Asked on Easter morning to speak on the resurrection, Bartholomew taught that its true meaning is this: when the body falls away at death, the master becomes not less present but more — and more accessible than before. That greater, unmediated presence opens the door to direct spiritual experience in ordinary, humble people, and it is exactly those spontaneous realizations, he said, that organized religion has always feared and repressed.

Context: Recorded on Easter Sunday, April 6, 1980, in Taos, New Mexico, this session opened with a request that Bartholomew speak on the resurrection and the symbolism of Easter. From that teaching the morning moved outward through the recently surfaced Gnostic gospels, the Seth material, the question of whether war is a necessary precondition for human awakening, and the art of learning from the natural world. (The same gathering also included Bartholomew's account of three of his own past lives, presented separately as Tape 166X2.)

The Real Meaning of the Resurrection: Bartholomew located the whole power of the Easter drama in a single reversal that most people miss. When the body of Jesus was gone and the master was sought in a tomb, he could not be found there — because the most glorious moment had already come: with the body dropped, his power and life were more present, not less. Those who truly loved him saw him, he insisted, not as a vague wished-for apparition but as an actual living radiance, "alive with moving, dynamic fire." The reason so many could not participate then, and cannot now, is the illusion that the body is real and everything else is not. Christ, he said, "lives more now than he did then, and is more accessible now than he was then"; and the same is true of any great teacher whose body falls away — that is not the end of the teaching but the point at which the real teaching begins.

To Whom the Vision Comes: The resurrection appeared, Bartholomew observed, not to the appointed leaders but to the humble and the discounted — to Mary Magdalene and to ordinary men and women of no rank — because "it is out of the wisdom of a humble heart and a yearning mind that the light breaks." He drew from this a caution about hierarchy: no one can know in advance upon whom God will bestow such an opening, and the moment an organization sets itself to rank and license who may have valid experience, it begins to smother the very thing it was formed to carry. He noted, too, a pattern he said runs through all the levels of existence — that the great channels of divine wisdom have most often been women, not because they are better but because "women receive and men expedite" — and lamented how readily a genuine realization in a humble or ill-reputed person is explained away as mere emotion.

How the Spontaneous Church Was Organized Away: A living movement, Bartholomew said, began to die within the first week after the resurrection — not for want of power but because of it. So many unqualified, humble people were having true and clear experiences that the leadership faced a choice: honor the validity of those experiences and learn from them, or decide instead who was in charge and whose vision counted. They chose the second. The mystics, unable to hold the highest awareness against the organizing outer world, withdrew — became cloistered and hidden — and so there came to be two churches: an outer one that anyone may join without changing their life at all, and an inner one that, if truly entered, "will burn you to a crisp." One does not come out of that inner sanctuary the way one went in.

The Inner and the Outer Church: Turning to the recently recovered Gnostic writings, Bartholomew affirmed their validity without hesitation and said "there is more to come" that will shake the foundations. He noted their startling claims — that it was Mary Magdalene, not Peter, who first saw the risen Christ, and that to know yourself is to know God because you are God, a blasphemy to the established church. From this he pressed his central demand: one must align with the inner or the outer church and cannot straddle both, for to cling to the outer is finally to say "I want to be respectable." It is safe to sit in the front pew; it is dangerous to step behind the curtain into the mysteries — because there the self you take in may simply be left behind, and there may be no one left to come back out.

On the Seth Material: Asked to comment on the Seth material, Bartholomew answered with warm gratitude for those who had devoted their lives to bringing it forth, and affirmed that it is valid — though, like anything produced year after year, not all of it is equally so, which he said is not the measure by which such work should be judged. He distinguished his own task from it plainly: the exploration of multidimensional personalities is genuine and expanding, but "my job is not to build bigger castles — it is to open a door for you to get out of any of them at any time." He praised the word camouflage as one of the great words, spoke of how a channel's own inner resistance, not any dark external force, is what exhausts her, and urged his listeners to stop building walls, since a wall keeps everything out, not only the unwanted: better to feel each feeling fully, let it move through, and then call in the vastness that is always waiting.

War, and the Uses of the Military: To the question of whether war is a necessary precondition for human enlightenment, Bartholomew declined to give the answer he sensed was wanted. It is the burning fire, he said, that catches human attention — people attend to destruction, disease and death, not to the sun opening a flower at the roadside, though that small sight contains everything one would need to know. We write our own scripts, and could rewrite them; but as long as the world believes that what one person has another cannot, it will keep killing to possess. He then gently corrected a listener who equated the military with death: much of what the military embodies is discipline, camaraderie, building and the opening of new horizons, and some of the finest spiritual lights, he said, are to be found there — offering Winston Churchill, whose resolve saved England when the practical men had given it up, as his example. God uses whom he chooses; man makes the rules.

Learning from Nature: Asked how a person deeply drawn to the natural world might make that a spiritual path, Bartholomew answered that the whole secret lies in observation. A botanist may know everything about a flower and nothing of the essence behind it; the flower itself contains the knowledge of its own wisdom and will teach you, but only if you come to it in humility and quietude rather than as its master. Man is not the teacher of the universe but its learner. He described sitting down beside a plant in inner and outer silence, offering it the same reality one grants another person, until it begins to radiate and something in you quickens in answer. Lived this way — as an attentive silence sustained day by day — the natural world becomes a continuous teacher, and one is drawn, without books or schedules, to exactly where right action is needed.