On the third morning of the workshop, Bartholomew went straight at what he called one of the greatest obstacles of all — the belief that you cannot be miserable and God-realized at the same time. Awakening, he insisted, is not the end of pain but the willingness to find the light in the very middle of it, now, not once the trouble has been fixed.

Context: Recorded on February 7, 1995, at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this is the fifth of eight tapes from the eight-day intensive and the third day of what Bartholomew called the last of these workshops. He opened by returning to the basics laid down on the earlier days — awareness, consciousness, and the ten thousand things — and spent the session dismantling the students' conviction that suffering must be solved before God can be found. Much of the tape unfolds as direct, sometimes teasing exchanges with individual participants, whose names have been omitted here.

Awakening Is Not the End of Pain: Bartholomew began by naming a confusion he said lives in most people's minds: that to awaken fully to who you are means your life will become painless. So the moment a student feels anger, or dislikes the way life is, or falls back into hurt, the conceptualizing mind announces that awakening must be "light years away." This, he said, is the essential difficulty of the body-mind, which has been taught that if it can sit in the lap of God it will feel no pain at all. He asked the group to study that belief directly by looking at the lives of those who actually awakened and asking whether their lives were free of pain. No matter how well you control your environment, he said, "some of it is going to smile at you and some of it isn't" — and that ordinary rise and fall of happiness and sadness is not what he was talking about. He was pointing to a state that comes out of the heart, present at all times, and he begged them to let go of the idea that pain and God cannot be experienced in the same moment.

"Seek Ye First": The Great Ones and Their Suffering: To break the equation of holiness with comfort, Bartholomew turned to scripture and to history. "Seek ye first the kingdom and all else will be added unto you," he quoted, pointing out that the promise was not "all else happy" but an unspecified all else — up, down, loved, not loved, beloved and disliked. Christ he called the absolute exemplar: a fully awakened being crucified, who in the midst of it said, "Forgive them, Father, they don't know what they're doing." He reminded the group of the film of Ramana they had watched a night or two before, a face of intense pain, and of St. Francis with tuberculosis of the bone, "one of the most excruciatingly painful things" a body can suffer. Against the New Age idea that illness means you have done something wrong and must fix it, he set these lives as proof that perfect health and ease are not prerequisites for realization. Bliss, he stressed, is not "Oh, I'm happy" magnified — it is something that permeates every cell and lets one say, in the middle of incredible difficulty, "all's well."

The Ocean and the Silent Depths: Returning to the map he had drawn on the earlier days, Bartholomew described awareness as the deep silent stillness of God, out of which the first motion arises as consciousness, and out of that first arising come the ten thousand things. That very first motion, he said, is experienced as "I," and with it comes the conceptualization of all the other I's — so that each person, sure of being the subject, is in reality one of the objects of an amazing consciousness. He offered the ocean as an image: at the surface people are jet-skiing and playing with toys, deeper down there is less happening, and at the very bottom "a tremendous, powerful, impacted, silent darkness" so potent that all form explodes in its presence. But he warned at once against the trap in his own picture — you do not need scuba gear and lead on your feet, because reaching the silence is not a journey through distance or time. Everything is consciousness, he told one woman, every idea and object "framed in time space for a moment to appear to be stationary and real," while subjects and objects are only "dust particles that rise and fall within a stream of light."

Now, Not Later: Again and again Bartholomew hammered on time as the great deceiver of the spiritual search. Do not wait for a happy life, he said, do not wait for your children to get out of college — "you may be dead when they get out of college." It is a now life: "Now, now, now," in little increments of now. He took up the familiar image of the lotus rising from the mud and showed how it betrays people, because they picture it in stages — mud, stem, bud, blossom — and so assume awakening must take time. Time-space is a genuine concept, useful for catching airplanes, he allowed, but it does not exist outside of consciousness, "and this is why you can awaken in a moment." He teased those who had read the book about seekers going to the Himalayas to find the Dalai Lama: after all that travel, "they're still in this room." Wherever you go and whatever you do, he said, the stillness and depth of God is there right now, waiting only for consciousness to merge with it, and the more difficult your life, the better your chance, "because it is the power of the pain that pushes you within."

The Curse of Wanting to Be a Teacher: When one man raised the case of a great seeker, Dr. Aiken, who "had to wait till he died," Bartholomew stopped him sharply for projecting onto a life he could not know, and declined to name the man's private obstacle. But he drew a general teaching out of it: if someone carries a strong desire to be a spiritual teacher, that itself becomes an obstacle to awakening, "because it is very difficult to be a student and a teacher at the same time." This, he said, is why "the greatest curse of all is to be a guru" — not because teachers do no good, but because identification with "I am the teacher" leaves no room to be the student. He set against it the old monastery story: the wise one sought out turns out not to be the one ringing the gongs or giving the sutras, but the humblest person sweeping the floor, doing the simplest things with an open awareness, "not thinking that he or she knows anything." Ramana, he added, found the hardest people to reach were the very smart ones, their minds already full of what they thought was right — nothing you have experienced or believe, he said, has anything to do with awakening itself.

The Yearning and the Finding Are One: A recurring student worry — "I yearn and yet I am not there" — Bartholomew met head-on. The yearning and the destination are the same thing, he insisted; "you cannot yearn without being there," because this is not a destination but the now, and the moment you yearn you are already in it. The mind protests that it cannot be so, he said, precisely because it is thinking so much that "you wouldn't know if you were in bliss if you were in bliss." He offered the fish racing through the water crying out for water it cannot find, and reminded them that they are always aware of something — and that continuous, ever-present awareness, the screen on which all the projected images play, is exactly what they overlook because it is so obvious and familiar. He compared genuine seeking to falling in love, recalling a man who had just fallen in love and said, "I can't get her out of my mind." One day, Bartholomew promised, you will fall just as headlessly in love with God, and from then on nothing else will occupy the mind but "Who am I? Who are you? What is going on?" Whatever your path — the breath, the question, reading, anything — do it rambunctiously and abundantly, and once the right question is asked deeply even once, "the process home is already underway."

"Is It True?": The most charged exchange came with a man who felt that God did not love him. Rather than propose seven years of therapy to cure the feeling, Bartholomew called it "a magnificent way to fuel a path" — a gift that keeps a person pressed up against the idea of God at every moment — and even, with care, "a funny kind of arrogance." His instruction was not to argue the feeling away but to drop silently into silence, moment after moment, and simply find out whether it is true. He told of the first person ever to break into full understanding of his own God-self while listening to Bartholomew: a man wandering "down under" who discovered he had AIDS, suffered two weeks of incredible pain alone, then sat under a tree and asked the right question — "Is it true? Am I what other people say I am?" — and became aware of an incredible light and total acceptance, his gratitude going to the very tragedy of his life. Bartholomew even confessed a love of self-pity, because its very pressure eventually forces the honest question. And what you finally discover, he said, is not that it loves you but something larger: "you are going to find out that it is love. That's what you're going to find out. That all of it is love."