The Book of Mastery

The first book in channeler Paul Selig’s widely anticipated Mastery Trilogy leads you into an unprecedented journey of self-development, at once building your personal excellence and your ability to improve life for others.

The channeled literature of Paul Selig -- who receives clairaudient dictation from unseen intellects called the Guides -- has quickly become the most important and celebrated expression of channeling since A Course In Miracles rose to prominence in the 1970s.

Selig’s three previous books -- I Am the Word, The Book of Love and Creation, and The Book of Knowing and Worth -- have won a growing following around the world for their depth, intimacy, and psychological insight. Now, Selig embarks upon an extraordinary new trilogy on the “Teachings of Mastery” with his inaugural volume: The Book of Mastery.

The Book of Mastery provides a deeply practical prescription for heightening your abilities, aptitudes, and sense of personal excellence. The Guides’ teachings go much further, however, instructing you how to improve life for others and, ultimately, for global humanity.

As the Guides themselves put it:  “We will tell you this: No one who reads these books will be left unchanged. They will be like molecular systems that reinvigorate and realign and reclaim the reader to themselves in their worth, in their identity and, beyond that, in their physical realm. Underline physical realm if you like. Because the physical realm that we teach in is about to go back to the stone ages unless you all get it together.” |

“Authentic straightforward truth straight from the source field.” --Deepak Chopra 

“What moves Selig’s The Book of Mastery into the status of a classic is its spiritual insights into the Divine Self relevant to the fundamental questions human beings have asked about the nature of existence since time immemorial.” --Michael Bernard Beckwith, author of Spiritual Liberation

"Paul and his Guides somehow manage to transmit and then explain ancient gnostic revelations in simple language that anyone can understand.” --Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies, Rice University

“Generosity and compassion flow from Paul. His gifts help me find deeper connections to myself and to the world. His guidance is powerfully freeing, and, to me, indispensable.”
--Joan Larkin
 
“In a world of would-be psychics making great claims for themselves with little evidence to back them up, Paul Selig is the real thing.” 
--Rachel Pollack, author of Seventy-eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot

“Clear, compassionate, and at times ruthlessly insightful...this is no armchair New Age philosophy."
--Jose Luis Stevens Ph.D., co-founder of the Power Path, psychologist, teacher, and author of Secrets of Shamanism, The Power Path, and Awaken the Inner Shaman | In his breakthrough works of channeled literature, I Am the Word, The Book of Love and Creation, and The Book of Knowing and Worth, author and medium Paul Selig recorded an extraordinary program for personal and planetary evolution.

Selig was born in New York City and received his master’s degree from Yale. He had a spiritual experience in 1987 that left him clairvoyant. As a way to gain a context for what he was beginning to experience, he studied a form of energy healing, working at Marianne Williamson’s Manhattan Center for Living and in his own private practice. In the process, he began to “hear” for his clients, and much of Selig’s work now is as a clairaudient, clairvoyant, channel, and empath. Selig has led channeled energy groups for many years. In 2009 he was invited to channel at the Esalen Institute’s Superpowers symposium, where he was filmed for the upcoming documentary film Authors of the Impossible. He is the subject of the short documentary film Paul & the Word and is featured on the A&E/Biography channel series The UneXplained. His numerous radio appearances include Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. His recent and upcoming workshops include The Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

Also a noted playwright and educator, Paul serves on the faculty of NYU and directs the MFA in creative writing program at Goddard College. He lives in New York City, where he maintains a private practice as an intuitive. |

FOREWORD

RECEIVE THE HERO

Receive 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 Victoria’s 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 message—that 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 Paul’s 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

 

The following are transcripts of channeling sessions conducted in New York City between January 11, 2015, and March 12, 2015. Paul Selig served as channel. Victoria Nelson was present via telephone from Berkeley, California. Several sessions were delivered during live-streamed seminars, and selected questions from these sessions have been included.

