Stephen Berkley interviews professor and author Betty J. Kovacs, Ph.D., about our culture's systematic suppression of our natural divinity, as well as her experiences communicating with her deceased son. Dr. Kovacs shares her journey and experiences, shedding light on the depths of our potential for higher states of consciousness, creativity, and love, which have long been obscured by centuries of misinformation and control. This episode serves as a powerful call to break free from the chains of suppression, reclaim our inherent divinity, and co-create a world guided by love, compassion, and unity.
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Divine Deceptions: Exposing Centuries Of Suppression And Lies
Introduction
Welcome back to another edition of the show. I’m here with Betty J. Kovacs, PhD. Betty received her doctorate from the University of California Irvine in Comparative Literature and Theory of Symbolic Mythic Language. She wrote the book, The Miracle of Death, which delves into the often misunderstood topic of death, offering a perspective that challenges conventional beliefs and invites readers to explore the transformative potential of the dying process.
Dr. Kovacs, thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you for having me. Steven.
Culture's Suppression Of Our Natural Divinity
Here’s my first question for you. You’re an academic, so you are therefore a discerning consumer of information, but you are also a bit of a renegade. You say that we’ve constructed a left brain culture, which has led to 2,500 years of suppression. What is our culture suppressing?
That’s an excellent question because since it has been suppressed, we don’t seem to know it has been. What has been suppressed is who we are, the depth and the beauty of our potential to develop higher states of consciousness to create and love. That’s what’s been suppressed.
It reminds me. When we spoke, you were talking a little bit about how what the Catholic Church teaches is not what Jesus was trying to impart. The Catholic Church teaches something else.
The church got together and decided on the scriptures which were being used all the way around in the areas where Christianity existed. They chose the scriptures and changed them in the ways that they wanted, but they left out the scriptures. We have the Jesus that they taught who is a wonderful image except that Jesus is a God. We are not like him, and we must worship him again. We are nothing. We must worship him.
After the war, the Nag Hammadi texts were found in Egypt. Those texts were amazing because, in these texts, it was very clear that Jesus was a mystic. He said, “I did not come to save you. I came to remind you of who you are.” It’s beautiful. I remember when I first read it, I was out of my mind when He said, “It’s not enough to follow the Christ. You must become the Christ.” That wasn’t what the church was teaching.
That’s threatening to the church, right?
Yeah. What the church hated most was the mystic, the one who experienced higher levels of consciousness. The mystics were the heretics. They killed them, excommunicated them, or threatened them. They killed many people who even thought about having their own experiences.
The suppression still goes on, but in subtler ways perhaps. What is happening that seems to be suppressing?
I think of the people who want a world government and to control everybody. It’s a pathology. It’s the pathology that developed as a result of the suppression. What could happen to our children when we brought them up believing they’re nothing? Nature is dead, only to exploit. Take from it what you need. People are like, “If there’s no life after this life, I can do what I want.” Those who are in various circumstances in their lives and are deeply wounded by that have become politicians and world leaders who are working at the WHO to take over the entire world, dictate everything, and take away our right to vote. They were only appointed. They weren’t even elected.
The WHO is the United Nations agency formed to promote health and serve the vulnerable.
Many people don’t even know it because they control the media, and the media’s not talking about what’s really going on. That’s one form of the pathological brothers and sisters who have been so wounded that we are nothing. We didn’t even know until the 20th century. Remember that the heart is the fifth brain component. It was nothing except to pump blood.
Let’s stop there. The heart as the fifth brain component is a relatively new concept. According to my research, this is rooted in neurocardiology, which studies the complex interactions between the brain and the heart. Please continue.
All of these people, generation after generation, have been so wounded. It’s important that we recognize that they are pathological. They are left-brained. They are not using the right brain or the heart in the way that it can be used. They can’t help from information coming in to some degree, but not functioning with the left brain.
We know that the left brain does not have the capacity to see meaning or purpose. That comes from the right brain and heart. We have a science, quantum physics, that can support the visionary world. We know about the brain. We know that we have the potential for vision and mystical experience and that we can connect with the other world. People are having so many different types of experiences. The light is very strong. This is a time in which we really are going to have to come to terms with the effects of that suppression, and both sides will grow.
