for the dead pharaoh, but for that merging of the consciousness of life here and birth and life in the other world, that they called it the merging of birth and death in the consciousness of the pharaoh. They are so profound. Thank God for those scholars. As I said, Margaret Barker and Peter Kingsley, and others, they’ve just done a wonderful job in looking deeply into the consciousness that they had achieved, that we didn’t know about.
Rick: Yeah, and the second thing I wanted you to embellish on, you’ve actually led up to it quite nicely here, and that is this repression business. It seems that we have a history in the West, in modern times, of arrogance, really. The assumption that we are kind of the cutting edge of humanity, and there’s never been anything as advanced as us, and all these ancient cultures were primitive. I mean, look, you’ve alluded to the church several times, and that has a rather bloody history of suppressing and destroying indigenous cultures. Even now, I mean, the commercial and scientific destruction of the rainforest, for instance, in order to extract minerals and whatever else they’re looking for. There’s just this attitude of, it’s kind of like manifest destiny in a way, but on the level of commercialism. It actually kind of relates to what you were saying earlier. The world being alive versus dead. If our basic worldview is that the world is just stuff, then it seems like we should be able to do whatever we want with this stuff.
Betty: Why not exploit it?
Rick: You know, it’s dead. Yeah, it’s just dead stuff. But if we see the world as divine, then we wouldn’t dream of destroying all the animals in the rainforest and all this other stuff, because we’re kind of cutting our own body, as it were.
Betty: It’s a terrible illness. I think we have a hard time understanding that Western culture is pathological because it has suppressed the wisdom, the ancient wisdom of who we are. When we do that, I think one of the symptoms, we were talking about other things when we don’t have that empowerment within, is one of the major problems, forms of pathology is this arrogance. When you go within and you experience, you couldn’t possibly be arrogant. You know, you’re so delighted to see every living thing is loving in a part of itself and each other, and arrogance couldn’t play a role. But when we don’t know that, arrogance is dominant. That’s what we’ve seen in Western culture and in the universities. We see it in politics. We see people who need to play God in the garden of life and say who belongs there and who doesn’t and how it should be run and who’s in control. They also see people as flawed. This is a very, very important thing because in 621 BCE, before that, as Margaret Barker has shown and other scholars too, the First Temple Judaism was a shaman mystic tradition. The stories tell us that Solomon actually had been initiated in Egypt in the death and rebirth mysteries, which were very powerful mysteries. He formed the temple. In that First Temple, of course, was the Holy of Holies. It was there that the priest experienced wisdom, the feminine dimension of the divine. In the sacred marriage, he integrated soul into himself and had this wisdom. But in 621 BCE, the Deuteronomists changed that. They said they found a text within the temple and that they were going by that. They got rid of all of the images of the feminine, of the sacred feminine dimension of the divine, which is nature and which is the heart and soul wiped out. The tree was her symbol. She had groves and groves of trees, which they burned down. They destroyed every image and they got rid of all the sacred literature. Some Jews took it to Egypt, thank God, but she was wiped out. So that was one of the first horribly severe forms of suppression. Margaret Barker shows how the Jesus myth or the Jesus story is a rebirth of that ancient First Temple tradition because he is a shamanistic. But of course, then that was changed by different people having different ideas. Then the Roman church came in and they inverted the Jesus story. No, this was not what we found out that Jesus was teaching in early Christianity. This is about a God who was born on earth. If you believe him and you worship him, you can go to heaven and have a continuation of life. But the shamanistic tradition, which we find in the Nag Hammadi text, which were found right after World War II, but had been buried so the church wouldn’t destroy them because the church would destroy anything that showed the true Jesus. In those texts, it’s very clear that he is telling us, “I didn’t come to save you. “I didn’t come to die for your sins. “I came to remind you of who you are.” He even had, he encouraged the ritual that would help us to experience that vastness that we are. As he said, “When you drink from my mouth, you and I are one, do not follow the Christ, become the Christ.” But the church inverted that. So we lost it again. So here were these severe forms of suppression that lasted for centuries. The story from Deuteronomy of who we are is the most dreadful story anybody could imagine with the fall of man. I mean, that is the most horrible story that even if we don’t believe it, and most people don’t, it’s in our consciousness and it has informed our belief about ourselves.
Rick: You know, everything in creation goes in cycles, night and day and years and galaxies coming into existence and eventually fizzling out and everything goes in cycles. I heard one explanation from a spiritual teacher that I once had. He spoke of it in terms of natural law. You and I will talk about that because I’ve heard you talk a lot about laws of nature, but he said that if you think of natural law, you can sort of think of it as dharma or in the “Tao Te Ching” Lao Tsu talks about how a society can be very in tune with the Tao and this very harmonious and there’s no strife and no crime and all that, but then it can also, the Tao or the natural law can decline. And so anyway, this teacher talked about it sort of declining gradually over a long period of time. Then when it reaches its nadir, kind of zooming up in one generation to its full value again, that it’s not gonna take as long to come back up as it did to decline. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that, but the reason I thought about that or wanted to mention it is just that it seems that this whole violence, oppression of inner life and of mystical traditions and so on and so forth has, had devastating consequences for the world in terms of what the world has become today. And it can’t go on any longer. We can’t actually afford to take a couple thousand years for it to be restored. It has to be kind of abrupt comparatively speaking. Many people, and I’ve heard you allude to this as well, feel that we are in a very transitional pivotal time and we might be on the verge of a huge shift. So please comment on the things I just said, then we can explore that further.
Betty: Well, these shaman mystic cultures that did try to live with the Tao, which is their way of saying, we must know the laws of nature and walk in harmony with those laws. And the great megalithic structures were to understand the rhythms and experience of rhythms of nature, the solstices, the equinoxes and so on. That the human being was the mediator between those rhythms of the cosmos and the human, the Earth. So we were mediators. So yes, it was walking with the Tao and these cultures that knew that, but were suppressed did come up. They went underground, but they kept emerging in Western history four times. This is the fifth time. Each of those four times, it was brilliant, but they couldn’t develop. They were squashed once again, and yet they’re underground. Now today, I think it’s the most pervasive awakening that we’ve had, but we are also up against the darkness that has developed because of that suppression and repression. I mean, here are children, you might say, who had been bequeathed a toxic text that is not sacred. That what the Deuteronomist taught us, that we were flawed, we were sinners, and that we will go, when we’re dead, we’re dead, and encourage the unconsciousness.
Rick: Dead, we’re dead. So now that I’m not familiar, I’ve read the Bible, but I can’t remember what it says in Deuteronomy, but maybe you were alluding to dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
Betty: Yes.
Rick: Yeah. Now, doesn’t that just refer to the body though? Because obviously our bodies will decay once they die, but even the teaching of the Bible is that you don’t die when you die, although I think that their options are rather limited in terms of what actually does happen to you after you die. (both laughing)
Betty: And yes, I think it does, this dust to dust. You are from the dust and you will return to the dust. Well, that’s not quite accurate, that we’re from the dust and we’ll return to it. It’s stated within the context, and I should actually say about the story I’m talking about the tree of life in the garden of life, Eden, in which God says of all the other trees you may eat, but you may not eat of the tree of life, which is not called life, but called the tree of good and evil. Well, he leaves, Eve partakes of the tree, gives it to Adam because the serpent is there telling her, you really won’t die, you know, he’s just telling you that. So here’s this dreadful story in which God comes back. First of all, he’s told them tree of good and evil, tree of consciousness. He wants them to remain unconscious. And so then he punishes them for this. It’s a wretched story that he punishes them and tells the woman, you will suffer in childbirth, and yet you will desire your husband. And the woman should be beneath the man. That of course is completely the opposite of what our blueprint tells us, that in the holy of holies, we are equal. We come together in the sacred marriage and know we are to eat of the tree. And let’s see, what is the other thing I had them? We’re not to become like God. Well, if we eat of the tree, we know we’re divine. So everything there, nature is cursed. Now, if they are referring to just the body, one could get confused about it because first of all, we don’t come from dust, you know? And the question is exactly, what are they talking about? If somewhere down the line, they say we live, what is this all about? It’s one of the most negative derogatory things we could imagine, both of nature and of ourselves. But in the earlier tradition, which they’ve distorted, if we even go back to the Sumerian, in the book, I have a beautiful tree in which the fruit is just hanging on it. And the God is sitting on one side, the Goddess on the other with her Kundalini serpent behind her. They both are offering the fruit to anyone willing and able to take it. And there are even trees in which the initiative is brought to the tree. And there’s someone there who takes the fruit off the tree and hands it to the initiate. Then in the First Temple tradition, I haven’t seen the actual images. That was long before the Deuteronomist said that there could be no images. I haven’t seen these images, but the descriptions are absolutely incredible that the tree has the light of the sun. It is the burning tree with the feminine within it who gives birth in the holy of holies. And this tree has the fragrance of the incense of the holy of holies. It even says, she says, her name is Wisdom, queen of heaven. “If you work with me, you will not sin. And if you hold me fast, you will have joy.” So it’s exactly what we should do. Of course, in Egypt, there are many, many images of trees in which the feminine, the tree is always feminine. She is always giving the fruit. There are many images of that. So this was such a turnaround in culture, but that’s the only thing I grew up with was that dreadful story. I always thought there was something demented about it, but I couldn’t figure out what. So now we understand this. We’re getting the knowledge of Sumer, of First Temple tradition, of Egypt and so on. So we begin to realize there has always been this deep, deep stream of wisdom of who we are, that we are immortal, divine, and creative. That’s what the message was from eating the tree.
