On the opening morning of the eight-day Ghost Ranch workshop, Bartholomew rose to deliver a deliberate jolt: "Put down your pens, for you cannot take notes to find out who you already are." What followed was among his most radical teachings — that you are not the subject of your life but an ever-changing object within a vast awareness, and that the whole of the work is simply to let that awareness reveal itself.

Context: Recorded on February 5, 1995, at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, this is the first of eight tapes from an intensive multi-day workshop with a large gathering of longtime students. Bartholomew set the tone at once by standing to make a point he knew would unsettle the room, and much of the session unfolds as direct, often playful exchanges with individual participants (whose names have been generalized here). It lays the conceptual ground on which the rest of the workshop would build — above all the distinction between awareness and consciousness, and between bliss and happiness.

"No Notes": You Cannot Forget Who You Are: Bartholomew opened by forbidding the note-taking that fills such gatherings, standing up so as to take "the full force" of the anger he expected it to provoke. What a silly thing, he said, to write out who you are as though you could otherwise forget it — for the very act of getting it "through the mind and through the body" is precisely what separates you from letting go. You are the answer, he told them; you are also the problem that presents the problem. The whole of the workshop, he suggested only half in jest, could be finished in a sentence: stop pretending you do not already know, shut up, and relax. People return year after year not to gather new ideas, he said — they are already full of ideas, and ideas are not the answer — but to let the truth of consciousness come forward and ignite what is already present.

You Are the Object, Not the Subject: At the center of the morning was a single reversal. Your mind, Bartholomew said, has told you that you are a body-mind through which consciousness moves, and that you are the subject of your life while everything else is the object — and it is exactly backwards. You are an ever-changing object, arising and disappearing moment to moment, while the true Subject is consciousness, God, awareness itself: "that which sees through you and breathes with you and hears through you." So long as you insist on being the subject, you will suffer, and you will accumulate guilt — for once the ego believes that what you do is to your greater glory, it must also believe that what you do is to your greater guilt, and from there flow whole lifetimes of it and the machinery of karma. He was not condemning the game, he said; he was only asking whether anyone was ready to play a bigger one: to set down the identification with the guilty doer and relax into the ever-present Subject of one's own being.

Awareness and Consciousness: Bartholomew then drew, plainly, a distinction he had insisted upon from the beginning. Awareness, he said, is total potentiality without any movement or motion whatsoever — the silence, the stillness. Consciousness is what arises with the very first movement out of that stillness, and from that first ripple comes motion upon motion: the whole beautiful, manifested, multidimensional world of the life one is living. The trouble is that we identify relentlessly with consciousness — and wherever there is thinking or emoting there is motion, and there one is in consciousness, not in the stillness where the bliss lies. Every anxious "how do I do this?" a participant raised, he pointed out, was itself only more motion, more thinking, the mind filling the screen. The bliss is not in consciousness, he said; it is in awareness, present every moment beneath the movement, and available the instant one is willing to drop into it.

Bliss Is Not Happiness: He pressed the group to be honest about what they actually wanted. When most people say they want awareness, he said, what they really mean is that they want a happy life — and with that he could not help them. He pointed to the lives of those who had truly found it: Buddha dead of poisoning, Ramana and Ramakrishna of cancer, Christ crucified, St. Francis riddled with disease — awareness is no guarantee of a pleasant life. Bliss, he insisted, is not happiness: happiness comes and goes, and the moment you have a happy life you begin to dread losing it, whereas bliss is one's own basic nature. "The greatest curse you could have," he said, "is that you will be happy from now to the end of your life" — for it is the honest acknowledgment that happiness rises and falls, replaced by pain, that keeps one awake. Yet he gave one absolute assurance: if there is even the slightest genuine desire to know what one really is, that desire comes from the heart and is a prayer that must be answered — one is never given such a longing and left unfulfilled.

The Chains Around the Heart: When one man spoke of the "chains around his heart" and asked how to break them, Bartholomew answered that there was nothing he could do about them — and that this was the good news. He had not consciously built the chains; they had simply accumulated. And the mind cannot free him, because it is the nature of the mind to conceive of chains in order to break them, only to conceive of the next set and break those, endlessly, back and forth. The way through is not to conceptualize chains at all but to feel: chains in the mind are experienced in the body as heaviness, and the instruction was simply to sit with that heaviness, neither fleeing it nor trying to understand it, and to sink ever deeper into it. In the very middle of that heaviness, he promised, is the bliss one is seeking. He extended the point to a striking claim about awareness itself: it cannot be damaged, violated, or darkened by anything one has ever done — what people most want to protect, even in their fiercest moral arguments, is this pristine awareness, which they have merely confused with the body.

Why Consciousness Gives Rise to Suffering: If awareness gives rise to consciousness, and consciousness to the manifest world, one participant asked, why is there so much pain? Bartholomew turned the question back and drew the answer out of the room: to experience. Human beings, he said, are "drama kings and queens" who did not, in truth, want a life of unbroken happiness, because pure happiness is "no fun." The juice of a human life is in the contrast — in overcoming obstacles and fear, in the interplay of winning and losing, health and illness, sanity and insanity. Even grief he set in this light: grief arises out of love, and without the grief one would never know the love, the two coming together in human form. The people in the worst condition, he observed, are not those in pain but those boring themselves to death — too frightened to try anything new, growing rigid and decaying.

"Being, Reveal Yourself": To a woman who asked whether she creates her own reality, Bartholomew answered with another question: which "I"? An object cannot create itself; the power that creates moves through the limited body-mind out of consciousness, and one has, he said — if he were to be outrageous — almost nothing to do with what it does. "Without God you can do nothing": nothing good, nothing bad, nothing at all. From here he gathered the whole teaching into its simplest form. Whatever the path — meditation, yoga, chanting, any discipline, however imperfect and under however flawed a teacher — the heart of every one of them is a single prayer: "Being, reveal yourself." And the only question worth asking, the one Ramana pressed, is "Who am I?" — a question that, once genuinely asked, must be answered. He did not tell his students to stop trying; on the contrary, he urged them to try with all the intensity they had, to become "the best doer in your town," until one day, out of being rather than decision, trying simply ceases and what remains is being itself. To one who felt lost he replied that the feeling of being lost only presupposes that awakening is supposed to look a certain way — and that the very moment she was in might be the perfect vehicle for it. "Be still," he closed, in the old words, "and know that I am God."