Who - or what - was Bartholomew?

Over the 17 years during which Bartholomew shared his wisdom through Mary-Margaret Moore, the question of his nature was broached several times.

He established early on that because he realized people wanted to know whether to call him “he”, “she” or “it”, he thought it would be more convenient to just call him “he”, even though he made it clear he didn’t really care one way or another.

Maybe the best answer to the question above came in one of the early sessions (Tape 30C - “Bartholomew’s Function” - June 1978 - Timestamp: 00:00:57) when the facilitator, Justin Moore, asked:

“…we would like to ask something about your function in the plan, the spiritual plan for this planet and for perhaps the cosmic scheme of things. How do you fit in and this work?”

Bartholomew answered:

“Basically, what you need to know is that, just as on the Earth plane so called people have different jobs, in the higher areas certain energy fields are dedicated to certain fulfillments. And an energy field is really how it is best to explain what I am. But if it's easier to stop using that terminology, I will. I say "a teacher" in this case. Certain teachers are given certain assignments, so to speak, because their energies connect up with the necessary unfoldment that should take place. When a force field like myself enters into the Earth plane, which it just has recently - I have not been here in a long sense in terms of the world - and that is because a movement, a shift in energy, is taking place on the globe, and the energies that I used to represent in an area called the Himalayas, which is where I was; again, please understand, when I say I am speaking of a force field, and I am speaking of a force field that greatly extends past any idea in your mind that you might have of a teacher.”

Then something odd happened: another presence came through, interrupting Bartholomew, who said:

“I feel that the other master is about to come in.”

This happened several times in the early years, even though the identity of that “other master” was never revealed. The other master added the following:

“I feel that I would like to intervene at this time for my brother and answer this very high question…

The energy field that he speaks of, if you could observe it in the physical world, would be made up of boundless units of energy that would seem to take on the form of an immense man. This is why so many psychics have interpreted this energy as beings of light, giant beings of light. We are composed entirely of moving, undulating, rhythmically cohesive light. We carry a field of power. At this time, the shift in energy is moving away from the Himalayan section of the world and moving into other places. One of these places is this area. The main focus of this is the mountain called by you the Taos Mountain. …

He continued:

The function is simply to do the best that we can to imbue the entire area with a very high spiritual force. It is greatly advantageous to our plans if we have agents - again, a very bad word - I do not mean agents in the mundane sense. If we have certain vehicles who are receptive to our vibration, who can help to move this energy into greater and greater awareness among the population of that area, the understanding that is necessary must come into the peoples of this area because the destiny of this area is very important.

This second master then proceeded to explain in a nutshell the essence of the message that Bartholomew was to repeat countless times in the following years, namely that:

The question that is constantly asked by Earthlings is "how can I best become aware of this thing called God?" Is this a valid question? The answer is simply that, once you stop thinking of yourself as separate from that force, you will find it easier and easier and easier to merge your consciousness with it. This is best illustrated by the separate mind viewing itself as separate and beginning to view itself as one with every other mind. It is a practical instruction. For example, as you stand in front of another brother, another human being, if you would make yourself aware of the space that lies between your bodies rather than the bodies themselves, you will begin to attune yourself more and more to the Oneness. If, as you look at an object, instead of fastening your view on the object, if you were to fasten your awareness on the space between you and the object, you would soon become aware that space has a meaning. Space itself carries the message of Oneness, and as you concentrate with your eyes and then later with the feel of the space upon your skin, all of these techniques begin to convince you slowly that what you have done is to carve out of the unity of the One individualized objects. If you keep your attention on the individual objects, it is much more difficult for us to break down the mental construct of separateness that you have made over the lifetime. So, as strange as this may sound, it is a very helpful tool for you to concentrate on the space between things rather than on the things themselves.

This was an early clue regarding Bartholomew’s nature and mission. It also explains why on different occasions Bartholomew would describe himself merely as an “Elder Brother,” a “Planetary Brother” or a “Gentle Brother” (hence the titles of the books) or, as in this quote, a simple “Teacher” (Tape No 500 - 27 May 1990 - "Filters" - Timestamp 00:06:07):

… this is not the great, wonderful guru who presents to you the great, wonderful teaching. This is not so. This is the mirror of remembrance. This is all that it is. It is a mirror of remembrance, and in that relationship to you, let us now talk again about the basics.