Rick: A couple of thoughts come to mind. One is that, you know, I’ve often felt like the problem with religion, the reason it became so repressive and so closed off to mystical experiences is that kind of administrative types took over. They weren’t the mystics, and they didn’t understand what the mystics were talking about. They therefore had a superficial experience of the very scriptures that they were supposed to be the custodians of. And so they repressed the mystics, or in many cases, murdered them. So that’s one theme. Another thing, based on what you were just saying, is perhaps you can correlate what I just said with the fact that the feminine was cast out. So there’s something very non-feminine about rejecting mystical dimensions of life and just sort of being dogmatic and rigid about some kind of literal interpretation of a text that you don’t fully understand to begin with, and then kind of grasping onto as much power as possible and doing whatever you can to maintain that power and so on. I mean, am I kind of doing justice to perhaps the psychology of why we’ve ended up in the mess we have?
Betty: I think so. We know that Constantine wanted a religion that would hold his empire together. So it was a business deal, you might say, from the beginning. But there was a tradition of Christianity that was different from that. And we are told that there was a hidden tradition that Jesus taught, which was this Gnostic experience of the vast consciousness that we are. But the church, the people who formed the church and were in the church, they had heard about these people, but they themselves had not had the experience in the main. So they thought they were lying or crazy or whatever the heretics, when they were the Gnostics. But there were the mystery schools and there were always were those who were told the stories, the symbolic stories about what we are and what we can experience. Then there were those who actually went for the initiation and experienced it. So I think the church heard the stories and they preserved some of the stories, but I think you’ve exactly described them. They had an organization to run. They wanted more people. They wanted this throughout the empire and they wanted control and power through the church. So it lost the living image and the living myth that we are to become the Christ. Oh no, that won’t work because then we won’t have a church.
Rick: Yeah, and another thing on that is that to a person who only experiences themself as a limited individual, to say that we can become the Christ sounds egotistical because they think that the person is referring to their individuality, which is what they would be referring to. But actually the mystic is not referring to his individuality. He or she is referring to his or her universal nature. But someone who can’t even conceive of universal nature, much less experience it, is going to perceive them as being egotistical.
Betty: Exactly, that was the big problem is who do they think they are?
Rick: Yeah.
Betty: It’s without knowing that potential within us. And today there are people who need to transhumanize us because we’re flawed. They’re still living out the old Deuteronomy story. And so they still, without realizing it, and also the limited science, but there is the feeling that we’re flawed and they must do something about it. So I think that when the church looked at the people saying that, I mean, they thought, well, they’re flawed, they’re egotistical, what’s wrong with them?
Rick: People who lacked access to inner experience, you can understand why they would begin to orient themselves around mere belief. Because, I mean, have I ever experienced the dark side of the moon? Well, no, but I believe it’s there, but I haven’t experienced it. Or many other things, angels or heaven or anything else. If I don’t have experiential access to those realms, then they become matters of belief or disbelief. If your whole worldview is built up around the importance of these things, then it’s a life or death issue, whether or not you believe in them. Oh, if you don’t believe in them, you’re going to hell. If you do believe in them, you’re going to heaven. But again, the yogi or the mystic would say, yeah, why are you making such a fuss about belief? Get onto the experience and belief will be a moot point.
Betty: It’ll be a moot point, but it’s like that in the university too. If you don’t believe what science tells you, then you’re ignorant. How can you be in the university if you don’t? So we have these belief systems all over the place. I’m thinking too about having a vital living culture that’s scientific and spiritual at once, and then it goes down. All I know to say about that is that it seems to me, the older I am, that this has to be worked at all the time, that we have to, on a daily basis, keep our connection to spirit alive. That’s what ritual, a lot of ritual, is to help us to be conscious of it. Otherwise it does go down. So it could well be that there are these cultures that really have the world they want, and then we take it for granted.
Rick: Regarding science, Aldous Huxley said that, in his opinion, the greatest gift of the scientific revolution was the development of the working hypothesis. In other words, you don’t need to believe anything in particular. You could take any idea and hold it as a hypothesis that’s perhaps amenable to exploration, and maybe it’ll pan out, and maybe it won’t, but it’s kind of irrelevant whether or not you believe in it. I guess the idea is you want to form hypotheses that you have some hope of exploring, but that’s a big departure from the Middle Ages in which you could get, well, like that Bruno guy, I forget his first name, got burned at the stake for suggesting that the stars are their suns like our own, and they might even have planets with people on them.
Betty: He really, he had a much deeper understanding, and it sounded frivolous to the ones around him, but he was part of that emergence for the third time just before the Rosicrucian Enlightenment in Prague, and he was one of the scientists, mystics, who saw in an advanced way, but oh my Lord, when he talked about it, he sounded like he surely was demented. And of course he had to be burned because he wasn’t telling the truth. But then those scientists in old Bohemia or Prague, they were scientists, they were mystics, they were engineers, they were poets, and they wanted to create a world, a civilization in which everybody could experience who they are. An enlightenment for the whole world is what they wanted. They got power for a very short period of time, but then the church moved in on them and destroyed their papers, their research, their towns. It was just such a destruction. Then a battle between the Protestants and Catholics for 30 years, and after that, when the Royal Society for Science was developed in 1660, the church made it very clear, you can only study matter. None of this mystical business, that’s all heretical. That’s how we got a very limited science that has almost destroyed us.
Rick: Yeah, this theme interests me a lot. Initially the church resisted even studying matter, it seems to me, like Galileo got in a lot of trouble for developing a telescope and suggesting that Jupiter had moons and the church authorities wouldn’t even look at his through his telescope. (coughs) But I guess, and then he got put on house arrest, of course, but I guess the church realized that they had to usurp or give up some of their territory, astronomy, for instance, because there was so much proof that the actuality was different than the theology. But then I guess what you’re saying is they forbade scientists from any study of something more subjective or mystical or esoteric.
Betty: Yes, because some of the scientists who actually were in England and a part of this Royal Society had been a part of the mystic scientific society that had been destroyed. The church was very afraid of the study of consciousness and wouldn’t have put it in that way, but the study of any inner reality. I think, first of all, they didn’t know, they didn’t understand it and they were afraid of it, but it would take their power away. Then of course later, when matter itself became quite phenomenal, they couldn’t take that either. Anything that would disrupt the power and the structure of the church. Yet I always feel the need to say that there were teachers within the church who were loving and kind and compassionate. I went to a Christian college and then I got a scholarship to go back for a master’s degree in American studies. In that college, they knew I didn’t believe after the first year or so. They were very respectful of my search and encouraged it and nurtured it. Still today, that college is closer to my heart than later universities I went to because they were loving and kind, compassionate and let me be free to find what I could find.
Rick: Of course the church has produced, I don’t know if the church produced people like St. Teresa of Avila or St. Joseph of Cupertino or St. John of the Cross, or just somehow tolerated them, but somehow such people arose within the context of the church and they had to mind their Ps and Qs very often or they’d get in trouble. But it did provide a context in which some very saintly people have lived.
Betty: Oh, absolutely. The first Renaissance, after 700 years of such deep suppression and repression and just one had to toe the line, after 700 years of that in Europe, here was this incredible flowering in the high Middle Ages. What I love about it is that when there was this awakening, we realized what was wrong is that we were missing this feminine aspect of ourselves, of nature, of heart, of soul, the feminine herself had been suppressed and there was just this flowering. I mean, even chess changed and made the feminine more important.
Rick: Really, they changed the rules of chess?
Betty: Well, I don’t know anything about chess except they changed one of the characters into a woman instead of the male before, I don’t know. But at any rate, the men wore more feminine clothing. Then of course, the Parsifal stories or the stories of the grail is all of the King Arthur’s court seeing a vision of the grail and all streaking out in different directions into the forest, into the darkness of who they are to find the grail, which is exactly what was missing, that inner sustenance of soul, symbolized in the feminine as well. They’re all looking for the feminine, who is the grail, that heart and soul of who we are. But it was so incredibly beautiful that when it did arise again, we knew what our illness was. The masculine, he doesn’t really, in terms of Parsifal, he doesn’t know anything about how to relate to women. He just stumbles around and makes mistakes. But this is great because that’s where we were and where we usually are when we begin our journey. We don’t know what we’re doing, but at any rate, we show up. And that was Parsifal. It’s always a story about the woman. I love the story about, I don’t remember which night it was, who married this beautiful woman. It was a beautiful wedding. Oh, everyone just thought, oh, this is amazing, this woman that he has married. They went back to their room on the wedding night and suddenly she’s a wretched hag.
