Summary
Paul Selig describes channeling as receiving and relaying direct dictation from guides, and explains how his clairaudient abilities developed after a powerful spiritual awakening. The conversation explores discernment, spiritual preparation, personal transformation, and the possibility of guidance from subtler realms.
Questions This Interview Explores
- What is channeling, and how does it differ from intuition or inspiration?
- How can someone recognize whether spiritual guidance is coming from beyond their ordinary mind?
- What can trigger a spiritual awakening or the development of psychic abilities?
- Why is patience and preparation important before teaching or sharing spiritual experiences publicly?
- Are there spiritual beings or subtle realms that influence human life?
Key takeaways
- Channeling involves receiving direct dictation rather than creating an inspired interpretation.
- Spiritual abilities may unfold gradually through practice, service, and sustained discernment.
- A powerful awakening can overturn familiar beliefs and force a person to rebuild their life.
- Public spiritual work benefits from years of private practice and preparation.
- Feeling special can become a trap for people who develop unusual abilities.
- Meaningful experiences can provide trust and direction even when their ultimate source remains uncertain.
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 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, tuned into it, watched some channelers and all, but let’s presume that a few of them haven’t. For their benefit, and also for your particular definition of it, why don’t you define channeling for us?
What channeling means
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, and 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 six books through me. The books require no editing. I mean, 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? 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. I’ll hear one phrase repeated incessantly, and it may not mean anything to me. I may hear, “They all need to know,” or, “You all come and decide,” and whatever it is, I finally 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, “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 from my own, and I recognize it at this point and I’m familiar with it, which is why I trust it. I mean, I’ve never called anybody “my fellows” in my life, and the guy will say, “You and your fellows.” 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. What was that?
✨ Paul’s awakening in 1987
Paul: Well, I mean, I’m almost at this point uncomfortable with that story, only because I’m not so fond of my own narrative at this point. 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, it was 1987. I was maybe a year out of graduate school, about four months before I hit a real wall.
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. 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 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. 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 a voice telling me to get 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 I had been raised an atheist. I was hearing people say, “Oh, there’s this thing happening and people are going to be waking up.” 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.
Then I thought, well, if there is this thing and people are going to be waking up, why would it say no? 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. Somebody had, and I tried to teach myself how to meditate for the first time. That was what I did up on 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. I don’t really know what happened, and to this day I say I may have been hyperventilating. I really don’t know.
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.
It kind of left me frozen and rocking. My mouth was frozen, and I wasn’t here. I was just sort of swaying in this energy.
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. 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.
I’d heard something clairaudiently, I had felt something, which is clairsentience, and I was sitting with the light show. 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 a two-by-four across the head.
Paul: I did, I did. I mean, people said it sounded like a spontaneous Kundalini awakening or Shakti power. I mean, I know what these things are.
My favorite definition was when somebody said it sounds like a soul awakening, and I like that because, in retrospect, that’s kind of what it felt like. It felt like I was being 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 a 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. They’re just kind of bopping along on the donkey, and all of a sudden this huge thing happens to them. In retrospect, they feel like it was a blessing from God, 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 was letting go of an identity that I was very attached to without knowing that I was doing it.
I was 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 have 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.
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. 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. I had maybe half a year or something, in fifth or sixth grade, when I had some nuns in school, and I was taken out promptly. But 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 coming awake at a time of tremendous drama. 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. It was an extraordinary experience and a terrifying one in many ways.
So what I did, first of all, was that people sent me to an energy healer because suddenly Paul was seeing lights around people and believing in God. I’d had platinum-blonde Billy Idol hair that I’d gotten rid of, and people were like, “Oh boy, what are we going to do with this guy? This makes no sense.” I was this rock-and-roll playwright, but I went to this energy healer. Later, I 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 I studied with this woman. I was volunteering at a 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 heard the name Abby, I learned to say, “Who’s Abby?” And you might say, “My sister, my mother, my wife, my cat.” 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. I’d 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.”
I was having to 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.
Somebody said I’m an Enneagram type. My friend Russ Hudson recently said, “You’re an Enneagram…” I think I’m a five 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 the entirety of my experience, but I kept with this stuff, and it continued to develop. 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 graduate program at Goddard. It was what I did for myself.
A long apprenticeship
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.” You kind of went through an apprenticeship, you could say, for 18 years.
Paul: Yeah. I was told—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 another person whom 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.” 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.
I cared far too much about what other people thought of me, and I had an ego. Looking back at that time, I probably 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 someone used the term “premature immaculation.” 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.
