Taking up a student's interest in the Toltec path, Bartholomew spent this session showing how every genuine road inward — assemblage points, luminous filaments, other teachers, other realities — fits together, and why not one of them should ever be mistaken for the only way. His refrain to a room of longtime students about to scatter to other practices was simple and repeated: "Take my love and go."

Context: Recorded on February 8, 1995, the fourth day of the workshop at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this is the seventh of eight tapes from the last Bartholomew workshop. Much of the hour was given to reconciling Bartholomew's teaching on the formless with the Toltec system of seers — assemblage points, balls of glowing energy, the "mold of man" — and to reassuring students who were being pulled toward other paths. It closed with one of his fullest answers to why awareness takes human form at all.

"No Conflict With the Toltecs": The Assemblage Point: Bartholomew opened with a paraphrase of one man's growing interest in the path of the Toltecs, and went point by point through its claims to show there was no conflict with his own teaching — only a difference between speaking of form and speaking of the formless. That the new seers see humans as balls of glowing energy and filaments of light, he said, is exactly his own teaching that "you are all specks of light interconnected constantly" with the reticulata of consciousness. He embraced the notion of the assemblage point outright: it names how "you have coalesced all of your impressions, all of your experience, all of your reality into one particular point out of which you perceive the world." Drugs shift it, death shifts it — when you die "your assemblage point shifts" out of sensory reality to another point of perception — and shamans and aborigines are simply those who can move it at will into other worlds. He confessed he had spent years trying to be "an assemblage point mover" himself, prying students off their one insistent window, though he warned that moving to exquisite other realities "is a lot of fun, but it doesn't free you." On one technical point he gently pushed back: the Toltecs shift the assemblage point to the left, but he suggested checking that, since Ramana Maharshi taught that "the doorway to all the depths of reality is to the right."

The Mold of Man Is Not God: When the material described a magnificent being of light — the "mold of man," radiating love, wonder, peace and light but found on examination to have "no powers, no volition, no ability to forgive or to help" — Bartholomew seized on it as a perfect illustration of his oldest warning: "anything that you see that is in form is limited." He linked these beings to the great presences met in near-death experiences, real and there "as the great comforter," welcoming souls out of this world and, he added, presumably welcoming them in. But precisely because they cannot transform anyone's circumstances, they are not God. God is "limitless, formless, and is in no way confined to a shape, no matter how radiant." The being of light cannot look at you and "zap you with something that says, that's finished, you are now pure and holy and majestic" — the whole labor of transforming one's beliefs "lies with you, and that's all we've been talking about all these years."

Every Path Is the Right Way: The session's steady heartbeat was Bartholomew's refusal to rank one road above another. To a student unsure which way to jump, he answered plainly: "What interests you is the right way. What causes you to ponder is the right way... There are no wrong ways." He trusted each person's own consciousness to find obstacles where a path was wrong and open where it was right. Pressed on whether Bartholomew himself was merely a limited window from Mary-Margaret's assemblage point, he conceded at once that from the first moment of putting truth into words "we have been forced into falsity, because we cannot speak of what cannot be spoken of." His answer to "how far does Bartholomew's perception go?" was not a defense but an invitation: "try it, find out." The only validity is one's own experience, never belief — "why should you believe that Bartholomew's perception is deeper than the Toltecs?" And so he sent the wanderers off with his recurring blessing: "Don't juxtapose truth to this truth"; take whatever has entered the heart, put it through your didgeridoo, and go on. "Take my love and go... Go deep, go far, go high. Go in all directions at once. No limitations."

No Favorites, No Superiority: Bartholomew grew notably firm answering a question about volunteers from other realms who have supposedly come to displace the forces of chaos and fear. What made him "a little nervous" was the "sense of speciality" in it. A true World Server's one focus, he said, is that "they are as ordinary as everyone that they are serving"; the real avatars walking the Earth "would never dream" of separating themselves from those they walk with, because the sign of an awakened one is "absolute unity, unification and oneness." There are no favorites — "how can there be inequality in one?" As for the fear and chaos the volunteers meant to fight, he reminded them these "are two of the primary motivators that get you to the state of pure nature." He was untroubled by the whole "get your light and get out" model for one reason: the moment you truly know you are the Light, "your heart will melt," and the last thing that will occur to you is to leave. You will "turn away from whatever looks safe" and move fully into the pain, the fear, the sorrow to lessen it — not "how can I save myself?" but "how can I help right here, right now?"

