A week after declaring that each of us is living every other life, Bartholomew returned to the claim under questioning and pressed it to its farthest edge — that there is finally no separation, no time, and no one whom we may exclude — teaching that the ego is a shifting web of fear laid across a single luminous oneness, and that freedom is a matter of courage rather than knowledge.

Context: Recorded on August 24, 1980, in Taos, New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this session took up a question left over from the previous week's tape: what could it possibly mean that we are each living one another's lives? From that starting point Bartholomew built a sustained and, by his own cheerful admission, "high-blown" discourse, moving from the mechanics of the ego to the claim that all lives — past, present and future — are being lived at once, and closing on the single thing he said he existed to give: courage.

What "Living All Lives" Actually Means: The week before, Bartholomew had startled his listeners by saying they were each living everyone else's life, and a questioner pressed the obvious objection: if so, then one person's arthritis ought to appear in another. He answered that he had never meant duplication — not that whatever is in one person is literally in the next — but that the part of us vaster than separation is, at every moment, participating in the whole of the life going on everywhere at once. We perceive separateness only because we look through "the prism of our individualized senses"; let that veil fall, he said, and there is no longer a him and a me, but only one beingness, with no he, she, or it. Illness and health, beauty and ugliness are motions within the ego's world, not walls between truly separate people.

"Your Problem Is You": The Ego and Its Webbing: From this Bartholomew drew a hard consequence he knew his listeners would resist: if you perceive a problem "out there" in someone else, it is your problem, because you are that other person. The ego, he said, wants to be omniscient and omnipresent, never wrong and always justified; the moment one says "I know," or calls another stupid or silly or wrong, one can be sure it is ego and not divine action that is speaking. He located the origin of the whole predicament in the birth of the "I thought" — the first sense of being a separate self — which fell across the world "like a shroud," a vibrating web of mind and emotion through which we now try to see. Reacting to it only agitates it, making it vibrate faster and obscure more; meditation and single-pointedness, by contrast, act like "a diamond drill of wisdom," boring a widening hole in the web until the clear, alight oneness behind it shows through and the stilled web drops into uselessness.

The One You Will Not Let In: Freedom, Bartholomew insisted, requires excluding no one: as long as there is a single person, anywhere in past or present, into whom you will not let your being flow, you have built a wall and cannot pass it. He asked each listener to examine the private "list" of what they refuse to identify with — the drug addict for one person, the "straight, stern and stuffy banker" for another — and to notice that what repels them is only a behavior pattern, not a living, powerful thing. Every negative pattern in the world, he said, is nothing more than "fear crying out"; grasp that, and hostility turns to compassion. This is why the great ones weep over the most wayward of their flock and go after them: beneath the ugliness they hear a being crying "help me, I am lost." He rejected a "spirituality" that congratulates itself while quietly keeping whole classes of people outside its heart.

Protection or Freedom: A questioner asked whether, instead of shielding ourselves from others' negativity as we have been taught, we should open to it. It depends entirely on your goal, Bartholomew answered. If you wish to keep a high, pleasant vibration around yourself, then by all means surround yourself with light and protect yourself, and it will work. But if you want freedom, you must let it in; and if your work makes that impossible — he gave the example of a nurse who grew dizzy along with her patient when she opened herself — then you face a genuine choice about whether the life you have chosen helps or hinders you. He counseled not rash upheaval but a surrendered life, held daily rather than decided once: surrender deeply enough, he said, and if you truly need to move, the circumstances themselves will fall away and release you.

No Separation and No Time: The White Crystal: Then, warning that he was about to confirm for some listeners that he was "indeed mad," Bartholomew pressed the teaching to its limit: we are living not only every present life but all past and future lives, our own and everyone's, simultaneously — for there is no separation and no such thing as time, which is only a mental construction. In this sense, he said, there is no reincarnation as one life following another; it is all being lived at once, by all beings, and he welcomed the chaos this threw into the listening mind as a kind of koan to batter against. He offered a luminous image in place of argument: the white light of oneness projecting downward into countless rays, each strand a "life," fragmenting into ever more colors the farther it descends — and our mistake is to identify with one strand near the bottom rather than with the white crystal from which all the rays pour and which is unchanged as they pass through it. The vast part of our being still rests in that crystal, which is the only reason we are able to "go back the way we came"; and this, he said, is why a friend of Mary-Margaret's had rightly perceived that there is no personality that survives to be reborn.

The Nest, and the Courage to Let Go: Much of the human difficulty, Bartholomew said, is simple satisfaction: we are convinced we know, and we prop one another up in it — which was his quarrel with "support systems" that help a person adjust comfortably to what he called a neurotic and wholly individualized way of seeing. His own task he likened to a mother bird kicking the ready fledgling from the nest: those who have listened long enough are perched on the rim, peering into the empty space and clinging "with claws of steel," held back only by the fear that nothing will catch them. The single remedy is to learn that the space will bear your weight — and that is learned only two ways, through meditation and through moment-to-moment awareness, until that space comes to feel more like home than one's own body and mind. He warned, too, of an interim stretch when the path seems to make life worse rather than better, because one is now seeing the gray web of the ego more vividly than the openings of vastness between its strands; that seeing is necessary, for no one leaves the ego until they have understood it for what it is. A true teacher, he added, is known by one mark: that he gives courage and never diminishes it, knowing the seeker already has the ability and lacks only the desire.

Ego as Addiction, the Illusion of Lack, and the Final Question: Bartholomew likened the ego to alcohol: its responses are habits and its movements an addiction, and we cling to them because they give us sensation — mistaking the net trembling in the wind for something alive in its own right, when it is the divine breath moving through it that we actually feel. Take the eye off the net and put it in the space, he urged, and one begins to sense the far bolder motion of the one Self behind it. The ego, he said, is above all an accumulator, resting always on the premise that something is lacking — yet since we are the whole world, everything already belongs to us ("you want a Cadillac, you have it; you want polio, you have it"), and the very thought of wanting a thing brings its fruition in the same instant, two sides of one coin. This holds even of freedom itself: to be able to want it is already to be it. He drew a sharp line between pity, which secretly enjoys feeling superior and sees the other as limited, and love, which sees no limitation at all; and he closed with the question he said the whole tape came down to — do you truly want freedom, or only to think and read and pretend about it? The one difference between his listeners and any avatar, he said, is that the avatar took these outrageous statements seriously enough to set out and discover whether they were true.