Death, Bartholomew insists, is the wrong place to begin — and so he refuses to start there. Before anyone can learn how to die, he says, they must first learn how to live, for a life lived with enough depth, focus, joy and wonder makes the so-called ending moment as easy as stepping off an aircraft into a new city with the spontaneous thought, "oh, what's next?" What follows is a sustained meditation on the deathless: the mysterious, ever-present source into which we already drop a thousand times a day, between every breath and every thought, without ever noticing. The whole of the teaching turns on a single willingness — to let die what can die, and to relax into what cannot.

Context: This was a commercially released Bartholomew teaching cassette, the second of a set of four issued as part of a series addressing specific aspects of our relationship to God, channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, who had by then been working with the inspirations of Bartholomew since 1977. Its subject was "awakening to the deathless" — the premise that everyone takes birth in order to have some kind of awakening, and that it is our willingness to let die those things that can die that leads to the experience of the deathless. Bartholomew argued that it is essential to know how to live before concerning ourselves with how to die, and he spoke of illness as a doorway that can be used as a focus for awakening. The tape opened with a discussion of the nature of the deathless and moved through an extended question-and-answer exchange with the gathered listeners, whose names have been omitted here.

How to Live Before How to Die: Bartholomew set aside the question of dying at once, saying the essential knowing is how to live — because a life with real quality, depth, focus and "magnificent joy and fun and wonder" in it turns the terrifying final moment into something simple and even, if he could be so rude, exciting. He compared it to arriving in a new city or country: the aircraft comes to a stop, you step off, and your first thought is "oh, what's next?" The dreaded ending moments, he reminded them, are not truly endings but "just moments of a continuum," and approached with that spontaneous quality they become easy, expansive, magnificent. But to understand living, one first has to ask who it is that is living this life — and the basic assumption everyone has made for years is that it is the ego doing the living.

The Mercurial Ego and Its Endless Motion: Ego, Bartholomew explained, is a cluster of thoughts that, taken in a bundle, we call "my mind." He traced the flow precisely: a thought arises, the body produces a physical sensation in response, the two coming together produce what we call an emotion, and out of the emotion comes action or inaction — a composite of cause and effect we then label "me, mine, what I want, what I'm afraid of." Yet this seemingly substantial self is the most insubstantial thing in all creation, more insubstantial than the table, the glass, the floor. It is like mercury, constantly shimmering and running this way and that: I used to love steak, now I am a vegetarian, now I hate everyone involved with steaks, and how dare you be interested in them. He asked the listeners to watch this ever-changing mercury with good humor, because understanding its flow is precisely how one learns to return home.

Full of Holes: The Gaps Between Breath and Thought: As one watches the ego move in and out like a flood tide, Bartholomew said, one discovers that this seeming solid self is full of holes, full of gaps, full of openings. The most observable is in the breath itself: no one breathes in an unbroken line — there is the in-breath, a pause, the out-breath, another pause, breath resting back into the deep self. Thought is no different: it rises, and then there is space, wonderful empty space with no thought, and it subsides back into its source before another rises. He offered the image of a magnificent lake, out of which waves arise by the power of the lake itself, move in their patterns, and fall back. The frightening picture people carry — of an ego building bigger and bigger, faster and faster, until it crashes in one catastrophic moment called death — is false. The reality is infinitely gracious: constant breaks, constant returns, motion forever subsiding back into the source out of the tremendous love and compassion of the deep self.

Sleep as the Rehearsal for Death: Bartholomew pointed to sleep as the plainest evidence of what death actually is. A dream is only a wave rising out of sleep; when the dream ends and one falls into deep sleep and wakes the next morning, no one spends days weeping that a dream is over. A genuinely good night's rest, he observed, is never one full of nightmares and pursuit — it is the night when the small "I" of ego dissolves entirely, when there is no thought, no emotion, no action, nothing. Yet no one wakes saying, "I died last night and recreated myself this morning"; instead one wakes feeling better for having fallen into that state of non-being. "That is death," he said — the same blessed dissolution people yearn toward night after night, crying "blessed sleep, blessed sleep," while being terrified of its twin. He extended the point to the body itself, noting that science now finds subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence, there and then not there, exactly as the breath is there and then not there — the body constantly dying and reconstituting, so that the body going to bed at night is never quite the body that rises in the morning.

