Paul Solomon

Founder of the Fellowship of the Inner Light

Paul Solomon was a gifted speaker, propounding the ideals of a Meta-Human, and who shared ideas of the ultimate possibilities of human potential.

He was lauded as prophet, sage, philosopher, minister, intuitive counselor and teacher. Some even called him a Miracle Worker, and he was counted among the most dynamic and insightful speakers of his time. In his travels around the world, he touched the lives of thousands of people, inspiring them to seek spiritual growth and personal transformation.

Paul was born July 7, 1939 and was the son of a Baptist minister. He was steeped in the Bible from early childhood. As a young man, he attended seminary with a goal of becoming a minister; until he was forced to leave his studies because of a shattering personal experience.

After five years of rebellion and depression, a powerful mystical experience changed everything. It was a breakthrough into Higher Consciousness beyond the reality of the physical senses.  He was catapulted instantly into a new life, a new relationship with God, and a new ministry.

He spent the rest of his life studying, learning, and teaching what he called Inner Light Consciousness, a guided experience in spiritual evolution.  His goal was to help people find their own Inner Light. He encouraged the development of a close, personal relationship with God, the Source of our being, so we can confidently ask questions and receive answers when guidance is needed.

Paul was unique in his ability to explain complicated concepts in clear and precise language that is easy to understand. His teachings are practical and applicable to everyday life. His wide range of knowledge and experience covered topics such as soul growth, altered states of consciousness and awareness, ancient mystery traditions, arcane knowledge, comparative religion, Sacred Scripture, Kaballah, Universal Law, holistic healing and many other facets of human existence.

His workshops in personal transformation include Unconditional Love, Emotions Mastery, Effective Communication, Loving Relationships and many others. These workshops go beyond just simple behavior modification to produce lasting change within.

His love of the Bible remained, and he received a doctorate from the New Seminary of New York City. Over the years, he shared podiums with such luminaries as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Sir George Trevelyan, Buddhist Priestess Tamo San, Dr. Jerry Jampolski, Buckminster Fuller, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Founders of the Findhorn Community Peter and Eileen Caddy, Jean Houston, Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, Sun Bear, Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow), Manly Palmer Hall, Marcus Bach, and many others.

In his later years, his passion included helping the less fortunate. After working as a volunteer with Mother Teresa in India, he formed the organization Dignity International. For his efforts, particularly on behalf of the enslaved children and refugees of Thailand, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. *

He brought together people of diverse nations, races and religions, honoring all of life and transcending boundaries. He empowered people to express their full potential and whether they did or not, he loved them anyway. He said:

“True spirituality comes after the time of formal worship and is expressed in a person’s life.”

He encouraged people to change from being victims of life to becoming conscious Causes of all that they experience. Growing in our own conscious awareness and abilities, he believed, is the most appropriate response to the current world situations and the only way to successfully heal the traumas and crises of today’s world.

For Paul, family always came first – his family being the world.

Paul Solomon died in 1994, leaving behind a wealth of information and instruction. We, of the Fellowship of the Inner Light, feel honored to carry on his work. His dream was for us, his students then and now, to go beyond his accomplishments, and change the world!

 *  Nobel Prize. See The Prophetic Revelations of Paul Solomon by W. Alexander Wheeler, Published by Samuel Weiser, Inc. , 1994, Introductory Page.

Humble Beginnings

This is Paul Solomon’s story, condensed from a lecture he gave on May 9, 1983 at Frost Valley Retreat in New York.

“My father was a Southern Baptist minister, as was his father before him, and all my uncles. I grew up partly on the campus of seminaries when my dad was studying for the ministry. All the adult males I knew in my early life were Southern Baptist ministers and students in Bible school. By the time I was a teenager, I was very familiar with the Bible. This produced a feeling, early in life, of wanting to have a right relationship with God.”

Paul was ordained as a Baptist minister at the age of 14. Before he finished high school, he began his pastoral tasks by ministering to prisoners and their families and became the youngest Baptist chaplain in the Arkansas prison system.

