Journey Beyond the Veil with Paul Selig

In this Episode

• [00:09]Stephan introduces his next guest, Paul Selig, who is considered one of the foremost spiritual channels working today.
• [01:54]Stephan wants to understand better the meaning of planetary evolution and how that looks different for our guides.
• [07:26]Paul narrates the beginnings of his understanding of reality.
• [14:24]Stephan and Paul discuss their perspective of free will and our gift to choose.
• [21:12]Stephan asks Paul to share an example of making a choice that’s not as positive.
• [22:54]Paul describes getting a message and hearing a voice from his guides which is a tone of knowing.
• [28:38]Stephan shares having clairaudience and hearing it from his voice and internal voice and Paul talks about his channeling, getting psychic information and hearing guides.
• [33:21]Stephan wants to know the distinction between intuiting a book versus channeling a book and how to distinguish the two.
• [40:34]Stephan asks Paul about the phrase conscious channels.
• [44:06]Paul discusses his whole trip with channeling.
• [46:46]Paul shares his prayer of protection and explains the reason for using it.
• [48:32]Stephan wants to know if Paul is still practicing reading people.
• [51:08]Paul talks about having clairvoyance to access visual information, see auras and teach people how to see it.
• [52:50]Stephan asks Paul whether Christ and Jesus are the same or different and wants to know about Christ’s consciousness.
• [55:19]Visit Paul Selig’s website to listen, get readings, and access his teachings.

Jump to Links and Resources

Paul, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me.

I would love for us to start with a better understanding of what planetary evolution means and how that looks different for our guides and those above looking down on us, helping us elevate versus what we think planetary evolution is?

No, I had no idea. Planetary evolution was my first editor’s descriptor for the work that I was doing. And that’s what’s ended up in the text to describe the books; I think it’s accurate. I can talk about what I believe it may mean. The guides teach individual evolution and realization, but it’s not self-help. They’re teaching this so that we’re participatory to a much larger act that they say is occurring, which is a new awareness of who and what we are beyond an old existing paradigm that has its foundation based on fear. 

And so the level of consciousness that they say that they’re bringing us to or supporting us in is unity consciousness; it’s not a dualistic paradigm, as I understand it. So now we’re perceiving this as moving from a sense of individual self to a pluralized, collective sense of agreement to the inherent divine that must be in all things or nothing at all, which is how they describe it. 

“We’re in this great wave of change.” And they’ve been saying this since 2009.

How it looks to the guides is a really interesting question, I probably have to ask them. But they’re saying that this is a real opportunity for all of us. They also say, which I found interesting because I didn’t hear this, that humanity has decided collectively to stay to take a step forward. Of course, we still have individual will, and we can do what we want. But the collective has agreed to this transition. And what they’ve said is, “We’re in this great wave of change.” 

And they’ve been saying this since 2009, with a very first book when they said humanity is a time of reckoning. And a lot of what they talked about is sort of foretold the collective experience that we seem to be having about now. But this collective wave of change is something that we get to ride, and it brings us to a higher place; we don’t have to fight it. It’s not about restoring what was, although we’re going to try to do that because that’s what you do when you’re in a stormy sea, you hold on to them the most solid thing you can find. 

But I understand that this is a positive change that we’re undergoing. It does mean that we move to a new foundation, they call that foundation, their language for this is the “upper room,” which is just another level of consciousness that they’re saying is available to us and can be aligned through individual will, and certainly through the collective ability to choose something beyond what we’ve been taught we’re allowed.

I love that this is a positive time. I feel that’s true. There are other channels, mediums, and connected folks who deliver that same message. 

When I’m working, I know that this is all real because the phenomena around it are impactful to me and have been deeply impactful in my life.

The first one that comes to mind is Lee Carroll, who channels Kryon. And there’s this great parable that Kryon shared through Lee around this fish tank, and that’s being renovated in a way because the whole apartment is being renovated, and it’s too big of a fish tank to move. So the fish in there don’t understand that there are humans outside of the fish tank; they don’t understand that the humans are dropping the food, and the board is put on top. And there’s all this commotion going on with stuff shaking and vibrating and stuff like that. 

The fish doesn’t realize that the apartment is being renovated, that new cabinetry is being put in and so forth. So they don’t have the context. And they get all freaked out. And yeah, it’s a lot of fear. But what’s happening is quite beautiful, and it’s a whole new world. And at the end of it, after the renovation is complete, the owner moves back in and removes the board, and everything comes back to stability like it’s all-new. So it’s not just we’re back to normal. And that’s how it is for us. We don’t see outside our fish tank; there is a much bigger picture.

And I’m curious to hear your moment of recognition or realization that this is not our physical reality as we tend to think of it. This is like a simulation of sorts, or it’s a movie that stars me as the person who’s in the pilot seat because I happen to be the observer. So my positivity, faith, and certainty define to a large degree my experience and the experience of the entire universe and the multiverse. It’s my universe that I’m piloting. 

