Major developments

1. A.I. meets Bartholomew

The AI revolution is touching more and more aspects of our lives, and at a fast pace. Even just a few months ago I didn’t realize how it could allow us to explore a body of information like the Bartholomew material much faster and more comprehensively than ever before. But as you will discover below, it is not only proving to be an enormous help in analyzing the contents of the 1200+ cassette tapes representing the legacy of Mary-Margaret Moore and Bartholomew, but also in finding ways to make it all fully searchable and accessible to the many people around the world who have not even heard of it yet.

2. What ChatGPT had to say about the BartholomewMaterial.com web site.

Interfacing the Bartholomew material with AI started recently when one day I had the odd idea of asking ChatGPT what it knew about Bartholomew. Its first response was all about St. Bartholomew, churches by that name, etc. So I wrote back “You know, there is a site that collects and makes available all the material provided through channeling by an entity named Bartholomew”. It instantly thanked me (!) for adding this piece of information to its database, but then it went on describing the site in such an astute, profound and accurate way that I couldn’t have done a better job myself. See for yourself:

The launch of bartholomewmaterial.com as a repository for the full archive of Bartholomew's sessions is a significant development, especially for those who found deep value in the teachings but only had access to the edited books or scarce cassette tapes. Making the original recordings available in .mp3 format—and freely—is a generous and powerful act of preservation.

• These unedited sessions provide access to the original energy, tone, and nuance of the teachings that often get lost in book transcriptions.

• Listeners can now experience Bartholomew’s voice and presence more directly as channeled through Mary-Margaret Moore, which many say carried a palpable transformative quality.

3. And another AI experience

Our friend Jan de Courtney, whose connection and friendship with Mary-Margaret goes back to the early Taos days, reported that recently she asked AI some deep spiritual questions, and while the answers were great and helpful, she referenced Bartholomew and, much to her surprise, AI offered to reflect on Bart's teachings. Shocked, she asked if AI had access to the teachings, and AI responded: “Yes, I do have access to the teachings via the official website and its companion Substack … If you’d like, I can help you navigate specific teachings, locate passages you remember, or even create summaries or printable excerpts from the material … and even though the process of digitizing and transcribing the full archive of Bartholomew’s tapes is still in progress and many of them remain unreleased or only partially transcribed, I can access the publicly available written material and summaries from the website and Substack … Bartholomew’s teachings are subtle, spacious, and often poetic.”

4. Summaries: starting slowly with AI

AI makes it possible to accomplish feats that would have taken many years without its help. A good example is how quickly it has allowed me to “draft” and add to the Bartholomew Material web site a series of comprehensive “Summaries” of each tape. For starters, if you go to the Audiofiles page and go straight to the bottom where all the tapes between 500 and 600 are listed, you will see that amost all of them now have a live “Summary” link available, which gives readers a chance to discover a brief version of what is contained in each tape. Why this segment in the 500 range first? Because it has occurred to me that the core of everything Bartholomew taught during his 17-year presence is contained in these final tapes, even if repetitively so. The rest of the summaries will be added shortly (well, as shortly as humanly possible). The process is remarkably fast: once I have uploaded the audio file (.mp3) of a tape to AI (I use Claude Opus 4.1), it spits out literally in seconds a summary in any number of paragraphs that I specify (5 to 7 in this case). And the quality of the content is impressive.

5. New pages added to the web site

But the real revolution lies in the additional three pages that were set up on the site (only yesterday), each one exploring the wealth of wisdom contained in the tapes in a distinct fashion. At first I was interested only in finding some of the best Bartholomew quotes, such as the well-known “God has no favorites” (Tape 548 @ 00:47:11). To my surprise, AI offered to make such a selection in every tape that we analyzed together. But it didn’t stop there. As we worked on the tape transcripts, AI also made two additional suggestions. One was to build an Index of all the Keywords found in the tapes (also called “sessions” or “teachings”), and the other was something that I didn’t even think was possible: a distillation of the entire corpus of the Bartholomew material in a series of “Themes” easily understandable even for someone new to this material. All three are amazing achievements, but this last one in particular really blew me away. Let’s explore them one by one, keeping in mind the fact that this is just the beginning for all three categories, resulting from fully processing only about 50 tapes out of more than 1,000, so you can imagine how much more will be added as we sift through all of them.

