Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Inside the Mind of a Spirit Channel – A Conversation with Paul Selig

Full Transcript:

[EERIE MUSIC]

MATT DILLON: Greetings, listeners, and welcome to The Pop Apocalypse, a podcast that explores the mystical and the mythic, the paranormal and the psychedelic as it appears in popular culture. My name is Matt Dillon, and I'm a research associate at the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School.

And on the podcast today, we are honored to have as a guest Paul Selig. Paul is a playwright creative writing teacher, and, most notably, one of the most widely-read spirit channels working today, which, of course, makes us ask, what is a spirit channel? And here, we should back up a little bit.

In her introduction to Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling, the great Cathy Gutierrez notes, "Spirit possession is one of the truly global religious phenomena." No matter where or when you look, individuals have cultivated techniques for going into trance and then allowing some other voice to speak through them. Oftentimes, it's full-on like the movie Ghost, where they take control of vocal cords but can also be automatic writing, where the hand moves while in trance.

In any case, which spirits come through varies enormously. Again, this is a global phenomenon. And this can range from ancestors in Indigenous shaman communities to the Holy Spirit, inspiring Christians to speak in tongues.

In 19th-century America, there was this widespread enthusiasm for what we call spiritualism. In spiritualism, the mediums, typically but not exclusively women, would become possessed by a deceased person. And yes, some of them would be possessed by great figures from the past, like Galen or something. But oftentimes, it was an unknown person or somebody not too far in the memory of the person who was doing the mediumship.

In-- any case, that was an enormously popular movement from the about a decade and a half preceding the Civil War, right up to near the end of the 20th century. Then, starting the 1950s but exploding in popularity in the '70s, America helped spawn a new form of spirit possession, which we call channeling.

As Hugh Urban notes, "The new technology that was in the ether, as it were, was quite important to this new terminology." The medium would tune into a different channel-- radio, television-- and pick up the transmission. While some, like Helen Schucman, would claim to channel well-known figures, like Jesus Christ, most channels would work with historically unknown figures, like Jane Roberts channeling Seth. And these, oftentimes, had never even been human. These were alien intelligences, often millennia upon millennia old.

Now, saying that something is universal does not set aside how extraordinary the phenomenon is. And as with all extraordinary phenomena, it leaves us with certain riddles right. First, it's a universally-distributed altered state, but why? Neurologically and culturally, that's a puzzle. Neurologically, what's the evolutionary adaptation in that? Culturally, it's difficult to examine because it's so diffuse and so varied.

It can be an official part of a tradition, as we see with, say, Oracle at Delphi or as we see in the book Radical Spirits, by Harvard's own Ann Braude. The spirit possession can critique society and critique tradition and offer a voice to the disaffected, as it did in the 19th century, for women, who, at the time, were locked out of the economy and the right to vote and political representation. So it's this really interesting puzzle.

And another part of this puzzle or maybe a different puzzle-- let's say we bracket all the metaphysical claims. That's the only way we can really work with this. Otherwise, we're in a mess, where we're just taking down dictation from ancestors and aliens and historical religious figures. That's going to get us into trouble.

But even assuming all that and putting it in brackets, we're left with this puzzle of how this staggering creativity and eloquence and coherence can come out of somebody while in trance. It's befuddling. And this started to be noticed almost from the beginning, but there's a great book, a really interesting book by Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars. I think this is 1902 or so.

And there, Helen Smith, even if we set aside the fact that what she says about Mars was wrong, the fiction that comes out is amazing. It's one of the great high fantasies of the early 20th century. And some of the theological ideas and philosophical ideas that start to infuse the later 20th-century channels, particularly Jane Roberts or, of course, in miracles from Helen Schucman, it's staggering too to think about that coming out of a person so immediately and without pause, without breaks, in large sections. It's pretty remarkable.

Now, I don't have answers for any of these puzzles, which is why we are so fortunate to have on the show today Paul Selig. Paul has channeled 12 books from those he calls the guides, which the first book there was, I am the Word, published in 2009 and then in quick succession thereafter.

As he comes to describe it, the books are transmitted section by section. So the guides say, we're going to have you sit down at 9:00 AM on this day, and we're going to speak. And we're going to conclude that section, and that's going to be it for the day. Then next day, same time, do it again.

And while this is coming through, for Paul, as he describes it later, it is like fortune cookies, the fortune part, coming one by one with a sentence on it. And he sees the sentence, and he whispers it. And then he re-elocutes it much louder, for the people in the back, as it were. And phrase by phrase, the books come together. And then each of these seems to take about three weeks.

In this interview, we'll talk with Paul about how he first came to recognize his channeling abilities and then developed them, the relationship that he sees between his creative writing and his mediumship, what happens in his mind during the channeling state, and then how Paul has come to review his early life and important episodes within it, in light of his current abilities and what he does for a living now, which is channel these books. So without further ado, it is our honor to welcome to the show Paul Selig.

[MYSTERIOUS MUSIC]

So it is our incredible honor to have Paula Selig with us today, the renowned channeler, playwright, and teacher. So Paul, how are you doing today?

PAUL SELIG: I'm well. Thank you.

MATT DILLON: Excellent, excellent. So happy to have you on the show here. We are, quite literally, in the shadow of Harvard Divinity School here, so I try to start each of these shows with the same question, which is, what was your relationship to religion, growing up? Did you have a strong religious upbringing, a non-religious upbringing? How did that play out for you?

PAUL SELIG: It was a non-religious upbringing. Both of my parents-- I assumed that we were just atheists. That's how I assumed our lives, but my father had been a German Jew, and he was part of the Kindertransport. He didn't believe in anything by the time he came to the States.

And my mother, who'd been-- which I actually didn't know until recently-- she had been a practicing Christian when she was young and had a rough encounter with the minister on her 18th birthday, and that ended her relationship with all religions. So I grew up without it. I thought it was for other people. I lived in Manhattan. We went to therapy. We didn't really go to church or to synagogue.

MATT DILLON: Oh, just quick follow-up, do you know what sort of denomination or tradition your mother practiced?

PAUL SELIG: She passed recently.

MATT DILLON: Oh, I'm sorry.

