On the closing morning of the eight-day workshop, Bartholomew pressed a single question until the room could not escape it: by what light do you see anything at all? What began as the teaching that you live within consciousness rather than the reverse ended in an unguarded farewell — a plea to have more faith in him once the body was gone, because in the unseen world "there are no filters."

Context: Recorded on February 8, 1995, at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, this is the eighth and final tape of the intensive multi-day workshop. Much of it unfolds as rapid, affectionate exchanges with individual participants (whose names have been omitted here), and it gathers the week into one image — the light of God by which every object in consciousness is perceived. Because it is the last session, it also turns openly to departure: Bartholomew speaks of leaving for Mary-Margaret's sake, of continuing his work from the immaterial world, and of the legacy the students already carry in one another.

You Are Within Consciousness: Bartholomew opened by correcting the instinctive picture: people believe there is consciousness within them, and they have it exactly backwards — "You are within consciousness." All the work asks, he said, is that you give up your tenacity, the human clinging to "me and mine," the insistence "I know I can do it." When you relax that, what takes its place is what has always done it: consciousness reveals itself as the doer, while the body-mind is only the last to catch up, finally saying "I didn't do it after all. I didn't create myself." He offered deep sleep as the standing proof — every night you enter a state of non-form, aware of nothing, yet you never wake doubting that you slept or wondering whether you went to bed as one person and rose as another. The great ones, he added, simply do consciously what the sleeper does blindly: Sai Baba answers to his name yet knows he is not the name — "in and out, in and out," always aware of the going.

By What Light Do You See: The heart of the morning was a teaching he said he had pressed for seventeen years. A brilliant mind, he insisted, is a brilliant reflection of the light of God, but it is not God — and to demean any mind, brilliant, mediocre, or inferior, is nonsense, because all are equally objects in consciousness perceived by the light of awareness. You cannot see the sun without that light; the sun itself is only a form in the consciousness of God. "You see each other because of the reflection of the light of God," he said — without it there would be no perception, and indeed nothing at all. So the instruction was to stop trying to fix the ever-changing objects and instead notice the light by which you perceive anything: "you see by the light of God, you hear by the light of God, you think and breathe and move and have your being in the light of God." It is not hidden. "Open your eyes. It's right under your nose." And the deeper turn: people say "I want to be seen," but what they truly want is to see — to know themselves as the light by which all things are perceived and in which all things rise, live, and dissolve.

Do Not Chase the Blissful Experience: To one who had known a powerful opening and wanted it back, Bartholomew was gently blunt: you cannot do it. He retold Mary-Margaret's own error — a luminous experience in an abandoned temple in Andritsyna, Greece, and her conviction that she must live there to have it again. That wonderful feeling, he said, was just another object in consciousness; it rose and it went, and now you are swimming through the sea of consciousness begging Paul or Bartholomew to help you find it. "It's gone. It rose in consciousness and it's gone." The point is neither to grow addicted to the objects you love nor to flee the ones you hate, but to become aware of that within which all of them rise and fall. "You can go home after lunch," he teased when one seemed to grasp it — everything lives and dies in consciousness endlessly, and that motion is not the point; the milieu that holds it, and the light that illumines it, is.

This Is It, Peggy: In one of the tape's most tender exchanges, Bartholomew scolded and played with a longtime student who still believed that what she experiences now differs from what she will experience when enlightened. "You just haven't yet realized this is it," he said. It is hide and seek, and one of these days the door will open. When she looked at a face or a wall and said "I'm not enlightened," he asked whether she saw light — "You are seeing the light of God every time you open your eyes. Even when you close your eyes," for the very blankness behind closed lids is still sight, still being, still God. Her mind was searching for something other than this, saying "it's not enough," looking for a special slice of something elsewhere, and that idea — that it must look different, feel different, sound different — is the only thing that separates. "This is it, Peggy. Just this moment, the next moment, the next one." He closed the exchange by apologizing for having overlooked her hand earlier, asking that there be "no residue," since any negative reading of the oversight had no reality at all.

A Dance, Not a Funeral March: Asked why consciousness bothers with movement and complexity at all rather than resting in silent simplicity, Bartholomew answered that the delight lies precisely in the play between two states. You enjoy the stillness of deep sleep and you enjoy waking; to be always awake would be disaster, always asleep would be boring. Simplicity is fine, he said, but complexity is interesting too — this is why the East Indians call it a dance and not a funeral march, because there is life and enjoyment and endless facet in it. He widened the frame with a grin: human expression is by no means the only mode of consciousness creating, and people have it wrong when they file every other reality onto distant planets — there are countless realities with nothing physical about them at all. It is, he said, a wondrous explosion, and creation moves through endless modalities simply for more delight.

The Goddess as Intuitive Power: On the goddess energy, Bartholomew refused the language of masculine and feminine as too superficial, calling it instead a human thing — the intuitive returning to balance an intellect humankind has honed to a cold, fine point. "Intellect is cold," he said, "not something you want to snuggle up with at night or even when you're in pain." He reported very intellectual men having goddess dreams in therapists' offices the world over, no longer the old forms, because the goddess is that part of every psyche that can go deeply into the intuitive, so close to the creative and inspirational. He warned against reviving the old goddesses — Hera raging and jealous, turning women into cows and trees, "a lousy goddess" — and urged the students to build new intuitive roads instead, and not to make it another war of the sexes. This power, he said, is what will help save the planet, for the goddess energy is the one that will stand up and say "stop it, stop it, stop it," and when she speaks she will be heard. But he cautioned too against intuition gone amok — the person too sensitive to shop or make dinner — since either faculty overdone breeds imbalance.

Play the Hand You Were Dealt: To one who longed to be a hermit and dreaded dealing with people, Bartholomew asked whether being good with people is necessary for God-realization and answered flatly, "absolutely not" — some are so good with people they never think of God at all. Every life, every hand, is as good as any other when the goal is awakening; the task is not to clean up the hand or steal another's high cards but to play what you were dealt and quit complaining you did not get the ace of spades. The queen of spades, he said — the darkest, most offensive thing about you — may be the very doorway, the highest card in your hand. When you sat with the Dalai Lama and he laughed that you have problems, he meant he has them too; problems are the human condition, and it is only a problem to have problems if you make it one, since it is your problems that lead you to who you are. He extended this to every "negative" attribute: let it be a bell ringer that stops you and drops you into the vast, deathless place within — and if life has dealt you a difficult person you have tried for thirty years to change, get metaphorically on your knees in gratitude, because that person was given to you as the bell.

Have More Faith in Me: Because it was the last session, Bartholomew turned to leaving. He asked the students, without arrogance, to have more faith in him than they did — not to underestimate the power of the unseen world he represents. A primary reason for his departure, besides Mary-Margaret's own need to deepen (he pictured himself kicking her downstairs when she wants to linger on a familiar plateau), is that this energy will help them more from the unseen than the seen: "In the non-physical there are no filters." "You've never been doing it all," he told one who feared the teaching's end; the love that has held him is not going anywhere. "I haven't let you down in the physical. Why would I ever let you down in the immaterial world where I am much more powerful?" His assignment is not finished, he said, and he is stuck with it until each one who joined him in the heart awakens. He received a woman's testimony that he had helped her less than the mosses and the ground had, and rejoiced — "I'm very happy that you were more helped than I was" — reminding them that they help each other deeply. He praised one man for his service to Justin and Mary-Margaret, told a teacher bound for Sydney to trust his own intuition with people who need the truth simply and now rather than in the old centuries-long systems, and sent him off: "Travel well, my friend."