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. I had a little group that met once a week. People would sit there, and we’d be in the energy. I did this up until, I don’t know, fairly recently, when the group stopped. 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. It was crazy, but I didn’t care. It was my apartment; I could do what I wanted.
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. It was heady for me. 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 an energy that they called the Word, and I thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. I started hearing “Jerusalem Bible” in meditation, and I finally went to a bookstore and said, “Is there something called a Jerusalem Bible?” And there is. It’s a very beautiful translation from the Aramaic. It’s not the “thee-thou” King James Version; it was this very simple thing.
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 read the thing aloud.
Then, at 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 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. I decided I wanted to go off and write plays for a little while and have a relationship, and I did those things.
Actually, it was after 9/11 that I started my group again, and I never stopped. That’s when everything… It’s just been consistent ever since.
From psychic work to channeled books
Rick: One more retrospective question, and then we’ll move on. Did you have anything in your childhood that presaged this sort of development? I know you said you were kind of raised an atheist, but was there anything in your childhood that foreshadowed it?
Paul: Yeah, a couple of things, but there’s something distinct, and I’m still questioning it. I was about five years old, four or five. My brother was in the room, and he was in the crib. 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 I have a very distinct memory of a 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, and it was glowing.
It was speaking to me from above as I was in the bed. 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.
I remember telling my mother about it, and I assume she may have said, “Oh, that’s probably your father.” My father died when I was five. I said, “Well, that wasn’t my father. I know what my father looked like. It was something else.”
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: “Well, you agreed to what you’re doing. You made the agreement to do 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. I had a dream that I was walking up a strange stone flight of stairs to a garden with a fountain that was shaped like a Coptic cross, with pavers around it and all these leaves.
When I was in Vermont and we hit the town of Plainfield, I started to have déjà vu, and we ended up at Goddard College. My mother was visiting somebody there, and there was the stone flight of stairs, the garden, and the pond that I had dreamt about years before. I never forgot it.
When I was about 31, Goddard asked me to go teach there. I mean, they literally asked me to apply. I wasn’t looking for work. I went there, and I was there for many years. I’m actually still on the board.
But my work, in many ways, was catalyzed there. The woman who first suggested that I write about my clairaudience—when I didn’t want to, and so I didn’t include it in the guide’s packet—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, if you think about academia, is rather rare. But I was supported, so that was there.
Clairaudience, Precognitive Dreams, and Taking Dictation
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 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.
It’s 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 as a teacher, when I wasn’t writing, when I was studying healing, and when I was beginning to make this my focus, there were years when I didn’t know what the hell had happened. 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.
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. I thought, “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 me now.”
And now it does make sense to me, and I’m very grateful for it.
Subtle beings and experiential verification
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. Yet it’s interesting because a lot of people who would consider themselves 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, and I’m sure you don’t, based upon what you’ve been experiencing over the years. Maybe you could comment a little bit upon the idea that there are subtler realms or subtler dimensions which are not evident to ordinary human sensory experience, but which are nonetheless there, just as 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. The fact that I was seeing things—I mean, 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.
The fact that one of the reasons I am actually able to trust the channeled information, which has its own life, is that I have this ability 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. 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, a little bit of a scientific thing where you want some kind of experiential verification. You’re not just going to accept everything on faith.
Paul: Yeah, I can’t. 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. 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?
Rick: Verification and 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. Then they would either have to come back and explain it. 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 that’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. 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 in inquiry, and I also think it’s important to understand that when I work, there’s an energy that becomes present. It’s palpable. It’s in the books, but when I do workshops, you’ve got a hundred people sometimes who have never felt energy, and they’re feeling it. I think that’s really important, because then they have their own experience of knowing. 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 channeling is 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: you’ve written six books, you said. What if we just do a retrospective and say, “Okay, book one, here’s the main points of that,” and then, “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. I actually haven’t gone back to it since it was channeled. 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 is in I Am the Word, and I didn’t realize that at the time.
They said something really important in the first book. They say that Christ and man, or humanity, is an event that happens. Their definition of Christ, which is very specific, is the aspect of the Creator that can be realized in material form, in manifestation.
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.” 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. 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, elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by “Divine in form.”
I suppose Jesus would be a nice example of someone who had really embodied the Divine in form.
Embodiment as the Guides’ Emerging Teaching
Paul: It’s a teaching of embodiment. It’s exactly what it is. This is what they’re going to now, and I’m not as articulate about it as I am perhaps about 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 God up in the clouds, and we’re stuck here in the mud.” 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.”
