Bartholomew addressed homosexuality within a wider teaching on love, insisting that the only measure of any relationship is whether it frees and supports each person — never the shape or sex of the bodies involved — before moving on to humanity's kinship with the Earth, the masks we wear, karma and race, the coming of the Maitreya, and what it means to live the life divine.

Context: Recorded in Eugene, Oregon, this session opened with Bartholomew commenting on the group itself, urging its members never to let their gatherings harden into ritual but to meet as "brand new people" each time, dynamic and spontaneous. From there the questions ranged widely. Prompted by the fact that several members of the group were gay, one questioner asked Bartholomew to speak on homosexuality — the session's titular subject — and his answer broadened into a general teaching on the nature of real love. Later questions carried the evening into humanity's relationship with the planet, the psychology of the masks people wear, the workings of karma and race, the "karma committee" that shapes each incarnation, the coming of the Maitreya, the meaning of the life divine, and finally whether the manner of a child's birth carries spiritual weight.

The Living Group: Asked to comment on the energy of the core group, Bartholomew warned against any preconceived idea of where the gatherings are headed. When one works with divine energy one is constantly changing, he said, and if there is no change he suspects the group has fallen into ritual and is merely repeating the old. Each time they meet they should understand themselves as brand new people, alive to whatever arises spontaneously — a healing one night, a personal problem another. Nothing should be organized or decided beforehand; every meeting is "a combustible moment," and the more combustion, the more the reality of the divine is present. If the group ever finds itself saying and doing the same things, it should simply stop, because that is a sign the life has gone out of it. The single criterion is whether one participates at the maximum of one's own inner ability: if a thing sets you on fire, use it; if it does not, leave it alone.

Love Knows No Package: On homosexuality Bartholomew was direct and compassionate. Those disturbed by it, he said, have much to learn about their own fear and lack of understanding; the whole matter is "a great to-do about nothing." He saw not separate male and female bodies but ever-moving fields of light partaking one of another, and asked how energy could possibly be frozen and forbidden to flow from one body to another. Wherever love genuinely exists it is maximum and inconsequential whether it is two male bodies, two female bodies, or one of each. If a relationship grows you, expands you, and is meaningful, follow it; if a male-female relationship takes you nowhere, he did not suggest you continue it. There are no rules, only energy in motion manifesting in different ways. What he did object to is the hypocrisy of assuming male-female union superior when at its core it may hold nothing but manipulation. Should two men or two women embody real love, he said, he would get on his knees to that energy and wish it good luck, for he did not care what package it comes in.

The One Hallmark of a Relationship: Broadening the point, Bartholomew named the sole test of any bond: can you support and free your partner? Freedom means saying, "you are who you are and I delight in who you are, and it is not my place to change you." Love carries no judgments and no conditions — not "I love you, but," and not "I love you if you will change," but simply "I love you," accepting all of it. Everyone who takes physical form has something to overcome, and the task of lovers, friends, and parents is to walk together and ask "how can I help you," rather than to insist the other walk one's own way. Where people restrict, strangle, or manipulate one another under the name of love, he counseled calling it what it is and reconsidering, for the only relationship worth building is one in which each can let the other be who they are.

Guests Upon the Earth: Turning to the planet, Bartholomew described Earth as an entity in its own right, with a psychic thought-form of its own, that has long hosted a humanity that has been a poor houseguest — polluting the air above and the ground below. There may come a time when this entity decides a change is needful, brushing humanity away as one brushes flies from an arm, bringing the predicted cataclysms. Yet full communion with the planet's energy remains possible for those willing to expend the effort. Because human intelligence has carried people far from the natural and spontaneous, realignment requires becoming natural again — an inner change, dropping every falsity, rather than merely retreating to the woods. He counseled a two-way relationship with land and place: not plopping something down within weeks, but sitting quietly with a site and letting it speak, asking what can be shared, since man has been "the boss" for a long time and it is worth asking honestly whether that has worked. Findhorn, he noted, proved this, but each person must become their own Findhorn.

The Masks We Wear: One of the chief things keeping people separate from their own spontaneous being, Bartholomew taught, is the many masks they wear. He invited the group to notice, hour by hour, how many faces they put on for lovers, bosses, strangers, and the grocery store — always asking "what is expected of me" rather than "what is the naturalness of this?" The effort of maintaining these masks is enormous and largely wasted, since most people are too absorbed in their own masks to notice anyone else's. The greatest sign of friendship is to let a friend be free of their masks, to accept whatever is truly there — anger, jealousy, depression, plain nastiness — without demanding it be prettied up. He distinguished "I am angry" from "you make me angry," locating the emotion as one's own chosen response, and observed that feelings come and go like wind through trees when simply allowed. When people forbid each other honest emotion, they drive it into underhanded manipulation and cheap shots. And in learning to let others be who they are, one finally discovers the freedom to be oneself — for the so-called "dark uglies" within are only unexpressed energy that has been warped by not being allowed to flow.

Karma, Race, and the Bold Outline: Asked about the karma of races, Bartholomew rejected the stereotyped notion that to incarnate in a persecuted race, such as the black or the Jewish, is punishment for having been "a bad apple." Before taking form, one selects the racial band that best serves the work to be done, since certain lessons — humility, universality, the transcendence of suffering, or the expansion of intellect — can be learned only within particular races and cultures. He asked that pity, which he called a demeaning emotion, be replaced with awe and respect for the courage such a life requires. Confirming with delight the questioner's image of a "karma committee," he explained that between lives one draws a "bold outline" — the major people, marriages, children, and illnesses of a life — while filling in the details moment by moment through one's choices. At certain "points of power," often experienced as being struck by a two-by-four, one has the chance to awaken; ignored, the blows grow heavier. When a person amasses enough energy to transcend these limitations — the horoscope, the karma, the pattern — they become free agents, artists creating anew each moment and leaving a traceless path behind them, which is what freedom on the earth plane truly means.

The Maitreya and the Life Divine: Speaking with deep awe, Bartholomew described the coming of the Maitreya as a blessing the Earth has never before received — a power so vast that no single physical vehicle could hold it, and which will therefore ground itself in certain humans in various parts of the world. He would not name where, lest people rush to manufacture Maitreyas there, but promised that anyone who draws close to the source within will be able to hear this power without sitting at anyone's feet; he asked that hearts be prepared now, that this Messiah not be lost as the last was for want of enough who could say yes. This led into his summary of the life divine itself: withdraw attention from the outer world to the inner, watch honestly whatever is found there, and hold the mystics' claim that "you are not what you think you are." From that arises the one burning question — if I am not what I think I am, then what am I? — which, when it will not let a person alone, marks the beginning of real inner life. Safety, he insisted, is found nowhere in the ever-changing world but only in the changeless source within, "because God is you." Closing on a final question about cesarean versus natural birth, he called the distinction karmically real but spiritually unimportant, far outweighed by the mother's loving openness, and asked everyone to hold one thing toward their parents above all grievance: gratitude, for having been given a chance.