 

INTRODUCTION

Day One

We will ask questions now to you and Victoria about what is to come. Is the willingness there to prepare yourselves for a new life? Because the text that is going to come through, and come through very quickly, is in preparation for a new life for you and for those who read it. You cannot be exempt from the teachings that come through because as you are the vessel, Paul, for the exchange with the reader, Victoria is the audience who is participatory to the teachings as they come. So both of you are, in part, engaged in a process that will continue for a lifetime after this text is finished.

We have issues for you to contend with as we congratulate you, and all of you, in advance for the work on this text. This is the most important text of the three we have delivered so far,* and as we move beyond the third to this text we say “yes” to the reader who has said, “I am here.” “I am here as I am, in my knowing, to congratulate myself for the life that I will live.” The exchange of energy that happens here through this text will be the highest so far, and those who are attending to it must be prepared to withstand the changes that will come.

This is not about convenience. This is not a convenient text to the personality self and the creations of the personality—those things you see before you that you identify yourselves as and through—because many of the things that you create in order to know yourself on this plane were prepared by you in a biased way to attend to the teachings that you have inherited for a millennium.

Now the times have changed and the teachings must change as well. The preparation for this will come in several chapters because we must lay a foundation for each of you, each of you who attends to these teachings, to climb the mountain that is going to be before you. You don’t like to climb, you see. You want somebody to lift you by the scruff of the neck and place you at the top of the mountain. You want to be told that you are there already and you have no other work to do.

We will tell you this: If you wish to climb the mountain, you will be met by us every step of the way. We do not leave our students behind. But what we will not do is pretend to carry you up the slope when you want to be sitting at the base doing what you’ve always done, which is to decide for yourselves that it cannot be done, will not be done, and, therefore, why bother.

“They will do it for me,” you say. “The teachers will do it for me.” In fact, we will support you but we cannot do your work for you.

“What is the work?” Paul is asking.

The work is mastery, and this is the text of mastery, and what mastery means is that you can no longer blame another for your own lives, for your own dilemmas, for your own physical self, for your own creations. It means you claim purview of every avenue of your life and you walk the boulevard that is before you as the Divine One you are.

Without action this text means nothing, and we will explain what that means: When you have a teaching that implies you have work to do, the work is not just the eyes on the page, the work is what happens when you attend to the teachings and put them in action in your lives. And what you must understand, each of you who reads this text, is that the assignments that you will be given will come in the form of your lives. Your life before you becomes your teacher and the opportunities to learn are put before you sequentially so that you may attend to your own consciousness as the master that you are.

We do not placate you. We do not tell you you are fine, or that you are done, or you should go play in the pond and smell the flowers. There are times for that, yes, but there are also times for action. And to become the master of your own life has several tenets that are required by the reader.

The first and foremost is, “I Am Here.” The Divine Self as you who already knows her name, “I Am,” is here, can only be here, can never be anywhere else but where you are. And the Divine Self as you who comes forward in this test of your own availability to see yourself as the master of your life will come to you with the answers you require. But as we teach you—and the teaching, “I Am Here,” will be paramount to this class—you must understand that the one you are who knows her name, the Divine Self as you, will be calling you forward.

The second thing we wish you to know is that you must not suffer. This is not a text of suffering, and those of you who would like to take this text and use it to harm yourselves—“I can’t do it right,” “I will never understand it,” “It cannot be so,” “I must be foolish”—should put the book down now and come back to it when you have a good sense of humor, because you’re going to need it.

The life that you live, the life that you express through, has taken many forms and the creations you take so seriously, “Oh, look at the mess I made,” “Oh, look at that thing over there, what am I to do, what am I to do?” are actually only as great as you perceive them to be. And the mountains out of molehills, we will say, must be reduced to the level of sand that they come from so that you may walk upon them and claim your true destiny as the master that you are.

