On the second morning of the Ghost Ranch workshop, the night after a film on Ramana Maharshi, Bartholomew spoke to those grieving that the teaching was soon to end — and answered as Ramana had answered his own weeping devotees: "Where would I go?" The teaching, he insisted, cannot be lost, because it was never in the words at all.

Context: Recorded on February 6, 1995, at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this is the third of eight tapes from an intensive multi-day workshop, and the first full session after word had reached the group that the Bartholomew work was drawing to a close. Prompted by a film on Ramana shown the previous night and by students' fear of "losing a friend," Bartholomew centered the morning on the non-verbal core of the teaching, its indivisibility from every other true teaching, and the commitment that binds his students to their own awakening. Much of the tape unfolds as direct exchanges with individual participants (whose names have been omitted here).

"Where Would I Go?": The Teaching Is Met in Silence: Bartholomew opened by addressing those who felt they were losing a friend as the work ended, pointing to documented cases of people who, loving Ramana so much, deepened into total awakening only after his death by dwelling on him more than when he was alive. Speech, he reminded them, is the least important way he can reach anyone: his words pass through Mary-Margaret's vocabulary and then strike each listener's own dictionary, "one dictionary talking to another dictionary. The only problem is you don't have the same publisher." The real teaching has always lived in the non-verbal — "it is in silence that you meet me." Every time you yearn to love, to not despair, to help anyone, he said, "we meet in the silence of those moments." As Ramana told his grieving devotees, so Bartholomew told the room: "Where would I go? What is it that I am that I could go someplace?" All that is ever required, he said, is a relaxed, open heart that says, "love me" — and the response will be there.

"It Is Not the Teaching, It Is Teaching": Bartholomew stated flatly that this is not THE teaching but simply teaching, and that all teachings which inspire the heart are one and the same, with no separations except in the minds of human beings. He predicted that after he fell silent more of his students would reach total awakening, carried by their own love and intention, and that Ramana's simple truth — "you are that" — would spread everywhere in the coming years though he died in 1950 with only a small following. When one man asked whether Ramana was one of Bartholomew's incarnations, he answered "as sneakily as possible," refusing to lock anything down: what is Bartholomew was present within and part of the awakening of that life, but to say "Bartholomew was Ramana" would only limit it, just as one could never call St. Francis Jesus and yet could never separate them. To a woman worried about conflicts between different books, he offered the easier way: when your heart "zings," simply claim the truth as your own rather than asking "what would Bartholomew say," and never compare. He does not do "how-to," he added — he is only "a certain flavor in the soup" and does not talk about your kidneys — so students should embrace whatever else excites and clarifies them.

Caught in the Machine: To show the inevitability of awakening, Bartholomew reached for "a wonderful irrelevancy" — the scene in Jumping Jack Flash where Whoopi Goldberg's skirt is caught in a paper shredder and stripped away in an instant. All that has to happen, he said, is that the slightest part of the hem of your garment gets caught in the machine, and then "the machine will take care of it. Awareness will take care of it." There is no stop button, because there isn't one, and everyone in the room had already gotten close enough to be caught or they would not be there that week. What must follow, then, is "a total annihilation of your false identity" — standing bare in the sense of stripped of false concepts, of "I am this and I am that," until only the true identity and its bliss remain.

Angels, the Light in Liquid Motion, and a Death Into Love: Asked about angels, Bartholomew affirmed they exist "totally, fully, completely and utterly," ranging from very small to hundreds of thousands of miles tall, their life strands undulating in and out of the human, unlike other forms of consciousness whose appearance would terrify. They have no toes — "why do they need toes? They don't walk. They drift. They move. They flow" — and their basic component is light: "light in liquid motion. Fire. Sound. Power. Vast wonder." Once the body is finished and one loses "the peepers," all such shapes become available to awareness. He then spoke of the mother of one man present, who before her death "became aware of love itself," repeating through tremendous pain the same words to Mary-Margaret: "It's all love. That's all there is, is love." That, he said, is what he would wish for all of them in whatever moment they are ready.

