Asked whether he had ever lived in physical form and how his own search began, Bartholomew recounted three of his many incarnations that he thought were worth mentioning — each one a life in which the very thing that wounded him most became, in the end, his teacher.

Context: Recorded at the same Easter gathering as Tape 166X1 ("Resurrection") on April 6, 1980, in Taos, New Mexico, this account was given in response to a questioner's request for Bartholomew's own incarnative history. He prefaced it by observing that most incarnations are "very boring" — long plateaus with few high peaks — and that he would touch only on those lives that bore directly on the question of how a soul awakens.

The Beautiful Man of Egypt: The first life Bartholomew described was that of a strong, extremely handsome man near the pharaoh's court, who had chosen that incarnation precisely to taste the fruits of physical beauty and had indulged himself utterly in it. A chariot accident then destroyed his face, and those who had worshipped his beauty turned from him in horror. Retreating into isolation, he suffered an infection that took away his sight, his speech and much of his hearing, and passed his final weeks alone in the desert, swinging between rage at the universe and a stubborn inner insistence that "I am still the same; where have I changed?" Offered, in the dark, the option to end it all, he refused: "I will stay until I understand." That choice, Bartholomew said, was where his real growth began, for he died with the absolute knowledge that "as people perceive you, you are not that."

The Woman of the Mud Pits: Reincarnating quickly so as not to lose that thread, he returned as a lowly, ugly woman laboring in the mud pits for the pharaoh, despised and, as a girl, abused and used as a prostitute. In the horror of that experience she discovered the one refuge: that when the body is being used, one can go within where no one can touch you. Going within, the inner light returned and a quiet inner sight began to open. Strangely, the men who came to abuse her began to leave lighter and happier, sensing something real had passed, though they credited it to some new trick; and when a voice urged her to take her earnings, wash herself and build another life, she answered, "This is my place of service, and I will serve this way until God removes me." She gave what she had to the abandoned and the outcast until she died, as such lives usually did, of disease — and was wept for, strangely, by many who had never understood her.

The Shepherd and the Tree: The last life he chose to tell was that of a man again, ordinary but burning early with a longing he could not name, tending flocks through many solitary hours on a hillside. As silence descended on him more and more, the animals stayed near, and he came to lean day and night against one particular tree, until in his heart he came to regard that tree as his mother — sheltering beneath it, clinging to it through storms, yet wondering all the while where its comfort truly came from, since whenever he went down into the valley the sweetness was gone. Falling ill and sensing he still had not found what he had come for, he cried out to that tree, 'Mother, teach me — I have not learned it.' In that one vast night the walls fell: he saw that the comfort had never belonged to the tree itself, and that everything which had wounded and deprived him had been his teacher all along. He sent gratitude to all of it, especially to those who had hurt him. This, Bartholomew said, was "the moment of knowing from which I have never returned."

The Lives Left Unspoken: Bartholomew declined to describe two further lives, saying it would be arrogant to dwell on their glamour, and closed by naming the single thread that had run through the whole telling: that there is always a moment when one realizes that the very thing which wounded one most has become one's greatest teacher.