Bartholomew presses the room to stop the lifelong project of self-improvement and simply say, "This is me, world, take it or leave it" — then follow that acceptance down into the one thing no one ever did anything to deserve: awareness itself. What begins as a bracing challenge to one struggling woman opens out into non-doership, humility, and the difference between being conscious and being aware.

Context: Recorded on February 5, 1995, at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this is the second of eight tapes from an intensive multi-day workshop with a large gathering of longtime students. The session unfolds almost entirely as pointed, affectionate exchanges with individuals (whose names have been generalized here), and it centers on ceasing the effort to perfect the body-mind and relaxing instead into the ever-present awareness that no effort ever produced.

"This Is Me": Accepting Yourself Exactly As You Are: Bartholomew opened by shouting, tenderly, at one struggling woman who believed her misery meant she was off the path. There is no path she should be feeling her way along, he told her; her very feelings of inadequacy have "fueled your rocket to God," and she clings to her bad tendencies precisely because she knows this. You were dealt a hand of cards — smiling ones and frowning ones together — and they are you, but they have "nothing to do with anything," and when the game ends you do not go home rehearsing the queen of spades. He begged the whole room to stop trying to be different: "if you'd stop trying to be good, you would be goodness itself." The only real step, he said, is to say deeply within, "This is me. That's it, world. Take it or leave it," and then forget it — and the harder half is to grant everyone else the same, to say to the world, "That's you."

Perfecting an Object That Is Going to Die: The trouble with all this improving, Bartholomew said, is that you are laboring to perfect an object that is going to die and missing life itself while you do it. Your awareness has never been touched; it is totally untainted, as it is; consciousness gives life to this object, and when life ends all your idiosyncrasies simply finish while the subject — consciousness and awareness — remains. He named it the cosmic joke, and when a woman protested that it is not funny when it is painful, he agreed, then asked why she thought all those Buddhas are smiling. The "me" of you goes on endlessly changing, shifting ground, now this and now that, he said, and in chasing that motion you miss the eternal, "the bliss of eternality." Like a fish racing about certain that water must be somewhere, one keeps hunting for the very thing one is swimming in.

The Ego's Two Stages: Strengthening, Then Surrender: To one man confused about where his creative power came from, Bartholomew laid out the stages of awakening. There is a real stage, he insisted, when you need a strong ego — not egolessness, but the settled sense that "I can set a goal and complete it" — because someone with a weak ego is too frightened ever to relax into God-realization. On that level the ego rightly thinks it does it. But then the car wrecks and you are paralyzed, and the ego was not focusing on that, and the honest question arises: who created that? Religion answers "God did it," the East answers "past lives," and all of these mental answers prove unsatisfactory. The whole spiritual search, he said in a nutshell, is "trying to figure out who's doing what to who and why" — until, worked lifetime after lifetime, it finally settles into the admission that you do not have the foggiest idea what is going on, and the ego at last loosens its grip and begins the deep prayer, "reveal yourself to me."

"What Did You Do to Get a Brilliant Mind?": Bartholomew turned the room toward humility with a string of plain questions. What did you do to be beautiful, to be handsome, to have a brilliant mind, to make friends easily, to accumulate good fortune? "You didn't do anything" — a man and a woman made love, and the result was you, and something unseen has been pulsating and living through the body-mind ever since. The ego is happy to claim the good and disown the bad, he noted, but the excitement begins when you can say with your whole heart, "I don't understand, I don't know," and offer "thank you, thank you, thank you" for both fortune and difficulty alike. That, he said, is true humility. In truth you know only one thing — that you are sitting in this room — and you need know nothing more; be silent for a single moment and you find "the integrity of living," the reason a person leaps into a dangerous river to save someone rather than standing on the bank crying out.

The Oak Seed and the Sweetness of the Cane: Asked how much of a life is planned into a "blueprint" before incarnation, Bartholomew first drew a distinction he asked the group to keep for three days: "me" means the body-mind mechanism, "I" means consciousness itself, and awareness is the third word. Then he answered with the oak. Oakness is fully present in the tiny seed — its essential nature is set — but the seed does not program how many storms it will weather or which blight will eat its leaves; only the essence is predestined, while everything else is "a magnificent, ongoing, dynamic, alive, present creation," created always in the now. So it is with each person: an essential self, yet a living, breathing, humming creation you are all making together at once. For consciousness itself he offered the East Indian image of sugar cane, where consciousness is "the sweetness of the cane" — the essential sweetness permeating every particle, making it what it is.

"Who Is Making Me Feel This Yearning?": When a man spoke of a recurring ache of yearning, Bartholomew gave him a practice with teeth. When it comes, turn on it with all your power and demand, "Who is making me feel this yearning? Come on, show yourself. Where does it come from? What is its nature?" — boldness, he stressed, not rudeness, never the petulant "you stupid God, you keep frustrating me," but the fierce "I need to know, and I want to know now." This is the intensity of a head held under water, he said, except that no guru will hold it there for you; you must put your own head under and keep it there yourself. He would have done it for all of them years ago if he could, out of nothing but total love, but no one can. The only tools anyone has ever had are silence, listening, and watching — amassed consciousness turning back on consciousness itself and saying, "Show me your face."

"You Are Not the Doer": To a woman anxious about whom and how to serve, Bartholomew answered ruthlessly that her worrying was a whole suffering world built in one moment, and irrelevant. An enlightened one does not think of serving, because there is nobody to serve; the real teacher knows there is nothing to do and simply does whatever spontaneously arises and drops it. "The greatest service is to know who you are," he said; give yourself fully, and when it is finished, do not look back asking what you did wrong — just do what is next. He returned again and again to Ramana Maharshi: you are in bondage because you believe you are the doer, and thereby subject to guilt, sorrow, and inadequacy — "You are not the doer. Thank God." The tales of karma and long reincarnations, like the koans of every religion, he called conundrums meant to confound the mind until it stops; even enlightened ones have negative thoughts, he said, but know such thoughts arise as conditioned responses and never taint awareness, which is why an awakened one may be rude, or loving, or buy Rolls Royces like Rajneesh.

Conscious Versus Aware: Bartholomew closed on the distinction he most wanted the week to carry: there is a difference between being conscious and being aware. You are always conscious unless knocked into unconsciousness — you drive to the Safeway meaning to go the other way and arrive anyhow, conscious the whole time but not aware. He warned at once against turning awareness into a discipline: "you cannot train yourself to be aware," and to make it one more "I have to, I have to" is to be finished before you start. He was speaking, he said, to consciousness itself, and consciousness knows absolutely that the difference is real; his only job was to mirror it back so that, having pretended to forget, they now remembered — "and awareness will take care of it." Once consciousness recognizes "I am not who I think I am," a part of it turns permanently inward toward the heart of awareness, and that is what it means to be on the path without doing anything. In its own moment consciousness will merge with awareness, he promised, "and there is not a thing you can do to stop it. Not one thing."