Rick: Oh yeah, I remember that story.
Betty: Remember that story? And he’s horrified, of course. And she says to him, “You have the choice. I can be beautiful at court, or I can be a hag at night, or I can be a hag in court and beautiful for you at night.” So yeah, it’s Sir Gawain and the loathly lady. Kim just handed me the book, yeah.
Rick: What did he choose? I forget.
Betty: Okay, this is the real secret. He says, “That should be your choice, my lady.”
Rick: Ah. (laughing) Smart man. (laughing)
Betty: And that’s what these men had to learn all the way. How do we listen to the feminine? How do we ask her the heart, the soul? Yeah, I love those stories.
Rick: And did it turn out that she, because he answered it that way, she was beautiful all the time?
Betty: I think so.
Rick: I think that’s how it turned out.
Betty: I think so, yeah. Yeah, that was the case, that she was her beautiful self.
Rick: Right, right.
Betty: No, because it was the lack of knowing by the masculine that had made her the hag.
Rick: Yeah, interesting. Now, you mentioned a while ago that there had been four spiritual renaissances throughout known history. Correct me if I’m getting this wrong, and that we now may be in the fifth. Am I right so far?
Betty: Yes, yes.
Rick: Okay. Now, one thing I would say that distinguishes this one from the others is that the cat is really out of the bag this time. I mean, the church doesn’t have any kind of authority anymore. We have the internet, and stuff that used to be like secret esoteric knowledge is just available with a few clicks. So, I don’t know. I think this one’s gonna be different. It would be very hard to repress.
Betty: I hope that’s true, and I think it is. I think that what we’re up against this time is the results of all of those, when the high Middle Ages, that suppression was incredibly bad, and killing, and murdering, and then slaughtering of women, and destroying so much that had been built. And then, well, there was the Italian Renaissance. There were, for instance, like Pico della Mirandola, he actually saw that Kabbalah and these underground traditions were the source of who we are, and that it would take the place of all religions, or all religions could belong to it. Well, they couldn’t. But if they could see it as the spiritual path for all life, they could. But he was such a brilliant man. And always, it hurts my heart to think about him and how we destroy so many young people this way, because he had that insight that that Renaissance needed. He was brilliant. He could memorize every book that he had read in Greek and Latin. And he had a strange mind. He could even recite them backwards, so we’re told. I mean, I don’t even understand that kind of mind.
Rick: Autistic savant or something. Rain man.
Betty: And he started reading about these underground traditions and all of the traditions in Europe. He decided, we will have all of these sages and great men come to Rome, and they will discuss it. And he wrote, I think it’s called 900 Theses, to get ready for that conference, to invite these. This would have been a real Renaissance, because in Italy, so much was happening. Well, he went to Rome to get it printed. Well, he obviously wasn’t very diplomatic, and he was quite flamboyant. Of course, when the Pope found out, he said, “No, you cannot print this. You cannot have the conference.” And he put Pico in prison. This is the kind of thing that’s happened again and again. So, we have today, I think, the consequences of this kind of treatment again and again and again. We’ve really got to understand what we’re up against. What does it mean of the plans that are being made for us? We really have to be aware of that. I think that to deepen ourselves in our spiritual practice so that we can confront, because these, as I said before, this thinking, the decay, you might say, is a result of this suppression. They are part of the human species, a brilliant part sometimes, sometimes not, but they have plans for us. So, there’s that darkness, that decay, that we need to really understand. Again and again, we see that the only way that we can deal with this now, I think the consciousness is here to great degree, is that it has to be through love. It has to be through that understanding of what has happened. When you started out with that, I mean, I just, always when I hear those stories, it makes me want to cry to think what we do to our children. Then we give them these stories and expect them to live with it. And I think that what we’re bringing back today are our true stories. No, the Deuteronomy story is not. That’s a political power story. Look at those beautiful trees, the description in the First Temple tradition, or the ones from Sumer, or the ones from Egypt. They’re absolutely beautiful. The descriptions from the Hebrew tradition and all of our other stories, I think that’s what can give us strength, but that’s the sacred text we need to give to our children. They need to know, we must give that text to them in whatever way we can, so they won’t kill themselves and others.
Rick: Yeah, well, these days, I started on my spiritual path in the late ’60s and have stuck to it. It was a little unusual in those days, I mean, being a meditator and doing yoga and that kind of thing. These days it’s in corporate boardrooms and there are yoga centers in every town and so on. I used to teach meditation and there would be opposition from fundamentalist Christians and all, especially when there was some effort to get it taught in the schools. But really the church doesn’t have the kind of authority that it did in the Middle Ages. Obviously they can use legal means to prevent such things from being taught in schools and even prisons perhaps. But it seems to be continuing to gain momentum, this sort of spiritual renaissance and interest in enlightenment and all such topics. I don’t know what could stop it this time. I’m a lot more optimistic than I would have been several hundred years ago.
Betty: Yes, well, during the high Middle Ages though, the church was, I think perhaps before it really caught on, but there were those in the church and members of the church who were so willing to put the money forth and do whatever they could to build these magnificent cathedrals all over Europe and in France and to build these cathedrals to Our Lady, which is to our soul. In the form of probably Virgo, the constellation, which would have been what Egypt did always to bring onto the ground what is in the skies. And they had the Beguine women who were not a part of the church, but they were very powerful women who supported themselves and many of them were mystics. And then the Cistercian monks and others, there were so many things going on in the building of this labyrinth so that you walk the journey. And when you’re in the center, you’re right at the center of the rose window. You were at the center where Mary is holding the birth of the higher self. Of course there was the teaching for 200 years at Chartres within the church. It’s a strange thing that it was within the church that the Renaissance of Christianity actually took place and the hidden tradition that Jesus taught was taught. These masters actually taught not only logic and intellectual thought, but how to enter into an altered state of consciousness. I just wanted to try to make a little bit clear how the church itself was the secret tradition that Jesus taught. It became that in so many ways, at least within certain areas. That even just outside the church, there were mystics and so many people who were experiencing this. They knew that it was the heart that was the core, the heart of consciousness, and that the only way that we could heal the world, that’s what they were thinking at that time, how do we heal this darkness? But they knew that it was the heart and that the whole body would become the frequency of the heart. That’s the way they would distill the darkness into light. There were some pretty powerful mystics at that time. So even when the church caught on as to what was going on, of course, they put a stop to it, but until they did, it’s interesting, like a phoenix, the hidden tradition grew within the cathedral itself.
Rick: Yeah. I was just thinking of Dylan’s song, “The Times They Are Changing.” I wanted to just, just pulled up the lyrics here. “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land “and don’t criticize what you can’t understand. “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. “Your old road is rapidly aging. “Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand “for the times they are changing.” So, you keep mentioning the church and I keep thinking, it’s not the problem that it once was because it’s kind of lost its oomph. I mean, church attendance of every denomination is diminishing and diminishing and younger people are so open-minded and they accept LGBT and all kinds of other issues that were once verboten in the church or still are in some churches. I just think that the pace and the profundity of change that’s taking place in the world is not going to be able to be thwarted by any church at this point.
Betty: Oh, I don’t think it will be the church. No, I agree with you.
Rick: So, what will it be, if anything?
Betty: Well, I think that there are, it might be a little bit more difficult to see it, but I think that if we look at anything that is happening that does not nurture the development of the human being, then we can detect what it is that might want power over us. I think we do have to look clearly. I mean, the power structure of corporations and foundations and government. I mean, we always need to ask the questions, is what is happening nurturing to the children, to the people? And if not, then what is going on and how can we work? Not for a moment do I think it’s going to be the church now. It was then, and even then, so many phenomenal things happened, although it was suppressed once again. But I just think that there are many wounded people like the young boy. And when we’re that wounded, we can, you brought it up before we started, that wonderful saying of Jesus, as teachings in the Nag Hammadi text, that if we bring forth what is within us, what we bring forth will heal us. But if we do not bring it forth, what we don’t bring forth will destroy us. And I think that’s what we see. We see young people sometimes just, they just explode. They kill others, they kill themselves. Then we see others who really think science is the only answer, the kind of science that was in the 17th century and that the human being is flawed and we can take care of this. We are the gods in the garden now. So we have to look carefully at that. Many people are very brilliant who are working to, how can we make this world better? How can we make the human being better? How can we make society better? And they’re doing it like God did in the Garden of Eden. That’s their model. So I think that could be what will slow us down. But I love your optimism. And I think that we have to work at it. That was like my husband was totally optimistic. I mean, he said, “No, this doesn’t happen until we’re ready. This kind of light that’s coming with the masters of light or the merchants of light, this energy field, that happens when we are going to heal.” So he was very optimistic and I liked that. And I think it’s probably correct, but I think we have to work at it every moment. And those in our species who’ve been damaged by these false stories, they are our responsibility to understand and to heal. It’s within our human species’ psyche, I think.
