(Present Day 2024) Why am I even writing all this? Good question. My primary reason for writing this is to help others on their journey in this life. The intention is to offer not only hope, but also a window into the place from which the hope arose and to show what it took to keep that hope alive and use it to alchemize my life. I’m writing to show that transforming one’s life is not always easy (but man, have I made it unnecessarily difficult at times!), rarely linear and always worth it. Another reason for writing this is that it simply wants to be written. There’s this little voice in my head, this pressure to get it out into the world. I can’t quite discern whether the desire to write it stems from a need to stay stuck, to re-hash the pain (“Never forget!”) or simply to get it in writing so as to remove it from my system. There’s very little “charge” left around most of this stuff, although I can sort of “tune in” to it if I allow. A large portion of my two year’s worth of writer’s block stems from hesitation around how to describe my experience with Paul Selig’s work.

(2020) So clearly, I didn’t off myself. But man, did I think about it A LOT in 2020. One summer afternoon, I went for a walk and it was all I could think about. I walked to a friend’s house, needing to talk to somebody but lacking the fortitude to admit I needed to talk to somebody. I vaguely recall thinking something along the lines of, “I’m not going to ring the doorbell. I don’t want to be a burden. If I don’t see anybody, that’ll be my sign”. As I rounded the corner, he was just coming home. We chatted for a bit. I never did ask for help or admit to my maudlin thoughts, but the mere act of talking was enough to relieve the pressure. Once again, proof that you never know when or how you may be helping somebody.

At some point in mid 2020 I told my therapist, over the phone, that I wanted to kill myself, their answer shocked me. “You can. But I’d rather you didn’t.” Whaaaaat? I was expecting men in white coats to break down my door and cart me off to the loony bin in an ill-fitting white coat with extra belts! It was clearly a well-calculated response. Because in the act of giving permission to that act which I thought was absolutely and utterly verboten, I was momentarily confused, yet ultimately set free. To be clear, I don’t recommend or in any way endorse this approach (more on that in a future blog entry). As in, “don’t try this at home”. In my case, as delivered by a professional with 30+ years of trauma experience with whom I had a deep, trusting therapeutic bond, it was exactly the right thing to say at the right time.

Let’s return to the subject of author and conscious channel Paul Selig. Finding Paul’s work was at least as pivotal as my discovering the transformational power of psychedelics in mid 2018. For years, I wasn’t sure if I was an atheist or an agnostic. In fact, in college when it was time to either become a pledge or during the activation ceremony at the Sigma Chi fraternity, I recall being very conflicted around having to state some belief in Jesus Christ as my savior or some such equivalent. Shit, I just wanted the beer and parties! Reluctantly, I attested. Anyway, fear not, because Paul’s work is none of that - neither beer, nor parties, nor religious dogma.

Paul’s story is fascinating. I won’t retell it here. Paul is clairaudient. Basically, he has a highly refined ability to tune in to two different “channels” 1.) he can “hear” information that comes from another person’s “higher self” and 2.) he can hear information coming from beings / intelligence that exist in the non-physical realms (wherever that is). I know. It sounds weird. It took me a minute. And you absolutely, positively do not have to believe it. I’m not here to convert anybody to anything. As I wrote in my last post, I cannot explain the pull of the first podcast on which I heard him nor could I deny it. If you’ve been reading this blog since the beginning, you may recall I worked with Maxine, a coach/therapist/psychic who channeled St. Germain. At the time, I recall thinking, “Ya, ok, whatever.” The advice I got was always sound and when I followed it, things in my life improved. So, WTF do I know? Within a day of listening to this first podcast episode (August 1, 2020), I went out and bought three of Paul’s books. To date, he has channeled 12, all without any edits other than a clarification here and there. By 5:30pm on August 2, I was 68 pages into “I Am the Word”. Here’s what I wrote in my journal that day:

I see that I get my debt from my father. Memory of him advising me to use debt back in college. Something also to do with the allowance / work schedule he set up for me around 5/6th grade and then promptly forgot about within a week. I’m still carrying stuff around from that. Let it go. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, he wasn’t capable of showing it due to the damage he carried.

The “voices” that Paul hears are those of Melchizedek, an “order” of ascended masters who are referenced in the Old Testament. Despite their mention in the Bible, their teachings are not religious. They do not require anything of the reader in the way that religion does. The essential teaching is that humanity’s biggest problem is its denial of the Divine (call it “God”, “Consciousness”, “Spirit”, whatever). We think we are separate from that which created us. I certainly couldn’t deny that I held this belief. As I read his books and watched his livestreams, my “Inner Cynic” (he and the Inner Critic are quite close) kept looking for the “catch”, the con, the “Man Behind the Curtain”. I couldn’t find it. Within the books there are exercises. Some are writing exercises, some are verbal affirmations. I was getting better at actually doing that which was recommended by all these books I was reading to ostensibly help myself, so I did them. Slowly, very slowly – almost imperceptibly at first – things began to shift. I often found myself utterly shattered and in tears while reading particular passages. During his livestreams, which he was recording from the grounds of Ram Dass’s Hanuman Maui location (a lifelong New Yorker, he got “stuck” on Maui during the pandemic), I was mesmerized and enthralled as I heard other’s questions and watched him deliver poignant guidance from these non-embodied beings who call themselves Melchizedek. During certain parts of the livestreams, I found myself in something of a liminal state (not quite awake, not quite asleep) with energy thrumming through my body just like it had during the acupuncture session with Adam in Sedona earlier in the year.

