Paul Selig Interview

Summary:

The interview covers topics such as Paul’s background, his experience of awakening in 1987, his process of channeling and writing books, his relationship with the guides, and his teachings on the divine self and freedom.

Some of the key points from the interview are:

• Paul describes himself as a radio that takes dictation from the guides, a collective of higher beings who have a larger agenda for humanity’s evolution.
• Paul says he does not take credit for the books or the teachings, and he is still in inquiry and learning from the work. He also says he does not think he is special or better than anyone else because of his abilities.
• Paul says the teachings are progressive and build on each other, and they challenge the attachments and identifications that we have inherited from our culture and history. He says the teachings are not about feeling good or manifesting material things, but about realizing and embodying the true self that is beyond time and form.
• Paul says he is happy with his life and his work, and he is grateful for the experiences and the people he meets. He says he has simple personal requirements, such as having a nice relationship, a healthy body, and not worrying. He says he is not interested in fame or fortune.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve conducted hundreds of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones please go to batgap.com and check out the past interviews menu where you’ll see all the previous ones archived in various ways. This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers and so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount go to the any page on the website where you’ll see a PayPal button. My guest today is Paul Selig. Paul Selig is considered to be one of the foremost spiritual channels working today. In his breakthrough works of channeled literature including I Am the Word and The Book of Truth, author and medium Paul Selig has recorded an extraordinary program for personal and planetary evolution as humankind awakens to its own divine nature.

Paul was born in New York City and received his master’s degree from Yale. A spiritual experience in 1987 left him clairvoyant. As a way to gain a context for what he was beginning to experience he studied a form of energy healing and began to “hear” for his clients. Described as “a medium for the living,” Paul’s unique abilities have been featured on ABC News Nightline, Fox News, the Biography Channel series The UneXplained, Gaiam TV’s Beyond Belief and the documentary film Paul & The Word.

Paul offers channeled workshops internationally. He serves on the faculty of The Omega Institute, The Kripalu Center and the Esalen Institute. Also a noted playwright and educator, he served on the faculty of NYU for over 25 years. He directed the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College for many years, and he now serves on the college’s Board of Trustees. He lives in New York City where he maintains a private practice as an intuitive and conducts frequent livestream seminars. Does that sound familiar, Paul?

Paul: Yep.

Rick: So, thank you for doing this. Paul, I thought it might be useful to kind of start with the ABCs. Probably most of the people in my audience have heard of channeling, you know, tuned into it, watched some channelers and all, but let’s presume that a few of them haven’t and for their benefit and also for your particular definition of it, why don’t you define channeling for us?

Paul: Well, I mean when I’m channeling I’m taking dictation, I’m hearing clairaudiently information from another source and I’m actually relaying it as I hear it. I make the distinction between channeling, which I feel is really direct transmission and dictation from, say, inspired work where you’re sort of inspired by spirit and then you do something with it, which is what most artists do. I say that I’m a radio, so as a radio I’m taking a broadcast and I’m relaying the broadcast. I work with guides and they’ve now dictated, you know, six books through me and the books require no editing. I mean it’s the transcriptions of the oral dictations become the books, so that’s my job. And then when I work as a psychic or as an intuitive, I’m the radio that’s tuning into you and I’m hearing your broadcast. So I look at channeling in a very distinct way as sort of taking dictation. It’s stenography and really not that much more.

Rick: So when you’re doing it either as a channel or as a psychic and you get this dictation or the messengers of these thoughts, is it kind of very similar to your ordinary thoughts except it’s stuff that you wouldn’t ordinarily think, that it’s just kind of coming to you and so you know that it’s not from you, it’s from them?

Paul: This is sort of how it happens for me. Before I work, I kind of imagine that I’m climbing into the back seat of the car and I’m turning the wheel over to the guide that I work with, the guide that’s collective, and I’ll hear one phrase repeated incessantly and it may not mean anything to me. I mean, I may hear “they all need to know” or “you all come and decide” and whatever it is. I just finally I have to give voice to that one phrase. Once I speak the one phrase everything tumbles out right on top of it and I don’t stop until they say at the end “stop now please” or they’ve been known to say, you know, “period, period, period” at the end of their point. So all I’m really doing is keeping up with the dictation. There’s a cadence and a language choice that’s quite different from my own. The sentence structure is different than my own and I recognize it at this point and I’m familiar with it which is why I trust it, but I mean I’ve never called anybody my fellows in my life and the guy will say “you and your fellows” you know, it’s just not my stuff, it’s not how I would use the word in a sentence myself.

Rick: Yeah and you know a fair amount about words and sentences having taught creative writing and been a playwright.

Paul: Yep.

Rick: So you alluded to some experience in 1987 or something that … what was that?

Paul: Well I mean it’s you know I’m almost at this point uncomfortable with that story only because I’m not so fond of my own narrative at this point and I have to live through this bio that people send out about me and I kind of don’t relate to it much anymore; but the story is I was … it was 1987, I was about maybe a year out of graduate school, about four months before I hit a real wall. I mean I had a list of things I thought I had to do in the world that would make me okay and I got the whole list and I wasn’t okay and I was bottoming out in a hotel in Minneapolis where I was working on an opera and I heard a voice telling me to get my act together. I started praying in that hotel. Three days later I heard for the first time in my life, three days later I heard a voice getting my act together. I did what they said and then I heard there was this thing happening a few months later called a Harmonic Convergence. It was 1987 and you know I had been raised an atheist so I was hearing people say, “Oh, there’s this thing happening and people are going to be waking up” and I had just come from a place of thinking there was no such thing as a universal power of God or whatever you wanted to call it, to perhaps thinking that there was, which was radical enough, and then I thought well if there is this thing and people are going to be waking up why would it say no? You know, why would it not want you to wake up? So I went up to the roof of this building that I was living in the night before this supposed celestial event and I asked to be woken up and somebody had and I tried to teach myself how to meditate for the first time. That was what I did up in the roof. Somebody had given me a crystal and somebody gave me a mantra and I thought you needed the props and the mantras to do this, so I sat there and I ended up having an experience of energy and I don’t really know what happened and to this day I say I may have been hyperventilating, I really don’t know, but it was an experience of energy moving from the base of my being up, up, up, up and out through the top of my head. And it kind of left me sort of frozen and rocking, my mouth was frozen and I wasn’t here and I was just sort of swaying in this energy. And I feel in retrospect that given where I came from I needed something that was somewhat palpable for me to trust.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: I think it was helpful for me to have something that I could know and I started seeing little lights around people after that. I don’t know if it’s tied to the event or not, but suddenly there were these fireflies going off around people and so you know I’d heard something clairaudiently, I had felt something which is clairsentience and I was sitting with the light show and my life changed, it’s the only way I can say it, it was enough proof to keep me going and 30 years later I’m still here and still with the work.

Rick: That’s cool. There’s an Indian saying that for the wise only an indication is needed, so I think some of us need more of like a two by four across the head.

Paul: I did, I did. I mean you know people said it sounded like a spontaneous Kundalini awakening or Shakti power, I mean I know what these things are. My favorite definition, somebody said it sounds like a soul awakening and I like that because in retrospect that’s kind of what it felt like, like I was being, you know, acknowledged in some other way beyond what I had known thus far. It was helpful, it was helpful, that’s all I know.

Rick: You know, having interviewed so many people I’ve heard so many stories and in so many cases it almost seems like someone has been blessed by some higher beings or higher power or something. They weren’t looking for this, they weren’t anticipating this in particular, but something happens, kind of like Paul on the road to Damascus, you know they’re just kind of bopping along on the donkey and all of a sudden this huge thing happens to them and in retrospect they feel like it was a blessing from God or a blessing from angels or some higher beings or higher source or something. I mean, do you get that feeling yourself now looking back?

Paul: I don’t know what to think of it to be honest with you. I know that when I looked back at that time in my life it was a real uprooting. I mean, I was letting go of an identity that I was very attached to without knowing that I was doing it and I was not suddenly not taking drugs or drinking or doing any of those things anymore, and I was suddenly believing there might be this thing called God because I’d started praying and I heard a voice. It was weird. So I don’t know where to place it. I place it in the context of a series of things that happened in a somewhat brief period of time that led me to what I do now. I don’t know if I was blessed or tapped by something else or if I was just truthfully at a place of such willingness. I got to say I went up to the roof believing that such a thing could actually happen and that’s a kind of innocence that I don’t know if I’ve ever had again, but I believed it could. And now every other week you hear some cosmic event and there’s some portal opening up and I’m just, “okay, okay, maybe so.” I try not to be cynical about it but at that time and at that moment in my personal history or narrative I was really ready. It was like somebody burned a hole in the map that I had been on and suddenly I was elsewhere in this experience of being alive and that hasn’t changed, truthfully. It’s not been graceful but that hasn’t changed.

Rick: Yeah, I mean you say it hasn’t been graceful, did you sort of have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming or did your innocence kind of continue along and you acquiesced fairly readily?

