Stepping Into Our Fullest Potential

"My guides have been telling me these times are the beginning of a series of great changes. I think that there's great potential here should we choose to take it. How we choose to take it is really going to mean a lot about how we experience ourselves in the coming years."

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Esalen faculty and award-winning author of channeled texts Paul Selig has repeatedly been asked: “What comes next during these challenging times?”
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“I don't know what will come next during the pandemic, but I think what has begun will be going on for some time,” says Paul, who leads I Am the Word: The Energetics of Consciousness July 31 through August 2, and in a campus-wide workshop August 2-7 at Esalen.

“My guides have been telling me these times are the beginning of a series of great changes. I think that there's great potential here should we choose to take it. How we choose to take it is really going to mean a lot about how we experience ourselves in the coming years.

“I don't think that this is necessarily a quick experience and I'm not speaking about COVID-19. I'm speaking more about what's been initiated here. I think a lot is changing and I think we can rise to it if we're willing to deal with it.”

Paul adds that one of the main actions at hand during the pandemic—and even beyond it—is to fully reclaim our awareness of the worthiness of every human being. “We are being asked to stumble out of this polarization and separation that I think has been killing us.”

Paul, who is considered to be one of the foremost spiritual channels working today, channeled his breakthrough work of literature, I Am the Word, at Esalen more than 10 years ago. He says the guides he works with have been informing him of a global turning point for many years.

“In I Am the Word, the guides said humanity is at a time of reckoning and a reckoning is a facing of oneself and all of one's creations,” he shares. “In the last few books, the guides have been talking about how all of the larger structures that we've been party to—economic structures, governmental structures—were actually going to be reclaimed, re-known and transformed.

They basically said that everything that doesn't have its basis in truth is going to alter because it's an opportunity for all of us to reclaim our true identity. They said we're being invited now to reclaim who and what we truly are.”

While there may be many ways to actually do that, a common agreement is that the highest version of ourself does not operate from a place of fear.

“The guides have said the action of fear is to claim more fear,” Paul explains. “Every choice we make in fear is going to get us more of the same. It's pretty much a guarantee. The guides do make a distinction between prudence and fear.

“Prudence is there are sharks in the water; best not to go swimming. But that's not about fear. That's about caution and thoughtfulness. When the guides talk about becoming the true self, they're talking about an aspect of us that they say is always present. They say you can't make anything holy, but you can deny that everything already is. You can deny the divinity in anything.”

To that end, Paul says that the guides are supporting humanity in reclaiming the aspect of ourselves that knows and operates beyond fear.

“They do say that they're supporting us in going up to the next level,” he adds. “They say everything is in tone. They say you're in ‘accord,’ I'm in ‘accord,’ we're all in ‘accord.’ The level of vibration begins to live through you as you begin to align to the truth of who you are and begin to let go of the ideas that you've probably utilized to get what you think you should have.”

It’s curious to trace Paul’s journey. He was raised an atheist in New York City and wasn't “spiritual in the least.” When he was 25, several experiences opened him up spiritually and psychically, and as a result, he began studying a form of energy healing to find context for what he was going through. After he began volunteering at a health center for people who were mostly living with AIDS, he began doing energy work there.

“I started to ‘hear’ for the people that I was working with,” he shares. “If I had my hands on somebody and I'd heard the name Bruce, I'd learn to say, ‘Who's Bruce?’ They'd say, ‘They're my lover, my father, my son, my dog.’

“As I kept getting confirmation, I began to trust the information that I was getting to access. For me, all of this stuff has been experiential. I led a group very quietly that met in my apartment for 18 years. At that time I was in the faculty of NYU and I wasn't looking to be known as a channeler. The process now is pretty much the same as it's always been, it's just more refined.”

He likens channeling to being a switchboard. When he hears the guides, he feels plugged into them, and when he “reads” for people, he’s plugged into them in a different, more practical way. Channeling, he says, requires no interpretation whatsoever. It is just dictations.

It wasn't until Paul was invited to channel before scholars and scientists at a Center for Theory and Research conference at Esalen that his life took another dramatic turn. As Paul channeled before a group, writer Mitch Horowitz took dictation and had the notes printed one day prior to Paul boarding a plane back home. I Am the Word was published by Penguin Books several months later.

“Thanks to Mitch, and thanks to the Murphys—Esalen co-founder Michael and wife, Dulce—I was invited to teach at Esalen,” Paul says. “I hear they hadn't had a channel or a vessel ever since the 1970s. Esalen has been a wonderful home for the work that comes through me ever since. I'm very grateful.”

When asked if his guides had anything more to say about the current times in which we live, Paul pauses, tells us he is going to inquire with the guides and channels the following:

Don't agree to fear. Don't agree to fear, understand the opportunity here. Understand the opportunity here to really know who and what you are and how the world is made. How the world is made much of what you have agreed to. Much of what you have agreed to was agreed to in fear; was agreed to in fear or an agreement to deny the truth itself, or an agreement to deny the truth itself.

This is, in fact, an opening. A great opening. A great opening, if it is taken as such. Deny the divine in yourself and you deny it in all. You deny it in all. Deny it in another. Deny it in another and you've denied it in yourself. You've denied it in yourself. Open to the possibility you may be re-known; that you may be re-known in a higher way.