PAUL SELIG: But an old babysitter of mine wanted to meet her after many, many years. And I arranged the meeting, and this woman interviewed my mother, where my mother just poured all this stuff out. So I think she was initially a Catholic. I think she ended up being a Protestant. I really don't know because we didn't talk about it. It wasn't something that was discussed in the home at all. And when I got into the work that I do now, nobody quite knew what to make of it, myself included, really.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. That's a really fascinating part of your backstory I hadn't heard before. OK, so we'll definitely wind there. So a non-religious upbringing but people with, as you've clearly shown, spirit abilities later on in life. It's pretty common for there to be either some sort of experiences that, in retrospect, as you're a kid, show, oh, well, that's pointing me in this direction. So what were those for you?

PAUL SELIG: Well, the first one, which was the one that I still question-- not the validity of it but what actually happened-- was when I was about five years old, and it was an out-of-body experience, where there was a being hovering over the side of my bed. And I was laying on my side, looking at it. And I just knew that it was glowing gold, and there was intricate fabric on whatever it was wearing.

And then the next thing I knew, I was floating on the ceiling, looking at myself down in the bed, engaging in this conversation, none of which I heard because I wasn't in my body for it. That was significant.

And when I was about nine, I dreamt about walking up this strange stone flight of stairs to this fountain shaped sort of like Coptic cross that was covered in autumn leaves, and it was technicolor. I never forgot it. I didn't know the place, and that was Goedert College, where I ended up running a master's program. When I first saw the campus when I was 13, and that blew me away because I saw the steps, and I saw the fountain. My family was traveling through Vermont at the time.

And then when I was about 30, 31, I got a call asking me to interview there. And there was the fountain. And in a lot of ways, that was an important place for me, personally and spiritually, because my life was taking a very strange turn.

And I was having to question everything, but there was something about being back in this fountain that I had dreamed about when I was nine that gave me a sense that, perhaps, I was where I was supposed to be. And in fact, I really do look at that time at Goedert as preparatory for what I do now, in many, many ways.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, I can't wait to dive in there because one of the things that I really want to explore with you is this relationship between creativity and the channeling but want to get to there through a couple other questions as well. So you ended up teaching in the creative writing program. Do you remember when you first started writing, your first piece?

PAUL SELIG: Yeah, in college. I started writing in college my freshman year. I didn't want to be a writer. I still really don't. And I'm trying to work on a memoir now, but I have the worst writer's block of anybody I've ever known for many, many, many years. And I was teaching writing at NYU, and I was running a writing program at Goedert. And it's what I did, but I started when I was in college.

And I never, when I first began channeling and getting known for this, never really thought of a relationship between my own creative work and the sort of more psychic channel work until, actually, it was Jeff Kripal who asked me that question. And then it made sense.

When I was writing, I was actually inducing trance without knowing that I was. I would put one piece of music on loop for hours, and I would just sit there and write. And that was the initial writing. So I didn't know what a trance was. I didn't know that I was inducing it, and I didn't know how clairsentient I was.

My channeling is one thing that I do. The psychic work that I do is a little bit different. I step into people. So I'm not a medium for the dead. I'm not going to hear, necessarily, your great uncle, but if your uncle is living in Poughkeepsie and you haven't talked to him for five years, I might be able to step into him, start to resemble him in here. So I'm embodying, at a certain level, with whatever I'm doing. And that was happening in the writing as well, without my thinking of it in those terms.

MATT DILLON: Is that what brought you to write plays?

PAUL SELIG: No. I don't know. I don't know. I got encouraged. I was encouraged my freshman year. I think I was dating somebody who said, you should do this. So I said, OK. I just did what I was told. But it was always about voices, really. It was never about narrative and story. That was always my weakness, but I could hear voices, and I could give them a truthful rendering.

It's quite different than what channeling is for me. It's a very different process. The channeling isn't an emotional process. The writing was. And it was about becoming other people. I think of myself as a radio more than anything else. So when I'm channeling, I'm playing one station. I'm playing a broadcast that's specific, and it does its job.

And my job, really, is to be the spoken stenographer. And I look at it as stenography, really. It's not creative in that kind of way. The psychic work is a little more creative because I'm embodying a bit more, I'm feeling what people are feeling, and I'm having to give language to things that I see or I'm feeling or interpret a gesture that I may be making or an expression if that's OK. I'm making an angry face. What's this about?

But there are different things. And how that relates to the writing, I don't know. I suppose I was a radio then. I just was playing a pretty-low level station. It wasn't the happy stuff.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. I was looking through your plays, and it's different, quite different than what eventually came out in channeling. So if you didn't go to college to be a writer, what did you go to college?

PAUL SELIG: No, I did go to college to be a writer. I started writing in college my freshman year. I was going to act, and I hated that. And then I started writing, and then I stayed writing through college. And then I went straight out of college to Yale, and I got a master's in playwriting there, although, in retrospect, I was probably drunk for much of my graduate career.

MATT DILLON: As grad students do.

PAUL SELIG: I did it a little better than other people, I have to say. Yeah, but so I was writing. And I don't know. I mean, it was about-- when I look back at my old writing from those days, I was really always writing about transcendence. I just didn't know that that was my subject. It was always about people finding this other state of beingness, maybe, perhaps, through madness or something or other.

It wasn't necessarily at all having to do with religion because religion was for other people. It wasn't part of-- it wasn't on the menu of what I thought I was allowed. And I thought it was kind of for stupid people when I was growing up. It wasn't for us.

MATT DILLON: I can hear how you and Vicky-- or Victoria Nelson, who has previously been on the show, would have very much gotten along on that front. The Secret Life of Puppets seems to resonate with what you're talking about quite a bit.

So you're talking about the way transcendence worked into your plays. This brings me to, soon after you got out of college or your MFA program, that's when the harmonic convergence was, correct?

PAUL SELIG: Yeah, that was a year later. I got out of Yale. I was 25. I had a drinking problem and an incipient drug problem. And I looked like I was about to have this stellar, stellar career. I was getting produced already in New York and London, and I was getting published. And basically, everything crashed down around my head at 25.

I mean, I'd never been out of school. I'd worked in bars when I was in college. I had relatively no skill set for the real world. And suddenly, I was in New York. And well, basically, what happened was I started praying-- that's really what happened-- for the first time in my life. And the first voice I heard told me to get my act together and how to do it, and I listened to the voice. And I actually stopped drinking then. It's been 37 years or something now.

And the harmonic convergence came shortly thereafter, and I just heard that there were going to be people waking up. That's what I heard. I said, well, if there is a God-- and I was beginning to think maybe there was something like a God-- and if you asked to be woken up, why would it want to say no? I mean, I didn't know any better. I just didn't know any better. So yeah, I had a bit of an experience the night before this cosmic event.