Paul: I think I was fortunate in that in my case, I was brought up with no religious training. You know I had maybe a half a year or something in like fifth or sixth grade when I had some nuns in school and I was taken out promptly, but you know that was an Upper West Side New York school. There was nothing really terribly religious happening that I recall, so I didn’t know this stuff and I wasn’t prejudiced. I was also, you know, coming awake at a time of tremendous drama. I mean, I was suddenly back in New York after three years in school in New Haven in the midst of the AIDS epidemic where half the people I knew were dying and it was an extraordinary experience and a terrifying one in many ways. And so what I did, you know first of all people sent me to an energy healer because suddenly Paul was seeing lights around people and believing in God and I’d had platinum blonde Billy Idol hair that I’d gotten rid of and I was like, “Oh boy, what are we gonna do with this guy? This makes no sense.” I was this rock and roll playwright, but I went to this energy healer who and I later got the courage to say, “Can I study this?” I thought only and this was back in the day before everybody and their brother was a Reiki Master. This was 30 years ago and there was this and I studied with this woman and I was volunteering at this center for people who were living with life-challenging illness and that’s when my clairaudience kicked in, when I had my hands on people. I started to hear things for them. If I had my hand on your chest and I heard the name Abby, I learned to say, “Who’s Abby?” And you might say, “My sister, my mother, my wife, my cat.” And as that kept getting confirmed, I began to trust it. But the innocence that I had was challenged by this reality that I was living in which was not easy. I was very poor and I couldn’t write for some reason. You know, I’ve been prolific when I was a rock and roll playwright and here I was now going, “I don’t know how to do this anymore.” And I was having to sort of learn just on a human level how to take care of myself after a life of having been a student and not knowing how to do that. I mean, I was so grandiose when I was a kid that I never learned to drive because I assumed somebody would be driving me. That’s really delusional. Yeah, somebody said I’m an Enneagram. This guy, my friend Russ Hudson, recently said you’re an Enneagram. I think I’m a vibe or something like that. Anyway, it’s part of my type, I guess, if you believe in those things. So anyway, I was challenged by my entirety of experience, but I kept with this stuff and it continued to develop. And I was working very, very quietly for years. I had a group that met in my apartment for 18 years while I was going off to teach at NYU and running this grad program off at Goddard. You know, it was what I did for myself.

Rick: That’s nice to develop quietly like that because a lot of people have some kind of spiritual breakthrough and they just put up a shingle right away, “I want to teach,” and you kind of went through an apprenticeship, you could say, for 18 years.

Paul: Yeah, I was told, you know, it’s funny, I was told by … I met some woman when I was 30 years old in Provincetown. She grabbed my palm and she said, “You’ve got a whole other career at around age 48 and you’ve got a second lifeline,” and I do have a second lifeline, “so you’ve got to follow this other path.” And this other person who I met around that time said, “You know, this work that you’re doing now is going to become public but not until you’re around 48, for your own protection,” and at the time I was sort of peeved about that because I thought, “Well, why not do this?” But I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. I know it. You know, I cared far too much about what other people thought of me, and I had an ego and I probably, looking back at that time, had an investment in being special that I don’t have in the same way anymore. I don’t think I’m special and I think that’s a terrible trap that people can fall into in this work. So yeah, I was on a slow burn for a very long time, and only when the guides began dictating books did I come out of the closet and leave my own life.

Rick: I find that very interesting because, you know, someone used the term “premature immaculation” that a lot of times people have some kind of awakening and they just want to start teaching, as I said earlier, and it proves to be very difficult for them. In some cases it leads to a serious downfall, and I know in some of the more ancient traditions that once you have some kind of awakening you don’t just rush out and teach, you percolate for a decade or something until you’re deemed ready to do it.

Paul: Well, I worked in my apartment, you know, I had a little group that met once a week, people would put sit there and we’d be in the energy, and I did this up until, I don’t know, around recently that the group stopped and we still connect once in a while and meet and do our work, but for me it was the laboratory for the work and my abilities continued to change as I worked. I didn’t start lecturing in channel until 2008, around the time I finally quit smoking. I was a heavy smoker. When that was gone, all of a sudden my work changed entirely and the work that I do now became present.

Rick: Yeah, as a matter of fact I heard you say in some interview that the guides said, “Okay, Paul, time to kick that habit because we can’t really work with you anymore, it’s holding you back or something.”

Paul: Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. I mean I used to channel and smoke out the window during breaks, you know, it was crazy, but I didn’t care, it was my apartment, I could do what I wanted. And I mean I went through a short period in my early 30s where I started doing public groups and people were coming because the energy was so palpable and so high and it was heady for me. And then I ended up sort of breaking with my mentors and teachers and I just didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. The guides that I work with brought through this attunement to this energy that they called the Word, you know, and I thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. And I started hearing in meditation, “Jerusalem Bible,” and I finally went to a bookstore and said, “Is there something called a Jerusalem Bible?” And there is, and it’s a very beautiful translation from the Aramaic. It’s not the “Thee Thou King James” version, it was this very simple thing. And I took it home and I said, “Okay, now what?” And I heard, “Read John aloud.” And I did for two nights. I sat there in bed and I read the thing aloud. And then the next group I did, they said, “We’re going to bring through the energy of the Word.” And they brought through this attunement, which is still the attunement that they’ve used all these years. But I balked at it initially because my teachers hadn’t taught it to me, I didn’t know what I was doing, it was too far out. And I had gotten very fed up with the New Age, you know, as it was at that time. I mean, it was ridiculous. You’d hear things like …

Rick: It was pretty loopy.

Paul: It was very loopy and there wasn’t tremendous depth. And I decided I wanted to go off and write plays for a little while and have a relationship, and I did those things. And actually it was after 9/11 I started my group again and I never stopped. That’s when everything … it’s just been consistent ever since.

Rick: One more retrospective question and then we’ll move on. Did you have anything in your … I know you said you were kind of raised an atheist, but was there anything in your childhood which presaged this sort of development?

Paul: Yeah. A couple of things, but there’s something distinct and I’m still questioning it. But I was about five years old, four or five. My brother was in the room and he was in the crib and he’s two years younger, so that’s how I date the room and the time. He was in a little tiny crib, so he was an infant or fairly small. But there was this … I have a very distinct memory of this being hovering over my bed, and I was watching it from pillow height. My head was to the right and it was wearing something that was golden brocade. That’s all I knew. It was ornate fabric. That’s all I knew, and it was glowing. And it was speaking to me from above as I was in the bed. And then I remember floating at the top of the ceiling, looking down at my body, having this conversation with this being and not knowing what was being talked about. And I remember telling my mother about it, and I assume it may have been, my father died when I was five, “Oh, that’s probably your father.” I said, “Well, that wasn’t my father. I know what my father looked like. It was something else.” And so that was important to me, and I always wondered what was said. I met somebody recently who tuned into it and said, “Basically, what I thought, which was, ‘Well, you agreed to what you’re doing. You made the agreement to what you do.'”

Rick: At the age of five.

Paul: There was something else that happened when I was nine, which was a very hard year in my life for many reasons. And I had a dream that I was walking up a strange stone flight of stairs to this garden with this fountain that was like a Coptic – now what I would describe as shape like a Coptic cross with pavers around it and all these leaves. And when I was Vermont, and we hit the town of Plainfield, and I started to have deja vu, and we ended up at Goddard College. My mother was visiting somebody there, and there was the stone flight of stairs and the garden and the pond. And I dreamt about years before, and I never forgot it. When I was about 31, Goddard to go teach there. I mean, they literally asked me to apply. I wasn’t looking for work. And I went there, and I was there for many years. I’m actually still on the board. But my work in many ways, I think, was catalyzed there. And the woman who first suggested that I write about my clairaudience when I didn’t want to, and so I didn’t in the guide’s packet, and said, “No, we have a book to write,” that was all because of Goddard, so I’m terribly grateful to it. They actually allowed me to be a channel and be there, which was, if you think about academia, that’s rather rare. But I was supported, so that was there. But those were the experiences. There were precognitive dreams and things like that, but I didn’t think of myself as psychic, and I still am uncomfortable with the term. It’s a little loaded, but I’m able to hear and feel for other people and access information that I shouldn’t be able to get in any other way, and for some reason I take dictation well.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting, the stories you’ve told and the experiences you had when you were five and nine and later on, it’s interesting to look back on one’s life and kind of recognize that there has been some kind of divine orchestration that organized things in a way that you wouldn’t have been able to, because you just didn’t have the breadth or depth of understanding, but it’s kind of more than just random coincidence that this, that, and the other thing happened.

Paul: Well, when I look back at the time I went to Goddard, and as a teacher, and I wasn’t writing, and I was studying healing, and I was beginning to make this my focus, there were years where I didn’t know what the hell happened, you know. How did I get here, what am I doing, it didn’t look like the life I was supposed to live, and I was quite unhappy, and for some reason the fact that I was in this place that I had dreamt about when I was nine years old placed this in a context, and it gave me comfort, like I don’t know where I am, but I think I’m where I’m supposed to be, even if it doesn’t make sense to be now. And now it does make sense to me, and I’m very grateful for it.

Rick: Yeah, the implication of what you’re saying, and of the question I just asked, is that there are sort of a lot of beings who aren’t in human form, who are hanging out somewhere, and some of them are interceding in human affairs, beneficially in most of the stories we hear, and yet it’s interesting because a lot of people who would consider themselves, you know, on a spiritual path, not a lot but many, rather discount the whole notion or possibility that there are subtle realms of beings residing in them. They think it’s either mythology or fantasy or some kind of illusory imagination or something. I don’t think that way, but, and I’m sure you don’t, based upon what you’ve been experiencing over the years, but maybe you could comment a little bit upon the idea that there are sort of subtler realms or subtler dimensions which are not evident to ordinary human sensory experience, but which are nonetheless there, just as you know, science has told us there are many things which aren’t evident to our sensory experience, but which are there.

Paul: I tend to be fairly practical, I’m not terribly woo-woo for somebody who does what I do, so you know the fact that I was seeing things, I mean orbs, you know orbs of light would show up in the room and these things that were quite real visually to me and startling was important to me, and the fact that you know one of the reasons that I actually am able to trust the channeled information which has its own life is that I have this audibility to step into other people and become them and then hear them, it’s telepathic work or sentient work, but I seem to operate that way. And the fact that that gets proven out again and again has helped me to trust the authenticity of the other, it validates it for me and I’m finding that helpful.

Rick: Now, that makes you more credible too that you have this sort of little bit of a skeptical attitude I guess you could say, a kind of a show-me attitude, you know a little bit of a scientific thing where I want some kind of experiential verification. I’m not just going to accept everything on faith.

Paul: Yeah, I can’t, you know, I mean if the guides that I was working with decided, you know, one of the rules with the books is that they can’t be edited, they can’t be changed, you know, and occasionally the editor will try to change a phrase into proper English and I change it right back to what was on the recording, because unless I garbled it in the transmission, which has been known to happen, it has to come out the way it was spoken, that’s the deal. Why was I saying this? So my

Rick: verification and you know skepticism and stuff.