The final thing we wish you to know, and all of you to know, is that you are not alone in this teaching. Each one of you who attends to these words is being ushered through this process by us, the Guides who work with Paul, yes, but those that we have assigned to you to support you in your process, and those who attend to the text will be attending to one another as well on the higher levels of frequency that you now exist in. If you can imagine that there is a parade of awakening souls walking down each boulevard, you will see that you are not alone. And if you raise your hand in expectancy of assistance, you might as well accept that it will be there, if not by us, then one of your fellows.

We will say this to you: The ideals that you hold and have held thus far as the being that you are are going to be challenged, and the aspects of you that are very moored to the things you’ve made, the identity you’ve claimed, the way you’ve decided you should be, will be addressed sequentially by the teachings of this text. And by “sequentially” we mean we are taking you through a journey where those aspects of yourselves that you have claimed as you will be seen, will be witnessed, will be comprehended by the self who wishes to release herself from those creations.

“Who is the True Self?” Paul is asking. “Which self are you speaking to, the Divine Self or the Christed Self, or the false self?” We will not say there is a false self, but we will say there is a personality, an identity that you have used to navigate a life that supports you in some ways, but has a deep investment in denying the truth of who she is, and she does this only for one reason: to protect her status as the ruler of the kingdom she sees before her.

You all live in a kingdom, you see, and the kingdom you see before you is what you have attended to thus far as a cocreator of your life. Those aspects of you that you’ve decided should be pronounced have been pronounced, have called things into being, and you walk about your lives saying, “Look at me, this is who I am, this is how I am known, this is what I have achieved.”

Now the small self, or the personality self, knows herself through these things and counts on the landscape to identify through her, to see herself as the magistrate of all of her creations, “I made this thing, it is here,” “I decided that thing, it came to be,” but the who that decides and the who that chooses is the aspect of the self that was taught to believe, or create, in certain ways. The Divine Self, or the Christed Self, or the Divine Truth of who you are, who seeks its expression through you, will claim something vastly different when she knows who she truly is in exchange with the things she sees before her.

When you decide in advance what something should be, the aspect of you who is deciding is the aspect of the self that was taught certain things: This is what it means to be successful, to be happy, to be lived a life in happiness. Well, we will say this to you: While there may be merit in some of those teachings, they were created by others and you simply attend to them as if they are the truth, and you look at your landscape and you measure your worth, or your achievement, or your happiness by the creations you have made. This is presumptive, on your part, that you should be achieved, or be happy, or in congruence with society’s needs for what these things should be, or mean, or look like.

We will ask you this: If there were never any laws, would mankind have gone wild? Were that there were never any status, would one have risen above the other, would things be valued in the ways that they are? If there was never any death, would you all be running around in your lives as if this is the last piece of bread you would ever be given or the last sunset you would see?

We will tell you this: The world that you know, that you have created and cocreated with your fellows, is a construct. A construct is a creation, a manifestation of consciousness made into form, and that is the kingdom you know yourself through. It is a shared creation. You and your brothers, you and your sisters, are all party to these creations. What will happen through the reading of this text is that the landscape you live in will be transformed because you will begin to exist in the higher octave that we call the Kingdom of the Christ or, if you wish, the Divine Self in her manifestation in all she sees before her.

Paul wants to run for the hills with this one. “Don’t make such promises. We have been betrayed too many times. Don’t tell us we will be loved, or that we will be realized, or that we will know ourselves in prosperity if it is not so.”

Here we will tell you the truth: You have always been loved, you have always been prospered, and your belief in happiness is based on expectations of who and what you should be and happiness should look like. Consequently, it is a fabrication.

You believe that your contentment is the product of being realized, and that is not the case. The product of being realized is knowing who you are, and the being of that, which is manifested as and through you, is what calls the Kingdom into being. You understand this, yes? The Divine as you has the eyes to see the Kingdom. It is always here, has always been present, but you can only perceive with the eyes that may know it.

How you attend to this, how you come to this place of being, of realization, is the teaching you will be receiving here, and the names you are given by yourselves will be taken from you so that you may claim your True Self:

“I know who I am, I know what I am, I know how I serve. I am here. I am here. I am here.”