So what was that moment for you were like, “Wow, this is not anything like what I first anticipated.” Is it something that you’ve had since childhood, like you started seeing and hearing things? Was there a certain moment where you woke up after a dream or after praying or something, and it’s like a whole new realization? How did that transpire for you?

It’s been a process, and it’s an ongoing process. There was a sort of radical break in my understanding of reality when I was 25. And I was a hard-partying kid about a year out of Yale – grad school. And it was wonderful; I thought self-destructive. I thought it was kind of a wonderful way to be in the world. But I was bottoming out in a hotel room in St. Paul and going for campus Motor Lodge; I was working on a project there. 

The Gideons leave these books in the drawers, and that night, I pulled it out, and it said a prayer for people in crisis. And I was raised as an atheist, pretty much, so I was interested in the paranormal, but the idea of God was for other people. It wasn’t for me; I didn’t know what spiritual life was, I didn’t know why you would want one, I didn’t think it could even be had. But I said this stupid prayer, and then I let it go. 

And three days later, I was back in New York, and I woke up in the morning, and I asked myself what I could do that day that was positive. And I heard a voice, and it told me that was the first one, and then everything changed. And so for me to go from a world where there is no such thing as the Source, God, or Spirit, I don’t care what people call it, to one in which there was the equivalent of moving to another planet. It was totally different. It made no sense to anybody that I knew that suddenly this was where I was at.

And then I had this experience, maybe four or five months later, there was this thing happening, people were calling the Harmonic Convergence. I heard people are going to be waking up, and I thought, well, if there is God, and you asked to be woken up, why would it want to say no? I mean, it was completely innocent, but I didn’t carry a lot of baggage. 

So I went up to the roof of the building I lived in and tried to teach myself to meditate. Somebody had given me a crystal and a mantra; I thought, you need these things to wake up. So I cried the first time; I was sitting there doing this mantra. And I felt this energy start to move through me, and I didn’t know this. It was a Kundalini mantra. I didn’t even know what Kundalini was. But I had an experience of energy moving through my body, and that sort of left me frozen. I always say I may have been hyperventilating because of the breathwork; I have no idea what happened. 

But I was there, I was rocking in this energy, and it was palpable for me. Given where I had come from, I needed something palpable. And oddly, the work that I do with my guides has always been very palpable for people, the energy comes through in ways that can be experienced and felt, and the books are transmissions for this. So that was the beginning, and then everything else has been an unraveling of who I thought I was. and letting go of my ideas of what the world is and what’s important. 

I think that’s what life is; in some ways, it’s opportunity.

So I don’t claim to be awakened or ascended. And I find that most people who do claim that probably are speaking from an egoic state, the people I’ve met that I think are that awake aren’t talking about it, they don’t need to, they just are being it. And I’ve seen that in people that probably have no formal spiritual life at all but just are operating at that level of faith, trust, and agreement to whatever is before them. 

I still don’t know that there’s a moment for this. When I’m working, I know that this is all real because the phenomena around it is impactful to me and have been deeply impactful in my life. But I don’t feel that somebody turned a switch on and suddenly I was there and awakened and knew everything because I don’t. I always have to say, I’m not a spiritual teacher, and I’m certainly not a guru, and I don’t want that stuff. 

I have this audibility that I show up for very consistently. And I was showing up for this consistently when I had three or five people coming to sit in my living room for 18 years, putting ten bucks in a basket. That’s how this began, I was trained for the work that I do now, and it took time; it wasn’t an immediate thing, like, “Oh, here we are, we’re a channel, let’s go have a career.” 

I had to be dragged out kicking and screaming from my academic closet to do this stuff publicly. And that’s only six years ago, but I left that life to say, “Okay, this is your work. Now, this is what you’re doing.”

So that’s all, it was a 10 or 18 years overnight success.

It’s not even an overnight success. It’s an ongoing process. It really is. I don’t know; I have friends that say, “Well, don’t you want to be awakened in this lifetime?” And when I’ve done workshops, and people have raised their hands to ask my guides, and a person says, “I just want to know that this is my last lifetime that I don’t have to come back.” And then the guides say, “Well, then you get to come back.” Because you’re still refusing to be here at a certain level, the whole idea is that this is something to be escaped, as opposed to something to realize yourself through that it’s an opportunity to learn. 

I think that’s what life is; in some ways, it’s opportunity. It’s not always what we say it should look like. In my case, it certainly has not been in any way, shape, or form what I said it should look like but do I feel that I’m in some hologram that I’m creating? No, I think I’m in a collective field that I contribute to. And one of the things that infuriate me at times about the new age is people say, “I’m creating everything.” 

But what if you’re living in a town where the water is polluted, and people are getting sick from the water? You’re in a collective agreement to be in a world where people can poison the water and get away with it. And there are choices that we make collectively that create a shared reality. We’re all contributing to everything we see through the consciousness that we hold it, and I believe that we co-create. 

But I’m not so much on the side that we’re the director of all things because I think there’s free will. And if I step on your foot, you have every right to say, “Get the hell off my foot,” and it’s your reality. You got to get to say no, just as I got to say, “Okay, I’m going to do that. Pay the price.”