Paul: Yeah, but if the guides were to say something like in a transmission, “And by the way, the moon really is made of green cheese,” I would have to say, “Hey, wait a minute,” and I would question the teaching, and then they either have to come back and explain it, you know, that’s kind of the deal. Once in a while they’ll say, if I say Paul was interrupting, we’ll attend to his question later and they’ll come back to it, but it’s kind of the deal, because I don’t want to be party to anything. I didn’t write the books, but my name’s on the cover, and at that level, there’s a level of accountability that I feel, and I don’t want to be party to something. I don’t claim authorship, but I am at a certain level a collaborator, because my consciousness is being used, my body, my voice, my vocabulary, even though they seem to extend at times beyond my vocabulary by using words that I know are words, because I’ve heard them, but I don’t know quite what they mean until I look them up after the session. But I have to be an inquiry, and I also think it’s important to understand that when I work, there’s an energy that becomes present, that’s palpable, it’s in the books, but when I do workshops, you’ve got a hundred people sometimes that have never felt energy that are feeling it. And I think that’s really important, because then they have their own experience of knowing, and if they’re doing that, then they don’t have to defer to me, because I don’t want anybody’s authority. It’s a mess, I don’t want it, I have enough problems with my own.

Rick: Yeah, good. All right, I think I’ve asked enough groundwork questions in terms of what is channeling and your background and all that kind of stuff. Now let’s start talking about what information you actually have come through you. I was thinking of a way of doing it, see if you like this idea, of just you’ve written six books you said, of if we just do a retrospective and say okay, book one, here’s the main points of that, and here’s book two, here’s the main points of that. Obviously in as much or as little detail as would take given the time allowed, but that would give people a really comprehensive overview of everything of your work so far.

Paul: I’ll try.

Rick: Okay.

Paul: So the very first book was called I Am the Word, and it really is the primer, and I actually haven’t gone back to it since it was channeled really, I haven’t gone back and read it.

Rick: I’ve listened to a bunch of it in the last week or so.

Paul: Yeah, but I actually think that the DNA of all of the succeeding books are in I Am the Word, and I didn’t realize that at the time. But they said something really important in the first book and they say that Christ and man or humanity is an event that happens, and their definition of Christ which is very specific is as the aspect of the Creator that can be realized in material form, in manifestation. And initially I thought, “Oh, this is conjecture and this is about a nicer way of being and being more loving to one another.” That’s not what they’re teaching at all. I mean that comes with the territory. They were very clear to say things like, “You can’t be the light and hold another in darkness,” you know. I mean their teachings are very specific about those things. But I Am the Word lays out, I believe, their agenda for the realization of the Divine in form. And I missed the form part early in the text because that was too far out for me. The second book, the Book of Love and Creation …

Rick: Before we go on to the second book, so just elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by “Divine in form.”

Paul: Sure.

Rick: I suppose Jesus would be a nice example of someone who had really embodied the Divine in form.

Paul: It’s a teaching of embodiment. It’s exactly what it is. And I mean this is what they’re going to now, and I’m not as articulate about it as I am perhaps other things, because the teachings are still coming fast and furious. But what they’ve said is, “We’ve been raised to believe that there is some maybe, some God up in the clouds, and we’re stuck here in the mud.” And they say, “Well, here’s the big deal. God is the mud, and it’s also your skin and your breath and everything you see.” So you know, the realization, which means the knowing of the Divine in form, is what is translating to the Kingdom, which they say is the awareness of the Divine that’s inherent in all manifestation. To operate at that level of vibratory accord is an alignment that cannot exclude form. Other than that, you’re back in this kind of separation. So it’s easier for me, truthfully and sadly I’ll say, to know that God or whatever you want to call God is in that tree out the window than it is in my own overweight body some days. You know, it’s like this isn’t what I’m supposed to look like, but the tree really is. So the realization of the Divine in form, to realize, isn’t just to figure out, it’s not an intellectual thing. Realization is knowing, and to know something is to be as it is, I would think. So the teaching of embodiment has actually been progressive, but it’s oddly somewhat … I’m not going to say it’s masked in the other teachings, they just don’t get to it formally for a few more books, and this is really where they’re at now. So “I am the Word” is the attunement to the vibration of the Word. All the books are attunements in their own way to vibration, and there’s an attunement in “I am the Word” that’s very specific. I am Word through my body, Word I am Word. I am Word through my vibration, which means the energetic field, Word I am Word. I am Word through my knowing of myself as Word, and they say this is a new claim of identity.

Rick: And what would be a good synonym for Word here, if we could use a synonym?

Paul: I mean, in esoterica I think it’s something like “monad,” which I also don’t really understand. But they say their definition of the Word is the action of the Creator, that’s the Word, it’s the action of the Divine, as can be realized.

Rick: So when you’re saying “I am Word,” you’re saying “I am the action of the Creator,” or “I am the Creator embodied in this form.” Is that fair?

Paul: Yes, but the real challenge here is not to confuse that with the personality itself. The personality itself isn’t the one that’s claiming this. It makes more sense, I think. I mean, there’s a whole … there’s like a 50-page chapter that unpacks the Word in the first book, and I should probably go back to it because I could give you a better answer. They’re saying not at all, the answer was fine. They’re saying the answer was fine, so I’ll leave it at that for now. The second book …

Rick: One more thing on your first book I want to say. You know how you were saying a minute ago that it’s a lot easier for me to see God in the tree than in my overweight body or something like that? I find it interesting to use just as a little tool for remembrance of the Divine, that I take the body, overweight or not, has about a hundred trillion cells in it. Each cell is about as complicated as Tokyo, and is able to repair and replicate itself, and is all coordinated with all the other cells. I mean, what an incredible display of intelligence. It’s not just a lump of meat, I mean there’s this amazing thing going on here, and if you kind of remind yourself of that it just gives you goosebumps.

Paul: Yeah, and that’s pretty much what they say as they progress in the teaching. You know, the Divine is as every cell in your body, you can’t exclude it, but the realization of God in every cell of your body is a whole other thing.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a different matter.

Paul: And that’s the embodiment that they’re moving us towards, I believe.

Rick: Yeah, and you said earlier that you’re like an instrument, like a radio. I mean, a radio can pick up radio waves, a rock cannot. Even though maybe the rock is made a lot of the same elements as a radio, so we’re arranged in such a way as to be effective receptors of this.

Paul: Yeah, we are, and you can usually feel the attunement when you work with it, which is the nice thing. So they’re attuning the physical self, the vibrational field, and then they’re beginning the work on identity, which is sort of a replacement of the emphasis on who. So, is who as personality versus who. That’s my word, “versus,” not theirs, as what they would call the true self or the Divine Self or the Eternal Self or the Christ itself. They use all these different phrases to describe.

Rick: Good.

Paul: The second book.

Rick: I’m going to let you do that now, the second book.

Paul: Okay, I don’t have much to say about the second book. I was in a terrible mood when I channeled it. You know, as a lot of people, it’s their favorite book of the bunch. It’s really thick, it’s 500 pages.

Rick: No wonder you were in a terrible mood.

Paul: Well, no, I had just gotten dumped. I didn’t tell this story. I had just gotten, just a relationship had just ended, and I had had an appointment with this woman, Victoria Nelson, who was on the phone for the first number of books. There has to be an active listener. Now, the books are dictated in front of students, the whole last book, and chunks of the books before were delivered before audiences. You know, there’s a record of it all now. But Victoria and I had had a date to talk about the second book, and I tried to get out of it and she wouldn’t let me. And she said, “Let’s just get on the phone and put the recorder on and see what they want to say about when they want to start.” And so I did it and they started that day, “Here we go,” and they started dictating the introduction, and they didn’t stop until it was done. In those days I used to dictate pretty much every day until the thing was done. Unless I had to go teach a class and now it’s a little easier. I do them in workshops. I show up at the workshop, I sit down and I say, “Okay, chapter 1,” then they just do it. It’s easier.

Rick: Two birds with one stone.

Paul: Yeah, but that book in some ways seems to be a textbook, you know, I mean a manual on how to begin to operate at the higher level. That’s the best way that I can describe it.

Rick: So if someone were to read it they would be able to extract from it practical steps that would enable them to operate at the higher level?

Paul: They talk more in that book about opening up to one’s innate abilities, to one’s own knowing, you know, your true knowing. They talk a lot in general about the distinction between thinking and knowing. You know, the true self knows, the small self thinks. There’s nothing wrong with thinking, but you can understand the difference. And they talk, as I recall, about how to develop clairaudience, clairsentience, you know, how to begin to work with the subtle bodies as part of that teaching. But the larger teaching, which I know, you know, truthfully, other than sitting in the recording studio and doing the audio book, I’ve actually never read it. I dictate it, I typed it. I was so sick of hearing my own voice by the end of the transcription that I never wanted to hear it again. Now somebody else transcribes the stuff, and I can go back and read them and learn from them, but at the time it was challenging. But it’s a dense teaching, and the sentences I find in that book are almost Henry Jamesian in their length. These long, long paragraphs go on. I mean, it was just, I didn’t know how to punctuate a channel text. I mean, people think these books are written, and they’re not. They’re spoken, and they just seem as if they’re written because the guides are adept enough to relay structure of a sentence in a way that can be moved to the page.

Rick: How many years ago was that book published?

Paul: That I think was channeled in 2009 and probably published a year later, I would think, maybe 2011, something like that.

Rick: And so it’s been out there in the public for eight years or something. Do you get feedback from people, “Hey, I read this book and actually, yes indeed, I’m developing these abilities. It’s working for me.”

Paul: I hear things like that, yeah. I mean, a lot of people, call it their favorite book, and I’ve actually not asked why. I mean, it’s a dense teaching, and it may have been that I was not in a great state, not really wanting to channel it, but I showed up anyway, and I’ve learned over the years that how I feel doesn’t make much difference at all.

Rick: Might have been just what the doctor ordered for you, you know.

Paul: I think it probably helped. The next book…

Rick: Let me ask you a question here before we go into that. When you do these channeling sessions, either currently or over the years, do you generally feel enlivened and uplifted afterwards, or do you feel like, “Oh, I’m kind of wiped out now, I’ve got to go take a nap”?