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. It’s like, “This isn’t what I’m supposed to look like, but the tree really is.”
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.” They say this is a new claim of identity.
Rick: What would be a good synonym for “Word” here, if we could use a synonym?
Paul: 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 fifty-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 you to see God in the tree than in your 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, which 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. 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. The Divine is in 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 toward, 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 of many of the same elements as a radio, 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” 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 it.
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. A lot of people say 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. 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 it, 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.
The Guides Dictate Paul Selig’s First Book
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.” 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. 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 one,” and 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, your true knowing. They talk a lot, in general, about the distinction between thinking and knowing. The true self knows; the small self thinks. There’s nothing wrong with thinking, but you can understand the difference.
They talk, as I recall, about how to develop clairaudience and clairsentience, how to begin to work with the subtle bodies as part of that teaching.
But the larger teaching—I know, truthfully, that other than sitting in the recording studio and doing the audiobook, I’ve actually never read it. I dictated it, I typed it, and 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. 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 didn’t know how to punctuate a channeled text. 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 the structure of a sentence in a way that can be moved to the page.
Rick: How many years ago was that book published?
Paul: I think that 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 saying, “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. 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. 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 afterward, 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 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.
When I go to Esalen, I was at Esalen in California in November and December for five weeks, and I channeled every day, sometimes for very, very long stretches. So now the book dictations, now that they’re doing them in workshops, are a very different experience.
The energy in workshops is very, very high, and I would be there anyway. 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.
When they’re teaching a workshop, there are certain things that I understand they will often do. They’ll attune people, and 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.
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 can know and channel, but the books are exciting because 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. 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. 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—careful, careful, careful, careful, careful.
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. If you watch videos of me channeling, because there are some from the earlier days, my body’s rocking back and forth, and 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 there’d be two things. One is, if you get this energy flowing through you, that in itself is enlivening and stimulating and enriching. But then, if there’s a lot of detritus that’s kind of clogging the channel, so to speak, that’s got to be cleared out.
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 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 afterward.
Like the day I put my dog, who was my companion for so long, down, I then had to channel that night on a livestream. The guides came through beautifully. 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—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 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 overidentified with or believe we are at the cost of what we truly are. That’s so much of what this is about, and I get to experience that as well.
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 overidentified with or believe we are at the cost of what we truly are. 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. Not so much when I’m doing a workshop. When I’m channeling a workshop, they’ll say, “Paul is interrupting,” or they really can’t ignore it.
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; they’ll acknowledge me as a 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—it was the Book of Truth, 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. 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 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 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.
In those days, I was channeling on my feet, so I was walking and channeling with the phone to my ear in front of a group. Her sneaker squeaked on the floor, and I jumped out of my skin. I was already angry at somebody else.
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.”
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 anger in a whole other way. I think it’s a valuable thing in the book. I did read it, and I thought, “Well, this still makes sense and it’s supportive.”
But it doesn’t happen anymore that way. 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 fifties; 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. 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 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 does it come from?
Paul: I think you’d have to ask the readers. I mean, every time I dictate for the texts, some of the stuff is familiar from prior teachings and I understand it, and some of the stuff isn’t.
The Consistency of the Channeled Teachings
What I think is interesting is that the teachings have been extremely consistent. I really don’t know—I haven’t heard of any time when they contradict a prior teaching in the books. I’ve never heard of it, and somebody may find that one day, but I haven’t seen it or noticed it, or it hasn’t been called to my attention.
What I think is interesting is that the teachings have been extremely consistent. I really don’t know—I haven’t heard of any time when they contradict a prior teaching in the books. I’ve never heard of it, and somebody may find that one day, but I haven’t seen it or noticed it, or it hasn’t been 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—until the last two books. Then I saw what they were really going for, which was, I think, that 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 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. 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 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, but the guides—I mean, they’ve been doing livestreams lately—have been using the metaphor of the eye of the needle and the camel.
Rick: That’s where he said it, right in that passage.
Paul: Yeah, it’s the same teaching, but the idea is that the things to which we attach great importance, which stand in the way, will need to be released. 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. You hit the bumps, and you’re dislodging the suitcases as you go. Very often, that’s the process here.
✨ Collective consciousness and social change
Rick: I’ve often thought about that and have been through a lot of it myself, as have my friends, since I’ve been meditating for about stages and levels and degrees of development. But you can always extrapolate from the individual out to 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, and 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, if you want to—or not, whatever.