Let’s talk about free will because that concept has so much depth. What I’m learning in Kabbalah is that free will exists in the space in between in the moments where you make decisions to either be reactive or proactive, and everything is essentially already written. 

They say we’ve been gifted with free will and that we do have a choice.

So you’re acting out a movie or a play where all the scenes have already been decided. The script is already written, and you’re acting it out. You might think that you’re not getting to choose all these different things, but it’s really in the moments where you get it challenged or push into what seems like a corner you get uncomfortable. And the reactive route, which is the route that most of us take in most situations, is the script that’s already written. But the proactive route, not getting reactive, but pausing, making a different choice that is more thoughtful and loving will take you on a different path that is also written, but it’s like an alternate timeline. 

So that is my understanding from a Kabalistic perspective of free will. It’s those moments where you choose to be proactive instead of reactive and then all the other stuff, all the different chance meetings, and the winning the lottery or not winning the lottery. All these different things were already preordained. What are your thoughts, or what’s your understanding of that?

I don’t hear that. That’s not what I’m told. But you know, I was reflecting on my life a couple of days ago, and I thought, “None of it feels like an accident.” How things have happened. And I can look at the breadcrumbs that were laid out that I followed to live the life I’m currently living. But I don’t know that I agree with it as you’re putting it, because the guides I work with honor with free will. They say we’ve been gifted with it and that we do have a choice. 

The action of fear is to claim more fear and that every choice we make in fear contributes to all the fear that is, so we’re doing that, and we have the opportunity to change our minds. Now the guides talk about individual will and divine will, and the individual will, I suspect, although I probably should try to get this directly from them. But I’m on my first cup of coffee today. So I don’t know that I can channel well. 

If you look at everything from a higher vantage point, you begin to understand this cosmic dance that we're all engaging in, which has its own perfection. Click To Tweet

My personality self, which the guides sometimes called the small self, is nothing wrong with it. But basically, everything it knows is born in historical data. These are the choices available to me because these are the choices that I’ve been taught are available. And so consequently, I’m always referencing this menu of cultural agreement about how it can be lived; I broke every rule that I taught, I didn’t know you could talk to guides. 

My practice as a psychic is telepathic, I sit there, and I tune into people, and I become them. And I started to look like them. It’s just crazy. I didn’t know that this could be so until it was happening. And then, I had to stretch my understanding of what was normal to embrace this. The divine will, they talk about as the alignment to the true self. It’s all really about alignment. And they talk about a braiding of the will in their teachings. 

So you’ve got the personality itself, which is I want to be successful, this is what success looks like. And so, I’m going to aspire to what success looks like in this culture that defines success in certain ways. And then you have the divine self that knows who it is and doesn’t need to have that reflection back to know its own value. 

And they talked about the braiding of the will, which I found interesting. So the example that they used to give was because I used to hear, “Thy will not mine be done.” And that was helpful for me at a stage in my development to say, “I don’t know what’s best. You handle it.” But then there’s this other place that they come to, which is the unified will, which is up there with, ‘I am the source, whatever that is are operating as one.’ And that’s the expression of the unified will. So you’re not operating from a paradigm of separation. And that’s where I understand they bring us to. 

Now when they talk about that, they talk about being in one’s knowing, that’s just operating from your knowing, it’s not trying to figure it out anymore through the data that’s presented. It operates from claircognizance, which is the awareness of the divine self. So I know for a fact that there were large choices that I made in my life that I knew not to make and that I paid dearly for them. Some of them, my guides said, “Not a good idea,” and I went and did it anyway, and I got dropped on my head. 

Would have I have had a different timeline or experience? Yeah, I do think I would have. Did I learn through what I chose? And you can become pardon. Was it not integrated into the path of my life? Absolutely, it was. And it is all useful because all experience I believe is useful at the level of the soul, even if it’s not what I say that I want. So, I think both things are true. 

I once was at a conference speaking, which I almost never do. And the person who was up at the conference right before me said in response to the questions, “There’s no such thing as free will.” And I went, “Oh-oh,” because my guides got up after that. And then they channeled a whole lecture on why there was free will. And really, you do choose what side of the bed you get out on, you do. I choose to overeat, which is to my detriment. I know I can make other choices, and if I were to make other choices, I’d be a little bit healthier.

I learned not to give my authority over somebody who has a whole other agenda for me or my work.

So that’s how I’m framing it right now. But once I look back on it all, I say, “Yeah, this is all been perfect.” I think both things are true simultaneously at different levels of reality. Everything is perfect now, but it sure doesn’t look like it. But if you look at it from a higher vantage point, you want to begin to understand this cosmic dance that we’re all engaging in, which has its own perfection. And I do believe that.

Yeah, I do, too. Could you share an example or two of making a choice that, in retrospect, wasn’t so good and you get dropped on your head?

Yeah, I fell in love with the wrong person once when I was about 26 years old. I prayed on it. And in those days, for me to get an answer, I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for my guides to get through to me. Because of the density of my field, it must have been like picking a jackhammer, getting a message through, and I heard distinctly, “End this now!” Of course, I didn’t want to because it was, and it took me about two years to get over that one; I think it would have taken me about two weeks if I had listened. 

