This session began by addressing a fundamental confusion about enlightenment - that people are constantly looking for something they believe they need to find or deserve, when in reality they are already experiencing what they seek but have misnamed it. Bartholomew emphasized that enlightenment is not a future attainment but an ever-present awareness that people are experiencing continuously. The difficulty arises because when individuals examine their moment-to-moment experience and find it unsatisfactory, they conclude that if this is enlightenment, they don't want it. This creates a cycle of seeking something "other" than what is perpetually present.

The teaching addressed a student's reluctance to abandon familiar meditation practices (like following the breath) for what seems like a "less direct" approach of resting in emptiness and stillness. Bartholomew clarified that true emptiness is characterized by three unmistakable qualities: total love, total bliss, and a state of natural knowing. Rather than representing deprivation or loss, this emptiness makes everything in life more vibrantly alive and real. The fear of losing what one holds dear - relationships, work, family - represents a fundamental misunderstanding, as enlightened awareness enhances rather than diminishes engagement with the world.

A crucial section of this session resolved the dilemma many spiritual seekers face regarding loving or accepting what appears abhorrent in the world. Bartholomew explained that withholding love from certain events or people in an attempt to avoid "feeding" negative energy actually perpetuates separation and conflict. True healing of global difficulties requires enough people to rest in enlightened awareness and from that perspective contemplate all events with compassion and understanding. This doesn't mean condoning harmful actions, but rather bringing the qualities of vast awareness - love, wisdom, clarity - to bear on challenging situations instead of responding from reactive judgmental states.

The practical instruction focused on recognizing that people constantly experience "snapshots" of enlightened awareness throughout each day, and that deep sleep represents a nightly immersion in the same oneness they seek. Rather than searching for something foreign, students need only pay attention to what is already familiar and ever-present. Bartholomew used the analogy of body awareness to illustrate this point - just as people rarely focus on full-body sensation despite being constantly embodied, they miss the wholeness of consciousness by attending only to fragmented experiences of thought, emotion, and sensation.

This session introduced a simple practice of expanding from partial awareness to wholeness by beginning with feeling the entire body as a unified field rather than focusing on separate parts. This naturally leads to awareness of the wholeness that contains and surrounds even the body's wholeness. When people stop trying to control through thinking and instead rest in pure experiencing, healing naturally occurs through expansion rather than contraction. This approach directly addresses various forms of dis-ease by accessing the balanced awareness that exists prior to mental analysis or emotional reactivity.

A fundamental teaching emerged here about the nature of the "experiencer" - the constant aware presence that witnesses all changing experiences. Bartholomew emphasized that people can never question whether they are experiencing something; the fact of experiencing is undeniable and continuous. The confusion arises when attention gets absorbed in the secondary commentary about experience rather than resting in the primary fact of experiencing itself. This primary experiencer represents the true self that remains constant while all mental, emotional, and physical experiences rise and fall within it.

The teaching concluded by addressing the intensification of desires that often occurs when people begin practicing awareness. Rather than trying to eliminate desires, students are encouraged to recognize that most thoughts and emotions revolve around desires, and that this is natural and acceptable. What matters is staying rooted in the feeling of being the experiencer while allowing all secondary experiences to arise and pass away naturally. There exists one fundamental desire beneath all others - the yearning to return home to Source - and when this primary desire strengthens, it provides the magnetic force that keeps attention anchored in present-moment awareness while simultaneously allowing appropriate fulfillment of secondary desires. This approach ensures that nothing valuable is lost while the foundation of enlightened living becomes increasingly stable and accessible.