Universal Consciousness with Betty Kovacs

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Well, hello to everyone joining us today on our podcast. You're listening to one of our Successful Aging episodes this month on the Living to 100 Club program, and I'm your host, Joe Casciani. Each week, our conversations educate and inspire, helping you get the best out of all the years we're given, regardless of what obstacles come our way. Today's podcast is a provocative conversation about universal consciousness. We discuss the global shift that's taking place from a negation of the spiritual, mystical side of life to a spiritual renaissance. Our guest is Betty Kovacs, the author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World, and also The Miracle of Death. There is nothing but life. We explore the friction between Western science that's focused on the materialistic view of life and the shamanic larger view of reality. They were— we are all connected, immortal, and divine. Also touch on the views of birth and death being two different sides of the same state and how this can ease the experience of loss at the time of death. First, a little background. Dr. Betty Kovacs shares her knowledge and passion through her books, speaking, teaching, and media interviews in the United States and Europe. She speaks to national and global audiences through webinars, keynote presentations, and media interviews. She received her PhD from the University of California at Irvine in comparative literature and Theory of Symbolic Mythic Language. She taught literature, writing, and symbolic mythic language for 25 years. She served many years as chair and program chair on, on the board of directors of the Jung Society of Claremont in California and sits on the academic advisory board of Forever Family Foundation. Betty, welcome to our program today.

Thank you so much.

Oh, you're very welcome. I'm looking forward to this. I always like to open by asking our guests to share with us maybe the highlights that brought you to where you are today. I've gone through your history, illustrious career, but tell us maybe the highlights that brought you to where you are today.

You know, I think it probably started as a child. We lived in the country. My brother and I played all the time we could, although I started school at 2 years old, if you can imagine, that is to kindergarten, and we walked almost 2 miles to school. That seems impossible today, but that's what we did. But I had to be with my brother. That is from the time I was 2 years old. So we made up stories and we talked and we tried to figure out everything on the way to and from school and just played all the time. And then one afternoon we were in listening to a half-hour radio. There was no television then. And I think half-hour radio was all we ever had. We could be outside. And it was Gene Autry and it was interrupted. It was Sunday afternoon. It was interrupted to announce that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Well, my life had just been wonderful as a child. I was 5, not quite 6 at the time. And life was wonderful. You know, as long as everything worked, it was beautiful and didn't have so many questions. But that, first off, what was war? And my mother tried so hard to explain to me in a way that I would accept. But what I couldn't get over is that it was the adults who were fighting. Now, my brother and I would get in arguments and, uh, we were brought in and would have discussions with our parents about that and how to resolve things, but not in fighting. And if we weren't supposed to fight as kids, what was going on in the world? It just absolutely threw me as a kid.

Mm-hmm.

And I, I think for the rest of my life I was trying to figure out Why do human beings do that kind of thing? What happened to us?

Yeah. Yeah. So that had a profound effect on you and it probably colored your, your interest in literature and language and cultures, different cultures.

Everything. Everything. It was to figure out what happened to us that we would kill each other. That if we as kids could figure out ways of resolving our conflicts, why in the world couldn't adults?

Yeah, yeah. So that's, um, you know, you and I spoke earlier, and I, I'd like to really jump into the deep end here and help me understand, or help our listeners understand, what you call the suppression by the church and state over the years about the soul, the creative, mystical side of our world. What was this all about? Why was this story told in Western culture?