Paul: In the first books, I was channeling for a long period of time at once, sometimes two hours in a sitting, which is impossible, and I felt completely stoned when I would get out of the chair.

Rick: Stoned in a good way, like high?

Paul: Not high in a good way, I mean a little bleary. I mean, I was like, “What the hell just happened?” It’s not that experience anymore, but I work a lot now, and I’ve been known to channel in workshops for five hours in a day, and I do it frequently. I mean, every weekend that I do a workshop, and when I go to Esalen, I was at Esalen in California in November-December for five weeks, and I channeled every day for and sometimes, some days, for very, very long stretches. So now the book dictations, now that they’re doing them in workshops, it’s a very different experience. The energy in workshops is very, very high, and I would be there anyway, and I enjoy the channelings for the books and workshops because I don’t know where they’re going to go. They’re going to have to build on prior teachings, but it’s all going to be brand new material. And they’re teaching a workshop, there are certain things that I understand that they will often do. They’ll attune people, there are certain talking points that they may get to, but very often, after the introduction to the workshop, I don’t know where they’re going to go. I mean, I never know where they’re going to go. You can know and channel, but the books are exciting because, well, every time I channel, it’s like I’m standing on a diving board about to jump into a pool, and I don’t know if there’s any water, you know, because I’m sitting in a chair before a room full of people, and they’ve all chosen to be there, they paid money to be there, and I don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth at all, I’m just there. And then, bang, it happens. So that’s extremely exhilarating. The channeling can be joyful, and I can be filled with great love while I’m doing it, and it can be emphatic or dramatic or very thoughtful and very precise. The last two books that were dictated felt completely as if I was sitting there being recited a book that had already been written by them. It was so carefully spoken, I mean, careful, careful, careful, careful, careful. And that may have been the case with the earlier texts, but I don’t know if I was at that level of alignment, of ease. You know, if you watch videos of me channeling, because there’s some from from the earlier days, my body’s rocking back and forth, it’s very jerky. It’s a much more fluid transmission now as I’ve worked. So I can be exhausted at the end of it, but it’s arduous, physically arduous.

Rick: I can imagine just talking for five hours.

Paul: Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but the energy is not what knocks me out. The energy is great.

Rick: I can imagine, you know, there’d be two things. One is if you get this energy flowing through you and that in itself is enlivening and stimulating and enriching, but then if there’s a lot of detritus that is kind of clogging the channel, so to speak, that’s got to be cleared out. And sometimes when accumulated stuff that’s in us is cleared out, we feel all foggy or rough or difficult. It’s unpleasant sometimes as it’s clearing.

Paul: Yeah, I think that’s very true. I mean, I remember there was a channeling that I – I mean, I’ve learned this over the years. I’ve had some very hard days where I was expected to then channel after the fact. Like the day I put my dog, who was my companion for, you know, and then I had to channel that night on a live stream. And the guides came through beautifully. I mean, in a lot of ways there’s some mechanism in place where I can be having a rough time, and they come through with grace. They’ll often address – if there is an issue, and I’ve had this happen, I could have just had a disagreement with somebody or I’ve gotten my feelings hurt and I have to go channel, and they will talk about, not specifically my history or my issue, but the investment of personality and outcome or whatever it is that they really want to get through, you know, and move us through. So it’s all used, it’s all usable stuff. And the detritus, sure, I mean, so much of the work that they’re teaching is about releasing what is not the true self, what we’ve over-identified with or believe what we think we are at the cost of what we truly are. I mean, that’s so much of what this is about, and I get to experience that as well.

Rick: It’s kind of amusing sometimes listening to you because they chide you like a naughty boy, you know, like, “Oh, this Paul here, he gives us a bit of a hard time and he better get to the background now because we really want to talk to you.” You kind of have this cute relationship with them.

Paul: Well, you know, it’s changed a bit, but I mean, not so much when I’m doing a workshop, you know, when I’m channeling a workshop and they’ll say, “Paul is interrupting,” or they’ll really can’t ignore it. Or if I want to put my two cents in, they’ll say, “Or if you wish,” which is usually a nod to my thought. They’ll incorporate it if it’s appropriate, you know, they’ll acknowledge me as contributor. But what they started to do in The Book of Knowing and Worth, that was the third book, fourth book actually, it was later, they started to anticipate – it was the Book of Truth, it was late, two books ago – they started anticipating my interruptions before I could interrupt. It’s funny if you look at these things, because they’ll say things like, “Now Paul was interrupting, but I was about to,” but I hadn’t formulated the thought yet. And then they’ll say, “Imagine I and my fellows are having discord.” I mean, it’s language I would never choose, but what they’re doing is they’re anticipating the interruption in order to continue their teaching without my getting in the way. In the third book, the Book of Knowing and Worth, there was one channeling session that I did, it’s midway through the book, and Victoria Nelson was in the room, which she’d always been on the phone. She was in the room and I was nervous that she was there, and I was – in those days I was channeling on my feet, so I was walking and channeling with the phone, you know, to my ear in front of a group, and her sneaker squeaked on the floor, and I jumped out of my skin, and I was already angry at somebody else. And the guides finally said, and this is in the book, “You know, we have to stop and deal with Paul’s anger, and we’ll decide if this is going to be in the text or not.” And at the end of the chapter, it’s in the text, the whole thing is in the text, but it was clear to me at that time that they had to sort of rethink the structure of the book. They started doing a lecture on principles, as I recall, and then it became about, you know, anger in a whole other way. And I think it’s a valuable thing in the book. I did read it and I went, “Well, this still makes sense and it’s supportive,” but it doesn’t happen anymore that way, you know. They’re anticipating the jumps to avoid them, so it’s kind of like I still don’t know how to drive. I’m in my 50s, I never learned how to drive, but I imagine …

Rick: Maybe you can afford the chauffeur now.

Paul: No, that’s not going to happen.

Rick: You live in New York, you just hop in the cab.

Paul: But the difference is, I think if you’re learning to drive, there’s some lock on the steering wheel where there’s a second wheel and the driving instructor can take over, and I think that’s kind of what’s happened. If I want to grab the wheel, they know how to get it back now without having to restructure their text.

Rick: If one were to do a Ph.d thesis on your work and study all your books very carefully, would they find a lot of redundancy or is it just fresh material and fresh material and fresh material rolling out? I mean, I can imagine there’s certainly a point to re-emphasizing certain points, but I mean, to me the thought of sitting on a stage for five hours, much less five books or six books, and just dictating fresh material is hard to imagine where it comes from.

Paul: I think you’d have to ask the readers. I mean, every time I dictate for the texts, you know, some of the stuff is familiar from prior teachings and I understand it, and some of the stuff isn’t. What I think is interesting is the teachings have been extremely consistent. It’s really, I don’t know, I haven’t heard of any time where they contradict a prior teaching in the books. I’ve never heard of it and, you know, somebody may find that one day, but I haven’t seen it or noticed it or it hasn’t called to my attention. The teachings are progressive and I think that’s important. They’re building blocks, and I was less aware of that, really less aware of that, than until the last two, and I saw what they were really going for, which was I think their agenda for us is much larger than I assumed. I really do.

Rick: What do you think their agenda is?

Paul: Realization. It’s embodied.

Rick: All of humanity?

Paul: Yeah, this isn’t the feel-good teaching. This isn’t about how to manifest a better condo. It’s not, never been that stuff.

Rick: Well, all of humanity being realized would feel pretty good, I think. Condos or no condos, it would be a better world.

Paul: I think the idea of re-identifying who we are comes at a cost, and the cost is the challenging thing, and it’s why this isn’t necessarily a convenient teaching, because it’s not ascribing to what my personality thinks he should be or have, or or any of those things, necessarily.

Rick: Yeah, I’m reminded of the rich man coming to Jesus and saying, “I want to follow you,” and Jesus says, “Okay, give up everything and follow me,” and the guy says, “Sorry, I can’t do that.”

Paul: Yeah, well, but the guides, I mean, they’ve been doing live streams lately, they’ve been using the metaphor of the eye of the camel, the eye of the needle in the camel.

Rick: That’s where he said it, right in that passage.

Paul: Yeah, it’s the same teaching, but the idea that the things that we attach great importance to that stand in the way will need to be released, and sometimes what does that is a great big shock to the system and a bump. They’ve used the metaphor of a jalopy, an old convertible, with your suitcases piled in the back, and you hit the bumps, you’re dislodging the suitcases as you go. Very often that’s the process here.

Rick: I’ve often thought about that and have been through a lot of it myself and my friends since I’ve been meditating for about stages and levels of degrees of development, but you can always extrapolate from the individual out to the society and imagine that the entire society may be going through or may soon go through the kinds of changes that individuals go through in their spiritual development. So, I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit or the guides could speak to that as to what sort of speed bumps will be hit by society as it undergoes the necessary changes, what sort of structures that we’ve all thought to be stable and secure might end up toppling down as the World Trade Centers did metaphorically.

Paul: Well, I don’t know if I’m going to channel them today, it can happen.

Rick: If you can, you want or not, whatever.

Paul: Listen, if I don’t answer well they’ve been known to to cut in and say pretty much, but they have talked about this. The Book of Truth is where they really start talking about the externalization of this. And what the guides say really is we’re in agreement to everything that we see. If we can see it we’re in agreement to it and by agreement they mean vibrational accord.

Rick: And we means people?