As I continued reading the books, I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with some of the positions I held. Another core teaching is “that which you put into darkness calls you to the darkness” or “what you damn, damns you back”. I certainly had my share of things I kept in the dark and people whom I was damning, foremost among them, a large chunk of debt and both my parents. Yet, the cynical voice remained. I would find myself estimating how many people were on the livestreams and how much money he was making. One time, I think there was a glitch and the number of attendees appeared on the screen. My internal Mr. Business Brain quickly did the math and the resultant dollar figure was not small. “See! He’s making money on this!” I thought. In late October 2020, less than three months after immersing myself in these teachings, discretion got the better part of valor. There was a shift. Something caused me to see how the cynicism was keeping me stuck. I made the active decision to drop the skeptical cynicism. I mean, it wasn’t really serving me, was it? So I chose to test out accepting what I was reading and seeing as truth and stop looking for the “loophole”. Nobody was forcing me to do shit. Did I want to get out of my quagmire of debt, derision and pain or did I want to live this way for ever? It might have all been familiar, but man, was I ever sick of it!

On 10/24/20, I had the following Edible Insight:

Sense of myself as infinite. The secret is the ability to just DO something without thinking it to death. To choose it. In the moment in the face of the fear. Negate the fear. To change mind when necessary without beating yourself up.

A journal entry from 10/27/20 points at my beginning to see the outlines of underlying dynamic between my father and I:

There’s a sense of “me not being allowed to be successful” that I picked up from my father. As if my early conception and birth somehow kept him from achieving what he wanted to achieve. [Note: my parents had only recently turned 22 when I was born.] And so to be more successful than him was not allowed. There was some kind of agreement. This is at least part of the source of my self-sabotage.

So I had to walk a tightrope between succeeding enough to please him so that I could be validated and loved yet not be too successful so as to break the agreement that I not be better.

Recall again the time he visited the Bonnie Brae house for first time while under renovation and he seemed almost envious. Was not excited or proud.

On 10/28/20, after waking at 3am with deep deep perineal pain that felt like something was beginning to spasm, I drank some Calm magnesium solution and returned to bed. By 7am, when I woke again, the pain was reduced. I was scheduled to sit / guide for a friend’s first mushroom journey later that day and wasn’t sure if the pain was related to anxiety around that commitment. I was reading this blog about grief and I completely broke down. As I did, my perineal pain dissipated and then it moved up between my shoulders. From my journal - “Clearly this is buried grief, sorrow, anger, fear.” Man, was I sick and tired of being sick and tired and in pain. Because when I say, “Perineal Pain” what I really mean is “Dick Pain”. The pain would shoot right through my urethra like fi-yah, reminding me once again, “You aren’t fixed yet, pal!”

In addition to reading Paul Selig’s books (my log shows I read six of them in the last six months of 2020), I would also subscribe to his livestreams, despite the fact that the five day intensives cost over $100, which to me, at the time was a lot of money. But, man, there was a pull! During the livestreams, Paul alternates between broadcasting teachings from The Guides (as he calls them) to whom he is tuned and taking questions from those who are watching. He then either listens to the higher self of the person asking the question about the teachings or about a person or interpersonal conflict (and potentially that of the person with whom they are having a conflict) and / or The Guides come through with wisdom. I found both portions equally useful, as very often I got some deep insight about a similar issue occurring in my life from the question of another.

On 11/3/20 I published this blog post “coming out” about my lifelong struggles with debt. That post was a direct result of guidance I received through Paul during the first livestream I ever tuned into on October 20. Have a look at the clip of the conversation here (it’s two and a half minutes long). Yes, he repeats himself. It is the way the information comes to him. And, for me, it was part and parcel of the reason I let down my guard and began to trust. It is one thing to spout off a coherent-sounding monologue. It is quite another to whisper and then repeat all the words and have the monologue be different every time. I mean, who does that? As you can see, after years of shame and denial, it was time to bring light to this dark secret of mine - I was deeply in debt and couldn’t see any way to get out of it. None of the old tricks worked. Well, to be fair, I had neither energy nor patience for doing it the way I had done in the past, which was to simply bury my head in my work and attempt to forcibly bend reality to my will. It was time to let some body, some thing, some power other than me do the work. I was scared shitless when I pressed the “Publish” button that night. Would I be ridiculed, cast out of the kingdom for my transgressions?