In the academic community, how much due respect is quantum physics getting as compared to Newtonian physics?
There was a friend of mine who taught at the colleges here in Claremont. When I was writing my book, I showed him how the description of the quantum field by scientists and the description by mystics of the spirit world were so similar.
For those members of our community who are not acquainted with this concept, quantum physics and mysticism converge on several profound aspects of the nature of reality, interconnectedness, and the role of the observer. There are striking similarities. Please continue.
He’s a smart guy. I said, “What did you think about that?” He said, “That was amazing,” and then it was like unconsciousness. It was like it didn’t exist and he never said it. He never brought it up again. It didn’t change his life a bit. That would knock me out. I find that people don’t question. We’re so brainwashed over centuries that we can’t believe it.
Personal Experiences And Insights
A lot of your mission didn’t really start until you lost a child. In 1991, you lost a son, Pisti, when you were a college student who was about to turn 20 years old in a car accident. You had experiences that informed the rest of your life. Could you tell me a little bit about what happened? Did you have to do a bit of a mental or cognitive jump in order to be where you are or did it come very naturally?
I don’t think anything came naturally to me, but I have to say that I spent my life looking. My brother and I always played. One of the games was, “What’s it all about anyway? What if there wasn’t a world?” I continued questioning all my life. My brother, at one point, thought, “I have to be responsible and do my job.” He was deeply wounded for the rest of his life.
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I’m stopping the recording here because I wanted to clarify something. Dr. Kovacs is talking about her brother’s deep wounds. I had trouble following Dr. Kovacs during this part of the interview. What she is referring to is the systematic suppression in our society regarding the existence of a metaphysical or a spiritual realm, a realm where the principles of Newtonian physics do not apply.
In academia, believers of this realm are often labeled naive or unsophisticated. In religious circles, those who attempt to interact with energies residing in that dimension are called heretical or even demoniacal. In scientific and psychiatric circles, those who attempt to engage the unseen are considered irrational or psychotic. In the case of Dr. Kovacs’ brother, he apparently felt separated from his own spiritual essence, his divinity, if you will. For him, this resulted in tragic circumstances, according to Dr. Kovacs. Let’s continue the interview.
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He became an alcoholic. He and I talked about it. I said, “Bill, I know what’s wrong,” and he did too. Once he stopped the quest, he couldn’t be in touch with any potential meaning. I was questioning all my life. I went to university to study. I studied religion, mythology, and then shamanism. I went twice to South America with shamans to study. Not too many life-changing experiences happened, but I was always questioning.
I wrote down all my dreams. I was always looking at what was going on in my life. To say that I really knew, that’s what my goal was. I was like, “I want to experience it.” Jesus Christ taught our own experience. He even had techniques. One technique that he taught is the round dance. We know the Sufi certainly do that. I discovered Jesus taught that too. As one quantum physicist says, “Matter is how Spirit looks in the physical world.” Matter is spirit. We can get in touch with those laws through our own right-brain heart consciousness with this intermediary world.
I do want to get back to Pisti’s death and exactly what happened. That’s where I’m going, at least.
That’s where I was trying to go. I was involved in all of this, but it wasn’t until he died. Here were all of my searches of a lifetime. When he died, the day after his memorial, both my husband and I experienced his consciousness not so much that first time, but then, he came through so clearly and beautifully.
Let’s take this in a linear fashion. Tell me what happened the first time. It wasn’t as big, but it was surprising.
We had hoped. We knew that we would experience him. The first time for me was when I heard Native American chanting. I then saw in this vision that a spiral of souls was coming to the world. They were spiraling around the earth and being born everywhere. They had come to help us heal what had happened from this suppression. I felt them say to me, “Our brothers and sisters on the earth are dreaming a terrible dream.” I knew they had come to help us, and I knew that they wouldn’t come if we hadn’t been ready and asked them. That was my experience.
Are you saying that maybe it was Pisti who brought or ushered in this vision that you had?