Paul: The collective, yes. I mean everybody who’s hearing this is in agreement to it. You may disagree with what I say or who I am or how I present or any of those things, but everything you see the guides would say you’re in accord to, which is vibrational accord. It doesn’t mean that I created the war in Iraq, but I’m in agreement to it in vibration because the consciousness that I hold is focusing on that, and the moment something is known my consciousness is in agreement to it. So it’s a trippy teaching but they’re talking now about the collective agreements to the whole and so pretty much they say that the consciousness, let me see if I can get this right, they’re going to be the so-so so they may step in actually at all. They’re saying we would like to, what he’s really asking, they’re saying what he’s really asking is how do you evolve is how do you evolve beyond the barriers that you’ve erected, beyond the agreements you’ve made, as collective as a collective that are now hindering progress, that are now hindering progress. The manifestations you see are things in fact, are things in fact that you have created. Anything that’s been created may be recreated in a higher octave, in a higher octave. But this happens at the cost of the old. Everything is in resonance. Everything is in resonance. Everything that was erected in fear, everything that was erected in fear or serves fear in some way – or serves fear in some way, must now be reknowned, must now be reknowned, realized in a way, realized in a new way beyond what you’ve chosen thus far, beyond what you have chosen thus far. The small self will choose what the small self has done, what the small self has known. She knows herself through history, she knows herself through history, and is participatory and is participatory in the replication of history in an ongoing way, in an ongoing way. The true self that you are, the true self that you are, the aspect of the true self, the aspect of you that is the true self, can conceive of something higher once you realize yourself, once you realize yourself as who you truly are, as who you truly are in the higher way, in the higher way, the creations you attend to, the creations you attend to must conform to the identity you hold, must conform to the identity you hold. You lift the kingdom, you lift the kingdom into being, into being or the awareness of the divine, or the awareness of the divine, through your own acknowledgement, through your own acknowledgement of your own inherent divinity. It cannot be other, it cannot be other, period. So they’re saying period.

Rick: Right, that makes sense to me. I mean maybe another way of phrasing it is everything we see in the world, all of its structures and systems and cultures and political things, everything else, is just the external manifestation of human consciousness and the quality of human consciousness as it exists in various, you know, individuals, families, communities, countries, you know, the whole thing. It’s all just an external thing and if the consciousness is going to change, it changes, then all those external structures are going to change. I think that’s what they were just saying. And there’s a kind of a resistance sometimes. For instance, you know, Trump is out there campaigning saying, “We’re going to keep digging coal.” And you know, coal is a completely ridiculous technology compared to the ones that are already blossoming in alternative energies. But you know, there’s a tendency to hang on to the old and resist the new. And I have a feeling that, as they said in wherever that saying came, Star Trek or something, resistance is futile. You know? Yeah, I mean, if the forces of change are too powerful to be resisted by even the greatest corporations, as powerful as they may seem.

Paul: I agree. In the very first book, I Am the Word, they said that humanity is a time of reckoning. And they said a reckoning is a facing of oneself and all of one’s creations. And this is happening on an individual level. The individual is happy to go through this, but the collective is as well. And we’re all participatory to the whole. You know, this idea that we’re not as complicit, truthfully, to everything that we see, because the consciousness that we have, they say, imprints itself on what we see, or supports it. So the example they gave, because I question this, and I’m not always their best student, but they said, I think it’s somewhere in the Book of Mastery, which was the fourth book, I said, “So you know, if I’m at a table in Paris, I’m in agreement to the book on the table in Paris.” And consciousness said, “Yes, the moment you know that there’s a book on the table in Paris, your consciousness is actually informing that.” You see, and how you hold anything in your awareness contributes to it. The simple teachings are, “What you damn, damns you back.” “What you bless, blesses you.” It’s the same idea. And so much of their teaching is about the awareness of the inherent Divine in everyone. You know, “I know who you are in truth, I know what you are in truth, I know how you serve in truth,” which is, they say, the claim of mastery, or the realization of the Divine that is present in all that can be known and realized and claimed in fullness.

Rick: This is a little bit of a metaphysical question, but it just came to mind. It’s something I’ve heard bandied about. Apparently Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore had this debate, and one of them, I think it was Tagore, was saying, “Well, if there’s no one perceiving the moon, then the moon doesn’t exist.” And Einstein said, “No, that’s ridiculous. I mean, the moon exists whether or not anyone is there to perceive it.” And my argument would be, “Well, let’s say all of humanity agrees not to look at the moon. We still have tides.” So, I mean, does our awareness or perception of the universe actually bring it into being, or is it there regardless of whether or not anybody’s actually perceiving it? If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Paul: But I get it. I mean, this is what I’m getting right now. It’s there, but it’s existing in multiple octaves. But there are different ways of realization. So what they’ve been saying recently is that we’re used to the keyboard that’s on the piano, which is basically the three-dimensional world that we’ve been playing in. And they say, you know, the note C exists well above what the human ears can comprehend.

Rick: Yeah, you just keep going up an octave and keep going on up.

Paul: Exactly right. And as you lift to the higher octave, your experience of what you see is transformed. When they’re teaching the Kingdom now, which is one of their teachings, and they say the Kingdom is the awareness of the Divine in all manifestation, what I’ve been understanding about this, which was surprising to me, is that your claim of this thing, your awareness of the physical realm in the high octave is actually what calls it into being the witness of the Divine, or the fabric of the universal force, whatever you want to call it, that’s inherent in everything. One’s witness calls that forth. It’s a trippy thing. When they started doing this, which was in a workshop at the Esalen Institute last summer, they were working with the claim, “I know who you are, I know what you are, and what means in manifestation.” And the claim, “I know what you are,” when people would focus on the physical person before them, and claim, “I know who you are, I know what you are,” the person before them, the energetic field of the person before them, would emit these waves back, which was essentially the Divine coming back and saying, “Yes.” So the focus on the Divine in material form, when claimed, actually has – they call it the echo, or the echo, the boomerang, the resonance of the field responding back. I mean, it’s trippy as can be, but we could all experience it. So that, I think, is the beginning of where they’re going now in their teachings, which is really about creation and how consciousness does manifest. I mean, this is sort of my stuff, you know. I’ve never read, you know, I don’t read anybody’s stuff, I don’t read other channeled work. I read half a Seth book when I was a grad student, and I thought it was great, but I wasn’t into that kind of thing. And I’ve never read any of the new physics, and I just don’t read it. I buy things and I don’t read them, and I think part of the reason is, I’m trying to, or I’m being maintained to be clear.

Rick: Maintain your innocence and not get too many of your own ideas in there?

Paul: Yeah, well it’s not even that. I think once something’s in the pot it can be used. You know, people sometimes come to me and they say, “Well, tell me about my soul contracts,” and I go, “Well, that’s Carolyn Myss’s work.” My guides have never mentioned soul contracts, they’ve never talked about it, but they do talk about agreements we make prior to incarnation, and that may be the same thing. But the idea that once things are in the zeitgeist or in the vocabulary, they’re so – isn’t how the ones that I work with seem to work at all. They actually say, I don’t know, this is just maybe because I flunked science when I was in high school, but they say they don’t use the language of science, because the language of science will be dated in 50 years, in 100 years, and what they’re teaching is truth. And they say, “What is true is always true, it’s always been true, it will always be true.” So they use different language, they don’t speak about dimensions, they speak about octaves, you know, and resonance. Yeah.

Rick: I mean, I imagine in 50 years there will still be a language of science, but it’ll be even more different than today’s language, than today’s is from 50 years ago, you know. It’ll just be the way things are exponentially developing.

Paul: Well, if you look at, you know, George Horowitz wrote about this, and it’s an interesting thing, he said if you look at the … if you look at the language of the occult, you know, if you look at table-tapping, at the rise of spiritualism, that was the time … Well, no, table-tapping was, you know, once for yes, yeah,

Rick: Houdini was … He was trying to bust it, or trying to get some verification of it, you know.

Paul: But it was like once for yes, twice for no, but those were the days of Morse code.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: So that makes sort of sense, you know. My guides talk about dictaphones for some reason, that’s their language. But you hear other people, you know, other channels. I had a download last night, I mean, we’re appropriating the language of the times to describe the phenomena that we’re all experiencing.

Rick: If I had your ability, I think I’ve heard you say that you don’t do this, but I would be so curious, I’d want to know, who are you guys? Where do you live? What is it like there? Do you live in houses? Do you eat food? Do you have relationships? I mean, how long have you been there? Have you ever been a human being? Are you going to be a human being? I would end up with having all these curious kinds of questions. And Irene said, “That’s why I’m not a channel.”

Paul: I don’t know, I’m cautious about this stuff. It may be my caution that prevents them. I mean, they’ve started getting into this territory on occasion, and it surprises me at times what they will answer. I mean, occasionally I’ll be doing an interview and somebody will say something that I’m sure they’re not going to talk about, but I say, “No, we would like to take the question.” And then they go on and they do. And this may be about my comfortability. I don’t like names. I’m not a good New Ager. When I was coming into this stuff, in the 90s, I guess the early 90s it would have been, you’d hear things like, “Oh, there’s an Archangel Michael channeling in Brooklyn, but you really want to go to the Upper West Side because Gabriel’s the really hot one!” And I think that’s ridiculous, you know, a sort of kind of spiritual materialism. And I was uncomfortable when the guides came through with a name, and they’d say, “If you want to call us something, you can call us this,” because again, there’s attachments to that, and there’s ego attached to that, and narratives, and I’m not comfortable with it. The only reason I call them the guides is because my ex, when my ex found out I could do this, used to say, “Ask the guides this, ask the guides that.” That’s why they’re called the guides. It’s really easy. It was an easy title, and nobody’s complained about it from their end thus far. So the questions that you’re asking, the only other person that said that’s the first thing I would want to know was Steve Paulson from NPR. It was like, “I want to do all these things,” you know? And I suspect that they will. There are three more books coming, as far as I know, and I assume that they’ll get into some of this stuff, because there is interest. But I do hear that how they operate is very different than what we can imagine, beyond the known. So I don’t think we can really put this stuff in a box, as we would like to. You know, they’ve been teaching beyond the known since the last book was completed. That’s the Book of Freedom, and it’ll be out in November. And immediately, the next workshop started, “Okay, we’re on to Beyond the Known.” And one of the things that they’ve said, which I find interesting about where they’re going, they’ve begun talking about the limitations of language itself as a way to convey information, because the language itself is so laden with history. And they said, “You know, every time something new appears, you all want to name it.” And that’s basically our way of controlling it. What you need to do is ask it its name, ask it what it is.

Rick: Interesting.

