Recorded two days after the previous session and opening in the middle of the same discussion of the sleep state, this talk quickly moved past dreaming into deeper territory. Bartholomew named a fourth state beyond the three levels of sleep — the “clear and present life,” in which there is no separation and nothing to dream — presenting it as the true goal of human understanding, and he grounded the whole teaching in two themes he returned to again and again: that we receive exactly what we most deeply want, and that our thoughts build the world we then have to live in.

Context: This session was channeled on October 14, 1979, two days after Tape 129, and the recording opens mid-sentence as Bartholomew is recapping the three levels of the sleep state described in that earlier talk — the nightmare level, the level of personality and daily life, and the realm of the clear light where the great teachers are met. From there the session largely followed the questions of those present, moving well beyond sleep into the nature of true wakefulness, grace, thought, responsibility, and service.

Recapping the Three Realms — and Trusting Them: Bartholomew briefly restated the three levels of sleep and then pressed a reassurance: that one does not remember a dream does not mean one has not entered the higher realm. He warned against qualifying one's dream life with the same anxious scrutiny one applies to daily life, which only traps a person hopelessly. The universe is benevolent and one is never alone — not a single soul awash at sea, but someone given more help than they know what to do with; unless a person fills their system with agitation, alcohol, and negative thought before sleeping, they will reach some part of that healing realm most nights. He was equally firm that there are no rules for dreams and no need for dream books, which only classify and build hierarchies. The dreamer created the images and the dreamer must come to the understanding; one should be one's own testimony rather than handing that authority to anyone else. In the same breath he offered the counsel that runs through all his work: believe nothing he says on faith, test whatever can be tested, and if it does not stand up to one's own experience, discard it.

Awake While Asleep: Asked about Ramana Maharshi's saying that when we are awake we are asleep, and when asleep we are awake, Bartholomew agreed and unfolded it. Ordinary waking life, for most people, is a kind of automatic sleep — a mechanical round of attack, response, and past memory, a pale replica of what is possible, as though one were groping underwater. True wakefulness is a living rapport with the vastness, and by contrast our usual daytime state is revealed as the deeper sleep. Rightly used, then, the sleep state itself can be genuinely awakening, because in parts of our understanding we are actually closer to the Source asleep than we are in our so-called waking hours. This, he noted, is slowly changing, as more people begin to be truly awake during their waking hours as well.

The Fourth State: The Clear and Present Life: Beyond the three levels of sleep, Bartholomew pointed to a fourth state that some had touched in meditation or in daily life — the one the great ones call the clear and present life. It is the space where there is no separation, where there can be no dream because there is no dreamer and nothing to dream about; there is nothing but everything, and little can be said about it. It can be consciously entered and consciously remained in, and to stand in that space — whether awake or asleep — simply knowing, not knowing this or that but simply knowing, is as he perceives it the very goal of human understanding. It can be approached through meditation and at times through the dream state, but the door is always the same question he returns to for everything: what do you really want?

You Receive What You Most Deeply Want: That question is the whole matter. What you truly want is what your day will unfold into, and excuses — “if only so-and-so were different, my life would be blissful” — miss the point; if only you were different, your life would be different. Freedom comes to a person only when they want it more than anything else, and until then the path is simply the work of arriving at the place where that is all one wants. You get exactly what you ask for, and what you ask for will free you — but ten minutes a day of asking for higher wisdom cannot be expected to yield a life lived in it. Bartholomew declined, however, to say that people get what they “deserve” in the punitive sense: from his vantage every person deserves the divine, and deserves it now, because he does not see the smallness and ego-sensitivity that people see in one another.

Grace Is Now, Not Earned: Pressed on whether this was grace, Bartholomew accepted the Christian word but rejected the common distortion that makes grace something earned by doing the right things. Grace is not a future state to be reached by good performance; it is a now state, and it can only be found and experienced now — if it is not here now, it is not part of the whole. To keep performing, forever measuring whether one is finally “good enough” to experience God, is the ego's game, and the ego cannot be purified because its very function is to keep one feeling separate. He counseled abandoning that project altogether: one does not climb a ladder of self-purification into the divine, since purity of action is a divine movement and not something the ego can manufacture. And once again he set guilt aside entirely, as an endless trip the ego offers that never brings one home.

Rapture, and the Endless Extension of the Divine: Asked about rapture, Bartholomew affirmed it warmly as a real and helpful experience — the feeling of the divine power moving through one — but described it as an intermediary state that is eventually surrendered, because what is finally needed is total quietude, and even rapture, wonderful as it is, is in the end given up for the vastness. It is a one-to-one reality between a person and the power, not a group event. Asked whether God evolves, he drew a careful distinction: the divine does not “evolve” in the sense of becoming better or more refined, but it extends, endlessly, through eternity. Each person who moves into that knowledge becomes part of the extension, so that enlightenment is never “finished” — it is creative extension without limit, which he called one of the most wonderful things he could tell them.

Your Thoughts Build Your World: The session's strongest ethical teaching was that one is responsible for one's thoughts, because thought builds the world. A thought of destruction or revenge toward another does real harm even when it is never physically carried out; the comforting belief that one has hurt no one so long as one did not act is false. Each person is part of the human condition, not separate from the wars and cruelties they deplore, and the place to help is to clean up the environment of one's own mind. The most effective way to strengthen the good, Bartholomew said, is to take one's awareness off the bad, since whatever one attends to is what one feeds and increases. Most people live on “automatic,” reacting through the day as one drives a car half-asleep, unaware of the power constantly moving through them; to claim that power — with quiet wisdom rather than arrogance, and with the humble recognition that it is not of one's own making — is to pick up the key. He added, on service, that no trick of astral projection is required and none is a prerequisite for freedom; if one lives to serve by day, one will be used spontaneously at night, and thinking too much about it only spoils the spontaneity. Pay attention to your thought, he said, and you will find God.