Bartholomew opens by naming a quiet tragedy: people are missing moment after moment of their own enlightenment because they are looking for something else entirely. They have tied awakened being to pleasure and health and a smiling life, and so whenever pain or poverty or a broken heart arrives, they assume enlightenment must be far away. But awakened being is what you always are and can never not be — present in the midst of the worst that has ever befallen you. This session is a sustained correction of that misconception, delivered as a single insistent instruction: in the very moment of impatience, fear, or delight, stop, and relax into what is ever-present.

Context: Recorded on March 27, 1994, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this was one of Bartholomew's regular monthly gatherings, with the next meeting set for April 24th. Speaking to longtime students, he moved through a chain of misunderstandings about awakening — that it depends on happiness, on cleared karma, on a perfected ego, on suffering, or on some external discovery — and turned each one back toward the same simple practice of dropping out of mind into present being. Along the way he drew on the last days of Christ, Ramana Maharshi's silence, a man dying of AIDS, Mary-Margaret's own dream, and the everyday pull of a piece of chocolate cake.

Enlightenment Is Not the Absence of Pain: Bartholomew began with the misconception he had come to clear: that awakened being can only be present when you are happy, healthy, and running around your universe telling everyone what a wonderful day you are having. Look at the enlightened ones, he said, and this idea should stop immediately — whatever else may have happened to the Christ, the last days were no fun, full of pain and unhappiness, and yet surrounding and part of that very painful experience was a full and conscious enlightenment. This is where the old phrase comes in, he said: God is in God's heaven and all is right with the world, no matter what the world looks like or feels like. The misunderstanding is the belief that you cannot feel this ever-present awakened being unless the rest of your world is in alignment — unless you are happy, unless you have resolved all your past karma. And as for that last hope, he wished them good fortune, because the tricky thing about past karma is that you are constantly creating it, discreating it, and creating it again, leaving a very big mess on your hands.

"I Don't Care If You're Happy": This, Bartholomew said, was why from the beginning he had infuriated many people by saying, "Excuse me, but I don't care if you're happy." It had nothing to do with loving them or not; it had to do with the fact that happiness is a temporary, suggestible state that enters and exits and changes moment by moment — now you are, now you're not — and that is no description of awakened being. God does not come and go depending on your mood. He then warned of the opposite pole, the training many had received that suffering brings you closer to God, so that people conclude they cannot be experiencing God unless they are suffering. Suffering can indeed be a wondrous opportunity, he granted, and here he spoke of the tremendous advantage of people with AIDS, who at certain stages face a pressure of non-escape — no back door, no windows, only themselves and this moment and the real question of whether God is present now or not. A cure would come in the not too distant future, he said, and they must learn to use this advantage soon.

A Loving Heart Cannot Be at Peace Without This: When someone says they want peace, Bartholomew said, they do not yet see what peace requires. Because you are all, at the base of your hearts, loving beings, you cannot truly be at peace while you look out on the world's suffering — the love in your heart will not allow it. You cannot feel at peace if the people you care about are suffering, unless somehow you come to know that all the seeming disaster and difficulty and chaos and tears and loss is in some way magically, mysteriously appropriate. This was the focus he asked them to hold: in spite of whatever suffering is going on, to be at peace. And he was quick to say that "suffering" is a grandiose word for what he meant — he was talking about the ordinary impatience, the rude, snippy, snide, gossipy, nasty little backbiting business that runs on in the mind, that little voice inside constantly making judgments. If you wait to clear up all of those judgments, he said, you are going to live here forever.

Now Is God's Moment — Stop and Remember: Rather than tracing a judgment back a hundred years to some past life where you were their mother, which is endless nonsense and mostly untrue, Bartholomew asked for something far simpler. In the moment of your impatience, as small as it is, now is God's moment — that is the time. Without trying to fix it, just stop, and remember what you do not need to remember because it is ever-present: stop mind, stop story, stop history, stop idea, and fall into the moment, closer than hands and feet. It will relieve the impatience for a few moments, and then impatience arises again, and then the remembrance comes again, back and forth, until one day you realize you no longer have to remember — it simply happens. He recalled Mary-Margaret's dream of a road lined with endless garbage cans and her dismay at having to go through them all, and the voice that told her to just shut up and sit down. When she sat in the middle of the road, the dream changed. The point was never to sort through the debris, keeping this and throwing out that — that could take lifetimes. The only real question is when you are going to stop.