I got coerced into doing professional things in my earlier career that I would not have chosen, and I knew it was going against myself in some way. Again, I learned what I would not do again; that was the value of it. I learned not to sign a contract that doesn’t feel healthy and supportive. I learned not to give my authority over somebody who has a whole other agenda for me or my work. 

And so, these were things that I got to learn through. Did they all work out so far? Thank God they have in some ways. Would I live a different life if I married the person I could have married 20 years ago? Probably, yes. But I didn’t. So I’m not having that life. I’m having something else.

I got enough confirmation for the information that allowed me to trust it.

When you heard that voice saying, “End this now,” is it in your voice, like your internal voice? Or was it like a female voice? How did these voices sound to you?

Well, when I’m traveling, it’s a whole different experience. Now, at the very beginning, as I said, I wasn’t expecting to hear anything. And no, it’s not a voice in the room at all. That’s a kind of clairaudience, but it’s not how I demonstrate it. I have this active brain that’s always running, running, running, running stuff. It’s like having a radio on, just static buzz all the time. 

Monkey mind.

Monkey mind. Yeah, but I had a really loud one, especially in those days. We used to call it the committee. I had a loud committee, and what it was like when I heard to get my act together, which was the first thing I heard. And then the second thing I think I heard was, “Don’t go pursue this relationship.” It’s like a thought that stops all other thoughts. It’s like it parts the waves of the chatter, and it overrides it. 

And it has a texture to it, a different resonant tone. And the tone is, and I wouldn’t have known this at the time, but it was the tone of knowing. And the guides I work with say, “The small self thinks, the true self knows.” And when they define that, it’s pretty easy when you’re really in your knowing there is never a question even if it’s what you don’t want to know. I know it’s time for the relationship to end. I know this isn’t how this situation is for me, I know. 

When you have those moments of knowing, they’re rarely convenient to what we want at the level of personality. But whenever and think about it, and we’ve all had knowing moments of knowing you go into you remember what it was like probably there was no question attached. So that was how it began. 

There are choices that we collectively make that create a shared reality. We're all contributing to everything we see through the consciousness that we hold. Click To Tweet

When I first began channeling or hearing was always for other people. I was working as an energy healer, which I had done. I was a college professor, but I had this other life pursuing my esoteric interests. And I was studying, I studied a form of energy healing, and I was volunteering at a center in the early 90s. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic in New York City; people were dying right, left, and sideways. There was no medical treatment, and these little pop-ups were starting in Manhattan, and all over they were some in LA to provide alternative services. 

And I found that when I had my hands on people’s bodies, I began to hear things for myself, I had my hand in your chest, I heard the name Arthur. And I’m not thinking of any Arthur and the same thing; we just interrupt the chatter; I learned to say, “Who’s Arthur?” And you might say, “My lover, my father, my dog, my best friend, the man who beat me up when I was 20, whatever.” And that would prompt an energetic release. 

When I’m getting psychic information, I’m getting my own voice.

As I continued to get confirmation from the people I was working with, the information was accurate. I began to trust it more. And so what I was doing was finding a station that I could trust, like a radio station, and then I put a line to that station. And when I sat down to do a group in my apartment, it started; I wasn’t looking forward, I wasn’t expecting to channel, I was going to do a meditation with energy like my old teacher used to do. 

The very first time I started getting instructions, I was appalled; I was like, “I think I’m hearing this, I think I’m hearing that.” So people say, “Just say what you’re hearing.” And that’s how I learned to do this. Because there was an energy that would come back in response to the instruction. So if I’m sitting in a group of people, and I’m hearing from the guide, or whoever’s coming through, we’re going to put a hand on your foreheads. And then the whole room goes like that. I mean, it’s like Beetlejuice, “Robin, what the heck is this?”

I got enough confirmation for the information that allowed me to trust it. I was ever interested in the information coming through me; I was only interested in the energy. And it wasn’t until 1998 when I was in my late 40s, and I quit smoking after many years, that the guides began lecturing through me, and all I knew was that I was talking more. That’s all I knew, “Well, it’s a lot more talk tonight. I know what this is about.” And it wasn’t until I began recording and transcribing that another medium forced me to do. They were so appalled that I wasn’t doing that, that I realized what was coming out was coherent lectures. 

When I became willing to do that, they started dictating books, and they hadn’t stopped. It’s ten now; the 10th one is done. But the experience of the voice, sometimes there’s an accent, sometimes there’s not. Sometimes it feels abrupt and a little shouty, sometimes it’s graceful, once in a while it feels more female, but only because the reference points that are being used seem to have some context in a kind of domesticity that would have been more appropriate in another age.

I don’t get to decide what they can say.

Say, “When I’m hearing lectures that are using illustrations about embroidery and baking.” It’s all a very domestic kitchen. Hearthstone and other guides don’t use that language. But I have no idea of the gender of who’s working; it feels male, it feels female, it feels both at once as well. So it’s evolved as I’ve done it—a long answer to a short question.

