This session returned to a theme the group had been working with for some weeks: that enlightenment is not something to be found, earned, or deserved, but an ever-present awareness that one already is and has simply misnamed. With great gentleness and much repetition — and a running wariness of how words themselves mislead — Bartholomew offered a set of very simple beginning instructions for recognizing that constant experience, and answered several questions sent in by those who had tried to practice it during the month.

Context: This talk was channeled on September 27, 1992, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with the next meeting set for October 25. Bartholomew opened by reviewing the previous month so the group could build on it, then worked through questions people had written in — about the fear of emptiness, about desires growing stronger, and about whether one could be doing the practice wrongly. He closed with an announcement of the January 1993 Taos Winter Intensive.

What You Already Are: The heart of the teaching is that enlightenment is an ever-present awareness, not an object to go and find. It cannot be deserved, Bartholomew said, because how could anyone possibly deserve what they already are? It is what you are. The difficulty is that people have misnamed it, and in misnaming it they go looking for something other than what they are constantly experiencing — then, disliking much of that constant experience, they conclude that if this is enlightenment they want no part of it. Whatever the mind, the emotions, and the body may be doing in any given moment, there is in that same moment a familiar, constantly present something. It tends to arrive as an idea — “I am this, I am that” — but it is in truth an ongoing experience, not a thought.

How the Ego Misleads: The ego has a tremendous capacity to mislead, Bartholomew warned, chiefly by letting a person believe they understand something when in fact they do not. It will either confuse an issue until the seeker turns away in disgust, or make it seem so simple that the seeker walks around assuming they have already grasped it. For this reason he approached the whole subject with deliberate simplicity, circling back again and again rather than building elaborate structures the ego could hide inside.

“Who Am I?” and the Three Guideposts: One of the most direct ways to begin, he suggested, is to ask — not abstractly but seriously — “Who am I?” The answers come forward: a name, a gender, a sign, a past life, whatever one most likes about oneself. One lets them all arise, and in doing so begins to see that every such description is incomplete against the wholeness of things. For what the great teachers have always said is that you are all of it: the vastness of God-awareness pulsating continuously in the world of creation, whose basic nature is total love, total wisdom, and total bliss. Those who walked the trail before left these as guideposts — a sense of what one is only pretending to look for, since in truth one has always known who one is.

The Fear of Emptiness: Answering a woman who wrote that she was reluctant to give up her meditation and afraid to take the leap into emptiness — fearing she would lose all she held dear — Bartholomew addressed the word “emptiness” directly. To the human mind it suggests nothing felt, nothing alive, a kind of death, and the language of religion often points that same way. But the three guideposts answer the fear: if you are truly feeling emptiness, you are feeling total love, total bliss, and a state of knowing. None of that is something to be afraid of, and none of it threatens the people one loves. What one is moving toward does not drain life from one's relationships and work; it makes everything more robustly alive, trading confusion for assuredness and a haphazard path for a continuous knowing of who one is.

Loving Everything Without Judgment: Many people fall short of the goal, Bartholomew said, because a part of them refuses to love what they find abhorrent — the strife, the starvation, the atrocities of the world — believing that to withhold their energy is to refuse participation in those events. On one level of observation that may seem true, but it is not the level this work concerns. The deeper willingness is to drop into the field of awareness that knows there is but one energy manifesting here, and that however terrifying something appears, there is a level, once entered, that lets one fully understand it — and with understanding comes compassion. This does not mean applauding cruelty or doing it oneself; it means refusing to meet an event only in its duality, where the fight simply goes on. One either blends with the totality or stays on the surface with a conditional love that gives neither peace nor wisdom.

Falling Out of Thinking Mode: The practical instruction he returned to repeatedly was to drop out of the thinking mode — which he called the control mode — and into the awareness mode, which is ever-present. People cling to thinking from the fear that if they stop paying strict attention the structures of their lives will collapse; the truth, he said, is the opposite. The more moments one can spend in awareness, the more understanding and compassion arise, and the more one can view even crippling events from a place that makes them understandable. From that place the enlightened one is able to bring the qualities of enlightenment to an event. If no one brings that awareness, the only energy feeding these events is the energy that sees them in their dual nature, as right against wrong — and so the way to bring peace is for enough people to be willing to move into ever-present awareness and, from there, to let the world's events simply move through their view.

