On the second evening of the Ghost Ranch workshop, Bartholomew answered the anger of students who wanted their lives to go "my way" with a single unyielding claim: consciousness is the doer, consciousness will have its way, and that consciousness is exactly what you are. From there he moved into some of his most practical teaching — on falling in love, on releasing a haunting concept, and on the four-day way of leaving the body at death.

Context: Recorded on February 6, 1995, at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this is the fourth of eight tapes from an intensive eight-day workshop. Much of the session unfolds as direct exchanges with individual participants (whose names have been generalized here), several of whom arrived angry that the teaching seemed to strip them of control over their own lives. Bartholomew turned that anger into his subject, insisting that the surrender of the small "me" is not bondage but freedom, before moving to intimate instruction on love, dying, doubt, and desire.

In God's Oven: Bartholomew opened with a woman anxious about family and control, telling her plainly that she had no control over the process and need not worry about it. She was, he said, a "half baked seeker" — and the honest thing was to say so and to know that she was baking, in God's oven, not in charge of the heat or the frequency. He revised the image to a nuclear reactor to convey the sheer intensity of the God-realizing power at work, then reminded her how she got there: no teacher put her in the oven; she "walked on your own two feet right into his living room" while John Aiken sat there baking himself. The anxieties and fears he understood completely, but underneath them the process was already happening, and the invitation was simply to let a part of herself relax. As the bliss of "the heat of the God love" is finally tasted, he said, that love grows stronger than the desire to please, to be loved, to have money, or to be considered normal.

Consciousness Will Have Its Way: At the heart of the morning was the students' fury at not getting their own way, and Bartholomew met it with a reversal. When you say "my way," he said, you are confusing the tiny body-mind with what you truly are — and "there is no such thing as consciousness plus you. There is only consciousness." What you deeply want as consciousness, you will get, because consciousness is the actor and does the doing; the body-mind, which "changes its mind every time somebody leaves their socks on the floor," is not the one in charge. He likened it to a parent and a child who wants six pieces of cake for dinner or the whole bag of Halloween candy: "Yes, dear. No." The body-mind says it just wants to be happy, but consciousness knows better and overrides those flickering desires because it never loses sight of the true goal, which is bliss and total awakening — and this, he insisted, "is the statement of your freedom, ladies and gentlemen, not your bondage."

The Luggage on the Train: Drawing on the film of Ramana shown the night before, Bartholomew repeated the sage's assurance: "that which is to happen will happen, and that which is not will never happen, no matter what you do." This means consciousness is in control — and the anger it provokes comes from the deadly misidentification of oneself as the body-mind, which he named as the real addiction underneath all the others. Stop being addicted to being a body-mind, he said, and the way to do that is to find out who you really are by falling silent, moment after moment, until you touch the consciousness that at rest is awareness itself and "cannot forget." He closed with Ramana's image of a passenger on the train from Bombay to Calcutta with a load of luggage: you can carry it balanced on your head, or you can set it on the floor of the train, and either way it arrives — so what is your choice?

The Quiet, Not the Explosion: One man questioned the nuclear-reactor image, and another student had told Mary-Margaret at the break that she disliked its explosive connotations; Bartholomew honored the objection and corrected himself. He had used it only to convey immense power, but he did not want naive people imagining a "gentle floating up crystal staircase like Gene Kelly on his way to paradise," for the path also carries periods where one feels God is lost and passes through "pain beyond all pain." Yet God-realization, he stressed, is far more often very quiet. He recalled a letter asking how one could know one was truly in contact with Bartholomew when nothing explosive or dreamlike had happened, and gave the simple answer: if in turning toward that awareness there is even "a sense of I'm not alone," a gentle, instant quieting down — "that's it. Just like that."

Real Love Comes From Consciousness: To the same man, newly in love, Bartholomew asked whether he could fall in love without consciousness wishing it, and answered his own question: it is "consciousness deepest, deepest wish that you love." He granted freely that the body is sexually attracted — "what fun" — but insisted that the deep love which commits to another's happiness, which is willing to stand second and to give up sleep and comfort, does not come from the body-mind at all. It is consciousness that overrides the body-mind's fear of commitment and past memories of pain, that "will demand you to love," because in deep love one comes closest to consciousness in its own heart. Consciousness would never force a choice between awakening and love; but should it ever wish to withdraw from a relationship, it will, once that relationship is "no longer maximum for the awakening of the beloved." His counsel was to drop the past, let go all fear, and let consciousness carry him.

A Concept You Can Release: A man said he shared his body with another entity, one of which had been "extracted" years before. Bartholomew told him this was a concept, an idea concretized — picked up perhaps from an overheard conversation, a vibration, or a bleed-through, but no more real than "a collection of ideas," just as everyone in the room is mesmerized by the concept that they are their own name. Nothing said that day could destroy the concept, but the moment the man decided with all his being that it was an inferior way to live and stated "Out. Out.," he could be free of it. Since the mind can hold only one thought at a time, Bartholomew instructed him to answer the sensation, whenever it arose, with another concept: that his body is entirely full of "abundant light, purity and clarity and nothing else," visualized as a pulsating waterfall of light flooding the very place the intruder seemed to sit. The truth is that no continuous entity lives there but "the light, the power, the wonder and the wisdom of the God Light itself" — and no one need live under that tyranny.

The Four-Day Way of Dying: Asked about a teaching he had once given, Bartholomew described the way consciousness can withdraw the life force from the body over four days and nights — recalling that in the film Ramana knew he had two days, and lovingly told his devotees to come and pretend he was leaving. The only hard part, he said, is knowing when: not a drug-crazed impulse to suicide, but a quiet, private knowing that arises and steadies over days until it is consistent — "yes, it is time." Then, lying down, one simply withdraws the focus from the manifest field and draws it deeply within, and consciousness, which makes no mistakes, does the rest; it will never let you leave before your time, finding some part of the ego to keep you if you are not ready, as it did with John Aiken, who "was taking vitamins while he was trying to die." He noted that some 80 percent of health-care money is spent in the last six months of life fighting this natural withdrawal, and lamented how the living cry "stay and play" to those who wish to turn quietly inward. The greatest aid to the dying, he said, is simply to breathe with them, to follow their rhythm and not your own; and where breath is too irregular, as with a stroke, one may place the right hand on the heart and the left hand on the crown, mirroring the hold Ramana used — base of the spine and crown for a soul coming in, heart and crown for one going out — so that the goodbye is wordless: "here I am. Let's do this together."

Stay With the Doubt: A man doubtful of God pressed hard, and Bartholomew told him he much preferred that doubt to disinterest, since "we only doubt things you care about." He refused to give the man a belief, urging him instead to believe only one thing — "you are here" — and to notice the wordless knowing of his own being that has no name. Awakening comes with ripeness, he said, like fruit falling from the tree, not by joining a monastery where the monks are often "wondering how much rice they're going to have for lunch." The anger, the frustration, the not-knowing were not obstacles but the very entrance: "This very feeling is the door. It looks like the obstacle, but it's the door." So he asked the man to stay with it and ask not for a solution — which only ends a line of thinking — but for the source: who is having this doubt, who is here? To a woman fearful in a suddenly "full" space, and to another afraid of eternity, he gave companion instructions: as long as someone is there to be afraid, simply cry "help me" and help will come; and rather than dreading endless time, think of "ever deepening," expanding forever into compassion, since a mind bound by time and space can never think its way to a bliss that lies outside them.