For me, I have clairaudience, and I hear it in my voice and internal voice. And I didn’t know if that was normal or not. This is all new for me. I haven’t been receiving psychic stuff in the previous years. This is all just this year. 

I started watching a show on Netflix called Manifest, and they hear their callings in their voice. So that’s how it normally shows up. It’s not in some booming, fatherly male voice, a female voice, or whatever. It’s in your own voice. That tracks with my experience. Then I started binge-watching that show, and like I realized that this is not my highest best, I needed to stop watching Netflix.

Yeah, When I read for people, I’m often here because I’m not as receded. The guides aren’t coming through to teach. When I was channeling, I imagined myself climbing into the backseat of a car and turning the wheel over the guides. When I’m reading for someone, I share the front seat and maybe pass the wheel back and forth. 

When I’m getting psychic information, I’m getting my own voice. When I hear the guides, the difference is less voice than word choice and cadence for me. When they started, which was after the first book. The second book and the recordings, which I still have, are all over the map in terms of the accents. Some days it sounded like an Irish bloke; other times, it was like Edinburgh. It was crazy. What is this? 

I couldn’t figure out at the time whether the guides weren’t just using another voice to create a distinction for me, between them and me or not. And it still happens sometimes, although it’s settled in. But what I find interesting with all of the books that were channeled over now, over a decade, it’s all in the same voice. For example, one guy likes to use the word deers, which is a word that I bore. We’d like you to know “deer,” and I’m like, “Oh no,” but that’s the only quirk that I’ve experienced.

Except in the last book that wasn’t out yet, I was doing a lecture. This is in front of a roomful of people, where the guide said, “I’m speaking today,” and I always hear “we,” and I was taken aback with this “I’m speaking.” I have much to say, and it was a great lecture and very funny. But this was the one who was talking about, I mean – it’s illustrations where when you put beads on it when you applique a piece of fabric with beading, and when you stretch the fabric, the beads will fall away. 

I’m like, “What the heck is this stuff?” It’s not my stuff. But it was so joyously adamant, and it had its own. That would come with an accent. I remember it was rather Irish. But anyway, I can’t figure it out. I just show up, and I try not to judge it. I used to be mortified. When there was an accent, and I was channeling, I was like, “Oh, no,” but I still whisper everything and repeat after all these years. Sometimes I don’t. But almost always. That’s the delivery, and I had to get past this idea. 

Somebody once said to me early on, “Well, why don’t you channel the right way.” The guide said, “As if there’s a right way to do this. It makes no sense. No way that this is even happening.” Occasionally, when I see someone who’s sitting in a lotus position, saying, “I’m calling through the energies of the so and so.” I’m going, “Huh?” Because my experience is not like that, it’s quite physical. 

I don’t watch other channels as I’ve never – most everybody, I think I’ve seen five minutes of one of the two of the better-known channels out there scrolling in my social media feed, but I don’t read other people’s stuff. And it’s not that I disagree with it. I just try to keep it clean for me, and when I hear so and so saying similar things as you did. I went, “Oh, that’s good news.” That’s confirmation. That makes me feel nice. 

But when I saw Jane Roberts, who channeled Seth, I saw some of her old films. And I recognized it; I could see exactly what she was doing. It was like, yep, that’s what it feels like. It is different. It isn’t casual. It’s the transmission. It’s about being a radio, and being on the radio doesn’t judge the broadcast. It can’t be effective if it is.

The action of fear is to claim more fear and that every choice we make in fear contributes to all the fear we feel. Click To Tweet

I want to distinguish between intuiting a book versus channeling a book. I’m working on a book right now, and it’s intuitive. I’ll get intuitive hits. As you describe that, you receive something whether you hear it, see it, or whatever. It’s just like everything else stops. The monkey mind and all the chatter cease, and you don’t have another thought pop in. It just stays put. 

Whereas if it’s your subconscious mind, it goes to the next thought and the next thought, next thought, etc. I just know that I’m supposed to be intuiting this book; I’ll get these hits. And I’m like, “Okay, that’s the subtitle of the book. I love it.” Okay, write that one down. And tons of things just come at different times. Sometimes when I’m least expecting it. And sometimes, I have prepared myself to receive. It comes in unexpectedly a lot of times. 

But channeling is supposed to happen to me for my second book. I don’t even know, first of all, that I’m supposed to do a book after this book. But okay, I’m supposed to do another book, and it’s supposed to be channeled. So that’s more like what you’re talking about how you get this content and how Jane Roberts got hers. How do you distinguish these two things? Do you end up having to prepare your vessel? Like you said, “I only had my cup of coffee, or whatever. I don’t know if I’m ready yet.”

It’s changed over the years. When I first started and started doing groups, I felt like I had a tin can on a string. And I would show up and hope to god, somebody else at the end of the can; I was always terrified that I wouldn’t be able to hear. 