Rick: Yeah, I agree. I was thinking of Ray Kurtzweil when you were talking about that. He’s the guy who wants to figure out, I mean, others want to do this too, but they want to figure out how to upload your mind to the cloud or something so that when your body dies, you will still exist. Or, and then there’s all these efforts to sort of replace organs with bionic components and so on. So as to keep the body living as if this is what we are, which again is absurd from a more cosmic perspective.
Betty: That’s why I wanted to say death is a miracle, the miracle of death, that we can actually leave this body and be born in another dimension of reality again. that’s a miracle in and of itself. I prefer that to staying in this body forever. But I think some of the dangers are people who, interspecies, who see us as flawed, the human being is flawed. I can fix you now. Well, I think Greg Braden says it very well, is that if we enhance what is human, the essential, spiritual human, if we enhance that, that’s good. But if we change what is essentially our humanity, then that’s not so good. Because what these people have not known because they haven’t received our true stories is that we are capable of experiencing the cosmos that gave us birth. We need to work with who we are and how to awaken that. But if there is someone who says, “But wait a minute, you’re flawed. “And I have nano-medicine, I can gene edit, “I have artificial intelligence, I can trans-humanize you, “I can make a better world.” Well, we need a little debate on that. Will it be a better world? But we don’t want to lose our essential spiritual humanity.
Rick: Yeah, this is an interesting topic. When this kind of topic comes up, I always feel that we have to be really nuanced in our thinking, because you can throw the baby out with the bathwater, you can say, “Oh, science is bad.” You know, or what the, you know, the pharmaceutical companies are all evil or something like that. It’s just too black and white. You have to kind of, obviously there’s corruption in every field of life and every corporation, every major corporation whose products we use, such as Google and Apple and the car companies and every other have been sued for something, you know, that has some wrongdoing. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t use their products necessarily, or that everything they have done is bad. So I see a lot of that, which is why I’m bringing it up. A lot of people dismissing everything that some whole sector of the economy does, because there’ve been some bad apples in that sector.
Betty: No, no, but the true intelligence differentiates better than that.
Rick: Yeah. I think that, you know, if this technology can help me walk again.
Rick: Yeah, there you go.
Betty: Yeah, then that’s what we want.
Rick: Or if they could figure out how to repair a ruptured spinal cord or something like that, so the person is no longer paralyzed, marvelous.
Betty: Absolutely. I go to get a shot in my eye every eight weeks and I can see, I can still drive. If I did not have that, I would be going blind. So, you know, both allopathic medicine and natural medicine saved my life again and again, all of it. But I think that’s the focus is that we want to, we need to know what is the essential, you know, self? What is the soul, the spirit, the heart? Let’s work to enhance that because our ancestors tell us, look, we can experience cosmic consciousness. Let’s work on focusing on enhancing what we have, because our ancestors knew we are divine and immortal already.
Rick: I absolutely agree, yeah. And you know, Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven within “and all else shall be added unto thee.”
Betty: Yeah, yeah. But that’s the first.
Rick: That’s the bottom line, right. That’s the first.
Betty: Know that before you get too technical with me, you know, and then I’m happy for it.
Rick: Yeah. But what you’re saying a minute ago about all the people who were, you know, depressed and taking opioids and committing suicide, all this stuff. And in fact, we can broaden it out and just say basically every problem that besets humanity is a result of our failure to adequately unfold our full inner potential.
Betty: Absolutely, absolutely. We need to think of how do we go about having a culture? We need the technology, as Marija Gimbutas said about old European technology, it always nurtured the human being. And spiritual technology in Egypt, their technology was to enhance and nurture what it means to be human. I think that’s the real science, you know, and we’re told that we still have a lot to learn from Egypt because they have the whole science, Schwaller de Lubicz at least thought this, and I think there’s more and more evidence to back up his findings, that every temple in Egypt was actually a temple to reflect another aspect of the cosmos, that the complete science was laid out in Egypt. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it’s very, very interesting to me. And he discovered, for instance, and worked so long on the Temple of Man, which was a temple to the person who had achieved cosmic consciousness. This is incredible to me. Let’s learn these things so we can create a culture in which our children are imbued, you might say, with the spiritual and the spiritual technology, with the symbolic and the conceptual mind. As [Giambattista] Vico said, there is a symbolic mind that comes before, develops before logic, the logical mind, and it is symbolic, it is our first language. It is not irrational as we have thought. It has a poetic logic, and it feeds into the conceptual brain. Otherwise, the conceptual brain could never be logical. But he said, you can’t reduce one to the other. We have for the mind to experience its own wholeness, there must be an integral and dynamic movement, consistent continuation, continual movement between these two brains, never reducing one to the other so that we can experience our wholeness. This is what advanced science will do, that the spiritual will work with the conceptual and create everything that will enhance our spirituality and our intellect. But allow us to be fully human.
Rick: Yeah, that’s great. And I could envision a time when we don’t think of science and spirituality as different camps. They would just both be aspects or facets of the means of gaining knowledge. You just use different tools, well, depending on what you’re exploring. Okay, if you wanna see, what’s on in some distant galaxy, you need a telescope. But if you wanna discover all the subtle realms of creation, you have an instrument here, the human nervous system, which you can develop the full ability to use, and then you can explore all these subtle realms. And who knows, it might also help you explore what’s on the distant galaxy.
Betty: Absolutely, I think it will. Well, Keith Critchlow talked about the megalithic period. And he said, when we look at it, we say, well, is this a temple or is it an observatory? And he said, there was never a question they would have asked. It was both, of course. You observe with your conceptual mind, but you also are spiritually in the rhythms of the nature that you’re observing. So it is a temple and it is, earlier, the shaman mystic scientists never separated it. Never. It was always a union and a sacred union.
Rick: You suggested that we need to sort of fully appreciate the wisdom of ancient Egypt. Do you think that can all be resuscitated and that we can ever really know what these ancient cultures knew and utilize it now? Or do we somehow have to reinvent the wheel? There’s a saying, only a new seed can yield a new crop. Do we have to kind of have a fresh revival of knowledge, and then go with that?
Betty: Well, I don’t know, but I think that we’re discovering so much. I mean, most of what is in my book was really discovered in the 20th century, the last century. I mean, so much more is revealed and who knows what other cultures we will unearth that we don’t even have any idea about, you know? But I think attention to indigenous cultures and attention to cultures such as Egypt that seems to be so highly developed. When I see the artifacts that are being now revealed and how we have brilliant scholars working with them who really do understand that spiritual aspect of them, like Alison Roberts and Jeremy Nadler, incredible scholars. I think there’s probably so much there for us yet to discover if we can just be allowed to get in and discover it. But there’s always kind of a fight with people who are holding ground and those who are discovering. But I think in spite of that, there is much for us to discover. And I think, you know, as I mentioned near the end of the book about some of the indigenous cultures, the Kogi, for example, in the high Sierras in South America who were separated from the conquest. And they have developed over the centuries of their existence, they have a shamanism that is highly developed. I mean, they knew things about the cosmos. There are no books there, but they knew. The training for shaman is nine years in which they are only in nature or cave and they have to get in touch with a Luna, which is spirit. And then spirit begins to teach them. They teach them about the cause and they did know things that they couldn’t possibly have known that we think we can only find out in books. And then if one wants to go on in shamanism, then they are isolated nine more years. And they live up in the high high Sierras, only have contact with the shamans who’ve studied nine years. And they say, we have been through our meditation, keeping the world in balance, but younger brother is doing so much to demean and destroy the scaffolding of nature. And they say, which is so interesting because this is true in quantum physics, we know this. Here, these people know this. They say, thought is the scaffolding of matter and we are dumbing down the thought and that makes it impossible for them to hold the balance. So it’s what we’re thinking and feeling that will create the scaffolding. So I think we have a lot to learn from them. And then much to my surprise with the San Bushmen and well, they were in the Kalahari Desert. Now there are only a few that remain in Botswana, Namibia, that they say, well, we’ve been practicing cosmic consciousness for 65,000 years. Maybe it’s the origin of all these spiritual traditions. Maybe it really was the origin of the cave cultures. Archeologically, we think they came first, but I kind of think maybe the San are correct, but they have this, they don’t have possessions, but they have this culture of such joy and laughter. It’s just so different from our children who would go kill someone. I mean, they have this balance and love for life. So we’ve a lot to learn from our ancestors and indigenous peoples alive today.
Rick: Yeah, I was a big fan of Laurens van der Post. I read all his books back in the ’70s or so.
Betty: Oh yes. I like him very much too.
Rick: Book recommendation for those listening, check out “A Story Like the Wind” and “A Far Off Place” by Laurens van der Post. Those are two separate books. Anyway, he writes about the Bushmen, which is why I mentioned it.
Betty: Yes, and I have a section based on his work, van der Post, in the book on the San. And then with Bradford Keeney.
Rick: Keeney, Bradford and Hillary.
