Bartholomew / Mary-Margaret Moore:

The question is, had I been in the physical form, and how did I begin my search? What you are asking, my friend, is for my incarnative history, is it not?

I see. Very interesting. Ah... Do you have time for this, ladies and gentlemen, maybe? I will not bore you with all of the incarnations, because how boring they would be. Because one thing you must understand: most incarnations are very boring.

You look back upon them, and there are certain peak times when things were not boring, but basically it is one of much plateaus and very few high mountain peaks. Look on your own lives, and I think we will find a similarity to them. And I will only touch upon those that I think have any relevancy to what the question is addressed.

In order to do that, we must go back to the days of the Egyptian experience. At that time, a male, a strong, extremely handsome male, having chosen an incarnation of great physical beauty, because he so desired to taste of the fruits of the physical life. And well he did. Suffice is to say that he was not one of the slaves, but rather one of those closer to the pharaoh. No great importance, no great wisdom, no great understanding, simply very, very good looking, very attracted to the female and male of the species, and indulged himself totally and utterly in such pursuit.

But then the day... and the fall from the chariot. And the chariot runs over the beautiful face. And now we have, instead of beauty, terrifyingly ugliness. And now the mighty has fallen, and the great followers and worshippers of the body now look upon the face and say, "I want nothing to do with you." But there is still much life left in this body. And because of the pain and the ego's inability to face the look of horror that overcomes other people's faces when they look upon, he retreats.

But in those days there were many places to retreat where people would leave you very much alone, coming from a family that you would consider relatively well-to-do, it was not a matter of having to work for a living, but rather of having to simply allow yourself to face the people who come to give you your daily providing, and to become accustomed to their look of horror. I'm speaking of an extremely ugly countenance. No such miracles in those days to transform the ugly to the beautiful. That life ended abysmally, within and without.

Toward the end, however, in the last weeks of the lifetime, having selected the solitude of the dryness of the desert to live in, there came upon this young man some kind of an inner stirring that said, "I do not feel ugly. 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? And what is care?" [?]

Infection had set in through all of the festering on the face. The eyesight was gone. The cords were decayed. Speech was impossible because of the tremendous lack of ability... the jaws were structurally completely destroyed. There was no speech. There was no seeing. And there was very little hearing. Some, but very little of it.

So we are talking about total isolation, a total — if you will — renunciation, unasked for, but certainly ... [?]. And the dwelling, day and night, alternating between the two forces: the one of anger, hatred and resentment at a universe that could have done this, alternating with 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 awake because of tremendous pain, you understand? None of the great panaceas of drugs and so forth. And the one thing that I can say about that young man, that I give great credit to him for is this: 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 to the physical was so extensive that life did not last much longer after that. But at the end of the round, there was the knowledge, the absolute knowledge, that as people perceive you, you are not. Did you hear? As people perceive you, you are not!

He knew, because he knew himself to be something within, and the perception of others on the outside was totally different. And he could see clearly, as clearly as day and night, the difference. So the death comes, the freeing into the other world, the perusal of the situation, and most of all, the perusal of the misuse of the physical form, to the abuse of many, many females — that is my tactful way of saying that that part of my experience had misused females as a male, in many ways, in many extreme, in pursuit of his own desires.

The choice to reincarnate comes quickly. Quickly. And now we find a woman — of course — lowly born, very ugly, deformed — by choice — and she finds herself at work in the mud patches for the pharaoh. Does this respond to anyone in this room? I will paint a picture of people working in the mud patches for a pharaoh, moving up and down, with the feet, bringing water to those who are thirsty. Do you hear anything? Do you feel it?

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

So comes a child who, as a young child is very much abused and very much misused by men. No surprise with any of that for you, I'm sure. But still again, now we see something I think quite miraculous for such a degrading experience. For any of you who can remember lives 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. And 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, and it was allowed, and she made no response, she fought not against it, all was allowed, no one came to her defense... "that ugly mud hen who... what? 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 that abused one. I am not this physical body." Because of the horror and 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 began to show through in her eyes, and she was truly able to see as others could not see.