Paul: And you’ll have a different relationship to it. Yeah, that’s where they’re going.

Rick: You know, there’s a thing in Sanskrit where it’s said that the vibratory quality of a word matches the vibratory quality of the object to which it refers. So if you take apple, for instance, whatever the Sanskrit word for that is, the vibratory quality of the very sound that refers to the apple is parallel to or resonant with the vibratory quality of an actual apple. I have a question that’s been in the back of my mind for a little while now today. And that is that we were talking about, you know, channeling Archangel Gabriel or whoever, you know, all this kind of stuff. And, you know, I’ve run into a number of … there was a guy in our town who for quite some time was supposedly channeling somebody like that. And he didn’t strike me as being very genuine, but yet he could sit there and go on and on and often affecting a foreign accent of some kind. And I’m just wondering if … some people might say, “Well, there’s a level of the mind which is just more imaginative and creative, and if you can tap into that, it has nothing to do with other beings. You can sit there all day and churn out some kind of information.”

Paul: I don’t know. I suppose that’s true. I’m not negating that possibility. You know, I’ve been the one to question this, I think, the most of anybody that I know. And my biggest problem with what I do is that I’m the one doing it. You know, if you were the channel, I could decide what I think. But, you know, as the one taking the dictation, it’s a different thing. The one thing that I do know is that no matter how good a vocabulary I have, I don’t think I’m capable of dictating six books that require no editing.

Rick: Yeah, but what if there’s a deep level of your own mind that’s just super creative? I mean, we see this stuff coming out … look at Shakespeare or Beethoven, and if you look at their personal lives, you might think, “There’s no way this turkey is going to come out with all this brilliant stuff,” and yet they had the ability to tap into something so deep and bring it forth.

Paul: Sure. I don’t know. I mean, the only way that I can answer that is that I’m also able to access information that I have no way of knowing, and that’s been proven and filmed and all of those things, and that helps me trust the channeled work. And that there’s also an energy that’s palpable that people experience. I mean, there’s phenomena attached to this. I mean, maybe there’s a scientific reason for this. There’s this attunement that the guides often do in workshops where they stand before people and they sort of witness them and claim them in a new way, and that’s about moving into co-resonance and vibratory accord. But I’ve been told again and again and again that my eyes turn bright blue when I’m doing this, and you can see them. I have hazel eyes. I mean, they’re not pale blue eyes. And so when I’m working at that level, there are things that seem to happen. Am I accessing some much wiser part of myself? I suppose that could be so, but it doesn’t feel that way. What they’ve said is I am connected to them already, and so that there’s already a relationship that sort of predates this work that allows it, so I can be seen as an aspect of them. But do I perceive this as my higher self? No, I actually don’t.

Rick: Actually, there’s a way of saying yes to both those things, I think, which is that at the deepest level, what we are is so expansive that it does include all the impulses of intelligence and beings and whatnot that are orchestrating creation. And so it’s just, you know, it’s yourself, but like you say, it’s your higher self. And so being in touch with the higher self means being in touch with all the fountains of wisdom that emerge from it.

Paul: I know the difference. I; Yeah, but there’s a difference.

Rick: Irene said, “There is a difference.”

Paul: I think there is a difference. I mean, I know the difference between when I’m reading for somebody, when I’m tuning into somebody and hearing for them, and then I have to interpret information, or when I’m getting visual information or physical information, and then I have to interpret. I can be sitting with somebody and I can feel a pain in my pectoral, and I don’t know whether that’s a tumor or a cyst or a bruise, and sometimes I find out that that’s where they had the biopsy, it was fine but I’m still feeling it. had the biopsy and it was fine, but I’m still feeling it. There’s interpretation. That’s very different than what I’m channeling. When I’m channeling, I am literally taking dictation. Yeah. The whole point is that there’s no commentary on it. If there is commentary on it, it comes in my own voice. And initially, there’s a line in the very first book that confuses people, and this is before I realized I could footnote things effectively, but in the very introduction they say, “This is not a book that’s written before. This is not A Course in Miracles,” and people say, “Well, are they dissing A Course in Miracles?” And the fact is, no. I heard, “This is not a book that’s been written before,” and I piped in, in the background, “Yeah, what about A Course in Miracles?” I said, “This is not A Course in Miracles.”

Rick: I see. They’re responding to your …

Paul: Exactly. And now I would know to footnote that, but essentially all of those things now have been included as Paul is interrupting. They acknowledge the thought and then continue on, which is an effective way to work, and it solves some confusion.

Rick: Okay, good. I’ve always wanted to ask that question of a channeler. Let me throw in a few questions now that people have sent in, and we might jump around a little bit because they’re from different people, but here’s one. If we are to assume that channeled beings are indeed communicating through certain people, what would their ultimate purpose be and how would their input be different from earthly teachers – I think this person is referring to, let’s say, enlightened masters who are still in human bodies – or from finding answers within ourself?

Paul: I hear it’s a different methodology. I also hear that there’s a different purview as we teach. As we teach, we realize. They’re saying, “We realize you. We know who you are. We know who you are.” And they’re saying, “And support you in your recognition of this. That is our honor. That is our honor as your teacher, as your teacher.” Our only investment in you is your own realization, your own dependency. We want no dependency upon us or the teachings on us or the teachings we teach about ourselves. We teach you to know yourselves, to be the divine self that you have always been and create and create from that manifest place, the divine as you. The divine as you is the key to your freedom, is the key to your freedom. You look outside yourselves. You look outside yourselves. You may look to a teacher if you wish. You may look to a teacher if you wish, but comprehend the teacher, but comprehend the teacher as an aspect of the divine as well. And then you will lift yourself beyond the dependence upon him or her, period. And they’re saying, “Period.” So I never said this, you know, when I hear I whisper the words and repeat and everything.

Rick: I was going to ask you about that. Why do you suppose you do it that way as opposed to just thinking the thought and then saying it?

Paul: I think that would take longer, truthfully. When I first started, very first started, and I don’t know, maybe it’s just a bad habit, but this is how it works. I mean it that way. I used to feel as if somebody were pressing their lips against my forehead and imprinting the words, and my lips would form the words and I would whisper as that happened and then repeat them, and nobody could hear me on the whisper, so I got used to this as a simple way of being heard.

Rick: And so you couldn’t say it out loud, the normal volume, straight away?

Paul: If I can, I have to think to pause. I have to try not to say the words as they come, so the whisper is the transmission itself. And so I would have to either … when I’ve tried to experiment with this, initially what I would do is try to raise the volume on the whisper and I would end up losing my voice or getting hoarse pretty quickly working that way.

Rick: It’s also very fast, compared to …

Paul: It’s staccato fast.

Rick: Right, right.

Paul: It’s like, “Bubba, bubba, bubba, bubba.” I’m hearing the thought, I’m whispering the thought, the other thought is then coming right on top of it. I’ve said it’s like reading fortune cookies, you know, one after the other after the other. So all I can do is keep up with the phrase.

Rick: Like Lucille Ball with the chocolates going down the conveyor belt.

Paul: It’s a lot like that, it really is, and God forbid somebody makes a noise in the room when I’m doing that because then I panic, because it’s like somebody kicked the phonograph record and the needle skipped, and the guides are fine, they’ll just go right back to where they were, but I’m in a panic because I don’t recall what I just said. You know, I’m retaining about 30% of the information because I’m so busy in the moment. So the few times, and it actually happens more and more recently, so I shouldn’t say the few times, where I’m channeling without the repetition. It’s very out of control for me, personally. It feels like you’re being sung, you know, it’s a whole other thing. And when I do that I don’t retain anything, you know what I mean? I’m really …

Rick: You’re out of the picture.

Paul: I’m really out of the picture. I’m not a transchannel, I don’t want to be. I’ve heard of other people who are just out. Edgar Cayce is asleep, and that was fine. I’m still in inquiry with this, and I kind of want to know who’s coming through when they’re coming through. You know, there’s a lot of radio stations out there people can play, and I don’t think they’re all at a very high level. You know, when I hear people that are channeling and they’re talking about, “Oh, who killed Princess Di?” and I’m thinking, “What the hell is this about?” That’s kind of low-level astral stuff, if it’s even coming from any other source. And I don’t want to be critical, but I do feel that I hold a responsibility here as the channel. Now when they do come through full force, the energy has often been almost more than I can handle. I mean, it’s huge. There’s recordings of it, there’s a few of them. There was one in a workshop in Mexico, and they started channeling directly, and then they just moved at a certain point to sound. It was just sound that was coming out.

Rick: Of your vocal cords?

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: Like humming or singing or something?

Paul: It was toning, and now that’s what they’re doing. But they were actually … and the energy was palpable, I mean, we’re all sort of so in it. And now they’re working with tone in very intentional ways, and that’s very, very new. That’s only been going on for a few months, and I’m sort of trying still to understand what’s happening.

Rick: It must be having a profound effect on you, I mean, having all this go channeling through you all these years. You know, it’s like … well, they got you to stop smoking four packs a day. I mean, I know a lot of people who struggle with that one unsuccessfully, but …

Paul: You know, I’d like them to get me to lose 50 pounds too. That’s going to be my job.

Rick: Wait a minute, they’re saying, “Go to the gym!”

Paul: No, I mean, believe me, I don’t know how it’s going to happen. It’s my stuff. And maybe they’ll probably tell me on the air, which would be even worse, what I’m ignoring. It has changed my life enormously, and at the moment you’re catching me, and I will say at this moment, and I hope it lasts, I’m actually happy. At the moment, yeah, I kind of am.

Rick: You tend not to be a lot of the time?

Paul: Yeah. Well, this has not been a graceful journey for me at all. Two years ago I left a career I’d had for 25 years. I loved teaching college, I was very good at it. And it was in a lot of ways my spiritual practice, was teaching. And I honor it as thus, and it was a place for me to love, you know? Teaching, real teaching is an act of love. But I could take credit for what I did as a teacher in a way, and my own writing I could take credit for. I don’t feel any sense of achievement with the channel books.

Rick: I see what you mean, yeah.