Paul: Listen, if I don’t answer well, they’ve been known to cut in and say pretty much what they want to say, but they have talked about this. The Book of Truth is where they really start talking about the externalization of this.
What the guides say, really, is that 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 by “we,” you mean 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 with. That’s 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. 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. They’re saying—let me see if I can get this right—they may step in, actually.
We would like to. What he’s really asking is, how do you evolve beyond the barriers that you’ve erected, beyond the agreements you’ve made as a collective that are now hindering progress? The manifestations you see are things that, in fact, you have created. Anything that’s been created may be recreated in a higher octave, but this happens at the cost of the old. Everything is in resonance. Everything that was erected in fear, or serves fear in some way, must now be re-known, realized in a new way beyond what you’ve 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 and is participatory in the replication of history in an ongoing way. The true self that you are—the aspect of you that is the true self—can conceive of something higher. Once you realize yourself as who you truly are, in the higher way, the creations you attend to must conform to the identity you hold. You lift the kingdom into being, or the awareness of the Divine, through your own acknowledgment of your own inherent divinity. It cannot be other. Period.
Rick: Right, that makes sense to me. Maybe another way of phrasing it is that 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 individuals, families, communities, countries, and the whole thing.
It’s all just an external thing, and if consciousness is going to change, then all those external structures are going to change. I think that’s what they were just saying.
And there’s a kind of resistance sometimes. For instance, Trump is out there campaigning, saying, “We’re going to keep digging coal.” Coal is a completely ridiculous technology compared to the ones that are already blossoming in alternative energy. But there’s a tendency to hang on to the old and resist the new.
I have a feeling that, as they said in wherever that saying came from—Star Trek or something—resistance is futile. 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 in a time of reckoning. They said a reckoning is a facing of oneself and all of one’s creations.
This is happening on an individual level. The individual is happy to go through this, but the collective is as well. We’re all participatory in the whole.
This idea that we’re not complicit, truthfully, in everything that we see—the consciousness that we have, they say, imprints itself on what we see or supports it.
The example they gave—I questioned this, and I’m not always their best student—was, I think, somewhere in the Book of Mastery, which was the fourth book. I said, “So if I’m at a table in Paris, I’m in agreement with the book on the table in Paris?”
Consciousness said, “Yes. The moment you know that there’s a book on the table in Paris, your consciousness is actually informing that.” 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.
So much of their teaching is about the awareness of the inherent Divine in everyone: “I know who you are in truth, I know what you are in truth, I know how you serve in truth.” They say this is the claim of mastery, or the realization of the Divine that is present in all, which can be known, 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.”
Einstein said, “No, that’s ridiculous. I mean, the moon exists whether or not anyone is there to perceive it.”
My argument would be, “Well, let’s say all of humanity agrees not to look at the moon. We still have tides.” So 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. This is what I’m getting right now: It’s there, but it’s existing in multiple octaves. There are different ways of realization.
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. They say 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 what they call the echo, or the boomerang, the resonance of the field responding back. I mean, it’s as 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. I’ve never read—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… It 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 and resonance.
Rick: Yeah. 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—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…
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.
🛤️ Questioning the source of channeling
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 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.
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 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 attachment 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 who 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 from 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, is that they’ve begun talking about the limitations of language itself as a way to convey information, because 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 channeling Archangel Gabriel or whoever, you know, all this kind of stuff. And 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, 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 there’s also an energy that’s palpable that people experience. I mean, there’s phenomena attached to this. 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.
Paul Selig’s Relationship with the Guides
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 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. Yeah, but there’s a difference.
Irene: 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. Sometimes I find out that that’s where they had the biopsy. It was fine, but I’m still feeling it. There’s interpretation. That’s very different from 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.
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.
Initially, there’s a line in the very first book that confuses people, and this is before I realized I could footnote things effectively. 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.
Purpose, freedom, and the role of the channel
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 ourselves?
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.
We want no dependency upon us or the teachings. We teach you to know yourselves, to be the divine self that you have always been.
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. 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, at 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. 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, and 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. 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.
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.
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. When I hear people who are channeling and they’re talking about, “Oh, who killed Princess Di?” 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 are recordings of it, a few of them. There was one at a workshop in Mexico, and they started channeling directly. 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 still trying to understand what’s happening.
Rick: It must be having a profound effect on you, having all this go channeling through you all these years. 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 in a lot of ways, it was my spiritual practice—teaching. I honor it as such, 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 for my own writing I could take credit. 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 from what I’ve known before.
