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May 9, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:43
Edition 632 - Past Lives/Present Lives

Dr. David Bettenhausen and Carla Bogni-Kidd say they have lived many times before and have played major roles in each other's life... from Chicago in the "Roaring 20s" to the UK hundreds of years ago... They believe the path of reincarnation is the same for all of us...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes of This Is The Unexplained.
Well, I'm recording these words at the very beginning of May.
It's quite a mild but overcast day.
It feels like a British spring, but they're telling us that later this week, the temperatures are going to rise and the sun will appear.
And I have to say that's great.
I love it when the sunshine appears at this time of year.
It's almost like being on holiday, but staying at home, if you know what I mean.
Thank you very much for all of your wonderful feedback that you were kind enough to send me through my Facebook page and also through the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me emails from there.
It meant such a lot to me to hear from you on the launch of the TV show and such kind things that you said.
As you know, the radio station effectively ceased to be and became a TV station last week.
And I was offered the chance to move my show on a Sunday, which is the longest running show from the radio station.
No other show survived as long as that one.
And that's thanks to you for supporting it.
They asked me if I wanted to do it on TV.
And my first reaction was, this is not going to work on TV and I'm not a TV performer.
So what I agreed to do was to try it.
And I've enjoyed it.
I'm learning something different.
There is different technology.
There are more people involved.
They put makeup on your face when you do it.
But I actually enjoyed the first one.
You've got to get used to having little earpieces in your ears instead of nice sounding hi-fi headphones and that kind of thing.
So it's a different medium.
Now, I had so many wonderful messages and I'm still getting through reading those.
Thank you so much for your kindness and your support.
I don't think I could have done any of this without you.
I know that fact.
Somebody else said that they didn't like me putting material that had been on the radio show and now the TV show on my podcast.
And of course, for the last couple of years, I've been putting extended items, extended versions of things from the radio show on the podcast to make sure that they're there for posterity.
They're there forever.
And I will continue to do that.
I think that's important.
But if you hear me say that something that I'm going to put on the podcast has come from the TV show or the radio show, and you think I've heard that before, I don't want to hear it again, then you just have to skip that edition.
I used to listen to some of Art Bell's old shows.
I'm not putting myself in the same category as him.
But I used to listen to some of Art Bell's old shows four, five, six times.
And I think it's important for me to keep some of the best material as podcasts under my control so that I know that they will be there forever, for as long as I'm breathing.
So that's why I do that.
And I think it's right that I will continue to do that.
And of course, regular, like the one that we're doing now, regular, you know, dedicated shows that are done only for the podcast, which is the bedrock of what I do here and will continue to be.
That's a lot of talking.
I'm sorry about that.
The bottom line of it, the up and down of it, the long and short of it is I've been so touched by the wonderful things that you've said.
And I understand that, you know, there'll always be one or two people who have criticisms.
You have to do your thing your way.
And I think if Mother Teresa started a podcast, you could be the most wonderful, angelic person in the world.
And you would still get people who would attack you in one way or another.
And that's just one of those things, really, that goes with the territory.
I'm doing my best.
And I thank you very much for being there for me.
You are my radio and now television family, I think, around the world.
And I couldn't do it, any of it, without you.
Thank you very much to Adam.
I couldn't do any of it without Adam for getting the shows out to you, of course, my webmaster, Adam Cornwell.
The guests on this edition are Dr. David Bettenhausen and Carla Bogney Kidd in the US.
I'm going to read this to you about them very quickly.
Dave and Carla have been close friends since 1998, feeling a deeper spiritual kinship for each other.
Dave and Carla had spontaneous memories of 29 past lives together while they were meditating.
They went on to get past life regression training.
Now Dave and Carla spread the message of love and kindness and they teach holistic approaches to healing.
They teach meditation at a local university and senior centers.
Dr. Dave was a registered nurse for 10 years before returning to medical school.
He recently retired from his private practice and now serves as vice president of medical affairs at a small Midwestern hospital.
Carter recently retired as his office manager.
They now share their message rather together, the gift of past lives and love is the answer.
You know, as I get older, maybe you too, you think to yourself, what's been the point of all of it?
And, you know, what happens when this ends, when the light is turned out?
A lot of my friends believe nothing.
I like to hope that I might reunite with my wonderful parents and some of the people that I've lost over the years, and then I might do something else.
I don't know whether I want to come back necessarily, but maybe you've got no choice over it.
Or maybe it is, as some of my friends say, just oblivion.
My jury is still out about that.
Okay, sorry for all the talking at the beginning of this edition.
Let's get to Dr. David Bettenhausen and Carla Bogny-Kidd.
Thank you both for coming on my show.
Our pleasure.
Thank you.
You know, this is, I think, the most fundamental of all topics that we're about to talk through here.
Because as we get older, all of us know that we start to contemplate the meaning of our own mortality.
The fact that this journey that we've been on, good, bad, or indifferent, has a finite length and it's going to end.
Then you start to ask yourself, as I'm wondering now, maybe you are too, both, what happens after this?
Is there any more?
Do I meet people who I've known in the past?
Or as many of my friends say, do they just turn the light out and send you on your way?
So it is the most fascinating and fundamental of questions.
And both of you, it seems to me, have come to it in quite a unique way through your recollections of past lives.
So I want you both, and I did listen To part of another podcast that you did just for a few minutes.
I never like to listen to anybody else's interviews because they're going to influence me, so I don't do that.
But your story, you tell beautifully between you.
You choreograph it.
So I'm going to let you tell your story both.
Okay.
So for the two of us, this really started with an experience that happened.
I'm a physician.
In the United States, we had to meet a new requirement by the federal government to go to all electronic medical records.
And for me, it was incredibly stressful.
