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OPENING — ON EXPERTISE AND INNER AUTHORITY

I'm here because I read once that an expert is somebody who is at least 500 miles away from home — so that makes me an expert. But I don't hope you hold me to it.

The only expertise I have is in my own experience, and nobody can match me on that. My life's interest has been to know a little bit about a great many things, and consequently I know a lot about many things but don't know very much about any of them. But that's been my thing — medicine and general practice. I know a little bit about a lot of ailments, but I've never become a specialist. In the spiritual field, I've studied the teachings of all the great religions, and I know a little bit about many of them, but I'm not an expert in any of those fields either.

My word to you is this: follow your own inner drive. Nobody knows your blueprint except you. Don't put your blueprint on anybody else, and don't let anybody else put theirs on you. Don't let anybody put his trip on you if it doesn't feel like what you want. I quite agree with Bartholomew on that.

BACKGROUND — HYPNOSIS AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

Back about 20 years ago I took a couple of seminars in hypnotism. I got into that after reading the book by Morey Bernstein — The Search for Bridey Murphy — and so I played with hypnosis and age regression with a few people. Quite interesting, lots of variety, Murphy type of thing. I used it occasionally in my practice, occasionally for pain relief.

My wife, being an obstetrician, used it with her patients too — but usually without calling it hypnosis, because in our country particularly, many people are frightened by the word. They've heard strange things about it — that people can get control over you if you're in a subject position. So she didn't call it hypnosis. She just said, "Let me teach you how to relax." And she got along very well with her OB patients that way.

MEETING MARY-MARGARET — THE FIRST SESSION

Then Mary-Margaret — I think we first met her around 1963. I'd gone to Los Angeles and was invited to talk to a group at a psychologist's office. These people had been to Menlo Park — the Stanford Research Institute — for a federally financed research program on experimental psychedelics. Very well done. Mary-Margaret had been part of that program, and so had a number of other people. They were meeting every week at the psychologist's office. I was invited to come and talk to them because we had been exploring hypnosis as a tool for understanding psychic experience. That's where I first met Mary-Margaret, about 1963.

Over the years she was our friend, visiting in her various homes — in California, up in British Columbia, Taos, and so forth.

At one point during a regression at our place, she went back to a past life in Palestine — one of the Old Testament prophets, though no name came. Then a few months later, she was having some personal problems and came down from Santa Fe to talk to me. She said, "Maybe if we use hypnosis, we can go back to something that's causing these problems." She came down on the 3rd of December, 1977.

So I said okay. Did an induction — it worked quite well. Then I said, "Would you go to some event in this lifetime or some other that will help us understand what the situation is?"

She went back. I said, "Now where are you?"

She said, "I'm in a monastery. I'm in charge of copying manuscripts." [She appeared to be an elderly Greek monk.]

I said, "Is anybody else there?"

"Yes, there are five young monks working under me."

"How old are you?"

"About sixty."

"Have you always been in a monastery?"

"No — I had a wife and children, but war came along many years ago and I came out here to the monastery to get away from it all."

And about this point there was an interruption. What was obviously a different entity — a different personality, a different feeling altogether — that said: "We have been working with this woman for a long time. We are glad to have this opportunity to speak to her more directly through you with regard to her problem."

It then gave instructions: "Just be very quiet inside. Say to yourself — not out loud, but to yourself — remember why we came here. Remember why we came here."

Things began to change. He was not responding angrily. He was quiet. And the entity said, "There will be a subconscious communication with him. If he will do this, it will make changes in him too."

Later on, when Mary-Margaret came back to normal consciousness, I told her what had happened. She was very much disturbed. "You mean I'm going to be a psychic? I don't want any part of that."

And I said, "Well, this seems to be different." I'd had a lot of experience with psychics in the last 25 or 30 years — since my son died and I had to find out whether the death of the body was the end of life. I found out it wasn't. But I had experience with many of them, and I had explored many communications like this. And to me, something authentic was happening here. This one spoke as one with authority.

So I tried to reassure her. But she didn't want anybody to find out about it. She didn't tell Justin.