But she did not speak of it. "Mud hen" doesn't talk to a great rooster, or a pheasant or a peacock. A mud hen just goes quietly and does what has to be done to keep body and soul together, but she's beginning to see, what you would call her psychic vision is beginning to open, she's beginning to understand, and slowly it opens, and her world comes back to her, and back to her, and back to her.

And then a very strange thing happens: those men who come to abuse her, then abuse her — or use her, whichever way you put it — but others remain to talk with her, and she sits quietly, in her chair. And this is a very uneducated woman, very simple, no great intellect here. Simply be as what you know. And they leave, and they go home, and something in them is... lighter, happier, and has nothing to do with sexual relationships because they've had that countless times with countless people. This isn't it. Their mind wonders "what... what... what is it?"

She's not aware. She's not actively doing anything. She is just giving up what she has. But a change is taking place now. Because she's learned something. And to all of you great holy religious people, this next segment will be anathema, and I do ask for your great pardon... but she had learned that her service was be a whore, young and nice. In beautiful, wondrous, total giving of her physical, she goes enjoined, with the light that she now had, and each man left with something far more wonderful than he imagined. Day and night.

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, that must be some new trick she's learned, some new physical but... pysiological trick of the body to make them feel so wonderful." So they began leaving more and more coins. And when the voice comes to her that says "Why don't you take the coins and clean your body and go somewhere else, and build a new life?" And the answer was not that. And the answer was "No, this is my place of service. This is my way of serving. And I will serve this way until the Gods remove me."

And all of this money that had accumulated? Handed out. The child on the street, the woman with too many children, the man abandoned by his family and friends and alone, a leper. Wow. Great. And that's where that ends, strangely. One of the main difficulties of those lives is that the horde [?] almost always died of venereal disease... or not. And so she chose it, and so it was. And at the funeral, as ordinary 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.

Then we have the next life, which was the last — at least the last that I think I should speak of. And now we find a man again. Strong. Ordinary. But early on yearning with something he knows not. A shepherd family, wandering flock, many, many hours alone on the hillside, surveying the flock, in the unknown, and the sky. And he wondered, and he wondered. 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 it. And how can he know it? But he knows that to leave his life is to deprive his mother of her sole means of support, so he chooses to stay. This is the line that follows through our lives.

This day, speaking "The one thing I do not wish to do is that which I will do, because it will serve others." And he stays. 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 leans against this tree day after day, and somehow a silence descends upon him more and more, 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 their time chasing things that are lost, and... you know, in crevices and crannies, and they run away, and this would have taken up much of his time and they don't fall, and he sits there, and they kind of sit around and — not near him, I am not trying to... be a St. Francis situation — but that simply means, you know, they didn't go falling off ravines and making life trouble for him.

So he's given a lot of time, and he stays with this time, and day by day, night by night because, now in the summer months, they stay there all the time, day and night. This moment, now, begins to take over. And at first he thinks it's the tree, because he spends so much of his time near this tree. He sleeps under it, he uses its branches, he hangs on to it when the storms are bad. It is... his mother, if you will.

And all the time wondering where does this power come from, because it is here, and when he leaves to go down into the valley, he misses it. And the sweetness is gone in the end, and he returns to this tree. So he begins, in his mind, to make a misidentification, feels that it's the tree, and whole heart. And then he becomes ill, and he realizes that there isn't much time left.

And he also realizes that he hasn't done it. Whatever this thing is, he has not done it. So he's crying 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 simplicity, because of his tremendous yearning to know, immersed in light, the wall falls, and he dies. And he knows many things now, but mostly he knows that what he's been given, the teachers that had led him, all of the men that ever beat, all of the deprivations that 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.

There were two other lives on the earth, which I will not go into: the glamorous, which would be arrogant on my part, but I would simply say that that was a moment of knowing, of which I have never returned.

I thank you all for coming. I'm very grateful.

Justin Moore:

Thank you, Bartholomew.

Copyright (©) Estate of Mary-Margaret Moore - All rights reserved.