It started with having to get up at five in the morning when the first at least three to six months were this way.
Getting up at five in the morning, opening all the notes, starting to put information in.
Frequently, I wasn't done with all the notes till seven o'clock at night.
Some physicians handled it different and saw a lot fewer patients.
I tried to see the same number of patients, but the workload was incredible.
Carla started to tell me I was too grouchy and that I wasn't good with my patients and I wasn't good to be around.
No, and normally I would say that Dave is a cross between Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear.
He's fun-loving and happy, and he just was a shell of a person.
He was unapproachable.
So I had been reading an article in a senior publication called AARP about the benefits of meditation.
And it sounded like something that could help him.
So I bought it into the office and I said, okay, Dave, what do you want to do?
Either I'm calling a counselor or let's try to meditate as an office.
You know, it can only help.
And of course, he said, well, I don't want to go to a counselor.
Let's try to meditate.
So we thought we would all meditate as an office about a half an hour before the patients began.
And we did that the first day, all of us.
Can I just interrupt?
When you say, and I've heard you say this before, when you say, as an office, we started this technique together.
How many people were involved in this and what were their attitudes to doing this?
Well, there were only the four of us.
It's a small office, and they were all for it.
One of them was my sister.
And, you know, we're, although we were raised Catholic, we were open-minded.
The other girl in the office didn't really have any religious upbringing.
So it sounded cool to her.
So the first two days, they were good with it.
We all commented on how difficult it was to shut down our brains because, you know, we're bombarded with everything electronic, our phones, the computers, the TV.
So the first day we did it for like, you know, 35 minutes.
And the second day we did it and we all saw different colored lights.
And we all talked about it afterwards.
And then the third day the girls said, well, you know, we don't want to come in early in the morning.
We'll do it at home.
So it was just Dave and I. And we meditated for about 30, 35 minutes.
And then we heard the patients coming in.
So we got up, went to our adjoining offices, and Dave came up behind me and said, Carla, I know you'll think that I'm really strange and I've lost it, but I think I was talking to your mother.
And I said, what?
Now, my mother had died 18 years before.
Dave never met her.
And so he had my attention.
And he said, she was really jovial, and she kept showing me a shoe.
And I said, what kind of shoe?
And he said, I don't know.
So I went to the computer and I googled ballroom dancing shoes and like 60 or 70 pair appeared on the screen.
And I said, which one?
And he went over and he pointed to the exact ballroom dancing shoe that my mother wore her entire life.
It was a small pumped open-toed sandal.
And not only did she wear it for dance, she wore it to church and for dress-up.
So he had my attention.
And my sister.
Dave, did you know about that?
Did you know about that before?
No.
No.
I knew that she had died of a brain tumor.
And that's about all I really knew.
Interesting.
Sorry, Carla, I interrupted.
Carry on.
No, keep interrupting.
We like questions.
So, you know, my sister went in the back and she got a picture from her wallet.
And she brought it up and she said to Dave, it was a picture of my mother.
And she said, is this who you were talking to?
And Dave got very emotional.
And we said, what's the matter?
And he said, that's who I was talking to.
So, of course, you know, we just wanted to sit and meditate.
We didn't want to take care of patients that day, but we went ahead and took care of the patients.
I still had to run down the office and I'm like, I've lost my mind.
I know I'm a physician.
Is this even possible?
I don't know what to do.
And I had to run into a room and smile and say, you know, what's wrong with you?
And you were not having a dream.
No.
Oh, we were all wide awake.
All wide awake.
And so we kept meditating whenever we could.
They wanted to meditate at lunchtime.
And everybody's all excited about this.
It's a few days later.
And I suddenly have this memory.
And when I say a memory, it was from this life.
This tells you kind of how old we are, but it was from 1962.
I remember getting in a blue sedan, driving across the country from Nebraska, where I lived, to Boston.
Wow.
My dad was going back to graduate school in Boston.
We got to Boston.
I remembered married student housing, these little brick buildings.
And I remembered that summer running on a beach.
And the memory became just flooding to me.
I was running on the beach.
I could feel the sand between my toes.
I could see Ferris wheels in the background.
I could see these little buckets where people's feet were hanging.
I saw this long souvenir stand along the beach that was there.
And as I'm running on the beach, I suddenly hear this little girl and she yells, be quiet, you're bothering my family.
She runs across the world or the beach at me, knocks me down, sits on my chest, gives me a kiss on the forehead, jumps up laughing.
She's standing there in a little two-piece blue ruffled bathing suit.
And then Carly goes, Oh my God.
That was me.
What he left out was that he was screaming very obnoxiously.
He was screaming like, ah!
So it really irritated me.
I thought he was very ill-behaved.
I was one of six girls, good little Catholic family.
That particular day, my parents were together.
They were always splitting up, but would never divorce because of their Catholicism.
And that day, for whatever reason, when we got there, I normally would have inherited a bathing suit from one of my older sisters, but I had none.
So we went across the street, all of us.
Daddy had rented two cabs to go down to the beach that day.
It was Revere Beach, which is, it has an amusement park with it.
So as he explained it to me and to my sister, we knew exactly which one it was.
And of course, simultaneously we said to Dave, well, you never mentioned being in Boston.
You know, this is the first time you've said anything about it.
We didn't know.
We had no idea.
So that particular day, again, my parents were not well off.
We didn't have a car.
When we got there and realized I didn't have my bathing suit, we went across to a souvenir shop.
And my parents, not being able to afford it, really, really could not.
They bought me my first brand new two-piece blue ruffled bathing suit.
It was etched in my mind forever.
Okay.
Now, look, I've got to ask a couple of questions connected with this.
Did this really happen?
Or were you playing parts in each other's, which itself is amazing, were you playing parts in each other's meditative states years and years later?
