FROM THE MUNDANE TO THE DIVINE

Bettye Johnson ©


The signs of awakening are often quite subtle. From my experience this was so for me. Before my awakening I was a wife and a mother of three growing sons and during this time I was what one would call a person with my mindset a W.A.S.P Republican housewife. (W.A.S.P. stands for White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant). I was married to a career military man who had served two tours of duty in Vietnam and having grown up in an era of patriotism during WWII, I could not understand the attitudes and protests of the sixties. It took the Watergate scandal involving President Nixon to crack my belief structure.

At the beginning of my forties, a thought would come into my head, By the time you are fifty, your life will be different. The first time it happened, I paused and thought Huh? Where did that come from? From that time on, this thought would pop into my brain off and on. It was also during this decade that I began to feel a disquiet. My life was boring and mundane. The relationship with my husband was one of no depth or understanding. We were like two strangers going through the motions of pretending to be like Ozzie and Harriet. My sons were in high school and about to begin the graduation process, thereby leaving the nest. I was ripe for change.

Sometimes we do not recognize the gift in what appears to be an adversity. Mine came in the form of an automobile accident where I sustained a whiplash neck injury. One year later the orthopedic surgeon told me that medically speaking, I should be well and suggested I see a psychologist. This shocked me and after one session with a man who thought I was a woman going through menopause, I knew there was no understanding or help there. This set me on a journey of self-discovery. My first step began with a twelve-step program, Overeaters Anonymous (O.A.). This brought out of me a buried desire to be free of my husband – my mundane marriage.

My sponsor in O.A. introduced me to metaphysics and my first book that began opening my mind. The name of the book was The World Before by Ruth Montgomery. The information given in her book resonated with me and my journey into the Divine and Enlightenment began.

It would be some years later when I realized that the thought coming into my head was a message from my soul. On my fiftieth birthday I had my coming-out party. I was newly divorced and well into my journey of self-discovery. I was an avid seminar, workshop junkie. I wanted to know and understand everything. I explored crystals, the tarot, metaphysics, astrology, the paranormal and various forms of healing. I had an inner knowing that they were all only stepping stones and not the end result. I studied New Thought, Religious Science, Divine Science, Unity and even received my Ph.D. (which I do not choose to use.)

Little did I realize that all of this was the journey of awakening to the Divine within me. A year or longer after my divorce, I was introduced to a ministerial school of Divine Science and went to one of their classes in a city located sixty miles from my home. What I heard resonated within me. The following session I enrolled as a student. It was here that I met my late husband and he was the magic of a relationship I had yearned for all my life. I call him my Mr. Magic. He passed from this plane in 2001 and with no regrets; I am onward in my journey.

In 1983 my husband and I chose to attend a Brugh Joy and David Spangler spiritual week at Asilomar, California. It was here that I awakened to my teacher. I was not into channeling and when it was announced one evening that three people would channel their entities to talk about peace, I was ho-hum and laid back on the floor. I barely heard the first two have their entities speak. Then the third one, a cute little blonde from Tacoma, Washington left her body and another entity took over. The moment this entity said “Indeed,” I sat up like a bolt of lightening. I was mesmerized because I knew that I knew him. I didn’t have any memory of where or when I knew him, but I knew he was a Master Teacher. When the session was over, I could not recall what Ramtha the Enlightened One said, and I pondered this for a long time.

It wasn’t until 1985 that I reconnected with him via a video and from that moment on, he has been my teacher. There is an ancient saying that when the student is ready the teacher appears. I attended events after seeing that early video and when the Ramtha School of Enlightenment was formed in 1987 in Yelm, Washington I became a student. My husband retired and we moved to Washington State. At the time of our move, I thought it was to be near friends and also a son in the Navy. That was the outward motive, however the inward motive was to be in this school.

My journey is my own unique journey just as the reader has her or his own unique journey. Not all of us are pulled to the same teacher. I can only share what I have learned from Ramtha. My understanding is that the Soul creates the map for each one’s incarnation. This is decided before we are born into this lifetime or any other lifetimes. Some come in with a knowing in certain areas that others do not have. An agenda is set by the Soul and our parents are selected for their genetics and DNA. What we have not owned as wisdom in previous lifetimes are the challenges we face in this lifetime. We have only to look back on our life to know what was to be resolved.

Ramtha has called Heaven the Plane of Bliss and it is on this plane that after the death of the body, the Spirit that we are rests and contemplates. The Soul is the recorder for the Spirit and it retains the experiences of every incarnation lifetime after lifetime and it sets the program for the next incarnation. We incarnate with an agenda to resolve any unfinished resolution of an attitude or the emotions of an experience. From my understanding I have learned to seek the gift of wisdom from each experience and the changing of an attitude or belief.

