Selig - The book of knowing and worth : a channeled text

This book is the third and, in some respects, the most significant of the channeled teachings brought through Paul Selig. It is dramatically practical and clarifyingprobably the most complete and well-rounded channeled spiritual psychology since the work of Edgar Cayce in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the recent history of channeled literaturefrom Cayce to Jane Roberts and the Seth material to Helen Schucman and A Course in Miraclesit is possible to detect an intimate and important connection between the channeler and the intelligence that speaks through him or her. Pauls messages arrive from a consortium of unseen Guides, whose voices are deeply ethical, penetratingly insightful regarding the foibles of human nature, and unsparingly blunt about the possibilities and pitfalls facing us in the present era. As an intellect, Paul, too, possesses these qualities and serves as a fine instrumenta kind of Stradivarius of the soulthrough which the Guides can play their notes.

This same quality of relationship, though with different tones and elements, appeared in the interplay between Edgar Cayce and his Source. The nature of Cayce as a man fundamentally colored the tenor of the communication that came through him. Cayce was a Christian mystic, a person of Southern agrarian roots, and a dedicated reader of the King James Bible. These qualities lent color and voice to the channeled energies that traversed him. Paul, by contrast, is a lifelong urban dweller, a university teacher and widely produced playwright, and a contemporary man accustomed to a world in which spiritual choices and psychological vernacular abound. These qualities, in turn, mark the tone found in Pauls twenty-first-century teachings. Yet beyond the skin-deep differences, Pauls work, like Cayces, resounds with a set of universal religious ethics, a deep respect for the individual and for individual identity, and a psychological depth that allows each reader to see his or her own personal questions, crises, and hopes in this material. The work of Paul and the Guides is spiritual literature of great substance and posterity.

I began publishing Pauls work with the Guides in 2010, shortly after meeting him at a conference for independent scholars of religion at the Esalen Institute. This conference, held in the spring of 2009, marked Pauls initial public acknowledgment of his work as a medium and channel. Until then, his academic appointments at New York Universitys Tisch School of the Arts, where he teaches dramatic writing, and at Goddard College, where he directs the MFA program, made him conservative about disclosing the more occult aspects of his life. The unanimity of praise among conference attendees encouraged Paul to continue the public phase of his channeling, and in the summer of 2010, his first channeled book, I Am the Word, appeared from Tarcher/Penguin. A new work, The Book of Love and Creation, followed in 2012. In the brief time since then, I have watched Pauls work enter foreign translations and grow in impact around the world.

The expanding popularity of Pauls work is remarkable on several counts. While the viewpoint of Pauls Guides is very much in harmony with tenets of New Thought and the ideals of the human-potential movement, the Guides do not offer a narrowly conceived message of personal attainment or self-enrichment. The Guides do not eschew such aims, but their teaching requires a concurrent growth of self-understanding and personal observation on the part of the individual; it demands the cultivation of empathy and inner study; and it often offers rigorous exercises in these pursuits. This teaching is not for people who are easily distracted or narrowly self-interested. It places a demand on the whole person.

This is not to say the teaching lacks encouragement, hope, and portent. The Guides repeatedly state that if the reader employs their affirmationsand in this book the keynote is I know who I am, I know what I am, I know how I servethe Guides will offer invisible assistance and will aid the individuals development. The individuals ability to receive this help restsas with any authentic spiritual programon his or her depth of hunger for self-change. If that hunger is sincere, so the Guides promise, their helping energies will be felt, and immediately so.

This teaching places us at a remarkable precipice: Its spreading influence reflects a new phase of maturity in the therapeutic spiritual philosophy that often goes under the term New Age. This channeled wisdom signals both a cultural turning point and, quite possibly, an individual turning point for each of its readers. It places us at the front of a rigorous and hopeful spiritual expression, and a methodology for self-change.

MITCH HOROWITZ

May 31, 2013