Or did that actually happen?
Did you meet then as kids?
We actually met as kids and then did not meet again for another 36 years when we met in Ohio in the middle of the country.
She lived in Boston.
I lived in Nebraska.
She ended up moving to Michigan.
I ended up doing a residency in Ohio and bought a practice in Ohio and she was the office manager.
All right.
Okay.
Well, I mean, that's mind-blowing.
Okay.
That is astonishing.
But when you'd met at kids, as kids, and then you met later, before you did the meditation, did you have any inkling that you'd met before?
No.
No.
Good lord.
Except the day he walked into my home and he was discussing buying the practice.
We were real familiar with each other.
It was like long-lost friends.
In fact, I have pictures of like the first time he came over to dinner.
And yeah, I mean, we're really, you know, joking with each other.
And we have pictures where I'm sticking my tongue out at him.
That's how familiar we were right off the bat.
Yeah, the first day there's, we've got a picture where we're sitting in two like beach chairs out on the deck and we're laughing hysterically.
We're talking like we have known each other forever.
I can't explain.
I can't even begin to explain that.
Look, we know that sometimes life delivers us the most astonishing coincidences.
I have had them, things that you wouldn't believe could happen.
One of the reasons I'm doing this show is because I started thinking some of those weird coincidences may not actually be coincidences.
But confronted with that, I don't know how I would react.
How did you both react?
We just wanted to know what was going on.
It was, we started, we kept meditating.
We kept jotting down everything we saw.
He saw we would see faces and objects and places, and none of it made sense.
So we just wrote it down because we didn't understand what it was.
Yeah, it surprised me.
One day I was trying to explain to Carla what I was seeing, and she says, I think it's the temple at Chitsunitsen.
And I'm like, what is the temple at Chitsunitsin?
I don't know anything about this.
She goes, it's a Mayan temple.
We went there on vacation, and you're explaining this Mayan temple to me.
And I'm like, okay.
So again, I went to the computer and Googled a picture of it.
And he said, that's what I'm seeing.
And I said, well, I had a vacation there once.
Isn't it odd where we choose to vacation while we're drawn to certain people in certain places?
The synchronicities are unbelievable.
Well, it certainly sounds it.
But were you having the same or similar pictures, displays in your meditative states?
Were they synchronized?
No.
Not yet.
Wow.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Okay, but they did happen.
Which leads to the next memory that was incredible to me.
I was meditating.
I looked across this.
I suddenly looked across the dark alley and I see Carla standing there.
Now, when I say Carla, it didn't look exactly like Carla.
I knew it was Carla.
I knew she still had the same steel blue eyes.
She was blonde.
She had on this little gold band on her head, fringe skirt.
She looked like she was dressed like a flapper.
I saw two large flashes, heard two bangs, suddenly realized I'd been hit in the chest and was shot.
And I was thrown back in this dark alley on the ground, and it was raining.
The next day, I had more memory, but it was before that day.
And I was in a little car getting out at Ashland Auditorium in Chicago, Illinois, and running up the steps to go to a wedding of a man named Angelo, who used to come into the bank where I worked.
And during that wedding, the same woman walked out to stand up at the altar, the makeshift altar in Ashland Auditorium, because it's a meeting, big meeting hall that's still in Chicago that I never knew was in Chicago either.
But she got up and she sang during the middle of the wedding of this man named Angelo.
And her voice was incredible.
And I Wanted to meet her so bad that at the reception I sought her out.
And when I met her at the reception, we started to talk.
She was kind of pushing me away, but she suddenly agreed to meet me for breakfast the next day.
The next day, I went to breakfast.
I met her, and we took a walk along the Chicago coastline.
It was cold.
It was snowy.
And it was January 10th, 1925.
January 11th.
Yeah, it was January 11th, 1925, because the wedding was on January 10th, 1925.
And she told me her name was Ruby Donaldson.
She had moved from Bullock, Georgia to become a dressmaker and a singer, and she got a job with a man named Angelo at a speakeasy called DeAndres, and that she was a flapper singing there.
My God, the only thing that's missing from this is Elliot Ness from The Untouchables.
It's astonishing.
It's pretty close because Carla went out to do research.
Well, you know, he told me enough.
He told me that my name was Ruby Donaldson, that I was one of 11 children to James and Anna Donaldson, born in Bullock, Georgia.
So I went to Ancestry.com and didn't I find Ruby Donaldson born in 1904 to James and Anna Donaldson and one of 11 children.
Now there were pictures of my parents then and pictures of some of the siblings and some, you know, censuses, things like that.
So I called Dave and I said, well, you know, oh, and the other thing I found was I looked through newspaper articles from Chicago and I found the wedding of Angelo Jenna to Lucille Spinola January the 10th, 1925 at Ashland Auditorium.
And there was over 3,000 mobsters.
That's why they could not have it in a church.
No church could accommodate that large of a crowd.
There were pictures of the wedding cake, which was like 10 feet tall.
And I called Dave and I said, you know, you're not crazy.
I found corroborating information.
This is actual.
And we found when we did the research, Angelo Jenna was the mob boss in Little Italy before Al Capone.
Well, I don't know what to say about that.
That is astonishing.
So you were both there then, in that incarnation.
Why do you think, I mean, look, that is a very colorful time of history.
And you were there.
I mean, you were right at, you know, right at the heart of some very important and quite bloody things.
I wonder why, you must have asked both of you, you know, why were we put into this situation, which is so remarkable and so much a part of the news and all the rest of it?
Why weren't we just anonymous people with boring lives?
Well, we have 29 past lives together.
Dave has 42.
I have 34.
29 were together.
They weren't always like that.
But, you know, as you will read from other people that have had experiences with either past life regression or with spontaneous memories, sometimes we're kings, sometimes we're paupers, we're black, we're white.