No, I don’t think that. It wasn’t that I saw him as a part of that, but I felt his presence in it. Also, in the last dream he had before he died or the dream in the year of his death about his own death, candles were burning everywhere. He was going out into the cosmos and coming back. It was that he had this deep connection, it seemed. I felt his presence in all of this. I also felt that we were a part of it. Many of us here are a part of that spiral of souls.
Are you saying your son had a dream that he reported to you? Before he died, he reported this dream where he felt like he was part of this movement.
He was chanting. I was hearing the chanting in this first vision. We always shared a lot of the dreams we had from the time he was little. He had 1 when he was 12. He experienced that he was in the trauma center, which he was in for thirteen days, and that he was up above looking down at what he called his dead body. He was brain-dead. We didn’t know that at the time.
At twelve years old, your son reported a dream in which he was brain-dead.
He didn’t know about the accident at that point. He said, “I’m up above the hospital, looking down at my dead body. It’s in the trauma center.” I’m thinking, “How does he know that?” At any rate, this was the dream. He said, “What do you think it means, Mom?” I thought, “Lord,” because it was horrifying in a way. I said, “Let’s look at all the sides of it. You’re going into puberty. You’re becoming a man. That’s quite a transformation.”
Seven years later, your son gets into an accident and he is in the ICU. Did you recall the dream at that point and say, “This is coming true.”
I saw it. As a matter of fact, he would record his own dreams and draw a picture. When I walked in, the bed was where it was in the dream picture and the wash basin was where it was in his sketch. Someone said, “He’s nothing but a vegetable now,” in the dream, and that’s true later. He said, “I looked at that body on the bed and thought, “That’s not me.” He went flying through the cosmos again. It was almost like he was practicing leaving his body. I, here making cappuccino, took his arm and said, “Thank God it wasn’t you.” It was him. There it was.
I felt his presence with the chanting. I don’t know what to make of it except that the chanting was connected to him and his death. I’ve read other people have had similar visions of this spiral of beings coming. The other side is working diligently with us in this time of our transition, and we need it. My husband had no interest in these things except he’d had a vision of Pisti’s death also two weeks before his death.
You mentioned that the second time Pisti came, it was more profound, more palpable, or something along those lines. What happened?
For my husband, the first real journey with Pisti was so profound that he sat up on the side of the bedroom. He said, “I had no idea what you were talking about. I will never look at the earth in the same way again,” and he didn’t. When I would come out of the vision, the left brain was there. It’s highly trained to believe in its superiority like, “Give me the evidence.” Its evidence isn’t the same kind of evidence as experience. The experience is the evidence. The left brain in all of its high mightiness thinks that only its kind of evidence is important. It isn’t. It’s important for left-brain things. It would pounce on that and try to tear it apart.
I had to go through a period in which I could see what was happening. My husband then was the anchor for me because he never doubted. His experience was so profound that he was changed. He then started having visions of his own death, which did come two years later when he went to his home country to visit his family in Hungary. He was killed there in an automobile accident as well.
After Pisti’s death, it was shortly after his memorial that you started feeling him in the house. You and your husband would do something actively to invite him into the room.
There were several things. We meditated and listened to music. The music was meditative music, drumming, or very spiritual music. Sometimes, there were spontaneous experiences. At other times, since I had worked with shamanic traditions and I had worked with sacred medicine, we decided that we would use that.
Sacred medicine isn’t better understood, although it’s beginning to be. Here are plants from nature that when they combine and relate with our consciousness, there is the ability to experience cosmic consciousness. Here is this beautiful gift in nature that if we respect and work with it in a relationship, it opens us up. We were so amazed. Pisti was so present. My husband, Istvan, could see his image. I couldn’t, but I knew where his energy was. We had conversations sometimes for 2 or 3 hours. It’s like he wanted us to remember. It’s not like he was telling us or teaching us. It’s like, “Remember. We created this. these are our lives from the other side.”
Sacred medicine isn’t better understood. When these plants from nature combine and relate with our consciousness, we can experience cosmic consciousness.
In terms of the methods, going over them really quickly, you used shamanic music, chanting, and sometimes plant medicine. For people who are seeking this kind of connection, would you recommend plant medicine?
