This tape offers one of Bartholomew's most accessible and practically useful teachings. He opened by reassuring the audience that the goal of spiritual awakening is genuinely within reach — then spent the session examining, with characteristic precision and humor, exactly what gets in the way. The teaching moves through doubt as a necessary part of the path, the mechanics of how consciousness expands through successive limits, the central practice of staying present with whatever arises, and the liberating truth that no one is further from God than anyone else. The Q&A section is particularly rich, including a remarkable exchange with a man frightened by a powerful light experience, and a closing teaching on identity and self-description that is among the most practically applicable in the archive.

Context: This session was recorded on May 14, 1992, in Copenhagen, Denmark, during one of Bartholomew's European teaching tours. The audience was largely made up of Scandinavian seekers already familiar with spiritual practice, and the session combined a prepared teaching with open Q&A.

Doubt Is Not the Enemy — It Is the Engine: Bartholomew opened by acknowledging what he sensed in the room: many people whose initial excitement about the spiritual path had at some point stalled, and who were carrying a quiet self-reproach about it. His first move was to dismantle that reproach. The period of doubt and disillusionment — the feeling that "this isn't going to work," that the path has dried up, that one's teachers or methods have failed — is not evidence of failure. It is, he stated plainly, a bona fide part of the whole. Looking back over one's own life, one will find that nearly every genuine advance in consciousness was preceded by exactly this kind of wall. The confusion of the "new age" marketplace — with its proliferating methods and teachers all claiming to offer the way — amplifies this disorientation. But the method matters less than the willingness to stay awake on whatever path one has chosen. The doubt itself, when moved through rather than fled from, is what propels the next expansion.

The Mechanics of Limits — How Consciousness Actually Expands: The central teaching of the evening was a precise account of how the expansion of consciousness actually works. Every person carries an implicit belief about how vast they are — "I am a body," or "I am a body with an aura," or "I am a body connected to a vast vortex of energy above my head." Each of these is a limit. The spiritual path is the process of filling up one limit completely — grounding it, inhabiting it fully — and then pushing through to the next one. The moment one hits a wall is not a sign of failure; it is a sign that one has completely filled the space defined by the current belief and is ready to expand. What enables the push through the wall is not discipline or technique but a vividly imagined, genuinely felt sense of what it would be like to be the vaster version of oneself. Bartholomew's instruction: when you hit a limit, dwell on the excitement of what lies beyond it, not on the fear of the wall itself. That dwelling — sustained, playful, genuine — is what shifts the boundary.

Everything Is God Substance — Nothing Is Outside It: Bartholomew offered what he called the fastest single practice for moving through boundaries: to remind oneself, on an ongoing daily basis, that everything one sees, hears, and feels is part of the God substance — that nothing is outside it. If this were genuinely believed even for a moment, he said, there would be no boundaries left at all. Every experience, including death, including confusion, including the most mundane moment of sitting in a chair chewing gum — all of it is God in manifestation. The practice is not to think this but to feel it: to relax into the present moment fully enough that essence becomes perceptible behind the diversity of appearances. God has no favorites, Bartholomew added. The person alone on a desert island has identical access to the Source as someone surrounded by teachers and teachings. The same amount of divine presence is available in every human consciousness, always, without exception.

What We Are Really Avoiding: Turning to the human tendency to escape through distraction — television, alcohol, busyness, whatever the particular flavor — Bartholomew made a distinction that stopped many in the audience: people commonly say they do these things to avoid their pain. He questioned this. More often, he suggested, what is being avoided is not pain but the lethargy of a life unlived — the dull, directionless feeling of a consciousness that is not moving. A lethargic life, he said simply, is not worth living. The antidote is not to eliminate the avoidance behavior but to turn toward whatever feeling is present — not to analyze it, describe it, or explain it, but simply to say: "I am ready and willing to experience this." That willingness, the moment it is genuine, is the moment freedom becomes possible. Because there is never going to be more God present in any other moment than there is in this one. Waiting for a better moment is waiting for something that will never come.

The Man Afraid of the Light — Fear of Change as a Limit: One of the most vivid exchanges in the Q&A involved a man who described experiencing a vast, powerful light that seemed to come hurtling toward him — like a meteor, he said — and who felt both drawn to it and frightened that if he opened to it fully he would "fall apart" or "miss himself." Bartholomew's response was immediate and precise: this is a limit. The belief is "I am a person who cannot contain this light." The fear is not really of being shattered — it is fear of change. And Bartholomew was honest: yes, the light will change you. He could not promise otherwise. But he could say with certainty that the light cannot harm anything. The prescription was not to force the opening but to spend days dwelling on the excitement of what it might feel like to be someone totally filled with that light — re-describing oneself in a vaster identity, from the inside, until the limit shifts naturally. That process of dwelling is itself the practice that makes the opening possible.

Grace Is Not Something That Comes From Afar: Asked about grace — why it seems to come to some and not others — Bartholomew answered without hesitation: the only thing between any person and grace is the belief that it is something outside their grasp, something that must travel to them from a distance if they are lucky enough to receive it. In fact, he said, if you are breathing, you are already in the presence of grace. Without grace, the breath would not happen. The instruction was to feel about each breath exactly what had just been described — to sense it as the continuous, unconditional action of the divine — and the experience of grace would open from there.

Identity, Self-Description, and the Box You Build Around Yourself: The session's closing teaching was among its most practically grounded. Bartholomew drew attention to how relentlessly humans describe themselves to themselves and to others in terms of their current limitation: "I am depressed," "I have nothing," "I am someone to whom this has happened." The world, he noted, simply agrees with whatever description is offered and hands it back. The agreement is not a confirmation of truth — it is a mirror of the story being told. The first step out of any difficult situation is to identify the box as clearly as possible — to name it, see its shape, recognize that it is a chosen identity rather than a fixed fact. The second step is to begin to play with the feeling of a vaster identity: not to deny what is happening, but to re-describe oneself with "humor and expansion and courage and delight." From that re-description, the boundary shifts. He closed with a statement he called particularly important: the widely held belief that one is born with fixed personality traits and is stuck with them is simply not true, and has done more to dampen joy on this planet than almost any other idea. Every human being has access to the full range of human potentiality — from the very best to the very worst — and the choice of which to inhabit, and how broadly, belongs entirely to each person.