Sometimes we're just ordinary poor people.
You live on both sides of everything because how else do you learn love and compassion unless you experience what everybody else is experiencing?
So for your listeners in the UK where you are, we have a life in the Cotswolds.
Hold on before you tell me about that, I just want to go back to the roaring 20s in Chicago.
And you're there walking by the lake and there's this big wedding attended by all of these mobsters.
And you, Dave, come to a sticky end.
Correct.
Very sticky end.
Because I end up being, well, I end up dying.
Here's parts that people need to know.
We kept going back to visit that life and we kept finding out more and more information about that life.
And this is where the experience that really shocked us is I came in and I said, I know more of the story.
And I sent, I said, Carla, sit down.
You've got to listen.
And I started talking to her.
And I literally became JJ Wright.
That was my name then.
And as I'm speaking to her, my voice changes slightly.
My emotions change slightly.
I start having a conversation like I'm talking straight to Ruby.
And Carla starts to be Ruby.
And she literally answers the questions the way she did in 1925 during the conversation.
And we have a shared experience where we're both at the same time, at the same experience, at the same moment.
And we had the same emotions.
And of course, in that life, we had a very short but significant romantic.
Passionate.
Passionate.
And we did not have that.
We were friends in this life.
We were married to other people in this life.
And we actually felt uncomfortable.
And we jumped up and ran down the hall'cause I had patience to see.
I was avoiding him like the plague.
Now, look, my listeners are thinking this question, so I'm going to ask it.
You said it was, I mean, it was you, Carlo, who said it, that your relationship then was passionate.
How do I phrase this?
Well, you just, you've answered my question, really.
Did you recall those aspects of your relationship?
See how diplomatic we Brits are.
Well, let's just say, okay, so we wrote a book.
Our first book is called A Gift to Past Lives with Mother, Isabella, God, and Elizabeth.
And in that book, the Ruby and JJ story is laced all through it giving unbelievable details.
We had to cut out some of the details, but it's- It was a little spicy.
We had to take some of it out.
Okay, well, I think you had to do it.
Yeah.
So there is at least one quote in there that I'm Going to just say, because it says, when this weekend ended, JJ had done to Ruby what a man does to a woman 17 times.
Oh, my God.
Well, I think your answer, both of you, has been more than fulsome and adequate for my audience.
Well, no, I mean, that's rather lovely.
But then you go and die, the victim by the sounds of it of some kind of assassination.
You know, how did that affect Ruby?
Well, we don't want to tell that whole story.
Okay.
I mean, we need to have your listeners sitting on the edge of their seat because we don't want them to know the ending if they read all of the details.
I understand that you, you know, I mean, it's only fair that you've got to promote the literature.
Of course you have.
No, you don't want to ruin the storyline.
Well, the storyline is good.
Did Ruby come to terms with it?
Let's just hand my listener that tidbit.
Well, let's just tell you this.
Angelo Jena in that life, who was Ruby's boss, in this life was my first husband.
So did I come to terms with it?
In this life, he was very abusive and I walked away.
So I did fix the karma in this life with Angelo Jenna.
Who killed you then, Dave?
Angelo Jenna's men.
Right.
And what had you done or what did they perceive you had done to warrant that?
Ruby, to give you a little bit of the story, Ruby's family sent her to Chicago to an ad where someone would become a dressmaker.
Live in a boarding house.
Lived in a boarding house.
The boarding house was part of the mob apparatus, and some of the young women were farmed out to be flappers.
And so.
We just have to say that flappers, my perception of flappers, I see a woman in pearls in the kind of dresses they wore in the 1920s doing the Charleston.
Correct.
So they were dancing at speakeasies, meaning they were, you know, supposed to encourage the clientele to drink and flirt and et cetera.
To buy illegal alcohol.
Right.
Okay.
I mean, we have to say this is, you know, this is a wild time that you were part of.
And so just complete the story then, Dave.
So the story really is Angelo becomes really Ruby's owner, if you want to talk about it that way.
And so the interaction Ruby has with me is not approved because it reduces his assets.
Ah, so it's forbidden love.
It's forbidden love.
And so my life has ended.
Interesting things happened to Ruby, which we'll let your readers find out about sometime.
It's a great story.
It's a great story, but you use the word story.
Some of my listeners are, I mean, I see things from all sides, okay?
Balance and journalism.
Those are in my DNA.
But some of my listeners are always saying, well, you know, you're just having a fantasy here.
No.
So the fantasy I had was corroborated by numerous sources.
And then I'm going to tell you that a little bit of the follow-up story is Carla and I were so interested, we got in the car and we drove to Chicago.
And I walked with my memory down Halstead Street, turned on Loomis Street and found the apartment building that Ruby Donaldson lived in.
A friend did some research, found that the apartment building was built in 1899 and has been an apartment building in Chicago ever since.
Still standing.
And visiting those places, I like to go back to places that have been impactful in my life.
I want to go back to Cardiff, where I trained to be a journalist, the university there, because I stand on the spot where all of those decades ago I went through things and I feel emotions.
Going back to another life, you must have felt something, both.
We felt all sorts of things.
And now here's part of the story that they haven't heard yet.
During the middle of this, I met another woman.
And I'll say a woman, that's how it is.
Meditation during meditation.
And her name was Isabella.
And Isabella had told me that she had been with me for 6,000 years as my spirit guide.
When we got to the apartment building on Loomis Street and turned and looked at, I said, this is the apartment.
The name of the apartment was the Isabelle Apartments.
Oh, boy.
We can't make this up.
They kept coming.
And then that night we walked back down the street.
We were looking for DeAndre's.
We found that it's been torn down.
It's part of the University of Chicago now.