“From high school,” he said, “I went into the army, got married and had a little girl. After the army, I attended a Baptist seminary, and I pastored a Spanish-speaking Mexican mission. 

“Things were going well, but just before I completed seminary, my wife fell in love with another man, and she left.  I became a member of a non-existent species – a divorced Southern Baptist preacher. There simply was no such thing! That meant that I had spent all of my time training for a job that didn’t exist and my training was now worthless.  I became very angry at God.”   

Making Up For Lost Time

“I suddenly started doing all of the things that weren’t allowed in a Baptist household – all of the things that I thought would get back at God. I bought a pack a cigarettes and smoked the whole pack, and got sick. I drank my first beer. I plunged headlong into satisfying my appetites in any way I could. I went to New Orleans and to California. I worked in night clubs and bars. I drank, used a lot of drugs, and engaged in a lot of sex. I made up for lost time, and if there was anything that I didn’t do, it was because I just didn’t think of it.”

He spent five years in rebellion – working, partying, trying not to think about God, and surrounding himself with people who were doing the same. One day, while watching his pet hamsters running endlessly on their treadmill, he thought, “That’s me! I am running hard and fast and getting nowhere.” That was when he became seriously depressed.

“The depression lasted, and I began to get worried about myself. When I was preparing for college, I had worked in a mental hospital, so I recognized the symptoms of depression and that scared me. I didn’t want to go to a doctor and didn’t want to go to a minister. The last thing I wanted was religion, but I had to do something to come out of the depression.”

Paul had been part of a pilot program in the Army that helped soldiers through their personal problems with hypnosis, and he thought that a good hypnotherapist might help.  He found a hypnosis clinic in the yellow pages and made an appointment.  He believed the therapist could help him, but then he found out the price! There was no way he could afford it. Then he became even more depressed.

The First Reading

“It was in February 1972 when I went to my favorite bar and started telling my sad story to my friend Harry. In an effort to cheer me up, my friend said, ‘I hypnotized somebody once.’

“That’s great. Let’s go try it, I said. I took Harry to my apartment and laid down, and he started this boring hypnosis routine. I remember thinking he was going to bore me to death. The next thing I recalled was suddenly waking up, doubled up in pain with stomach cramps. Harry was practically jumping up and down with excitement. He was telling me that we talked with spirits. He tried to explain that there was a ‘voice’ that he talked with, but I didn’t want to hear it.  I told Harry, What do you expect when you hypnotize a Southern Baptist preacher? That is just all my years in seminary coming out. I insisted he leave. 

“However, Harry kept coming back. One day he returned with a tape recorder so he could prove to me that there was indeed a voice. The fact that he spent his own money on a tape recorder impressed me. Then he said, ‘I know it can’t be you. You’re not that smart.’ He made a good point, so I agreed to try again.”

Paul and Harry formulated a test question that neither knew the answer to, but that also was provable. Paul’s great-grandfather had been murdered before Paul was born and died without disclosing the whereabouts of a great sum of money that the family believed he had hidden.  “Where is my great-grandfather’s money?” was their first question.

They asked two more questions:  First, what caused the stomach cramping and how can we prevent it? Second, who or what was speaking through Paul?

“Once more I lay down and Harry started his boring hypnosis routine. I lost consciousness, and this time we recorded the voice. An authoritative, booming voice spoke. It said:

“You have not attained sufficient growth or spiritual awareness to understand contact with these records…That which you perform is a foolish experiment, for you attempt to harness powers you do not understand and to contact sources, records and Intelligences you are not familiar with. How will you try the spirits should you attain that you seek? Would you recognize Him whom you do not know, have not been familiar with?”

Harry asked the voice what they should do to prepare spiritually, and they were given a list of instructions. These included a specific diet, exercise, prayer, meditation, a recommendation to read the Sacred Scriptures in the Bible, and to study the Search for God books from the A.R.E.

Harry asked, “What is the A.R.E?” The voice responded, “It is the Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach,” and the voice gave the address and the zip code.

The Rest Of Your Mind

Then the voice explained the source of the communications they were receiving.