What happened once in that period was I heard, “We’d like permission to merge.” And there was this big whoosh of energy that lasted about 20 minutes. And since then, I don’t feel that anymore. It’s always accessible, but it’s, for me, literally the equivalent of turning a dial on a radio. So now I’m with you, if I was reading you, you would be the station I would be turned into. And then I’m hearing your thoughts and your emotions. And if you ask about your partner, your sister, or whatever, I’m turning the station to them. They’re the coordinate that I’m reading from. 

Inspiration is enormously important. I feel all great arts are inspired art, whether it be music, painting, or spiritual texts. There’s a vast difference between inspired and channeled work, and I’m a purist on this. And other people, I hear people say, “Oh, I channel this painting, or I channel this poem or whatever.” I think that they probably meant that they were inspired as they wrote it and that inspiration is high. And it’s not to denigrate it at all. It’s just different.

Channeling is you’re transcribing or dictating word for word what you’re receiving, versus inspiration is like, “Wow, this feels like what I’m supposed to be working on.” Or it’s more of a directional thing. Not word for word transcription.

It’s important to set a common field where there’s safety and trust in the source of all things.

Absolutely. I believe that inspired work can be crafted. You get you’re given the idea for the story, but you’re going to execute the story. You need to go back and rewrite it and maybe work with an editor or something. 

First of all, I don’t write my books; they’re all spoken and recorded. And the recordings are transcribed. And now they’re filmed. And they’re the last five books; I think maybe six were done in front of audiences. So they were done, either online, in groups, or workshops. And the guys will finish a lecture and say this is in the book. Or sometimes they’ll say, and this is not in the book, but they decide what goes in. 

The rule has always been, and the first, some of the books were just everything was for the book, the last book I just did, everything was for the book. It took two months of dictation. But in any of the books, two words may be changed, sometimes three in the entire manuscript because I mispronounced them, or I was speaking so fast that I stumbled across, but you can usually catch it. The reason for this is it’s not my book to correct. It’s not it. 

I mean, I’ve had people say you need to go back and correct the book because you’re using a male pronoun. My guides are terribly inclusive, the genders even I’ve had editors saying, “Paul, the sentence begins with ‘she says this’ and it ends with ‘and he’s grateful for it.'” And that’s intentional for them. It’s frustrating. But I’ve had people say, “Well, use this was one.” 

This was early on. Somebody wrote and said, “Paul, you need to tell your guides to stop using the word Christ because it turns people off.” I don’t get to do that. I mean, honestly, I don’t get to decide what they can say. And when I tried to, you should hear what I get on the other side, although I think they take the notes in some ways. If I’m uncomfortable with something, they’re going to have to address it because they’re going to have to work through me, and I’m a conscious channel. So I feel that’s the key. 

It’s about not editing and not rewriting; if it’s a channel book, it’s channeled. If it’s an inspired book, it’s inspired. It’s no less than I promise anybody. It’s just a different way of approaching what the work is. We all have different capacities, abilities, gifts, and ways of being worked with. And I think that’s part of the beauty of this; how I channel may not be how somebody else does it. 

I would love to go back truthfully and write an inspired book that I’m the author of, but I don’t consider myself the author of any of these books, even though my name appears on the cover. I have no weirdly, when you finish a creative project, “Yo, that was great. You did a great job,” I feel so realized; I don’t get that. I go, “Oh, thank God, that worked.” They didn’t contradict themselves. It all makes sense. “Oh, thank God, it happened again,” and that’s my experience of doing these things. 

I’m like a court stenographer when I’m doing is taking dictation. When was the last time you noticed a court stenographer? You hear the testimony, and the guides are the ones delivering the testimony. Occasionally, I’m interrupted and say, “I don’t understand this,” or “This is confusing,” or “Can you explain that?” So they’re going to say pause interrupting? And then they’ll include that if they think it’s useful, I think for the reader, or if they need to do that, to keep me on board, and not interrupting the lecture again, and again, and again.

You use the phrase conscious channel. Does that mean that you essentially step aside, but you’re still present, and you can interject if you disagree with something? Or does that mean that there are unconscious channels where their body is completely taken over?

Edgar Cayce  was asleep when he was dictating his work that was done in that way. I’m not there, and maybe it’s because I don’t want to, I whisper and repeat. So I’m able to hear that teaching only in the repetitions. It’s like, I’m so busy taking dictation, and I hear a phrase, phrase, phrase, phrase, phrase, that I don’t know where the whole lecture is going at all. I don’t even know where the whole paragraph is going. The whole sentence is going. 

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I may hear, “On this day, you all need to hear.” And I’m saying that, and they’re starting to feed that the realization of humanity is, and I’m saying that just like this ongoing loop of dictation for me. Now, when I don’t repeat, I don’t remember what I said. And that’s frightening to me a little bit. It’s kind of like it all just becomes sound, vowels, consonants, and tones. And I may go to a place where that’s where I work eventually. 

It’s happened publicly before. For example, there was one workshop, I delivered a lecture in Mexico. And on the recording of that, by the end of the lecture, I was making vowel sounds; it was like, “Ah, oh,” they were toning, but I didn’t know at that point what toning was because they now do it intentionally. But it just would be the idea that my context of language just fell apart at a certain point. 