Yes, well, first of all, we need to know what we really discovered in the 20th century. Various scholars discovered that there were many shaman, mystic, and given time, scientist cultures. Now, so this means our ancestors were living in a different way from the way we live today. And they lived, you might say, through— we would say today, both the left and the right brain were working. They worked in harmony with each other. And that means the right brain has contact with the heart. And our ancestors knew that the heart is a brain component. They wouldn't have put it in that language, but they knew that it was part of the brain. In fact, the Sufis called it the organ of soul. So what does that We in the West don't really know what soul is. But our ancestors would explain that if the left and right brain are working, they wouldn't use this terminology. This is modern terminology. But they would speak of the heart and flowing through the heart. The heart is the organ of soul, and that opens us to the consciousness of the universe. And they saw us as living. We are all in this, what quantum physics today would call the field of fields, the quantum field. It contains all fields, and it's a field of infinite energy. And our ancestors called that spirit. And they tried to figure out all kinds of ways of working with this energy. And they realized a lot of things about their own anatomy. That is that, you know, the right and the left and the heart. And many of the ancient rituals are very clear about that. Scientists today will say that the right brain and left brain are not masculine or feminine. That is the left being masculine, the Right being feminine, connect with the heart. But we have to say that's true. But historically, the characteristics of the left brain have always been associated with our— and everyone has it— masculine side. And the characteristics of the right brain have always been characterized as the feminine and the heart, soul, and so forth. So they understood that this has to function as a whole, the whole mind. And the Egyptian culture was an absolutely magnificent culture. In doing just this and showing the rituals that helped us to keep in touch with heart consciousness. They would say, and, and modern writers would also say, that we are all born into universal consciousness, the quantum field. We're all born, and that's who we are. We're in it. It's us. It's everything. And so it would be how to work with this energy field that our ancestors were concerned with. And Egypt just did an absolutely magnificent job of understanding that. Everything in culture was structured in such a way to ignite that in us, that consciousness.

Wow. A very advanced culture, advanced civilization in many respects. So what is this suppression? Why did Western society suppress these insights about, you know, the heart consciousness?

What, what was that? Yeah.

What was that about?

That's a very good question, isn't it? Well, you know, the, with Margaret Barker, a 20th century scholar, she's still alive today, realized once we had other scriptures, once other texts were available to us, she realized with a great deal of evidence that the Jewish First Temple tradition is a shamanistic tradition. And then, I mean, it was incredible, the whole temple, it was all of bringing in the heart consciousness uniting the feminine and the masculine and the holy of holies, which was an altered state, a cosmic state of universal consciousness. And then suddenly it didn't exist. In fact, she just discovered it. So many of these cultures were so destroyed that we didn't even know they existed until wonderfully in the 20th century, scholars working independently happened to have found many of these cultures. So here was that culture. How were they destroyed? By the Deuteronomist. Now we don't know who they were, priests of some sort. And we don't know why. Were they trying to save the people of Israel? Were they trying to protect them by thinking that only they knew how to control them with laws? But what happened was this, is that the Deuteronomist completely destroyed the First Temple tradition. The images, for instance, of the feminine was called Wisdom. She was actually a symbol of universal consciousness, and she and Yahweh were married. They co-created the world. And there was a great love between them, which meant we're really looking at the right and left brain and heart harmoniously working together. And it was just an incredibly powerful mystical tradition. And much of the literature shows that one of the major symbols was the Tree of Life. The feminine is the tree, which is soul, and always she is offering her fruit for us to eat, was never denied to anyone. There's some of the most beautiful literature in the earlier Hebrew literature that describes this tree as the most fragrant tree imaginable. The woman in the fiery bush or the fiery tree, the menorah kind of came from that, although it has historical connection. First of all, it was the divine feminine, the soul in each of us. So it's beautiful that relationship with the feminine. And Yahweh was a completely different person, co-created the world together. Later he forgets, but we'll get to that in a minute. So the tree is a symbol of the mystical tradition. You eat of this tree and you remember who you are, that we are all born out of divine consciousness. We are immortal. Divine, and we're all creative. Well, this would make very independent creative people, wouldn't it? Even before the Jewish tradition, the Sumerian, there are many seals in which you see the tree with the fruit just hanging from it, and the god and the goddess on the other side are pointing to the tree like, here it is for you. So when the Deuteronomist came in, we all know their story. The more I live with that story, I just, I can't imagine anything so horrible taking place. But they completely condemned the tree, that is condemned our eating of it. So the story they changed, not the tree that the mystical Jews knew, but it's now the tree of the Deuteronomist. God says to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, you can eat of anything you want except for that one tree. And they changed it to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and another tree that's a tree of life. They didn't want us to eat it either, but we didn't even know where that one was. We, he just showed us the knowledge of good and evil. Well, of course, when you say someone, there's only one tree, you know, that's exactly, any parent knows that, that's exactly where they're gonna go. And Eve took the fruit, but it was in her tradition always to take the fruit and give it. To the mortal man. So she did that. The serpent is the Kundalini energy, but now it's a wicked thing telling them, you know, you can go ahead and do that, you won't die. God tells them that if you eat of this, you will die. Well, eating of the tree meant that we found out we don't die, that we're immortal. And so God then, when he realizes what they have done, he punishes them. He's furious, angry, and punishes them. And they are then exiled from life, from the Garden of Eden. And they're flawed. We human beings, this is the story that is in the sacred text. We're flawed. We need fixed or saved or, and for the Jews, it was to be saved by law, by the laws now, not the mystical experience, which is going inward and realizing that we are all divine immortal consciousness. That was denied to us. Now that story, even as a kid when I read that, I thought, well, I mean, a little older kid, I thought, what in the world? Why would a God want us to be stupid and remain unconscious and not know what's good and evil? And then later when God exiles them, he has an angel at the gate of the garden with a sword so that poor couple can never enter again, lest they eat of the Tree of Life and become like us, which they would have had they eaten of the tree, original tree. They would have known they don't die, that they are divine, and that they are immortal. I mean, and that they are creative. So this was a negation of everything, of who we really are.