Now, I feel like there's a cosmic event every other Tuesday, it seems like. And I don't pay them much mind, but when I was 25 I really-- I was at a state of real, I think, openness to the possibility of something like God, whatever that was. And I welcomed it.

And I went up to the roof of the building that I was living in, asking to be woken up, thinking that something could actually happen. And in my case, something did. I'm not going to say it woke me up, but it woke me up out of one thing into another possibility, which has anchored the life that I've lived since then.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. I mean, I know you've written and spoken about the night of the harmonic convergence many times. And I mean, one, it's exceedingly beautiful, but it's also interesting to hear the way energies come up, right?

PAUL SELIG: Yeah.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, energies and auras and these things that would eventually start to come out much more fully in the channeled work. But you have this very profound energetic experience, right?

PAUL SELIG: Somebody had given me a mantra. Somebody gave me a crystal. I thought you needed the props in those days. I thought this is what you need to go wake up, so I was trying to teach myself how to meditate. And the mantra was Satnam. I didn't know what it meant, but it turns out it's a Kundalini mantra.

And people said it sounded like I had a spontaneous Kundalini awakening. I don't know. I sometimes think maybe I was just hyperventilating, really, all these years later. But it was an experience of energy moving through my body, out through the top of my head, and my hands were clawed.

And it's a state that I've had a milder version of doing breathwork than I had been there. I just didn't know what the hell was going on. I just knew that it was a palpable experience of something other and that I had asked for it, and something was actually happening.

And I think, given where I had come from, which was a lifetime of skepticism, the idea that I could have an experience of something that was palpable was very, very helpful and useful. And then there were fruits to the experience. I started seeing little lights around people shortly thereafter, and that was the beginning of this other kind of awareness.

MATT DILLON: And one of the things that I came upon-- I was rereading I am the Word in advance of this. And it just hadn't clicked for me before when I first read it, but it's on page 211. The guides point out that after that experience, you had a very sad, dark two years. And that's really both interesting, important, and humanizing because that's what happens after these profound experiences. So if you want to unpack that at all.

PAUL SELIG: Well, I mean, I don't recall it being that time that I had-- everything was falling apart at that time, truthfully, for many, many reasons. I mean, I was newly sober. I was suddenly living in a world where there was this thing like maybe God, which was just mind blowing to me. And my friends thought I was nuts. I was seeing little lights around people. People thought I had a detached retina or a tumor. I didn't know what the hell was going on.

And also, to place it in time, it was the height of the AIDS epidemic in New York, and my friends were dying all around me. And I had no money. I mean, I was really in a strange, perfect storm that, I think, allowed for what happened to happen. I think, had I had a stronger mooring in who I was at that time, I might have had a different experience, but I was at a time where so much of everything that I thought was suddenly being challenged. 23-year-old friends of mine were in the hospital. It was a horrible, horrible, horrible time.

The experience that I do recall, which was later, a few years later, I had a brief, maybe two, three-day experience of a heightened awareness that came after a very, very difficult period, where it felt like the pain that I was in was just gone. And I knew-- and I was very poor, very, very poor-- I knew that I was right where I was supposed to be. I had $0.45 to my name, and I knew I was fine. I knew everybody was fine.

And that lasted for a few days, and then it dissipated, and I felt terribly, terribly sad and betrayed after that because I thought I had arrived, like there was this payoff to having had such a rough time. But sometimes, I think now about those kinds of experiences when they come is that they need to be integrated.

We have the big experience, but then people get attached to big experiences. And I think, really, it's about, well, now, how do we integrate this? And does this become part of our life? And in my case, I think it generally always has. But you get to go back almost, strangely I want to say, and earn it so that it becomes more practical and less exotic or less foreign, less trippy.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. And that's one of--

PAUL SELIG: Yeah?

MATT DILLON: That's one of the wonderful things about your channeled works is just how direct and practical it is. It's not exotic in that way, which a lot of them are.

PAUL SELIG: Yeah.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. It's also not uncommon for people who have had these sorts of experiences-- and not to exoticize but just to moor them in reality a bit-- you, especially coming from a skeptical background, try to figure out what the hell happened? You have to go around, and you go to workshops. You start to read books. So what were some of the things that entered into your world, that made you go, OK, I'm starting to be able to make sense of this in a way that doesn't make me think of detached retinas?

PAUL SELIG: In my late 20s, early 30s, I did read. I stopped, and I really don't read other channeled stuff. When I was a grad student, I read half a [INAUDIBLE] book in between bottles of NyQuil, and I thought that was kind of amazing. But I didn't finish the book. But I actually do think it cracked a window open that had been closed, that book.

So I read stuff, and I read William James, and I read some of the new-agey stuff that was coming out around that time, which was useful and interesting. And all of those things really did was give me permission. I never got into deep, esoteric occult study. It just wasn't my thing. And I think I was probably a little spooked by it.

Emmett Fox was a new thought writer. That had a huge effect on me. And that was big in 12-step land. I had a therapist who shoved that book at me. And much of what I feel the guides teach is in some kind of accord, although the guides have now dictated 12 books to me, and I only read one of his.

So there were influences, but I think mostly, more than anything else, I had people show up. I studied with a teacher, at a certain point, who was teaching healing back at a time when everybody and their brother wasn't teaching healing. I mean, she was this lady who'd been one of the first 22 Reiki masters attuned in the US by this woman named Takata, who was a protege of Dr. Hussain, who brought through [INAUDIBLE] Reiki.

And she was doing her own thing, and she was formidable. And she spooked me because she was good. I was scared of this lady, but I wanted to be like her. But I had people who showed up. And I have to say, I'm very fortunate they've always shown up because I have to say, I'm not a trained channel. I'm not a trained psychic. I didn't know that I could do anything that I do until I was doing them, and then I had to find some context or somebody who could say, yeah, is what you're seeing or this is what this means.

And when I look at somebody, and I feel the pain on my right side, it's their left side, too. I'm like a mirror. And I go, oh, thank god. That's what that means because there's other people that work this way.

And I think I was fortunate that I was kind of grounded in recovery stuff still in those early days because my spirituality, as I first encountered it, was extraordinarily practical. It was a necessity. It wasn't about feeling special or being special. And it's one of my quibbles at times with spiritual stuff, is that it becomes special. And I think, actually, it's less special than we think. I just think we don't know that we have permission to claim what's already ours in some ways.

MATT DILLON: That's well put, yeah. So with that, so you're studying with the Reiki master. Is that when you started to have the experience of being a channel for the living? Is where that developed out of?

