Originally a private reading, this session is shared here - with the questioner's name removed - for the teaching it carries reaches well beyond a single life. Bartholomew answered a series of written questions from a woman: why certain sounds and places stirred an inexplicable unease in her, and how she might respond to a grandchild caught in a drug addiction. In tracing three of her past lives and then offering counsel on unconditional love, he showed both how the soul carries its history forward and how love can hold steady in the face of another person's self-destruction.

The Tibetan Monastery and the Bell: The first question was why the sound of a Tibetan bell left her so uneasy. Bartholomew traced it to a life as a young orphan boy placed in a small and remote Tibetan monastery. Its abbot — "almost diabolically clever" and a highly competent occultist — drew the monks and boys into astral labor, conjuring thought-forms to frighten and dominate, and using bells, thoughts, and ritual objects to coerce passing travelers into surrendering their possessions so that the isolated monastery could prosper. The boy and several others resisted, and were eventually pressured by the abbot to leave. Nothing outwardly terrible befell him, yet the bell became the symbol of that helplessness and inner manipulation — which is why it still surfaced in her, especially during inner work in a workshop. The reaction, Bartholomew assured her, was entirely natural.

The Catacombs of Early Christianity: Her unease with tunnels reached back to the early Christian era. She was then a man — handsome, strong, and a respected figure among an educated peasantry — and a convert drawn from a Judaic tradition he had found inert and apathetic toward the new faith. The "tunnels" were in truth the catacombs, where the persecuted faithful sheltered. Bartholomew saw the arena and its lions, but said that death there was not this man's fate. His difficulty arose instead from his longing to study and become what would now be called a priest — a calling that neither his own family nor the family of the woman to whom he was betrothed were willing to accept.

The Medieval Noblewoman: A third life unfolds as a noblewoman whose real awakening came through a philosopher granted free entrée to her palace. As she sat at her needlework, he would talk nearby, filling her with ideas and answering whenever she raised her head to ask a question. Tellingly, the ladies-in-waiting around her — daughters of old families that had fallen into poverty — listened, too, and through her they began their own soul journeys, at a time when it was far from usual for a woman to ask deep questions at all. With time on her hands she became, in Bartholomew's words, a very fine meditator, puzzling over these matters with long and intensive yearning; and it was here, he said, that her growth truly began.

The Granddaughter and Unconditional Love: The final and most tender question concerned her granddaughter's drug addiction, and what she herself was meant to learn from it. Bartholomew declined to comment on the young woman's own path — "that is her own private business" — and turned instead to the grandmother's role: do the best you can, and then release. Above all, never withdraw love. Nearly everyone, he observed, succumbs in some life to a hypnotism of the world — drugs, alcohol, money, power, sex, self-importance, even "do-gooding" — and hers was simply the obvious kind. In that, she was not different from anyone else. The grandmother's task was to keep reminding her granddaughter of her own worth, and to let her know — positively, never through disapproval — that the love between them had not changed. To withdraw love as a means of discipline is one of the world's customs, Bartholomew noted, but this young woman already knew she stood in disapproval; what she needed was to feel her basic worthiness and a caring that would remain in whatever form her life took. To honor her choice — not aloud, but inwardly — was to recognize that she had the right to learn her own hard lessons, and that love, offered in a positive spirit, needed to never be mistaken for approval.