One teacher in a long line of other teachers

From our human perspective, one could consider Bartholomew as one of the hundreds, if not thousands of spiritual teachers who have appeared in history since the beginning of time to help humans wake up from the illusion that they are separate from the unicity of the universe. But since humans are singularly hard-headed and have short memories, the process needed to be repeated over and over again down the centuries, which is why a prophet, a holy person, a mystic appeared at regular points in time, preached the message of unicity of and with what humans call God (usually mistaking It for some kind of figure that looks like them, only bigger), only to end up killed in some cases or revered in some others. And after a few centuries during which their message ends up distorted, the necessity of yet another refresher course becomes apparent, and a new one shows up. Sometimes they are welcome and adulated, some other times not so much. In some cases they are followed by large numbers of people, if not the majority of a population, while in other cases they have only a small following. It seems that, for all the intrinsic high spiritual quality of his teachings, Bartholomew belongs to this last category, and apparently by design.

Build no organization

As far as spiritual teachers go, Bartholomew is unusual in many ways, and that is what makes “him” so refreshing. One of these ways was how sternly he admonished his followers to not build any type of structure or organization around his teachings. The reason? In his view, any type of group, church, ashram, movement, etc, is distracting individuals from what is ultimately a strictly individual quest. All these groups are not bad in themselves, but all too often their very existence prevent the people from doing the work needed to rediscover their true nature. In other words, while they are reassuring and comfortable, they also serve as crutches. [The extracts below are borrowed from Tape No 191 - “Build no organization around Bartholomew” - The full audio version is available on the site and can be heard here.]

So I would like to clarify at once what we stand for and what we do not. The first thing we do not stand for is a group, a movement, an organization, any of these things. … And the reason I say this with such assurance is that when you come to the realization that you need to find out who you are, there is one thing you will know at once, and that is that it is a one-man job. You must go alone. You cannot go in a group to the gates of heaven and knock and say, "There are 25 of us here. May we enter?" You have to go to your own awareness alone.

Therefore, if you have an organization, that organization is going to, however subtly, bind you by its very cords of what it believes. And it will come to the moment, if you are truly trying to clarify your inner self, where you see their belief structure and your inner self will not be able to accept it because inner self sees no structure at all and you will then be in a clashing position with this thing that you have given your life to.

And it is at that moment that you step back and say, "I will go along with my organization or I will break free." And in breaking free, that means leaving it all behind, saying goodbye, going out. … Lifetimes have been spent doing that. And I say, please, let us not do it again.

… I say this with all the boldness that I can say. If you are really looking, you are alone. Because it is only in the loneliness of looking at your own thoughts, looking at your own beliefs and abandoning them one by one, not through any tricks or magic, but just by seeing them, letting them go through your fingers, it is only through that, that you can come to the clarity where nothing exists within you, where all thought is finally quieted, and then the seer of the all appears. And you cannot do this in groups. You cannot do this through beliefs. You cannot do this through organizations.

… So what then is the job? Simple. To sit so quietly in the still pool that you observe all of the rocks, all of the moss, all of the trees, all of the mountains, all of the sky, just watch it all. By that I mean watch your thoughts, watch your emotions, watch your opinions, watch your beliefs. If you sit there having heavy thoughts and beautiful thoughts of God, I don't care, that's a thought. … We are still in the realm of thought. And it is not there that you will find it. So, I say to you, be grateful that it does not take an organization. Be grateful that it only takes one thing, because that one thing you have, which is you. And that is all that it’s ever taken and all that it ever will take.

… For those who find this too steep, too austere, too boring, I say I understand. Go your way, find a group, join it, believe in it, give your all to it and learn all you can from it. But whatever happens, there comes one day when you must stand and say, "There is just my being. That's all I know."

… So what do we speak of when we talk about ascent to freedom? We speak about this: for people who want to come and observe the external world, who want to do a great deal of talking, who want to have a great deal of external relationships, then this is not the place for them. Not because they are not loved and welcomed, but because that is not what it's all about. What this place is all about is the lonely walk within your own being to your own self.

So, I say this so that those in the world who are hearing this tape will not be misled by thinking that when they come here, [Taos, NM] that they're going to see a bunch of people running around, taking care of them, showing them this, taking them there, to the art galleries, this and that. That is all available for whoever wishes. But when we speak of what we stand for, what we are here for, we are here as no-thing. Nothing. Nothing.

That is all that we have to offer, which is a space to look at nothing. That is all. Anything else is simply confusion, is more of your senses, is more of your mind. We are not here to validate that. We are here to calm things as best we can, split in the clarity of the calmness, what can arise is the beauty of who you really are. There is no such thing as an organization. There is no such thing as a Bartholomew group. There is no such thing, because there is only no-thing. And if you follow this, it isn't even a path. It is nothing.