THE BOTULISM CRISIS — JUSTIN COMES IN

I think in March of 1978, Justin — he was working as a counselor at the State Penitentiary near Santa Fe — attended a conference of prison workers in a town in Mexico. I've forgotten which one. About 35 people got sick after that conference with botulism, which is very serious — often fatal, from food poisoning. Two or three of them died. I think Justin came very close to dying, but he made it out.

In the meantime, he knew that Mary-Margaret and I had something going, because we'd go to their place and disappear into the bedroom with a tape recorder to have a session with Bartholomew. We had to bypass Justin. Finally she told him about Bartholomew.

When Justin was recovering from the botulism incident, he and Mary-Margaret came to our place in Socorro and spent a few days with us. Mary-Margaret was pretty tense about it — "Will I even let go with Justin here?" But she did.

And Bartholomew said to Justin: "Mr. Moore, you made a commitment before you came into this lifetime to go for the top spiritual attainment. You have been failing your commitment. And so has the woman. There is important work for you to do in this lifetime, and I think it's about time you got busy with it."

And Justin said: "Yes, master. Yes, master. Yes, master."

The turnaround that night was remarkable. You wouldn't have believed he was the same man as before. And Justin said afterward, "You know, when I started talking with Bartholomew, I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask him. He answered all of them before I asked any of them."

Bartholomew told Justin about his past incarnations — that he had been very dramatic in some, very sinful in others, but that this time he was bound to go for the top spiritual attainment — and he hadn't been doing it. And it was time.

THE NAMING OF BARTHOLOMEW

When the entity first interrupted Mary-Margaret's past life as the Greek monk, I had asked the name. The entity gave the name of the monk: Bartholomew.

A couple of sessions later I said to this entity, "You were not that Bartholomew — that was the past life personality you came in through."

He said, "Correct. But the vibrations were close enough that I could use that entry point. So I used it as an opportunity to begin this work."

I said, "Can I have your real name?"

He said, "Names are not important. If I were to give you some important name, you would all get too excited trying to identify it. And you would be even more put off if I said I was Jesus — because I've heard of psychics who claimed that, and it turned everybody off. It doesn't sound like Jesus to me."

He said, "Call me Bartholomew. Call me Joe if you want. Names don't matter. What matters is whether what I say feels true to you, and whether you do something with it."

So we called him Bartholomew, although he never actually carried that earth lifetime. At one time he said, "There are a couple of other lifetimes — if I told you, you wouldn't believe it." And since then I've suspected I know who they were. Maybe I should say, maybe I shouldn't. But I think one of them was Ramana Maharshi, because Mary-Margaret didn't know anything about Ramana Maharshi — and all the details that came through have since been confirmed.

THE LIGHT PHENOMENON — SIGHTINGS IN SOCORRO AND DETROIT

About five different people in Socorro who had come to meetings told me — each one independently of the others — "I saw something." One of them said, "I saw a bearded head." So I got a picture of Ramana Maharshi and passed it around. I said, "Did it look like this?"

She said, "Yes, that's exactly what it was."

Then last spring I was with a group in Detroit and someone in the group said, "You know, there was one of us who saw that same thing when Mary-Margaret was up here giving a workshop."

So I asked Bartholomew about it. He said, "Well, let us just say that Bartholomew has never been absent from any of our sessions. Ramana has never been absent from any of our sessions."

HOW I GOT INTO THIS — A PERSONAL HISTORY

Now let me tell you something about myself, because some of you might wonder how I got into this strange field.

My son was in the Navy during the Korean War. He was a radar operator on a plane — a night trainer operating out of a California base. The plane crashed in March 1951. We never heard from him again. Never saw him again.

Then in 1952, I cracked up my own airplane — I was the only one hurt, fortunately. While I was laid up, a patient of mine brought me two books. She said, "I don't know why I'm bringing you these books, because I don't like them myself." One was Sherwood's Life After Death — I had heard Sherwood lecture when I was in college at Penn State, and I figured if he believed this stuff about psychic communication, there must be something to it. The other book was LeConte's. I don't remember much about that one, but it put the question in my mind. So that got me started asking questions, and I began exploring — spending time with psychic researchers and investigators.

