In a wide-ranging session built from mailed-in questions, Bartholomew moved from how to kindle a genuine desire for freedom, through the soul's entry into the body and the ethics of psychic sight, to the evening's central teaching: that one is not a separate self but Life itself, living all lives at once — and that the way home is not to grasp for it but to step back and become the watcher.

Context: Recorded on August 17, 1980, in Taos, New Mexico, this session opened with a warning that it would answer a backlog of questions sent in by mail and so would move through "a great many diversified questions" rather than building one continuous thought toward a single peak. Bartholomew granted that some of these were not the highest sort of question, but held that if a person had taken the trouble to send one, he was obliged to answer — because one never knows when a limited question will open out into the vastness.

Kindling the Desire for Freedom: Bartholomew began with a question that had reached him again and again: many teachers insist that without a dynamic drive toward freedom the goal cannot be reached, so what can a person do to increase that desire? "A mediocre desire produces a mediocre result," he said. When someone protests that they cannot find time to meditate or are simply not interested, what they are really confessing is that they are not yet convinced the process is worthwhile — and while they remain lukewarm, they defeat their own end. One of the pleasantest remedies, he suggested, was to keep the masters close at hand and read them often, whether their own words or those of a good translator of the process, until one becomes convinced the goal is truly possible; a mind kept on the mundane all day will find its half-hour of meditation just as mundane as the rest. He urged plain honesty: many who would hear the tape did not want freedom at all, and would do better to admit it than to fool themselves and others. For those who were serious but lacked momentum, he advised humbling oneself to seek out someone of vaster wisdom — taking care to choose a guide who would not chart one's path but stand only as a co-participant — and warned against the ego's arrogance that dismisses a teacher as unworthy (the American Roshi "not from the finest strain of Zen") and so ends by doing nothing at all.

The Elders, and the Two Kinds of Souls: Asked to describe how a soul chooses its birth circumstances between earth lives, and whether the phrase "Lords of Karma" carried any meaning, Bartholomew identified those beings with "the elders" and then largely declined the invitation to describe the other side in detail. To do so, he said, would be mostly mental speculation with no bearing on one's present life, and he was wary of painting that realm so gloriously that his listeners would resolve to "sit this one out" and wait to be guided later — when in truth the elders' help is available now, not only before birth. He distinguished two kinds of entity who choose to incarnate: the one who surveys the possibilities, is offered further counsel, and refuses it — "no, thank you, I have it all figured out" — leaping in only half-prepared; and the humble one who listens and enters carrying that same willingness to learn. Arrogance, he warned, carries over between the realms and is not magically shed at death; many souls incarnate "for one thing only, to learn that they should have listened," and may be known by the refrain of their lives: "Why didn't I listen to so-and-so?" The real lesson set before the know-it-all, he said, is whether they can take counsel not from lofty beings but from those nearest at hand — their children, their parents, their bosses — and he recalled the definition of genius as one who can genuinely learn from another's experience, which most people refuse to do, certain that in the same circumstances they would have managed better.

When the Soul Enters the Body: Several questions concerned the soul's relation to the growing body, and to each Bartholomew returned the same refrain: "There are no rules... the rules are not written." As to when the soul enters the fetus, he said no single answer was possible, since it depends entirely on who is incarnating and why: a vast being has no need to hover about the womb studying its parents, while other souls come and go, or remain throughout, or enter as late as the very moment of birth — and in some cases the entity present is "not even" the one expected. The orderly growth of the body itself, he stressed, is a natural, organic, animal process, no different from a dog's, and not the soul's doing; the soul does not fashion one appendage and then the next. What a soul may do is seek out a particular body — beautiful, ugly, or deformed — for the sake of a karmic understanding, drifting toward parents whose circumstances afford the needed lesson, though the choice is far less automatic than people imagine, with the parents, the birth, and the whole financial and physical setting all weighing in. To the worry that souls must fight and shove to claim a birth, he answered essentially no: as above, so below, and where an orderly "doorman" governs the door, each waits its turn. On abortion he restated a position he had given at length elsewhere: the first responsibility lies with the woman, who does better to take precautions before a body has come into being than to be careless and then face having to destroy a body-form.