A negation, a real distortion of those early understandings of, um, kind of feeling, um, We've been deprived of all of that. I mean, it's, it's so sad. As you say, it's, it's sad to be deprived of that kind of rich history and understanding of why we're here and how we're all connected. And we're kind of resurfacing now, as you said, that we've had this periods maybe 3 or 4 times in our culture, and now it's resurfacing again, this true insight, this true understanding. Of our connectedness.

Yes, there were other cultures like Peter Kingsley and discovered that the pre-Socratics, we, all of that information wasn't available to us. Here, this is an incredible group of people from Anatolia, went to Greece though, I mean, who were extraordinarily rational, which means they highly developed the left brain, but they were extraordinarily mixed mystics and healers. And they would go into a deep state of altered consciousness sometimes for days. And they were the ones who developed all of the subjects that we study in school. It said of them that they knew how to make laws that could heal whole towns, whole groups of people. Whatever they were, they were extraordinary in their achievement. Now, I mean, they didn't sit in an ashram and meditate all day, although they did have those times of meditation, but they were ambassadors and politicians and inventors. This is the kind of world we would like to imagine. I am not attracted to being in India and being in an ashram for my life to meditate. I love this view that the deep ability to meditate and be in touch with this universal consciousness that we are, and then to go out in the world and to live and create and be a part of what's going on, shape what's going on. It's said that Plato's description of the ideal city was based on what the pre-Socratics actually had constructed. So that too was suppressed. Once the church got its power around the, in the 4th century, late 300s, they just suppressed everything. They carried on the Deuteronomist tradition. Although it's kind of an interesting story that Jesus was a rebirth of the First Temple tradition. But that was destroyed too because he was a mystic and teaching this. We know that from the Nag Hammadi text and other texts. But when the Roman Church then took power, they brought in all of the worst from the Deuteronomist. And at the same time, they inverted the Jesus story from being a mystic who teaches us how to discover who we are into a God outside of us that we must worship. So again, took away who we really are and carried on that. So, but it was for power. The Deuteronomist wanted power over the Jewish people. I don't know what their intentions were. The church, we do know. In the main, it was to, to have everybody believe what they had decided was true. And they burned texts, they burned temples, they burned mystery schools, they murdered people and anyone who challenged the doctrine. And so people were suppressed brutally for hundreds of years until around 1000 AD, these underground traditions began to surface. And the High Middle Ages was that first period, which was an incredibly more powerful period than I was ever taught in school. I mean, a lot was going on when we think here are the temples, the cathedrals, so mathematically structured as were the Egyptians so that they could ignite a kind of consciousness. If when we're entering them, there was some kind of high knowledge that had been maintained underground that did reemerge in the High Middle Ages and then the Italian, but it couldn't really develop because of the power of the church. Then there was a scientist and mystical Renaissance in the 1600s that was destroyed totally by the church. We didn't even know it existed until Francis Yates discovered it in the 20th century. And then the German. And so this is the 5th time that this underground tradition has come to the surface. But what we are faced with is the Deuteronomists are still with us, whether they would call themselves that or not. We still need fixing. We still need to be merged with the machine in this case, or use nanomedicine, artificial intelligence to change us from being human because we are not worthy of living in the Garden of Life. That is still with the technocrats. And I think these people are what has happened by the thousands of years of suppression. If they didn't have a way of finding out this that we're talking about, what was there? I should make the, why not make us better? But it may not be how many facts we know. It's this whole system working together that can open us to a consciousness that is far different from AI. It's what the Egyptians said. Instead of teaching us something, they wanted to construct situations so that our brain would suddenly just experience it. Experience it. And that's a knowing far beyond any factual knowledge. So maybe we're a being which has available certain intellectual knowledge with the left brain, as long as we keep it in touch with the right brain, where we now know it gets its context, its meaning, its purpose, its feeling. If we cut off from the right brain, we don't feel anything. So we can kill people. What's it matter? You know, we don't, and that's been a problem. We're a left-brain culture. But if we could stay with the right brain and the heart, then we would have a very different civilization. And Ian McGilchrist's book has come out, The Master and Its Emissary, and he has made really, really clear how this brain works. And that what is happening today with just the left brain and how we're so violent, the left brain can be violent, competitive, all that. If it isn't in touch with, it has to always, after it's done all these wonderful things to information, take all of that back to the right brain to get its context and meaning and purpose. And then the feeling from the heart. And the Egyptians said, without feeling, there can be no civilization. Which we're finding out, right?