So if you think of it, I’m mostly in the backseat of a car, hopefully reading a magazine, like occupying myself just with keeping up with the action of the dictation. But if I were to hear from the backseat, today we were going to tell you that the moon was made of greek cheese. I perked up and go, “Excuse me. What?” And that’s the extent of my involvement. 

I work the way I work; it seems to allow for consistency. I’m still developing; I feel, truthfully, I really do. How I work is still developing. It’s been the books have only been coming through for ten years, and I think they’ve gotten much better at delivering books through me because you can’t read these. You read these books, and it seems as if they were written, and they weren’t, they were all just talked with no editing. Whenever I sort of doubt these whole phenomena, and there have been times I go, “How can this be happening?” I go, “I don’t care how eloquent I might be. I’m not capable of dictating ten books that don’t require any editing.” 

There’s a lecture that just went up online last week, which I’d forgotten about once, which was from the last book, The Kingdom, and I rarely watched them. But I watched this one because I’d forgotten the lecture. And I was astonished by it only because it was so fast and intense and beautifully woven. I couldn’t write a good college essay, where you had to have a thesis statement, couldn’t stand those things, but they’re doing it in their strange way.

Now, you were asked by your guides or whoever was channeling through you, the collective that was you were working with, “We would like permission to merge.” Do they ask you for permission every time? Or is this now like blanket permission they don’t need to?

It wasn’t like that. I don’t know what happened there. I think what they did was create a link-up that was present for me so that I didn’t feel like I had to find them somehow. And I don’t know what happened beyond that. This is many years ago, this was when I was maybe 33, and I’m pushing 60 now. 

No, I don’t meditate before I work; sometimes, I may if I can. But no, I work with a little prayer protection that I’ve been working with since the beginning. And when I’m saying that, I’m receding, I’m climbing into the back seat; I use that to step away. And then I will hear one phrase, just the very first phrase of whatever the dictation is repeated incessantly, like, “On this night, we are going to address blah blah.” And then I hear it three times; then I say, “On this night, we’re going to address,” and then woosh! Everything else comes flying out after it, and it doesn’t stop until they’re done. And then “I’ll say stop now, please.” Sometimes they’ll say, “Paul is tired, he wishes us to stop,” “We are not going to,” and then they’ll continue. 

No, I don’t have a lot of prep. But I know people that are very good readers, and they meditate for half an hour before they talk to somebody on the phone and do a reading, and I’m just like, I just turned the radio to their station. That’s it. I’m a radio. That’s it. I don’t know why people, when people say they want to channel, I often go “why.” It’s not; it’s never gotten me a date. It’s an odd skillset. But it’s a skillset, and it’s not about the channel. 

That’s the whole trip with channeling; at the very end of when I used to be a writer myself, I became briefly kind of a ghostwriter, which meant I got used to the idea of getting my name off the page, just like okay, somebody else’s gets credits, not about me. In retrospect, that was very helpful for me because, in my early days, I had a great investment and who people thought I was. Now people just may think I’m a kook. And I can live with that if I have to; there are worst things. Okay. But hopefully, you know that I’m honest because I am. I just show up and do my thing.

Yeah. Amazing. That prayer of protection that you pray all the time is that something that’s publicly available that you can maybe link to?

I use the Unity Prayer of Protection by a man named James Dillard Freeman. And I’ve used that because the first human circle I went to back in 1987, run by a woman named Nancy Mans, who was the first person to introduce me to this work. She’s now a well-respected teacher in her own right. She taught it to me, and I used it and added it at the end. And I added, “Set the intention that you’re only open and receptive to those energies and that information which offers your highest good and the perfect amounts needed for your healing and evolution at this time.” 

“Fear doesn’t exist at that level of vibration.”

And I added that because in my early days of channeling and breathing through energy. I thought, “Oh, let’s make it-” I was like I charismatic, big. Then one night, somebody keeled over from the energy they just passed out, and I went, “Okay, no more, he took too much.” And it doesn’t happen anymore. That was back in 1992, or something like that. So I used to know those people who are saying, “Give me more and more and more and more and more.” I’m going to say that you can’t have too much of anything and get a little bit, get a little nauseous from it. 

But no, the prayer protection I just use and not because I think there are things to be frightened of. But I think it’s important to set a common field where there’s safety and trust in the source of all things. And that’s what I’m doing. It’s not conjuring, it’s just setting the boundary for a shared field, but we’re willing to be inclusive of it.

And do you still read people?

I have a practice. Not as much as I used to. But I do. I do a lot of online workshops now because traveling has been somewhat curtailed. And I’m always reading in those. The guides are lecturing, and then people are asking questions of the guides or asking some more psychic questions that I address. 

But I keep the practice; in some ways, I like the fact that so much of the reading stuff that I do is verifiable. If I tuned into your mother, and I start to sound like your mother, you go, “Okay, he’s got my mother,” and I go, “Okay, I can trust this.” And that’s always helped me trust sort of the more extraordinary phenomena of the channeling and the spiritual teachings, which are a stretch for me to believe at times. It’s not convenient stuff; none of this is easy self-help, go by Crisco and float away. It’s like, you want to change your life, this is one of the ways that will support you if you choose it.