Betty: Yeah, they’ve done incredible work with the San. And even the San gave them their spiritual teachings, which they have now recorded. I just have it out here. The way of the Bushmen is told by the tribal elders. And they had such a beautiful and deep spirituality. Of course, they’ve been, as van der Post says, it’s a murdered culture, but those who are still alive still hold these. So I think there’s so much. We have to do this for our children. They simply cannot be brought up within that terrible sense of a meaningless world. As Kingsley says, there’s a deep missingness inside us.
Rick: Yeah, so the theme that we’ve been discussing for the last few minutes then is, can the wisdom of all the ancient cultures and the indigenous cultures be preserved, first of all, and reawakened to its full value? And can it be somehow disseminated more widely so that, there’s other cultures too, of course, Aborigines and Russian shamans and so many different things, but can it actually be translated in a way that can be a practical value for the masses in the West? Some things like that have been. There’s a lot in ancient Hindu and Buddhist traditions that are everyday routines for Westerners, but there must be so much more in all these other cultures. If they can be preserved and re-enlivened and propagated, it’d be great.
Betty: It would be. I think that just to know, just to, I think it’s so important and I am happy that I discovered that, that there is that deep, deep spiritual river flowing through all of our history and it will rise to mainline culture and then it will be suppressed and then it will live underground, but it keeps coming back. And each time it is, I think this time is the strongest, it’s the fifth time. So I think that, yes, the more we know that, no, we were not stupid, ignorant, cave people who knew nothing. No, let’s find out, here are the San long before cave people even probably, and look what they could experience. We need to know that this has always been a part of who we are. And so I think the history helps us, but I think we also have to create a world in which this is experienced in various ways within our culture as a daily way of knowing and living in harmony with the earth and the rhythms and honoring that. It’s so much we’ll have to melt away that is negative, but it would be by the way we shape our culture. And as I say, at the end of the book, we need the scientist and we need the poet to create our culture. And during the fourth emergence of this underground tradition, which was actually kind of a shoot off from the Rosicrucian, was the German and English Romantic period. And Goethe and Novalis who studied the underground tradition because Goethe had brought it up, here was a continuation of the Rosicrucian through pietism and alchemy. Goethe became an alchemist, but these two people really understood that we had to have a culture that is rooted in our becoming. Is that well, Jung’s individuation process, they saw that and they wanted to nurture it. They said, it is the voice of the poet that should nurture this and ignite it and awaken it. And that we would have a culture based on our becoming with poetry and music and dance, but in understood as a part of our potential.
Rick: I’m gonna do a segue here. A question came in from Evening Stark is the person’s name from Maraida, Mexico. And it’s been in the back of my mind, which is, “Can you talk more about your personal experiences following your son’s death?” It’s a brief question, but your first book was triggered by that event and it’s an amazing book. So let’s use our remaining, well, we’ll see where we go with our remaining time, but let’s launch into some of that because you’ve had some very profound experiences as a result of that tragedy.
Betty: Yes, well, that was really a turning point. Well, I had spent my life studying about this and trying to find meaning. And I had started to have, I had met Jung, I would say, in the inner world and also through his books when I was last year in college. So Jung was a great guide for me, but I had also gone, as I said, to South America. That helped some, but I was beginning to have more visions, but I had followed the dreams. But I really wouldn’t have known, I didn’t know, know whether when we die that we continue. I didn’t know that, but when Pisti died, I had-
Rick: Pisti is your son.
Betty: Pisti, yeah, sorry, he’s my son. I did have those experiences and had absolutely no question. I mean, it was so powerful and so real. Now, my husband, Istvan, had not been interested in these things. He was a businessman, but he was very tolerant of me. But one time when I was trying to tell him about a vision I’d had in South America, I noticed that he wasn’t paying attention. He kept looking back at the newspaper. And I said, “You’re really not interested in this, are you?” And being caught, he said, “I know that for you it’s real, but I have never had anything like that. And I don’t even know how to relate to it.” Well, that’s an honest response. But two weeks before our son Pisti was in the car accident that killed him, he was in his office and suddenly he had his first vision. He suddenly saw the car on the side of the freeway and he saw Pisti’s body superimposed to the car. And he knew he was dead because it was two different dimensions. And then he heard himself say, “Oh, that’s right, Pisti. It’s almost time for you to do this.”
Rick: Wow. Did he say it audibly? So that if you had been in the room, you would have heard it or was it just a thought? Or maybe that’s not even relevant.
Betty: I don’t know. It was whether, I don’t know whether he said it or thought it, but that was his response. And that made him feel terrible because he thought, “What am I saying?” But then Pisti said to him, “That’s right, dad. I’ll be out of the house for a little while.” Then he was immediately unconscious. He didn’t remember it until the call came through from the hospital. And we just happened to both be here, that which was unusual, it was in the afternoon. Then when Pisti was in a very critical state during the hospital stay, the doctor came to us and said, “He may die within the hour. There are three things we can do and we’re doing them now.” Well, our friends were all over the place but they left the two of us alone. I took Istvan, that was my husband’s name, a hand. And it was like a shock went through my hand. I looked at him quickly. I thought, “This man’s gonna have a heart attack.” He looked pretty stressed. I then became the strong one for a change and said, “Istvan, if we are called to do this, we can do it.” Later he told me that he did think he was gonna have a heart attack because he said the energy was so intense. He said, “It just built up to an intensity but instead of a heart attack, it just went into images.” He said, “I was in the trauma center. I saw Pisti sit up in bed, catch a dove with a ball of fire and its beak, put it in his heart and lie back down.” Then he said, “I was at Machu Picchu and I saw Pisti standing on the small mountain and his hand, left hand was up in the heavens and he was looking up that way and his right hand was down.” So like he was a bridge and handing information down. He said, “Everything was, when the vision began, it was like everything was calm and I was calm. I had no stress, was calm and peaceful and filled with love.” And he said, “I didn’t even think to ask if he’s going to live or die.” He said, “It was no longer an issue. I simply knew that I could never be separated from him because the love connected us.” And so he didn’t know whether he would live or die. He lived through that hour, but died later. But, and then after his memorial, we both started having experiences with Pisti. Istvan felt that he had kept himself on ice, as he said, for so long. He’d come into the study, he’d say, “Okay, give me another book. I’ve got to make up for 50 years.” He said on the way to work, it was almost like a tape recorder. Just all this stuff was coming back to him as though to remind him of a reality that he’d forgotten. Then we had very powerful visions and Pisti wanted us to know, first of all, that he’s fine. There was a lot of joy in him. And, but he wanted to make sure that we understood that. So there was talk about death and experiences with that. And then there was his effort to let us know why we chose to be born now and what the earth is going through in the next years that is going through this powerful, powerful transformation. And certainly there was the optimism there. I mean, that we might go through a lot, but that this light will be able to bring the whole species into health and joy. I don’t know how long it will take, but it was clear that there would be a lot to go through. there was one very, very powerful vision. I had had experiences with Anubis. The Egyptian got Anubis and the jackal, you know, working on what is decayed because the jackal eats decayed meat and takes it into his own body and transforms it into life. Well, in this vision, Istvan had the jackal too, but Pisti was talking to him. He said to him, “Dad, go get the I-Ching and look up starting from the top to the bottom, straight, broken, broken, straight, straight, broken.” I ran in when the vision was over, got the I-Ching, took it back in there and I looked it up in the back. And what is the hexagram? And so that was the jackal’s message too. And Pisti said to his dad, speaking to both of us in the vision, “Read this hexagram carefully. It is your work and it is the work of the earth.” And so I think that this is a time when we are looking at what decay we have brought into being by our not bringing forth what is within us. This is the great work of our time. And we are building a lot of light to do it. I said to him, “Well, how did you remember straight, broken, broken?” And he said, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s ML.” I said, “ML?” He said, “Yes, merchants of light.” Well, I thought maybe, you know, sometimes since his second language was English, that he’d come up with funny combinations. I thought merchants of light? And he said, “Yes.” But anyway, as merchants, of course, he was saying these are actual beings that can now be born on the earth because the energy field, this ML is a code for an energy field of light that we have now pulled to the planet. It’s a highly organized energy field in which we are more capable of working and transforming this darkness into light. This energy field gives us so much, many more abilities than we’ve had before. That made me remember a vision that I had had earlier, which confirms that. I don’t know whether you want me to go into that.
Rick: Well, actually, I think maybe you’re going to tell us, you experienced a disk of light coming into a room, hovering over you and some feminine being said, “You have called us and we are here.” Is that what you’re about to get to?