“You are not talking with some other spirit or other personality. What you are talking with is the rest of Paul’s mind.  You are talking with the Source of his mind which gave birth to his mind. It pre-existed his physical body and gave birth to his body. The part that you use, your conscious mind, is only the very tiny tip of the iceberg of your real consciousness, your whole mind. And when you get that conscious part of your mind completely out of the way, as Paul is doing right now, unconsciously, the rest of the mind can communicate knowledge.”

The voice further explained that everybody has what the voice called the ‘Superconscious Mind,’ and everyone can access it.

The voice told the location of Paul’s great-grandfather’s money, which they did, indeed, find in the chimney of his great-grandparent’s house that had been destroyed by fire. 

The voice then explained the reason for the stomach cramps. It said that the pain occurred at the moment when Paul’s consciousness was leaving his body. The physical body will do anything in its power to keep the life force within it, and because it associates this projection of consciousness with death, the muscles of the solar plexus were cramping to try to prevent the consciousness from leaving the body. But it didn’t prevent it. It only produced pain. The voice said that as soon as Paul realized this, the cramping would stop, and it did.

Paul and Harry followed the voice’s instructions to read the Bible, study the Search for God books, and begin a regimen of diet and exercise which the voice advised them to do. Several times a day, they resumed leading Paul into the hypnotic state where Harry would ask questions.

The answers were strange and puzzling to them. They still hadn’t the foggiest notion of what was really happening. They had never heard of channeling or psychic readings. All of their lives, they had been told that fortune tellers were of the devil. They believed that the last of the prophets died in Biblical times.

They didn’t know about spiritualism or out-of-body experience and hadn’t even considered the possibility of reincarnation. These topics were never mentioned in a Baptist home, and if you asked about it in seminary, it was grounds for being expelled. Yet this voice spoke of these topics. Suddenly subjects totally outside of their realm of knowledge had become a part of their experience.  

Of God or The Devil?

Paul was intrigued and the depression was finally gone, but born of his childhood upbringing, a question remained, “Was this of God or the devil?” The person he trusted most to answer this question was his father, so he went to see him.

“My argument was all prepared because I was sure my father was going to say it was of the devil. But he didn’t! He listened to the tape recording and he said, ‘It is of God.’ It shocked me and I took the other side of the argument. How can you say that? It doesn’t sound very Baptist to me, I said.”

His father said, “There are two reasons why I know it is of God. First, it is not the first time in history this has happened. What you did sounds exactly like what Daniel did in the Old Testament times. When he needed to know the answer to the king’s dream, he went to his room, took three friends with him, laid down and became unconscious, and in his unconscious state, God gave him information. It sounds to me like you did the same thing he did.

The second reason, and maybe most important reason that makes me believe it is of God, is that ever since you left the ministry, your mother and I have prayed for you every day. There is a verse of Scripture that says, ‘If your son asks for bread, would you give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, would you give him a snake?’ (Matthew 7:9) I know this is of God because we asked God to bring you back to Him, and we trust that God didn’t give us a stone or a snake.” His father then told him that he should learn everything he could from this voice.

So, Paul and Harry continued to seek information, and because they realized they had access to a source of all knowledge, they wanted to be sure to ask questions that were profound and worthy of such a source. They began to call the voice the “Source” and refer to the communications as “Readings.”

One insightful question that they thought would elicit an extremely long discourse was, “What is God?” The Source answered with only one sentence:

“A God is a being who can recognize good without evil as a point of reference.”   

So they tried other questions. They asked about healing and the Source gave very specific instructions on how to develop oneself as a healer. They asked how the average person could develop the ability to turn off the conscious mind and listen to the Source. They were given guidance which formed the basis for Inner Light Consciousness (ILC), which is a guided experience in spiritual evolution.  

In the 22 years of Paul’s ministry, he gave thousands of Readings, lectures and classes to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. These form a core of the teachings of the Fellowship of the Inner Light.

Paul Solomon’s teachings can perhaps best be summarized by the Credo of the Fellowship of the Inner Light: