This was a wide-ranging evening session that opened on the practical question of diet for a spiritual aspirant and then expanded, level by level, into some of Bartholomew's most useful teaching: how the mind shapes the body, the truth about drugs and intoxicants, the workings of karma and the divine plan, why the spiritual path is far easier than the life of illusion most people lead, and finally a searching look at what love actually is — and is not.

Diet for the aspirant: Asked about the role of diet, Bartholomew answered "on various levels," refusing to lay down any dogma. At the highest level he counseled no red meat, fish and fowl only in small amounts, an emphasis on fresh vegetables over fruit, plenty of water, and walking — often, he says, more beneficial than some of the yogas. Tobacco he singles out as having no redeeming quality whatsoever, a defilement of the temple even beyond liquor.

The three levels of health, and the mind as blueprint: He framed health as a ladder. The lowest rung is reliance on medical drugs and doctors (perfectly acceptable if that is genuinely where your belief lies); above it, pure foods, clean water, and vitamins; and highest of all, the recognition that the mind creates the body. His "best health remedy on all three levels" is a daily practice: for five or ten minutes, hold in the mind a vivid image of oneself as a whole, balanced, light-filled body suffused with upliftment. The body, he sayid, follows the blueprint the mind draws. In the same vein he noted that the truly spiritual eat very little, being "fed from a higher source" — though he warns against forcing this through ego-driven fasting; it comes of itself, gradually, as one gives more time to the path.

Drugs and intoxicants: On consciousness-expanding drugs he was firm: marijuana and liquor stand together, with LSD, mescaline, cocaine, and heroin in a more damaging class. All of them falsify perception and breed the compulsion to return again and again. In an addict the process becomes desperately hard to reverse. He allowed a "lesser category," however — the occasional use of liquor or marijuana to ease genuine tension drew no condemnation; the real danger is when they become a crutch that substitutes for living a full life, squandering hours that can never be redeemed.

The sphere of light and darkness: Bartholomew pictured the body as a sphere through which light and vibration move. At its highest it is golden, joyous, and undulating; at its lowest, dark, heavy, and compacted like a rock that light cannot penetrate. Negativity accumulates by compounding — one dark thought makes the next easier — and the very same law runs in reverse toward the light, each step of practice multiplying the power of the next. Drugs and heavy living disease the temple from within and invite dark vibrations to settle; the only remedy is a "crack" through which light can re-enter, the slow work of many lifetimes.

Karma and the divine plan: Turning to karma at his guests' request, Bartholomew called it "comic" from one vantage point and tragic from another, and urged that it be understood simply as cause and effect within a single life — speculation about past and future lives he set aside as irrelevant. His governing image is a car: so long as you insist on driving your own (the ego's way), you proceed under your own power down roads of your own choosing; but when you weary of it and call out, moving in harmony with the divine plan, help pours into "all aspects of your journey" — new vistas, new fellow travelers, even, in time, a teacher who can take on your karma entirely. The divine law, being real, cuts clean across the karmic law, which has no substance because the whole earth-plane is an agreed-upon illusion.

The path is easy; it is the illusion that is hard: When you withdraw your energy from that illusion, perception itself begins to change — the visual field shifts, which frightens many back into retreat. He commended the discipline of attending to the space between things rather than the objects, work that can be carried on even in the middle of a conversation. And he overturned a cherished belief: the spiritual path is not the hard road. The truly hard journey is the ego's passage through Maya — the exhausting labor of keeping every thought-form, name, relationship, and emotional tone "straight" in a world that is forever falling apart. The first step is hardest only because of fear; the great leap of faith is to set aside every doctrine and resolve to find out for oneself — after which, he promised, the whole host of heaven rushes in, a support that can even be felt pressing physically against the skin.

Love — what it is not and what it is: Bartholomew gave the session's close to love, beginning with what it is not. Most of what people call love, he said, is attraction — and attraction always carries its opposite, repulsion. Honest attention reveals the gaps: the resentments, whether shouted aloud or hidden behind demure good manners. Real love does not switch on and off; the single test he offered is constancy — ask of any feeling, "Is this eternal?" Whatever comes and goes belongs to the ego's play, not to the Source. You cannot will yourself to love, he said, but you can will yourself to want to love; the love itself is already within you, an unused tool you simply are not picking up — because you are love, and are not separate from its Source.

The two sisters: He ended with love and wisdom — two sides of one coin, the twin culmination of every genuine path, whichever one it reaches first. He cautioned against giving oneself to any teacher who does not embody both completely; when so many perfected beings have left their traces, there is no need to follow an imperfect one. And he leaves the listener with the charge to find their own way to the ever-present, never-leaving essence of the one Source.