Betty: Yeah, because it was earlier. Of course, these experiences don’t always come in a linear fashion. You know, I had to put all the pieces together. But Istvan had that, that ML is a highly organized energy field that we have now drawn to the earth, which will make it easier for the light to distill this darkness that we have allowed to develop. I thought of that was the one vision with this disk that I was still in the time of doubting that was before any of the deaths. I thought, this is one thing I can’t doubt. This was so powerful. I knew it was real. It was that disk of light filled with people. And I knew it was cosmic consciousness. The woman spiraled out of the bottom of it into my heart, through my crown chakra into the heart. And here is this round disk and she had a square satin hat on, white and white dress to the waist. Then she sang and me, well, it was, I was doing, we were doing a ritual for the children, our children, the children of the earth. And there were two other women, but this was so powerful. What she revealed to us is that the earth out of its longing for love and its ability to love had drawn this light to the planet. She said, “We are the light that had been around your planet. It seemed for a long time that they were there. Now we have drawn them and all of us are rooting it in the earth, that light.” So I think that confirms your optimism that we can do it this time because we’re in a different energy field. But that vision absolutely transformed me.
Rick: Yeah, we have friends in high places, so to speak. I kind of interpreted that story when I heard you tell it, not necessarily some extraterrestrial thing, you know, a disk of light with a lot of beings in it, but kind of more of a celestial thing. By that I mean, my understanding is that there are gross, I’ve heard you speak of the three worlds. You can think of gross, subtle, and transcendent as one way of categorizing them. There’s a whole subtle realm, which is populated, teeming with life, but the life forms just don’t have gross, blood and flesh bodies like we do. Most of us don’t have the capacity to see them, but some people do. They are very much here, but we’re kind of disconnected from them by the fact that we’re disconnected from our source. That perhaps the time is coming, your experience seems to indicate, where the connection will be made, and we’ll be able to benefit from what they have to offer. Perhaps we, in some way, can be a benefit to them too. But we’re not talking about extraterrestrials. We’re talking more about, we could call it angelic realms, or celestial realms, or something along those lines. The kind of thing that David Spangler at Findhorn has been talking about for decades.
Betty: It felt that way to me. I didn’t feel like a extraterrestrial. It was loving, and beautiful, and inclusive. And I knew that she spiraled into me because she could be the transformer, you might say, of what they wanted to tell us. She could spiral into a form that I could take. Although after it, I was still so energetic, so almost electrified from the power of it. But yes, I think this is from the subtle archetypal world. And the interesting thing is, later I read William Irwin Thompson, who talked about the Aurobindo ashram, and the mother’s experience, in which she said that in the future, we are going to be receiving from above this supra mental energy, and that it would be coming from above. And I thought, well, that’s probably why the hexagram started from above. Because it’s usually, you throw the coins and it’s from the ground up. But we’ve been doing this ground, raising this energy from the spine all the way up through the brain into the heavens. And this is going to be supra mental coming down. And it said that the mother experienced that in the ’50s, that coming, that same kind of thing of the light coming into us. When we experienced it, it was as though we were born to do that. When it said they’re ready to connect to the earth, we felt they were connecting, and we were playing some role in that, which I think it was an important role to play. But I think it was probably happening all over the earth, with people, that this was an archetypal experience that was happening to people around the world, that the light was all around the planet. We were all calling that, we’re all longing for that love, that missingness to be filled. All of those who call that and long for it and love were the ones who brought that energy to the earth and rooted it in the earth. So to me, it was a very powerful archetypal experience.
Rick: Yeah, and it’s happening now. And I mean, it’s happened throughout history, right? There were, when Jesus was born, according to the story, there were angelic hosts who came to the event. And when Muhammad, as I understand the story, first had his awakening, it’s as if angels were doing vivisection on him or something. He really got worked over by some kind of subtle beings. You know, every tradition, I’m sure every shamanic tradition and Hindu and Buddhist, they all have iconography and stories about interactions between humans and these higher forms of life.
Betty: Yes, yes. I think it’s our heritage to be connected to spirit world, to that subtle world. I think we got disconnected for some various reasons and then forgot that there was anything to be connected to, but we live most creatively and lovingly with the connection with that. When we experience it just for a few moments, our minds are blown. (laughs) And so happy to have that. I think that we’re working toward reconnecting so that we’re always connected and that will always be flowing through us.
Rick: Yes, that’s important. I mean, I remember there used to be, when I was younger, I used to see these ads for the Rosicrucians and [they] said, “A split second in eternity, the ancients called it cosmic consciousness.” I would always think, oh, it’s just not a split second. cosmic consciousness can be a continuum. It can be an abiding state. That’s the goal.
Betty: Well, that’s what Maurice Buck thought.
Betty: Maurice Buck was, I think he was the doctor for Walt Whitman, but he tells the story. I think he was in Canada at the time, was spending an evening with friends and they talked about the various poets. They were just totally involved in that. He got in the carriage to go home and then he thought, oh my God, the town is on fire above. Then he realized he was filled with this light. And he said, “In those moments,” he said, “I have no idea how long it lasted.” Could have been very few moments. He said, “I knew, I understood that the world is filled with its love, its light, and we are immortal. And that all of us will eventually live in this state of cosmic consciousness, that this is our future evolution.” Well, it changed his life forever. He said, “Just these few seconds or moments changed me forever.” And I think if we do have the split second, we are changed forever, but we want to create a world in which all our children can experience that and that we will create the world in which we all live in it.
Rick: Yeah, and there’s no reason why it can’t be an abiding state. I mean, the great sages, Ramana Maharshi and others, they weren’t going on just a split second that happened to them. They were in that state all the time. Even when, in his case, even when he got cancer and his body was going through something that on a physical level must’ve been very painful, it was quite evident that he was beyond that level. The inner bliss of his realization was his predominant reality, no matter what the physical body went through.
Betty: Yes, and I think that, you know, there’s a state of cosmic consciousness in which it’s so vast, we can’t do our daily task, but I think that we will learn to live with it in a way that we can live in what we call ordinary consciousness and do these things, but we are informed by that beingness and knowledge. And then if we want to really go completely into discovery or visiting various places, we can, but that we’ll be able to be flexible, but we always are making choices out of that knowledge of cosmic consciousness.
Rick: Yeah, but also I think that the whole name of the game in spiritual development is to incrementally integrate cosmic consciousness or unbounded awareness so that one becomes more and more capable of driving a car or driving a plane or paying your taxes or whatever else you have to do while established in that unboundedness.
Betty: I like that better. Your description is much better.
Rick: The boundaries and the boundless get sort of integrated.
Betty: I like that a lot. That’s good.
Rick: Yeah, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes, the nervous system has to be cultured in order to support that kind of thing, but that’s the goal.
Betty: Yes, yes, I agree. Yeah, I would just, I guess my description of trying to tune it in such a way, but you’ve said it exactly right, I think.
Rick: Your son had a vision, I noted this down, of a woman whose body was so vast that she covered galaxies. What was that about?
Betty: Oh, that was Istvan, my husband.
Rick: Oh, your husband, okay.
Betty: Pisti had already died. Yes, his first vision, and this is a man, he was transformed with his vision, but he said he and Pisti were talking and all of these things were, he was remembering, and then he said, then he realized that there was a woman, that there was the feminine there, and she encompassed everything, and yet there she was loving, and so Istvan talked with her, and he just said, he was just stunned, but I think that what he was experiencing is this symbolized in this woman that was as large as the universe, that she’s always present. This is the Tao, always present, soul, heart, and then in a vision I had with Pisti, I said to him, that’s when he said it to me, Because I started having experiences with her too, and I said, Pisti, who is this? I mean, she seemed to be like the universe, and he said,”Mom, her body, she is so vast, her body covers galaxies.” Well, I thought that’s a symbolic way of speaking, but I was so amazed when I was reading Mary Rodwell’s work, and she’s working with children, and these children talked about the beings where they were born, where they came from, whose bodies were as vast as galaxies. I thought it was just interesting that they both use the same language. It’s symbolic in some way, but it’s some vastness of being.
Rick: I do think that there, I mean, when we say beings, usually people think of a physical body, which obviously the biggest one that’s ever existed on this planet is the blue whale, but that’s pretty small compared to the world or the galaxy or anything else, but again, we’re referring to subtler dimensions, and my understanding, for what it’s worth, is that there are beings whose jurisdiction, actual beings, not just sort of archetypical symbols or something, but actual beings whose jurisdiction might encompass a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies or some huge thing or on a smaller scale, the solar system, and I don’t know exactly how all that works, but to my way of thinking, the whole universe is an ocean of intelligence and manifest forms such as stars or planets or galaxies or whatever have subtler dimensions to them and are governed by impulses of intelligence who work on various scales according to their jurisdiction or their responsibilities. You’ve talked quite a lot about archetypes and laws of nature and so on. Is that the kind of thing you’re alluding to when you talk about that?
Betty: I think you said it very well. I had a sense that there was this consciousness that had a responsibility to the planet, that they were present and working with us. These, yes, you’ve described it, I think, very well, and yeah, that was a powerful kind of experience to, you know, I had read, especially in Eastern writings, you know, of these vast beings who took care of the Earth and so on, but we did experience that sense that that was true.
Rick: What would you say the relevance of this is to our conversation or to humanity? It’s kind of interesting metaphysical speculation, but I feel that in some way, it’s very, very relevant. How would you address that?
