A young woman felt pulled between two pieces of advice she kept hearing: one that said that she alone was responsible for everything in her life, and the other that everything is God's will and unfolds exactly as God intends. Which was true? Rather than settle the matter with a verdict, Bartholomew reached for an image — white light passing through a prism and fanning into countless bands of color, each of us a single band shaping forms out of our own strand of light. From that one picture he unfolded the entire paradox of free will, and by the end the teaching had quietly turned from a question about God's will into the dissolution of the self that imagined it was asking.

Context: Recorded on November 2, 1980, in Taos, New Mexico, this session resumes a thread begun at an earlier gathering in Socorro when the recording had failed on one side of the tape. The setting is intimate — a small circle putting their questions to Bartholomew directly — and the participants' names have been omitted here, making it a private teaching rather than a public workshop. What follows moves in a single sustained arc, from the prism analogy into free will and divine will, responsibility and blame, the emptiness of forms, compassionate watching, vulnerability, the illusion of a continuous self, spontaneity, and the hunger for security.

The Prism and the Bands of Light: Bartholomew asked the questioner to picture white light passing through a prism and spreading into many colored bands — far more, he noted, than the human eye or human instruments have yet detected. Each of us, he said, experiences ourselves as one individualized, separated band — call it red — and we take that light and play with it, stamping our own mark on everything we make: now anger, now acceptance, now work, now children, now love. "It is power, it is light, and you create with it." His one quarrel with humanity, he said, is the moment a person shapes a form out of their own red light and then declares, "God, you made this." Yet the surrounding white light of the prism is always there, upholding everything, even when attention is fixed on the flashier red. And the game is far from simple or monotonous: right beside the red is orange, and one's own light reflects and entangles with the forms the neighboring bands are making, so that each person can gaze down the whole spectrum, left and right, and glimpse other possibilities — peering dimly toward a distant green or purple and deciding, that is what I want, that is where I am going.

Credit, Blame, and the Murky Picture: As long as the picture one paints is pleasing, Bartholomew observed, a person takes full credit and gives it no further thought. But the colors must eventually run together, and mixing many colors tends to produce black — and then anxiety rises and the question becomes, who created this mess? Surely not me, one insists; it must be someone else — and if those nearby refuse the blame, there remains one convenient target: God, "who cannot say yes or no." The real difficulty, he said, is that people cannot see their own orange or red blended into the whole. They imagine they have created their world separately when in truth it is a joint creation, all the bands interplaying; they will own one corner of the palette and disown the rest. And the analogy fails wherever it suggests something rigid, for genuine ego movement is a ceaseless swirl of eddies intermingling and intermeshing, painting an elaborate, living picture of light.

Free Will, Surrender, and Going Back Up the Band: This, he said, is what free will actually means: to be given the power to create, and to be held responsible for what one creates — even when one creates from the limited instruments of the senses, the emotions, and the mind a picture that cannot last but will surely affect one at that level. The reason not to despair is that one may awaken, however dimly, to the knowledge that there is another source to draw upon for the power of creation. Merely realizing this is only the beginning of the path; the decisive movement is surrender, and at the point of surrender the power itself lifts one up, so that one no longer gathers any karmic residue at all, because now the vast power of the prism is generating the work. When Ramana Maharshi says to "go home, go back the way you came," Bartholomew explained, it means moving back up the band of red light through intensive self-awareness into the source. There one learns the pivotal thing: the prism does not generate light — it only receives it, and the same light that enlivens the prism enlivens every individual strand. From that height one sees the white light thundering down, feels its full power rather than the tiny driblet of red, and watches one's own small drama and everyone else's with a compassion born of understanding so much more. Both answers to the original question are therefore true at once: it is the divine that enlivens the band of red, and it is you who give the form its shape.

The Forms Cannot Harm You: Bartholomew turned to the forms themselves, which carry a power to attract or repel. Because people do not yet know that the form is empty — that what matters is not the form but the quality of light permeating it — they are drawn to or repelled by one another's ideas, appearances, and words. This, he said, is pure conditioning: the trained belief that a form can hurt you or please you, wound you or lastingly help you. His standing invitation was to hold "the great doubt" — that any form, whether verbal, material, or mental, is only a momentary freezing in time, and that if one is still and watches, it will change before one's eyes. Watch someone say an angry thing, he urged, and watch with a compassionate heart what comes next, and next, and one will see nothing but change. If a person can truly feel that no form has any lasting power to harm, then things may be allowed to come and go with what he called compassionate acceptance — which he sharply distinguished from a stoic, superior acceptance that builds a wall of encrusted protection through which neither pain nor love can pass.