And so we went from there and we were walking down the street and we thought it would be sort of reminiscent if we went into a little Italian restaurant.
We found one.
We went in.
The Mater D took us over and sat us down in a little booth and on the side of the booth was a blonde.
It was an etched glass picture of a little blonde flapper.
Boy, listen, I don't even begin to know how to react to that because it is one of the most astonishing stories that I've ever heard.
And look, you must have tried to weigh this up in your mind, to rationalize it, to compute it.
You were working in the health field.
That involves giving people firm and physical answers.
And here you're experiencing things that have no firm or physical answer because they don't fit what we call rationality.
And what we did, Howard, is for me, it immediately drove me into looking for whatever evidence I could find, Whatever made sense, whatever, so I started doing research.
And I did research, and we found, Carla and I both found research by Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies.
And so those studies are really all done on children who have spontaneous memories.
And so we went through some of their, what those children have, and there's about 2,500 cases cataloged.
And we saw the intermission memories, and we started comparing things that those children had to memories that we had.
And the memories were very consistent because they all talked about beings of light, meeting people.
Beautiful women.
Angels.
And angels and et cetera that they met, planning their next life, having a past life review.
They remembered meeting their family when they crossed over.
They remembered being confused, bright lights, colors.
Then we started reading about near-death experiences and all of the experiences that the near-death experience people that I had and these kids who had spontaneous memories, their memories all have some patterns that are the same.
And you have to start to question, is there some sort of soul consciousness that exists beyond this life?
As you start looking at this, you see patterns across near-death experiences, people who have spontaneous past life memories, children that have past life memories, and most children, the memories start to disappear at five or six or seven years old.
When this life starts to be filled with memories, they start to lose those other memories.
All of those patterns are very unique and they're similar.
And then I started looking at science and I found some interesting things.
One of the things you find out is that during meditation, during hypnosis, which what past life regression is, during the time between wake and sleep, when a lot of people also have memories that are like this or they remember some of their dreams, the brain has increased alpha and theta waves.
And the brain has increased alpha and theta waves whenever there is memory being accessed.
Then you start looking at the whole mind theory of modular theory of how we rank everything that occurs in our life and we make it as a positive or negative experience.
So the example is the first time you touch something hot in this life, it burns you.
The next time you pull back faster, you find out that people who have past life memories always remember the most positive and the most negative things first.
So the fact that I was shot in Chicago is actually a very negative memory.
So it's not surprising that would be the memory you would get first.
Sure.
Do you remember what happened when you died?
Do you remember the process?
Or was it just a light being switched out?
Actually, my memory is so very specific, it sounds canned, but I've had the same experience more than one time when I died.
I saw everything get dark, and then I saw two golden rings that carried me through time, space, and eternity with lights flashing and colors going by at an incredible rate, and time disappeared and no longer mattered.
And suddenly I was in a world that was bright, beautiful, warm, and comforting with an incredible amount of strength and warmth and love that was surrounding everything.
I then felt that I was confused because I could no longer communicate with those around me.
And it took me three days till I got to the point where my thoughts could communicate with those around me.
And then I realized that I was no longer communicating with words, sound, color, you know, touch.
I was communicating telepathically.
I remembered past life reviews where I saw what happened in that life and what I did wrong.
And in fact, we have 20 stories in our first book.
And at the end of the book, at the end of each story, we actually say what lesson we were supposed to learn and what we did wrong and why we would have to return because there were more lessons to learn.
Right.
So you believe that given the example of the gangster era, 20th Chicago, that you've learned a lesson there and you'd have to come back.
Do you know what happened, both of you really, after that particular existence?
Were you able to chart that or is it more random than that for you?
Well, interestingly, in our next life, it's also in Chicago.
We're brother and sister.
We're Katie and Johnny.
I was six years old and Dave was four years old.
Father was a fighter pilot in World War II.
And it was Christmas Eve.
Our mother was in the other room wrapping presents and we were playing on our three-story staircase.
And we were playing like little kids do, and we fell to our deaths, both broken necks.
Oh, Lord.
Yes.
And so after that happened, you know, we had lots of questions for Isabella.
And we asked, why would that happen?
And she said, well, children don't have lessons to learn when they have an early death.
But the lesson for us or for somebody else in that life was our father.
Our father was bombing cities that just didn't have soldiers.
It had children.
It had families.
It had doctors, lawyers, all of the above.
And he needed to know what it felt like to lose his children.
So you're saying this is some kind of karmic balance thing?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And but when he came back after the war was Over, they had another child.
They had a daughter, and her name was Carla, and she was born on March the 9th, 1958.
What's interesting about that is that my name is Carla, and Dave's birthday is March the 9th, and my birth year is 1958.
Another synchronicity.
Well, I don't doubt, and I don't question skeptically what you've just said, because I find, and I'm saying this for the first time actually for my listener here, that there have been people in and out of my life, and the dates of their births have been remarkably similar.
There have been a few people that I've known who share the birth date of my mother, which is weird.
And I always think, well, it's just, it's all coincidence.
But when it keeps happening, you think, well, maybe not.
So that's astonishing in itself.
But what this must have said to you in the early stages of research of this, and this is all fairly recent, isn't it, for you, the meditation and the discovering all of this.
This is something that doesn't go back decades and decades and decades.
We're talking about the late 90s, last 20 years, isn't it?
Thereabouts.
2014.
So there you go.
It is all comparatively recent.
Let's park that point there.
You both told me that one of your existences mutually was here in the United Kingdom.
Correct.
Actually, several.
Several.
Okay.
Tell me about the one in Gloucestershire.
So, yes.
It's actually our favorite life.
It is our favorite life.
And people will ask why, and I'll tell you because the life is beautiful.
I'm not going to say the life is easy.
It's simple.
But it's simple.