Yeah, we're sort of missing, we're disconnected from the right brain side and left to the left brain. So, you know, I'm always fascinated by this concept of universal consciousness and our connectivity, and our— we're connected, we're, you know, this kind of immortal divine quality. How can we understand that? What is this? We wanna feel it. What does it feel like?

Well, you know, if we think in terms of the conceptual description of the quantum field as a field of field of energy, tremendous energy, then we can then say, okay, how does a mystic look at it? It looks at it as a field of field. The spirit is, we're in it. We live in it. It isn't up in the heavens somewhere, it's all here. Then how would it feel? That's the thing is that we can only know by experiencing it, they would tell us. There's no way to conceptualize it. And yet people always try. You know, you think of the people who've had near-death experiences and they've experienced, they say it is, it is a universe of love, like nothing they've ever felt before. And in each of these Renaissance periods, they discovered that the heart, that feeling was the central, it was central to higher consciousness, that we can't have higher consciousness without love. There's no way it opens to us. So whatever it is that the heart opens us to in this universal consciousness is we feel it. It is love. It is something so beyond anything we can describe. That's what they tell us who've experienced it. But, you know, we can know when we love someone on the Earth, you know, we love each other, we love children, we love, we get an idea, you know.

And it really speaks to the fact that we are, there's this thread connecting all of us, right? I mean, we are all connected. We're all part of the same energy field.

We are, yes.

All living things, not inanimate things, I take it, just living things.

Everything. Everything has some degree of energy, is some form, frequency of energy. And it's all, every single thing, every atom is connected. And this is where quantum physics comes in and knowing that when it is connected, you can't, it doesn't separate anywhere, no matter where it is or what dimension. I mean, it's a, This field of field is flowing through us all the time. You know, when we get all of these thoughts, we thought, oh, how brilliant, where'd that come from? Well, you know, we don't really isolate ourselves in our brilliance. We're only brilliant to the degree that we can let this energy just flow through us.

And it pre-existed us, right? And it continues after we pass, right? I call it a kind of a pre-existing condition. I mean, it's, it's, it's something. Yeah, it's there.

It is. And our ancestors would say, and don't forget, you will continue to exist too. That the consciousness that, and there's a lot of evidence now, so much evidence that we do continue on our journey.

I guess that's how we stay, sorry, that's how we stay connected after death.