Life Itself Is the Teacher: Speaking to a woman named in the room, Bartholomew celebrated the years of stretching the group had done together — "we're better than aerobics" — and its permanence: "there's no going back," the power generated in each stretch simply continuing on as consciousness keeps pushing. But he insisted the pressure need not arrive dressed as a spiritual teaching. It can come "in a love affair," in a move, in a new interest, in "the birth of a child or a grandchild," in "the teaching of a tremendous illness." The world "is absolutely God's playground," and "life itself is the teacher." Do not wait for the lesson that announces "I am the teacher," he said; embrace the doll "whether you frown at it or kick it or love it, or take it to bed." To a woman troubled by beings who come to her psychically for help, he offered a concrete instruction rather than a cure: state clearly, "I'm sorry, I cannot help you. Look around, find the light, and go and follow the light." She was, he assured her, "perfectly normal in a different kind of a way" — and he advised her, wryly, not to mention any of it to her employer.

No Angelic Children: Asked about the new children coming into the world, Bartholomew punctured a comforting myth: "there is this lie that's running around that all the children that are coming into the Earth plane are little angelic beings full of light and consciousness. That's nonsense." Because of an increased vibrational frequency, yes, many children now can "vibrate at a more rapid rate" — but the same extra power drives those "with a degree of unconsciousness about who they are." You cannot have the light turn on without the negativity turning on too, he said; "look at your world." A school, after all, "is for people who need to learn." Then he turned the light back on the students themselves: "you're not so bad yourselves," he told them, praising "your own courageous willingness to look like a jackass in the face of the world" — joking that the clever ones had not told everyone they were off to a place called the Ghost Ranch to "hang out with this ghost."

Why Awareness Takes Human Form: For a woman from Australia who asked why we take human rather than angelic form, Bartholomew gave the tape's deepest teaching. "Awareness cannot be aware of itself — there's only one of it." So out of that still oneness arose, by its very nature, motion; and in that motion appeared consciousness, "the first I am, the first sense of separation," and from it "the 10,000 things." The whole point of the separated "me" is that awareness might experience itself in form — and love, its basic component, might extend itself. As a separated self follows the remembered sound of the source home — like Jumping Mouse hearing the sound of the river — "love extends itself," the light grows brighter, the wonder vaster. This is why the journey out and back is not futile: you are creators, "extenders of love," and consciousness never returns the same, just as the hero of every old tale returns transformed, helped by "mysterious powers, mysterious arrows, potions." Asked whether there is a level beyond love, he agreed there is — awareness itself, which "needs nothing added to it, nothing taken away"; love and light are attributes of consciousness in motion, and when you return to the absolute, "no attributes" remain. "When you get there, you'll know it."

Be Lights Unto Yourselves: Returning to the old question of why consciousness creates pain, Bartholomew repeated that it is for experience and contrast: "if you were happy all the time, you would be bored." But he pressed harder on what to do with suffering. When one catches oneself blaming or feeling sorry, he mimed a pointing finger and said, "take your finger and turn it around" — ask instead, "Why are you doing this? Why am I doing this?" This is the Buddha's last instruction, "be lights unto yourselves": ask yourself the deep questions and blame no one else. The mature student, he said, is the one who reaches the turning point: "either I am a victim and subject to its whimsy, or I am that power itself." Consciousness "creates your life every day, and the body-mind plays it out" — and the mind will never accept it, protesting "I would never create a mess like this," though "you do it every day." The answer he refused to hand over, because it would only bore them: "Find out. Find out from whence all of this springs." He ended teasing the students who kept handing in their "Bart cards" — giving up, changing their rules — noting that within five days they were "not the same people" who arrived, and that the world would go on thinking them fools.