Betty Bethards Interview speaking on her work and her Death Experience.

(by Rachelle Beneviste)

My work is to give men and women the simple tools to enlightenment and the encouragement to go for it. They look at me and think, "If she can do it, I can do it," says Betty Bethards, well-known mystic, spiritual leader, and meditation teacher. Founder and president of the Inner Light Foundation in Petaluma, California. Betty's new (and eighth) book, The Dream book, Symbols for self Understanding has recently been released with 650 more dream symbols.

Affectionately called "the common sense guru," Bethards exudes warmth, humor and wisdom. One feels embraced by her love and compassion; her conversation is filled with endearments, like "Honey, you've got to be aware of your energy around different people. You want to feel uplifted, not drained."

Bethards has been sharing her spiritual knowledge for 28 years through her books , lectures, and audiocassettes, mainly in northern California. Focusing on dreams, meditation, affirmations and visualization as tools for self-knowledge, she also shares her exuberance for life, her own death and rebirth experience which opened her to the life she now lives and teaches, and her belief that one need not suffer to remove the husk of habit. She encourages awareness of our inner guru who knows the answers to all the questions of our life, if we just listen.

"If I'm suffering," Bethards says, "boy, am I doing something wrong. Get up into that thirds eye and see your experience as God sees it and say, "Wow, how did I set that up? What were my positive lessons? What do I need to do to change it?" Still she acknowledges that it is usualy a traumatic life experience that awakens one to ask the big questions, like Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning and purpose of my life? "We suffer through ignorance, " she says. "If we know, we don't have to suffer like that again."

And one of the most important tools for understanding yourself, Bethards tells us, "is your dreams. If there were one tool I wished I'd had as a child, I wish it had been the dream book. It would have changed my life. Dreams are your direct link to God, higher self, or guidance. They provide a door to the subconscious mind, for insight, problem solving, and teachings from the other side.

Dreams and the Death State

As expressed in Bethards' Dream book, "The only difference in the death state and the dream state is that the silver cord, which is much like an umbilical cord connecting the soul with the body, is severed in death. This cord allows the spirit to travel in realms and planes beyond the physical at night, and to receive higher teachings. As you go to sleep at night and your consciousness leaves the physical body, you are experiencing the same thing as death. As you gain more control of the dream state you will realize that there is no such thing called death, only a change of awareness."

I tell her that one of my earliest memories is of a nightmare, when I was no more than three. After all these years, I tell her, I can still see it. "sure," she explains, "we rarely forget nightmares. Our 'good' dreams may go in one ear and out the other, but nightmares we don't forget. They are always from God. There's nothing scary in them. In fact, all dreams are positive; they all have something to teach us. If you're terrified in a dream, you are going to remember every detail. That's when your teachers are trying to get your attention. If you work it out symbolically, you realize it's an important message."

She pursues my early nightmare. "There were two older people behind me," I say. "I was probably in my cradle. I just remember this fear. I called out to my parents. They ignored me and inside of myself, I realized I would have to take care of myself."

"They were your guides," Betty tells me. "Older people in dreams are always wise ones. But of course you didn't know that."

I reflect on the possibility that those guides were always there with me, when my parents could not be. How else did I get through those harsh and painful times? Did the guides represent an inner strength I was not really conscious of until recent years?

"I tell children when they dream of monsters to imagine opening up the monster and finding a cookie monster or some other little being. Children often come up to me and tell me their dreams. They aren't afraid of them," Bethards says.

"In dreams, monsters symbolize fears of your own making allowed to grow out of proportion through undue worry and lack of attention. It is but an illusion in your mind. Make an effort to confront the fear, the monsters; what part of you it represents, what thought, belief or fear. See the monster as a friend that has something to teach you, to give you an insight. Remember, all aspects of the dream are you."

She elaborates on the latter, "People in dreams usually represent qualities within yourself. Male and female figures represent masculine and feminine energies within you. A child represents your child part, an aged person an old part of yourself. A house building or structure is you. If it is large, it represents great potential and awareness of opportunities and/or inner resources."

Bethards' book contains over 1650 symbols to help the reader to decipher the code; as Bethards says, "the lessons we are learning at night." Where did these symbols come from?