In 1957, my other son drowned. He was out on a sailboat on a lake with two others — an 18-foot sailboat in a storm. The mast broke, the ballast shifted, the boat capsized. They were in the water all night. One of them was picked up two days later. So we did find out what happened. Two of them barely made it.

So this put the pressure on — I had to find out what life was all about. I'd been trying to figure it out anyway. We had gone to a Baptist church when we were practicing in Missouri — got sprinkled rather than dunked, so I wasn't really going all the way with it.

Then in 1959, Arthur Ford came. This opened up a whole new era of understanding I'd never encountered before. I was amazed at the amount of research done by qualified scientific men. There really is life after death. Really.

But just surviving the death of the body wasn't enough for me. It didn't answer my real question: what's it all about? What's the whole picture? Why are we here? Where do we come from? Where are we going?

So I began asking those questions. And when you begin to ask questions, you begin to get answers. The books of the mystics began coming to me one way or another — St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, all those Christian mystics, then the Hindu and Buddhist traditions — beginning to provide answers. And then Bartholomew comes along and confirms all these things. That's a long story, but that's as brief as I can make it. It's been a lot of fun.

When our sons died, we thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to anybody. Now I can say it's the best thing that ever happened to me — because it woke me up.

ON PSYCHIC COMMUNICATION — THE RADIO ANALOGY

Through a couple of other psychics we found a number of channels. Some of them were very poor. To me, psychic communication is a little bit like radio used to be in the early days.

I built a little one-tube set back in 1924 in Iowa, with headphones. One night on that set I had built with my own hands, I heard a voice say, "This is Radio KFI, Los Angeles." I was thrilled. But what did I hear most of the time? Static. A lot of static and nothing much else. But I knew I'd heard Los Angeles.

With some psychics, there's a lot of static. With others you get clearer stuff coming through — like Arthur Ford. He was a really good one. I'd say 80% of what came through Arthur was probably correct.

With Bartholomew, I'd say 95% at least. But I still don't accept everything unless it makes sense to me. Here is an authority on spiritual life — but when he talks about something like banking or earthly practicalities, he's learning just as we are. He said so himself once: "I'm learning many things about earth conditions."

ON TRUSTING BARTHOLOMEW — BUT NOT BLINDLY

Mary-Margaret said one time, "I never really knew what love was until I felt Bartholomew's love for everybody who has come here." I can never see anybody quite the same way I used to after watching that. I'm seeing them through his eyes. It's been a tremendous thing for me.

I don't think we should be like some of the fundamentalist brethren in the Christian tradition who take every word of scripture as literal and verbally true. I don't believe that — never did. And I don't think you should make that mistake with Bartholomew either.

He is a great communicator. He's doing a tremendous job. But look at what he says. If it makes sense to you, then do something with it. Don't just listen to this stuff. If it doesn't make changes in your life, you're wasting your time — and mine. If it sounds true to you, use it. If this approach doesn't appeal to you, find something else. If it does appeal to you, then go to work on yourself.

This way does not appeal to everybody. Remember, as Bartholomew said: "This is a way. Never THE way." This is a way. If you're looking for the way home, go and work on yourself. Don't be hearers only. Why have you been sitting here? Have you done enough that you don't have to come back and hear this stuff?

Somebody asked me about certain channeled materials. I've read some of it and found it interesting — but nothing I hadn't come across before. One source claimed that a disciple had to come back to earth because he had made some minor mistake — had to go through more lifetimes as punishment. So we asked Bartholomew. He said, "I cannot agree with that. It would be very unjust to penalize somebody for some minor mistake."

But don't take anything to be 100% true — not what's written in scripture, not what any teacher has said, not what I say — unless you check it out for yourself and it makes sense to you.

Bartholomew said it himself: "Remember, this woman makes mistakes. There are mistakes in communicating. My brother Bartholomew makes mistakes. There are mistakes at all levels." So keep that in mind.

As Paul said: "I know whom I have believed." Not "I believe on somebody else's word" — I KNOW, from my own experience. That's the only kind of knowing that counts. If I know it from my own experience, I'm an expert on that.

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