PAUL SELIG: Yeah. And she wasn't teaching Reiki. She had broken from that community and was doing her own stuff, which was the energy of the divine feminine, which now everybody talks about. But again, back then, it wasn't discussed. There was this whole Mary component to what she was doing, but she was an old Scotch-Irish lady, and this was her thing.

Anyway, I've been trying to write about this time in my life myself. And so I've been thinking about her and this time. But yeah, I studied with her. We'd take a weekend here, a weekend there. I kept going. And then I got a call to volunteer at this place called the Manhattan Center in New York, which was providing services for people with life-challenging illness. It was one of the pop-ups that began in the AIDS epidemic to provide alternative services.

And I found that when I had my hands on people's bodies, I started to hear things for them, and I started to feel what was going on in my own body. And it was provable, which I liked. I could feel it. And that's how that began.

And once I began to trust that I was actually getting some valid information that was of some use to somebody, I started a little group that met in my apartment. And it met there for about 18 years, very, very under the radar. I wasn't looking to get a career doing this. I wasn't wanting to be known. You had to know somebody to come to the group, but that's where I really began to be developed. And I really do think that I was being developed through that time. It was, in some ways, a school for me as well as the people that were there.

MATT DILLON: Describing the mediumship for the living, I understand the empath. That makes sense. And then entities or-- I know you don't channel deceased persons, but for some reason, that is easier to wrap the brain around. Channeling living persons, that's--

PAUL SELIG: It's easier.

MATT DILLON: Pardon?

PAUL SELIG: It's so much easier. I mean, for me, it's easy. That's the easy thing. And what I like about the living is that you can prove it. There's a show that I was on a few years ago called The unXplained. It actually airs on Hulu now. I think you can find it. When I was stepping into this woman's kid-- I just met the woman. The camera crew came, and she sat in my apartment.

And I sat into her. I just stepped into the name of her kid. I used the name as a coordinate. It's like psychometry. And you can see me somatize the kid's cerebral palsy, which I didn't know that he had. And they intercut me with the kid. And I didn't believe that I was really doing things at that level until I saw that because I just feel it. I feel it. I don't get the confirmation, unless somebody says, you look just like my uncle or you're doing this. You don't know what this means. My uncle is a skier. Those are the ski poles, that kind of stuff. It's physical for me.

But my feeling about this is that people that still have a body are on one sort of radio station that's easier for me to access. And the guides are at this whole other one. People that are dead are on this other station.

Now, I can get them, and I do. But if you ask about your mom, and she's crossed, I may step into your mom, and I would get her as she was when she was here. And sometimes, then, I will get them as they are when they're there. And sometimes it's happening, and I don't know it.

If I'm reading for somebody, and I see a guy who's dressed right out of Saturday Night Fever, I've learned to say, did you lose somebody who wore a puka-bead necklace and a Kiana shirt? And she said, yeah, that's Frank. He's been gone since '82. I like that.

But the difference for me is hearing. I can sometimes see them. I can sometimes resemble them. I can report on things, but the clairaudience-- or maybe it's telepathic-- but the ability to hear and work with language seems to be much more grounded in people that still have a body. And that includes, which is interesting to me, people in comas, locked-in syndrome, kids that have never spoken, have been nonverbal.

That's what happened in that TV episode because I was hearing this kid, and I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know what was wrong. He kept saying, get me out of my body. Get me out of here. Get me out of here. I'm thinking, what the hell is going on? It turns out he'd never spoken. That was the first utterance.

And it was upsetting, but I didn't know what was going on. And I lost my hearing during-- I said, is he deaf? And the mom was saying, I don't know. And I'm going, how the hell does she not know? She's got a 13-year-old kid. But she didn't know because the kid didn't have language.

So that's easier for me because it's physical, and I just call it stepping in, just stepping into somebody else. And you become them when you do that. I always have to say, it's not psychic spying because I think we're at levels of conversation on higher levels all the time. We just don't know it.

MATT DILLON: And this can come up around the channeling, too, but it raises so many interesting questions about personhood. So we're having this conversation right now, but, ostensibly, somebody could be channeling Matt in a different space.

Actually, that's an interesting question. Have you reached back to somebody who you channeled for someone else and said, what was your experience like at this time, that I was doing the channeling? Did they have any awareness or strangeness?

PAUL SELIG: People report-- I mean, when I do a lot of groups-- and when I do the groups, I'm doing a lot of readings and short ones. It's different than being with a client on a Zoom call or something like that. So I often hear the reports from them about what they're experiencing. Sometimes, the energy that the guides I work with show come in very specific ways. And people then have their own experiences. And I'm far more interested in people having their own experiences of this stuff than deferring to whatever mine is.

But have I gone back to somebody and said, what was it like during the reading? No, I don't think I have, unless they want to have another session and tell me what they felt. And occasionally, I'll get stuff like that. And often, it's just, it didn't make any sense what you were saying, and now it does. That dog you said I was going to adopt, it's in my lap now just as things like that happen. But that's not a big deal.

MATT DILLON: Speaking of, is your dog around? Because I always--

PAUL SELIG: I've got two of them. I've got Lily. And my mom died, so I have her dog now. My dog is under the desk, my mom's dog. Lily? I don't know where she is. She may be outside. It's pretty today.

MATT DILLON: It does look nice. It sure looks nice. I'm just used to seeing you with one of the dogs on your lap, which is lovely. So yeah, this is great. Before getting into the channel stuff, I want to ask one more question about just pre-life, which is, you had this whole career, both at NYU and at Goedert, right?

So what was it like navigating those two worlds, where you're developing these psychic abilities, and you're having these workshops, and you're also completely professional, putting on and publishing plays, teaching? How did that function for you?

PAUL SELIG: So much less graceful than you just described it.

MATT DILLON: [LAUGHS]

PAUL SELIG: I started off adjuncting at NYU, and then I got a real job there eventually. But I was just so grateful to be able to buy dinner in those days. And Goedert, which is an old hippie school, when they found out that I did this stuff, they said, well, why aren't you doing it here? And I said, are you crazy? And they said, no. This is Goedert. You don't leave any parts of yourself behind.

So suddenly, I had permission to start integrating this part of myself into my academic life, probably for better and for worse, but I was learning. I began teaching at NYU when I was 27. And I was excited and opening up spiritually. And I used to teach the students how to see auras on a low-teaching day, when we had extra time.

