Paul Selig - The Book of Mastery

RECEIVE THE HERO

R eceive the hero.

The phrase is an invocation of energies into the human form commonly used by the Guides in the channeled work of Paul Selig. I remember well the first time I heard it. It was April of 2009, and I was visiting Paul in his apartment on Eighth Avenue in New York City at the recommendation of my friend Victoria Nelson. Victoria had just read the manuscript of my book, Authors of the Impossible, which is about how paranormal experiences are often structured like stories, and how these extraordinary events point to the paranormal potentials of language, of reading and writing. Victoria was working with Paul that spring on what would become I Am the Word, and she was seeing all sorts of connections between what I was writing and what was manifesting between the two of them over the phone between New York City and Berkeley.

You need to meet Paul, Jeff.

I took Victorias advice seriously. I contacted Paul the next time I was lecturing at Columbia University, and the two of us met. I happened to be exploring the various comic book stores of the city on the same trip as part of my research for a book I was writing on the paranormal experiences of sci-fi and comic book artists and authors. When I sat down with Paul to meet the Guides and was told to Receive the hero, the phrase hit me on a number of levels. That caught my ear.

But that was just the beginning. Paul also read my wife, whose facial features he eerily somatized before me. He had never met her, never seen her, and yet here he was, becoming Julie. That caught my eye.

He also, I must observe now from 2015, read aspects of my own future, which have since come to be. That has caught my mind.

Most of all, though, Paul has caught my heart. He is a gentle, funny, shy, sophisticated, but finally humble man who channels an extraordinary messagethat we are always a Divine Being, a Christ, an Incarnated Self who also exists outside of space and time; that everything is God; that our small selves are not who we really are, despite everything we have come to believe or think from our specific religious, cultural, and familial histories. There is no inflation of Pauls own ego here. Paul only claims to be the channel of this message. He remains a small self all the while, questioning the message, getting more than a little nervous about its implications, occasionally even freaking out, as he often says.

Still, it is not quite true that Paul is only the channel. As I write this foreword, I have just finished teaching a month-long workshop with Paul at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He sent the manuscript of The Book of Mastery to press while we were here, while I read it each morning. Here, in Big Sur, I have seen up close and many times what this new book calls the master manifest through him. I have seen the master work, lovingly and powerfully, with dozens of individuals, becoming their significant others, as he did with my own wife, and stepping into their own conscious and unconscious selves in order to read their emotional and spiritual complexes in uncanny, seemingly telepathic ways. To the extent that he manifests the master in these moments, Paul demonstrates the central teaching of the Guides about mastery: that we have yet to claim who we really are, what we really are, and how we can truly serve.

This is the message of the present book, the fourth in a growing series of channeled teachings. To be a master, we are told, means to change matter through your own conscious manifestation and expression. This is done through a new personal alignment with the higher dimensions of the self up the mountain and a particular kind of out-picturing, which we might reframe as a kind of Divine imagination whose spiritual and material manifestations are anything but imaginary. Such mastery is not accomplished at the level of the personality. Again, it is not about divinizing or inflating the ego. It is done at the level of the Divine Self and its union with all.

Although I recognize this teaching as a modern reflection and refraction of countless similar teachings in the history of comparative mystical literature, I will make no pretense about fully understanding it, much less explaining it. That is the work of the book and its coded energies, its own paranormal powers of language, if you will. But I do understand now why Victoria wanted me to meet Paul six years ago. He and the Guides are authors of the impossible. They authorize the impossible as possible. As us.

JEFFREY J. KRIPAL

Big Sur, California

7 June 2015