And yet it is all. And that is what I'm calling you to. …

Bartholomew’s past lives

Bartholomew was also often asked what were his past lives. On several occasions, he ignored the request, considering that it was of no importance. Nevertheless, on at least one occasion, he relented and explained how three rather dramatic lives were what allowed him to re-discover his true nature and absolved him from needing to come back in physical form. [The full audio version and transcript of the tape where this information is found - Tape 166A - have not been added to the site yet. They will in due time. What follows is an abbreviated and edited version.]

First significant life

An Egyptian experience. At that time, he was a male, a strong, extremely handsome male who had picked an incarnation of great physical beauty because he so desired to taste the fruits of the physical life. And he did so. He was not one of the slaves, but rather one of those closer to the Pharaoh. Not of great importance, no great wisdom, no great understanding, simply very, very good looking, very attractive to the female and male of the season, and he indulged himself totally and utterly in such pursuits.

But then came the day he fell from the chariot, which ran over his beautiful face, completely disfiguring it. And now instead of beauty, we have terrifying ugliness.

And now the worshippers of his body look upon his face and say "I want nothing to do with you." But he is still very much alive, and because of the pain, the ego and the inability to face the look of horror that overcomes other people's faces when they look at him, he retreats.

And in those days, there were many places to retreat where people would leave you very much alone. Coming from a family that we would consider relatively well-to-do, it was not a matter of having to work for a living, but he had to face the people who came to give him his daily providing and become accustomed to their look of horror, since his was an extremely ugly countenance.

That life ended abysmally, within and without. Toward the end, however, in the last weeks of his lifetime, having selected the solitude of the dryness of the desert to live in, there came upon him some kind of an inner stirring that said “I do not feel ugly. My countenance is greatly changed and the world responds to me very differently, but I do not feel changed. What is this?”

Infection had set in through all of the festering of the face. The eyesight was gone. The chords were decayed. Speech was impossible because of the tremendous lack of ability. The jaws, the structure was completely destroyed. No speech. No seeing. And very little hearing. So we're talking about a total isolation. A total, if you will, renunciation, day and night, alternating between the two forces, one of anger, hatred, and resentment at a universe that could have done this, and that feeling of, “but I am still the same. Where have I changed? Where have I changed? And my feelings about myself are not different. What is this all about?”

Round after round, night after night. Much spent away because of the tremendous pain, with none of the great panaceas of drugs, but the one thing that can be said about him is that given the option of ending it all, he did not do so. As tempted as he was, he said, "I will stay until I understand."

And that is where the real growth began. When that choice was made on that dark night, when the choices were available to live or to die, he said, "I choose to stay until I understand." The damage of the physical was so extensive that life did not last much longer after that.

But at the end of this life, there was the knowledge, the absolute knowledge, that as people perceive you, you are not. Did you hear this? That as people perceive you, you are not. He knew because he knew himself to be something within, and the perception of others on outside was totally different. And he could see clearly, as clearly as day and night, the difference that he was not.

So death comes, freeing him into the other world, where a perusal of the situation takes place. Most of all, the perusal of the misuse of the physical form, the abuse of many, many females in pursuit of his own desires. The choice to reincarnate then came quickly.

Second significant life

And now “he” is a woman, of course. Lowly born, very ugly, deformed by choice. She finds herself at work in the mud patches for the Pharaoh, moving up and down on her feet, bringing water to those who are thirsty.

And she is despised because she is truly very ugly. But in it all, there is a taste, the remembered taste, and this is why the quick incarnation. The desire not to forget that part which said “you are not what you appear to be.”

As a child, she is very much abused and very much misused by men. Now we see something quite miraculous for such a degrading experience. For any of you who can remember life as prostitutes, or having been used as a prostitute, you will find one thing: when the prostitute's body is being used, because of the horror of that whole experience, you have two choices. You may go insane, or you go within.

And if you go within, no one can touch you. Whatever is happening to your physical body has nothing to do with you, because you are within. And this was the choice that this young girl made. And while whatever was being done to her was done, she made no response. She fought not against it, all was allowed, no one came to her defense. “That ugly mud hen? She should be grateful that anyone paid attention to her at all” is their response.

But she goes within, and quietly within her being now, she begins to feel once again “I am not that which I appear to be. I am not this physical body.” Because of the horror, the loathing and the anathema of that experience, again, instead of choosing death, always an option, she goes within. And she begins to sense again and to taste again upon that light, that radiance that was there.