Edgar Cayce's Source, and the Ethics of Psychic Sight: Asked to comment on the source of Edgar Cayce's trance readings, Bartholomew flatly declined. If that source had remained a closed door to Cayce himself and to those who worked with him in his lifetime, it was not for anyone afterward to force it open — that, he said, would be "cosmic snooping." The sounder measure was the fruit: to what degree were the readings realized and helpful? If they proved positive and true on the earth plane, that was enough to know the source had been of sufficient quality. This opened onto a broader question about the ethics of psychic probing, which he was reluctant to call a crime, since everyone probes everyone constantly — reading one another's psyches through the ordinary course of life and responding with love, reserve, or anger. It is no more one's business to look uninvited into another's akashic record than into their checkbook, he said; but the moment a person sits before a genuine psychic with a real question, it becomes that psychic's task to mirror back what is already there, and one cannot in any case enter another's record without permission or an absence of resistance. The deeper point toward which the whole answer tended was that the very notion of separate, private psyches is itself an illusion: it is all one.

"You Are Life" — Living All Lives at Once: From that thread came the session's central and, by his own warning, highest teaching — the one at which "many people listening to this are going to absolutely bail out." If a person would only drop the idea of division, Bartholomew said, they would find themselves participating in everyone's life at once, in the whole of it without selection: joy and sorrow, love and rage, everything in abundance. "You are life," he repeated, "and if you are life, then you are living all lives" — not merely one's own small biography. To the listener convinced that their life was one of worthlessness and failure, he answered that this was simply not valid, for standing right beside them was someone living a dynamic and creative life, and they were living that life too. He was careful to correct a likely misreading: freedom does not mean switching one's awareness out into another person — leaping into the center of the woman with sixteen children to sample motherhood — which is only another form of the self-abandonment by which people already live through their children, spouses, and jobs. Rather, one is to become so rooted in one's own center that the life-force radiates outward and encompasses all. The reason illumination is so hard, he said, is that the one thing we refuse to admit is our non-separateness; each of us expands only as far as our belief allows — to the family, the town, the nation, the world — and then posits an enemy outside, some "they," and leans against that wall until we consent to dissolve it. To "kill the Buddha," he said, is simply to stop worshipping an ideal outside oneself and to participate fully in one's own life-spring.

The Myth of the Artistic Temperament: Turning to a letter about the nature of artistic expression, Bartholomew allowed that artists, writers, and their kind may at times come close to the life-force, since their finest work tends to arrive when they are least conscious of achieving anything and feel themselves "taken up and being lived by a power vaster" than their ordinary selves. But he firmly rejected the myth that grows from this — that the artist is nearer to heaven than the carpenter or the garbage collector. In reality, he said, anyone in any occupation has equal access to Life, since Life is what is living in them all; the peculiar danger of the artistic self-image is precisely the arrogance of feeling "closer to the source," which can leave the garbage collector too convinced of his own distance from it to cry out for freedom. The lifting power that turns labor into a love affair, he said, comes to any work done in full immersion — caring for children, building, speaking — and it deepens as one becomes more the watcher of what one does and less its anxious doer. At its height there is no longer a lover and a beloved, nor even a love affair, but simply love itself, awash and in movement.

Stop Grasping: Becoming the Watcher: A final questioner described a veil that seemed gossamer-thin and yet slipped just beyond his grasp each time he reached to tear it. Bartholomew's answer, which he admitted would sound unhelpful, was to stop grasping altogether: to quit trying to rend the veil and step back to become the watcher of the very effort to rend it. Here lay the old paradox — striving cannot reach the goal, yet without trying one does not reach it either — and the way through was to identify with the seeker, the awakened part of oneself, rather than with the thing sought, which is only an idea in the mind. "You cannot seek to be something that you already are," he said; one can only awaken, as from a dream whose seeking figures were themselves only dream. He described going back through the layers by which we are held: ceasing to identify with the body, which deep meditation can loosen, and then with thought — harder, because thoughts feel close and interior — until one becomes the watcher of the thoughts rather than the thoughts themselves. He closed as he had taught throughout: that the whole tape was only words, meaningless until lived, and that one has to do nothing except watch and participate as the watcher of the drama, whereupon one merges and becomes awash in the single power that is always there. "There is only one power," he said; rest in the knowledge that this is so, and find it within.