And then it started showing up on my evaluations. I learned about Aristotle, and now I can read an aura. And I thought, oh, god, I've got to stop this, so I did. And I just did my thing. And it wasn't until the books started coming out, which was in 2010, that I really couldn't hide anymore.

And finally, what happened was I think that there was enough-- at least at NYU-- there was enough video of me chatting online that the students would show up, and they'd go, look at this guy. And none of it was mean.

My favorite was when I had to tell the kids that that TV crew wanted to film me at NYU. And I had to get permission from my chair, who I didn't think knew. And he didn't seem to care. He just said, good. Go for it. And I was like, well, this is interesting. I had to go tell a class of NYU freshman-- I said, I don't know if you know about this about me. And they said, oh, yeah, we know.

MATT DILLON: Yeah.

PAUL SELIG: They knew. They were just being really sweet and really polite. And they all dressed up the day the camera crew came. And they pretended to be interested when I gave them a lecture that they'd heard two months before in front of the crew. So people don't care as much as you think, at least when you're in the arts. It's not that big a deal anymore.

But when I started off, I had a website without my name on it or without my photograph. I didn't want people to find me. And I had to make a choice, I think, when the books started coming to publish them with my name, even though I'm not the author. And I agreed to do that. And that wasn't a bad move to do.

MATT DILLON: Oh, certainly not. Interesting. So that brings us here. How did the first book start? So I am the Word, where does that come from? What's the gestation for going from doing these things in workshops to, we're going to write a very thick book?

PAUL SELIG: Well, when I was 48, which must have been 2009, 2008, something like that, I quit smoking. I'd been a four-pack-a-day guy for most of my adult life. I loved it, but the guides one day said, we want to keep working with you. But until you attend to this, we can't. And I quit immediately, and I quit.

And when I did, my work changed enormously. The channel work changed completely, which that's when they began to lecture. I was hearing stuff. Most of the work for me was about the energy that would come through when they were channeling, which was palpable, and they were working with energetic attunements. And it was a big energetic event, but I wasn't that interested in what they were saying because I thought, well, you can't fake the energy. The energy, we can all feel, but who knows what this is that I'm saying? I'm just saying what I'm hearing.

But once I began to take the dictation, a friend of mine found out that I wasn't recording and transcribing. So I started to. And then I got hired and fired from a writing gig. And I went to bed. And Victoria Nelson, who was a colleague of mine at Goedert-- I think I'd been in bed for two days already. And she called me up, and she said, Paul, this might be a very good time for you to write that book about-- or write that memoir about how you became clairaudient.

And I said, well, I'm never going to write again. And I meant it. And then the guides piped in and said, well, we have a book to write. And if you take two weeks, we'll do it. And at that moment, my ego had just been quashed. I had extra time that I wasn't planning on using. I think it was winter break or something at NYU. And I agreed.

And two days later, we met on the phone. And the guides dictated this book called I Am the Word, and it took two weeks and two days because I took two days off to go back to NYU to teach, so I took two days off from the two weeks, so a little over two weeks. And they said, this is the first-- they said a number of things. They said, this is the first book in a trilogy. They said, it's going to be published. It's the first publisher who reads it, and don't haggle.

MATT DILLON: [CHUCKLES]

PAUL SELIG: And it's everything that pretty much happened with that. But it wasn't planned. I didn't really know. I just showed up. I showed up. I put a CD recorder on the arm of the chair. I had my dog in my lap. I had two iced coffees on the floor.

And I just step back and I allow-- what's always happened is the same thing. I hear one phrase repeated, and I give voice to that one phrase. And the rest of everything just tumbles out on top of it, until the guides say, stop now, please, which means that's the end of the lecture. That's the end of the dictation.

It took me longer to type the thing up than it did to dictate it. And it wasn't until it was all typed up then I saw that it really was a book because I didn't know if it would hold together at all.

MATT DILLON: And it really does. So you brought up the energy there, and I wanted to follow up on this because one of the things that I love about your works are-- and the guides speak to this-- that there's the level of information-- the words-- and then that's kind of a sheath for this energy transmission, right?

PAUL SELIG: Yup.

MATT DILLON: And people who listen to this and are scholars of mystical literature are used to those sorts of transmissions, in a way, but you work so hard for them because you're learning primary languages, and you're learning complex philosophy. This is so straightforward, but it still has all of that in this really, really palpable way. So you feel those energies as they're coming through as well or not, actually?

PAUL SELIG: I'm in it when it's happening. So at times, when they're doing an attunement, I still feel it when I do them live, in live streams or public workshops. I can feel the energy and the attunements as they're delivered. But when they're channeling, basically, it's not like I'm them. I'm receded. I feel the energy shifting, but what they've said is that the books are operating on two levels, the words on the page and then the energy that informs them, that the real book is the energetic transmission, and the language gives it context.

I'm so busy when I'm channeling, trying to keep up with the next phrase that, really, I'm so singular when I'm working because I hear, I whisper, and I repeat. I bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It's like a thousand fortune cookies, one after the next, in order. And I'm just trying to-- sometimes, so, so fast, the transcriptionists have to slow down the recording to be able to work with it.

But when the very first book came out and nobody knew who I was and the guides said, this is a book that will be experienced more so than read. And people started reviewing the books, and it was really interesting. People said, I'm reading this book, and I'm seeing auras. I'm reading this book, and I'm feeling energies. And people started having their own experience with this stuff, which is what the guides had intended. So that's how it's been, really, since they've begun.

And it's what I like about the work. They're claiming us in some kind of an agreement to what they to be true, in a way that we can have our own experience with. I'm not a spiritual teacher. I'm not a guru. I have no desire to be either of those things. I've gotten better at trying to interpret the teachings when people ask Paul questions. Over the years, I've gotten better at that, but yeah, that's how the books work. I mean, they are transmissions. So I didn't know that there's a legacy of this in mystical literature, but I don't know this stuff.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, but-- just to repeat-- it's just, how direct it is really, really interesting and special. There's no back flip hermeneutics that you have to get to it. It just sort of transmits, which is wonderful. So I guess now that we've talked about them over several minutes, who do you understand the guides to be? Who are the guides?

PAUL SELIG: Well, the only reason they're called the guides is because my ex, many years ago, when he found out I could do this, used to say, ask the guides this, ask the guides that. That's why they're called the guides. It was easy.