Turning the Face Toward the Beloved: The one thing asked of a person, Bartholomew said, is simply to turn — and this he described as a love affair. As you turn your awareness back toward the deep self, whether you call it God, Atman, Brahman, the Son of God, or your true nature, you begin to fall, quite literally, in love with an "ever present, absolutely thunderously powerful energy field" humming through everything. He was careful to say that this God-self will never, out of its love, spin you around by force and demand your attention; like any true lover it allows the temporary separated awareness to go where it wishes. All that is required is that you turn back and then relax and allow it — and, like stepping out of the shade and turning your face to the sun, the sun does what it does: it shines, warms, nourishes, and pulls you toward it. The turning, though, must be repeated moment after moment, because the human mind rebels against a thing that must be done again and again. The whole of it reduces to a single willingness: not a trying, not a grasping, but the sweet, spontaneous "I am willing" — which he called the great and courageous shout of awakening, made without even knowing what one is willing for.

The Dandelion and the Billiard Ball: Bartholomew warned that beginners are often discouraged by misidentifying what the experience will feel like. Having read of bliss, light and angels, they turn within and find nothing there — not something bad, just empty — and conclude "that's not it." But putting a toe in the surf is not swimming; that comes only in the plunging depths. A rare few great sages — Ramana Maharshi, Christ, the Buddhas, Rumi, St. Francis — arrived by hurling straight down into the source like a billiard ball dropped from the sky, drowning completely in the self. Most people are more like a dandelion puff, full of spaces and no focused power, floating gently wherever the wind of lifetime after lifetime carries them. What one wants is to become the billiard ball — heavier with divine power, prana, focus — so as to fall at greater velocity into the depths between the breaths and the thoughts. And here he named the grace of God: no moment of focus is ever wasted or dissolved in the night; it accumulates, deeply and wondrously, so one need not worry about lacking twenty minutes to meditate but only do what one can and let grace do the rest.

When You Know Who, You Will Know Why: Pressed on why, if the deep self is doing everything, the world is such a mess, Bartholomew refused to give a mental answer, saying any such answer merely lets the mind conclude "now I know." He asked instead that the question be suspended until one actually knows what one is talking about. Do you know how to create a dream, he asked, or to create deep sleep, or to make yourself breathe? The lights overhead do not honestly imagine they are the source of their own heat; trace the wire back and something unknown moves the whole operation. So too the ego, like a light bulb believing it lights up your life, will discover endless circuitry running back into the deep self that has been guiding and moving it all along. "Once you know who," he said — who is creating, breathing, living, moving through you — "you'll know why," but until then no idea will suffice. The way is not to fight the mind or read texts, but to go quietly, with no rules, to the only place available, which is oneself: shut up, be still, drop, and let the mysterious awareness reveal itself.

Illness as a Doorway and Letting Die What Can Die: In the closing exchanges Bartholomew turned to suffering and illness, taking up a listener's question about creating a serious illness as a "foolproof" way to say "I'm willing." Every birth, he said, is taken in order to come to some awakening, and part of the vast self may choose "a true dynamic wake-up call" that catches one by the throat — not only through disease but through poverty, or a child's suffering — using the pulsation of the moment to force awakening. But there is never a universal answer: within every dis-ease lies the person's own particular question, whether to transcend, to love, or finally to slow down, and it can never be imposed from outside. The instruction was to stop projecting outward — blaming a hostile neighbor, a lost love, a difficult circumstance — and instead bring the feeling close, as close as a hand held to the face until it can no longer be seen. Meet the loneliness, the fury, the fear fully and it disappears, not forever but for now, revealing the open, pristine moment beneath. What one truly wants to die, he said, is not the body — which dies easily and endlessly anyway — but the fears, self-pity, doubt, righteousness, and even humility. Let die what can die, and what is revealed, never born because it was always there, is the deathless. He ended with an urgent call: in the next ten years there is a maximum opportunity, greater than ever on this planet, for more people to know exactly who they are and what God is — so be willing, again and again, to die to fear now without anything outside having to change, and then let God do what God has always been doing, and relax and allow it.