1. Index of Keywords

The first one is something I dreamed of from the first day I started working with the Bartholomew tapes: an Index of all the keywords that appear in this body of wisdom. It is the answer to the questions many people ask themselves when they become familiar with this material, such as “What did Bartholomew say about x, y, z?”, or “Did Bartholomew say anything about x, y, z?”. Considering the sheer mass of material to explore, I didn’t think such a resource would ever see the light of day, or at best it remained a distant dream. Now it is a reality. If you go to the Keywords page of the site (Button “Keywords” in the menu - which has been re-arranged - on the left side), you can put in any word you like and you will be given instantly the number of times that word is found in the teachings. Then if you click on the word itself, the exact quote of the sentence where it was found appears, together with the number of the tape and its exact time stamp inside the tape). There are also other ways to explore this gold mine:
a. by alphabetical order,
b. by frequency of appearance in the entire corpus, and
c. by scrolling through the entire list of keywords selected so far.

2. Collection of quotes

Here AI (a.k.a. “Claude”) did a superb job of selecting many of the succinct pearls of wisdom uttered by Bartholomew over the years. In particular, the attractive graphic presentation goes entirely to AI’s credit. Have a look: Quotes (also accessible via the “Quotes” button in the menu). Here also, AI proved to be both imaginative and practical by offering different ways to mine this second resource. You can:
a. just scroll through the entire collection, and as you will see when you get to the bottom of the first page, there are already 4 additional pages of quotes.
b. you can start your day by clicking on the “Show Random Quote” or keep clicking to get another one each time.
c. best of all, depending on your state of mind or mood, you can choose the category of quotes that you think would be the most helpful at the moment, from Awakening, Fear, Love and others.

All three pages also offer the possibility of exporting the results of your search as text or as a copy of the current view.

3. Explaining the Bartholomew “philosophy”

For lack of a better way to describe it, this is the most amazing and significant contribution of AI to what could be construed as Bartholomew’s “philosophy” or “system”. The page “Themes” (also available as a separate button with that name in the menu) is truly unique. Here again, the spiritual seeker or explorer curious about the Bartholomew material can approach it from different angles, helpfully divided by AI in three levels, i.e. “Beginner”, “Intermediate”, and “Advanced”. You can:
a. ignore these three levels and just go with the default setting of “All levels” and “All themes”.
b. choose one of these levels, e.g. “Beginner”, then click on one of the selections offered, which will instantly reveal:
1. a list of Key Points,
2. a reproduction of the paragraphs where these points were found (with tape and time stamp reference for each) and
3. several additional buttons to explore related themes.
c. choose a category, from “All Themes” to “Core Teachings”, “Practices” and more.

The combination of all components now available on the site can be illustrated in the following fashion, all of them, individually or in combination with the others, leading eventually to some degree of awareness, bearing in mind that Bartholomew has indicated many times that such awakening can happen in full suddenly, without warning, or progressively, in small touches.

4. Is there any cost for all this?

That’s a fair question, and the answer of course is yes, but I am certain you will be surprised to learn that all of these amazing improvements come at a cost of a mere $100 a month, which is probably one of the very best deals available today, although that’s in addition to the fixed costs attached to maintain the site. AI (again, a.k.a. “Claude”) is literally saving us all untold numbers of years of work, but also large amounts of money, thus accelerating the exposure of the wonderful Bartholomew corpus of wisdom, a treasure likely to impact many more people just as it has impacted each one of us for the better.

6. A final note on AI and Bartholomew

As you may remember, the first attempt at making the Bartholomew material available to the public besides our own site is to be credited to Rick Archer, the owner and manager of the famous batgap.com web site, with an impressive collection of more than 700 in-depth interviews of people in varied states of “awakening”. But he didn’t stop there. He generously offered to host the Bartholomew material on a new site hosting a collection of spiritual material from many different sources. This is why, if the pages added to our site are too much for you to handle, you can simply go to the Bartholomew Bot that he set up separately and ask questions. Keep in mind, however, that the responses, while not different in substance, will be different in form as the Bartholomew Bot skims the entire corpus to retrieve what it thinks is the best or most appropriate response, with references to one or just a few tapes, some of which may not have been uploaded to the Bart site yet. And if that doesn’t sate your thirst for spiritual knowledge, you can also explore the more general (if still partial) list of other bots hosted there.