Betty: Well, I think it is relevant, and I think it gives us a great deal of hope, and it’s that loving, highly developed intelligence that is part of who we are, and I think in some ways, that’s what our ancestors meant when they wanted to be the mediator between this vast beingness that had certain rhythms and that if we could then mediate that to the Earth, it inspires us because we’re working with vast intelligence of which we are a part, and I think it gives us a great deal of hope. There’s love, tremendous love, and desire for healing. Just the presence is phenomenal. I think it’s so important for us to know that the whole cosmos is intelligent. It is consciousness that creates matter, and that we are related to vast intelligence working with us in this journey of becoming who we are.
Rick: Yeah, and like that experience you had where the feminine being said, “You have called us and we are here. “We are the light that circles around your planet. “We are ready to connect to your planet.” It’s kind of like the key phrase is, “You have called us.” So it’s kind of, we’ve reached the stage at which we are receptive and have put out the call, like ET phone home. (both laughing) And if we hadn’t become receptive, what could they do? We’re shut down. We’ve got our eyes on the ground and would not be open to being intermediaries.
Betty: Yes, and I thought it was interesting. First of all, there was such an incredible sense of love and intelligence. And when she said, “Can you feel us? “We are here. “Can you feel us?” And I think that heart consciousness is feeling. And that’s something in the Egyptian culture that Alison Roberts makes so beautifully clear is that they knew that civilization or life cannot continue to develop if we cannot feel. That feeling is something that must be nurtured and developed. I thought it was just so beautiful when she said, “We are here. “We are here. “You have called us and we have come. “Can you feel us?” And then with the connection to the planet, she said, “You have joined to yourselves this day, “all those on your planet “who are creating worlds of love and peace.” And I think that’s exactly what happens to all of us when we are loving and want to create that kind of world. We are joining and connecting to each other and that’s a powerful force.
Rick: It really is. There are so many traditions in which a collection of people who are kind of of one mind, who are on a spiritual wavelength is considered to be so much more powerful than, it’s much more than the sum of its parts, much, much more powerful than just an isolated individual who’s having that kind of awakening.
Betty: Yes, and it just goes so beyond all of our particular religious paths, but they’re all included. And to the degree that they’ve taken us there, they’re sacred and valuable, all of them. But it’s beyond probably what we’ve come up with. It’s that incredible power of creativity and love. And that is one thing that, the feeling and the love that has been kind of swept aside because the 17th century philosophers, the enlightenment that developed, not the kind that the scientists and mystics wanted in 1600, but later, when the Royal Society was formed, and then the enlightenment philosophers in France, feeling wasn’t an issue. That wasn’t important, what you feel. It’s just the rational conceptual brain and we’re superior, it had all of the symptoms of the disease, the pathology of not going within. So they didn’t, we didn’t value the heart’s part of the brain or the heart’s ability to feel, or as Corbin would say, that the heart is the organ of soul. And if we breathe through the heart, feel through the heart, you’re opening to that dimension. And then you can perceive it absolutely specifically as it is, your vision increases when you live through the heart.
Rick: Yeah, and imagine a society in which that was the normal way of functioning for the vast majority of people. I mean, right now it’s just, you know, extreme minority who function that way, but imagine if it were the majority. Then, you know, these sort of vaster intelligences that we’ve been talking about, we could be in perfect communion with them. And not only them, because even then we’re talking about something that’s in some way isolated, but in perfect sort of attunement with the unbounded awareness that is our essential nature. Imagine what society could be like, and how absurd all these problems we have, and what a primitive memory of a distant past those could all become.
Betty: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. We have the potential and we’re learning. We’re learning that we have that potential and that we’re deeply and profoundly connected to this cosmic intelligence, which we can experience in many different ways. It can come to us as an individual, an animal or whatever. I mean, it’s that sense of connectedness is what we have been missing, and it’s what’s killing our children. I had one experience in which I really felt I was, I couldn’t come back from the, I couldn’t get back. I had gone too far. (both laughing) You know those old stories of the hero getting stuck to the underworld? Well, I had. And then Istvan though, here’s a man who had never experienced these things, and he was really going deep in this stuff. He experienced what I was doing there. And he said, “You did go too deep to return on your own, but there were female helpers who brought you back, but you went that deep to bring back the pure clay for our children.” And I thought, what is Istvan talking about? (both laughing) But I had come to pay attention to him because, and it took a long time. I began to realize that remembering the true stories, not the ones that were inverted and took away who we are, but I want to find and bring back the true stories, the stories of the San people, of the cave cultures of Egypt, those, and the story of the tree that no, you eat of this. We’re here to offer it to you. There’s an intelligence behind it and within it, and we want you to have that intelligence. It’s that loving stories. Every, well, as Jung said, and I think it’s absolutely accurate, the myths and our true stories are true because they are structured by the organizing principles within the human psyche. It’s not like someone makes it up like the Deuteronomist did or the church. No, this comes out of the psyche and they are always for our growth and development. They’re never going to try to keep us unconscious or set us against each other. Those are never our true stories. So I think the pure clay for ourselves and our children are the true stories that are the blueprint of our evolution. And that’s what these ancestors and many indigenous cultures gave us. I think finding that and making that truly the sacred text of who we are so that our children can know that and develop not out of a toxic text like that young man in Michigan had. That’s toxic that kills our children.
Rick: I would surmise that the organizing principles of our individual psyches, was that the phrase you used?
Betty: The psyche, yes, which is universal.
Rick: Of the psyche is that the individual is like a wave on the ocean. And so whatever organizing principles there are within our psyche are kind of reflections or manifestations of organizing principles within the cosmic psyche.
Betty: Absolutely, absolutely it is. And researchers found out that these fairy tales and myths are similar with different language and symbols, but around the world.
Rick: Yeah, in cultures that had no way of communicating with each other.
Betty: Exactly, and Jung saw that in his patients out of hundreds and hundreds of patients. He saw this similar structure. He saw a man’s dream who was like an alchemist dream or work, so we have a blueprint for our cosmic evolution, for our development. It will come to us in different ways. I’ve had dreams that show exactly where I am in my development and what’s missing and what I need to work on. I think that’s what happened in the high Middle Ages. The myths that emerged showed us exactly what we hadn’t integrated, that feminine, loving, feeling heart. And I had that also, I saw myself as a knight in the high Middle Ages, but it was also right after World War II, I thought. And my knight saw these images and he couldn’t, he’s leaving the church. He had been a priest too, and a knight. No, he was leaving, thank you. He had work to do. And here she is, he doesn’t listen much to her. And then as she’s, it was at Chartres Cathedral. As she’s walking down the road that he’s riding his horse down, she sees this beautiful feminine and these beautiful wombs being born all over on both sides of the earth. He doesn’t even see that she’s behind him. Well, that dream was important because I saw that masculine aspect of me that the conceptual mind that wanted to get out in the world and discover was missing the whole visionary picture that was right there. and he didn’t listen to her very well. So I thought, that’s great. It showed me some things I needed to know.
Rick: I saw a little video the other day where two knights dressed up in their armor and all that walked up to a hotel reception desk and said, “We need a room for two knights.” (both laughing) Okay, so, you know, we have about 10 minutes or something left. What haven’t we covered that’s important to you that we should definitely cover? Not to put you on the spot or anything, but there’s so much. I mean, it’s like I kind of come to an interview like this feeling like it’s a great big huge smorgasbord and I’ve just got this little plate and I can only put so much on the plate. But you know.
Betty: That’s right. And then if you get too much, you’re miserable. I feel that, you know, it’s so. I just think that the major theme of my life has been that I was brought up with toxic myths and our whole culture has been, and yet underneath there has been a powerful stream of the wisdom of who we are and that we are beginning to integrate that in this fifth Renaissance period. I think we have to be very intuitive and intelligent and know the forces within ourselves and our species that are still ill and would destroy this rebirth. That’s just being intelligent, but we can only work with what wishes to destroy us with very sharp intelligence and the heart, love. It can’t be this awful business of opposition and fighting. It doesn’t solve anything. It just makes things worse. But once we know the illness and we know its symptoms, and then we have to look in ourselves, to what degree do I have both, and stay in tune with the light that is clearly flooding the earth now.
Rick: Yeah. And how do you do that specifically? Do you have a technique or practice or, I know you’re a Jungian psychologist, and I’ve heard you mention dreams in far more detail than I ever remember of my dreams.
Betty: Well, there was a time when they were very, it’s rare now that I have those dreams now, but Jung really was an answer really to a prayer that was my life of trying to understand. And I had gone, I was dating a man who had just become a minister. He’d finished Andover Newton. He had a party to celebrate his first church. They were there with their girlfriends. And that night they were talking about physics and mathematics and Carl Jung. And I didn’t understand a thing. So I kept my mouth shut the whole time, but I was so amazed. And then I asked him later about it. And I borrowed “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” That was my introduction to Jung. And I read and read and read. Sometimes I didn’t know what I was reading, but he really, he was asking the questions I was asking. And he had hundreds of patients’ dreams, and he had then the work of alchemists and of these underground traditions. And so he gave me a path. And I’m very, very grateful for that. It was a path. It was a practice, you might say, where years I would think on and meditate on these possibilities. And it kept me alive and kept me searching. So, and some people do it through running. Maybe you do too, have these experiences through running or swimming. I don’t because I’m not that athletic. But many people say, yes, my dreams and then my visions. But I would say that I have fewer of those today than I did in the past. But I’m always, I think my practice is always being in touch with the other side. I feel that that energy is with me and working with me and helping me to make wiser decisions from time to time.