Laughter, Seriousness, and the Zen Woman Who Lost Her Head: One of the hardest things, Bartholomew said, is to awaken someone who is very serious, tight, and intense — until one day they run into something that makes them laugh, and in a real laugh "where is the thinking mind? It's gone." A couple he knew kept a sign reading that the sign of the presence of God is joy; that is only half true, he said, for the sign of God's presence is equally the lack of joy, since God is present no matter what you do. He then retold the Zen tale of the woman who woke convinced she had lost her head and ran screaming through the village until, tied to a bedpost and finally silent, she realized her head had always been there — she had only ceased to believe it. So one wakes one morning crying "I've lost my God," and the wise part within ties one to the bedpost of the real question. That question, drawn from Ramana, is simply "Who am I?" — and the instant it is genuinely asked and turned inward, the mind stops, "because the mind cannot answer a non-mental question, but being can answer."

The Only Safe Place, and Any Motive at All: When one participant said the only safe place is truth, Bartholomew agreed emphatically: there is no safe place on this planet, which is subject to change at any moment, and no matter how firmly grounded you are, you will die, and unless you stand on the safe ground of truth you will be afraid — "and don't fool yourself" that intellectualizing will spare you. Yet the door is wide: God will take you any way you come, he said. Whether one is driven by hatred of life and a longing to escape, by a compassion that wants clarity only in order to ease the pain of others, or by a grief too deep to bear, "the truth will embrace you, no matter what your motive." "Come unto me, all who are heavy laden," he quoted — nothing has changed, there are no favorites, and one may come on one's knees, on one's face, or standing strong. He also warned that these are chaotic times in which "everything you feared will come upon you" and "everything you've hoped for will come upon you," and urged them not to enter as fixers but as companions.

The Formless, the Timeless, and Faith as Mental Noise: When a man asked why the group was "quitting," Bartholomew answered that the students themselves had created the whole Bartholomew experience by wanting more and more, and had now reached a place where "there are no words that go farther than the truth that comes that says you are." From here he taught that time and space exist only because we like form: an object must be slow enough to observe (time) and able to sit still (space), but the formless part of oneself — infinite light, total silent potentiality — needs neither. Because everything loved in time-space disappears, "therein lies the suffering," and the only way out is to know everything is grounded in timelessness where nothing is lost. When a woman asked whether faith is an idea like doubt, he told her the question came "right out of your mind," and that the only antidote to both faith and doubt is to stop thinking: people grow proud of their faith, and "the only answer to your suffering is God realization. There are no band-aids." Awareness will work its way with you, he said; your only responsibility is to be willing to be worked with, which you do "by just shutting up for a few moments." Every silent heart, he added, is exactly the same size — no one has a truer or purer heart, and those are lies.

Two Magnets and a Committed Relationship: To a woman whose mind ran all day building houses and thinking about money, Bartholomew did not ask her to stop thinking but to "fall in between the sentences," into the spaces between thoughts, and assured her that her interest in the mystery was deepening whether she could perceive it or not. He likened the process to two magnets drifting closer while they still have free will, until they enter a force field and can no longer do other than move together — and once in that force field of power, "you cannot get out." This, he said, is why he had the audacity to promise awakening: "we are already committed to your awakening... we are in a committed relationship," and even if a student never thinks of Bartholomew again after the workshop ends, the commitment on this side holds, as the prodigal son had to come home. When a woman confessed her fear and asked whether fear itself keeps awakening from happening, he called it "one of the finest things I could have heard," for it meant she had glimpsed that this is not a thing done between lunch and dinner but something that takes one's whole life — the reason Mary-Margaret chose the Ramana film. There is fear of not making it and fear that you will make it, he said, and Rumi will "scare the pants off of you." To one who wanted God-realization but not a life like Mother Teresa's — who herself said "I don't want to go" to Calcutta, and went — he answered plainly: "You don't want to go all the way. You want to go just as far as it's comfortable." Put a nuclear reactor through your body, he warned, "and you're not going to be the same."