The name that they've claimed, when they say, if you wish to call us something, you may call us Melchisedech which is an old name in a priesthood. Sometimes, they call themselves the True Self, which is another way that they use the term Christ. They say that Christ is the aspect of the creator that can be realized in form. Sometimes they call it the Monad or the True Self.

I'm uncomfortable with the names only because this stuff tends to be very heavily laden with history and also in the new age. And I'm not a good new-ager, truthfully.

Back when I was just opening up, you'd hear things like, there's an archangel Michael channeling on the Upper West Side. You better go to Gowanus in Brooklyn and hear Gabriel. That's the hot one. And it was just kind of ridiculous. So I used to think, it's really just the energy. It's the energy and the truth of the teaching that matters. Anybody can call themselves anything.

The one that I've seen, that I've seen on a few occasions that's come through in a very visual way, seems to resemble that archetype. It's an interesting presentation, to say the least. And I recognize him in a profound way when I see him. It's like, oh, here it. This is it. But that's the name, for better or for worse.

MATT DILLON: So is the one you've seen from time to time, do you think it's-- or does it click for you as the same one you saw when you were five?

PAUL SELIG: [EXHALES]

I think so. That's my feeling now, when I go back to that. And I was just asking somebody-- and I was asking another psychic about this. I said, what do get on this one? Because I'm trying to unpack some of this for myself now that I'm trying to do a little bit of my own writing about my life.

And I think, sometimes, that if I was prepped for something, that was it. I mean, I was a weird kid, granted, but I also was firmly convinced that thoughts were things when I was a child and so much so that my thoughts were frightening to me. And it wasn't-- I mean, maybe now you'd say it was OCD or rumination, but it was not easy stuff that I showed up with. And I sometimes wonder if I wasn't being told, hang in there. There's work to be done, but I don't know. Maybe one day.

MATT DILLON: The great revelation, at some point, just sort of identification. So I want to talk a little bit about-- or unpack with you-- what the guides teach, and it's certainly evolved over time. But it seems to me the most basic, fundamental idea there is this humanist two. There's this conscious self and then there's the Christ self or the conscious self or something like that. Yeah, so anyways, yeah, so what would you say their fundamental message is? Sorry to ask the big question.

PAUL SELIG: I'll try. I mean, I think sometimes it's the same, really. I think they may have been unpacking the same message since the first book in an escalation of understanding and awareness. They seem to be speaking to the realization, which is the knowing and the embodiment of what they call the divine self or the God within.

And when I was in my early 30s-- I always have to say, I'm 99% sure I heard this in channel because I was just really opening. And I didn't understand this, and I wrote it down because I was struggling at the time. And I heard, "Freedom will come when the throne relinquishes its king." And I thought, what does that mean? But that's the essence of the teaching, when I look back at it, which is, who sits in the throne? Who's running the show?

And they say that the personality self or the idea of who we are is completely indoctrinated through a false lens of separation. So our memory, individually and collectively, is actually shadowed by a belief that we're separate from one another and from source, and we've accrued all of this evidence to that. But they say that the denial of the divine is the only real problem humanity faces, and that's not a religious thing. It's an awareness of the God within.

So the teachings from I am the Word have always, always been about the manifestation of the divine self, as can be known in form. And they don't talk about-- I don't know. I mean, I think it's probably-- well, let me put it this way Jeff Kripal said-- because we taught together once at Esalen, which was fun because the guides would debate him at times. I don't know if he liked it. They were funny.

MATT DILLON: Oh, my gosh. That's wonderful. Is there a video of this? I would love to watch this.

PAUL SELIG: There might well be from that time. I don't remember. Jeff might know because he was running the thing. But on the nature of evil and things like that, I mean, the guides-- and the only other person I've ever done this with is Charles Eisenstein, who's a philosopher. The guides have debated with Charles, too. It's funny. They like it. They seem to enjoy it when they go there.

So Jeff used to say that the teaching was Gnostic. He said, this is a Gnostic teaching. Victoria Nelson, who was actually on the phone with me for the first two or three books-- she was the active listener. I was recording. She was taking her own notes. And she said it was not a Gnostic teaching. It was-- what's the other one-- hermetic. She said it's a hermetic teaching because they're dealing with form and the body and manifestation.

And they are, increasingly so, in their books. They work with these energetic claims. I know who I am in truth. I know what I am in truth. I know how I serve in truth. And they say these things are claimed by the divine within not the personality self. And they said once to a student early on, who thought he had the teacher, I get this. We become the Christ. And they jumped in.

And they said, no, you don't become the Christ. The Christ becomes you, which is a very different paradigm of realization, of allowing the divine essence to express itself through you. And they say that's how one serves, is to be most fully expressed as what they call the true self. And that doesn't come at the cost of the personality. It comes as the personality self as acclimated to the higher. It's not about ridding ourselves of our humanity. It's about re-knowing the humanity as part of God as well.

MATT DILLON: In that debate, I side with Vicky, for what it's worth.

PAUL SELIG: OK. That's interesting.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, and especially since I'm Jeff's student because I'm assuming what Vicky is pointing out is there's not this sharp dualism in anything that's coming from the guides. And embodiment is, on no level-- it doesn't seem bad in any of those teachings. so yeah, although the Christ itself does definitely resonate with certain of the ancient texts, for sure.

Speaking of, so you have this sort of outsider's experience of religion growing up and Jewish father. What was it like when you started talking about the Christ self in the channeled literature or when it started to come out of you, yeah?

PAUL SELIG: It was uncomfortable a bit, but I mean, I had my encounter with some of the new thought teachers. And they would use that term, but I think that they were reclaiming it. And the guides have said, they're reclaiming language that's been abused or utilized wrongly when they use some of this stuff.

There was somebody who wrote me after the first or second book came out and said, you have to tell your guides to stop using that word "Christ." It's offensive to many people, and you have to-- and then somebody else wanted all of the books rewritten in gender-neutral language. And the answer was always, I don't write these books. That's not mine to fix. It's not mine to edit. I mean, there's maybe three words edited in any of the most recent books.

The earlier, maybe, a little more but only because I stumbled more, I think. And that's usually an S that's been added to a word that didn't need to be pluralized. So it's the books are clean transcriptions, so I don't know.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. So speaking of your role in this, one of the things that makes you both really captivating to watch and to read is, if you're reading it on the page, in some sense, you're like a character, in the sense that they're like, so Paul, right now, is seeing a well, and they're describing your response to the well or they might go, oh, Paul is very uncomfortable with what we're talking about right now.