Every person has to know what they’re ready for. It’s very important to treat plant medicine with respect. Be in a safe place. Meditate. Many people around the world are working with those who do know how to use it and who are there when others are using it, and that’s a way to begin. After the death, we were together and ready. I wouldn’t have been much earlier. It’s something that one must use with caution and in a sacred context.
I would add to what happened, too, that sometimes, these things are spontaneous. I went to a bookstore and heard music. Miracles was the name of the music, and I was so moved by it. I sat down. I was stunned by it. As soon as it was over, I went up to the counter, bought it, came home, and jumped into my sweat. As soon as I lay down, he was present. He said, “Mom, let’s go through all of the stages of my life,” and we did. He would say, “Surf with life. Go with the flow.” The moment when I’d think, “I can’t let this go,” I’d start to sink and he’d say, “Go with the flow. Surf with life.”
We came to the time when he was in the hospital and dying. I thought, “I can’t do this,” and then I thought, “He’s dead physically. I’m with him now. His consciousness is here. This is a whole new reality. I can let him go because he is here.” The music stopped the moment that I had finished my own process, but I had to go through a process as we do in the Western world. 2,000 years of suppression isn’t nothing. It has an effect on us.
You’re of the belief that the earth is not well and there are spiritual forces out there that are coming to our aid. Is the implication there that the spirit world doesn’t feel sorry for us and they’re impacted by the fact that the Earth is not doing so well?
Absolutely. We worked together. My husband had the image of a bridge and that they could only go so far without breaking the bridge unless we would move with them. Many of us are here because we want to help ourselves and the Earth. This is a time when we’ve chosen to come to do the best we can. When I was growing up in college, it was, “Writer, write the best American novel,” and all that business, which never impressed me. It’s not about that. It’s that each one of us is needed. It’s not a one-person operation. We fit like pieces in a puzzle, working together lovingly, appreciating, and respecting each other’s work. Altogether, it will make a difference.
Many of us are here because we want to help ourselves and the earth, and this is a time when we've chosen to do the best we can.
How do you respond to your colleagues who say you’re working in a dangerous area? I know things have happened where this information is becoming more prevalent. We’re hearing more about it in the mainstream media. Before, this was a risky area to be working in, no?
Yes, it was. I was able to get away with it at school in college because I was working with texts. We studied the texts. The texts indicated these things as well as many artifacts and archeological artifacts. They really respected the class, so they didn’t dare. The two people that I had been friends with, we’d worked through the whole Vietnam thing together and other things together, and it came to this. When I tried to tell them some of the experiences, they walked backward. They did not want to hear it. The best way to do it for them is to ignore it and never ask a question. They were still loving, respectful, and kind, but they never asked questions and were afraid to hear.
When you say they walked backward, do you mean you’re walking down the street with them and telling the story and they started walking in the other direction?
I was in the hallway. I was about to go into class and he was about to go to another one. He didn’t want to turn his back on me because I was talking, but he was walking backward. I did bring it up one time and he said, “It scares me. I can’t deal with it.”
Metaphorically, it was perfect, it seems.
He was looking and hearing it, but going backward.
Conscious Dying
We’re coming towards the end of the hour. I want to make sure I bring out certain points in your book that struck me. You talk about the concept of conscious dying. How does conscious dying differ from conventional approaches to death?
First of all, to talk about it. In the hospice, very often, there’s no talking about it. I had a student who was getting his doctorate at Pacifica who wrote a manual on how to consciously die when people are in hospice. One thing with the ones who are there and not dying and the loved one who is dying is to talk about it and anticipate what might be happening.
Many people experience deathbed visions. They see loved ones coming to get them. They see them there waiting for them. This should be talked about. That’s a conscious dying. Be open about what’s happening. Be receptive. Be able to pick it up. There are even methods developed with music and different kinds of rituals to help people consciously die.
I wish as a whole collective of creators that we could create a world in which nature and our own bodies work in such a way that we don’t have to die in such painful, wretched states. We can do that. That ayurvedic medicine wouldn’t have existed if we couldn’t because the doctor was praised when no one got sick. If we work with nature and the nature of our own bodies, we wouldn’t have to do that. When you’re in such pain and you have a lot of pain medicine, it’s hard to die in that way.
The Interconnectedness Of All Life
You also emphasized the interconnectedness of all life. How does this perspective inform your views of death?
That is the absolute number one principle of all higher consciousness and the mystic tradition for anyone who has experienced that pure consciousness and pure intellect. We’re not separate. We’re all one loving consciousness. We play these wonderful games of creating worlds in individual bodies, loving each other, living, and dying, but we’re all one.
As our ancestors emphasized again and again, we are immortal. There is no death of consciousness. We are immortal. We’re all divine. Jesus wanted us to know, “Be the Christ.” We are creative. Instead of waiting for God to do something and blaming Him, we have the capacity to work with the great consciousness and the universe to create worlds that are worthy of who we are. We are immortal, divine, and creative. We need to remember. That’s what Jesus wanted us to know, to remind us of who we are. We can do so much. When we look at this darkness in the world, it is not to be afraid but to know it for what it is and remember who we are and the vast unity of forces we’re working with.
Dreams And The Spirit World
You spoke about the importance of dreams earlier in the interview. I have believed for some time that dreams have a purpose. It’s a portal. We receive information during dreams. You believe that too, it sounds like.
Those dreams or images are coming from the intermediate spirit world. That’s symbolic language. That’s what I taught. That is our first language. The more we work with it, the more we can understand it and deal with it. I was guided by dreams most of my life. I met the work of Carl Jung and his work in dreams. He became a mentor to me through my dreams. I encountered him more than once, and I felt that he guided me in my dreams. I honored them because of that. They helped me, thank God. I needed all the help I could get.
Those dreams are images from the intermediate spirit world, and that's symbolic language.
In retrospect, everything that happened to you and your family, was this, do you think, part of your plan coming in?
It seems that on the other side, we do have a great deal, because we’re creators, in choosing where we will be born. I know someone said to me, “I didn’t choose my parents,” but we do. I’m not dominant in my thinking about any of this, but it appears that we choose the situation we want to be in. In order to get the whole picture, some of it may not be what we’d really want to have, but pretty much. It seemed that what Pisti wanted to relate to us is that what the earth needs more than anything else is to know that we are immortal.
The old worldview is that when you’re dead, you’re dead. You’re nothing. You’re a fluke of nature. You have no meaning. This has to be dissolved. It seems that he made it pretty clear that we were not only playing this game here but in parallel worlds. Many children are dying young, but the parents are so desperate that they connect with them. In this way, we are individually connecting to the spirit world because that was severed. We have been desperately ill as a result of it.
I see this knitting it back together through individuals who are losing their loved ones. They’re longing. There is that love to connect to that other dimension that we are knitting our dimensions back together. Dreams and experiences help us, and so many people are having them. I think we did plan this. In fact, they gave me a little lesson about, “We’re always here. When you love, we’re all in the heart. There’s no way you can get rid of us.” They were being funny, like, “If you wanted to, you couldn’t.” I feel that presence constantly in whatever I’m doing. I don’t feel that separation anymore.
That’s nice. You must never get lonely.
For many times, I was alone, and I thought, “I never feel alone,” and that’s good. That’s a good thing because there are many old people I know who are alone, and it’s a desperate situation.
Finding Out More About Dr. Kovacs
People who are reading this interview will want to know a little bit more about you, how to get a hold of you, and what you’re doing. They want to know where to buy your books. Could you tell us how people can find out more about you and your work?
Yes. Thanks to Kimberly in The Kamlak Center. One can go there. It’s Kamlak.com. There are articles there. There are podcasts and webinars. You can buy books from there as well. Also, my email number is there. I am very open to people writing if they have questions. They do that often. Mainly, you can get all the information from The Kamlak Center.
The Miracle of Death and Merchants of Light are your two books?
Yes.
They’re available on Amazon also, right?
Yes. They’re available on Amazon and anywhere that books and eBooks are sold. There are eBooks as well. You can buy them anywhere. If you want it signed, then if you get it from The Kamlak Center, I’m happy to do that.
Thank you so much for your time. That was very informative.
Thank you. I enjoyed talking with you.