Paul: It’s not my stuff. I mean, I’m grateful that people are having these wonderful experiences with it and learning through it. I’m uncomfortable with that too, in a way, because I didn’t author it. I participated in its creation. So I’m having to come to a new relationship with this work that’s very different than what I’ve known prior.

Rick: Well, you know, a lot of spiritual teachers would tell you that it’s not about me, I’m just an instrument of the Divine, you know? I’m just a tool in the hands of something much bigger than me, so don’t look at me as the source of this thing.

Paul: And I would agree with all of them, I would agree with all of them. But I think channeling is a little bit different, because it really is dictation. I know, I was an inspired teacher when I was at NYU, and I know what being an inspired teacher feels like.

Rick: Now you’re just a stenographer.

Paul: In some ways, yes, but they’ve recently said that I was now integrating in a way that I would be more present in the work as myself, and that’s something I’m curious about, to to see what that looks like.

Rick: Also, I think your experience as a teacher of writing and a playwright and all, gives you qualifications that somebody working in manual labor or something without that kind of education wouldn’t necessarily have, so it’s a gift that you bring to it that not everyone could.

Paul: Well, I think I was trained, you know? I was thinking about this yesterday, there was a point, God, maybe 10 years ago when I was teaching, that I was repelled by my lecture notes. I didn’t want them anymore, and every class was about my just opening up, and it was like surfing. And in retrospect, I was prepping for what I do. I was being prepped. When I was a playwright, and it never occurred to me, somebody once asked in an interview how being a playwright prepared me for being a channel. I said, “Well, they had nothing to do with each other,” and they did, in retrospect. But I used to write to music, and I would put the same piece of music on loop for hours, and what I was doing was inducing trance. And then I would sit there and let it come through, and that was how I wrote for years. And the idea of embodying character and allowing a voice to come through wasn’t foreign for me. What I didn’t know until, again, I was reading for somebody. People started to show up to want to talk to the guides, and that’s how my practice started. And I was reading for some woman, and she asked about her father, and she gave me his name. And my eyes were closed, and I heard her gasp. And I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “Oh my God, you started to look just like him.” And that’s when I found out that I could do it again and again and again. I could step into people and be … I was becoming people. It’s a freaky thing. This TV show that I was on a few years ago called The Unexplained, where they had me just read for people that I had never met, there was a woman who showed up, and she was a lovely woman, and she said, “I’m having issues.” I said, “How can I help you? I’m having issues with my …” She said, “My husband and my son.” That’s the information I had. And I tried to tune into her, and she was so frightened, and she was in a stranger’s apartment with a camera crew, so there was reason for her to be nervous. But I went to the kid, I said, “Give me your son’s name.” And I stepped into the son, and I somatized his cerebral palsy, and they intercut me.

Rick: So you started …

Paul: Yeah, I mean the whole thing happened. My hands caught up, I lost my hearing. They didn’t know if the boy was deaf, and I didn’t know what I was doing. And I kept saying, “You can’t hear me. You can’t hear me.” And she said, “I can’t.” And I’m thinking, “What the hell is this? This is a 13-year-old. Why can’t she hear him?” And then he kept saying, “Get me out of here. Get me out of here. Get me out of my body.” And it turned out the boy’s never spoken a word in his life. I don’t even know if he’s still with us. It was a heartbreaking thing. But the mother had never heard the boy before. But I believe, or I hope, that she was helped in some way, because the kid was aware at a level, and the awareness was something that she had lost faith in. You understand? I mean, he was having an experience, not the normal experience we have. And there was an odd period after that aired where I was reading for a lot of parents who would call or Skype or whatever with special needs. And it was fascinating, because I was able to access the kids in ways that perhaps they weren’t as adept at doing, primarily kids with autism, things with that, that weren’t using language in obvious ways, but can still be connected with and heard.

Rick: Yeah, I think I also heard you talk about tuning into somebody who was in a coma or something.

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Do you find that people in comas or kids with autism or people who externally appear to be quite checked out in one way or another, actually on some level are very cogent and coherent and clear, they just can’t express it?

Paul: I think it depends on what level you move to them on. If I were to tune into you, I could tune into you with a personality self, I could tune into you in a higher way and hear from you what’s really going on, why you’re still afraid of spiders, I don’t know, just do something, what the causation is, things like that I’m able to do in my work. But yeah, I seem to be okay as long as there’s still a body attached. I don’t call myself a spiritual medium, so I’m not the guy to tune into your great uncle on the other side. He may come through, it’s happened when I worked, but only in relationship to something really unresolved, you know, that’s blocking somebody in their growth, because my work is specific.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: So the living are easy for me for some reason.

Rick: It’s your specialty, you can’t all do the same thing. Here’s a question from Mary, she asks, “I’m wondering if there are any aspects of the teachings that you just can’t get on board with, or if over time everything has come to be known fully for you now?”

Paul: I’m going to put it this way, there’s a quote attributed to Helen Schucman who was the channel for The Course in Miracles, and she said, “I don’t believe it, but I know it’s true,” and I’m totally with that one. So there’s nothing that they’ve ever said that actually rings false, and there’s usually energy that accompanies what they teach, so every time there’s a new attunement we’re actually able to have an experience of it, and to feel it and to sort of see how we’re being asked to work, and so it’s tangible enough that I can be supported. The stuff that they’re talking about now around how our consciousness is informing the manifest world is challenging for me personally, and I’ve had an odd relationship with the body most of my life, and they’re talking very much about the Divinity that’s inherent in form, and the realization of that. And the idea here, I suppose, if you really want to go there, would be the idea of the Word “made flesh,” and I am completely challenged by that, you know, it’s not my stuff, but when they break it down – and this is where they’re starting to go, I believe – there’s a logic to it that I can’t really abandon. They’re talking about the limitations that we’ve all ascribed to culturally, about what’s possible, and this whole teaching of “beyond the known” is beyond what we’ve agreed to. The metaphor that they’ve been using at times seems to be something like, “We’re punching holes in this ceiling that we thought was there to find out that there’s so much more beyond it,” but the collective agreement has been to limitation and who we are. Now I will say this, because it’s an easy one, and I’ll shut up. The idea that there are things that I do now that are somewhat normal to me that can be proven out and shouldn’t be so, but if I can do it, that means they can be done, and I’m really not that special, and there are people that are doing things that I would never probably dream of doing. When I first started healing, this old Irish lady that I studied with showed me palpably in my body that there were things possible that I hadn’t known could be so, and that changed my life experientially. It took one person to say, “This is so,” and show it to me, that opened me up to possibilities beyond what I would ever have begun to claim.

Rick: Yeah, you know one thing that has always fascinated me is the real genuine genius trendsetters who kind of break, like they’re icebreakers, they break the ice for all the other ships to follow.

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: Elon Musk, for instance, I mean he shot a Tesla to Mars the other day, in addition to all the other stuff he’s doing. So it’s like, who are these people? It seems to me they probably don’t even realize it, but they’re being guided and energized by some kind of higher consciousness.

Paul: You know, his mother was my nutritionist for a period of time.

Rick: I’ll be darned.

Paul: You know, she lives in New York City, I don’t know if she still lives in New York City, I don’t think it quite worked, but she was quite a formidable lady, and I understand … I don’t know that they were even close, I didn’t even know who he was back in those days, he was probably still in graduate school. So yeah, I think that’s true, you know, I think that … I don’t know, I just feel like my job is to show up for whatever the hell this is, and if people are being helped through this that’s terrific, you know what I mean? But what my role is, or what your role is here, I can’t … I have no clue. It may be somebody who hears this a hundred years from now that’s going to make all the difference. I have no clue.

Rick: We all have our roles. Here’s a question from Shannon in Annapolis, Maryland I presume, “For those who are sensitive to the energy of other people and find it difficult to feel close to family members, friends, and even cohabiting with a partner due to this physical sensitivity,” this is a good question, “is there a solution for this dilemma?”

Paul: I don’t know, I don’t know that I’m the one to answer this. I mean, they’re saying yes, they’re saying know who you are and stop being frightened of the manifestations of others and the fear of what they can do to you. This is still fear, this is still fear in another form. So I’m energetically sensitive and I don’t like crowds and you’ll never see me at a rock concert and my idea of a quiet hell is a packed, loud restaurant, you know, I just don’t want to be there. And when I’m not working I do tend to hibernate a bit, you know, I like my privacy and my peace and I’m not looking for the big stuff, but I do know that my responses are my own. The one experience that I have that I can share with this person with this question is you know when people are pissed off at me or when they’re talking trash about me I feel it.

Rick: Even remotely you mean?

Paul: Oh, it’s all remote, yeah, it is half the time, but it’s literally … you hear that old saying, “Your ears must have been ringing,” it’s real, but for me it’s like a fork going into my ear. And usually with a male it’s the right ear, female left ear is usually the case. And the first time I was interviewed on a cable show I was excited and I watched it and the guy who did the interview had me channeling and he broke up all these clips into like three-minute YouTube things with these headlines like, “Watch Paul Selig channel on ET Realities,” and there’s this big man rocking back and forth, whispering and repeating himself. I was completely crazy and I know it and I could feel it, I could feel the stuff. And the YouTube comments were coming and I was feeling it energetically and I said to the guides, “If you want me to do this, why are you letting this happen?” And the response was, “Well, as long as you care what people think about you this is going to be an issue.” It was my issue. But I really did have my ear up to the wall with the glass, I wanted to know. And so when I can uninvest in that I don’t have that experience. It still happens but it hasn’t happened in that way because I don’t think I’m attaching at that level enough.

Rick: Yeah, maybe you’re just getting used to it. I mean imagine being president of the United States and all the criticism and everything you get, whatever president we’re talking about, they just get hammered all the time and I think after a while you must get somewhat inured to it.

Paul: I think people that are at that level of visibility probably have some … you’ve got to have some heavy layer of protection operating. I’m a bit of an open field, and many of us that are empathic are, and I think learning how to operate with this is challenging in some ways. There’s no question about that, but it’s also the gift, you know, it’s exciting as well to learn how to navigate it.