So there's a lot of things that you could talk about in relation to that, but I'm curious why they decided to keep all that in because so much of channeled of literature is direct. This is much more personal, in a way.

PAUL SELIG: In some ways, I think I'm like the student in the first row that they can't avoid. And I'm being used. It's my vocabulary. At times, I think their vocabulary is better than mine because we have to look up words once in a while to see if they've been used properly.

In the very first book, I didn't do much of that, I am the Word. And in the very first section of the first book, there's an odd little passage which says something like, "This is not a book that's been written before. This is not a course in miracles." And people said, why do your guides talk about the course in miracles for?

The only reason that's in the book is they said, "This is not a book that's been written before. This is not a course in miracles." And I'm thinking in the background, oh, yeah? What about a course in miracles? And they answered the question in the text. And what they learned to do is if I intrude, they will address the intrusion. Sometimes, they'll just dispense with it. Paul has a question. We will not take it now. For the most part, they do, and they unpack it to the extent that I can continue to work comfortably.

I think it was in one book-- it might have been The Book of Mastery-- they started off one section going something like, "Nothing is real." And I went, OK. I understand that. People talk about that stuff. And then the next section they said, "And now, today, we'll talk about how everything is real." And I panicked because I thought that they were contradicting their own teaching, which I don't think they'd ever done. And I thought, there goes the whole book. It's done.

And it didn't, but it was Jeff who actually explained to me at the time, oh, yeah, Meister Eckhart was talking about this. And I go, OK, as long as there's some kind of context for some of this stuff.

So the intrusions are mine. I'm told by people who like the books that it's helpful for them. I'm often asking their questions, but nothing's edited. The only thing that was edited in one of the books was when the UPS guy kept buzzing my buzzer when I was trying to channel, and I was cursing. And the guy said, we will dispense with this today. We'll do it again tomorrow. And we lost a little section, which was really good, but I was just too upset by the noise to be able to go back in and step out of the way enough to bring them through.

MATT DILLON: And in terms of that dynamic as well, when you're channeling them, you do the whisper, and then you elocute. You make it much louder. Is that something that you're aware of what your body is doing, and your voice, as you're doing it? Because I know you're a conscious channel.

PAUL SELIG: Yes and no. Both are true. In some ways, what I'm just doing is raising the volume on what I just heard on the repeat. When I started doing this initially-- and this is 30 years ago-- I used to feel like somebody was pressing their lips against my forehead and impressing the words in. And then I would form the words with my lips. And the whispering was the initial delivery, and I was whispering. And then I'd have to repeat what I heard.

Nowadays, I occasionally work without the repetition. The challenge for me is when I do that, I don't remember anything that I've said. I mean, and it actually just becomes reduced to sound. It's almost like, at a certain point, I'm just making noises. And I don't know if there have been words attached. And I find that a little out of control myself.

This way, I get to interrogate the teachings myself a little bit. And maybe I'm just still being developed. I mean, what they've said to me at times is their energy is so vast that this is how it can be parsed, through me. It's not like when I'm reading you or I'm reading somebody else, and it's just a voice in the living room. That's not how this is experienced.

It's a very, very different thing. And it comes fast, and it's very immediate, and it's very direct. And my job is to keep up with it. And if I start to presuppose where they're going to go with the sentence, which has been known to happen-- like when I want to finish the sentence the way I think it's supposed to be thought, Twas the night before Christmas and all through the-- you just want to fill in the blank. They've learned to switch the language up on me so that I have to stay present. So twas the night before Christmas and all through the pantry.

MATT DILLON: Back in.

PAUL SELIG: I'm back on target.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, there you go. No, I actually think it makes it really captivating in a way. I know you're repeating the same thing, but it makes it feel dialogical. There's this back and forth, and there's this rhythm to it. I really appreciate when you're watching other channels and it's just that direct. It's different, but it's good.

So the guides, I believe they've said before that they weren't human, they didn't have a past human life and get here. But for us, they speak a lot about reincarnation. Is the long-term goal of this reincarnation and learning to become ascended masters and guides like them or is there something else in view?

PAUL SELIG: They say some of us have been informed, some of us have not. So they're playing both sides. Some of them have had bodies. Some of them have not is what I've understood, of the collective that they come through with. They don't talk about becoming-- this is what they've said about who they are. My favorite thing they've ever said about who they are, they say, we are who you are-- we are who you become when you know who you are. That's what they've described themselves as.

But they don't talk-- I mean, they do talk about karma, and they do talk about ongoing learning, but it's not the focus of their teaching. And my slight memories that I have of other stuff are inclusive of some of his kinds of work, but I don't spend my time dining out there either.

MATT DILLON: I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this. So there's a certain urgency to their teaching. So why do they say now? What's important about now, as the time for this to come across?

PAUL SELIG: Well, they've said this since the very first book. And they said, humanity is at a time of reckoning. And a reckoning is a facing of oneself and all of one's creations and that everything that's been created in fear needs to be re-known in a higher way.

I also think-- and they've said as much-- that we have the means to blow ourselves to kingdom come now, if we choose to. And they say that the idea that we create bombs to keep ourselves safe is ridiculous because eventually, they go off. That's the purpose of the bomb. And I hear we're going to make it. That's what they've said. And they've said that consistently for the last number of years.

But I think that this is the time, and they've been pretty on it. When you look at the books and when the books were delivered and then what was happening in the world around that time or shortly after that time, it's really interesting to see that they've been on target with this stuff. I mean, they said-- and it was The Book of Truth, which was delivered a couple of presidential elections ago, when things went a certain way.

And they said, what's about to happen is that everything that's been buried is coming to the surface. And that means five years ago and 5,000 years ago. And things don't get brought to the surface because they need to be blamed, but they need to be seen because nothing is transformed until it's first seen. You can't bring the light to something that you're seeking to hide in darkness.

So we were in a process of excavation. And they said, imagine that your backyard is now an archaeological dig, and this is what life is going to be like for all of you. And right before that election, which was the Trump-Clinton election, three days before, I was channeling somewhere in the Midwest. And they delivered a lecture. Actually, that one's up online. They called it "Great Change" or we called it "Great Change" because we had to give it a title.

And it said, "Your idea of choice is, I'm going to have the milk or the cream in my coffee. And what's about to happen is that the table that carried the milk and the cream is about to get toppled over. That's what you're in for." And that was what we had, really, when you look at it.

MATT DILLON: Absolutely, yeah. That's another thing that, really, I appreciative about these guides is they have a sense of humor from time to time.