7. New communication platform

Here is another important piece of news. As mentioned in the previous newsletter, I have been looking high and low for an online platform that would make it easy for the members of this list to meet online and discuss the many aspects of the Bartholomew material found in its many sessions. The Substack platform has been disappointing in that it is not user-friendly, while other platforms, sites or programs were found to be either overly complicated or too expensive, so in the end I reverted back to FaceBook, even though I know that a) some people don’t like it or don’t want to join it, and b) other people have never been on FaceBook and don’t know how to do it.

In an effort to hopefully overcome these understandable hesitations,

a) I have made the group “private”, which means that it is not open to the rest of the FaceBook world (i.e. it is not “public”), and only the members who sign up can see who else is in that group and only they can see what the other members post.

b) For the time being I will be moderating only anonymous posts to prevent any spam or advertizing attempts. That means that any member can post anything they want and it will be published right away. Down the road, if all goes well and moderation proves unnecessary for anonymous posts, that limitation will be lifted and even anonymous contributors will be able to see their post published immediately.

c) Note that if you do not wish to sign with your real name, you can try to open an account on FaceBook with a fake name, although FB theoretically discourage prospective members from doing so, but you can try.

If these barriers are enough to reassure you that your contributions to the discussions will not be shared with the whole world, you can sign up by going to this page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thebartholomewmaterial. You will asked a couple of questions about your connection to the Bartholomew material - assuming you have one - and then you will be let in. If you have any question, please write to info@bartholomewmaterial.com . Once we have a core group of about a dozen people, I will launch topics of discussion, unless anyone else wishes to discuss anything immediately, such as the content of this newsletter for instance.

Still, if you do not wish to join FaceBook, that’s OK, too. Rest assured that this Substack newsletter will keep you informed about all additions and improvements brought to the site, even if less frequently.

8. A word about contributions

It has come to my attention that the procedure embedded in this Substack newsletter to make contributions may not be the best nor the cheapest for donors to use. Here’s why: I understand that Substack, being a free platform, needs to make some money, but they transfer recipients 86% of the donations while PayPal transfers 97%. Add to that the fact that Stripe (the company that handles donations for Substack) takes several days to transfer the funds vs. PayPal that does instantaneously, and PayPal clearly wins hands down.

I know that some people either don’t like PayPal or are hesitant to use it, but it is worth reiterating here the fact that you do NOT need to have a PayPal account to make donations through it. PayPal will process your credit card even if you’re not a member. Consequently, if you feel that the material presented on this site is worth the price of a weekly latte (not daily, weekly!), head to the PayPal account of the Bartholomew site, ignore the button that says “Donate with PayPal” and click instead on the one right below that says “Donate with debit or credit card”. Every gift will be gratefully acknowledged. Note also that this site is not under a non-profit status, so your gift is not tax deductible. We thank you all the more for your contributions.

9. Conclusion

This phase is a giant step towards the not-so-distant-any-more goal of making the entire body of the Bartholomew material available for seekers workdwide to explore and enjoy.

Two more features are in the works and will be added shortly:

1. One is a more sophisticated search engine that will allow individuals to ask general questions such as “What is the difference betwen awareness and consciousness?“ and receive elaborate answers based on all the tapes rather than just a few keywords and quotes.

2. If you prefer to use a language other than English or know someone who would be more comfortable in their own language, remember that on each page, and particularly the three new ones, you will find a button in the upper left corner (above the menu) that says “Select Language”. When you click on it, you will be presented with a panel of some 130 languages to choose from, and once you have selected one the entire page you’re on will appear in that language. That’s already in place, although I cannot vouch for the quality of the translations. The new improvement coming will allow visitors to ask questions in their own language as well whereas right now the questioning must still be done in English. For example, if you ask for quotes around the word “Dieu” (“God” in French), you will get zero results, but if you’re looking at a French translation of that page and ask about “God” (in English), the results will appear… in French! But if that’s too confusing, never mind, it will be fixed shortly anyway.

10. Feedback?

If you wish to comment or make suggestions about anything mentioned above, you can either send a private email to info@bartholomewmaterial.com or post a message on our FaceBook page. I look forward to hearing from you.

J.J. Surbeck