Snapshots, Deep Sleep, and “Lo, I Am With You Always”: This awareness is not foreign, Bartholomew said; it is so commonplace that people overlook it. One catches snapshots of it throughout the day, and holds a clear picture of it through much of the night in what is called deep sleep — a magnificent oneness one travels to every night and does not remember only because it is not a mental process. He likened its constancy to the body: the body is always present, yet one rarely feels it as a whole, attending instead to separate parts — a sore back, the act of eating, the drive to work. Sayings such as “Lo, I am with you always” point to this ever-present something that one has simply stopped noticing.

Beginning with the Body: Because wholeness is easiest to approach through what is most tangible, Bartholomew gave a concrete starting technique: for a few moments every fifteen minutes or so, feel the whole body at once as a single creative wholeness, rather than talking to separate parts of it. He had the group try it on the spot, asking afterward whether they had felt a sense of familiarity. As one relaxes into full body feeling — adding the fullness of whatever emotion and whatever thought happen to be present, without choosing among them — one begins to notice that this body-wholeness is itself residing within a larger wholeness, alive and well in something other than itself. This, he said, is also where healing takes place: not in the mind or the belief structure or the emotions, but in that wholeness which fills and surrounds the body. Those working with illness or disharmony should by all means continue their other work, but the most direct route to healing is to get into the awareness that already contains the balanced healing.

“Am I Doing It Right?”: A question that came up often — “Am I doing it right?” — is, Bartholomew said, an ego question that supposes experiencing can be done incorrectly. One may ask whether one understands an experience, or likes it, or wants to change it, but one never doubts that one is experiencing. That constant, undoubtable fact — “I am experiencing something” — is the primary reality he kept pointing back to. The endless commentary about the experience is a secondary arising, and the frustration of wondering whether one is practicing correctly is itself just one more thing being experienced. Since this awareness is something one is doing constantly, it is impossible to do wrong; so, he urged, jump in with both feet.

Vastness in Everyday Life: To the meditator reluctant to give up following her breath, Bartholomew's answer was: if a practice reliably brings you to stillness, by all means continue it. But he noted how hard it is to watch the breath while dancing, driving, or reading — it becomes a second thing added on, and the mind can truly focus on only one thing at a time. The alternative he offered was to do everything from vastness. Rather than reading with the eye narrowed laser-like onto the page, one can expand to take in the room, the body, the whole space, and read from that experiencing awareness. Instead of getting so small that one's own family scarcely fits, one gets so vast that the whole family of mankind fits in. He was emphatic that this is not disassociating from the world; it is becoming more fully present to all of it.

Desires and the One Primary Yearning: Several people found that as they practiced, the desires they were willing to let go of only grew stronger. That is to be expected, Bartholomew explained: becoming aware means becoming aware of everything, including how nearly every thought circles around some desire. The worst thing one can do is try to get rid of a desire. Instead one stays with the experiencer — simply watching desires rise and fall, noticing that they are never consistent (one wants a red car, then a green one; a million dollars, then two, then none). Beneath all the shifting secondary desires there is one ongoing yearning that is always present: the primary desire of all consciousness to fall back into the source, into home. As one stays with the feeling of the experiencer, that primary desire hums ever more strongly and becomes the magnet that keeps one centered — while the lesser desires remain, free to be met or not, costing one nothing. One gives up nothing and becomes vast enough to take it all in.

Closing and the January Workshop: Bartholomew asked the group to spend the coming month doing their utmost to remember this — and, each time they fell into forgetfulness, to notice without judgment (“Ah, I am experiencing frustration”) and return to the feeling of the experiencing. Thinking, he reminded them, is a very limited mode, while awareness of experience is immense; and often the healing of oneself comes as a secondary result of the practice. He then announced the Taos Winter Intensive for January 16–17, 1993 — the quiet, inwardly meditative workshop of the year, with longer seated and walking meditations, fewer questions, and more silence — and gave the registration and lodging details before closing with thanks for the group's patience and good humor.