Divine Voice with Paul Selig

Paul Selig is an academic, so it’s possible no one was once more skeptical than he of the practice of “channeling,” or receiving messages from the spirit world. And yet today, when he’s not leading a faculty meeting at Goddard College or teaching creative writing at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Selig can be found relaying the teachings of the energetic beings he calls his Guides. After years of reserving his gift for private audiences in his living room, Selig published his first book of channeled wisdom, I Am the Word, in 2010. He followed up with The Book of Love and Creation and The Book of Knowing and Worth in 2012 and 2013.

While the books carry a universal message of self-acceptance and peace, Selig also believes that the texts he channels—which he calls “the Word”—have the power to work as a direct energetic transmission from his Guides, touching readers personally and bringing them to a higher level of consciousness.

S&H spoke with Paul about his work.

You’ve been an educator and an artist for more than 25 years. How did you arrive at channeling three books?

It was unplanned. I’d been channeling for many years in my living room with a small group of people who would gather to sit with the Guides that I work with. A colleague of mine from Goddard called me to ask if I might be ready to write my memoir about how I evolved as a clairaudient, and my Guides piped in and said that they had a book to write, and they would deliver it in its entirety in two weeks if we showed up for the sessions at an agreed-upon time. The book, I Am the Word, took two and a half weeks, because I took a couple of days off to teach classes. The other two books followed in much the same way. They receive virtually no editing—that’s been the rule—the books are complete transcripts of the recorded channeling sessions.

Did you always know you had this ability?

Not at all. I’d been raised pretty much an atheist. I didn’t know a spiritual life was something one could have, so it never occurred to me to ask for one. I had some significant psychic experiences as a kid, but it wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I began to open up. I had an energetic experience that left me seeing lights around people. That prompted me to study a form of energy healing, and from there I began to open up as a clairaudient and empath. To be honest with you, I am someone who was always somewhat suspicious of channeling until I actually began doing it.

You speak of your Guides. Who or what are your Guides?

My Guides say they are teachers. They’ve come at this time to support us all in a reclaiming of our own divinity. Their new book is very much about claiming our worth as divine beings so that our lives can begin to reflect that claim. People ask for names sometimes, and sometimes they will give them but not often. There’s an attachment to names which I think gets rooted in a kind of spiritual materialism—we like to be able to say we talked to so-and-so—when the name, I think, in some ways may be emblematic to an energy. While the Guides come through with great personality and can often be quite funny, they seem very unattached to personality in the way that we are, although they value us with all of our “stuff.” My favorite way that they introduce themselves is by saying, “We are who you are becoming.”

Are you aware of what you’re saying as you channel the books?

I’m a conscious channel. I’m aware of what I’m saying, although I am somewhat receded. It’s like I’m letting them drive the car and talk, but I’m still in the backseat trying to keep up with the conversation and have been known to intrude when I have questions about their teachings, and I often do. I’m not the most graceful channel. I whisper the words as the transmission comes and I repeat it in a louder voice for the assembled, and at times it comes really fast. Channeling the books is a huge act of faith. It’s like jumping into a swimming pool every day and hoping that there’s water in the pool. I have no idea what the chapters will be or even what the name of the book is going to be until they tell me in the session.

What is the purpose of your three books?

They announced at the beginning of the first text, I Am the Word, that it was the beginning of a trilogy. The first book is an energetic attunement to the energies they work with, which they call the Word, or the energy of God in action. They call it a teaching of embodiment. The second book, The Book of Love and Creation, is very much a manual on how to operate in high frequency: how to let go of limiting structures and fear. The newest book, The Book of Knowing and Worth, they say is a teaching of incarnation. It’s about the being of it. They use the word Christ in their teachings and define it as “the aspect of the Creator that can be realized in material form.” The whole trilogy, frankly, is about mankind incarnating at this level of vibration: a real reclamation, they say, of who we were always intended to be. It’s wild stuff, but people can actually feel the books working on them. The stories are countless. It’s fascinating to me. The Guides say that each book operates on two levels: the words on the page, and the energy that informs the words, which is the “true” book. The words are there to provide intellectual context for the energetic experience of the teaching. Many people report feeling the books work in them. The energy is palpable, both in the workshops my Guides do and in the books they channel through me.

Your Guides talk a lot about claiming and knowing your worth, claiming the divine in each one of us. Can you talk about this a little?

One of the teachings they repeat most often is that you cannot be the light and hold our brother in darkness. It’s simply impossible. In order to claim your own inherent worth, you must be able to claim it in everyone—we all have the right to this—regardless of what we think. We tend to think that we’re our history—what we have done and the structures we have known ourselves through. To the extent that we do that, we deny the truth of who we are. One of the biggest challenges we have is claiming our worthiness as an aspect of the divine. Once we can claim this, our lives and our world can begin to reflect it.

The Guides also talk a lot about fear, how fear attracts fear. This is one of the teachings in all three books that helped me enormously as I became aware of how fear was dominating my life. What do they mean?

They say something interesting, which is that the action of fear is to create more fear. And they often illustrate it by asking us to look at the choices we have made in our lives because we were afraid and see how, invariably, these choices created more fear. The choice, then, is not to operate at that level and to choose a different, higher way. The new book actually supports people in moving their vibration into present time, so that they may choose in a new way, and not through the fear-based dictates of the past.

Your Guides speak of a coming revolution of consciousness on this planet. Can you expound on this?

Well, the Guides say that we are at a time of reckoning, and they explain that a reckoning is a facing of our own creations. They say that everything that has been created in fear must be re-created at a higher level, and a lot of what we’re contending with now is releasing the attachments to who and what we have all thought we were in limited ways. They do say that there is a revolution in consciousness as we let go of the small self we have wrongly self-identified and move into our true inheritance as divine beings. It’s big stuff.