I have traveled through the experiences of being a victim of people and circumstances and now in reflection I can see where I was a participant and the experience came because I had something to learn from it. I can now understand that much of my earlier life was similar to the character in the movie Groundhog Day. We keep doing the same thing over and over hoping we will get different results. I have learned to take full responsibility for everything that occurred to me in my life and I can now understand that my attitudes and beliefs brought the experiences to me.

It has been similar to peeling away the layers of an onion one by one and laying to rest the attitudes of resentment, harboring anger, jealousy, prejudice, unworthiness and so many more. There are emotions attached to each of these attitudes. How have I done this? It’s been a journey over the past thirty years of being willing to look at my limited ideas and beliefs without a near-death experience. I have no qualms about changing an attitude that I recognize as limiting. I recognize that fear is one of our major obstacles and fear is not an attitude. I have been taught the biology of emotions, how the brain works, quantum physics and much more in my school, an academy of the mind.

Science is now backing up much of what I have been taught. From Psychology Today, Sept-Oct 2002 issue, Susan Fiske writes: “Emotions have a powerful effect on the mind, and fear—considered a strong survival instinct—is particularly potent.” The author interviewed Elizabeth Phelps, Ph.D., Director of the Phelps Lab at New York University’s Psychology Department and in regard to being asked about the role of the amygdala to fear, Phelps responds: “It has been called the seat of emotion.” Very few people know that there is a place in the brain where fear resides.

From my understanding, fear has been fed by our emotions and attitudes stemming from beliefs. As children we were given many programming beliefs and the amygdala has held all of them. Some of these fears we came in with and it is our job to put them to rest. From my own experience, I have learned to let go of expectations of others. This was a biggie for me. I have learned that when I have no expectations from others, then I am lifted from a burden and let go of the emotion of disappointment. When the amygdala is not fed the same emotions over and over, this aspect of fear dies on the vine so to speak.

Socrates said “Know Thyself” and many centuries later Shakespeare wrote “And this above all…to thine own self be true.” Awakening is a journey into enlightenment. It is an evolution. Ramtha has taught, “To evolve means to change and evolve means to learn, and to learn means to be in knowledge of.”

What is the Divine? It is the God or the Creator within. It doesn’t matter the name given, because we are each endowed with a direct connection and it surrounds us and is in us. We are inseparable. We can only shut off our awareness of its presence. I would say that everyone has a deep-rooted desire for union or reunion. We seek here and we seek there. There is an ancient story attributed to great sages. They were discussing where to hide God and one said, “Let’s hide God deep in the ocean.” The others said that woman/man would eventually conquer the oceans so that wouldn’t work. A second sage suggested that God be hidden in the sky and again after a consensus, it was agreed that woman/man would eventually conquer space. After much discussion whether it would be deep in the earth and other places, one brilliant sage suggested, “I know, we will hide God within woman/man because they will never think to look there.”

What is enlightenment? I can only share my perspective. Enlightenment is a never-ending journey. It is the conquering of our limitations and gaining the wisdom from each of our experiences. Ramtha calls these our pearls of wisdom. When the light goes on in our brain, this pearl is given to our Divine self. How else will it know itself unless we give it our own personal unique pearls of wisdom?

Ramtha taught a discipline of creating one’s day. In the movie, What the Bleep, Dr. Joe Dispenza, a student at that time, shared it. It is a powerful tool and I use it every day and also in the evening when I retire. JZ Knight is also progressing this discipline by sharing her experiences of using it. Women especially need to utilize this tool because women have been enslaved and suppressed by men for eons.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thought I bring up is “I am wonderful!” I repeat this three times. The next thought I have is “I am genius!” Again, I repeat this three times. The third thought is “I am powerful!” I repeat this three times. Then I get up, go to the bathroom and instead of getting involved in busy things. I go and sit quietly and think of what I want to experience during the day. It may be that when I am traveling in my car that I always go to and from my destinations safely and that I am kept out of harm’s way. Then I ask for genius ideas to come into my mind. It may be that I want the sales of my books to increase or receive a request to speak at some event. Perhaps I want to experience joy all day long. It can be whatever one wants to experience during the day. It may be that the body is healed and whole. Or, it may be that today I experience being thirty years younger.

The mind and the brain are not the same. The brain is the sender and the receiver of thoughts and words. Whatever we think and speak becomes mind. Russians scientists have scientifically proven and explained that our brain has the capacity to be programmed by our words, our language and our thoughts. Baerbel’s summarization of Gosar and Bludorf ‘s work states, “The human DNA is a biological Internet and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. The latest Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self-healing, affirmation techniques, and much more.”

We are each Divine and we are each creators. When we change our beliefs, thoughts and the words we use, we change our mind and become enlightened.