Vulnerability and the Compassionate Watcher: To become free, Bartholomew insisted, one must eventually become vulnerable — a word humanity treats as weakness, though none of the great ones ever received the deepest understanding without it. "You will never know whether you are a mountain climber until you climb the mountain," he said, and just so, you will never know that you are utterly safe among the forms of the world until you drop your defenses and try. The way to truly help another is to have compassion enough to be vulnerable: to let them take their strand of energy and make whatever forms they wish, watching carefully and participating in whatever way is spontaneously right in the moment, then letting that view slip away as they make the next form. He noted why people make ugly forms in the first place — the mistaken belief that an ugly enough form will make others comply, a self-pitying enough one will make others take care of them, a sexual enough one will win adoration; it works for a while, until they sense there must be something more. And he was careful about how one watches: not with the cold, detached eye of a reptile awaiting its prey, but with eyes that sometimes run with tears and arms held out in support. His fear whenever he spoke of watching, he confessed, was that people would slip into an isolated, arrogant, looking-down stance, which is not the observer at all. The true observer runs into himself first — one sees out of one's own ego structure, beliefs, and manipulations before seeing anyone else's — and so cannot travel the worlds judging others from above. This is why it is well said that you must know yourself before you can know others.

Equal Blindness and the Open Hand: The common ground among everyone, Bartholomew said, is fear; and knowing one's own fear — the terrible way it seizes the mind and twists it into ever more hideous apparitions — is what makes compassion inevitable, for all are equally blind. There is no ranking of blindness worth making: one either sees or does not, and the only real difference is that some have made themselves more vulnerable than others. He reminded those present that not one of them would be there by choice unless they had already let go of something — a place they loved, material gain, financial security, old friendships and familiar surroundings, a prestigious future. They had done the hardest part, the first opening of the hand, so that the rope now slid more easily in the palm and had lost its terrifying grip. Yet fear remained inside, and the work was to open the hand completely, so that the threads of light might move without friction through the palms of one's existence. That, he said, is possible only by actively and compassionately viewing one another as brothers and sisters of equal pain — meeting a hurtful word not with "how can I defend?" but with "I understand," whether or not one grasps the specifics of what was said.

Nobody Is Home: When a questioner pressed whether the ego is therefore divine, Bartholomew answered that both things are true: the substance the ego manipulates is divine, but the forms it makes cannot stand, cannot hold, and must fade — which is why he calls the ego illusory. The questioner saw the ego as something marching relentlessly on through time; in truth, he said, it flashes on and off, and each time it reappears it is not the same as the instant before. People project continuity onto themselves and one another because they cannot face chaos: if one could see the ceaseless change in one's own mind, body, and emotions, there would be nothing anywhere to grasp. He likened the mind to a crab scrambling for a foothold on a rock as the waves tear its grip away again and again, terrified of the day the wave finally sweeps it into the sea. Asked at last who manipulates the bands of light, he replied that the real question is not who but what: there is no person there at all, only tendencies — habit and momentum strung together across eons and mistaken for an "I," each tendency cropping out of the one before, which is precisely what karma is. "There is nobody home," he said — and one should be glad, for if no one is there, then nothing has to die, and no anguished "death to the self" is required; only watching quiet enough to discover the vacancy. And the observer who watches, he added, is likewise not a person.

Spontaneity and the Trap of Dependability: Living spontaneously is a wondrously opening experience, Bartholomew said, but he warned that one of the ego's cleverest tricks is to counterfeit spontaneity while merely indulging its deeper manifestations; the test is the effect on others, for if everyone around one is hurting, the source should be questioned. Those who are genuinely close can help each other here, allowing one another to act out spontaneous impulses without restriction so that each can learn, from the inside, the difference between divine spontaneity and ego indulgence — whereas relationships hedged with "you must" and "you cannot," offered in the name of love, are in fact a paralysis. He then turned on the word dependability, which he called death and stifling repetition — the lone virtue chiseled on tombs, meaning a person could be counted on to respond the same on Monday as on Friday, this year as the next. People dread being thought undependable, and dread chaos, yet freedom often arrives precisely in times of upheaval, as in wartime England, where the old forms broke down and the new were being created moment by moment. The only dependability worth wanting, he said, is not sameness of word or act but the dependable fact of the divine forever moving through you.

Security, and the Freedom You Already Have: Underneath it all, Bartholomew said, lies the hunger for security — financial, emotional, sexual, material, or simply the security of peace so that one can get on with one's business. He asked each person to look within their own clenched hands at the one thing they beg God never to take away, and to look carefully, because it is already moving, already gone, and they are managing just fine without it. The wonder of freedom, he said, is to rejoice in the changes, to greet each moment's new arrival with ever-new joy. When a questioner asked how one can become free without existing, he answered that one is already free precisely because the self one counts on does not exist. He had come, he said, to scramble their ready-made logic and book learning until it could not be untangled, and he sent them within — to as many moments of the day and night as they could manage — to watch and listen until they found out who was there. Even the enlightened one, he noted, can never say "I know," for there is no "I" and no "knowing," only the finding out. "You are not who you think you are... there's nobody home." And with that, goodbye.