In this discourse Bartholomew addressed how to hold the teachings of others - from Madame Blavatsky to the great sages - without surrendering one's own inner authority, and turned the question outward into a sustained meditation on chaos, projection, love, and the reclaiming of personal power.

Context: Recorded on June 29, 1980 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this session (channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore) opened with a questioner asking whether Bartholomew recommended studying Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine and comparable esoteric writings. That single question set the theme the whole tape carried: how a seeker relates to any body of teaching, any teacher, any outside voice - including Bartholomew's own. From there the group's questions ranged across the world upheavals of the moment, the paradox of mounting difficulty on the spiritual path, the nature of perception, love, the counsel of psychics, and how one might help another soul. Throughout, Bartholomew returned insistently to a single instruction: keep the power centered in yourself.

Discernment Toward All Teachings: To the opening question Bartholomew answered unequivocally: whatever the inner being genuinely guides one to read and study is helpful, whether it comes from Madame Blavatsky, from Mary-Margaret Moore, or from anyone else. No writing, he insisted - not even the highest - contains total truth. The seeker is co-responsible for whatever is taken in, and must approach every teaching with an open heart and the intention to draw out what is growthful and let the rest go, without judging the person who brought it. To swallow any doctrine whole is to lose one's power to that doctrine, and this he refused to accept even of his own words: "If anyone swallows everything that I say, please go someplace else and swallow something else." A teaching should be given a fair trial and tested repeatedly against one's own experience - does it lighten or does it burden? Anything that feeds only the intellect and not the deep ache of the soul will not carry a person through. He warned against the trap of quoting authorities ("Bartholomew says," "Madame Blavatsky says") in place of speaking one's own understood truth, and against judging a teaching by the imperfect lifestyle of whoever channeled it. From the higher view there is no competition among Christ, Buddha, the Maharshi, or any true source; the one white light shines through myriad prisms, and one need only receive gratefully what is meaningful, and judge not.

The Auspicious Time of Chaos: Asked about Mount St. Helens and the disturbances then convulsing the earth, Bartholomew declined to soften the picture: measured by comfort, harmony, and worldwide equilibrium, the signs are not good, and the times of disharmony are only beginning. But measured by the possibility of personal freedom and release from the illusions of mind, the moment is dynamically auspicious. It is precisely in chaos, he taught, that those who truly seek are cut loose from the ruts and chains that had held them secure. He asked each person to recall honestly when real learning and expansion have come in their own life - in placid calm, or when the seas churned and one cried out for grounding. The power now loose upon the land can carry a person either toward fear and confusion or toward deep centering and the abandonment of old structures; which way it carries them is theirs to choose.

Problems, the Ego, and "I Cannot": To the question of why difficulties seem to multiply the further one advances, Bartholomew explained that life gives a person whatever they are ready to take, and that human consciousness awakens most quickly through pain and loss. When a person reaches the point of saying "I can't handle it," they are in fact closest to a great truth - for the belief that the small ego has ever, by its own puny power, accomplished anything is the grandest illusion. Nothing moves without the power of the divine Oneness: "You ride on the back of the gods and you think yourself to be flying." His counsel to one who understands this intellectually yet still suffers is simple and radical - accept, accept, reject nothing - and to stay centered as an observer while continuing to deal with the minutiae of a broken car, an aching head, a life in turmoil, without identifying with any of it. He was emphatic that no worthy God authors such calamities; the divine is present within every circumstance, and the seeker's task is to distinguish the mere event from that abiding divine presence.

The Space Between Events: Central to this teaching is the image of the play. If a person concentrates on the movement of the actors and the drama itself, they lose the sense of the space that unites all things; but if they place their awareness on that spatial oneness - "the space between the events and not on the events themselves" - they begin to be free. The deeper turn is his insistence that one is not merely watching the play but has written, directed, and taken part in it. So long as a person says "God wrote the play," they have not understood; the point is not to blame the divine but to see the events as one's own production, to make the inner life maximum and the outer life minimum, and to use the brief, hard times - which never last long - to press oneself inward before comfort returns and one falls back to sleep.

The Bubble of Projection: Bartholomew developed an extended teaching on what he called the bubble. The world exists in form and is genuinely shared - all are in the room, all see the broken car - but each person perceives it through a bubble of their own thought upon which their inner condition is reflected back to them. Where one sees a happy chance to walk in the sun, another sees calamity; where one calls a person a jerk, another sees someone kind. The reflex to ask "who is right?" is itself the error: both are right, each seeing their own reflection. The world as one sees it is one's own mirror. This gives a precise instrument of self-knowledge - the things "out there" that one strongly responds to, that provoke fear or the urge to flee, mark exactly where unfinished business and fear lie embedded within. The freeing lies not in running but in standing firm and looking. He extended this to the body and to fear of death, urging that attention be moved from the ceaseless protection of the physical form to the watching of the mind, since it is the mind that propels the body - a point he applied pointedly to those in the room who are nurses, immersed daily in the compelling appearance of illness.

Love, Meditation, and the Breaking of the Bubble: On constancy and love, Bartholomew turned every complaint back upon the one who makes it: do not demand of the world a fidelity, love, or steadfastness you have not first cultivated in yourself, for the outer world can only reflect what one already holds. Rather than straining to become loving, he offered a hypothesis for the doubting mind to test - you are love - a quality already present that can be shone forth at any moment. The path he named as quickest is to sit in the quietude of one's being, at all times and in all places, making the whole of life a meditation until the love begins to move, the bubble expands, and one day breaks open into vastness. He assured the group that this is not a solitary labor: the divine power presses against the bubble from the other side as hard as free will allows, in a dual movement whose whole object is to perforate it. One need only do their own half, and like attracts like - genuine yearning draws the answering yearning of the divine.

Psychics, Guidance, and Being the Path: Two closing questions concerned outside guidance. On psychics, Bartholomew distinguished the truly surrendered reader - who lets the divine wisdom select from a person's records what is best - from the more common case in which a reader, however well-meaning, hits the wall of their own ego and unconsciously selects and colors what they present, especially for those they know well. Going habitually to another for egotistical direction about what to do, buy, or sell risks receiving false or power-draining information; the seeker remains responsible each time and must never hand over their power. He noted that he himself rarely gave specific directives, precisely so as not to take a person's power, and warned that anyone who leaves feeling drained, ill, or clammy should never return. On helping another onto their path, his answer was the same principle inverted: the only true way to guide a soul is to so embody the path that one becomes it, so that others are drawn to ask - and then to share quietly, without lecture or proselytizing, always leaving the other free to walk their own way. Short of that lived radiance, it is best to give abundantly and let others find their own paths, keeping the power, as always, centered in the Self.