Rick: Yeah, well, it apparently is. I mean, I’m so impressed with your intelligence and your insight into so many different things. I was quite amazed when you said that you were like four years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, which would put you-
Betty: Six, six years old.
Rick: Six years old, which would put you well into your 80s. And I think, holy mackerel, I mean, you’re an inspiration.
Betty: Next month I’ll be 85, as a matter of fact.
Rick: Very impressive.
Betty: Well, I do let them know that if I’m going to do this work that I have to be healthy. So I’ll do my best and I need their help.
Rick: Yeah, by them, I presume you mean these higher powers and impulses of intelligence we’ve been talking about.
Betty: It seems so, yes, they do seem to be very present. Thank God, I didn’t know that when I was young.
Rick: Yeah, unfortunately, many of us hadn’t or didn’t. But you really do seem to be a wonderful servant of the divine, I would say, or instrument of the divine. You know, just in your own beautiful way, just kind of bringing forth so much interesting stuff. I mean, I wish I could remember it all, but I really learned a lot from, it really broadened my perspective reading your books.
Betty: You know, I think that that’s what every one of us, we’ve been told we’re nothing, you know? Who do you think you are? You know, parents will sometimes say to children, but we’ve been so told we’re nothing and the world treating us in that way, that it’s one of the most important things for everyone to remember is that each of us is born with a purpose, I do think that. And we, as the indigenous people say, each of us has a medicine that we come here to create, to give to the world. And every single person has that medicine that they came to create to give to the world. And it’s so important for them to know, each one of us is working on that in their own way. And someone else can give a medicine that no one else can give, that it’s so specifically creative and important. That’s something I just would want all our children to know and all people to know. It took me a lifetime to know.
Rick: Yeah, and you know, somebody might be listening to that and think, well, it’s easy for her to say, but I work in an Amazon warehouse, you know, or I work in Walmart and it’s really drudgery. And so what kind of medicine do I have? But I firmly believe that if, whatever your circumstances, if you embark on this journey of exploration and discovery of your inner potential, your inner nature, things will blossom that you couldn’t necessarily foresee at this point, they will.
Betty: Yeah, I believe that too. The first job I had, when I realized that there was no money to go to college, so I was gonna have, my brother and my mother had this serious talk with me. I think you don’t realize that there’s no money. And I said, well, then I’ll work and get myself into college. And I would go, when I worked at this company, I would go into the bathroom and cry. I’d get in the stall and I’d just cry. I hated it so much. And I thought, is this what it’s all about? But at any rate, I had a path. I was gonna go to college. That was my path at the time. And that led me out of there. And then it ended up that that job helped me. They gave me a job every summer. They did everything to get me through school. So it was really turned out to be a pretty decent place after all. So I was on my path and it did take me out of that place. But I know that feeling. And I know that I have known people very well who got lost in that and never could find the way out of that. And I think that’s one reason that I wanted to write about it. My own brother who had been so questioning as a child, there came a time when he thought, well, with this job, this way of life, this you have to finally make a living and let that other go. And it destroyed him. And I’m well aware of that particular problem.
Rick: Well, I’ve gone through periods of years where I was doing something to earn money, which I wouldn’t have done if I had won the lottery or something. It wasn’t like intrinsically fulfilling, but I did have a regular meditation practice throughout, steady, regular thing. And I had the confidence because it has always worked out that way for me, that one thing will lead to the next. And as George Harrison said, “All things must pass.” And I really feel like if a person, like we said earlier, “seeking first the kingdom of heaven and all else should be added unto thee.” If you can somehow integrate an effective spiritual practice into your daily life, even though many of the hours of your day might be in a mundane activity, one thing will lead to the next and things will change and opportunities will come along. And even if they don’t, even if you end up working in Walmart all your life, an inner fulfillment dawns. Stop talking about Walmart. Okay, Taco Bell. But an inner fulfillment dawns, such that the, like right now, a lot of people are just really kind of bursting at the seams because they’ve been cooped up due to the pandemic and they’re just dying to get out and travel and go to nightclubs and all this stuff because that’s where they’re accustomed to having found their fulfillment. Hildegard of Bingen who had herself bricked up into this, they actually laid bricks so she couldn’t get out this little tiny cubby hole. And she lived her life in there in a state of complete fulfillment.
Betty: I know that’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? Because you feel like we need each other so much, but people have, and I think of people who’ve been in prison for a lifetime and in solitary confinement, how do they survive it? Have to find some practice that keeps you alive. But I do know young people who, some have made choices, they loved, they married, they had children and they didn’t fulfill what they thought they wanted, but there’s still that possibility. There’s still always that possibility. If you long for it, you want it, you’ll find a way out of it.
Rick: And even on your deathbed, I mean, even then, if you somehow catch on to the notion of enlightenment or spiritual development, you set something in motion, you create a momentum which will carry on.
Betty: Yes. I always kind of go back to the hope that we can be more aware of our potential and the paths and have situations where our children can find those paths, that they will be such a part of our culture, the nourishing of who we are, that they can find it more easily. I think some of them just suffer tremendously. I mean, when I was young, I never heard of a serial killing. It wasn’t until I was out of college, I think. And now it’s all the time.
Rick: It’s every day. There’s been a mass murder every day in the United States this year.
Betty: Oh my God. And we have to take it seriously. This is a pathology. And I see that pathology as that suppression by those in power for centuries. And we’re waking up, but we’ve got a lot to work with because of that.
Rick: Yeah. But again, to end on an optimistic note, I’m optimistic because I think that, the light is more powerful than the darkness. You can have a pitch black room and you light one little candle and boom, the darkness is dispelled. So I think candles are being lit all over the world. Also another way of looking at it is that consciousness is more fundamental than anything else. And therefore, if you can function on that level, you have more leverage. And so more and more people sort of enlivening that most fundamental value, seemingly un-opposable forces of power and influence in the world. I think they will eventually crumble.
Betty: Well, I do too. And I have to say that every vision that I’ve had is exactly what you’re saying. I just feel we might have to go through some hard times, and really seek our alignment with that light and find ways and practices through which that light can flow so that we can more easily distill it. We will distill it, but if there are ways that could ease some of the suffering too.
Rick: Yes. Yeah, I’ve always felt that way that it’s kind of going to happen, but the more we can grease the wheels, so to speak, by infusing more spiritual value into the world, the less traumatic or cataclysmic it will be.
Betty: I absolutely think that. I think people come into our lives, if we love and are seeking that, that’s like a magnet that’s going to attract it. When we unite, then we can do so much more. So I’m optimistic too. I’m just worried about what we might have to go through, but as long as we keep our eye on the light, it can be done.
Rick: Yeah, I totally agree. There’s going to be some rough times, but I think it’ll be kind of a birth pang or something, some kind of rite of passage for humanity, but hopefully we’ll come out into a brighter future.
Betty: Well, we believe that. And we have the evidence actually to support it. And the visionary experiences are that that is exactly it. It is going to take place. But as I said, I think that we can do things to help the younger people coming so that they won’t have to be involved in what we see so many of them destroyed by. That is such a tragic situation. For so many children.
Rick: Yeah, there’s so much that can be done that still isn’t being done. So let’s just keep doing it, Betty.
Betty: Yeah, that’s it. That’s a good way to put it.
Rick: All right, well, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this whole week of listening to your books and everything. And this conversation has been marvelous.
Betty: Thank you. I enjoyed it very much.
Rick: Yeah, and thanks so much to Kimberly, your helper. She’s been great to work with.
Betty: Oh, I couldn’t get anything done without her. And that’s one of those miracles that came into my life. And just at the time that I so much needed someone like that. I mean, I have so much more time to spend on everything else because she takes care of so much. Plus we really have a great friendship. It’s just one of those gifts in life.
Rick: Good. That’s why Irene is here too.
Betty: I was going to say something. That’s true. And what a difference. If you were doing all this alone, it would be quite a different journey.
Rick: Be a shambles.
Betty: That’s what I say too.
Rick: Alrighty, well, thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. And next couple of weeks, we don’t have anything scheduled. We’re taking a little break over the holidays. And then the next interview after this in January will be a woman in Australia named Kate Greaves, who is into, of course, in miracles. I’ve interviewed several people in that tradition and it’s always interesting. So happy holidays, everybody. You take care, Betty, and I hope we’ll be in touch.
Betty: I hope so too. Thank you so much.
Rick: All right, thank you.