Yes. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we do. And people with near-death experiences, of course they are, connecting to everyone they knew and who they didn't know. So I think it's— one person described it as that we're like a nest of Russian dolls in a sense, is that from the atom to the human being, to the solar system, to the galaxy, to the universe. And we can't disconnect ourselves from that. That's who we are. So we don't grow by separating as we once thought and getting rational and then coming back to it.

Individuating.

Yeah, that we grow by how well we can lovingly cooperate with all of the systems we're in because it's a holographic system. And at every point in the system is the information. So we really have available to us the information of the universe. We wouldn't need that kind of information from AI except for certain purposes. But we have a very a different kind that we can open to that interconnected intelligence of the universe.

Wow. I wonder if you would mind sharing this story, a very touching story that you and your husband experienced after the death of your son. Share that.

Yes, yes. He was 20 years old when he was killed in an automobile accident. And my husband had had a vision. And this is funny to even say with my husband because he was polite about my interest, but that wasn't his. And so he was in his office and he suddenly had a vision of Pishti, that was our son, Pishti's car on the side of the freeway. His body was superimposed on it. So he knew it was two different dimensions and he knew he would die or was dead. And then he said, When he saw that, oh, that's right, Pishti, it's almost time for you to do this. And that shocked him. And then Pishti said to him, that's right, dad, I'll be out of the house for a little while. And then my husband Ishwan completely forgot it until the call came through. We happened to be here that afternoon, which was unusual, both, and about Pishti's accident. And then he remembered it, but he didn't, mentioned to me until later. And then when we thought that he was dying that moment, that hour in the hospital, he had another one, a vision of him. And this time, well, in fact, I was so surprised with Ishwan. He was the one who's always my anchor, but we were told that Pishchi could die within the hour. And so people were in various places. And so I took Ishwan's hand. We were standing there. I could feel that energy. It almost shocked me because his energy was just so high. And I looked at him, I thought, my God, could he have a heart attack? And Anyway, we didn't say anymore. And much later when it was over, he said that he really thought he would have a heart attack, that he himself, he couldn't bear it. And then he said, it's like everything was so high in energy and then suddenly it stopped. And that energy was so calm and peaceful and just filled with love. And he saw Pishdi and Pishdi sat up in bed and caught a dove with a ball of light and put it in his heart. Then Ishtvan saw him on Machu Picchu, the mountain of Machu Picchu, and he had one arm up and one down and handing something to Ishtvan. And Ishtvan said that, he said, I didn't know whether that meant that he would live or die, but that connection was so intense that it didn't matter anymore. I realized there was no real difference between whether he lived or he died because the spirit is always connecting us. That really helped him. That was one. Then after, and I'd had 2 years of dreaming that he died, but I had a way of interpreting it symbolically all along the way. But I think that I did grieve during that time in the dreams for this person who, oh, he was my son. No, he wasn't. I think that helped me later. But at any rate, after his death, we had many, many experiences with him. And he wanted us to know, yes, I'm alive and I'm still working. I'm still creating. And he wanted us to know that the Earth would be going through some really difficult times. And he wanted us to remember things. He, he wouldn't be like telling us things. He'd say, remember. Just like we all have this consciousness. But when we— well, someone described it in this way, and I think it's good, is that we're all universal consciousness, but we have a valve that limits that consciousness so that we can function like we are right now. And then, but every civilization should develop techniques to release that valve and then come back to tighten it.

And not be overwhelmed by it because there must be so much So much rich energy there that—

yeah, we couldn't buy groceries while we're in this state.

Wow. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. You know, I like to always bring in the notion of aging and aging well, and how does this reclaim our heart consciousness and our creative side? How does this help us on our aging journey?