Now as we teach you in this class, you will be given assignments and the expectation is you will take the few moments that is required to complete them before going on to the next one. As you read the text, the text itself will be working on you because you have a brigade of beings attending to the needs of the reader as she reads. The action of the text is to keep you awake once you are awake, and as you are awake, the eyes in your head, the consciousness you hold that can perceive, will begin to perceive a world that is very different than the world that you have been taught to live in.

Paul is asking, “Is this a different world, or are we only seeing the world differently?”

In fact, they are the same thing. What you see in higher dimension always exists, has always been here, but you have not the eyes to see it. If you can imagine a strange light that illumines things in the vibratory field that have always been there, you will understand what we are teaching you. We are shedding a light on those aspects of yourself that, in some ways, serve to preclude you from the entry to the Kingdom that you choose to exist in when you know who you are.

Paul is saying, “Why the word ‘choose’? Why wouldn’t we choose this?”

We will explain this to you: You all have free will. Everything is gifted to you, but you must choose to attend to it. We will not tell you anything that you should or must do. We will encourage you in certain ways, yes, we will say “thank you” many times for your endeavors, but we will not tell you who you should be.

We will tell you who you are and, like it or not, you are all Divine Beings. You cannot be anything but. But the eyes that you see through have become so glazed over by the things of this world, by what you have been taught to seek out, that you cannot lift them to the mountain that you will climb, and from the crest of the mountain the world that you see before you will be vastly different. The Kingdom, you see, is always here, but you must rise to the level of frequency where you can attend to it. It exists in the lower frequency but cannot be known there. You must rise to meet it.

Now as we teach you in this class, we will take the questions of the readers that are given to us in the ethers or in present time and, as we attend to the questions, we will clarify the teachings for those who require clarification. For those of you who don’t require it, we will ask for your patience.

We attend to the students of this text, each one of you, at the level of consciousness that you have attended to thus far and, consequently, this is one great big classroom and each one of you is being attended to at the level of comprehension that is appropriate to you. This is not a bad thing. It simply means that it’s a wonderful classroom with many different kinds of teachers attending to the learning needs of many, many students. And as you learn, you show the ones around you that it can be done, it may be known, and you may celebrate one another for the actions you take.

“What are the actions you take?” Paul is asking. “What do we do with this teaching?”

This is the teaching that will change your world, and it will change your world in manifestation, not just in ideology. This is the first of three texts. This is the teaching of mastery and it is fundamental to the texts that will follow.

Paul is getting in the way. “But what about the three texts you did already?”

They were preparatory, and foundational for the work that is to commence. So many of you need these texts to fill your individual needs, and while we are happy to support you in this, the real work of the texts has and has always been the ascension of mankind, or, if you wish to say, the realization of mankind to her true Divine Nature. And this is not done to make you feel better. It is not done to make you happy. It is done to show you who you are and who you have always been so that your True World, the Divine World before you, may become a reflection of this truth.

Now we will say this to you: We will encourage you to read the first three texts prior to embarking on this one, but we will also say it is not a requirement. As we have said, the beginning of this text will be to reframe our prior teachings and call you forward so that you may all attend to the journey up the mountain that we have prepared for you. This will not be a limited teaching, and those of you who know our work well will learn new things, but we must escort each of you, each and every reader, to the base of the mountain so that you all may climb together, and some of you need some information, or instruction, or some agreements to what may be so before you can even imagine making this climb.

This is the teaching of mastery and we will call it The Book of Mastery because those who wish to publish the book would like that to be the title. But we call it The Teaching of Mastery, and a teaching, we say, that will be an eternal one. And what we mean by this is very simple: When something is true, it is always true. And you must understand this: When something is true, at its essence, it will live a long life, it will be an eternal teaching, it cannot be otherwise.