And then it begins to show through her eyes. And she is truly able to see as others could not see, but she didn't speak of it. A mud hen doesn't talk to a great rooster, a pheasant or a peacock. A mud hen just sits quietly and does what has to be done to keep body and soul together.

But she's beginning to see. What you would call the psychic vision is beginning to open. She's beginning to understand. And slowly, it opens, and her world becomes vaster, and vaster, and vaster.

And then a very strange thing happens. Those men who come to abuse her, they abuse her. But now they remain to talk with her. And she sits quietly and shares. This is a very uneducated woman, very simple. No great intellect here. Simply be. Of that she knows. And they leave and they go home. And something in them is lighter, happier. And it has nothing to do with sexual relationships because they've had that countless times with countless people.

Their mind wonders “What is that, what is it?” She's not aware of it. She's not actively doing anything, she's just giving up what she has. But a change has taken place now, because she has learned something. This next statement will be anathema, but she had learned that her service was being a prostitute.

Day and night, in beautiful, wondrous, total giving of her physical, she rose and joined with the life that she now had, and each man left with something far more wonderful than he imagined. And she began to accumulate money, because now people were saying, "Wow, this is wonderful, this is special." And of course in their minds they thought, well it must be some new trick she's learned, some new physical, physiological trick of the body to make me feel so wonderful. So they began leaving more and more coins.

And then the voice comes to her that says, "Why don't you take your coins and clean your body and go somewhere else and build a new life?" And the answer was not that. The answer was no. This is my place of service. This is my way of service. And I will serve this way until the gods remove me. And all of this money that was accumulated was handed out to the child on the street, the woman with too many children, the man abandoned by his family and friends and alone, the leper.

And that life ends. Strangely, one of the main difficulties of those lives is that the prostitute almost always died of venereal disease. And so she chose it, and so it was. And at the funeral, as extraordinary as it was, there were many around who wept in a very strange way for a woman that they did not understand and could never have understood.

Third significant life

Then we have the next life, which was the last, or the last that I think I should speak of.

Now we find a man again. Strong, ordinary. But early on, burning with something he knows not. A shepherd family, wandering with his flock, many, many hours alone on the hillside, surveying the flock and the unknown and the sky.

And he wonders, and he wonders, and he spends most of his early years alone. And he wishes to free himself from this life because it seems to him that he needs to know something. And he does not know. And how can he know? But he knows that to lead his life is to deprive his mother of her sole means of support.

So he chooses this day to see the line that follows through all the lives. Then he starts thinking, "The one thing I do not wish to do is that which will never be because it would hurt others." And he stayed.

And he sits upon those very, very jagged rocks along the hillside, day after day after day, and he sits near one particular tree. And he moves against this tree day after day, and somehow a silence descends upon him. More and more. And he wonders why it is that his charges of animals don't go far away, because you know, most shepherds spend a lot of time chasing things that are lost, you know, in crevices and crannies, and they run away. And this would have taken up much of his time, but they don't go, and he sits there, and they kind of sit around - not near him, it’s not a Saint Francis situation - but simply they didn't go falling off ravines and making a lot of trouble for him. So he's given a lot of time, and he's saved a lot of time. And day by day, night by night, because in the summer months they stayed there all the time, day and night.

And this newness now begins to take over. And at first he thinks it's the tree because he spends so much of his time with this tree. He sleeps under it. He uses his branches. He hangs onto it when the storms are bad. It is his mother. And all the time, wondering, where does this power come from? Because it is here.

And then he leaves and goes down into the valley, and he misses it and his sweetness is gone. And he earns, and he returns to his tree. So he begins his mind to make a misidentification. He feels that it is the tree and so forth.

And then he becomes ill. And he realizes that there isn't much time left. But he also realizes that he hasn't done it. Whatever this thing is, he has not done it. So he cries to the tree. And he says, "Mother, teach me. I haven't learned it. I don't know yet what it is!”

And in that moment in time, because of his simplicity, because of his tremendous yearning to know, the walls fall, and he talks. And he knows many things now. But mostly he knows that what he has been given, the teachers that had led him, all of the men that had abused him, all of the deprivation he had ever suffered, were all his teachers. And in that one incredibly vast night, he sends gratitude to all, especially those that had hurt him, because now he's here.

There were two other lives on the earth which I won't go into, the glamour of which would be arrogant on my part, but I would simply say that that was the moment of knowing from which I have never returned.

I mention the ones that I do because I want you to understand that there is always that time when you know that that which wounded you the most is that which brought you the closest.