And it's a life in the Cotswolds.
We literally have memories of putting in the fence post, building the house, thatching the roof, riding an old horse, those kind of lives, getting married in a little tiny stone church that has no markings on the inside.
When was this?
In 16, well, in the early 1600s.
Okay, when you recall that, I mean, how fascinating is that?
I sometimes go to places in the country.
You know, I don't get much in the way of breaks or holidays, but I got a couple of days in Devon.
And I went to a few places and I stood in the peace and the solitude and the sunshine and thought to myself, I wonder what this might have looked like and felt like for my forebears, for people before me.
Did you get a sense of what it felt like, smelt like, what it was like to be there?
The trip to England.
And so that's a great question, Howard.
I went with my sister and my brother-in-law and my niece on a trip to England.
And went to the Cotswolds, ended up in Bristol.
And one of the parts of the memory in Bristol was that I left on a boat from Bristol.
And it was so interesting because I went to Bristol, I'm standing there, and suddenly I felt the wind blow and I went to the life standing in Bristol.
And I saw the water start to raise up of the river in Bristol, and the wind was starting to catch the sails.
And I was loaded onto the boat with our possessions and our children.
And Carla or Sarah, as her name was in that life, was not on the boat.
And I remembered standing on the boat and I started to cry.
And standing in Bristol, I was crying.
So you got the emotion.
And I started to cry and I said, I shouldn't look back because Sarah's no longer there.
And I don't want to look forward because when we arrive, she won't be there either.
Gee, so you left somebody so close to you for such an adventure, such a venture.
And I know that in that life, she died of TB.
Of consumption.
Oh, boy.
All right.
You know, this is a very hard one for me to do because I've heard people recount past lives and there's always a sort of almost televisual glaze over it.
It's almost like, you know, here I am telling you a story.
This thing happened to me and there you go.
But, you know, I'm able to, as we're recording this, we're doing it in sound, but I can see you.
And it seems to me that this has a visceral quality to it.
You re-experience those things.
I'm not quite sure how that works, how that can be.
It is the most emotional thing that I can explain.
I should say, and we don't like to say this, I mean, if you look in the, this is a, we actually wrote this in one of the books.
If you look for a definition for Dave's gift, I guess you would call him a mystic.
He can go back to any life completely and give great details.
Before we, for those of you who don't know who Dr. Brian Weiss is, he's a psychiatrist, well-known psychiatrist, who did a lot of past life regression accidentally and then became well-known for it.
And before we went and trained with him, I guess I was kind of doing that with Dave accidentally.
But there was a day when I took him back to a life that we had in what is now South Dakota in the United States.
And he was an eight-year-old little boy who stuttered.
Now, I recorded the whole thing.
And as he talked, he stuttered through the whole thing.
And he was so emotional because he witnessed a murder and mine, actually.
And during that time, I actually like pulled him out of it a couple of times because he was so emotional and getting so excited.
And you know, anyone that stutters, it's worse when they get upset.
So Dave has this wonderful ability that, you know, he's not a medium.
He's not a psychic.
He has those abilities, but he doesn't use it because Isabella said that's not why he's here.
We are together in this life to write our books, to tell people that reincarnation is real, that what we have been fed all of these years and we've all fallen, you know, prey to it.
It's not that God is mean and spiteful.
God is like a loving parent who gives us opportunity after opportunity to get it right just so that we can learn to love people and feel compassionate for everybody.
Are these experiences only for people who believe in God?
What about those of us who may not necessarily buy into religion?
I don't think it matters.
Now, I hate to say that.
And the first thing, Carla and I were both raised Catholic.
We certainly don't go to a Catholic church.
Certainly the doctrines within the church don't match our experience.
We actually went back and did some research.
It doesn't actually match, the doctrines don't actually match the history very well.
And it's research that anybody could look up.
Yeah, Origin of Alexander is one of the early church fathers in about 200 AD.
He's still writing that there's a pre-existing soul, a post-existing soul after your death, that reincarnation exists, that people transfigure their soul from one life to the next life, that you have a chance to atone again if you made problems in the past.
He's still writing that Jesus is created by God and that he's a spiritual, possible part of God, but not God incarnate.
This is in 200 AD, and he's the earliest church father who writes most of the doctrine for the Catholic Church.
It's about 325 AD where they say, oh no, we're going to have the Council of Nicaea.
Jesus is God.
And then it's about 400 AD, the church comes back and excommunicates Origen 200 years after his death and says we can't listen to what he wrote because it doesn't match the atoning death of Jesus story.
All right.
So you're saying that this has always been there and it's something that it's a constant is what you're saying.
It's a constant.
It exists in every ancient culture.
33% of the world's population believes in reincarnation.
Certainly a large number are Buddhist and Hindu.
And their concept of God is different.
Buddhists officially would say they have no concept of God.
But if you read all their doctrine, for the Buddhist, God is the universe.
It's the same.
It's one.
Yes, everything is one.
All things are one.
In Hindu, it's sort of that way, though God has a little bit more controlling.
If you talk about American Indians and Africans, and you go back to their history, they all have a nature or oneness or God that they came from, and they do ancestor worship, which is really a reincarnation kind of experience.
So this journey, these multiple journeys that you've both been on together, do you think that's the way things are?
But I know that I will have listeners who will be listening to this and who will think, well, you're just kind of make, it's just, we have, during this COVID period that we had, I had a lot of very, very colorful three-dimensional, I'm still having some of them, nightmares.
I don't know where they came from.
I meet people that I've never seen before.
I have conversations with them.
I exist with them.
You know, they're very realistic.
How do you both know that this isn't just an artifact of mind?
Well, the fact that we could find corroborating information, the fact that as we've gone through this, it has spiritually changed.