Rick: I have a friend who many years ago was teaching meditation in Louisiana, and one morning he was sitting in his meditation and all these horrible demonic sort of scary things were coming out of me. I thought, “What is going on?” And then later on he realized that an article had just been published in a local paper saying that he’s doing this … he’s the devil and he’s doing this demonic thing and he shouldn’t be in our community and all this stuff, and everybody was reading that and sending out these vibes.

Paul: Exactly right.

Rick: And it’s coming to him. Yeah, yeah. So, we got a little sidetracked, maybe. We’re kind of walking through your books. We went one and two, we jumped to four, we maybe did a little bit of three. Let’s pick that up in our remaining time and just wrap up whatever you feel is significant that’s come out all these years.

Paul: Well, I’ll talk about three, because that’s an easy one. That’s the Book of Knowing and Worth. The Book of Knowing and Worth really speaks about our own unwillingness to claim our birthright as a divine being, to claim our own relationship with the divine. It really is almost essential, I think, for where they want to take us next. The next book was the Book of Mastery, and that’s the beginning of a trilogy. And the Book of Mastery, in some ways, is the unpacking of the claim, “I know who I am.” It’s the true self, it’s the teaching of the true self, it’s who you are. And the Book of Truth, in some ways, I think, is the unpacking of the teaching of “I know what I am.” They’re really beginning to look at manifestation and collective agreement in this book, the things that we’re all in agreement to, that are operating in limitation, and how to begin to move through that. And they speak about the energy of truth as a vibratory field that’s present now. And they say at the end of the Book of Mastery, there was this odd thing in the book, and they said at the end of the book, “Okay, so if there’s something that’s still not moving, you can write it down on a piece of paper and imagine giving it to us.” And I objected to that because that sounded to me like magical thinking and an easy out, and maybe they’re trying to get out of a hard question. And their response was, “No,” they said, “because in truth a lie cannot be held, and we operate in truth, and everything that you’ve written down is not who you truly are.” So the teaching of the Book of Truth is really the expounding of that, and truth and lie cannot be held. And they really said this and this was channeled a couple of years ago now, I guess guess, that everything that’s been hidden is coming to the surface to be seen.

Rick: We’re seeing that, aren’t we?

Paul: We are seeing that.

Rick: In society.

Paul: Yeah, we’re seeing that, yeah. And they’re also talking about the structures that we’ve supported that are based in deceit will not be what they were in time.

Rick: Elaborate on that a little bit, because a lot of people would be a little pessimistic since a lot of the structures that we don’t consider highly enlightened seem to be doing just fine.

Paul: I hear “wait and see” on that, but the word that I hear is “reknown,” reknown realized, realized, reknown in a new way. They’re saying everything can be reknowned in a higher octave, in a higher octave, and they’re saying that’s your opportunity, Rick, to continue to recreate through your fear, through your fear or your blame, or your blame, or to lift what you see, or to lift what you see to its inherent true nature, to its inherent true nature. You create these things, you create these things, they are not being foisted upon you. If you can see them, if you can see them, you can claim them, you can claim them � I know them or know them in a new way, in a new way, period in the same period. So that’s that.

Rick: What about intractable problems like, for instance, the Arab-Israeli conflict and various other things like that, that politicians and diplomats have been working on for decades and that seem to be going nowhere? If we could jump ahead 30 years, would we find that these things have been resolved and is there any way of … it’s hard to imagine how they’re going to be. Do you know where I’m going with this?

Paul: I kind of do. I mean, what I hear … I mean, the guides have never really read on a political event. There’s a really interesting channeling that’s up online that was done in Richmond three days before the last presidential election.

Rick: By you?

Paul: Yeah, yeah, it’s a channeling and it was called “Great Change” and they really did, and I was surprised by the outcome of the election, as many people were, but the channeling really sort of talks about what to expect and it’s been an accurate teaching.

Rick: In terms of this, the outcome of the election?

Paul: No, not the outcome of the election, and there’s no names, but they said, “You know, your idea of choice is to have the milk versus the cream in my coffee,” and they say, “What you’re going to be really looking at is what happens when the whole table tips over. It’s a whole other level of change that’s really coming.” So I mean, I haven’t revisited that in a while, but when you asked the question, the answer I heard was “choice.” You are all choosing these things. They’re saying, “Call it intractable if you wish,” and you reinforce the very thing that you don’t want. If you want an intractable situation, continue to confirm it as such. You are participatory here. Everyone is. Realize the potential for change. The potential for change, that is always the first step. That is always the first step, without potential change. Without the potential for change, you deny the possibility. You deny the possibility, the same possibility that’s already present, that is already present. That’s the first step. That’s the first step. Then claim it as so, then claim it as so and receive the outcome, and receive the outcome. You are always claiming manifestation into manifestation, what you expect, what you expect. You know this, do you know this? What you expect is what you get. If you want war, you can have it. If you want war, you can have it. You are the ones who choose this. You are the ones who choose this period of the same period.

Rick: I mean I’ve always expected that there’s going to be a huge change in the world. I remember back in the early 80s I read a book called “Prophecies and Predictions, Everyone’s Guide to the Coming Changes” and the woman who wrote it took all the prophecies of all kinds of ancient cultures from around the world and correlated them with events that have already taken place and then kind of extrapolated with their further predictions as to when and how things were going to continue to change. But that was early 80s and even in the 70s we were talking about this kind of stuff. And now it’s 40 something years later. So do the guides ever give a timeline as to the pace and duration of this transition?

Paul: I mean I hear it’s happening now, you know, it’s happening now. But in terms of do I get a year? No I don’t, I never have. And this is a generational thing. I mean what I’ve gotten from them really is we’re paving the way for what’s to come, we’re creating the opening for those who are coming in to follow. So the metaphor that they’ve used at times is going through the underbrush with a machete. That’s what we’re doing right now, what we’re doing is we’re clearing a path for those who follow. And it’s what we choose as far as I understand.

Rick: I think that’s what John the Baptist said he was doing for Jesus. Okay, so is there anything else? I mean I’m sure we could talk for hours about all the stuff that’s in your books, but as you scan now the course of our conversation and also the course of your writing career or stenography career, is there anything important there that has come out in your books that we haven’t touched upon in this interview that you’d like to just sort of say?

Paul: Not that I can think of. I mean the newest book that will be out in November, they’re calling it the Book of Freedom. And the idea of freedom actually encompasses the idea of being free of our attachments to everything that we’ve inherited, which includes our comprehension of time. These are all structures that we’re in agreement to, and they’re talking about moving beyond those agreements. You know, they say the true self or the Divine Self can know itself in time but exists beyond it, isn’t bound by the clock and the calendar. And they’re supporting us, I hope, in coming to that level of comprehension about who we truly are.

Rick: It seems like that’s what they’re doing.

Paul: I hope so. I mean I think this is up for the individual to have their own experience with this, really. I’m not the best teacher of this, you know. I seem to be an adept being in order to take the dictation, but my rendering of it or my explanation of it is still limited by my lack of understanding at times. I do my best with the material.

Rick: I heard a great metaphor the other day, I forget who it was that said it, but it was that they were saying, “Well, the microphone never says, ‘Oh, I gave such a great speech,’ you know. I mean, it’s not the microphone giving the speech, the microphone is just an instrument through which the speech can be given.” And you seem to be quite humble in not taking personal credit for all this stuff, you have things in proper … I; It’s a high-quality microphone.

Rick: A high-quality microphone.

Paul: That’s nice to hear.

Rick: Maybe a Sennheiser or something.

Paul: You know, my own personal requirements are really simple, you know, I want a nice relationship, I want a body that works, and I don’t want to worry. Everything else can handle itself.

Rick: Yeah, so it sounds like you’re a pretty busy guy, you’re traveling a lot, giving workshops and everything all over the country, all over the world. You want to give people an idea of the scope of your activities in terms of stuff that they could plug into?

Paul: Sure, I mean, you know, my website just has my name, it’s paulselig.com, S-E-L-I-G. There’s a calendar there, but I do a live stream teaching pretty much every Wednesday, and it’s really the extension of a group that met in my apartment for so many years, which was the laboratory for the work. So the guides are always teaching forward and taking people’s questions. So that’s, you know, Wednesdays, 8 o’clock Eastern, and we send the recording out for people who can’t be there in person, you know, within 24 hours or something, along with a transcript that follows shortly thereafter for people who can’t abide the whispering and repeating, which I can understand. And I do workshops all over, so I may be, you know, upcoming workshops. I’m going to be in Boulder soon, and Chicago, New York this weekend, that workshop will be live-streamed, you know, wherever people are. It’s pretty much non-stop, two or three times a month I’m on the road.

Rick: So basically they just have to come to your website?

Paul: Yeah, it’s all there.

Rick: Yeah, I should just mention, I don’t mention this very often, but we have a page on batgap.com called “Geographic Listings,” I think. It’s a thing where if you type in a location, such as New York, then you see a listing of everybody I’ve interviewed who is going to do something in New York, or then it works its way out in a radius, so you might see Ithaca, New York or something, or Philadelphia, as you go farther down the list. So people might want to check that out sometime, and if you want to register your things in there, Irene will send you the information.

Paul: Thank you, great.

Rick: Yeah. All right, well thanks Paul, I’ve enjoyed this. I’ll be putting up a page on Batgap for this interview, as I always do, and people can … they’ll read about you, there’ll be links to your books, there’ll be a link to your website, and so on. And while you’re there, those who are watching this, if you haven’t been to the site before, just check out the various menus and what we have to offer. You can sign up for the audio podcast or for the email notification of new interviews and whatever you find of interest there. So thanks for listening or watching. We had a few technical difficulties today, but it’s because I have a new computer, but I will get those sorted out by the next one, which will be next Thursday, and appreciate everyone’s attention. Thank you, Paul.

Paul: Thanks for having me.

Rick: Sure. [music]

Rick: So, Paul, thanks for listening.

Paul: Thanks, Rick.

Rick: Thanks for listening.

Paul: Thanks for listening.

Rick: Take care.