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 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. It was like surfing. 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. What I was doing was inducing trance. Then I would sit there and let it come through, and that was how I wrote for years. The idea of embodying character and allowing a voice to come through wasn’t foreign to me.
What I didn’t know until later—I was reading for somebody. People started to show up wanting to talk to the guides, and that’s how my practice started. I was reading for some woman, and she asked about her father, and she gave me his name. My eyes were closed, and I heard her gasp. I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “Oh my God, you started to look just like him.”
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.
There was 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. A woman showed up, and she was a lovely woman, and she said, “I’m having issues.” I said, “How can I help you?” She said, “I’m having issues with my …” I said, “Your husband and your son?” That’s the information I had.
I tried to tune into her, and she was so frightened. 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 and said, “Give me your son’s name.” I stepped into the son, and I somatized his cerebral palsy. They intercut me.
Rick: So you started …
Paul: Yeah, I mean, the whole thing happened. My hands curled up, I lost my hearing. They didn’t know if the boy was deaf, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I kept saying, “You can’t hear me. You can’t hear me.” She said, “I can’t.”
I’m thinking, “What the hell is this? This is a 13-year-old. Why can’t she hear him?” Then he kept saying, “Get me out of here. Get me out of here. Get me out of my body.” It turned out the boy had 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. I believe, or I hope, that she was helped in some way, because the kid was aware at a level, and that was something she had lost faith in. You understand? He was having an experience, not the normal experience we have.
There was an odd period after that aired when I was reading for a lot of parents who would call or Skype or whatever with special-needs children. 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—kids who weren’t using language in obvious ways, but who could 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: 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, but 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—and what the causation is. Those are things 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’ve worked, but only in relationship to something really unresolved 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 A Course in Miracles, and she said, “I don’t believe it, but I know it’s true.” I’m totally with that one.
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, to feel it, and to sort of see how we’re being asked to work. 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. 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.
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. 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 ourselves 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 to 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 I do now that are somewhat normal to me, that can be proven out and shouldn’t be possible—but if I can do it, that means they can be done. I’m really not that special, and there are people who 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 through—they’re like 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: She lived 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. 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. 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 who’s going to make all the difference. I have no clue.
🛤️ Sensitivity, empathy, and personal responsibility
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, “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. You’ll never see me at a rock concert, and my idea of a quiet hell is a packed, loud restaurant. I just don’t want to be there. When I’m not working, I do tend to hibernate a bit. 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 who asked this question is that, 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 literal. 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. Usually with a male, it’s the right ear; with a female, the left ear is usually the case.
The first time I was interviewed on a cable show, I was excited. I watched it, and the guy who did the interview had me channeling. He broke up all these clips into three-minute YouTube things with headlines like, “Watch Paul Selig Channel on ET Realities.” There was this big man rocking back and forth, whispering and repeating himself. I was completely crazy, and I knew it, and I could feel it. I could feel the stuff.
The YouTube comments started coming, and I was feeling them energetically. I said to the guides, “If you want me to do this, why are you letting this happen?” 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. 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 who are at that level of visibility probably have some heavy layer of protection operating. I’m a bit of an open field, and many of us who are empathic are. 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. 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 meditation and all these horrible, demonic, scary things were coming out of him. He thought, “What is going on?” Later on, he realized that an article had just been published in a local paper saying that he was the devil, that he was doing this demonic thing, that he shouldn’t be in their community, and all this stuff. Everybody was reading that and sending out these vibes.
Paul: Exactly right.
The progression of the books
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 through one and two, jumped to four, and 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 over 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. 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.
The Book of Truth, in some ways, I think, is the unpacking of the teaching, “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 about that are operating in limitation, and how to begin to move through that.
They speak about the energy of truth as a vibratory field that’s present now. At the end of The Book of Mastery, there was this odd thing in the book. They said, “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.”
I objected to that because it sounded to me like magical thinking and an easy out. Maybe they were trying to get out of a hard question. Their response was, “No,” they said, “because in truth, a lie cannot be held. 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: truth and lies cannot be held. They really said this—and this was channeled a couple of years ago now, I 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. They’re also talking about the structures that we’ve supported that are based in deceit. They 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. 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 “re-known”—re-known, realized, realized, re-known in a new way. They’re saying everything can be re-known in a higher octave.
They’re saying that’s your opportunity,
Rick: to continue to recreate through your fear or your blame, or to lift what you see to its inherent, true nature. You create these things; they are not being foisted upon you. If you can see them, you can claim them. You can re-know them in a new way. Period. So, that’s that.
