In a session woven almost entirely from questions, Bartholomew turned again and again to a single, unwelcome doorway: that an open heart cannot be open only to the good, and that the willingness to suffer — one's own pain and the world's — is the very thing that opens one to bliss.

Context: Recorded on February 7, 1995, at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this is the sixth of eight tapes from an intensive multi-day workshop. The session unfolds as a long series of exchanges with individual participants (whose names have been omitted here), moving from feeling sorry for oneself, through loving kindness and the open heart, to the call for help and the meaning of the word "soul." Its recurring theme is that to be fully human is to feel fully — the pain and the presence together.

"Who Motivated You?": The tape opens with one man who felt he had been dealt a difficult hand and had spent much of his life feeling sorry for himself. Bartholomew did not deny the hardship — "you were dealt a really difficult hand," he honored — but insisted the answer was the same as for everyone in the room: stop trying to change yourself, drop out of the experience of yourself as a limited being, and allow the vast being to appear "just for an instant." When the man credited his recovery to a twelve-step program and to his mate, Bartholomew pressed further: who motivated you to go, who motivated whoever created the program, what is it that compels one mate to help you out of bed and another to put a pillow over your head? Something is behind all of this magnificent life, moving it moment by moment, and he asked the man simply to go down into the silence and find it. Do not trust, he said — he had forbidden that word the day before — explore: "Just stop thinking and go in moment after moment after moment and you will find what is there," because you do not create it, "it is the very God of very God."

No Points, No Life: A woman recalled an Olympic diver who chose the most difficult, pinpoint approach — a diver who once went backward and struck his head on the board and still earned the highest marks — and framed a hard life as a way to "earn more points." Bartholomew loved the image, tying it to his instruction of the day before: don't ask for an easy life, "ask for the consciousness to use it at maximum." He then told of an astrologer friend who had cast a perfectly balanced chart with no difficult aspects, and how everyone grew excited that a new avatar had been found — only to discover the person had lived an utterly boring, drab life, having gone nowhere and experienced nothing because there was nothing there to push against. "Is that boring your way to enlightenment?" he asked, and answered that, properly used, even boredom is a wonderful tool, "because if you've got nothing else, you've got your boredom." The juice of a life is in what pushes.

Loving Kindness Relaxes the Heart: To a woman whose love of the natural world and the animal kingdom left her in tremendous pain over the planet's suffering, Bartholomew replied that no one comes to such a path without a great heart, and "great hearts hurt." He did not ask her to save the world; he asked only that she act, moment after moment, with as much loving kindness as she could — even if she never left her living room — to stop saying what hurts and doing what hurts. Each time you choose it, "loving kindness grows and grows and grows in you," and, crucially, it relaxes the body: like a fish that has stopped swimming in a furor and begins to notice what it is swimming in, a person eased by kindness becomes willing to look within. This, he said, is why the Buddhists are so attached to loving kindness — "they know what happens inside the psyche" — and it is why he begged them to stop scolding themselves, for every self-reproach builds a negative image one is then too afraid to look behind. His prayer for all of them was that they might see themselves as he sees them: "If you love me, then love yourself. That's all I ask."

The Pyramid and Being the Food: One man asked how to have a continuous, unbroken experience of the love that fills the heart of Jesus. Bartholomew laid out the path as a pyramid: at the base, the organized religions with their rules and the promise of heaven; in the middle, those who break from the rules to find their own way and try everything; and at the pinnacle, where this man now stood, the moment one realizes with the whole being that every conceptualization — even the image of the sacred heart — comes and goes. What he wanted was "a 24 hour a day love that never fails," and Bartholomew told him it is present in every moment of every life, for where else could it be. There comes a point, he said, when you no longer want to read the menu or even to eat the food — "you want to be the food." The only guidance he could give was to be still: that part of the psyche knows precisely how to be still even when "you" do not, and all one need do is be willing to say it — until there is no longer you and it, but one, "and even one is too many."

The Yearning Is the Proof: Out of this exchange Bartholomew drew one of the tape's strongest claims. The being at the heart of all consciousness, he said, has as its main yearning to merge totally and utterly in the bliss of God, never giving rise to the illusion of two. And since this yearning is your own, he asked them to understand that the yearning itself is the proof: "The very fact that you are yearning for this, this is the proof that such a state is possible." When people demanded that he prove it, he answered that he need prove nothing — you prove it to yourself all the time, for the very fact that it can be conceived in the mind as a possibility tells you it can be done. "It is your destiny. It will happen."

The Open Door and the Willingness to Suffer: A letter was read aloud from someone who, opening the heart, felt warmth radiate from the chest and then floods of tears that seemed larger than herself, a chasm with no bottom. Bartholomew, remarking twice that "I never talk like this," affirmed that the heart chakra is real and does open — but that an open door is an open door, and "anybody can get in." To open the psyche to the love of consciousness is, as a byproduct, to feel pain intensely: one's own, others', and pain one has no identification with at all, because "there is a lot of pain awash in this world." The wisest response is not to shut down but to recognize that this is what it means to be fully human. To the cry of "why me?" he answered "why not me?" — the willingness to suffer joins one to the whole heart of humanity. What has been so unbearably painful, he said, was never the suffering itself but the resistance to it: "I don't want to suffer — that is what hurts." Be willing to suffer your own pain and another's without the mind rushing in to explain or escape it, and you gain the very capacity to feel bliss, for the two go together and "you cannot say, I'm willing to feel all the bliss and you guys keep all the bad stuff."

"Help Me" Comes From the Heart: When one woman worried that if she cried out for help without naming whom she called, "the wrong kind of help might come," Bartholomew thanked her for a deep question and answered it as divine law. The cry that brings this help comes from only one place — the heart — and "as the call is given, so is the response." A calculated thought that sits and wonders whom to call upon is not this; but the cry that comes out of being, "help me," is answered to the same intensity and power with which it is given, because there is only one heart. He assured her she would never worry about it again. From this he spoke of God as the most steadfast love imaginable, one that "will brook no separation": "God is not a capricious lover," he said — it is you who are capricious, and that is fine, but on the other side there is never forgetting. To another who felt his nearness, he underscored the same oneness: "There's only one heart, there's only one body. So if your body is there, this is there. Always."

Soul, the Power of the Presence: Closing before lunch, one participant asked why he avoids the word "soul." Because, he said, people picture "some kind of a wispy little ghost like thing that lives inside a human body" — yet soul is truly one of the power words. What one calls soul, that mysterious and unclear feeling which grows stronger week after month after year, is "the consciousness turned in on itself," getting deeper and clearer until it becomes an actual presence, "as tangible as anything else." Ninety-nine percent of your being is soul, he said, and every time you turn awareness within, you feed it and give it actuality, until one day it becomes the primary experience of your life and everything else is felt second. This is the power of the presence in the present — the total potentiality of all possibility, "the substance of the God light." He ended on the wonder he had named at the beginning of the workshop: "to be fully human and to feel fully the presence of God. What a gift."