I'll even talk about meditation just in general.
We found how healthy it was.
I started to meditate every day.
And over the course of a year, I dropped 104 pounds.
Wow.
Listen, just to jump in and ask this question.
We talked about meditation, and we just assumed that everybody would understand what that is.
In my lifetime, I've had a number of people that I've interviewed or had interactions with who've wanted me to try meditation.
I can't do it.
I cannot switch.
I can't switch out, switch off to that extent.
Just give me 30 seconds on what is meditation for those who would be questioning.
You can do it like anything else, like working out, making your bed, taking a shower.
You just have to get into the routine of doing it.
Dave can flip into meditation within seconds.
It takes me 20 minutes to shut my brain off.
We used to teach meditation at a local university and at a senior center.
And all you need is yourself.
We use peaceful music just because it helps you, you know, get rid of the background noise.
But if you can imagine yourself sitting in total silence and quiet, turning off the phone, everything electrical, and from the top of your head, imagining a nice warm light entering your body.
And you're concentrating on the breath.
And as you breathe, you breathe in that warm light into your forehead and into your eyes and into your ears and through every portion of your body, all the way down to the tips of your toes.
And when a thought comes up, you say to yourself, one, two, one, two, and you get rid of the thought.
And you might start to see bright lights and you might start to see faces, objects, things that don't make sense to you.
So it sounds to me like, look, I'm very good at daydreaming.
I can drift off.
This sounds to me like one step beyond what I've been doing all my life.
Yes.
And it is, in fact, what you've been doing all your life.
You know, Howard, have you ever gotten a car and drove to the same building you drive 50 times a year?
I don't know what you're going to say.
And as you drive there, suddenly you're there and you didn't once think.
I mean, you remember.
It's because.
It's scary, isn't it?
It is scary, but it's really because you're literally hypnotized and just meditating as you drive.
So it's insane.
You know, I used to have to drive.
Thank God I don't have to do it now.
I had to go from London on a Saturday morning.
I used to do a radio show for the BBC, early Saturday mornings.
I did it for years, out in Reading, Berkshire, past Windsor Castle and all the rest of it.
It was a 40-mile drive, and I was so well used to it, I'd have a big mug of coffee next to me in the car.
I'd listen to the same radio stuff.
But the more I did it, the more I found that I was forgetting the journey.
And I would suddenly find myself, at one moment, I'm passing Heathrow Airpod in London, and the next moment I'm passing Windsor, and I don't remember the bit in between.
And that's kind of like the state, is it?
Because I used to, I was getting worried.
I thought, am I starting to, have I got some kind of brain abnormality that's creeping up on me here?
It's actually, you're having the same experience.
Your brain is off somewhere else, and your body is automatically working.
Why do you both keep finding each other?
There must have been other people in all those lives that you interacted with.
There was, and we like to refer to them as soul family.
In fact, I told you that my first husband in this life was Angelo Jenna in Ruby's life.
My sisters have been in many of my lives.
In fact, Angelo Jenna has been in many of my lives.
Our next door neighbor has been in 21 of our lives together karmically.
He just moved, yay.
You know, but you have, as Isabella tells us, two reasons that you return with people.
We call them family mates or karmic mates.
One is to help us.
One is to test us.
So there's people you meet and you feel very familiar with them and comfortable.
And then there's people you meet that right off the bat you say, oh no, this relationship is going to be work.
Isn't that interesting?
I have a good friend and have had for three decades now called Katie.
Katie, she won't mind me saying this is a little older than me.
She was a producer at LBC Radio in London when I first arrived in London in the very last year, in fact, in the very last months of the 1980s.
And Katie and I have been the closest of friends for all of those years.
And we don't understand why sometimes she'll be thinking of me and I'll call her.
We're just, we're linked.
We get on like you two get on.
And we've always thought, well, maybe we've known each other before and we've been, we've had different relationships to each other through those different lives.
But we can't prove that.
How would we go about, Katie and me, who've known each other for all of these years, proving what we feel has always been the case for us?
Well, if you could...
So if you're having issues, if you have scary, what you think are dreams, it could be a traumatic experience you had in the past.
If you can go to a very reputable past life regressionist that doesn't lead you, that allows the soul to let surface what needs to be healed, then that is one way that you can discover.
If you're willing to put the time in, Howard, and do the meditation, you obviously are connected already because you're seeing people and things.
Those things will surface.
Well, I find what you said hugely, and I'm sorry I jumped over you again because of that time delay, Dave.
I find what you said pretty remarkable.
And, you know, I'd like to believe that it's so.
Obviously, because I do this, I need to be in the middle.
You know, I need to be the ringmaster here.
And, you know, you're here to lay out your stall, which you've done very, very effectively, I would say.
My listener will judge, but I think so.
What happens?
And you will have heard this one before, I'm sure, too.
You know, it is, I hope that you both live for many, many, many more decades.
But at some point, you'll be separated again.
What happens then?
Well, personally, I hope I'm done.
I'd like to get off this karmic wheel.
I'm trying to keep my nose clean.
The one thing we didn't touch on is when we were writing the first, when we were journaling everything the first time and we got everything together and Isabella said, you have to write the book.
Now, I just want to tell people, writers don't make money unless you're John Grisham.
We honest and truly do it so that we can reach people.
That is our purpose.
So I hope I'm off this karmic wheel, but Isabella told us that most people have heard about the Ten Commandments.
She said, I can shorten it for you and make it so that you'll remember it better.
We call it the five simple rules for living.
If you can remember with each choice you make, every time you do something, ask yourself, am I being conceited, selfish, jealous, unforgiving?
Am I making this decision out of love and compassion?
If I'm not, then you need to reevaluate yourself.
And if you're not reevaluating, if you're not evaluating yourself with all of your choices and decisions, then you're never getting off the karmic wheel.