"I would channel dream symbols for people," she explained. Everybody was asking for a dream book. The only one I found was too Freudian. So I spoke to GOD. I said, "Look, God, I need for you to give me real clear symbols.' I sad down with a psychologist friend and let myself enter into a trance. She went through the dictionary and picked out symbols and I translated them. We tested them. For six months I spoke to audiences and ran these symbols by them. And they rang true. My book is also out in Japan, Brazil, and England. These symbols cross over different cultures."

Bethards points out that it is not necessary to accept her philosophy presented in her book. "You are your own final word in dream interpretations, as in every other phase of living, be your own guru."

THE START OF THE JOURNEY

How did Betty Bethards become a healer, spiritual leader, driven to share her mystical knowledge? One night, when she was 32 years old, she woke up and felt herself floating horizontally above her bed. "I heard a man's voice," she said, "telling me I was sick with pneumonia and to see a doctor. I told my then husband and he said, 'You'll be okay in the morning, honey.'

"This experience was new and scary. It did not fit into anything I understood. I had been raised as a strict Baptist. But even as a child I knew there was something beyond what I was being taught. One thing was that we would be buried when we were dead and there was no life after that. I always hated the idea of laying in the ground.

"After my death and rebirth experience, I realized there was no death. I felt liberated. Following the experience of hearing a voice say I had pneumonia, I went to the doctor. I didn't have a fever. He wouldn't take a X-ray, and he told me I was hallucinating. I'd never taken drugs or alcohol. I was not hallucinating.

"In that out-of-body experience, I remembered a man reaching down and grabbing me and I reached up and grabbed my self and pulled it back into my body. Later I was sitting on the couch and about 25 feet in front of me, I heard the same voice say, 'You don't have to go back. But you must have antibiotics within 24 hours if you want to stay here.'

"They ran my three children by me and I said, "They'll be fine.' Then they ran the fourth child by me which was just 18 months old and I said, 'I have to go back." Instantly I was back in my body.

"Then I knew that death does not exist. Eventually, I did get a doctor to prescribe antibiotics. It took a lot of convincing to get a doctor to even take a chest X-ray, but he did, and he said pneumonia had started.

"Within two years," Bethards continues, "they began teaching me. What they were telling me was very simple. I thought, it can't be that simple."

When I ask who the "they" were, she says, "My guides. They have no names or egos." And then, "Joan of Arc said 'they' too."

She tells me her guides told her that thoughts, words and actions create our own reality. "They said to observe other people. I began to observe others carefully and could see how their attitudes trapped them. Then I knew I was doing it to me. And that's when my whole life changed.

"I continued to learn. I'm just a pipe and it comes through me. I learned about the 4th dimension. This is why you've seen people who have died; they haven't gone anywhere, they're just in the 4th dimension. We have to learn our lessons here in the body. We choose our parents, the time and date of our birth, and the lessons of the first 28 years. When we understand this then we realize that we can't blame anyone. Then we can love all people, knowing they have no power over us unless we give it to them. We have to learn to make good choices; that's the whole key.

"When I learned there was no death, I asked myself, 'What are you doing here, Betty? You're not here just to raise your kids or just to make a living. What are you doing here?" And of course I knew it was to know myself. Jesus said, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within; go within and you'll know God.' He meant 'shut up and listen.' It's all within us. I cancel out all negative thoughts, words and actions. You learn if someone is hurting you to say, 'boy, that hurts.' It doesn't matter if they hear you or not. You just don't want to stuff it inside of yourself."

Finally I ask her about what I have been perceiving during these times. "This is not a trend," I say.

"It's not a new age fad," she tells me. "Something is happening on this planet. So many of us are having experiences coming from another dimension. We are becoming aware that there is an order beneath the seeming random chaos of life; that we can be fully alive and aware and not dependent on the pop culture world that speaks to us in the media, films and popular magazines. For in these seeming reflections of our lives, we see the lives people live, including violence, lack of morality, and a focus on improving ourselves which suggest we are flawed; and if we are flawed, we feel trapped.

"But by finding our way, inventing and creating our lives, finding the answers within, we can find a way out of the prison of the world of habit, and be empowered, rather than victimized. God is saying that it hasn't been working the way things have been, so a lot of us are waking up at the same time. We're seeing beyond illusions to a life that is much more conscious, more expansive, and freer than we ever imagined."

Rachelle Beneviste is a poet, writer and all around wonderful spirit.

Nobody can stimulate and entertain audiences like Betty does. Her gutsy, down-to-earth teachings give people a real jolt of energy.

To order "There Is No Death," please go to the Books and Tapes page.