You know, I couldn't imagine just living in the left brain, you know, without that right brain and heart connection of our meaning and our purpose and love, which I think all of us have, you know, even though the culture emphasizes one, but we'll be more or less connected to it. But it gives meaning and purpose to our lives. I think, you know, the Native Americans used to say, we've all come to the Earth with a purpose, and that is to create a medicine. It's a medicine that heals what we need healing, and it will heal others who need healing in the same way. And they saw, as all our ancestors saw really, this beautiful purpose that each one of us comes with. So when we realize, and you know, it doesn't have to be doing things that someone knows about in the public. I mean, simply loving and being that person who holds love and purpose and meaning is a huge creative gift. But every one of us has a purpose. And I think knowing that as we age and we see our bodies changing and growing old and everything happening to it and surprising us every morning, that we can accept that because the body is simply a uniform. You know, we step into in matter and then we gradually, we live old. We are trying to keep it functioning, get it at its best. But as it does go, we can let that go because everything that we've loved is still living, still present, whether in this dimension or the other. I think it helps tremendous. I couldn't imagine living without it.

That's beautiful. That's such a kind of personal insight to this aging process that it is good. And we look for our— look for our purpose, we look for our connectedness. So you also mentioned that maybe you're— this is your husband's, um, comment, that birth and death are two different sides of the same state. Hold them in our hands and play with them.

Yes.

Uh, what is this like?

Well, he certainly had an education after our son died. He was speaking like a philosopher. I'm thinking, where did to do with my husband.

Of course she did.

But he, after one visionary experience, he wrote it down and it was, he, it was like he realized this. He said, death is as divine as life. Hold them in both hands, play with them, honor them. This is the divine game. I also said balance them. I left that out. This is the divine game. Yes. And Gandhi had said, birth and death are not two different states. They're two different aspects of the same state, which is life. If we come in, if we're born, we're gonna die. And this is just two states of life because our life is continuous. The life of the heart of consciousness is continuous. And, and you know, I love the old Mayan proverb that's, or oracle, I guess it is. It says, Polarity is the loom on which reality is strung. That's so beautiful because in the West we tried to cut the loom in half and it only wanna focus on birth and life and the intellect. And we've let all of this other kind of atrophy. And now this is the fifth Renaissance and we're up against the greatest darkness ever. But we're trying now to think, how do we put that loom back together? You know, in a living sense.

Yeah, there are two bookends on the shelf, right? Not just the beginning, but there's another one at the other side, and it's just a version of what goes before and what comes after.

Exactly.

Yeah. And how about grief? I know you had used the expression the creativity of grief. What— how do we learn? What do we connect to when going through grief.

I know that's hard. I remember one person who said they saw my book on the bookshelf and got furious when it said the miracle of death, because they had just lost their daughter. But later, we became very good friends and we talked about those things. But grief is so real because we're playing this game in matter. And when you think of how, for instance, with a child, I mean, you're with that child always and trying to, when they get old enough to be on their own, let them go and be independent, or with a spouse. I mean, we're with them for years and years and we share all our thoughts with them. So when that presence is no longer with us, that is that physical person, it's tough. No matter the fact that we're born out of universal consciousness, then we will be with them again. We still have to face the fact that we love that person and that body with us. We get up in the morning, that person's not here. And so that's grief. But I've discovered that it can be a dead end. I mean, it can kill us. I mean, it just, or I sort of felt in my experience, my mother was killed one year. My son was taken off the machines and the very same moment that she had been killed a year before. And then 2 years and 4 months later, my husband was killed. All with cars. And I just thought, I have to survive. And yet there were times, you know, there were times when it was the realization that they're not here and that I was not a daughter, a mother, would not be a grandmother or a wife. Okay. So I had to deal with that. And yet I would find that as I let myself experience those things in real grief, that it didn't keep me there. If I would go with it, it would take me somewhere else. The, our nature doesn't want to kill us with grief. It just wants us to experience it fully and then let it go. As one experience I had with my son after his death was this. He said, well, let's go through all of my stages, mom. Let's look at me in every stage of life. And as I would go through remembering some of them, I don't, we were surfing on the ocean of life. I would almost go under when I'd wanna hold onto it. And he'd say, no, mom, let it go. Just hold the experience each moment fully, then let it go. And I think grief teaches us we experienced it and we can let it go. But we have the gratitude and the memory. And, you know, with HeartMath, that institute has scientifically studied these things and they have studied over 32 years that if you go to the heart and focus on gratitude for knowing that person. You know, I think I had my son for 20 years and my husband for 32, and I would remember those things. And that what happens is that the heart actually sends out a high frequency bridge to the brain. And they, this is how we love science. So it's been scientifically studied. It throws out a high frequency bridge to the brain. And it shifts the way we look at the world. You know, it's suddenly we see the world in a different way, but people who stay in their grief, they can't see that again.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Um, really just, um, such a poignant way of understanding the importance of experiencing the grief and eventually moving beyond it because we do get past it.

