Recorded March 15, 1978, this is the first of a series of private sittings with Bartholomew attended by Mary-Margaret Moore, the channel, and Dr. John Aiken and his wife, Dr. Louisa Aiken. Though the session was originally kept private, the guidance it contains — on the nature of a channel's development, on discernment toward spiritual teachers, on death and fear, and above all on healing the body through the mind — speaks well beyond the three people in the room. It is offered here with the private individuals who were discussed left unnamed.

The development of a channel. Asked whether Mary-Margaret was being trained for more effective work as a channel for higher teaching, Bartholomew confirmed it, with an important nuance. The work serves two purposes at once: her own unfoldment, and whatever help she might in turn offer others. His deepest wish for her is a constant, moment-to-moment "hookup" with the higher forces — a state she is fully capable of reaching without any channeling device, but for which she still lacks faith in herself. "We have had to, in a sense, trick her," he said. The sessions are a provisional scaffold, not the destination; something more important than psychic work is being prepared for her, the nature of which he declined to specify, since so much depends on how she works with what she has already been given. Her intuition, he affirmed, is entirely sound — she simply does not yet believe it. He added a standing rule of spiritual integrity: give help when it is asked, and never use such a gift to reach into the lives of those who have not asked.

Service, environment, and inner readiness. Mary-Margaret wished to teach at a prison, and those close to her encouraged it. Bartholomew's answer was no — not from any fear of danger, for she was strong enough and precisely the kind of person who could do good there, but because the dark energies surrounding that place would, at this stage, work against the very opening being cultivated in her. The refusal was not permanent; should her path later take a different turn, it could become a fine vehicle of service. The teaching beneath the answer is that the energies of an environment act on inner work, and timing matters.

Discernment in a relationship and toward a teacher. Two threads of the session turn on the same lesson: how to remain clear-eyed and unattached amid the pull of others. Bartholomew validated Mary-Margaret's uneasy intuition about a close relationship that was drawing a loved one toward lower energies — financial preoccupation, drink, and distraction from the work they had built together — while counseling her not to judge or intervene: her task is to refuse to join those energies herself, without any sense of superiority, and to allow the other person his own path, even if it means letting him go. The longer teaching concerns a revered spiritual teacher — here called only "the Swami" — whose realization, Bartholomew said, flickers on and off like a light: genuine and hard-won, yet not the unbroken stream of the truly established. He named Sri Ramana Maharshi as the rare teacher of the age whose light never wavered, and urged the listeners to take what is true from any teacher and set aside what is not, never allowing themselves to be mesmerized. Even great seekers, he noted, still have their own work to do.

Death, fear, and the illusion of the body. Prompted by a mother's dread that her young child would not live long, Bartholomew offered one of the session's central teachings. Every death, at any age, is a departure agreed upon before birth; there are no accidents. The grief that overwhelms us springs from the master illusion that we are bodies — and that those who go before us are bodies. Loss can be used to quicken our own awakening, if we do not let the illusion swallow the lesson. He extended this to fear itself: resolve one fear and the mind will find another to take its place; the real work is not to answer each worry but to dissolve the ground of fear by coming to know one's own oneness with the light, so that there is nothing left to fear.

Questions from the Quest group. To a set of questions carried in from the group, Bartholomew replied that intelligent life fills the universe in "vast, vast" numbers, and that humanity's error is to imagine itself the center of things. He added a striking detail: members of the Earth plane do at times travel in what he called the "psychic form" — not the physical body — to these other realms, where they are warmly welcomed, since many of the different spheres value that kind of intercommunication. Asked whether women feel more from the heart than men, he said there is no such rule, for in the world of light there is no male and female at all. On spiritual healing he was emphatic: there is no true within or without; healing is constant, because in truth there is nothing to heal — the blocks are constructs of a mind convinced of its own separateness. The quickest way to heal oneself, he said, is to make contact with the "healthy, throbbing, pulsating vitality that life is." Running through these answers is his recurring remedy for self-doubt, which he called, tellingly, "very unfair to God": stop thinking, begin to feel, and allow the centers — the Kundalini, the opening of the heart of Christ, the Buddha mind — to open, which they will do only when the body itself says, "I allow."

Health guidance for Dr. Aiken. Bartholomew gave Dr. Aiken a detailed reading of his physical condition, describing the body as a form through which light passes easily in some areas and meets obstruction in others. He urged him to keep up his Hatha Yoga exactly at its present level — Dr. Aiken was benefiting from it far more than he realized, since it steadily breaks down the blocks and keeps the energies fluid — and to continue bicycling, which serves him better than walking. He cautioned about weakening night vision, advising him not to drive at night when it could be avoided, and noted the revitalizing effect of the sun and gardening on his health. For a longstanding prostatic condition he recommended specialized yoga postures together with visualization. This kind of practical, body-level counsel to Dr. Aiken on how to care for and heal himself recurs across several of the sessions.

The healing power of visualization. The session's closing teaching gathers the health advice into a principle for everyone. The human being believes the body must be in constant motion to be revitalized — hence, Bartholomew said, "the cult of the jogger" — but this misses the deeper truth that it is the mind that conditions the body's state. Five minutes a day sitting quietly and visualizing the life force moving harmoniously through every part of the body can be as effective as vigorous exercise, and in some cases considerably more so. The one condition is belief: if the mind rejects the visualization, the body will reject it too. He recommended the practice to all three present, pointing in each case to the areas where releasing the blocks would bring the most benefit.