Bartholomew opened the first day of the 1986 Malvern workshop by focusing the whole day toward a single question - how to strengthen the felt sense of the ever-present "I" until one knows, in every circumstance, exactly who one is.

Context: This tape is the first of a three-tape workshop with Bartholomew speaking through Mary-Margaret Moore. After a brief exchange settling the room, Bartholomew laid out the day's aim - to bring the divine power that has always been present so strongly into the present moment that the participants would begin to feel it and remember their purpose. The material moved through a sequence of guided meditations and paired exercises: resting in the constant "I am," meeting the fear of feeling, learning to lead with the heart, defining what God-consciousness would feel like, a passage on dying prompted by the recent death of a participant's mother, and, in response to a question from Dr. John Aiken about the healing arts, an extended model of healing.

The Journey and the Single Task: Bartholomew began by naming the human dilemma - if the divine power truly rests within, why does one not consciously live from it? He reframed the so-called fall of man not as a punishment but as a chosen journey into density, whose purpose was to ground the ephemeral thing called God-consciousness in the earth plane, in every extremity of birth and death, love and loss. Drawing on the prodigal son as a picture of the soul's circular journey out from and back to the Father, he assured the group they had already passed the farthest point of agony and were on the way home. From this the day's single task followed: to develop the inner awareness of who one is so strongly that one need never question it again, in this life or any other.

The Ever-Present I: The first meditation asked the participants to rest attention on the constant sense of "I" - not the I of the face but a felt I-ness of being - most easily located in the heart or the hara. On the in-breath they were to draw in a power sounding as "I" or "I am," and on the exit breath simply to let that presence move within them without defining it. Bartholomew described the self as a wheel whose spokes are all the ways one has identified - I am Jane, a mother, weak here, strong there - and invited them to pull back into the open, vibrating center from which those spokes emerge. There is no safety in the world, he said, until one feels this center core; most people try instead to build a safe world around them, which forever fails. Because energy follows thought, attention placed on this center increases its vibrational frequency, until one day one wakes and is simply no longer afraid.

The Fear of Feeling: Turning to a circle drawn on paper, Bartholomew addressed the great obstacle to falling into this center - the fear of feeling, since feeling has so often ended in pain. Using the image of the ocean, still in its depths while its surface heaves with waves, he taught that one can feel deeply enough that the surface disturbances ride harmlessly above. He set an alternating practice: dropping into the depth of "I am," then rising to complete the sentence "I am afraid of feeling..." and writing down what came, then dropping again. The point was to recognize that one already makes this soul-switch between depth and fear constantly - one would not be alive otherwise - and now to bring it under conscious command as a tool. He described the heart as an energy valve, its doors opening outward or imploding shut, and named the day's work as opening that valve as wide as possible.

Leading With the Heart: Rather than reason a way out - the mind, he warned, produces a double printout of reasons to leave the prison and reasons one does not deserve to - Bartholomew turned to the physical body as one of the best friends on this journey, a friend most people have cut off through constant negative judgment of their appearance. He had the group walk about the room feeling, on the in-breath, that something in the heart center was gently pulling them, an energy nudge rather than a mental directive. This, he explained, is the literal truth behind being guided by the divine: a part of each person's awareness is lodged beyond the time-space band, never separated from the Source, and that connection remains alive in the body, forgotten only because the mind is so entrancing. The task was simply to begin feeling the living cord that pulls from the heart.

Running Toward, Not Away: Bartholomew then asked the participants to hand the job of keeping them safe over from the mind, which cannot do it, to the deep self that is connected to the Source, perfect exactly as it is and needing nothing added or removed. The difference between a seeker and a finder, he said, is how many hours of the day one actually spends looking for what one wants. Most people run away from something down an endless road rather than toward something; so he had them ask, inside, what God-consciousness would actually feel like - to name the specific feeling-tones of a safe, wholly compassionate, loving state - so that attention could move toward it. He set aside the frightening or false images of God taught by religion, likened the group to knights and ladies who had forgotten what the Grail was, and urged a lighter heart, since the lighter the heart the easier the journey.

The Practice of Dying: Prompted by the recent death of a participant's mother, Bartholomew led the group in sending her the one directive he offers the dying - to scan all around, not just ahead, and to turn awareness toward the strongest point of light, where good and strong friends always wait to respond the moment one turns to them. He insisted that death is always entirely appropriate for the one who leaves, whatever the age, and described it through the images of a flower bursting from its narrow stem into open blue and of a rocket's lift-off - acceleration, exhilaration, expansion, and soaring. He invited the participants to practice their own dying with the words "expansion and soaring," noting that one can learn to expand and soar without dying, since heaven is here and now. He closed the passage with the divine Source's gratitude: each life lived here gives the gossamer, smoke-like God-realization a firmer footing on this dense planet, and it is this accumulating groundedness across the centuries that the promise of a golden age truly names.

The Model of Healing: Answering Dr. John Aiken's question about using the healing arts more creatively, Bartholomew offered one model of healing, framing everything as energy fields. The healer must first ascertain whether a person truly wants to be healed or only wants to be listened to, touched, or walked around the terrain of their difficulty as a good companion - for many are not yet ready, and pressing solutions on them only stops their process. The prerequisite for real healing is knowing that you do not know what the other needs. The healer raises their own vibration as high as possible and consciously blends their energy field with the sufferer's, willingly going down into their hell as Persephone went underground, offering the field as a free gift for the other to use as they will - then afterward withdrawing that field back into oneself and cleansing in moving water, showers rather than baths, as the old sweat-lodge and baptism rites understood. For closure after a loss, he taught, one helps the grieving open an active dialogue with the conscious energy of what was lost, making new arrangements to keep the connection while releasing the sorrow - for there is only one Self, no relationship truly ends, and within the body there is a specific place of safety, connected to the vast Source, that the healer can point others toward only after having found it in themselves.