What about intractable problems like, for instance, the Arab-Israeli conflict and various other things like that, which 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? Is there any way of imagining how they’re going to be? Do you know where I’m going with this?
Paul: I kind of do. The guides have never really read on a political event. There’s a really interesting channeling that’s online that was done in Richmond three days before the last presidential election.
Rick: By you?
Paul: Yeah. It was a channeling called “Great Change.” I was surprised by the outcome of the election, as many people were, but the channeling really talks about what to expect, and it’s been an accurate teaching.
Rick: In terms of the outcome of the election?
Paul: No, not the outcome of the election. There were no names, but they said, “You know, your idea of choice is to have the milk versus the cream in my coffee.” And they said, “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.”
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 is always the first step. Without the potential for change, you deny the possibility—the same possibility that’s already present. That’s the first step.
Then claim it as so and receive the outcome. You are always claiming manifestation into manifestation 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. You are the ones who choose this. Period.
Rick: 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. The woman who wrote it took the prophecies of all kinds of ancient cultures from around the world and correlated them with events that had already taken place. Then she extrapolated from their further predictions as to when and how things were going to continue to change.
But that was the early ’80s, and even in the ’70s we were talking about this kind of stuff. Now it’s 40-something years later. Do the guides ever give a timeline as to the pace and duration of this transition?
Paul: I hear that it’s happening now. It’s happening now. But in terms of whether I get a year, no, I don’t. I never have.
This is a generational thing. What I’ve gotten from them, really, is that we’re paving the way for what’s to come. We’re creating the opening for those who are coming in to follow. The metaphor they’ve used at times is going through the underbrush with a machete. That’s what we’re doing right now: clearing a path for those who follow. 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’m sure we could talk for hours about all the stuff that’s in your books, but as you scan the course of our conversation and also the course of your writing—or stenography—career, is there anything important that has come out in your books that we haven’t touched upon in this interview that you’d like to say?
Paul: Not that I can think of. The newest book, which will be out in November, they’re calling The Book of Freedom. The idea of freedom actually encompasses 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 with, and they’re talking about moving beyond those agreements. They say the true self, or the Divine Self, can know itself in time but exists beyond it. It isn’t bound by the clock and the calendar. 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 think this is up to the individual to have their own experience with it, really. I’m not the best teacher of this. 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 at times by my lack of understanding. I do my best with the material.
Rick: I heard a great metaphor the other day. I forget who it was who said it, but they were saying, “The microphone never says, ‘Oh, I gave such a great speech.’” It’s not the microphone giving the speech; the microphone is just an instrument through which the speech can be given.
You seem to be quite humble in not taking personal credit for all this stuff. You have things in proper perspective. It’s a high-quality microphone.
A high-quality microphone.
Paul: That’s nice to hear.
Rick: Maybe a Sennheiser or something.
Paul: My own personal requirements are really simple. I want a nice relationship, I want a body that works, and I don’t want to worry. Everything else can handle itself.
Workshops and staying connected
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 and all over the world. Do you want to give people an idea of the scope of your activities in terms of things they could plug into?
Paul: Sure. My website is just my name: paulselig.com, S-E-L-I-G. There’s a calendar there, but I do a livestream teaching pretty much every Wednesday. It’s really an extension of a group that met in my apartment for so many years, which was the laboratory for the work.
The guides are always teaching forward and taking people’s questions. That’s Wednesdays at 8:00 Eastern, and we send the recording out for people who can’t be there in person within 24 hours or so, along with a transcript that follows shortly thereafter for people who can’t abide the whispering and repeating, which I can understand.
I do workshops all over. I have upcoming workshops in Boulder, Chicago, and New York this weekend. That workshop will be livestreamed, so people can join wherever they are. It’s pretty much nonstop; 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: I should just mention—I don’t mention this very often—we have a page on batgap.com called “Geographic Listings,” I think. If you type in a location, such as New York, you see a listing of everybody I’ve interviewed who is going to do something in New York. Then it works its way out in a radius, so you might see Ithaca, New York, or Philadelphia, as you go farther down the list.
People might want to check that out sometime. If you want to register your events 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. I’ll get those sorted out by the next one, which will be next Thursday, and I appreciate everyone’s attention. Thank you, Paul.
Paul: Thanks for having me.
Rick: Sure. [music]
So, Paul, thanks for listening.
Paul: Thanks, Rick.
Rick: Thanks for listening.
Paul: Thanks for listening.
Rick: Take care. [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]
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