We do.

We can stay stuck there. We can hold on to it and it can be sort of a protection for many people, but it's also most important to get through it and to pass through it.

Get through it. Yes. And to, yeah, to realize we're playing this game of matter. We come in, we take on bodies and we love each other. We play these games together, but it isn't going to last forever. We have to be willing to let each person have his or her destiny and let them go. And I remember when my son was growing up, I was trying to be very conscious of not, you know, letting him be independent when he was old enough to be, when I could trust him to be. And I remember when he died, it was like, okay, now I have to remember. I have to remember that I had to let him go in life when he was able to be independent. And I have to let him go now in death. That's his destiny. And I have to honor that. And that was helpful to me, you know, not to try to control us any more than we can control the young man growing up. You know, we have to, we have to work with him.

Yeah. Letting go in both, both cases.

Yes.

Yeah. That's why I talk about, you know, we do have these losses and periods of grief and bereavement and we do move beyond and that's when we look at opening a new chapter, starting a new chapter because we have to redefine ourselves. I'm no longer a wife. I'm now a widow, or, you know, I have to see myself in a new way, create a new character for myself.

And that's creative. That's creative. It doesn't mean we don't love them or that their essence isn't with us, but in a different way. And we create different games at that point.

Yeah, I see. I'm just noticing the time and we're about out of time. So what would you hope our audience remembers from our conversation, which I love, by the way, I love this conversation. What would you hope our listeners take away?

Well, one thing is that we are immortal. We don't die. The other is that we are so much more than the Deuteronomist told us or that our technocrats are telling us. We are so much more than they have any idea of, and that's what we need to get in touch with.

Great. We are immortal and we're so much more than a lot of us have been led to believe. We have so much more potential once we connect with that right brain, that heart consciousness.

Yes.

Yes. So your two books, Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World and The Miracle of Death. There's nothing but light. Are these available on Amazon and on a website or how can people find them?

Yes.

Yes.

They are available at Amazon and anywhere books and ebooks are sold. They can also be purchased from the Kamlak Center. That's K-A-M-L-A-K.com. And also there are videos and webinars and articles on that website that we've done. And if you ordered the books from there and sign up for the newsletter, if you happen to want the newsletter, you'll get a chapter from Merchants of Light on the High Middle Ages. That was my, one of my favorite chapters.

And what was the website again? Kamlok?

It's, yes, it's K-A-M-L-A-K dot com, kamlok.com.

Great. Okay. Well, looks like we're out of time, Betty. But before I wrap up, I just want to remind my listeners to visit my website, livingto100.club, sign up for my email list. And download a free copy of my 9 Tips to Make Living Longer Enjoyable.

Yeah, I'll do that.

Oh, okay, great. So you'll also see an option to contact me with your questions and comments. I welcome your feedback. Betty, thanks so much for being a guest on our show. For those who might want to contact you, how could they do that?

Well, they can contact me through Comlock.

Okay. Okay.

And I think my email is there, I believe. But anyway, if they wrote Comlock, it comes to me too.

Comlock, get you that way. That's great. So, thanks so much for being a guest. This is probably after 200 episodes, one of my best, one of my most enjoyable.

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I enjoyed it too. So, thank you, Joe.

Yeah. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. Hope to see you next time.

It's time to rethink, renew, and reimagine retirement. Hey everybody, Jared Sylvester here, host of Retire Repurposed. Now, this podcast is about the non-financial parts of retirement, which many times can be even more challenging than the financial. We believe retirement is not the end, rather the beginning of what could be the most impactful, purposeful, and fulfilling season of a person's life. So don't retire, become repurposed. To listen now, search Retire Repurposed on your favorite podcast platform, Senior Resource, or Life Audio.