You Cannot Perfect the Ego — Relax, Don't Earn: You will never fix yourself, Bartholomew said, and he knew this was discouraging, because the idea people cling to is that they want to perfect the ego. But an ego is just a combination of thoughts, some good and some not so good; having more pleasing thoughts may make your life seem nicer and make people like you better, but it has nothing to do with awakening. Having the whole world at your feet adoring you would in fact be a good way to probably never get it. As the path deepens and you grow more silent, he warned, you begin to notice your negative and judgmental voices even more dramatically, and there comes the temptation to fix them. Therapy and twelve-step programs are magnificent, he insisted, but they are not enlightenment programs, because there is no program for enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something you get to; it is something you relax into. God is not earned or striven for and located — it is here, it is now, something you relax and absolutely expect to find. He even turned to the pleasant pole: at the dinner party where everyone is applauding your erudite discourse and you are full of that flush of ego delight, right then, are you willing to move your awareness away from that jolt of ego joy and relax into what has nothing to do with the positive and negative polarities at all?

Silence, and the King Who Forgot He Was King: All the great ones taught in silence, Bartholomew said — Ramana Maharshi, whom he quoted often for his tremendous magnificence, taught only in silence unless forced to speak. Whatever great force of awakened awareness one believes in, all those strands of help, seen and unseen, are available in the moment of inner silence, which can be held even while active outwardly. As you relax deeper, something arises from the depths that has nothing to do with ego mind, and action is accomplished from a different place, and from there comes the peace and the sense that all is well with the world — something the ego mind can never accept and was never meant to. To picture how this remembering works, he told again the story of the king who lives under an illusion that he is a pauper and beggar in the dirtiest dungeon of his own palace. Person after person comes and says, "Don't you remember? You're the king," and he tells them to go away — until enough people have said it enough times that one day he wakes and thinks, if all those people believe it, maybe it is possible. That, he said, is all he had been doing: telling them enough times that they are pure, alive, awakened awareness, so that many have long since left the dungeon and are moving out into the landscape, beginning to remember who they are.

The Fear That Waits at Three in the Morning: When you wake at three in the morning and all the horrors seem to wait and come flooding in, Bartholomew said, that is a great time — maximum opportunity, if you know what to do. What the ego wants is for you to ask where the fear came from, what it means, how to get rid of it, endlessly. But the fears that arrive in the night are rarely real events; they are phantoms assembled out of your stress, images of terror the mind presents. Do not run with the mind and its stories, he urged — instead, be totally terrified, be willing to be terrified, without barriers or explanation or the "yes but." In a few moments that immense, pulsating fear begins to open, and what is really inside it is not some reptilian consciousness but the pulsation of light, the very same substance found in the heart of any vision of an angel or feeling of exaltation. You mistake its outer garments for what it really is and become frightened. He told of a man who called Mary-Margaret, certain he was dying of AIDS, spending all his energy trying to convince himself it was not so — until it came to him that he had to let go and accept the possibility that he might die, and the moment he allowed that fear to enter fully, immediate relaxation came. His hell had never been the disease, but a fearful thought form sitting on his shoulder.

Every Addiction Is a Longing for God: Everyone in the room, Bartholomew said, is addicted to something, and once you understand this it should stop your judgment of all those addicted to "that." Behind every craving, from the ones considered most difficult to those considered most exalted, the same thing pulsates: an immense longing, an abyss in the heart yearning to be filled, and the mistaken idea that something outside can be put into it. The more you put in, the more it takes — add and add and add — until one lifetime you finally stop, and the very pulsation that drove you into the addiction becomes your friend, the thing that honestly woke you to the fact that this isn't working. He named the addictions playfully — a piece of chocolate cake that becomes the whole world for a moment, British mystery novels, and the final and subtlest addiction of all: the belief that if you just think the right thought, read the right book, or watch the perfect video of the perfect master, you will awaken. He was careful to say this was no dismissal of twelve-step or therapy, which of course work. The instruction was the same as for impatience and fear: do not run from the craving and do not try to satiate it, but simply sit with the tremendous force of the yearning and let it face you fully. He closed by warning of the ego's greatest final tactic — the voice that says you didn't really stop, you weren't doing it right, so you had better quit — and asked them to laugh at it as uproariously as they could, reminding them that every real prayer is always answered, and that Christ had said it beautifully: knock, and it will be opened.