Oh, God.
Well, there are one or two people in my life that I find it incredibly hard to forgive.
I have been working on it for some years now, but forgiveness is a difficult thing.
Forgetting, I think, is where I'm at at the moment.
But Howard.
But you're saying that unless I do that forgiveness thing, I'm coming back.
Well, Howard, you are very capable of doing these things.
Remember, we're infinite human beings.
We cannot be ruined.
It's not what happens to us in life.
It's how we choose to handle it.
So just forgive them and be done with it because it bothers you more than them.
I hear what you say, and I know there's a ton of sense in that, Carla.
I do.
Like I said, you will be separated.
Correct.
Are you both aiming for this to be the terminus then and for you to go on to eternity?
And I don't know what you'd be going on to then after that.
is that what you're both aiming to do?
That, I think, Howard, that's really what everyone's aiming to do.
The purpose, again, of this life is to be able to communicate in a telepathic world.
And to do that, you have to have shared experience.
You can't talk about a dog if you've never seen a dog.
You can't think a dog if you've never had a dog.
One more little synchronicity.
We just bought two puppies and we found them on the internet.
We got ready to go see them.
They both have Carla's birthday, just so you know.
So we come back to that point again.
I like to do that.
But so I think the goal is that everyone at some time is going to get off this karmic wheel.
Okay.
If you're the most selfish, most individualistic person, then maybe you're going to be that one last life who's alone.
Okay.
Boy, that's a big and portentous thought.
I promise you both I will work on the forgiveness thing because I think the other things I'm pretty much clear on, but the forgiveness thing is the hard part.
But every day I'm trying even more.
So at the end of all of this, when you're both done, are you going to go on to whatever comes next together or separately?
Or will it not matter by then?
Well, we're hoping that we finish and we work for God on one of those, let's say, plane four.
Plane four.
There's seven planes.
So the third book is the manual.
It talks about how your karma follows you and how it follows you related to your astrological sign.
It follows you.
Not that the position of the planets control who you are.
You happen to just be born at the time that the planets are in that position.
But it talks about planning the life between lives.
It talks about how your karma follows you.
It talks about the four kinds of karma, the conceit, selfishness, jealousy, and unforgiveness.
Unforgiveness is one of the types of karma.
It would be interesting, Howard, to know your birthday.
Yeah, Howard, don't tell me your birthday, but I mean, it could be any of them, but I'll just tell you that Capricorn, Sagittarian, and Scorpion fall under unforgiveness.
Okay.
Well, no, I'm not.
I'm a Gemini.
I can tell you that.
Oh, well, then, okay, so that's really good, except...
Gemini falls under the angel of conceit.
Oh, do they?
Oh, God.
Well, I don't think I've got any reason to be conceited.
None whatsoever.
Maybe you are conceited enough to think you don't need to forgive.
Oh, my Lord, that's a thought, isn't it?
Now, look, I'm going to bring you at the end of this to the most basic and earthly question that started to emerge at the beginning of our conversation.
And I thought I'd bring it out at the end here.
You both have other partners now, right?
But in the past, you've been very, very close, as close as it's possible for a man and woman to be.
I've known some people in my lifetime.
I've known a number of women in my lifetime.
Most of them would not have understood this.
That's the nicest way that I can put it.
They wouldn't have understood this thing between you.
How do you work that out here?
Well, Dave was actually having marital problems at the time this all started.
And I actually, later, my husband at the time was very on board.
He believed all of it.
He actually meditated with us.
He was on board with all of it.
Unfortunately, there was a big age difference between my husband and I. And we decided that it wasn't best for us.
I take care of him, but we don't have a marriage anymore.
But in answer to your question, Dave and I are best friends and we will be forever.
If that ever ends up turning into anything else, we'll let you know.
I hope you don't think I was.
I'm lovely.
Well, look, I can see the two of you.
I think you work beautifully as a double act.
I really do.
I think you could be doing a talk show together because, you know, you bounce off each other perfectly.
And I hope you didn't think I was prying there, but it's just a question I know would have been in my listener's mind.
Oh, we're an alphin book, but I'm bumped.
You know, you're not.
Yes, Howard, if you say, do I love Carla?
Absolutely.
How could you not?
Oh, yes.
But I can see it radiates between you.
You know, there is that sympatico.
That's a great word, between you.
Thank you both so much.
There is a lot more we need to talk about.
And, you know, I'm doing this TV show now in the UK.
Maybe you'd like to come on that sometime.
It would be our pleasure.
TV is very structured, though.
Well, that's great.
I'd love to do that.
What I'm learning about this is that TV is very structured.
So, you know, you don't quite get the time to range through things.
But it would be nice to introduce you to that audience, too.
Thank you very much.
Do you have a website or something that people can come and refer to?
Yes.
Our website is thegiftofpastlives.com.
Certainly the links to how to reach us, connect to us are on the website.
Links to all of our books.
So if people want to reach us and or reach or look to how to order our books, they can find it there.
Certainly it's available at many retailers in the UK, United States, even if they don't have the book on the shelf.
I'm sure they can search you both on the internet.
Thank you very much.
And it's nice to know that you're so open to people sending you questions.
So just to say that if you have questions of David and Carla, then you can contact them direct.
And you don't need to contact me if you've got specific Questions that maybe I can't answer about all of this.
Dr. David Bettenhausen and Carla Bogney Kidd, I've really loved this conversation.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure, Howard.
A lot of interest and food for thought there, Dr. David Bettenhausen and Carla Bogney Kidd.
Check out their various books online.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet here online.
My name is Howard Hughes.
Why did I have to think about that?
At least I didn't have to read the label on the back of my ship.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, in the springtime in the northern hemisphere, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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