So, however you wish to frame this teaching, in whatever language you choose, you must know that it has always been here, will always be, and will always be operable whenever you return to it, at whatever year, or decade, or century. We are actually distilling, in some ways, a teaching that was known by us a very long time ago in a way that you may comprehend.

Paul is getting in the way. “Why? Why? Why? If this was an old teaching, why is it coming through now? Did it not work the first time?”

The teaching that you are receiving now in mastery is not a new teaching, but you could not comprehend it at the time it was given first, which would go back prior to what you could even conceive of in linear time. Mankind was not in a place of comprehension, and the limitation and distortion that was overlaid upon it, which has become the world’s religions in a tampered-with way, will support your understanding. What we are actually doing is pulling away the cloth, and the residue, and the debris that has covered the truth so that you may know the truth as it has always been; the language that we use to teach you with we believe to be the language that will support you the most.

Now we will say this to you if you are new to our texts: The operable word with each of our texts is “frequency,” and the frequency that you hold is, in fact, your emanation and your consciousness in vibration, the operable word being “frequency.”

Now we teach you in frequency as well, which means the language that we use is informed with vibration that will work with the reader to attune her to the tenets and the vibratory field of the action of this text. And the action of this text, as we have said, is to lead you up the mountain and claim your mastery.

We thank you each now for your attention to us. We thank you each now for your willingness to be, and as we continue with this text, we will instruct you as we are allowed. We will ask Paul to show up on a regular basis for these sittings and the recordings that ensue. We will honor Victoria for her presence, once again, as the student and the listener to these words. And we will thank each of you, each one of you, who encounters this text, for your participation in the creation of a wonderful new world. We are blessed to know you. We are your teachers. We go in peace.

Thank you and stop now. Period, period, period.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION TO THE MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER ONE

IDENTITY AND CLAIM

Day Two

We will ask you questions now about what it means to be yourself and how you identify yourself in the world that you live in. “I walk down the street. I see myself in everything I see. I witness my reflection in everyone I meet.” This is a new concept for many of you, but as you have inherited much information about what it means to be in this world, you presume things. You see what you see, and you interpret it based on what you were taught. So, consequently, all that you see and interpret is through the vision of the one who knows herself through data, through individuation of consciousness that you have inherited.

Now we will explain this for Paul, who is already resisting the teaching. As a man, you have expectations about what it means to be a man, and as you live your life you encounter yourself through these expectations. Consequently, all that you see and all that you witness is informed by a sense of self that was made in conceit and in shared agreement, yes, by those who came before you. So the consequence of this is, very, very simply, that when you walk down the street all that you see is actually bound to a history, a consequence, of others’ thought and prescription.

Now as you know yourself in a new way, “I am the one I say I am,” “I am the man who says this or that,” you encounter yourself differently. As you individuate as a conscious being and you claim yourself as a self in the world, the purview of the self is to decide what things mean, the importance things have. The way you understand yourself, in many ways, is decided by you in ways you are not aware of. The vibration you hold, in certain ways, has conducted this. Your fears tell you one thing and your vibration moves into accord with fear and, consequently, what you see will be informed by what you are frightened of.

You are informed by many things, and the challenge you face today, as we instruct you, is that you have already decided many things for many reasons about who and what you are, and the unlearning of this, the decoding of this, if you wish, in your own field is what we must attend to to call you forward as the being that you are.

Now the being that you are, the True Being that you are, has no history. She is an Infinite Self. She understands who and what she is in a higher way that is not informed by a crisis you had when you were two, or what your husband said about you last week.

The Divine Self, or the True Self, if you wish, which will be claimed by you through this text, is actually an infinite being, and all of the things that you would see that would soil you, that would tamper with who you are or disfigure you, are actually not real. They are things that you have invested in and decided were so and, as you walk down the street, the world you see concurs with what you think should be there.

Now this is not an abstract teaching and we say this for Paul, who is already concerned for the reader. “What are you talking about? Will they understand what you are talking about? I barely understand what you are saying.”

We