PAUL SELIG: Sometimes.

MATT DILLON: Right, yeah. Occasionally, it comes out. They're not full-on earnest all the time. So you've spoken a number of times now about how you're the student in the front row, you're a student of these teachings not the guru, for sure. So how has it changed you, then, being the student over, I guess, you started channeling these works in 2009. So how have you evolved as Paul Selig?

PAUL SELIG: Well, I'm living a completely different life than I used to. I don't walk around feeling that I've ascended. There's a quote attributed to Helen Schucman, who channeled a course in miracles where she says, "I don't believe it but, I know it's true," which I a lot because I understand that feeling.

I am not the best student of their work, but I think I'm a good one. And I'm good in the ways that I understand that I can work with the teachings in immediate ways, which is not making choices based in fear. They say the action of fear is to claim more fear. They say you can't be the light and hold another in darkness.

I'm aware of when I do those things and how they harm me. And I'm aware that how I hold anything in my awareness contributes to the thing and the form that I claim it in, this terrible thing, that wonderful thing and how, as the guides say, we're collectively creating a reality through our belief in what should be there and what we've been told to expect and how that can be altered.

So I live a very different life now. I'm much more peaceful, but it's not at 100%. I don't know that I would have gotten into this stuff had I been so happy initially. It was not that I was seeking an escape from something. I was seeking a way to manage it. That's what life was like.

So I left my academic life maybe nine years ago now or something. And I walked away from two full-time appointments, at an age when people are thinking about retiring and are getting ready to think about it. And I do this work now. It's what I do. I accept that it's what I do. I feel that my job in this work is to show up for it. That's my job. I show up and often when I don't want to, and I show up.

And I understand that I may never understand it or I may not be the person who realizes it fully. There was a time, maybe seven or eight years ago. And I was really down, and I was working with this woman from Agape Church, Amy Perry. She's a lovely prayer minister type.

And she said, I'm going to ask your guides what's up with you because I can't always hear it from myself, but if somebody is asking the question, I can step out enough to render the answer clearly and without it being what I want to hear. And the guides said, Paul's job is to hold the door open for others. And we both went, oh, that sucks. That's not what-- that's awful. What terrible guides I must have.

And maybe a year later, they were channeling at the Esalen Institute, and they said, the door is open, and everybody gets to come now. Come, come, come. And that's when they introduced this concept of the upper room, which is what they teach now, which they call-- it's basically Christ consciousness, but it's a level of vibration that they say is available.

And they said, and Paul, you get to come, too, now, which was really quite something. And since then, my life is completely different. I live on Maui now. I have community, which is loving and kind.

And I'm surprised some days because I didn't think this would end up being me, and I never thought this is what I would end up doing with my life. Maybe at a certain point, but it was not on my plan for myself. I didn't even necessarily believe in channeling early on. And I think some of what passes for channeling isn't that's out there in the world.

I'm a little bit of a picky about that. I think true channeling is stenography. It's not about zeitgeist. It's not about the trend of the moment. It's not about who killed Princess Di. It's not the stuff that people like to attach to because it's kind of sexy and fun. And I think the truth of the channeling always has to be the channeling itself and how it changes people or works with people or supports people in their own lives. That's it.

MATT DILLON: Yeah. That's really well put. This is just a personal question, but when you were making the move from New York to Hawaii, did you consult with the guides at all? Did they say, no, that would be great or was that just a Paul decision?

PAUL SELIG: I didn't plan on coming here at all. I didn't plan this at all. This was the biggest gift ever. I was channeling in Costa Rica, and I had done some live stream where the guides had said, there's a big event coming to the world, and it's going to hit New York very, very hard. And I said, I don't want to be in New York. I said this online. There's got to be a tape of it someplace. I said, please just let me be someplace pretty, not in New York, in someplace pretty when it happens.

And I was in Costa Rica, channeling for a week when New York shut down during COVID. It shut down four days after I was there. I couldn't go home. And I had a friend who was on Maui. And I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know where to go. And he said, come to Maui.

And I had been to Hawaii, the state, once in my life, on a really terrible blind date with a dolphin instructor, dolphin communicator. I came all the way. We didn't do very well. I said, I'm never going back to Hawaii again as long as I live. And I ended up on Maui.

And I have to say, I never went home, really. I mean, the guides used to say in workshops sometimes-- people used to say, well, we've had this great high experience, but what do we do when we get home? And the guides say, who says you have to go home? You're choosing that.

You always think you're supposed to do things. Once they told a whole group of women, you can all leave your husbands, they screamed. And then they laughed because they weren't telling them to leave. They were saying, you can if you want to. And I never went home. It's happened to me. My dog was left in New York. My stuff was in New York. I had an apartment I never got to spend a night into that I had just rented. I was here through all that, and then I stayed.

And it's a funny thing. I ended up being welcomed by, through a lot of serendipitous strange, things, the community, the satsang that built up around Ram Dass.

MATT DILLON: OK.

PAUL SELIG: Yeah, it's a very weird story. So there's some other hand in this whole thing, including floating off at Esalen during a bodywork session and seeing a giant monkey staring down at me and saying to the guy, I'm seeing a giant monkey staring down at me. Yeah, I was chanting to Hanuman before I came here. So now, I'm with the Hanuman crowd here, on a beautiful island and feel myself very, very, very fortunate.

MATT DILLON: That is wonderful. That was really, really great. Also, blind-date dolphin instructor on Maui is a really great Mad Lib. It just sort of fills that in--

PAUL SELIG: Yeah.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, that was pretty sharp. But yeah, I mean, we're all very happy that you've landed someplace like this. And just to close out, where it sounds like what's on your front burner right now is this memoir?

PAUL SELIG: That's what I'm doing now, for the next few months. We'll see. It's the first writing of my own that I've done in 12 years, easy. And I'm having to face those demons, of oh, my god, can I still do this? But that's what I'm doing now.

But I still channel online every week, and I do a live stream intensive once a month. And I'm traveling again, so I'll be-- this spring, I do something here on Maui, a big event and then some stuff in Europe and stuff around the country. I like to travel with it still.

MATT DILLON: Wonderful. All right. Well, Paul Selig, thank you so much for coming on Pop Apocalypse. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, and enjoy the beautiful weather out there in Maui, while those of us in the Northeast are slipping around on ice and trying not to shiver too much.

PAUL SELIG: Well, thank you for having me. It was fun.

MATT DILLON: Thank you very much.

[MYSTICAL MUSIC]