It’s certainly a way to have people in your circle, not want to have anything to do with that person went over the deep end.

Do I get that? No, I don’t get it. I mean, the funny thing was me, and I’m fortunate here, I come from a somewhat traditional background. I went to graduate school at Yale, and I taught at NYU for 25 years. And I’m not a new ager, I’m not a floaty kind of guy, I never really have them. I’m also published by mainstream publishers. Penguin did the first six books, and St. Martin has been doing the others since then. 

But I don’t worry about that in the same way I used to, because you can’t. Do you know what I mean? You can’t. There are people that I think are doing this stuff that may be deluded, or maybe, wanting it to be true, or something else. And I think that those are stages that people go through. And I don’t think both, for the most part, people who are exploring it at that level are going to stick around with it. 

If you’re going to do this stuff, you’re going to have to change. It’s not a free ticket; your shits will come up, right, left, right, and sideways to be dealt with. It’s part of the process here. And I think that’s true with any spiritual path one is on. I don’t think it’s necessarily meant to be graceful and comfortable all the time.

Do you see angels or auras? Or anything supernatural kind of visions? Or anything like that?

Let’s look at you, I mean, with my eyes closed now? Yes, I’ll see more when that’s clairvoyance that way, but my third eye screen didn’t develop until late. That was maybe ten years ago or something. I started accessing visual information. Before then, I would see orbs, usually this beautiful sort of blue that you’ve never seen in this world before. This extraordinary blue orb, sometimes, is purple, I would say. 

And auras, I can teach people how to see, you know, these are the first layers, but when I’ve seen lots of stuff, I’ve been surprised because that’s not normal for me. It’s not my normal way of working. It has happened once in a while. I’ve been, “Wow, I’m seeing all those colors.” 

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But when I was a college teacher, and I would get bored teaching, I’d say, “Who wants to learn how to see auras?” Well, okay. So you have many college students, and they were more clairvoyant than I was. It was some woman saying, “Why am I seeing a pinwheel over this person’s forehead and a cone over the top of the head?” Well, that’s their chakras. And I don’t see those, so people have capacity. People can do this stuff. They just don’t know they can because perhaps nobody’s just given them permission and said it could be so.

Yeah. There’s a lot of social pressure to not believe in this stuff. But yeah, we’re all psychic.

Yeah, less so now, which is why I think we’re having this conversation. 15 years ago? No.

Maybe. Last question. So you mentioned Christ. How is Christ different or the same as Jesus? Or to the Christ consciousness? Which is another term that I’ve heard in New Age circles? Could you differentiate those?

I’ll try. I know what the definitions that my guides use are for these things. And the guide’s definition of Christ has always been the aspect of the Creator that can be realized in material form. Sometimes they call it the Monad. It’s the seed of God that seeks its resurrection through each of us. 

So they talk about Jesus as a personage of the Christ, or realization of the Christ, and they say that there have been others as well. Basically, I get that all religions finally take us to the same place if you go to the seed of truth within them, not what has happened to them over the years, through politics and economics and formalized structures. 

Christ-consciousness is what the guides I work with called “the upper room,”  which is a level of awareness that expresses beyond fear. The guides say that Christ is the true self. And the true self is always present, but it’s operating at a higher level of vibration and tone. And they bring us there and their teachings, and they call that “the upper room,” and you’re aligned to the upper room through their invocation. 

They just teach us how to get there and show us there are other ways to get there. And it’s from this place that you’re aligning to a level of vibration that does not operate in fear; that guide says, “Fear doesn’t exist at that level of vibration.” And that’s the big breakthrough, that’s the level that’s breaking the big rule of collective reality. 

The guides I work with don’t use the word matrix, but I suppose that’s kind of what they’re saying. This collective field that we operate in that’s been so fraught in fear; we’re born into it. The guides say pretty much it’s like, you’ll shut up in the pool where somebody already peed in, and you’re used to it, you’re so used to fear. And it’s what you’ve chosen through for so long, but you can imagine what it’s like to be beyond that. 

They make a distinction between fear and prudence. They’re big fans of prudence and discernment, which is if it’s raining, take an umbrella that is a use of well, it doesn’t mean to be frightened of the rain, it means you don’t have to get wet if you don’t want to.

Right. Wonderful. If our listeners or viewers wanted to work with you, like get readings from you, I’m imagining pretty busy and booked up, but if that’s available, how would they do that?

Everything’s on my website, which is just my name. It’s paulselig.com. And there’s an online booking thing, and there’s somebody that deals with appointments. I just show up for them when they are booked. I don’t schedule them or have much say in that; I show up.

Thank you. This was fun, enlightening, and inspiring too. I love what you’re doing in the world. It’s an important work. So thank you for that.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

And thank you, listeners, for being you and for shining your light in the world. And we’ll catch you on the next episode. I’m your host Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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