Bartholomew guided the Malvern workshop through a long round of questions, teaching that nearly everything we call darkness in ourselves and others is only fog — fear made visible — that dissolves in the presence of light.

Context: In this third tape of the 1986 Malvern workshop, Bartholomew moved from a closing image of grace into an extended question-and-answer session, then delivered a brief final blessing. The exchanges ranged widely — the discipline of pausing between actions, the Buddha nature hidden behind fear, a counselor's frustration with her clients, a woman's fear of her own power, the necessity of risk, speaking in tongues and the making of sound, marriage, the worth of ordinary work, and the panic then surrounding AIDS and homosexuality — but a single thread ran through all of it: that fear projects a fog onto the world, and that love, not condemnation, is what clears it.

Pausing Between the Pearls: Bartholomew opened with the image of a string of pearls, a rosary or a mala, and taught that the real practice lay not in the beads but in the spaces between them. He asked those present to stop between one action and the next, to drop inside and ask "what now?" of the God-energy within, rather than living the whole day at full momentum and only collapsing into rest at night. Learning to rest between actions, thoughts, and events many times a day, he said, brings a rejuvenating energy and eventually reveals the blanks between thoughts, into which one can simply fall. This pausing, he explained, is where the creative now arises, and he reassured a questioner standing at a crossroads that none of the roads before them would be wrong — some might merely be more fun than others — and that nothing a person creates cannot be turned toward their own enlightenment.

All Beings Are Buddha: Asked how one could honestly call all beings Buddha while watching ego-driven, seemingly selfish behavior in oneself and others, Bartholomew answered with his central image of the fog. In the beginning there was light shining within, he said, but the pain of many lives created a fog — an energy in which the synapses do not fire — so that whenever a fearful person looks out, they see others only through their own fog. All beings are Buddha in truth; it is only the fog of fear that hides the first light. He counseled that when others act in ways that seem far from Buddha, one should remember they are peering through fear and meet them with compassion, and that when we ourselves fall short, we should not shovel out the darkness but simply open the window and rest our awareness on the light, letting its warmth dissolve the vapor. Condemning evil, he warned, only feeds it more energy; darkness is fog, not granite, and love always overcomes it.

Turning the Spotlight Inward: A woman working in psychiatric counseling voiced her frustration that her clients were not moving as fast as she and they had hoped. Bartholomew redirected her attention entirely from the patients to herself, sensing in her aura a longing for her own quantum leap in consciousness that was being projected outward as impatience with others. Since she could do no more than give what she gave while they received what they could, he said, the only changeable element in the equation was she herself. He urged "..." to take up a notebook and ask, over and over, not what would make her good or pure or right, but what would make her happy — writing without thinking until the deeper particles of herself found a new place to explode into. She had climbed one mountain and examined its plateau, he told her, and the restlessness she felt was the next peak showing through the mist; she had only to start up it, and her clients would either rise with her or find someone else.

Drawing a Harmless Power: A woman who sensed a power in herself that she was afraid to claim drew from Bartholomew a teaching on why power frightens us. Everyone in the room, he said, had both misused power and had it misused against them, in this life and others, so the instinct is to let it out only in small, carefully policed amounts. He asked "..." to write, straight off the top of her head, what a powerful version of herself would look like — a first picture likely to be borrowed from the world's projection that women must not appear overwhelming or risk losing a man's love — and then, by her own heart and will, to draw a second picture of herself powerful, beautiful, balanced, and harmless. Because we create tomorrow from the visions we hold today, he explained, a model of harmless power drawn with care and desire will magnetize itself into being, and she could learn to trust herself even while knowing no one who walks the earth is ever totally harmless.

Where the Shoe Pinches: To a question about how long a person can remain in the same vibrational frequency, Bartholomew answered that many stay all their lives, because what lifts one out of a frequency is risk, and risk is frightening until one has risked again and again and awakened still whole. He advised finding the single place in one's life where the shoe pinches most — the point of greatest frustration and least delight — and simply identifying it, since half the work is naming it. Then, addressing the situation rather than any person, one declares that it must change, and writes out plans A, B, C, and D, discovering in the writing that choices exist and that some are less risky than others. Since any troubling relationship is a collusion between two people treading water together, changing oneself opens the structure so that light and air can move; he encouraged the questioner to step off the bank into the stream, willing to risk even if all that is being risked is the treading of water.

Making Sound and the House of Marriage: Asked about speaking in tongues, Bartholomew explained that in the beginning it was hoped a spontaneous flow of knowing from the vast self would always be present, and that genuine tongues — not mere hysteria — bring forward ancient power-sounds that go out into the energy field and make changes, needing no conscious translation. Human beings, he lamented, have become sound receivers rather than sound producers, leaving half of them unbalanced; he praised drumming, intoning around trees, and the striking of water-filled rocks by the ancients, and imagined a depression clinic with rooms for group and couples' intoning where people could "sound it out" past their accumulated pain. Turning to several questions about marriage, he distinguished astrologically between the house of lovers and the house of marriage, and warned that most people abandon the wisdom of the former on crossing into the latter, making it ponderous and tedious. He asked those unsure whether to marry to write a scenario of themselves within it: if it filled them with dread, they might be avoiding it out of fear for their freedom, and if it merely bored them, marriage was simply not their path — for an unexamined life is not worth living, though no one way of living is finer than any other.

The Mirror of What We Fear: Reassuring a man who doubted whether his ordinary work counted, Bartholomew declared that doing what delights you is the definition of doing God's work, that no job is higher or lower than any other — not Mother Teresa's, not the president of IBM's — and that what matters is never the action but the state of consciousness and the love in the heart while it is done. He then took up the era's fear around AIDS and homosexuality, teaching that the illness first struck male homosexuals not as punishment but because centuries of cultural derision had left them vulnerable in self-esteem, and that the fear of homosexuality in others is a mirror: a man who recoils is terrified of the feminine within himself. Whatever we hold an aversion to — homosexuality, another race, violence — should stop us to ask what it says about ourselves, so that we pull the projection back off the world and face the real issue within. Being right, he said, is a lonely job and never the point; the real warrior befriends what he fears, and when every projection is withdrawn and all the fog is gone, one sees only energy in motion, lights dancing, coming together and moving apart.

Turned Toward Home: After a co-facilitator led a closing exercise, Bartholomew returned to give the final blessing. He reminded those gathered that the human being, uniquely able to stand, bend, or lie down, remains always in magnetic alignment with the source of power they would call the divine — a source constantly calling them home, needing nothing to be deserved because they already are it. The whole way to the truth and the light, he said, is through remembering, and he offered the old, pre-English lines in which mankind pleads, "turn thy awareness toward me, O Lord, so that I might turn my awareness towards you," revealing that the God-source never has to remember, for its very existence is the remembering of its children. He closed with deep gratitude, telling them that they had come not for themselves alone but for the millions who do not yet know what they seek, and that in coming they had made a difference — being, always and eternally, one with the father who had sent them.